The nopes come in

Feb 16th, 2019 10:54 am | By

Was Trump really telling a whopper when he said Obama told him he (Obama) was on the edge of war with North Korea? Peter Baker at the Times has collected some “Nope”s from people who worked in Obama’s administration.

President Trump has been telling audiences lately that his predecessor was on the precipice of an all-out confrontation with the nuclear-armed maverick state. The way Mr. Trump tells the story, the jets were practically scrambling in the hangars.

“I believe he would have gone to war with North Korea,” Mr. Trump said in the White House Rose Garden on Friday. “I think he was ready to go to war. In fact, he told me he was so close to starting a big war with North Korea.”

Well I was there and I say he didn’t. In fact I heard him not say it.

The notion that Mr. Obama, who famously equivocated about a single missile strike against non-nuclear Syria to punish it for using chemical weapons against its own civilians, would have started a full-fledged war with North Korea seems hard to imagine, to say the least. But this presumption has become part of Mr. Trump’s narrative in patting himself on the back for reaching out to North Korea to make peace.

For reaching out to North Korea to make peace or for calling Kim Little Rocket Man on Twitter or something like that.

Trump has been claiming that we would be in a war with North Korea right now if it weren’t for his miraculous election.

“And I can tell you, the previous administration would have been in war right now if that was extended. You would, right now, be in a nice, big, fat war in Asia with North Korea if I wasn’t elected president.”

It is impossible to prove a negative, of course, but nobody who worked for Mr. Obama has publicly endorsed this assessment, nor have any of the memoirs that have emerged from his administration disclosed any serious discussion of military action against North Korea. Several veterans of the Obama era made a point of publicly disputing Mr. Trump’s characterization on Friday.

“We were not on the brink of war with North Korea in 2016,” Benjamin J. Rhodes, Mr. Obama’s deputy national security adviser, wrote on Twitter.

John Brennan, Mr. Obama’s C.I.A. director, told NBC News, “President Obama was never on the verge of starting any war with North Korea, large or small.”

Ok but who you gonna believe, some losers who worked for Obama or Jeenyus Don who saved us all by calling Kim names on Twitter?

Mr. Trump bases his argument on the single extended conversation he has ever had with Mr. Obama. In November 2016, Mr. Obama invited the man elected to succeed him to the White House for a 90-minute discussion of the issues awaiting him.

Mr. Trump’s account of that conversation has evolved over time. At first, he said that Mr. Obama told him that North Korea would be the new administration’s toughest foreign policy challenge, which seems plausible enough. Only later did Mr. Trump add the supposed war discussion.

After he made it up.

In an email on Friday, Mr. Rhodes said Mr. Obama did warn Mr. Trump about North Korea in their meeting, but hardly suggested that he was ready to use force. “He talked about the threat from North Korea’s program — where it stood, what our concerns were,” Mr. Rhodes said. “That’s very different from saying you’re about to go to war!”

Well, yes, to an adult mind it is, but Obama was talking to Trump, who doesn’t have an adult mind.

Jen Psaki, who was Mr. Obama’s White House communications director, likewise dismissed the notion that the departing president told his successor he had been ready to send in the bombers. “There is no scenario where I could see him saying that given he isn’t an alarmist and that is exactly what everyone has been trying to avoid forever,” she said.

Plus, he was talking to Trump.

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They describe for us the lineaments of justice

Feb 16th, 2019 9:50 am | By

Jack Goldsmith at Lawfare explains why much about Trump’s Fake Emergency is not abnormal or weird or even alarming, and then why much about it is one or all of those.

First, in stating that he “didn’t need to do this,” Trump acknowledged what so much of the run-up to his proclamation makes clear: there is no necessity in his action, and thus no “emergency” in the ordinary language sense of the term. As noted above, this is typically true of emergency declarations. But presidents don’t admit it, much less celebrate it. They tend to make emergency declarations in ways that do not highlight that the entire modern law of emergency power rests on the fiction that emergency powers can be invoked in the absence of what we normally think of as an emergency.

