Author: Ophelia Benson

  • 51-50

    Sure enough, “hero” McCain returned to the Senate and the vote was 50-50 and Pence broke the tie, so they voted to debate how best to take health insurance away from millions. They’re evil demons.

    That doesn’t mean they’ll be able to pass a bill, but it does confirm their evil demonhood. They want to take health insurance away from millions, and will if they can agree on the details.

    President Trump has been pushing aggressively for Republicans to pass a repeal-and-replace plan, and jabbed lawmakers this week by saying anyone who votes against kicking off debate is saying they are “fine with the Obamacare nightmare.” Speaking during a joint news conference in the Rose Garden Tuesday, Trump said he was “very very sad” for the Republicans who opposed the motion but “very happy with the result” of the vote.

    “Now we’re all going to sit together and try to come up with something really spectacular,” the president said, though he acknowledged Republicans face “a narrow path” on health care. “It’s a very, very complex and difficult task, something I know quite a bit about.”

    Moron. He knows very little about it. He only thinks he knows quite a bit about it because he knew absolutely nothing before and picked up a little during the process.

    On Tuesday a coalition of medical and consumer groups reiterated their intense opposition to all the health-care plans Senate Republicans have been considering, calling on them to drop those bills and begin anew with a bipartisan process that includes standard committee hearings.

    In a conference call, David Barbe, the president of the American Medical Association and part of the coalition, challenged the claims Senate GOP leaders have made about their main legislation to dismantle large parts of the Affordable Care Act.

    “It does not make care more affordable to low-income Americans,” Barbe said. “It does not reduce out-of-pocket costs. It could trigger substantial increases for patients with preexisting conditions.”

    They don’t care. They just want to break it.

  • You have to know about the word “momentum”

    But my favorite part of Trump’s Address to the Nations Boy Scouts is where he just veers off into telling them a long boring story about this one guy he met 50 years ago, like any other damn windbag you accidentally sit next to at a dinner or on a bus or in the dentist’s waiting room. You know those – the ones who just talk, regardless of who is next to them or what the likelihood is that anyone in hearing will give a damn.

    In life, in order to be successful, and you people are well on the road to success, you have to find out what makes you excited. What makes you want to get up each morning and go to work? You have to find it.

    If you love what you do and dedicate yourself to your work, then you will gain momentum, and look — you have to, you need to. The word momentum — you will gain that momentum, and each success will create another success. The word momentum.

    I’ll tell you a story that’s very interesting for me when I was young. There was a man named William Levitt — Levittowns, you have some here, you have some in different states. Anybody ever hear of Levittown? (Applause.) And he was a very successful man. He was a homebuilder — became an unbelievable success, and got more and more successful. And he built homes, and at night he’d go to these major sites with teams of people and he’d scour the sites for nails and sawdust and small pieces of wood. And they’d clean the site so when the workers came in the next morning, the sites would be spotless and clean, and he did it properly. And he did this for 20 years, and then he was offered a lot of money for his company.

    And he sold his company for a tremendous amount of money. At the time especially — this was a long time ago — sold his company for a tremendous amount of money. And he went out and bought a big yacht, and he had a very interesting life. I won’t go any more than that because you’re Boy Scouts, so I’m not going to tell you what he did.

    AUDIENCE: Booo —

    TRUMP: Should I tell you? Should I tell you?

    AUDIENCE: Yes!

    TRUMP: Oh, you’re Boy Scouts, but you know life. You know life. So — look at you. Who would think this is the Boy Scouts, right?

    So he had a very, very interesting life, and the company that bought his company was a big conglomerate. And they didn’t know anything about building homes, and they didn’t know anything about picking up the nails and the sawdust and selling it — and the scraps of wood. This was a big conglomerate based in New York City, and after about a ten year period they were losing a lot with it. It didn’t mean anything to them, and they couldn’t sell it.

    So they called William Levitt up and they said, would you like to buy back your company, and he said yes, I would. He so badly wanted it, he got bored with this life of yachts and sailing and all of the things he did in the south of France and other places. You won’t get bored, right? You know, truthfully, you’re workers. You’ll get bored too. Believe me. (Applause.) Of course, having a good few years like that isn’t so bad. (Applause.) But what happened is he bought back his company, and he bought back a lot of empty land. And he worked hard in getting it zoning, and he worked hard on starting to develop.

    And in the end he failed, and he failed badly. Lost all of his money. He went personally bankrupt, and he was now much older. And I saw him at a cocktail party, and it was very sad because the hottest people in New York were at this party. It was the party of Steve Ross who was one of the great people — he came up and discovered — really founded — Time Warner, and he was a great guy. He had a lot of successful people at the party.

    And I was doing well so I got invited to the party. I was very young, and I go in — but I’m in the real estate business — and I see 100 people, some of whom I recognize and they’re big in the entertainment business. And I see, sitting in the corner, was a little old man who was all by himself. Nobody was talking to him. I immediately recognized that that man was the once great William Levitt of Levittown, and I immediately went over — I wanted to talk to him more than the Hollywood show business communications people.

    So I went over and talked to him, and I said, Mr. Levitt, I’m Donald Trump. He said I know. I said, Mr. Levitt, how are you doing? He goes, not well, not well at all. And I knew that, but he said not well at all. And he explained what was happening and how bad it has been and how hard it has been. And I said what exactly happened? Why did this happen to you? You’re one of the greats ever in our industry. Why did this happen to you? And he said, Donald, I lost my momentum. I lost my momentum. A word you never hear when you’re talking about success. When some of these guys that never made ten cents, they’re on television giving you things about how you’re going to be successful, and the only thing they ever did was a book and a tape.

    But I’ll tell you, it was very sad, and I never forgot that moment. And I thought about it, and it’s exactly true. He lost his momentum. Meaning, he took this period of time off long — years — and then when he got back, he didn’t have that same momentum. In life, I always tell this to people, you have to know whether or not you continue to have the momentum, and if you don’t have it that’s okay. Because you’re going to go on and you’re going to learn and you’re going to do things that are great. But you have to know about the word momentum.

    As long as you know about the word “momentum” you’ll be fine.

  • It’s downright icky

    Some parents of Boy Scouts are furious.

    One parent wrote: “Done with scouts after you felt the need to have my kid listen to a liar stroke his ego.”

    …

    Responding to the criticism of the speech, the Boy Scouts of America insisted it was “wholly non-partisan and does not promote any one position, product, service, political candidate or philosophy”.

