Joining torturer Joe Arpaio…

Will be giving a Full Pardon to Dinesh D’Souza today. He was treated very unfairly by our government!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 31, 2018

Using the pardon power to dole out transactional favors is an insult and injury to the office of the presidency. It is a breach of the faith of the American people. It is wrong. https://t.co/fKNF1C8FoD

— Susan Hennessey (@Susan_Hennessey) May 31, 2018

It is hard to overstate what a naked abuse of the pardon power it is for the president to use it almost exclusively to reward criminal members of his own party.

— Matthew Miller (@matthewamiller) May 31, 2018

Trump’s Dinesh D’Souza pardon today, on top of his pardons of Scooter Libby and Joe Arpaio, make sense only as an elephant-whistle to Michael Cohen & all who know damning things about Trump: protect me & I’ll have your back. Turn on me & your goose is cooked. More obstruction!

— Laurence Tribe (@tribelaw) May 31, 2018

Imagine if Nixon had been waiting with a stack of pardons for his Plumbers to return from the Watergate break-in. A president may not be above the law, but he has the power to put his henchmen above the law. That’s what Trump is telling Manafort & others with the D'Souza pardon.

— Walter Shaub (@waltshaub) May 31, 2018

.@PreetBharara in 2014 said D’Souza’s illegal campaign contributions was “wilfully undermining the integrity of the campaign finance process…he has had to answer for this crime – here with a felony conviction.” https://t.co/KwDZYyy7P9

— Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) May 31, 2018

Bill McKibben on Justin Trudeau and Big Oil:

In case anyone wondered, this is how the world ends: with the cutest, progressivest, boybandiest leader in the world going fully in the tank for the oil industry.

Justin Trudeau’s government announced on Tuesday that it would nationalize the Kinder Morgan pipeline running from the tar sands of Alberta to the tidewater of British Columbia. It will fork over at least $4.5bn in Canadian taxpayers’ money for the right to own a 60-year-old pipe that springs leaks regularly, and for the right to push through a second pipeline on the same route – a proposal that has provoked strong opposition.

Uh oh.

That opposition has come from three main sources. First are many of Canada’s First Nations groups, who don’t want their land used for this purpose without their permission, and who fear the effects of oil spills on the oceans and forests they depend on. Second are the residents of Canada’s west coast, who don’t want hundreds of additional tankers plying the narrow inlets around Vancouver on the theory that eventually there’s going to be an oil spill. And third are climate scientists, who point out that even if Trudeau’s pipeline doesn’t spill oil into the ocean, it will spill carbon into the atmosphere.

Lots of carbon: 173 billion barrels of oil’s worth.

[T]he one half of 1% of the planet that is Canadian will have awarded to itself almost one-third of the remaining carbon budget between us and the 1.5 degree rise in temperature the planet drew as a red line in Paris. There’s no way of spinning the math that makes that okay – Canadians already emit more carbon per capita than Americans. Hell, than Saudi Arabians.

More than US Americans? I didn’t know that was possible.

Is this a clever financial decision that will somehow make Canada rich? Certainly not in the long run. Cleaning up the tar sands complex in Alberta – the biggest, ugliest scar on the surface of the earth – is already estimated to cost more than the total revenues generated by all the oil that’s come out of the ground. Meanwhile, when something goes wrong, Canada is now on the hook: when BP tarred the Gulf of Mexico, the US was at least able to exact billions of dollars in fines to help with the cleanup. Canada will get to sue itself.

So why is he doing it? Politics, McKibben says. Doesn’t seem like much of a reason, does it.

Meanwhile…

The Ministry of Environment and Climate Change Strategy says that approximately 100 litres of crude oil have leaked from the Trans Mountain pipeline in Darfield B.C.

…

Since 1961 Trans Mountain says they have reported approximately 82 spills to the National Energy Board — around 67 spills occurred with oil products. They add that 69.5 per cent of spills occurred at pump stations or terminals, and the remaining 30.5 per cent along the pipeline.

The news comes just four days before Kinder Morgan, the company who operates the Trans Mountain pipeline, will announce if they will continue with their pipeline twinning construction project.

The $7.4-billion Trans Mountain pipeline expansion would parallel the 1,150-kilometre route of the existing Trans Mountain Pipeline — which was built in 1953.

Pipeline capacity would increase from 300,000 to 890,000 barrels of oil per day if the project goes through.

The expansion project has been the centre of intense debate both within the public and between the province and Alberta and Federal Governments.

Gotta keep those SUVs humming.

Fact checker Linda Qiu checks facts:

During the rally, Mr. Trump also reiterated many claims that The Times and others have previously debunked: that Representative Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California, supported MS-13 (she never said this), that illegal border crossings had declined 40 percent (they recently increased), and that tax cuts he signed into law last year were the largest in history (they rank 12th). He also incorrectly described other countries as not “sending their best” through the diversity visa program (applicants enter of their own volition), claimed construction had begun on his border wall (it hasn’t), and said that the suspect in the Manhattan truck attack in October had sponsored two dozen family members through “chain migration” (this is implausible).

And the crowd cheered.