Second, in clumsily denying that the emergency declaration is about politics and the 2020 election, Trump confirmed what many people think: It is about politics and the 2020 election. That acknowledgment heightens and for many will confirm suspicions about mixed motives, pretext, and the like.

Trump is not by a mile the first president to invoke executive power aggressively for political purposes. But he might be the first plausibly to be seen to exercise emergency powers openly for political purposes. In this regard, as in many regards, Trump is undisciplined in his lack of hypocrisy. As I explained a few years ago:

A corollary to Trump’s shamelessness is that he often doesn’t seek to hide or even spin his norm-breaking. Put another way, he is far less hypocritical than past presidents—and that is a bad thing. Hypocrisy is an underappreciated political virtue. It can palliate self-interested and politically divisive government action through mollifying rhetoric and a call to shared values. Trump is bad at it because he can’t “recognize the difference between what one professes in public and what one does in private, much less the utility of exploiting that difference,” Henry Farrell and Martha Finnemore have noted in Foreign Affairs. He is incapable of keeping his crass thoughts to himself, or of cloaking his speech in other-regarding principle.

That’s an interesting point, and I suppose I have to agree it’s true. A major reason I hate Trump so intensely is his complete failure / refusal to acknowledge, much less heed, any norms about words and acts in prominent government figures. I suppose I have to agree that that means I think he should make an effort to pretend, and that means I think he should be more of a hypocrite. I do think he should keep his crass thoughts to himself, because his refusal to do so is an inspiration to millions of people who long to shout about their hatred for various appointed underlings. I do think he should palliate his loathsome actions with mollifying rhetoric and a call to shared values, when the alternative is his pissing all over the best of our shared values.

This is a counterintuitive idea. Many people see Trump as hypocritical since he often says one thing and does another (including things that he criticized his predecessor for). But he is profoundly not hypocritical in this sense: As in his border wall announcement, he is often guileless in asserting power, and doesn’t try to hide the tension between his political aims and his asserted constitutional justifications. This is one of Trump’s most remarkable and persistent norm violations. “The clearest evidence of the stability of our values over time is the unchanging character of the lies … statesmen tell,” Michael Walzer famously noted. “They lie in order to justify themselves, and so they describe for us the lineaments of justice. Wherever we find hypocrisy we find moral justice.” Walzer might have added that when we see in our statesmen an absence of hypocrisy in a contested context where principle normally matters, an absence of moral justice creeps in.

We are there.

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Memorable

Feb 15th, 2019 5:29 pm | By

There’s a reason he’s so fixated on Wall – the fact that he’s a racist shithead, yes, but an additional reason. Eric Lach at the New Yorker:

So why did he do [the emergency]? When a reporter pressed him on whether he would concede that he didn’t get the deal he wanted from Congress, Trump, of course, refused to concede. And, in doing so, he undercut what little concrete rationale his emergency had to begin with. “I could do the wall over a longer period of time. I didn’t need to do this. But I’d rather do it much faster,” he said. “And I don’t have to do it for the election. I’ve already done a lot of wall for the election. 2020. And the only reason we’re up here talking about this is because of the election—because they want to try to win an election, which it looks like they’re not going to be able to do.” So there it is, as straight as you can get it from this President: he didn’t need to do this, and it’s not about the election, but the only reason he’s talking about it is because of the election.

It’s a good day to remember that, according to Joshua Green’s “Devil’s Bargain,” Trump’s aides came up with the idea of the wall in 2014, not for policy reasons but for memory reasons. “Inside Trump’s circle, the power of illegal immigration to manipulate popular sentiment was readily apparent, and his advisers brainstormed methods for keeping their attention-addled boss on message,” Green wrote. “They needed a trick, a mnemonic device. In the summer of 2014, they found one that clicked.” Not with the public, or even with the Republican Party—but with Trump himself.

Wall. He can remember it. It’s just four letters, it’s a familiar word, we’ve all seen walls, some of us have them in our houses or apartments or cells. Wall. You don’t even need an article, you can just call it Wall as you might call it Don or Dan or Dun. Wall.