    It said the invitation to Mr Trump was a “long-standing tradition and is in no way an endorsement of any political party or specific policies”.

    Except that the way it played out, it was.

    Many parents, lobbyists and politicians took to social media to cite the 107-year-old organisation’s values, and to suggest Mr Trump had failed them.

    Lobbyist for women’s and LGBT rights Amy Siskind tweeted: “If the Boy Scouts organization has any decency, they’ll come out with a statement tonight denouncing Trump, and giving instructions for all troop leaders to speak to these boys about what they just heard and why it was wrong.”

    https://twitter.com/Leila_A_Rice/status/889676297852604417

  • The Trumpler youth cheered and chanted

    More on Trump’s confusion of the Boy Scouts with the Hitler Youth:

    “Who the hell wants to speak about politics when I’m in front of the Boy Scouts?” President Trump asked the 40,000 people gathered in Glen Jean, West Virginia, on Monday for the Boy Scout Jamboree.

    The answer is President Trump. The event, which occurs every four years, was attended by about 24,000 boys, ages 12 to 18, but Trump treated it like a raucous campaign rally. During a rambling, 35-minute speech, he playfully threatened a member of his cabinet about getting the votes to repeal Obamacare, recounted his election win in great detail, and attacked President Obama.

    A post on the Jamboree’s blog had warned troops to be “courteous” and refrain from chanting phrases like “lock her up” as they are “considered divisive by many members of our audience, and may cause unnecessary friction between individuals and units.” That did not prevent the audience from applauding Trump’s partisan attacks and even booing when he mentioned Hillary Clinton.

    “Divisive” is a weasel-word. Those chants are worse than just “divisive.” In any case the warning failed; the Boy Scouts cheered and booed on cue.

    It seems the president had prepared a speech about letting “your scouting oath guide your path,” but his trademark asides and non sequiturs dominated the address. Here are Trump’s weird comments to his largely underage audience.

    1. Trump starts off by marveling at the size of the crowd and attacking the press.
    “Boy, you have a lot of people here. The press will say it’s about 200 people. [Laughter.] It looks like about 45,000 people. You set a record today. [Applause.] You set a record. That’s a great honor, believe me. Tonight we put aside all of the policy fights in Washington, D.C. — you’ve been hearing about that with the fake news and all of that. [Applause.] We’re going to put that aside. And instead we’re going to talk about success, about how all of you amazing young Scouts can achieve your dreams … I said, who the hell wants to speak about politics when I’m in front of the Boy Scouts, right?”

    2. Trump calls our nation’s capital a “cesspool.” 
    “You know, I go to Washington and I see all these politicians, and I see the swamp. And it’s not a good place. In fact, today, I said we ought to change it from the word swamp to the word cesspool, or perhaps, to the word sewer. But it’s not good. Not good.” [Applause.]

    3. Trump boasts that ten members of his cabinet were Boy Scouts, then threatens to fire one of them.
    “Secretary Tom Price is also here. Today Dr. Price still lives the Scout Oath, helping to keep millions of Americans strong and healthy as our Secretary of Health and Human Services. And he’s doing a great job. And hopefully, he’s going to get the votes tomorrow to start our path toward killing this horrible thing known as Obamacare that’s really hurting us, folks.”

    [Applause. Crowd chants “USA! USA! USA!”]

    Yep; it did. That’s the part that’s making me hate this country today: that that rich narcissistic pig stood up in front of 40 thousand Boy Scouts and called expanded health insurance “this harrible thing” – and they applauded and chanted. I hate this nightmare.

    4. Trump says we need more “loyalty,” doesn’t explain what he’s referring to. 
    “As the Scout Law says: ‘A Scout is trustworthy, loyal’ — we could use some more loyalty, I will tell you that.”

    5. Trump marvels at the size of the crowd and attacks the “fake media” for refusing to show it (though CNN aired the speech).
    “I’m waving to people back there so small I can’t even see them. Man, this is a lot of people. Turn those cameras back there, please. That is so incredible. By the way, what do you think the chances are that this incredible, massive crowd, record-setting is going to be shown on television tonight? One percent or zero? [Applause.] The fake media will say: President Trump — and you know what this is — President Trump spoke before a small crowd of Boy Scouts today. That’s some — that is some crowd. [Applause.] Fake media. Fake news. Thank you.”

    6. Trump attacks his predecessor for failing to address the Boy Scouts (Obama sent a video message in 2010).
    [Audience chants, “We love Trump! We love Trump! We love Trump!”]

    “By the way, just a question, did President Obama ever come to a jamboree?”

    [Audience shouts, “No!”]

    “And we’ll be back. We’ll be back. The answer is no, but we’ll be back.”

    There’s a lot more, including a long wandering story about rich men in New York and the wild parties on their yachts and what they get up to out there and not saying it to the Boy Scouts wink wink nudge grab them by the pussy wink nudge.

    Nightmare, I tell you.

    From Gnu Atheism with apologies to Tom Lehrer

    Image may contain: one or more people, people standing and text

    Be prepared!
    If you are a Scout today.
    Be prepared!
    For what Trump might come and say.
    Seems they couldn’t get a speaker from the Klan
    So they got someone about to hit the fan.

    Be prepared!
    He does not need any notes
    For a long
    Diatribe about his votes.
    Let him count the countless thousands who the press won’t say were there.
    They’re the very few survivors of that dread Obamacare.
    If you do not vote against it then be scared.
    Be prepared!

    Be prepared!
    God and Christmas have come back.
    Be prepared!
    Even if belief you lack.
    If you claim he’s not for freedom, that’s just spin,
    “But if you do what we say” then ” you will win”.

    Be prepared!
    Be alert and be awake,
    For the news
    Has to praise him or it’s fake.
    Even Fox, apart from Hannity, has had it up to here.
    If you haven’t lost your sanity you know the end is near;
    In his lying tweets he soon will be ensnared.
    Be prepared!

  • That’s how you do it

    Pete Souza posted this on Instagram today:

    https://www.instagram.com/p/BW8u34hl0Rv/?taken-by=petesouza

  • Roosevelt used the occasion to talk about good citizenship

    The Post details how aberrant and wrong and narcissistic Trump’s speech to the Boy Scouts yesterday was.

    For 80 years, American presidents have been speaking to the National Scout Jamboree, a gathering of tens of thousands of youngsters from around the world eager to absorb the ideas of service, citizenship and global diplomacy.

    In keeping with the scouts’ traditions, all eight presidents and surrogates who have represented them have stayed far, far away from partisan politics.