Barr is scorching the earth and sowing it with salt.

Roseanne Barr’s Twitter saga didn’t end with the cancellation of her show Tuesday. Early Wednesday morning, she was back at it, first blaming Ambien and defensively comparing ABC’s response to her racist and otherwise offensive tweetstorm to those of other celebrities who have made controversial comments.

But what she said yesterday wasn’t just “controversial” – in fact in sane circles it wasn’t controversial at all, it was unmistakably and crudely racist. “Ape” is not ambiguous.

Barr seemed to liken the reaction from her co-stars and those a supporter called “her underlings” to the way President Trump complains about members of his administration being “disloyal.” In response to tweets calling out Gilbert and Emma Kenney, who plays Barr’s granddaughter, Barr wrote, “i feel bad for @POTUS-he goes thru this every single day.”

Hmm yes POTUS feels bad for POTUS too, but neither of them has any business feeling sorry for him, because he spends his life insulting people in public. “Pocahontas.” “Cryin’ Chuck.” “Failing New York Times.” “Crooked Hillary.” Heidi Cruz:

"@Don_Vito_08: "A picture is worth a thousand words" @realDonaldTrump #LyingTed #NeverCruz @MELANIATRUMP pic.twitter.com/5bvVEwMVF8"

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 24, 2016

Trump will probably give Barr a cabinet post soon.

You kids wanna buy some archetypes? #JordanPeterson #jordanbpeterson #12rulesforlife #Atheism #kanye pic.twitter.com/sVSTODVtY6

— Jason Gussen (@JasonGussen) May 3, 2018

We need to deal with everyday racism, Don Lemon says.

CNN’s @donlemon: I give ABC credit for cancelling “Roseanne” – but this wasn’t the first time, so why was she given this opportunity in the first place? https://t.co/XuT2RWthhp pic.twitter.com/rvLNVSOD1X

— The Situation Room (@CNNSitRoom) May 29, 2018

Preet Bharara said a thing.

"It's hard not to be proud of John McCain." Agreed. Whatever your politics. Yes, I'm watching the HBO special.

— Preet Bharara (@PreetBharara) May 29, 2018

“It’s hard not to be proud of John McCain.” Agreed. Whatever your politics.

Wellll, thought I. No. No it’s not. He chose Sarah Palin as his vice president. That means he chose her for president should he win the election and then die in office. That all by itself makes it not hard to refrain from being unmixedly proud of John McCain.

A friend pointed out another one, that I don’t think I was aware of. Ed Pilkington in the Guardian in September 2008 (two months before McCain lost to Obama):

Imagine the stink that would erupt were David Cameron to stand up in front of a dinner of rich Conservative backers and make a “joke” that implied that Sarah Brown had had a lesbian affair with Jacqui Smith and produced a love child (and an ugly one to boot). Can you imagine British papers deciding to downplay the story because it was in such bad taste, allowing Cameron to carry on with his assault on Downing Street?

Cross the pond and that is exactly what happened to John McCain at a fundraising dinner in Arizona a decade ago. “Do you know why Chelsea Clinton is so ugly?” he told a handful of big Republican funders. “Because Janet Reno is her father.”

Jesus. Misogyny much?

The remark packed into its 15 words several layers of misogyny. It disparaged the looks of Chelsea, then 18 and barely out of high school; it portrayed Reno as a man at a time when she was serving as the first female US attorney general; and it implied that Hillary Clinton was engaged in a lesbian affair while the Monica Lewinsky scandal was blazing. Not bad going, Senator McCain.

Any one of those elements would seem potentially terminal for a public figure. Yet here he is 10 years later presenting himself as a champion of feminism by appointing Sarah Palin as his running mate.

And according to Pilkington the US press barely touched it, which is why most of us didn’t know about it. (That was long before Twitter, of course…) They did him the favor of looking fixedly in the other direction. He still lost the election but he wasn’t outed for that shitty mean joke.

After his misogynist joke, McCain said sorry to Bill Clinton (though he made no direct apology to the three women involved) and the incident was all but forgotten.

Brilliant. He apologized to the bro but not to the women he actually taunted.

Whatever your politics, that’s shitty.

CNN reports:

The Supreme Court on Tuesday cleared the way for a controversial Arkansas law that blocks medication-induced abortions to go into effect.

The law, passed in 2015, says that any physician who “gives, sells, dispenses, administers, or otherwise provides or prescribes the abortion-inducing drug” shall have to have a contract with a physician who has admitting privileges at a nearby hospital.

So that will make it much harder to get the drug.

Planned Parenthood said it will “swiftly” make another challenge to block the law in US district court.

“Arkansas is now shamefully responsible for being the first state to ban medication abortion,” Planned Parenthood Executive Vice President Dawn Laguens said in a statement. This dangerous law also immediately ends access to safe, legal abortion at all but one health center in the state. If that’s not an undue burden, what is? This law cannot and must not stand. We will not stop fighting for every person’s right to access safe, legal abortion.”

