Category: Notes and Comment Blog

  • All the adults had left for the day

    The toddler ran amok.

    https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/948362512315056129

  • High noon

    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 THEIR OWN BLOOD. Nothing gets a bully like LYING LIB MEDIA”S attention better than to give them a taste of their own blood #neverbackdown.”

    Good. I reported that one. I don’t report stuff on Twitter, but when it’s a law enforcement official, current or former? That’s different.

    One Twitter user who complained about Clarke shared with CNN the email response from Twitter in which the company stated, “We have reviewed the account you reported and have locked it because we found it to be in violation of the Twitter Rules:

    https://support.twitter.com/articles/18311. If the account owner complies with our requested actions and stated policies, the account will be unlocked.”

    This is good because he was tweeting boasts about the “snowflakes” reporting him and how we FAILED neener-neener.

    Clarke did not immediately respond to CNN’s request for comment.

    He tweeted about the Twitter reports, writing, “I know I’m winning. Some snowflake lib made a complaint to Twitter because of my earlier tweet about black kids being exploited by lefty failed policies at Ballou High School. I said in my tweet, this CRAP is criminal. Twitter said no violation of rules. Diaper change time.”

    Happy new year, Mr. Clarke.

  • Mr. Trump has sometimes broken with familiar presidential decorum

    Reality as seen from the Wall Street Journal editorial board: fine, everything is fine, don’t worry about it, the very fact that so many people are so disgusted by Trump shows that he’s not a problem.

    As Donald Trump heads into his second year as President, we’re pleased to report that there hasn’t been a fascist coup in Washington. This must be terribly disappointing to the progressive elites who a year ago predicted an authoritarian America because Mr. Trump posed a unique threat to democratic norms. But it looks like the U.S. will have to settle for James Madison’s boring checks and balances.

    The ones that prevent an incompetent ignorant corrupt malevolent bully from attaining executive power and access to nuclear weapons? Those boring checks and balances?

    Mr. Trump’s rhetorical attacks on the media are excessive. But for all of his bluster, we haven’t seen a single case of Trump prosecutors seeking warrants to eavesdrop on journalists to discover their sources.

    But Trump’s “excessive” and also relentless and non-stop attacks on the news media are not inert; they have an effect; they coach we don’t know how many millions of people to distrust the Times and the Post and trust Fox News.

    Mr. Trump is also facing a special counsel investigation with essentially unchecked power to investigate him and his family.

    As that family infiltrates the federal government in defiance of an anti-nepotism law and enriches itself in defiance of several anti-corruption laws.

    The real story of the past year is that, despite the daily Trumpian melodrama, the U.S. political system is working more or less as usual. Mr. Trump has sometimes broken with familiar presidential decorum, especially in his public statements and attacks on individuals. But he is paying a considerable political price for that excess with an approval rating below 40% less than a year into his term.

    But he’s still doing it. It’s not some minor little side issue.

    But hey, stocks are up, so go buy a golf course or something.

  • Guest post: A better list

    Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on 100 easiest to think of off the top of his head.

    I’m not a fan of ranking things, but anyway here are some non-fiction books that have made me ever so slightly little less clueless:

    David Archer: The Long Thaw – How Humans Are Changing the Next 100,000 Years of Earth’s Climate

    Laura Bates: Everyday Sexism

    Sean Carroll: From Eternity to Here – The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time

    Sean Carroll: The Particle at the End of the Universe – How the Hunt for the Higgs Boson Leads Us to the Edge of a New World

    Barbara Ehrenreich: Bright Sided – How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America

    Thomas Gilovich: How We Know What Isn’t So – The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life

    Michelle Goldberg: Kingdom Coming – The Rise of Christian Nationalism

    Michelle Goldberg: The Means of Reproduction – Sex, Power and the Future of the World

    James Hansen: Storms of my Grandchildren – The Truth About the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity

    Margaret Heffernan: Willful Blindness – Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril

    Susan Jacoby: The Age of American Unreason

    Daniel Kahneman: Thinking, Fast and Slow

    Bill McKibben: Eaarth – Making a Life on a Tough New Planet

    Naomi Oreskes / Eric Connway: Merchants of Doubt – How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming

    Lisa Randall: Warped Passages – Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe’s Hidden Dimensions

    Daniel Simons / Christopher Chabris: The Inivisible Gorilla – And Other Ways Our Intuition Deceives Us

    Stuart Sutherland: Irrationality

    Carol Tavris / Elliot Aronson: Mistakes Were Made (but Not by Me) – Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions and Hurtful Acts

  • They believe their own bullshit

    Jeffrey Goldberg (at the Atlantic) talked to Jonah Goldberg (of National Review). They are not the same person. Indeed the fact that they are not the same person of part of Jeffrey G’s motivation for talking to Jonah G.