    I had assumed that, without knowing anything specific about it, because after all, it’s the Boy Scouts – it’s not a set of people you would expect to be interested in the minutiae of Donald Trump’s political biography and it’s also not a set of people you have any business assuming are political allies. That’s not how Trump played it though. He made it all about him, and he treated them as rabid Republicans.

    Franklin Delano Roosevelt used the occasion to talk about good citizenship. Harry S. Truman extolled fellowship: “When you work and live together, and exchange ideas around the campfire, you get to know what the other fellow is like,” he said.

    President Dwight D. Eisenhower invoked the “bonds of common purpose and common ideals.” And President George H.W. Bush spoke of “serving others.”

    For a brief moment at this year’s jamboree in West Virgina, President Donald Trump indicated that he would follow that tradition — sort of.

    “Who the hell wants to speak about politics when I’m in front of the Boy Scouts?” he said.

    It’s a miracle he didn’t tell them about his adventures in pussy grabbing.

    Then, standing before all 40,000 of them, he bragged about the “record” crowd size, bashed President Barack Obama, criticized the “fake media” and trashed Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. In the lengthy 35-minute speech, the president threatened to fire his Health and Human Services Secretary if he couldn’t convince members of Congress to vote for the Republican health-care bill.

    In short, he made a completely disgusting spectacle of himself.

    At one point, he told a rambling story about a conversation he had at a New York cocktail party with a once-successful home builder who “lost his momentum.” The lesson, apparently: “You have to know whether or not you continue to have the momentum. And if you don’t have it, that’s OK.”

    Throughout the address, Trump dropped in praise for “the moms and the dads and troop leaders” and thanked the scouts for upholding “the sacred values of our nation.”

    And then quickly reverted to talking about himself and his political to-do list.

    It was yet another example of Trump ignoring the custom that past presidents have dutifully observed in such public ceremonies. In his first full day in office, Trump bucked tradition at the CIA when he delivered a campaign-style speech in front of a memorial wall for fallen agency employees. In May, he used a commencement ceremony at the Coast Guard Academy to lament that he has been treated “more unfairly” than any other politician in history. And so it was at this year’s jamboree. Trump, who promised to be different than all the rest, was indeed just that, talking to the scouts in a way no president ever has.

    His only interest is himself, and he’s so Theory of Mind-deficient that he thinks everyone shares that interest.

  • He’s looking forward to it

    Oh, brilliant – now we’re expected to rejoice that War Hero With Glioblastoma Is Returning to the Senate to Vote on Urgent Matter – in fact to add his vote to the other Republican votes TO TAKE HEALTH INSURANCE AWAY FROM MILLIONS OF PEOPLE.

    I hate this country right now. Hate it. Trump’s performance in front of the Boy Scouts yesterday has pushed me over the edge.

    John McCain has excellent health insurance, because he’s a senator, and he’s coming back to vote to take it away from people who don’t have the good fortune to get health insurance from their employers.

    It was just five days ago that John McCain, the longtime Arizona senator, two-time presidential candidate and perhaps America’s most famous prisoner of war, was diagnosed with a deadly form of brain cancer.

    And yet, McCain is set to make a dramatic return to the U.S. Senate Tuesday for a key vote on health care.

    “Look forward to returning to Senate tomorrow…,” McCain tweeted Monday night.

    …to vote to take health insurance away from people who aren’t John McCain.

    It will be a remarkable moment, to see this man, whom his daughter described poetically as a “warrior at dusk,” take his place again in the “world’s greatest deliberative body,” where he has represented his southwestern state for 30 years.

    Oh yes, very remarkable; remarkable for how disgusting it is.

    The GOP has not been able to gather the votes in the Senate — and that has started to really rankle President Trump. His irritation was evident during his appearance Monday at the Boy Scouts National Jamboree in West Virginia.

    “As the scout law says, a scout is trustworthy, loyal,” Trump said. He added, “We could use some more loyalty, I will tell you that.”

    Speaking of Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price, an Eagle Scout, he said, “Hopefully he’s going to gets the votes tomorrow to start our path toward killing this horrible thing known as Obamacare that’s really hurting us.”

    Yeah, he did. I watched the clip where he said it. My brain woke me up at 3 a.m. replaying it. It’s why I hate this country right now – that hideous vision of a bloated rich man telling the fucking Boy Scouts how Harrible Obamacare is. Now I’m being told to marvel that a mortally ill rich man is returning to add his vote to the struggle to grab health insurance away from millions of people.

    Before the Scouts, Trump wasn’t quite done yet: “He better get Senator Capito to vote for it. He better get the other senators to vote for it. It’s time.”

    Sen. Capito is West Virginia Sen. Shelly Moore Capito, one of the holdouts on voting for what Republicans have so far proposed when it comes to health care. She’s one of a dozen or so senators who have not committed to even voting for the motion to proceed.

    Nevermind that Boy Scouts is supposed to be an apolitical organization. The group put out a statement after the speech saying it does not endorse any candidate.

    He thought they were the Hitler Youth. Pathetically, a lot of them acted as if they were – there was a great deal of cheering.

    This is life at the bottom of the muck.

  • Take it away

    There’s precedent for this enraged determination to rescind a piece of legislation that does something to help the non-rich. Republicans now are trying hard to take health insurance away from millions of people who won’t be able to afford it. In 1936 they tried hard to take Social Security away.

    The 1936 story, told in detail in Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s, “The Age of Roosevelt,” began in October when a group of Detroit industrialists worked out an anti-Social Security campaign that the Republican National Committee quickly adopted. Two weeks before the election, signs began appearing in plants with the message, “You’re sentenced to a weekly pay reduction for all your working life. You’ll have to serve the sentence unless you help reverse it November 3.” On opening their pay envelopes workers were told, “Effective January, 1937, we are compelled by a Roosevelt ‘New Deal’ law to make a 1 percent deduction from your wages and turn it over to the government. . . . You might get this money back . . . but only if Congress decides to make the appropriation for this purpose. There is NO guarantee. Decide before November 3—election day—whether or not you wish to take these chances.”

    Nothing was said about the employers’ contributions to Social Security or how the system would really work, but as the election grew nearer, Republicans were sure that they had an issue that would undermine labor’s support for Roosevelt. Republican candidate Alf Landon, who in September had declared that Social Security was “unjust, unworkable, stupidly drafted, and wastefully financed,” upped the stakes still further by insisting the federal government had no way of keeping track of Social Security recipients. “Are their photographs going to be kept on file in a Washington office? Or are they going to have identification tags put around their necks?” he asked.