Image result for wall

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Contentious

Feb 15th, 2019 4:39 pm | By

The BBC has an ick when it comes to abortion.

A group of healthcare bodies have today published a letter to BBC Action Line asking that they reverse their current stance on providing links to information about abortion. The letter is co-signed by British Pregnancy Advisory Service (bpas), Brook, the Faculty of Sexual and Reproductive Healthcare, Family Planning Association (FPA), Marie Stopes UK, the Royal College of Midwives, and the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists.

The issue emerged following last week’s episode of Call the Midwife in which one of the characters died as a result of complications from an illegal “backstreet” abortion.  At the end of the programme, the BBC Action Line website was advertised for viewers who wished to seek information and support for issues covered in the programme. A number of women who visited the website contacted the charity the British Pregnancy Advisory Service, bpas, to highlight that there were no sources of advice relating to abortion.

In response to bpas, who raised their concerns about the omission of abortion support, BBC Action Line stated that they had chosen to not include abortion because it is “contentious” and including this information could be seen as “supporting one side”:

“It isn’t possible for the BBC Action Line to offer support for abortion and similarly contentious issues without referring people either to campaigning organisations which take a particular stance on an issue or to organisations which provide it.

Doing so could imply the BBC supported one side or another in any contentious issue which it does not do in its coverage. However, as the current storyline in Call the Midwife also raises issues of miscarriage, pregnancy related depression and bereavement, it was felt that support should be offered for viewers who might be affected.”

Who decides that abortion is “contentious” and what are the criteria? Does the BBC also consider contraception “contentious”? Does it worry the BBC at all that being secretive about abortion is punitive toward women and women only?

Today, healthcare bodies have written to the BBC expressing their “disappointment” and asking that they amend this position:

“Abortion has been legal, in certain circumstances, in Great Britain for over 50 years, and 98% of terminations are funded by the NHS. Abortion is the most common gynaecological procedure in the UK, and one in three women will have an abortion in their lifetime. Polling demonstrates that the vast majority of the public support a woman’s right to choose, including those with a religious belief. Abortion is not a “contentious issue”– it is a routine part of NHS-funded healthcare, provided by doctors, nurses, and midwives every day in hospitals and clinics across the country.

“The BBC Action Line response states that including links to information about abortion could imply the BBC “supported one side or another.” However, in barring information the BBC is in effect “supporting one side” by treating abortion as different to all the other medical procedures and conditions the BBC choses to include. This is highly stigmatising for the healthcare professionals we represent and the women we care for.”

The healthcare bodies have provided links to evidence-based, impartial information for the BBC to consider, and stressed that their complaint lies solely with BBC Action Line and is in no way related to the programme Call the Midwife, which they state has repeatedly handled this issue “extremely sensitively and courageously.”

Do better, BBC.

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Another plumb

Feb 15th, 2019 2:04 pm | By

In that deranged press conference Trump said Obama told him “he was so close to starting a big war with North Korea.” He worked himself up to saying that, in stages. It’s a useful little paradigm of how he maneuvers himself into lies. Stage one, he asked Obama what the biggest threat was and Obama said “By far, North Korea.” Stage two, “And, I donwanna speak fer him…but…I believe he wouldv gone to war with North Korea.” Stage three, “I think he was ready to go to war.” Stage four, “in fact he told me he was so close to [nervous pause] starting a big war with North Korea.” He inches himself into the lie like someone inching into a too-hot bath. “He said it was a big threat; I think he would have gone to war; I think he was ready to go to war in fact wait a second he actually TOLD me he was.” You can see it happen as stage three seamlessly becomes stage four. “I think he was ready to go to war in fact he told me he was so close” – portrait of an inadequate man translating his opinion into a (false) memory of being told. He doesn’t have that mental thing, that doohickey, that reasonably adult thoughtful people have where we check what we think we know or remember in case we don’t.