    I wanted to interview Jonah because I find him provocative and sharp, but also because I have as a goal the disaggregation of all media Goldbergs. I am frequently confused for Jonah, and sometimes I’m blamed for the things he writes. He is blamed for the things I write, of course, and we sometimes get each other’s mail. This interview was a chance to convince podcast listeners that we are, indeed, two separate people.

    Or one person doing two voices!

    Just kidding.

    Anyway. Jeffrey G starts by asking Jonah G to tell us about his life as a “homeless conservative” – i.e. one who sees Trump as Trump and not our lord and savior.

    Jonah Goldberg: I’m not ideologically homeless. The problem is I’m politically homeless. What we’ve seen in the last couple of years is the Republican Party get either dragged along or leap ahead into essentially a cult of personality. A cult of personality is somewhat misleading because it’s only a handful of people who really think that Comrade Trump will deliver the greatest wheat harvest the Urals have ever seen. But for most of them, it’s more like—and I don’t mean to be glib about this. My brother was an addict. He died a few years ago. And I watched how my parents would try to rationalize his behavior. Every time my brother had a good day, it was the first day of the rest of his life.

    Jeffrey: “This is the day he became president.”

    Jonah: Yeah. This is the thing with Trump. It’s constantly, “This is the day he became president. This is the pivot. He’s off on the right foot. He can change.”

    Jeffrey: So there are two camps. There’s a camp of actual true believers. And then there’s a larger camp to say, “No, it’s not as bad as you think.”

    Jonah: I mean, so, it’s funny. A year and a half ago, at Fox and other places on the right, I remember being so unbelievably disheartened by how many pundits and commentators—not just at Fox, but talk radio, all over the place—lied. They would say, “Trump is fantastic. Trump is awesome. Trump is a genius. He’s a businessman.” All this stuff. And then the camera goes off, and the microphone goes off, and then they would say, “I can’t believe I have to defend this guy.”

    They don’t “have to” of course. It may be that they “have to” if they want to keep their jobs, but that doesn’t count as genuine necessity. The genuineness of the necessity diminishes as the horror of the person being defended expands. Trump is off the charts horrific, so you do the math.

    Jeffrey: That’s terrible.

    Jonah: It’s horrible.

    Jeffrey: By the way, that’s the swamp.

    Jonah: It’s totally the swamp. And what I’ve found though, a year later, you now find people who aren’t lying. Now, you don’t find a lot of people saying, when the camera goes off, “I can’t believe I have to defend this guy.” They believe their own bullshit.

    Which is also terrible and horrible and swampy…especially since his being president makes it so easy to observe for oneself exactly how disgusting he is.

    Jonah: I’ve lost some friends for sure, and I’ve lost a lot of fans. On the right, Trump is still sort of controversial. Just talking about him is divisive. Some people are all-in and some people are against him. And if you get asked the question, and you take a strong stand against him, and you don’t speak in these silly euphemisms, like “Maybe he should tweet less,” you piss people off.

    Jeffrey: His tweeting does cause a disproportionate amount of the destabilization that we are experiencing. Are you saying that telling him not to tweet is akin to putting Bacitracin on a tumor? Because it seems like that’s a stand-in for a whole set of impulsive behaviors that if they did not exist might bring us to a saner place.

    Jonah: The tweeting is a symptom. People tweet. Barack Obama tweeted.

    Jeffrey: No one would confuse their two Twitter feeds.

    Jonah: No. And the problem with Trump’s Twitter feed is that it is like the Narnian wardrobe to his lizard brain. It just vomits out whatever his raging sphincterless id has got going at the given moment. It gets him into an enormous amount of trouble.

    Oh, man – his raging sphincterless id. That’s good. I wish I’d thought of it.

    Read on.

  • Bloodroot has always welcomed and respected everyone

    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 sexuality, and yes, people who are transgender. Our long-time customers know that, many who are transgender, which is why they have been rallying to our defense.