That should be every woman’s right to access to safe, legal abortion. Men don’t need access to safe, legal abortion. If you disguise the class who is affected by this law you make it harder to explain the law and the ideology behind the law. This isn’t random; it’s part of the age-old policing of women’s reproductive capacities in the interests of men. If you don’t even understand that how can you know how to resist?

It seems the government may have underestimated the number of deaths caused by Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico just a tad. The new estimate is roughly 4,600, compared to the previous count of…64.

An analysis of vital statistics by The New York Times last December found that 1,052 more people than usual died across the island in the 42 days after the storm. Other news organizations, including Puerto Rico’s Center for Investigative Journalism and CNN, and Alexis Raúl Santos, a demographer at Penn State, have also challenged the government’s figure, finding evidence for hundreds of excess deaths in the weeks following the hurricane.

Researchers for this latest study visited more than 3,000 residences across the island and interviewed their occupants, who reported that 38 people living in their households had died between Sept. 20, when Hurricane Maria struck, and the end of 2017. That toll, converted into a mortality rate, was extrapolated to the larger population and compared with official statistics from the same period in 2016.

When infrastructure is smashed, people die.

So that’s over.

Stellar ratings and an apology weren’t enough to mitigate Roseanne Barr’s racist comments, and now ABC is pulling the plug on “Roseanne.” ABC Entertainment president Channing Dungey says the network has decided to cancel the “Roseanne” reboot.

Dungey said in a statement, “Roseanne’s Twitter statement is abhorrent, repugnant and inconsistent with our values, and we have decided to cancel her show.”

It was either that or see everyone connected with Blackish walk out. They kept the better show.

Rex Huppke at the Chicago Tribune sees Roseanne Barr the way I do – trivial herself but a portent of the world we now live in.

Barr quickly defended her Tuesday morning tweet as a “joke.” She then tweeted that she was leaving Twitter. Five minutes later, likely feeling pressure from ABC — the network making stacks of money off Barr’s reboot of the old sitcom “Roseanne” — she returned to Twitter with a more formal and entirely unbelievable apology:

“I apologize to Valerie Jarrett and to all Americans. I am truly sorry for making a bad joke about her politics and her looks. I should have known better. Forgive me — my joke was in bad taste.”

When the only people who would consider your comment a joke are racist lunatics, you have to reconsider your definition of the word “joke.” And when you try to apologize for your obviously racist comment by calling it a joke, you have to reconsider your definition of the word “apologize.”

It seems more likely that Barr, who President Donald Trump has praised in part because she and her character in the sitcom support the president, felt emboldened by the Trump era and confident she could let fly a “this black person looks like an ape” comment without fear of retribution.

What I’m saying. So many people feel emboldened by the Trump era, and act on their emboldened feelings.

Barr is a perfect avatar for this moment in our history. She’s white, she’s loud, she’s mean (she also took time Tuesday morning to tie Chelsea Clinton to some bizarre George Soros-related conspiracy) and she rants about unhinged narratives based on nothing but lies, like the tale of a global child-trafficking ring linked to Hillary Clinton that is jaw-dropping in its stupidity.

And yet, with all that, ABC happily gives her sitcom a prime-time slot. Behavior that once would’ve rightly destroyed careers now gets rewarded. It’s America in 2018.

I don’t much care about Roseanne Barr. She can spew her crazy all over the Internet and follow Twitter loons down conspiratorial rabbit holes to her heart’s content.

What I care about is ABC, which seems willing to tolerate her idiocy and contribute to the ongoing normalization of racism, xenophobia and outright craziness.

PBS will be giving Steve Bannon his own show at this rate.

Living in Trump World.

A week after Roseanne Barr’s ABC sitcom closed out a successful comeback season, the outspoken comedian was at the center of a social media storm prompted by her reference on Twitter to “The Planet of the Apes” when mentioning a former top adviser to President Barack Obama who is black.

Early on Tuesday, Ms. Barr posted a comment about Valerie Jarrett, the former adviser to Mr. Obama, that said if “muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby=vj.”

I’ve never seen her sitcom and I’ve never been able to keep track of all the people named Roseanne we’re supposed to pay attention to. but I know what “ape” jokes are about.

The tweet was deleted, this was the original comment on Valeria Jarrett. pic.twitter.com/Ydi5pdVqUw

— andrew kaczynski (@KFILE) May 29, 2018

Can’t really explain that away.

Ms. Barr initially dismissed accusations that the comment was racist, defending it as “a joke.” She also said on Twitter, “ISLAM is not a RACE, lefties. Islam includes EVERY RACE of people.”

Yeeeaaaah but 1. I don’t think Valerie Jarrett is part of the Muslim Brotherhood and 2. don’t forget the planet of the apes part.

Then she deleted the tweet, then a bit later she apologized.

“I apologize to Valerie Jarrett and to all Americans,” she wrote. “I am truly sorry for making a bad joke about her politics and her looks. I should have known better. Forgive me – my joke was in bad taste.”

Nah. That’s not just “bad taste” and it’s not just about “her looks.” It’s also not a “bad joke.”

I know almost nothing about Roseanne Barr and don’t care about her personally, I care about the way the rise of Trump has made this kind of shit possible.