Jeffrey Toobin on why Mueller’s approach was such a disaster, starting with the failure to make Trump testify:

Trump was the protagonist of this entire affair. He’s also a pathological liar, and he is someone whose perspective, if you want to call it that, was indispensable to resolving what really went on here, what Trump was thinking, what his intent was in a legal sense. So the failure to have his voice in the Mueller report and in Mueller’s determinations about what to do with the information he gathered left, I thought, a massive hole in the investigation…

The written questions were basically a joke. They were essentially written by the lawyers, and lawyers, doing what lawyers do, answered

Trump says Biden is gonna hurt god. What, bash it over the head? Bite its hand? Stamp on its foot?

https://t.co/rUCQAP8ype

— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) August 6, 2020

[wedge hand] Take away ya gunz, destroy ya seccun amennment, [flap hand] no reelijunn, no anything, [hatchet hand] hurt the bible, hurt god – [hesitation; flap hand] he’s agenst goddd, he’s agenst gunnz, he’s against energy, arr kind of energy, ahhh – I don’t think he’s gunna do too well in Ohio.

Brilliant stuff.… Read the rest

It is what it is.

COLUMBUS, Ohio – On Thursday, Ohio Governor Mike DeWine announced that he has tested positive for COVID-19. DeWine took a coronavirus test as part of the standard protocol to greet President Donald Trump on the tarmac at Burke Lakefront Airport in Cleveland.

So, no greetings for him. It is what it is.

WH testing protocols just led Ohio Gov. DeWine to learn he has the coronavirus. He was slated to greet Trump on the tarmac in Ohio today.

Note: These quick tests are designed to keep President Trump safe. But, Trump won’t say when these types of tests will be available for all.

— Yamiche Alcindor (@Yamiche) August 6, 2020

No, such luxuries are … Read the rest

Isabel Wilkerson has a new book out about the caste system in the US. She talked about it on Fresh Air:

TERRY GROSS: When my guest Isabel Wilkerson was writing her book “The Warmth Of Other Suns” about the Great Migration of African Americans from the South to the North looking to escape the lynchings, the cross burnings, the terrorism and the lack of opportunity in the South, she says she realized she wasn’t writing about geography and relocation; she was writing about the American caste system.

Now she’s written a new book called “Caste” that explains why she thinks America can be described as having a caste system and how if we use that expression, it deepens our

Jack Holmes on Trump’s galactic narcissism:

It’s not just that the president knows nothing about anything and cares less. This was an astounding showcase for his malignant narcissism, his inability to process anything except as it directly relates to him. The whole world of observable reality is filtered through how it affects him, and him only. You and everyone you know and love are not relevant. The task of thinking about himself is all-consuming. When Swan pressed him on his decision to hold an indoor rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in June—the culmination of a prolonged spasm of happy talk on the pandemic—he went immediately to how big the crowd was, and how Fox News got its best

On the Sally Yates hearing:

Former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates defended a sensitive Justice Department investigation into onetime Trump aide Michael Flynn on Wednesday, telling lawmakers Flynn was essentially “neutering” American sanctions and undercutting the Obama administration by “making nice” with a foreign adversary after Russia’s unprecedented attack on the 2016 election.

Testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Yates said Flynn’s lies to the FBI were “absolutely material to a legitimate investigation” — contradicting the rationale the Justice Department has now offered in seeking to dismiss the case.

Yates, who was a prosecutor for nearly 30 years, said the effort to drop a prosecution against a defendant who twice pleaded guilty was “highly irregular.”

It’s so bizarre having a … Read the rest

There was this tweet.

I wondered if I could find the source, and behold, I could. The first-named author is, of course, Chase Strangio, their star purveyor of fairy tales.

The title is Four Myths About Trans Athletes, Debunked.

Upholding trans athletes’ rights requires rooting out the inaccurate beliefs underlying harmful policies sweeping through state legislatures.

They’re not inaccurate though. The nonsense Strangio talks is inaccurate.