    One of our relatively new customers was enthusiastically telling us about a space in Massachusetts that catered to trans people and asked if we knew about it. We didn’t but since we are not trans, it wasn’t all that interesting to us personally and stated that for us, we prefer women only spaces. This comes from our history. When Bloodroot first started in the 70’s we were trying to create a space specifically safe for women, since there were so few places like that at the time. Of course even back then we were open and welcoming to everyone, not just women. This customer misunderstood what was really an off-hand comment and perceived that to mean that we were anti-trans. She then wrote a post slamming us. That post was seen and shared. Then some in the trans community – most of whom have never been to Bloodroot – started trolling us. We find it ironic that of all the many businesses that you probably buy things from, it’s hard to imagine any of them being as supportive of not only trans people, but all people who are “different” from societal norms as Bloodroot has been and continues to be. But Bloodroot, a Vegetarian (mostly vegan) Restaurant and Feminist bookstore, that has been in business for 40+ years and is owned and run by two lesbians aged 73 and 83, is the place they decide to attack. Women who through their activism as second wave feminists help pave the way for the rights and freedoms that the trans community today enjoy!

    You couldn’t make it up. Not angry men making violent threats; not angry men carrying out violent actions; not racists; not fascists; not anti-abortion fanatics terrorizing women seeking abortions; not homophobes, not gay-bashers, not pussygrabbers, not rapists – but two feminist lesbians who have have run a vegetarian restaurant for 40 years. Yeah, kids, let’s attack them, because that will be easy and won’t take any courage!

    Some of these “activists” are posting hostile reviews on Yelp, in hopes of harming Bloodroot’s business.

    Imagine for a minute if hundreds of people who don’t know you started to attack you online, spewing lies about you that go against your core values, and trying to destroy you. Better yet, imagine them doing that to someone you love – your mother or grandmother for example. We understand this is a subject matter that many people are passionate about, but we feel this anger is misguided and misplaced.

    Regardless of how you feel about Bloodroot’s stand on this, we will continue to be a welcoming space for all types of people, including those that are transgender, and treat everyone with respect. If you feel our explanation and response is inadequate for you, then you should not patronize us.

    But, more urgently, you should also learn who your real enemies are. They are not Bloodroot and they are not Selma and Noel.

    Image may contain: text and food

  • Incompetence did a lot of tempering

    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 . 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 it. His heart may be in it, but Vladimir Putin he isn’t. And the United States isn’t a fragile new democracy with weak institutions either.

    He’s got the rage but not the talent, the venom but not the discipline, the greed but not the dedication.

    Trump has another personality liability for the project at hand, one that fewer people notice: He is ultimately a wuss. He talks about his boldness all the time, and a lot of people—including his enemies—lap up the self-description. He likes to talk in sweeping, grandiose terms about the things he is going to do and the things he has done. In practice, however, he’s actually very cautious most of the time. Think about it this way: Leaving aside Trump’s words and claims about himself, do the actions of his first year in office generally bespeak boldness? Yes, he left the Paris Climate Agreement. And yes, he recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. And yes, he did the travel ban. But think about all of the bold things Trump has promised and backed away from: scrapping NAFTA and waging a trade war against the Chinese, ditching the Iran deal, walking away from Europe, draining the swamp, and confronting conservative orthodoxy on taxation.

    The boldest step Trump has taken, the firing of James Comey, was an accident. Trump actually appears to have believed that this move would be popular, because Comey had angered Democrats during the 2016 campaign. Most of Trump’s supposed boldness is just tweets and bombast and things he says. It’s a big part of his self-image, but the self-image is mostly a game of dress-up. When push comes to shove, he’s pretty paralyzed by circumstances much of the time.

    Well, unless there’s some pesky Balkan head of state in his way.

    On the other hand, Wittes goes on, he could do a lot of damage just by hollowing out the federal bureaucracy, and that he is in fact doing. (It doesn’t take much boldness.)

    All of which is to emphasize that we are emphatically not out of the woods. The situation remains dangerous, because Trump’s personality is so fundamentally incompatible with the nature and demands of the office he holds. His impulsiveness can get us into trouble any day. As his political situation, or his legal situation, continues to degrade, he could lash out and change the equilibrium at any time. Moreover, chipping away at institutions slowly, both by institutional and budgetary evisceration and by leadership attrition—one Chuck Rosenberg a few months ago, one James Baker last month, one Andrew McCabe in March—will take a big toll over time.