    The attack on Social Security infuriated Roosevelt, and on October 31, in a campaign speech at Madison Square Garden, he took off the gloves. “Only desperate men with their backs to the wall would descend so far below the level of decent citizenship as to foster the current pay-envelope campaign against America’s working people,” the president declared. The Republican disinformation campaign against Social Security was, FDR believed very different from politics as usual. When his opponents implied that Social Security would be stolen from its intended recipients, they were, he argued, guilty of more than deceit. “They attack the integrity and honor of American Government itself,” the president declared.

    Nicolaus Mills, Dissent

    Roosevelt fought back. The election wasn’t close.

  • A public relations campaign aimed at methodically strangling it

    The Trump gang has been using money meant to promote Obamacare enrollment to campaign against it.

    The Trump administration has spent taxpayer money meant to encourage enrollment in the Affordable Care Act on a public relations campaign aimed at methodically strangling it.

    The effort, which involves a multi-pronged social media push as well as video testimonials designed at damaging public opinion of President Obama’s health care law, is far more robust and sustained than has been publicly revealed or realized.

    The strategy has caught the eye of legal experts and Democrats in Congress, who have asked government agencies to investigate whether the administration has misused funds and engaged in covert propaganda in its efforts to damage and overturn the seven-year-old health care law. It’s also roiled Obama administration veterans, who argue that the current White House is not only abdicating its responsibilities to administer the law but sabotaging it in an effort to facilitate its undoing by Congress.

    They’re just desperate to take health insurance away from millions of people. Desperate. Wetting their pants desperate.

    “I’m on a daily basis horrified by leaders at the Department of Health and Human Services who seem intent on taking healthcare away from the constituents they are supposed to serve,” former HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said in an interview with The Daily Beast. “We always believed that delivering health and human services was the mission of the department. That seems to not be the mission of the current leadership.”

    They want more people with no health insurance. That’s what they’re working overtime to get.

    Under Secretary Tom Price’s stewardship, HHS has filmed and produced a series of testimonial videos featuring individuals claiming to have been harmed by Obamacare. Those “viral” videos have had decidedly limited reach, often gathering somewhere between 100 and 200 views each. But the Department has made a heavy investment in them nonetheless. To date, it has released 23 videos. A source familiar with the video production says that there have been nearly 30 interviews conducted in total, from which more than 130 videos have been produced.

    …

    Funding for those videos would come from the Department’s “consumer information and outreach” budget, which was previously used for the purposes of advertising the ACA and encouraging enrollment. The Trump administration has requested $574 million for this specific budget item, though HHS declined to detail how much it has devoted to specific line items. Two sources familiar with the videos say that HHS continues to draw money from the outreach fund, even though its objective has switched from promoting the ACA to highlighting the law’s critics and its shortcomings.

    It’s “outreach” to get people to lose their health insurance. Eyes on the prize, folks.

    Then there is Twitter. The official HHS account has become a clearinghouse for anti-Obamacare messaging. Since the Trump administration came into office, @HHSGov has mentioned “Obamacare” 13 specific times, 10 of which could be described as openly hostile of the law. Twice the account has re-tweeted Secretary Price’s own account when it has explicitly encouraged legislative efforts to undo Obamacare. The first was on May 4, when Price applauded the house for passing its bill, the American Health Care Act. The second came on June 5, when Price used the hashtag #RepealAndReplace.

    Perhaps the most glaring efforts to publicly undermine the ACA, has come on the Department of Health and Human Service’s own website. In the Obama administration, this piece of online real estate featured direct links for consumers to apply for coverage and infographic breakdowns of the ACA’s benefits and critical dates. Since Trump was inaugurated, it has been retrofitted into an bulletin board for information critical of the law.

    Currently, for example, the banner image on the site leads to a page explaining the ways in which the ACA “has done damage to this market and created great burdens for many Americans.”

    Subtle changes have been made to the “About the ACA” section of the website as well that reflect the current administration’s hostility toward to the law.

    • * The “Plain Language Benefits” section has been scrapped as has the section on “ER Access & Doctor Choice.”
    • * Under the “pre-existing conditions” section, the Trump version has removed any mention of women no longer being able to be charged more than men for coverage.
    • * Under the “Young Adult Coverage” section, the Trump HHS site no longer notes that before the ACA insurance companies could have removed enrolled children at the age of 19.
    • * Mentions of the “Affordable Care Act” have been replaced with “current law.”
    • * And while the Obama HHS site had a section noting that the ACA forced insurance companies to provide “easy-to-understand” summaries of benefit and coverage packages, the Trump site has no such page.

    They’re demons.

  • The girls with internal injuries

    Allison Pearson points out that porn is having some bad effects on girls.

    I was having dinner with a group of women when the conversation moved onto how we could raise happy, well-balanced sons and daughters who are capable of forming meaningful relationships in an age when internet pornography is as freely available as a glass of water. Porn has changed the landscape of adolescence beyond all recognition. Like other parents of our generation, we were on a journey without maps or lights, although the instinct to protect our children from the darkness was overwhelming.

    A couple of the women present said that they had forced themselves to have toe-curlingly embarrassing conversations with their teenagers on the subject. “I want my son to know that, despite what he might see on his laptop, there are things you don’t expect a girl to do on a first date, or a fifth date, or probably never,” said Jo.

    A GP, let’s call her Sue, said: “I’m afraid things are much worse than people suspect.” In recent years, Sue had treated growing numbers of teenage girls with internal injuries caused by frequent anal sex; not, as Sue found out, because she wanted to, or because she enjoyed it – on the contrary – but because a boy expected her to.

    And what boy expects boy gets.

    There was stunned silence among the mothers around that dinner table, although I think some of us may have let out involuntary cries of dismay and disbelief.

    For Sue’s surgery isn’t in some inner-city borough where kids may have been brutalised or come from cultures where such practices are commonly used as contraception. Sue works in the leafy heart of Hampshire. The girls presenting with incontinence were often under the age of consent and from loving, stable homes. Just the sort of kids who, only two generations ago, would have been enjoying riding and ballet lessons, and still looking forward to their first kiss, not being coerced into violent sex by some kid who picked up his ideas about physical intimacy from a dogging video on his mobile.

    Oh that’s nothing – the other day Teen Vogue (which is aimed at teenage girls) had a piece on how to submit to anal sex.