He does it all the time; we see him do it in cabinet meetings and shouting at the press on his way to the helicopter. His talking is like a little train line that pulls new bullshit out of him as it trundles along the track of his melting brain. It’s weird and creepy because normal people don’t do that. It’s terrifying because of his job.

He needs to be 25d.

Anyway…the actual point of the Post story is that he’s claiming Shinzo Abe nominated him for the Nobel peace prize. In the process of making that claim he expressed his usual envy of Obama.

Responding to a question about the upcoming summit with North Korea on Friday, President Trump said that Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe had nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize.

“Prime Minister Abe of Japan gave me the most beautiful copy of a letter that he sent to the people who give out a thing called the Nobel Prize,” Trump said. “I have nominated you, respectfully on behalf of Japan, I am asking them to give you the Nobel Peace Prize.”

Trump said he then thanked Abe but added that he did not expect to win the prize.

And that Obama got it, and didn’t know why, and he Trump probably wouldn’t get it, wahwahwah.

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What is IN there?

Feb 15th, 2019 11:18 am | By

What happens when he tries to string sentences together.

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Turns out it’s the Democrats’ fault

Feb 15th, 2019 10:42 am | By

Aren’t Republicans supposed to love the military? The Post reports:

House Armed Services Committee Chairman Adam Smith (D-Wash.) said that Trump’s plan to divert military construction funding to border barriers was “utterly disrespectful” to members of the military.

“This appalling decision by the Trump administration is an egregious example of the President putting his political agenda ahead of the interest of the United States,” Smith said in a statement.

Trump intends to tap $3.6 billion in military construction funds by declaring a national emergency.

What is his political agenda here exactly?

It seems to be to defend and consolidate and underline his image, his “identity,” as a ferocious racist xenophobe. It appears to be to leave no stone unturned in his effort to display his credentials as a hate-mongering white supremacist shit.

Which is sort of funny, in a sour way, because hey, dude, we believe you, you don’t need to do all this to convince us.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said Trump’s hand was forced on declaring a national emergency by congressional Democrats.

“President Trump’s decision to announce emergency action is the predictable and understandable consequence of Democrats’ decision to put partisan obstruction ahead of the national interest,” McConnell said in a statement.

Senator would you please go stick your head in a bucket of fresh cement? At once?

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Burning times

Feb 15th, 2019 9:42 am | By

Interesting.

Not a brilliant angle but reads “trans kids burn terfs.”

Incitement to violence?

Well let’s see what happens when we change “TERFs” to something else.

“White kids burn niggers”

“Straight men burn faggots”

“Men burn bitches”

Yes that doesn’t sound what you’d call benign, does it.

But, a voice from the back of the room calls out, trans kids are oppressed, so they’re not comparable to white kids or straight men or men in those examples. Ok, so does it sound more benign if we make the first term a subaltern?

“Gay kids burn niggers”

Better? No, I don’t think so. The coupling of the emphatic “burn” and the hate-label is enough. It’s not a literal threat in the sense of “We will burn you,” but it’s a menace. It’s not friendly.

This guy is a Labour councillor.

That they should be burned; oh well that’s all right then.

It’s weird how happy people are to let their hatred of women just hang out there for everyone to see.

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An optional emergency

Feb 15th, 2019 8:42 am | By

So here we go. Trump, sounding both drunk and brain-dead, says he’s declaring a national emergency, then promptly says he didn’t have to do that, which means it’s not an emergency, so all the lawyers are saying that won’t do him a lot of good in court.

Can’t anybody stop this runaway train?

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Always angling to make others feel smaller

Feb 14th, 2019 5:43 pm | By

Guess who:

He didn’t read intelligence reports and mixed up classified material with what he had seen in newspaper clips. He seemed confused about the structure and purpose of organizations and became overwhelmed when meetings covered multiple subjects. He blamed immigrants for nearly every societal problem and uttered racist sentiments with shocking callousness.

No, not him, the other one.