    But Trump simply cannot look back on the last year and be satisfied with the success of his war on the Deep State. His battle to remake it in his image has been largely unavailing—and has come at far greater cost to his presidency than to the institutions he is trying to undermine.

    But the blot on our record is there forever.

  • What to read

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

    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 normies’ is reminiscent of Baudelaire’s ‘il faut épater les bourgeois’), and its emphasis on men rebelling against the domesticating influence of women recalls the leftist counter-culture of the 1960s (think Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest).

    Yesssss – and other “transgressive” fiction before that. I remember noticing it decades ago when reading something late 19th century, I can’t remember what – it was all about the surging genius of the male protagonist and the determination of the castrating woman he had the bad luck to fancy to tie him down to domestic wharblegarble. I remember reading it and scowling and noting what a familiar pattern it is. Man has dreams, woman wants to put an apron on them.

    Another item to put alongside Jack Nicholson versus Nurse Ratched is Donald Sutherland and Elliott Gould versus Hotlips Houlihan, in which the dudes get their revenge on the uptight nurse by gathering everyone on the base to watch and then tearing down the curtain behind which Houlihan is taking a shower. Haw haw haw, naked lady in front of all those laughing fully clothed men. So transgressive.

    Image result for mash shower scene

    Cameron then offers some shorter reads.

    Unsurprisingly, 2017 produced many reflections on the outcome of the 2016 presidential election, and one issue some of these reflections addressed was the role played by gendered language in shaping responses to the candidates. Among the most intriguing approaches to the question was a dramatic experiment asking ‘What if Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton had swapped genders?’

    Must read that.

  • Trump wishes the haters a happy new year

    Trump isn’t much for consistency, is he.

    Tweet one:

    Iran has closed down the Internet. Not good!

    Tweet two:

    The US news media are Fake! Fake Fake Fake Fake!

    We know what he would say. In his infinite stupidity he would tell us he isn’t closing down the US news media, he’s simply reminding us how Fake it is. That’s true but incomplete. He’s abusing his power to do everything he can to discredit the US news media by telling a fundamental lie about it, over and over and over again.

  • 100 easiest to think of off the top of his head

    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 Logo? Top 100 of all time? Come on. And the Oliver Sacks book that was translated into a movie, when there are others that are such gems.

    22. A Grief Observed by CS Lewis (1961)
    This powerful study of loss asks: “Where is God?” and explores the feeling of solitude and sense of betrayal that even non-believers will recognise.

    23. The Elements of Style by William Strunk and EB White (1959)
    Dorothy Parker and Stephen King have both urged aspiring writers towards this crisp guide to the English language where brevity is key.

    No no no.

    41. How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie (1936)
    The original self-help manual on American life – with its influence stretching from the Great Depression to Donald Trump – has a lot to answer for.

    Indeed, but that doesn’t make it one of the best.

    73. Tales from Shakespeare by Charles and Mary Lamb (1807)
    A troubled brother-and-sister team produced one of the 19th century’s bestselling volumes and simplified the complexity of Shakespeare’s plays for younger audiences.

    Again, doesn’t make it a best.

    93. Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial, or A Brief Discourse of the Sepulchral Urns Lately Found in Norfolk by Sir Thomas Browne (1658)
    Browne earned his reputation as a “writer’s writer” with this dazzling short essay on burial customs.

    Now you’re talking. Urn Burial is extraordinary. You can find it online, too, and it’s not really a book, more a long essay.

    100. King James Bible: The Authorised Version (1611)
    It is impossible to imagine the English-speaking world celebrated in this series without the King James Bible, which is as universal and influential as Shakespeare.

    But it’s hardly non-fiction now is it?!

    Got any nominees?

  • Guest post: There could be conservative political virtues

    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 place”, and the eager trampling of every protection against well-understood environmental threats. Crassness, bigotry – again, where else do you suppose the dismantling of minority protections comes from? Toadyism as the form of public service – this is what comes of the tireless elevation of business culture as the model of efficiency to which government should aspire, and setting the lobbyists to work drafting the regulations for their industries.

    There could be conservative political virtues. There’s a lot to be said for preserving working institutions and reforming them carefully, rather than replacing them wholesale; for insisting on genuine character in leaders and for acknowledging it respectfully regardless of policy differences; for regarding society as an organism more than a mechanism and treating governance as more the work of a doctor than an engineer.