The item in the tweet is “FACT” number 3.

FACT: Trans girls are girls.

MYTH: Sex is binary, apparent at birth, and identifiable through singular biological characteristics. 

Girls who are trans are told repeatedly that they are not “real” girls and boys who are trans are told they are not “real”

Oh whew, Trump says Obama is completely wrong about racism, the US doesn’t have any and Obama is a dirty rotten scoundrel for saying it does. Obviously Trump would know way more about that than Obama does.

The Republican president, in an interview on Fox News, criticized President Barack Obama’s speech last week, in which the Democrat urged Americans to protect democracy and outlined a list of needed reforms such as making election day a national holiday, expanding early voting and increasing polling sites.

“There is an attack on our democratic freedoms and we should treat it as such,” Obama said in a eulogy for the late U.S. Representative John Lewis, a Black civil rights icon.

…

Trump, who

Uh oh, Don is pissed off again.

.@CNN has no sources on the Task Force. Their “sources” are made up, pure fiction! Jim Acosta is a Fake reporter!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 5, 2020

Nah, he’s not. So let’s see what his source told him.

President Donald Trump was still struggling to fully grasp the severity of the coronavirus pandemic during a task force meeting in the Oval Office on Tuesday, a source familiar with the meeting told CNN.

“He still doesn’t get it,” the source said. “He does not get it.”

No, we know. We saw that interview with Jonathan Swan yesterday. We know anyway – he doesn’t get much of anything.

Trump’s meeting with

Benjamin Wittes says this collecting intel on journalists caper is stupid.

… contemplating the Washington Post’s revelation that the Department of Homeland Security Office of Intelligence and Analysis (DHS I&A) issued two intelligence reports about tweets I had written, I can’t help but think that this is what J. Edgar Hoover’s abuses of power might have looked like had Twitter existed in Hoover’s time—and had Hoover been a total idiot.

On the one hand, DHS I&A was preparing intelligence reports on American journalists—on me and on Mike Baker of the New York Times—based on activity indisputably protected by the First Amendment: reporting unclassified information about the conduct of government. That’s toxic stuff. And DHS knows it. No sooner had

Oh hey, look at that, the Trump security people have been investigating journalists.

The Department of Homeland Security has compiled “intelligence reports” about the work of American journalists covering protests in Portland, Ore., in what current and former officials called an alarming use of a government system meant to share information about suspected terrorists and violent actors.

“Alarming” is putting it very mildly.

Over the past week, the department’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis has disseminated three Open Source Intelligence Reports to federal law enforcement agencies and others, summarizing tweets written by two journalists — a reporter for theNew York Times and the editor in chief of the blog Lawfare — and noting they had published leaked, unclassified documents

REPORTER: You called the Beirut explosion an "attack." Are you confident it wasn't an accident?

TRUMP: "Well, it would seem like it."

(This, in case it needs to be pointed out, is totally irresponsible.) pic.twitter.com/7LYYq1dWFr

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 4, 2020

Little bit, seeing as how reporting is that it was a warehouse full of explosives rather than an attack, so let’s not go to war.

The thing is…if you take New York out then the US hasn’t done quite so badly.

Daniel Dale lists some of Trump’s lies in the Axios interview – some because they’re still reviewing it at CNN and there could be more, because, you know, Trump.

Many of Trump’s interviewers are right-wing sycophants who have no interest in challenging him. But Trump has defeated even his other interviewers by employing a strategy we can call the hit-and-run — saying dishonest stuff, then darting ahead to other dishonest stuff before the interviewer reacts.

Aka not letting other people get a word in. I just watched a 15 minute clip of the Swan interview, coronavirus section, and it’s maybe Trump’s one actual talent – the ability to keep the flow going no matter what nonsense he has to talk. … Read the rest

He’s bumpity-bumping down the stairs.

Donald Trump stumbled through his second damaging interview in as many weeks, floundering in a conversation with the news website Axios over key issues he is tasked with responding to as president.