This isn’t how President Trump is depicted in a new book by former deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe. Instead, it’s McCabe’s account of what it was like to work for then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

The FBI was better off when “you all only hired Irishmen,” Sessions said in one diatribe about the bureau’s workforce. “They were drunks but they could be trusted. Not like all those new people with nose rings and tattoos — who knows what they’re doing?”

Ok who should be more insulted here, Irish people or members of the nose rings and tattoos community? I’m thinking it’s a toss-up.

The description of Sessions is one of the most striking revelations in “The Threat,” a McCabe memoir that adds to a rapidly expanding collection of score-settling insider accounts of Trump-era Washington. McCabe’s is an important voice because of his position at the top of the bureau during a critical series of events, including the firing of FBI chief James Comey, the appointment of special counsel Robert S. Mueller, and the ensuing scorched-earth effort by Trump and his Republican allies to discredit the Russia probe and destroy public confidence in the nation’s top law enforcement agency.

I think “score-settling” is too frivolous, not to say cynical. No doubt Comey and McCabe and others do have grievances, but they don’t need personal grievances to have urgent reasons to make clear how inept and destructive these crooks are. The grievances are supererogatory as reasons for warning us about Trump and Sessions and the rest.

McCabe is a keen observer of detail, particularly when it comes to the president’s pettiness. He describes how Trump arranges Oval Office encounters so that his advisers are forced to sit before him in “little schoolboy chairs” across the Resolute Desk. Prior presidents met with aides on couches in the center of the room, but Trump is always angling to make others feel smaller.

And himself feel enormous.

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Emergency, everybody to get from street

Feb 14th, 2019 12:54 pm | By

More bad moon rising.

Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, announced on Thursday that President Trump planned to declare a national emergency so he can bypass Congress and build his long-promised wall along the southwestern border.

That raised the prospect of a constitutional clash with lawmakers over who controls the federal purse.

Mr. McConnell said the president would take action after signing a bill to keep the government open but not fund his wall.

There is no national security crisis at the southern border.

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Is morality choice or perception?

Feb 14th, 2019 12:14 pm | By

Anil Gomes, a Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy at Oxford, explains Iris Murdoch’s version of moral philosophy at the TLS:

Her views on moral philosophy are set out in three papers published over this period, none of them in the mainstream philosophy journals where her former colleagues might have come across them, later collected together as The Sovereignty of Good (1970). She presents herself throughout these essays as opposing a certain picture of moral philosophy. It is a picture, Murdoch tells us, that can be found in the work of R. M. Hare, where moral utterances are a kind of prescription, in Sartre’s existentialism, where moral value is created by our undetermined choices, and in the hero of many a contemporary novel. According to this picture, moral judgements are not in the business of describing how things are in the world. They cannot, that is, be true or false. Perhaps they express your emotions, perhaps they prescribe your actions, perhaps they announce your decisions – but whatever it is they do, they don’t tell you how things are in the world. Morality, on this view, isn’t a matter of finding out truths about the world; it is a matter of choosing which values guide your life.

I suppose that’s what I think, pretty much. If you subtract humans then surely it’s true that morality doesn’t describe how things are in the world – or you could broaden it and subtract all sentient beings. But at the same time it depends on what you mean by truths about the world…

Murdoch, Foot, Midgely and Anscombe – that wonderful generation of women philosophers – all rejected this idea of morality. The lessons of the war seemed to be that there is such a thing as getting it right or wrong, and that it mattered that one get it right.

Yes, in human terms, but if you subtract humans – etc.

Murdoch took the rejection much further than any of the others, and in a way which led her closer, in some guises, to Plato, and, in other guises, to a form of mysticism which will be familiar to anyone who has read her novels. The aim of the essays in The Sovereignty of Good is to replace this picture of moral life with an alternative, one that is adequate to our empirical, philosophical and moral existence.