    Bret Stephens really could have had all of that with a President Hillary Clinton. He wouldn’t have the policies he’s crowing about, precisely because those come from the vices he supposedly condemns.

  • Religious texts instruct women to surrender their bodies

    Vidhi Doshi at the Post reports on a growing investigation into a sinister religious sect in India.

    At least 48 underage girls have been rescued in police raids on the sect’s ashrams in New Delhi since Dec. 19, officials say. Officials say they have found women and girls kept in prisonlike conditions, behind barbed wire and multiple locked gates. Authorities say there are hundreds more properties and potentially thousands of women and girls living in them.

    The sect, Adhyatmik Vishwa Vidyalaya (AVV) preaches that its leader is an incarnation of various Hindu gods and has descended to earth to unite people of all faiths and transform them into deities. Little is known about the sect’s origins or its leader, Virendra Dev Dixit, though followers say it is an offshoot of Brahma Kumaris — a large, international sect with over three dozen centers in the United States and millions of followers worldwide. Brahma Kumaris distanced itself from Dixit’s organization and denounced it decades ago.

    There’s nothing like a “sect” for giving men access to captive women, is there.

    Dixit claims to be an incarnation of, among others, the Hindu god Krishna, who according to myth has 16,000 wives. Swati Maliwal, chairwoman of Delhi’s government agency for women’s affairs, said that investigators found 200 women and girls in miserable conditions.

    “The ashram has been running illegal activities,” Maliwal said. Investigators, she said, found substances that induce dizziness and unprescribed medicines that may have been used to drug and pacify women. She also said religious texts found during a raid instruct women to “surrender” their bodies to Dixit.

    In a very Spiritual and Enlightened way, of course.

    Maliwal went with police on the December 19 raid, which found squalid conditions at the ashram and removed 41 minors. They didn’t have the authority to remove adult women against their will. All the women appeared drugged.

    The AVV case comes months after the rape conviction of another popular guru, Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh. The sect’s existence for more than a decade, despite at least 10 complaints to police over the years, illustrates the unaccountability of holy men in India, where religious leaders have huge financial and political power.

    The inquiry into AVV offers hope to hundreds of families with relatives in the sect. Police all over northern India are raiding other ashrams associated with Dixit. In Delhi, Maliwal said, five of at least eight ashrams have been searched by authorities. But many of the sect’s ashrams are in still unknown locations.

    The US is very like India in this way. Mormons and wack Christian groups can basically imprison women and children and abuse them freely because the authorities don’t want to take on the goddy gang.

  • Still never

    A Republican who likes many of Trump’s policies and actions nevertheless would prefer Clinton to have the job. The surprise there is only that there aren’t more like him.

    And want to preserve your own republican institutions? Then pay attention to the character of your leaders, the culture of governance and the political health of the public. It matters a lot more than lowering the top marginal income tax rate by a couple of percentage points.

    This is the fatal mistake of conservatives who’ve decided the best way to deal with Trump’s personality — the lying, narcissism, bullying, bigotry, crassness, name calling, ignorance, paranoia, incompetence and pettiness — is to pretend it doesn’t matter. “Character Doesn’t Count” has become a de facto G.O.P. motto. “Virtue Doesn’t Matter” might be another.

    But character does count, and virtue does matter, and Trump’s shortcomings prove it daily.

    It’s not even a contest.

    Trump demands testimonials from his cabinet, servility from Republican politicians and worship from conservative media. To serve in this White House isn’t to be elevated to public service. It’s to be debased into toadyism, which probably explains the record-setting staff turnover of 34 percent, according to an analysis from the Brookings Institution.

    In place of presidential addresses, stump speeches or town halls, we have Trump’s demagogic mass rallies. In place of the usual jousting between the administration and the press, we have a president who fantasizes on Twitter about physically assaulting CNN. In place of a president who defends the honor and integrity of his own officers and agencies, we have one who humiliates his attorney general, denigrates the F.B.I. and compares our intelligence agencies to the Gestapo.

    Not worth it, is it.

  • $750 tickets

    Again the scumbag profits from his presidency while we pay his expenses.

    President Trump is set to ring in the new year the same way he has for about two decades — at the lavish party he hosts at his private club here.

    But this weekend’s gala at Mar-a-Lago, his first since becoming president, will be a little different: The security will be tighter. The crowds will probably be bigger. And the tickets will run $750 a guest, a hike from last year, according to members and guests.