    The harm, of course, is not just physical. A study this week revealed that the number of schoolgirls at risk of emotional problems has risen sharply. Scientists for the Journal of Adolescent Health were surprised to see a 7 per cent spike in only five years among girls aged 11 to 13 reporting emotional issues. Boys remained fairly stable while girls faced “unique pressures”. Researchers said the causes could include the drive to achieve an unrealistic body shape, perpetuated by social media and an increasing sexualisation of young women.

    But there’s always Ivanka to look up to and Gwyneth to sell us jade eggs.

  • The Prevezon case was settled for $6m with no admission of guilt

    Waaaaaait a second.

    I’m not sure I’m reading this right.

    The Guardian has a big investigative multi-author story on Russian money-laundering and Trumps and lawsuits and all that.

    A Guardian investigation has established a series of overlapping ties and relationships involving alleged Russian money laundering, New York real estate deals and members of Trump’s inner circle. They include a 2015 sale of part of the old New York Times building in Manhattan involving Kushner and a billionaire real estate tycoon and diamond mogul, Lev Leviev.

    Go on.

    Leviev, a global tycoon known as the “king of diamonds”, was a business partner of the Russian-owned company Prevezon Holdings that was at the center of a multimillion-dollar lawsuit launched in New York. Under the leadership of US attorney Preet Bharara, who was fired by Trump in March, prosecutors pursued Prevezon for allegedly attempting to use Manhattan real estate deals to launder money stolen from the Russian treasury.

    The scam had been uncovered by Sergei Magnitsky, an accountant who died in 2009 in a Moscow jail in suspicious circumstances. US sanctions against Russia imposed after Magnitsky’s death were a central topic of conversation at the notorious Trump Tower meeting last June between Kushner, Donald Trump Jr, Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort and a Russian lawyer with ties to the Kremlin.

    What? Kushner did this deal with Leviev in 2015, and Preet Bharara prosecuted Prevzon (linked to Leviev)?

    Oh but it gets worse.

    Two days before it was due to open in court in May, the Prevezon case was settled for $6m with no admission of guilt on the part of the defendants. But since details of the Trump Tower meeting emerged, the abrupt settlement of the Prevezon case has come under renewed scrutiny from congressional investigators.

    May 6 this year.

    Four Russians attended the meeting, led by Natalia Veselnitskaya, a lawyer with known Kremlin connections who acted as legal counsel for Prevezon in the money laundering case and who called the $6m settlement so slight that “it seemed almost an apology from the government”. Sixteen Democratic members of the House judiciary committee have now written to the justice department in light of the Trump Tower meeting demanding to know whether there was any interference behind the decision to avoid trial.

    Holy shit.

    Question: was this meeting the meeting to settle the case? Or was it the meeting with Don 2 last year? It seems to mean the former, but it’s not crystal clear. If it is the former…jeeeeezus.

    Constitutional experts are also demanding an official inquiry. “We need a full accounting by Trump’s justice department of the unexplained and frankly outrageous settlement that is likely to be just the tip of a vast financial iceberg,” said Laurence Tribe, Harvard University professor of constitutional law.

    Stunning.

  • Self-righteous display

    The latest in the Hypatia saga: the Associate Editors have circulated a new letter among the philosophers. Daily Nous shares it:

    We, the members of the Board of Associate Editors of Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, are deeply disappointed that the Editors and members of the journal’s nonprofit board have been unwilling to collaborate with us toward a constructive solution to the current crisis, utilizing the processes for reviewing and changing policies outlined within the journal’s approved governance documents. As scholars who highly value Hypatia and who have dedicated a great deal of time and energy to its success, we are troubled by the recent statements by the Editors and the nonprofit board (posted on Hypatia’s website and Daily Nous on July 20, 2017). We are sending this response to members of the feminist philosophy community who have leadership positions in various feminist associations and journals because we do not wish to fuel speculations and inaccurate and harmful narratives about Hypatia of the kind that have circulated widely on the internet since this crisis broke in April.

    Collaborate. They’re disappointed – deeply disappointed – that the editors and the board don’t want to collaborate with them. How collaborative was their letter about Tuvel’s article? How collaborative was that (now removed) Facebook post? Not collaborative at all, that’s how collaborative. It was a horrifying thing to do to a junior colleague and a very destructive thing to do to Hypatia…and its editors and board. Why should they expect the editors and the board to collaborate with them now? It’s a bit Trumpian, this expectation of collaboration that runs only one way.

    Also notice that oh so typical agent-free version of the saga: “since this crisis broke in April.” As if it were an unexpected volcanic eruption. They caused the damn crisis with their uncollaborative letter and post.

    On Monday, July 17 the nonprofit board gave us an ultimatum of either resigning by noon on July 19 or they would suspend the journal’s governance documents and, thus, the authority of the Board of Associate Editors. At that time, the nonprofit board also informed us that they planned to make a public statement in which they would announce either our resignation or their suspension of the Journal’s governance documents, depending on our response to their ultimatum. They also informed us of the Editors’ impending resignation, retroactive to July 1. Their recent public statement claims that they have “temporarily” suspended our authority. Nonetheless, their unilateral decision is a de facto suspension of Hypatia’s governance documents and a firing of us.

    We strongly disagree with several of the claims made in both the Editors’ and the nonprofit board’s public statements explaining this action. Throughout this controversy, we have been guided by commitments to excellence, academic integrity, and inclusiveness that have long informed Hypatia’s vision and have established it as a leading feminist philosophy journal. Additionally, we remain steadfast in our commitment to working within the letter and spirit of the journal’s current governance document that was approved in 2012 by Hypatia’s Editors, Associate Editors, and founding members of the nonprofit board. To this end, we have repeatedly requested that the Editors and the nonprofit board engage in a mediation process with us, facilitated by a feminist philosopher acceptable to all parties. Our aim in making this proposal was to initiate a collaborative process in which we could discuss our differences, identify common goals, and find a constructive way forward for the good of Hypatia. Much to our regret, the Editors and the non-profit board rebuffed these requests, maintaining that we are solely responsible for the controversy in ways that, in our view, systematically deflect attention from the substantial philosophical and methodological issues that we see as the heart of the matter. Despite our persistent requests for mediation, the nonprofit board stated their willingness to engage in mediation only after they had posted their public statement, suspended our authority, and, de facto, suspended the journal’s governance document. We find it untenable to participate in such a process on these terms.