What is this alternative picture? In contrast to her opponents, Murdoch stresses the reality of moral life. To acknowledge the reality of moral life is to recognize that the world contains such things as kindness, as foolishness, as mean-spiritedness. These are genuine features of reality, and someone who comes to know that some course of action would be foolish comes to know something about how things are in the world. This view is sometimes thought to be ruled out by a certain scientistic conception of the natural, one that restricts what exists to the things that feature in our best scientific theories. Such a view is too restricted, Murdoch thinks, to capture the reality of our lives – including our lives as moral agents. Goodness is sovereign, which is to say a real, if transcendent, aspect of the world.

Yes, but human lives. Humans are a contingent fact about the world. Opportunity and Curiosity haven’t reported back any kindness or foolishness on Mars, as far as I know.

Making sense of these ideas requires a metaphysics of morals, one that helps us to make peace with the existence of transcendent goodness. But if morality is to move us, we need not just a metaphysics of morals but also a moral psychology: an account of how we creatures, concrete as we are, are able to know about, and be guided by, the transcendent good. Here Murdoch aims to replace the metaphor of choice which dominated her opponents’ work with the metaphor of vision. We can look carefully, we can attend to people and their situations, and when we do so, we can come to know how things are in the moral realm, to know how people have behaved, and to know what we ought to do.

It’s interesting, I think, but not particularly convincing. I completely agree that “there is such a thing as getting it right or wrong, and that it matter[s] that one get it right,” but not that it’s somehow transcendent. I don’t think I believe in that kind of transcendence. (What kind then? Just the ordinary factual kind where you transcend an insult or an inconvenience.)

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Had Twitter let it be known

Feb 14th, 2019 11:08 am | By

Julie Bindel on Meghan Murphy’s lawsuit against Twitter:

‘Twitter would never have attracted the hundreds of millions of users it boasts today had Twitter let it be known that it would arbitrarily ban users who did not agree with the political and social views of its management or impose sweeping new policies banning the expression of widely-held viewpoints and perspectives on public issues,’ Murphy’s lawyers submitted.

That’s a good point. (This is why people pay lawyers.) Twitter certainly didn’t make clear from the outset that it would be doing that.

As I wrote at the time of her ban, Murphy, who, like me, is constantly de-platformed, attacked and vilified for daring to question the Orwellian madness of the transgender Taliban, is a target of vicious trans activists. Murphy had the gall to tweet about Jonathan Yaniv, who had demanded large payoffs from several female beauticians because they had refused to wax his scrotum. Yaniv, who claims to be female, had booked in for a Brazilian wax, a process done on women who wish to wear extremely skimpy bikini bottoms and not flash any pubic hair. Murphy’s crime?  She referred to Yaniv as, ahem, a man.

The lifetime ban from Twitter has come as a significant blow to Murphy. The freelancer relied on Twitter as a platform to promote her writing and online magazine, Feminist Current, and had painstakingly built up close to 25,000 followers, so the ban has affected her income, as well as her reputation…

And this is for saying that a man is a man. I still have trouble believing that we are required, often on pain of arrest or banishment or both, to say men are women if they “identify as” such. I have trouble believing it and I have trouble understanding how so many people manage to ignore the alarming implications of requiring others to affirm falsehoods.

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No back pay for you

Feb 14th, 2019 10:12 am | By

Mister Populist is again finding a way to make sure workers get cheated out of their pay.

The Associated Press published a good overview, highlighting a variety of elements in the final package, but the Washington Post flagged a point of particular interest.

Lawmakers grappled with a series of last-minute disputes Wednesday as they sought to finalize the deal, including an ultimately unsuccessful push by Democrats to include back pay for thousands of federal contractors who were caught up in the last shutdown, and – unlike the 800,000 affected federal workers – have not been able to recoup their lost wages.

Alas, this isn’t too surprising. Democrats, led by Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minn.), pushed a provision to include back pay for federal contractors as part of the spending deal, but when reporters asked Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) yesterday whether it would be included, the senator replied, “I’ve been told the president won’t sign that.”

But but but we’re told he’s a populist. Surely populists don’t approve of stealing from The People?

As Vox recently explained, in reference to those adversely affected by the shutdown, “Up to 580,000 contractors, including cafeteria workers, security guards, developers, and IT consultants, could be missing out on back pay because of the impasse, according to NYU public service professor Paul Light.”