    That ticket hike is profiteering from public office.

    Critics said the boost in prices for Sunday’s party and Trump’s regular trips to Trump Organization properties — this is the president’s tenth visit to Mar-a-Lago this year — show how he is using his position to promote his brand.

    “The president continues to find ways to profit from public office, by exploiting the fact that there are people who will pay to spend time with him and to be seen with him,” said Kathleen Clark, a government ethics expert at the Washington University School of Law in St. Louis.

    Walter Shaub too.

    https://twitter.com/waltshaub/status/947530088639279104

    And they won’t talk about it.

    The White House and Trump Organization officials did not respond to requests for comment. A woman who answered the phone at Mar-a-Lago declined to share details about the party with a nonmember and said there was no press office to respond to inquiries.

    They have no right to stonewall questions or decline to share details. He’s doing all of this at our expense and while holding public office. None of this is “private.”

  • I’m not seeing the well-ordered militia

    In today’s US Gun Terrorism news so far:

    The Denver Post:

    One Douglas County deputy died and four more were wounded along with two civilians Sunday morning at a Highlands Ranch apartment complex. The shooter was also shot and is believed dead, the Sheriff’s Office said in a tweet at 9:32 a.m.

    Deputies were responding to a domestic disturbance call.

    CBS News:

    Police in Houston say they arrested a man found with guns and ammunition in his hotel room early Sunday, as authorities across the country remain on high alert ahead of planned New Year’s Eve celebrations.

    The guy was drunk and tottering around hassling other guests, so police asked him to go to his room and when he refused they escorted him there preparatory to escorting him with his belongings out of the hotel.

    When officers arrived at his room, they found “several” firearms and rounds of ammunition in the room. Cintillas said there were “several” firearms but “not a huge amount.”

    The man was taken into custody. Police would not comment on the exact type of firearms nor on why the suspect had the weapons and ammunition in his room. Cintillas said the officers’ intervention “averted a potentially bad situation.”

    And it’s not even afternoon yet.

  • Hijab on a stick

    A clear photo via Fariborz Pooya:

    Image may contain: 1 person, tree and outdoor

    Maryam’s new Facebook cover photo:

    No automatic alt text available.

  • Sheriff Bully

    Trump’s good buddy former Milwaukee County sheriff David Clarke:

    I am UNINTIMIDATED by lib media attempts to smear and discredit me with their FAKE NEWS reports designed to silence me. I will continue to poke them in the eye with a sharp stick and bitch slap these scum bags til they get it. I have been attacked by better people than them #MAGA

    https://twitter.com/SheriffClarke/status/947225820493426688

    BREAKING NEWS! When LYING LIB MEDIA makes up FAKE NEWS to smear me, the ANTIDOTE is go right at them. Punch them in the nose & MAKE THEM TASTE THEIR OWN BLOOD. Nothing gets a bully like LYING LIB MEDIA’S attention better than to give them a taste of their own blood #neverbackdown

    Nothing like getting under the skin of lefties like I did today. I fight to win. You come at me libs you better bring a hard hat, some aspirin and your veggie wrap because it’s going to be a long day and I’m going to smack you around until you crawl back to your mom’s basement.

    This man used to be in law enforcement, until he resigned last August. People like that should not be in law enforcement, nor should they be on Twitter. I’ve reported him a couple of times now.

    This is not normal and it should never become normal.

  • War on “the regulatory state”

    Princess Ivanka is pleased that Daddy is getting rid of all those pesky regulations protections that might eat into her profits a little bit.

    A couple of weeks ago he did a photo op with the Big Pile of Protections that he promises to kill.

    Salon says wait.

    There’s only one problem. That mountain of paper Trump used as a prop symbolizes hard-won measures that protect us.

    To refresh the president’s memory, back in the 1960s, smog in major U.S. cities was so thick it blocked the sun. Rivers ran brown with raw sewage and toxic chemicals. Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River and at least two other urban waterways were so polluted they caught on fire. Lead-laced paint and gasoline poisoned children, damaging their brains and nervous systems. Cars without seatbelts, airbags or safety glass were unsafe at any speed. And hazardous working conditions killed an average of 14,000 workers annually, nearly three times the number today.