    Ah, yes, mediation. They want collaboration and they want mediation – after they wrote those poisonous attacks on Tuvel. I’ve seen that before. Two or three of the inquisitors at Freethought Blogs tried to make me agree to “mediation” at the same time they were writing long inquisitorial blog posts about me every other day. Nope.

    We whole-heartedly endorse the COPE guidelines cited by the nonprofit board, and we regard Hypatia’s governance structure and guidelines as living documents that should be held open to revision in the face of new challenges. However, while we have stressed the importance of acting within the framework for policy review set out in the journal’s governance document in order to address the crisis, the nonprofit board has made it clear that they were prepared to set those guidelines aside, using the legal power they have as signators to the publishing contract with Wiley-Blackwell. Hypatia’s nonprofit board was formed in 2008 for the purpose of handling the financial matters of the journal and signing contracts with the publisher. Hypatia’s Board of Associate Editors has existed since the journal was established and is identified, both in Hypatia’s governance documents and in the nonprofit board’s own operating guidelines, as centrally responsible for reviewing and revising the journal’s policies and, more generally, for ensuring Hypatia’s continuity as a journal founded and sustained by a community of scholars rather than by a corporate institution. We continue to believe that the best prospects for meeting current challenges lie in working within this framework, not setting it aside.

    We understand that feminist philosophers are divided in their opinions about the letter we posted in May. We would like to emphasize that our letter neither called for retraction nor impugned any individual actions on the part of the journal’s editors. Instead, our letter clearly stated that it is the journal’s review process, not a particular, individual execution of that process, that requires review. A commitment to undertake such a review would make it clear that we take seriously public critiques of the journal and would be necessary if Hypatia is to realize the ideals of inclusiveness that we highly value. We understand that our decision to issue the letter was unusual, and that some members of our community consider it an abdication of our responsibilities as Associate Editors. To those colleagues, we ask that you consider carefully the position we have held since we drafted that letter: that our duties as Associate Editors of the flagship journal of feminist philosophy include being responsive to the voices of members of historically marginalized groups who have found philosophy in general, and feminist philosophy in particular, indifferent and at times hostile to their contributions. 

    We are greatly concerned that the most recent public statements from the Editors and the nonprofit board will deepen a split in the feminist philosophy community. It is our hope that, as a community, we will opt instead to respond by reflecting upon, and seeking to ameliorate, the various ways in which feminist philosophy has not yet lived up to its ethical commitment to transform itself, and philosophy as a whole, into a discipline that honors the perspectives and welcomes the scholarly contributions of historically marginalized groups, including people of color, trans* people, disabled people, and queer people. The current controversy did not begin with our letter; it is instead grounded in long-standing differences and tensions within the field. It is precisely our respect for Hypatia that informs our belief that what is at stake here is not only the continued existence and relevance of this particular journal, one that has done so much to establish feminist philosophy as a respected and valued scholarly field, but also the very identity and parameters of feminist philosophy itself. This is a pivotal moment in which we need to come together to ensure that our practices and scholarship are appropriately responsive to relevant work by those who are marginalized within the discipline of philosophy.

    We deeply regret that the Editors and nonprofit board were unwilling to engage with us in systematically reflecting on these issues and collaboratively addressing their implications for Hypatia. The declaration by the nonprofit board that they are suspending our authority means that we cannot fulfill our duties as Associate Editors in accordance with the journal’s governance documents. Regrettably, we see no alternative but to resign from Hypatia’s Board of Associate Editors with this letter.

    Linda Martín Alcoff, Ann Cahill, Kim Q. Hall, Kyoo Lee, Mariana Ortega, Ásta Sveinsdóttir, Alison Wylie, George Yancy

    I think what the editors and the board were unwilling to engage with the Associate Editors in was not “systematically reflecting on these issues” but doing so via public letters and Facebook posts. In other words the Associate Editors attacked Tuvel and Hypatia publicly and unilaterally, and now reproaches the board of Hypatia for not wanting to continue with that game.

  • Filters can be necessary

    This is annoying. Someone called Iona Italia wrote a post about Richard Dawkins’s de-platforming from a speaking event at radio KPFA in Berkeley. I think the de-platforming is rude and stupid and also shockingly under-justified by the people at KPFA, whose written explanation is about as cogent as a Trump tweet. But in writing about this Italia basically says it’s great that Richard is so rude. Yeah no – it’s not.

    Dawkins has always been a man without a filter, who says exactly what he thinks, without worrying whether it might offend. This means that, in his public statements on politics, he occasionally sounds goofy or politically incorrect or voices a sentiment without considering how it will be interpreted by others. He’s no diplomat, no politician. But his frankness is one of his most important qualities, a manifestation of the passion his new book title alludes to, a passion for truth. He has real integrity: he always says what he believes to be true, unafraid of how it will be received. He sometimes admits he’s wrong and corrects himself but he never self-censors in advance. He always speaks truth to power.

    Excuse me but that is crap. He does not always speak truth to power – he very often speaks belligerently and rudely to people with no power, and he very often does it for no reason of principle but just because he gets impatient and/or he is indignant at being contradicted…much like Trump.

    And this business of having no filter and saying whatever one thinks without worrying whether it might offend is – obviously – far from always a virtue. Yes it’s often useful to shock the respectable, yes it’s often a good thing to shake up conventions; that does not mean it’s always awesome to blurt whatever pops into your head and then shout at anyone who talks back. There’s being a rebel and there’s being an asshole, and it’s just not the case that Richard is always the first and never the second.

    I wish people made this distinction more often.

  • At least Loud Obbs thinks he’s doing a good job

    Aw poor Donald. He’s cracking. For the first time he’s letting us know it hurts.

    As if the laughter of the Russians were our fault and not his.

    Aw. If he weren’t such a sadistic monster, I might feel a little sorry for him at that. But he is, so I don’t. He’s earned his feelings of abandonment by being such a terrible human being and head of state.

    No, the sad thing is that Republicans so far have not done anything to stop him or slow him down.

    And every story is bad because…?

    Blah blah, blurt blurt. He’s watching Fox with his phone in his hand.

    That’s just pathetic.

  • He can’t, unless he can

    On Friday the Post ran an editorial by Laurence Tribe, Richard Painter, and Norm Eisen, titled No, Trump can’t pardon himself. The Constitution tells us so.

    Can a president pardon himself? Four days before Richard Nixon resigned, his own Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel opined no, citing “the fundamental rule that no one may be a judge in his own case.” We agree.

    The Justice Department was right that guidance could be found in the enduring principles that no one can be both the judge and the defendant in the same matter, and that no one is above the law.