Cafeteria workers and security guards – Trump stiffs them while billing us for his many many trips to his golf resorts.

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LOL #measlesoutbreak

Feb 14th, 2019 9:39 am | By

This is what you get when you set up a government of corrupt unqualified hacks: connections to people who bend their efforts to promoting epidemics.

The wife of White House communications director Bill Shine on Wednesday went on an anti-vaccine tirade while spreading conspiracy theories about an outbreak of measles in the Pacific north-west.

In a series of tweets, Darla Shine lashed out against a CNN segment detailing the outbreak, which has seen more than 50 unvaccinated people contract measles in Washington state and Oregon.

“Here we go LOL #measlesoutbreak on #CNN #Fake #Hysteria,” Darla Shine tweeted. “The entire Baby Boom population alive today had the #Measles as kids … Bring back our #ChildhoodDiseases they keep you healthy & fight cancer.”

Well yes, the ones alive today are necessarily the ones who weren’t killed by contagious diseases…but that tells us nothing about how many people were killed by contagious diseases. The people who survived Katrina are the people who survived Katrina; that doesn’t mean no one was killed by Katrina. I think we all grasp how that works.

Darla Shine, a former TV producer, is married to Bill Shine, the former executive at Fox News who was appointed last year as Donald Trump’s deputy chief of staff for communications.

Faced with criticism over her comments, Shine accused “the Left” of attempting to smear her.

That’s where they want to go? The left is in favor of preventing the spread of disease, and the right is for encouraging the spread of disease? Really?

When allegations of sexual misconduct surfaced against Roger Ailes, the network’s late former chairman, and ex-host Bill O’Reilly, Darla Shine sought to discredit their accusers.

Her husband, Bill, was forced to resign as co-president of Fox News following the allegations and has been accused of seeking to suppress the accounts of their accusers.

Fun couple.

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Opportunity lives on

Feb 13th, 2019 2:33 pm | By

Farewell, Oppy.

The longest-lived robot ever sent from Earth to the surface of another planet, Opportunity snapped pictures of a strange landscape and revealed surprising glimpses into the distant past of Mars for over 14 years. But on Wednesday, NASA announced that the rover is dead.

“It is therefore that I am standing here with a deep sense of appreciation and gratitude that I declare the Opportunity mission is complete,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s associate administrator for science.

The rover was designed to last only three months, but proved itself to be one of the solar system’s most unexpected endurance athletes. It traveled more than the distance of a marathon when its designers only expected it to move about half a mile. As it completed this course, Opportunity provided scientists a close-up view of Mars that they had never seen: finely layered rocks that preserved ripples of flowing water several billion years ago, a prerequisite for life.

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Shocked, shocked

Feb 13th, 2019 2:20 pm | By

Burn.

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Your likability score

Feb 13th, 2019 11:13 am | By

Maggie Astor at the Times zooms in close on sexism in electoral politics.

Few Americans acknowledge they would hesitate to vote for a woman for president — but they don’t have to, according to researchers and experts on politics and women and extensive research on double standards in campaigns. Reluctance to support female candidates is apparent in the language that voters frequently use to describe men and women running for office; in the qualities that voters say they seek; and in the perceived flaws that voters say they are willing or unwilling to overlook in candidates.

And this describes all of us. The drip drip drip of background sexism does its work on all of us, no matter how feminist we may be in the front parts of our brains. Men are coached to have contempt for women and women are coached to have contempt for women. Totally fair and equal, see??!

There’s the “likability” issue for one. Men can get away with being seen as not likable; women cannot. Furthermore any woman presumptuous enough to run for president is automatically not likable. BZZZZZZZT game over.

Women also tend to be viewed as unlikable based on their ambition. Harvard researchers found in 2010 that voters regarded “power-seeking” women with contempt and anger, but saw power-seeking men as stronger and more competent. There is often some implication of unscrupulousness in descriptions of female candidates as “ambitious” — an adjective that could apply to any person running for president but is rarely used to disparage men.

