The Times says it’s all over between Don and Steve.

President Trump essentially excommunicated his onetime chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, from his political circle on Wednesday, excoriating him as a self-promoting exaggerator who had “very little to do with our historic victory” and has now “lost his mind.”

In a written statement brimming with anger and resentment, Mr. Trump fired back at Mr. Bannon, who had made caustic comments about the president and his family to the author of a new book about the Trump White House. While Mr. Bannon had remained in touch with Mr. Trump even after being pushed out of the White House last summer, the two now appear to have reached a breaking point.

The Post says the working class is protesting in Iran, to the alarm of the mullahs.

“The rebuke both from the urban poor and more religious cities in Iran should be a wake-up call” to the Iranian leadership, said Behnam Ben Taleblu, an Iran expert at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington.

In the past week, there were echoes of the mass demonstrations that flared in 2009 after reformist political candidates were defeated in disputed presidential election: women pulling off headscarves, fist-pumping crowds, chants against Khamenei.

But unlike that earlier, largely middle-class movement centered in Tehran, the recent demonstrations are drawing heavily upon lower-income youths in religious cities and rural towns. In some cases, protesters have attacked

Originally a comment by iknklast on Aw, another rift.

forgotten men and women of this country

Honestly, I am so sick of this phrase. No one has forgotten these people; they would never let us. They make more noise, and get more attention than any other group. Bernie Sanders suggested putting up a pro-life Democrat to make these people happy. Every pundit across the spectrum has been saying for at least the past 5 election cycles that these are the people we should be pandering to, instead of “identity politics”, which means, in translation, we should be continuing to ensure that white midwesterners who are Christian and anti-feminist, who are pro-life and pro-Jesus, should continue to run the country … Read the rest

Frederick Crews, whose latest book is the wonderful Freud: The Making of an Illusion, has a review-article on a new book about “recovered memory” and a criminal trial.

Until now the work has been almost entirely ignored by reviewers. Yet it comes with the strong endorsement of a world-renowned psychologist and memory expert, Elizabeth Loftus, and a leading expert on coercive interrogation methods and false confessions, Richard A. Leo. If they are right, Mark Pendergrast’s 391-page The Most Hated Man in America: Jerry Sandusky and the Rush to Judgment can erase the shame of both Penn State and Sandusky, who languishes in solitary confinement, for 22 hours a day, in a maximum-security state prison.

Pendergrast is an independent

The BBC is excited but brief.

Breaking News, it declares.

Former White House aide Steve Bannon “lost his mind” after he lost his job at the White House, US President Donald Trump has said.

The president disavowed Mr Bannon after he was quoted in a new book describing a meeting between Mr Trump’s son and a group of Russians as “treasonous”.

But where did he say it, when did he say it, to whom did he say it.

I guess the reporter is still typing; the Beeb says to keep refreshing the page.

Updating to add:

Oh, I see, it’s a press statement. You’d think the Beeb could have said that before pressing Publish.

holy WHAT.

Trump: "When [Bannon]

The toddler ran amok.

It's not only Pakistan that we pay billions of dollars to for nothing, but also many other countries, and others. As an example, we pay the Palestinians HUNDRED OF MILLIONS OF DOLLARS a year and get no appreciation or respect. They don’t even want to negotiate a long overdue…

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 2, 2018

…peace treaty with Israel. We have taken Jerusalem, the toughest part of the negotiation, off the table, but Israel, for that, would have had to pay more. But with the Palestinians no longer willing to talk peace, why should we make any of these massive future payments to them?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 2, 2018

North Korean

Twitter has told “Sheriff” David Clarke to knock it off with the violent threats.

Former Milwaukee Sheriff David A. Clarke, Jr., a vocal surrogate for President Donald Trump on the campaign trail, was temporarily blocked from tweeting after Twitter users’ complaints alerted the company that three of his messages violated the terms of service, CNN has learned.

Clarke was placed in read-only mode until he deleted three tweets that seemed to call for violence against members of the media.

In one of them, which has since been deleted, Clarke told his followers, “When LYING LIB MEDIA makes up MAKE NEWS to smear me, the ANTIDOTE is to go right at them. Punch them in the nose & MAKE THEM TASTE

Bloodroot Vegetarian Restaurant in Bridgeport, Connecticut, yesterday:

As many of you know, Bloodroot has recently come under attack and is currently being trolled by a number of people in the transgender community and their supporters. We felt it was time to make an official statement. Because it seems whenever we try and explain what happened and our stance on this issue, it only serves to inspire more hatred, we will not be replying to comments.

Bloodroot and her owners are not transphobic – far from it! Bloodroot has always welcomed and respected everyone – especially people who might feel uncomfortable in a public space. Whether that be people from other countries, people of color, people of every type of

Benjamin Wittes looks at Trump’s war on the Deep State so far, and finds it fulfilling dire predictions but also not as bad as it could be if Trump were more competent.

The first few weeks of the Trump administration raised the question of the degree to which Trump’s malevolence would be tempered by his incompetence. In the first year of the Trump presidency, the answer to that question was that incompetence did a lot of tempering. Trump blundered from crisis to crisis. The lawyering around him was comically dreadful—as was the broader executive functioning. Taking on established democratic institutions and wrecking them actually takes a certain amount of focus and energy—and Trump just isn’t very good at

Deborah Cameron has a shorter and of course vastly better list of some good reads.

• Mary Beard, Women and Power: A Manifesto.
• Emma Jane, Misogyny Online: A Short (and Brutish) History.
• Angela Nagle, Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4Chan and tumblr to Trump and the alt-right.

About the Nagle, she says

Before anyone was talking about the ‘alt-right’, Angela Nagle was investigating the online subcultures from which it emerged, tracking the people involved, the platforms they used, the political positions they espoused and—from a linguist’s perspective most interestingly—the evolution of their distinctive communication style. This isn’t as distinctive as we might think: it has much in common with earlier celebrations of transgression (‘kill all

Oh goody, a list. On the other hand it’s a pretty odd list. It’s Robert McCrum’s choice for The 100 best nonfiction books of all time – in English, though that’s not stated, and the last one is the bible which was not written in English. But that’s the only translation as far as I could tell, unless Popper wrote The Open Society in German, which I don’t think he did.

But McCrum includes poetry and drama in non-fiction, which seems like cheating. It lets him include the First Folio, which by all means, but non-fiction, really?

Anyway the contemporary and modern choices seem pretty meh to me – more most popular or most familiar than best. Naomi Klein’s No … Read the rest

Originally a comment by Jeff Engel on Still never.

President Clinton would have made for a glorious 4-8 years of moaning and crying from the right, able to pick on every peccadillo and declaim about the moral superiority of the Republican Party who – they’d be happy to say – ultimately rejected Trump while the Democrats embraced Her Satanic Majesty. So yeah, it’s not that expensive being a Never Trumper from the op-ed pages.

Still – I don’t believe I can take fully seriously the complaints about Trump’s character combined with the delight in his policies. Bullying, pettiness, aggressive ignorance – these are the same things that will underlie the preferred conservative society of “ordered classes”, people “knowing their … Read the rest