…

In a lengthy discussion about the US’s poor response to coronavirus, Trump described the pandemic as “under control”.

Swan responded: “How? A thousand Americans are dying a day.”

“They are dying. That’s true. And you – it is what it is,” Trump said. “But that doesn’t mean we aren’t doing everything we can. It’s under control as much as you can control it.”

Ohhhhhhhhhh I see, “under control” means “as under control as we can get it, which is zero, … Read the rest

More on the apparent “tragic death of non-existent person” hoax from Ed Cara at Gizmodo:

A bizarre saga of events played out on social media over the weekend, embroiling much of the close-knit world of scientists, academics, and researchers on Twitter. It started with accusations that Arizona State University’s actions had exposed one of their faculty members, an Indigenous woman and anthropologist, to an ultimately fatal case of covid-19. But it ended with allegations that the death was a hoax, carried out by someone who also faked the supposed professor’s entire existence.

Given that many colleges and schools are debating if and how it’s possible to reopen physically this fall in the midst of the pandemic, the accusations of negligence

How that went:

Interviewer: John Lewis is lying in state in the US Capitol, how do you think history will remember John Lewis?

Trump: I don’t know. I really don’t know. I don’t know John Lewis. He chose not to come to my inauguration. He chose, uh – I never met John Lewis, actually, I don’t believe.

Interviewer: Do you find him impressive?

Trump: [pause with mouth open and disdainful “tsk” sound] Uhhh…I can’t say one way or the other. I find a lot of people impressive. I find many people not impressive – but – [shrug] no – but I didn’t uh – [hands come up in accordion gesture; meanwhile interviewer is asking “Do you find his story … Read the rest

An ego that blots out the sun and an empathy that can’t be found with any tool of human inquiry.

.@jonathanvswan: "How do you think history will remember John Lewis?"

President Trump to #AxiosOnHBO: "I don't know…I don't know John Lewis. He chose not to come to my inauguration." pic.twitter.com/LDv76rrIFc

— Axios (@axios) August 4, 2020

… Read the rest

Trump has been shouting at us again.

Donald Trump used his White House coronavirus press conference on Monday to repeat his opposition to lockdowns as a means of bringing the contagion under control, claiming falsely that under his leadership the US has done “as well as any nation”.

If by “as well as” he means “worse than” he’s right on the money.

On a day that the US had surpassed 4.7m confirmed cases of infection – more than a quarter of the global total – Trump tried to deflect criticism of his administration’s handling of the pandemic on to other countries.

Finland! Blame Finland! Also Senegal – why not? And how about Peru? Blame Peru!

He cited Spain, Germany,

Sir about those tax returns sir.

A New York City prosecutor fighting to get President Donald Trump’s tax returns told a judge Monday he was justified in demanding them because of public reports of “extensive and protracted criminal conduct at the Trump Organization.”

In other words we have a hardened criminal as president of the US. Ain’t life grand.

Manhattan District Attorney District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance, Jr. is seeking eight years of the Republican president’s personal and corporate tax records, but has disclosed little about what prompted him to request the records, other than part of the investigation related to payoffs to two women to keep them quiet about alleged affairs with Trump.

Probably a thousand newspaper articles … Read the rest

Weird occurrences on social media.

There’s an advocacy person called BethAnn McLaughlin who founded MeTooSTEM.

MeTooSTEM has accomplished much since it was founded in 2018 to fight sexual harassment in academic science. Since November alone, according to the group’s accounting, it has engaged with more than 750 individuals requesting assistance, filed hundreds of open-records requests about harassment cases and made dozens of complaints to funding agencies regarding researchers’ conduct.

The group has visited some 20 campuses to discuss federal laws governing gender-based discrimination and sexual misconduct in education, put on webinars and awarded $12,000 to advocates for women in science. Its founder BethAnn McLaughlin, also received the Disobedience Award from Massachusetts Institute of Techonolgy’s Media Lab last year, alongside