Well, you know, it’s like beards or neckties – they look good on men, and ambitious on women.

The qualities voters tend to expect from politicians — like strength, toughness and valor — are popularly associated with masculinity. This often means that from the moment a man steps onto the campaign trail, he benefits from a basic assumption that he is qualified to run, while a woman “has to work twice as hard to show that she’s qualified,” Ms. Hunter said.

And that one is really hard to overcome. I think on some level we sort of need, or think we need, half of humanity to be more nurturing than the other half, and probably, correspondingly, half to be more tough than the other half. It could be different if we could start from scratch, maybe, but starting from scratch isn’t an option. I wonder – I don’t think I’ve thought of this before – if it’s that much more difficult for the US to elect a woman at the top because since WW2 we’ve been the military top dog.

For many years, female candidates tried to adopt the characteristics voters wanted to see — to act, stereotypically speaking, like men. This worked for some but also brought pitfalls. For one thing, it did not challenge the premise that masculinity is better suited for leadership. It also opened women up to a familiar double standard: A man who speaks authoritatively might be confident or opinionated, while a woman who does the same is arrogant or lecturing. Most pressingly, it created a backlash among some voters who saw women acting “like men” and deemed them inauthentic.

Quite. It’s lose-lose no matter what direction you turn your gaze.

Nichole M. Bauer, an assistant professor of political communication at Louisiana State University, found that when women played up stereotypically masculine qualities, voters — regardless of party — rated them better in terms of leadership ability, but voters in the opposing party rated them significantly lower in terms of likability. There was no similar backlash to male candidates who defied gender stereotypes.

Dr. Bauer said that in all her research, she had found no way for women to win the support of voters in the opposing party. It’s a basic psychological phenomenon, she said: If a Republican starts out disliking a Democratic woman, or vice versa, “they’ll use gender stereotypes about women to maintain that perceived negative relationship” no matter what the woman does.

The Times piece ends on an up note, saying maybe with six women running for president maybe things will improve. Me, I’ve succeeded in depressing myself.

H/t Screechy

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 8 comments


Fore!

Feb 13th, 2019 10:16 am | By

Well, now we know what Trump is doing with his “executive time,” besides watching Fox & Friends. He’s playing Pretend Golf in a room of the White House.

President Trump has installed a room-sized “golf simulator” game at the White House, which allows him to play virtual rounds at courses all over the world by hitting a ball into a large video screen, according to two people told about the system.

That system replaced an older, less sophisticated golf simulator that had been installed under President Obama, according to two people with knowledge of the previous system.

Trump’s system cost about $50,000, and was put in during the last few weeks in a room in his personal quarters, a White House official said.

He paid for it himself, too – what a big boy.

President Trump has built his schedules around long blocks of “executive time” — unstructured periods in the day where the president’s schedules show no official meetings. He often spends this time watching TV, tweeting, holding impromptu meetings and making phone calls, aides have said.

And eating ice cream and playing Pretend Golf.

Trump — then a businessman and conservative celebrity — repeatedly criticized Obama for spending too much of his presidency playing golf. “Can you believe that, with all of the problems and difficulties facing the U.S., President Obama spent the day playing golf?” Trump wrote on Twitter in October 2014.

As president, however, Trump has played golf more often than Obama did: Obama played about 38 rounds a year, vs. about 70 per year for Trump. That’s just the outdoor kind of golf: The Post could not obtain statistics on Obama’s virtual golf-playing.

Silly Post; they’re overlooking the scoring system. You have to multiply the times Obama played by 5 because his daddy was from Kenya, by 3 because he went to Columbia, by another 3 because he went to Harvard, by 10 because [you know]. Trump on the other hand gets to discount by half because he’s from Queens.

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 6 comments
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He offered no substance

Feb 13th, 2019 9:47 am | By

And then there’s this cloud on the horizon.

Same reason they gave Trump so much airtime, no doubt. Greed? Cupidity? Lust for gain? One of those.

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 2 comments