Apr 20th, 2018 11:12 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Chris Cilizza comments on some highlights from the memos:
3. “The conversation, which was pleasant at all times, was chaotic, with topics touched, left, then returned to later, making it very difficult to recount in a linear fashion…..It really was conversation-as-jigsaw-puzzle in a way, with pieces picked up, then discarded, then returned to.”
No observation anywhere in these memos rings truer of Trump than this one, which comes from the one-on-one dinner the two men at the White House eight days after Trump had been sworn in.
Watch any Trump press conference or speech and you are immediately struck by the massively haphazard nature of it. Trump can jump — as he did earlier this week — from his
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Tags: Comey, Trump
Apr 20th, 2018 10:43 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Priss Choss met a woman in a receiving line and royally asked her where she’s from.
I met Prince Charles this week at the Commonwealth People’s Forum at which I was a speaker (on a day whose itinerary was entitled Politics of Hope: Taking on Injustice in the Commonwealth). It was part of the buildup to the Commonwealth heads of government meeting, the summit of leaders of 53 countries representing more than 2 billion people.
I shook the prince’s hand with my right hand. In my other, I was holding a copy of an anthology, We Mark Your Memory: Writing from the Descendants of Indenture, in which I have an essay published. I told him that my mother was born
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Apr 20th, 2018 9:55 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Reading the Comey memos this morning. Notice that they were no sooner handed over to Congress than they were leaked. So much for that whole pesky law and order idea that evidence from an ongoing investigation should not be handed over to Congress.
On page 3 the memo of the dinner for two begins. Comey reports that he had a chance to chat with the two servers before Trump got there, and that they were both retired Navy submariners and the three of them “had a fun discussion about height clearance in submarines.”
The conversation, which was pleasant at all times, was chaotic, with topics touched, left, then returned to later, making it very difficult to recount in a linear
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Tags: Comey, Trump
Apr 20th, 2018 9:07 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Investigative journalist Jonathan Greenberg tells a long detailed story in the Post about Young Donald Trump’s obsessive campaign to get himself onto the Forbes 400 list by means of prolific lies about how many $$$ he really had.
In May 1984, an official from the Trump Organization called to tell me how rich Donald J. Trump was. I was reporting for the Forbes 400, the magazine’s annual ranking of America’s richest people, for the third year. In the previous edition, we’d valued Trump’s holdings at $200 million, only one-fifth of what he claimed to own in our interviews. This time, his aide urged me on the phone, I needed to understand just how loaded Trump really was.
The official
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Tags: Trump
Apr 19th, 2018 5:40 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
Oh gawd these people. Rudy Giuliani has joined Trump’s “legal team.”
Former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, a combative former prosecutor and longtime ally of President Trump, told The Washington Post on Thursday that he has joined the president’s legal team dealing with the ongoing special counsel probe.
“I’m doing it because I hope we can negotiate an end to this for the good of the country and because I have high regard for the president and for Bob Mueller,” Giuliani said in an interview.
What is this “negotiate an end” shit? It’s not a war, it’s not a strike, it’s not a boycott – it’s a criminal investigation, and suspects / targets / subjects don’t get to “negotiate … Read the rest
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6 comments
Tags: Trump
Apr 19th, 2018 12:02 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
Now, we get why people prefer to have male children rather than female. It’s totally understandable. Girls are floppy and worthless, and they’re likely to turn out to be whores, and they’re a terrible drain on the wallet without giving anything back. If only humans could figure out a way to have male children exclusively.
A combination of cultural preferences, government decree and modern medical technology in the world’s two largest countries has created a gender imbalance on a continental scale. Men outnumber women by 70 million in China and India.
Yay! Now to get to no women at all.
Out of China’s population of 1.4 billion, there are nearly 34 million more males than females — the
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Apr 19th, 2018 10:49 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Speaking of Trump and tv and temper and tantrums…
President Trump was watching television on Sunday when he saw Nikki R. Haley, his ambassador to the United Nations, announce that he would impose fresh sanctions on Russia. The president grew angry, according to an official informed about the moment. As far as he was concerned, he had decided no such thing.
It was not the first time Mr. Trump has yelled at the television over something he saw Ms. Haley saying. This time, however, the divergence has spilled into public in a remarkable display of discord that stems not just from competing views of Russia but from larger questions of political ambition, jealousy, resentment and loyalty.
Or, less tactfully, … Read the rest
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2 comments
Tags: Trump
Apr 19th, 2018 9:40 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Oh god. I suppose I knew this but seeing it spelled out is another story. Trump rushed to bomb Syria so that his tweets would be true.
Defense Secretary Jim Mattis urged President Trump to get congressional approval before the United States launched airstrikes against Syria last week, but was overruled by Mr. Trump, who wanted a rapid and dramatic response, military and administration officials said.
Because he’s mentally a toddler. Rapid and dramatic=illegal and reckless and authoritarian.
Mr. Trump, the officials said, wanted to be seen as backing up a series of bellicose tweets with action, but was warned that an overly aggressive response risked igniting a wider war with Russia.
He wanted to be seen as backing … Read the rest
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3 comments
Tags: Trump
Apr 18th, 2018 5:27 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
Kris Kobach was held in contempt of court today for being such a vote-suppressing asshole.
Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach was held in contempt of court Wednesday afternoon by a federal judge for failing to follow a court order to register voters in Kansas. Kobach, who led President Donald Trump’s election integrity commission and is the country’s most prominent advocate for restrictions on voting, “willfully failed to comply with the preliminary injunction” against the state’s law requiring proof of citizenship law for voter registration, Judge Julie Robinson, a George W. Bush appointee, ruled.
In 2013, Kobach pushed Kansas to enact a law requiring people to provide certain forms of documentation, such as a birth certificate, passport, or naturalization papers,
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Apr 18th, 2018 4:18 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
Originally a comment by iknklast on A notoriously testosterone-charged profession.
Where I teach, we frequently get female students in the automotive department. The instructor sits them down and explains to them that they will face discrimination and hostility from the males. The instructor never sits down the males and says “They will not face discrimination and hostility or you will answer to me”.
I can be charitable, and accept that he believes this is in the best interest of the female students, that he wants to prepare them for the eventuality they will face outside of the classroom, and that it never occurs to him to try to change the situation, or that he can. I can be uncharitable, … Read the rest
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4 comments
Tags: Sexism
Apr 18th, 2018 11:34 am |
By Ophelia Benson
From the same piece, Wittes’s thoughts on Trump and Comey.
For a lot of readers, the easy part of the book will be Comey’s discussion of his interactions with Trump. There is no moral complexity here. There are no serious questions of whether Comey should have behaved differently—not in the macro sense, at least. There is only the question of whether one believes Comey or Trump about the nature of their interactions. And to pose that question is also to answer it. One of them is a man who, whatever his flaws, is not a liar and who has numerous contemporaneous corroborating witnesses and documents. The other is Donald Trump. I suppose another question is whether one believes the
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Apr 18th, 2018 10:47 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Benjamin Wittes has a long piece on Comey and his book and the emailselectioninvestigationfuss. It’s not a review; he says it would be wrong of him to do a review because he’s not distant enough. It’s reflections on the book rather than a review of it. It includes anecdotes like having lunch with Comey at the FBI cafeteria shortly after Comey became director, and what happened there, and how that fits into the general story of how Comey shifted the culture of the FBI and what people there think of him.
He also takes on this whole question I was talking about yesterday: about having no good options and having the luxury of hindsight that participants don’t have.
My
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Apr 18th, 2018 9:31 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Jennifer Rubin at the Post on McConnell & Co’s reluctance to “poke the bear”:
Let’s cut through all this: Republicans are petrified of provoking Trump (“the bear”), whom they treat as their supervisor and not as an equal branch of government. The notion that Congress should not take out an insurance policy to head off a potential constitutional crisis when the president has repeatedly considered firing special counsel Robert S. Mueller III and Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein defies logic. By speaking up in such fashion, McConnell is effectively tempting Trump to fire one or both of them. That will set off a firestorm and bring calls for the president’s impeachment.
Or. McConnell must be hoping, it will … Read the rest
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Apr 17th, 2018 5:53 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
What a disgusting bunch of sexist philistines we are.
Professor Mary Beard has accused a US broadcaster of editing her own episodes of Civilisations to make them more anodyne, saying her on-screen appearances as a “slightly creaky old lady with long grey hair” had been cut.
Prof Beard, who hosts two episodes of Civilisations for the BBC in Britain, said the American edits of the show had seen her central arguments erased, her on-screen contributions reduced, and an episode on religion re-edited to focus more closely on Christianity.
This isn’t Fox, either, it’s goddam PBS.
Prof Beard said: “Really hope that friends in USA realise that my Civilisations episodes on PBS are very different from original BBC versions, have
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Apr 17th, 2018 4:34 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
Trump is at his Palace of Golf with Shinzo Abe. They did a press conference. What does Trump do there?
On Tuesday, President Donald Trump used a press opportunity with Japanese President Shinzo Abe to tout Mar-a-Lago as the southern White House.
“Many of the world’s great leaders request to come to Mar-a-Lago and Palm Beach. They like it. I like it. We’re comfortable. We have great relationships as you remember,” Trump said seated on a couch next to Abe at the start of the bizarre presser at Trump’s Florida club Tuesday afternoon.
Glad we can be an advertising opportunity, Don. I guess we’d rather have you doing that than fumbling around with actual government.
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Tags: Trump
Apr 17th, 2018 4:01 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
The lawyers are not happy.
McConnell has said NO we’re not ever going to have a bill to protect the Mueller investigation, no no NO, now stop bothering him.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on Tuesday thwarted a bipartisan effort to protect special counsel Robert Mueller’s job, saying he will not hold a floor vote on the legislation even if it is approved next week in the
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Tags: Trump
Apr 17th, 2018 11:43 am |
By Ophelia Benson
I think I’m approaching an understanding of what happened with Comey and the emails and the press conference and the letter. Basically it’s that the alternative wasn’t as much better as we (with the luxury of not living through it) may imagine. He says over and over that it was a choice between bad options. There was no good one. What would have been so bad about not saying anything when the FBI closed the investigation? The fact that Fox and Trump-fan Twitter would have been all over it like an oozing infectious skin disease.
He explains it (again) in that NPR interview.
Inskeep: Let me circle back to the Hillary Clinton case and the decisions that you made
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Tags: Comey