    The Constitution specifically bars the president from using the pardon power to prevent his own impeachment and removal. It adds that any official removed through impeachment remains fully subject to criminal prosecution. That provision would make no sense if the president could pardon himself.

    But Trump doesn’t care what makes sense and what doesn’t, so could he and his people just go ahead and do it anyway? Is there anyone who can stop him who would stop him? Millions of people would if they could, but among people who actually can, I don’t know what the numbers are.

    President Trump thinks he can do a lot of things just because he is president. He says that the president can act as if he has no conflicts of interest. He says that he can fire the FBI director for any reason he wants (and he admitted to the most outrageous of reasons in interviews and in discussionwith the Russian ambassador). In one sense, Trump is right — he can do all of these things, although there will be legal repercussions if he does. Using official powers for corrupt purposes — such as impeding or obstructing an investigation — can constitute a crime.

    But there is one thing we know that Trump cannot do — without being a first in all of human history. He cannot pardon himself.

    He would love to be a first in all of human history.

  • An award for courageous achievement

    Updating a post from three weeks ago, aka reporting one bad thing from Trump’s Very Large Array of Bad Things averted: the Afghan girls’ robotics team were granted visas after all.

    At the urging of President Donald Trump, U.S. officials have reversed course and decided to allow into the United States a group of Afghan girls hoping to participate in an international robotics competition next week, senior administration officials told POLITICO on Wednesday.

    The decision followed a furious public backlash to the news that the six teens had been denied U.S. visas. That criticism swelled as details emerged about the girls’ struggle to build their robot and get visas.

    They got here.

    For three days in the Daughters of the American Revolution Constitution Hall, where an African-American woman was once denied the right to sing before an integrated audience in the 1930s, the Afghan girls in head scarves were stars on an international stage, with cameras, lights and whispers trailing them from practice to competition.

    …

    It was certainly a celebration for Roya Mahboob, a renowned Afghan technology entrepreneur who interpreted for the teenagers and came on behalf of her company, Digital Citizen Fund, a women’s empowerment nonprofit that sponsored the Afghan team.

    The six students were chosen from an initial pool of 150 applicants. They built their robot in two weeks, compared with the four months some of their competitors had, because their kit’s shipment was delayed.

    “I’m just proud that we show the talent of the women,” Ms. Mahboob said. “We see that there is change.”

    The Afghan robot, named Better Idea of Afghan Girls, lurched across the terrain for the first round and skirted out of bounds, but 15-year-old Lida Azizi, a teal-colored braid dangling from under her white head scarf, flashed her teammates a thumbs-up as they cheered in Dari and applauded. As the competition progressed, they continued to make adjustments as they got used to driving their robot, an Afghan flag carefully attached.

    They didn’t win, but they got to take part.

    During Tuesday’s awards ceremony, judges awarded the Afghans a silver medal as part of an award for courageous achievement, giving gold to the team from South Sudan.

    The crowd roared and waved flags as the teenagers accepted their medals and waved.

    It was the first medal Fatemah Qaderyan, 14, of the Afghan team had ever earned, and through a translator, she explained that she planned to hang it in her room and show it to all of her friends.

    “I am so excited, and very, very happy,” she said, turning the medal over in her hands. “I still can’t believe this happened.”

    We take our bright spots where we find them.

  • There still may be financial ties that we don’t know about

    The ABCs of ethics: it’s not ethical to have a government job with huge decision-making power over businesses and the economy they swim in, while also having businesses that can benefit or lose from your own decisions. Super basic, right? Not hard to understand?

    CNBC reports:

    Ivanka Trump or her trust received at least $12.6 million since early 2016 from her various business ventures and has an arrangement to guarantee her at least $1.5 million a year even as she serves in a top White House position, according to her first ethics disclosure made public late Friday.

    The report was released alongside an updated filing by her husband, Jared Kushner, who is also serving as a top adviser to President Trump. It shows that the couple benefit from an active business empire worth as much as $761 million to them, an arrangement that ethics experts warn poses potentials for conflicts of interest as the couple have been given a wide-ranging portfolio of government responsibilities.

    Of course it does. It’s a ludicrous arrangement. It’s made all the more ludicrous by their total lack of relevant education and experience: they have those jobs only because they are close relatives of the Dictator, and not because they bring anything of value. It’s about as scammy as it could be.

    Ms. Trump, who resigned from nearly 300 leadership positions at various entities within the family real estate businesses and at her fashion brand, has continued to receive millions of dollars from both streams, including more than $2.4 million from her stake in the Trump International Hotel in Washington and more than $2.5 million in salary and severance from the Trump Organization.

    Ms. Trump received about $1.7 million in payments from T International Realty, the family’s luxury brokerage agency, as well as two other real estate companies for various management, consulting and licensing work, the documents show. Those payments, for work done in 2016, were based on the companies’ performance.

    See it doesn’t matter how many positions she resigns from; she still owns the companies or shares of the companies so she still has an interest in how they fare under the Dictator’s administration. The arrangement is corrupt as fuck.

    But going forward, she will receive fixed payments — a change that her advisers say was developed in consultation with the Office of Government Ethics to minimize her potential conflicts by removing her interest in how well her family’s business performs.

    Pathetic. The Office of Government Ethics rolled over. The companies are still there and she will return to profiting from them if they continue to make a profit, so the potential conflicts are still there.

    Although the documents show Ms. Trump’s personal assets, income and liabilities, they do not disclose her brand’s fashion licensing partners, for example, or real estate clients. Such information is not required, demonstrating the limits of such disclosures for government officials with vast business interests.

    “There still may be financial ties that we don’t know about,” said Lawrence M. Noble, a former general counsel and chief ethics officer of the Federal Election Commission. “These really weren’t meant to deal with a situation where somebody’s going to keep a major business interest.”

    That’s why the norm is that they don’t keep a major business interest.

    Ethics experts say the extensive holdings of the two pose potential conflicts of interest. Unlike Mr. Trump, who is exempt from federal ethics laws, Mr. Kushner and Ms. Trump are prohibited by those laws from taking any government action that might benefit their financial holdings.

    Mr. Kushner and Ms. Trump both “walk a very fine line in having to step aside and recuse themselves from certain discussions and give advice if it would benefit them and their business personally,” said Scott H. Amey, the general counsel at the Project on Government Oversight, a nonprofit organization.

    “And we won’t know if they are taking necessary steps to recuse themselves because, unfortunately, the ethics process requires a lot of self-policing,” he said.