    In response, Congress enacted the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, Safe Drinking Water Act and other landmark pieces of legislation to protect public health and safety. Some of those laws also created the Consumer Product Safety Commission, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), National Highway Traffic Safety Commission, Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and other federal agencies to write and enforce safeguards.

    But Trump wants more workers killed in hazardous working conditions, more smog, more filthy rivers, more species going extinct, more people killed in car crashes because they weren’t wearing seat belts – the glorious land of FREEEEEEEEEEEEEEDOM.

  • Welcome to the Marshalsea

    From the ACLU:

    During the holiday season, many of us think about what we can do to help people struggling with poverty. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, on the other hand, decided just before Christmas to rescind a guidance meant to protect low-income Americans.

    The 2016 guidance, issued by former President Obama’s Justice Department, urged state and local courts nationwide to abide by constitutional principles prohibiting the jailing of poor people who cannot afford to pay court fines and fees. Jeff Sessions’ action makes clear that he and his Justice Department are unconcerned by courts trampling on the rights of poor people.

    The Obama Justice Department issued the 2016 letter after reports and lawsuits by the ACLU and other groups revealed how modern-day debtors’ prisons function in more than a dozen states, despite the fact that the U.S. two centuries ago formally outlawed jailing people simply because they have unpaid debts.

    These efforts revealed that poor people were being locked up in Georgia, Washington, Mississippi, and elsewhere without court hearings or legal representation when they could not pay fines and fees for traffic tickets or other civil infractions or criminal offenses. These efforts also show that modern-day debtors’ prisons result from state laws allowing or requiring the suspension of driver’s licenses for unpaid court fines or fees without first requiring confirmation that the person could actually pay.

    Modern-day debtors’ prisons received unprecedented national attention in 2015 when the Justice Department issued a 185-page report in its investigation of the Ferguson Police Department after the shooting of teenager Michael Brown. It documented how Ferguson police sought to advance the “City’s focus on revenue rather than … public safety needs,” leading to the routine incarceration of poor people to elicit court fine and fee payments, which raised due process concerns and reflected racial bias.

    This wave of attention on draconian debtors’ prisons spurred the Justice Department to issue the 2016 letter on fines and fees.

    But Jeff Sessions wants to see poor people locked up and/or made poorer by fines. It’s how he rolls.

  • It wasn’t the dossier

    The hot Donnie-news today is what got the FBI started on the Russia investigation. It turns out it was Papadopoulos blabbing to an Australian diplomat.

    During a night of heavy drinking at an upscale London bar in May 2016, George Papadopoulos, a young foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign, made a startling revelation to Australia’s top diplomat in Britain: Russia had political dirt on Hillary Clinton.

    About three weeks earlier, Mr. Papadopoulos had been told that Moscow had thousands of emails that would embarrass Mrs. Clinton, apparently stolen in an effort to try to damage her campaign.

    Exactly how much Mr. Papadopoulos said that night at the Kensington Wine Rooms with the Australian, Alexander Downer, is unclear. But two months later, when leaked Democratic emails began appearing online, Australian officials passed the information about Mr. Papadopoulos to their American counterparts, according to four current and former American and foreign officials with direct knowledge of the Australians’ role.

    The hacking and the revelation that a member of the Trump campaign may have had inside information about it were driving factors that led the F.B.I. to open an investigation in July 2016 into Russia’s attempts to disrupt the election and whether any of President Trump’s associates conspired.

    July 2016. That early.

    The information that Mr. Papadopoulos gave to the Australians answers one of the lingering mysteries of the past year: What so alarmed American officials to provoke the F.B.I. to open a counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign months before the presidential election?

    It was not, as Mr. Trump and other politicians have alleged, a dossier compiled by a former British spy hired by a rival campaign. Instead, it was firsthand information from one of America’s closest intelligence allies.

    Via one of Trump’s own people, babbling as he sucked down the gin. The FBI, on the other hand, did the opposite.

    Once the information Mr. Papadopoulos had disclosed to the Australian diplomat reached the F.B.I., the bureau opened an investigation that became one of its most closely guarded secrets. Senior agents did not discuss it at the daily morning briefing, a classified setting where officials normally speak freely about highly sensitive operations.

    There was debate about whether to go public or not, and the agency decided not.

    Ultimately, the F.B.I. and Justice Department decided to keep the investigation quiet, a decision that Democrats in particular have criticized. And agents did not interview Mr. Papadopoulos until late January.

    So we’re now living in Putin’s world.