    Corrupt.as.fuck.

  • Tragic role model deficit strikes boys

    Well that takes the biscuit.

    A former Doctor Who actor has hit out at the BBC’s decision to cast Jodie Whittaker in the role, saying that the decision meant there is “a loss of a role model for boys”.

    Peter Davison said she is a “terrific actress” but  that he has doubts that she is right for the role.

    He said before an appearance at  at Comic-Con in San Diego: “If I feel any doubts, it’s the loss of a role model for boys who I think Doctor Who is vitally important for.”

    I see – so it’s only boys who should have role models. Girls should just be passive blobs, with no goals, no choices, no aspirations, nothing to do or achieve – they just wait to grow up and be taken over by whatever role-model-enhanced boy decides he needs his own passive blob to fuck.

    Boys need role models because they’re real people, who have to grow up and do something in the world. Girls don’t, because they’re not real people, they’re just mindless lumps of flesh.

    Also, it’s not enough that boys have had and still have thousands of role models already. No, it’s urgent that all role models should remain role models for boys and boys only forever, while girls do without, because after all, what hope is there for a girl?

    It’s not enough that boys have had the Doctor as a role model since 1963, no, that’s not enough, they have to go on having him forever, while girls stand on the sidelines where they belong.

    Stay in your lane, girls.

  • A serious question about the state of intersectional feminism

    Emily Shire at the Daily Beast notes that the celebrity hijab-wearer and activist Linda Sarsour called Jake Tapper of CNN part of the alt-right.

    The woman widely considered the face of January’s Women’s March and the larger intersectional resistance movement against the Trump administration took aim at a journalist from the news network the President has all but declared war on because Tapper raised a serious question about the state of intersectional feminism.

    Monday afternoon, he retweeted a message from the Women’s March celebrating the birthday of the “revolutionary” Assata Shakur. The warm illustration of Shakur against a pink-to-purple background didn’t mention her conviction for murdering state trooper Werner Foerster when he pulled over a car with Shakur and two other members of the Black Liberation Army. Shakur escaped prison and fled to Cuba, which granted her asylum. As The Daily Beast’s Michael Daly noted in a 2014 report,  “The FBI continued to consider her [Shakur] so dangerous that it offered the $1 million reward in 2005 and put her on the Most Wanted Terrorists List” in 2013.

    So Tapper called out the Women’s March and specifically mentioned Sarsour and the Chicago Dyke March — the group that proudly expelled marchers for carrying flags with Stars of David in a gesture that many (including me) have criticized as blatantly anti-Semitic — for throwing their support behind Shakur: “Shakur is a cop-killer fugitive in Cuba. This, ugly sentiments from @lsarsour & @dykemarchchi …Any progressives out there condemning this?”

    Sarsour tweeted back that Tapper “joins the ranks of the alt-right to target me online. Welcome to the party.”

    That’s a bad and stupid thing for her to say. It’s not alt-right for progressives to take issue with, for instance, celebrating a convicted murderer. [Updating to add: But see Steamshovelmama @ 6 for reasons to think the conviction is unsafe.]

    It’s always pissed me off that Sarsour was the face of the Women’s March…hijab and all. Hijab is not in any way progressive or a symbol of left-wing values.

    This is the left’s version of Trump’s favorite bogeyman, “fake news.” Sarsour, like Trump, cheaply and falsely defames those who raise legitimate concerns or report non-favorable information about her.

    There is a real alt-right, and people do share fake news,  sometimes with violent ramifications (the Comet Ping Pong pizza shooting is proof of that). This is something else.

    Sarsour challenged Tapper to “please share my ‘ugly’ sentiments? Unapologetically Muslim? Unapologetically Palestinian? Pro-immigrant? Pro-justice? Shame.” Tapper responded by reminding the internet that Sarsour had attacked anti-female genital mutilation activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali, saying she wished she could “take [her] vagina away” and that she didn’t “deserve to be [a] wom[a]n.”

    Very social justice, much progressive.

  • We would be a dictatorship, not a democracy

    Harvard professor of constitutional law Noah Feldman says no, Trump can’t pardon himself, not because it would break a rule but because it would be the end of the US.

    Here’s some unsolicited advice for President Donald Trump: Don’t listen to any lawyers who might tell you that you can pardon yourself, or even that it’s a close legal question. You can’t — and no court is going to rule otherwise.

    There’s a decent historical argument about why, but it’s beside the point. The bottom line is that if the president could pardon himself, we would no longer have a republic — nor a government of laws rather than men. We would be a dictatorship, not a democracy.

    You know that. Americans know it. The Supreme Court knows it. Now let’s move on.

    Well I think “You know that” is too optimistic, but anyway.

    [A]s early as 1311 (you read that right), Parliament forced the king to promise that he would only pardon “by process of law and the custom of the realm.” The idea was to rein in the pardon power, making it into an instrument of law, not of arbitrary royal prerogative.

    Given that worry about the anti-legal nature of the pardon power was already more than 450 years old when the Founding Fathers drafted the U.S. Constitution during the hot summer of 1787, it’s a bit surprising that the pardon power even made it in.

    In Philadelphia, the more rights-oriented republicans, like George Mason of Virginia, questioned the whole idea of the pardon power. The more pro-executive participants, like Alexander Hamilton and James Wilson, managed to get it in, albeit without much debate. The idea was that pardons served mercy and could be expedient.

    Pardoning oneself obviously has nothing to do with mercy.

    But frankly, the history isn’t the point. The basic problem with self-pardon is that it would make a mockery of the very idea that the U.S. operates under the rule of law. A president who could self-pardon could violate literally any federal law with impunity, knowing that the only risk was removal from office by impeachment.

    We have a name for an elected leader who is outside the law: dictator. And dictatorship is fundamentally inconsistent with the republic established by the Constitution. In fact, it’s a little difficult to think of any single idea that would more grossly violate the rule of law than a president free to break any and every law and then wave a get-out-of-jail-free card.

    Trump is being a dictator in every way he can get away with it.

    I can predict with complete confidence that no court would uphold a presidential self-pardon. To do so would be to render the courts essentially useless as checks on the executive, to say nothing of Congress, which passes the laws in the first place.

    This isn’t a normal legal problem for courts to resolve by weighing plausible, competing arguments. It’s the whole ball of wax: the survival of constitutional government. The courts will treat it as such.

    Good. I hope he’s right. It seems likely that he is – justices are not likely to surrender to a dictator.