As recently as today

Apr 5th, 2018 5:48 pm | By

Jezebel:

It is not easy to admit our mistakes, particularly now, given the current media climate and general culture of intolerance on college campuses. Still, we feel that we owe our readers an apology.

We should not have hired Cannibal Witch, an elegant writer and thinker who, we have come to believe, after serious consideration, does indeed eat children.

They thought she might change. They thought she deserved a second chance.

However, it was Cannibal Witch’s recent appearance on Lou Dobbs’s podcast, Dobb Knobbin’ with Lou Dobbs—during which she discussed having eaten children as recently as today—that we have decided to part ways. The language she used to describe eating children made it clear to us that her original tweets about eating children did, in fact, represent her carefully considered diet of children.

They meant well. They meant so well.

H/t Pieter Breitner

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 3 comments


Guest post: Jordan Peterson and the very idea of pay equality

Apr 5th, 2018 5:33 pm | By

Guest post by Maureen Brian.

Midnight on April 4th was the deadline for companies to submit their data on their gender pay gap, if any, to the Equality and Human Rights Commission. Then some editor at the BBC had the notion of inviting wannabee-famous Jordan Peterson to comment on the whole exercise for BBC Radio4 Today.

In the course of a very scrappy interview it became quite clear that he didn’t like it. Not one bit. Certain things, it would seem, are ordained by God – that people who work long hours are all men and thus should be paid a lot more just for being, that the bulk of child or elderly relative care must fall upon women, that a woman who takes a career break should expect to return in a more junior role, etc. He also implied that people who work fewer hours should expect to be paid a lower hourly rate even with the same qualifications and doing the same work – the example given was a physician in general practice. Also, the figures are crude but we’ll come back to that.

Let us begin at the beginning. Employment law changes in 1970, when Barbara Castle was the Secretary of State, made clear that we were en route to equal pay. The law making that mandatory came in 1975. A small fortune was then spent on lawyers, expensive lawyers, to find or create loopholes so that bosses didn’t have to worry about abiding by the law. Far too important to worry about that, old boy! Finally a ruling by the ECHR in 1984 made it very clear that equal pay was for work of equal value. No more, no less. Trivial differences and different job titles did not count.

There has been progress since all this, led by the brighter employers ably assisted or firmly kicked by unions as required. Things got better but, again, slowly.

Come 2010 and we get the Equality Act which gathers together all the various bits of equality and anti-discrimination law. In the course of that, government took the power to demand that individual companies report how they were getting on with all this.

Years later and companies were given a year’s notice to report their current situation and answer just 4 questions – is there a difference between the pay of men and of women using median pay? And using average pay? And if you divide your workforce into four quartiles, how many men and how many women are in each? And bonuses, how much in total goes to men and how much to women?

They have all this data already for tax and national insurance purposes, as well as for the accountants. This must count as one of the simplest mathematical exercises that anyone over 15 has ever been asked to do. It just has to be input online and signed off by the CEO or senior partner. Also it applies this time around only to companies with 250 or more employees so no worries about small start-ups or niche forensic labs where the one person with a biochemistry PhD could give an outcome which looked odd. Imagine the cost of this done by civil servants.

So Peterson thinks it is crude? Yes, of course it is crude and quite deliberately so. These are very simple figures which you can generate in-house from data already on your computer. No statistician, not even an accountant required and virtually cost-free.

The thing is that each set of figures is owned by the company. They generated them and they own them. It doesn’t attempt to explain how you got there, what you need to do next. It simply says this is where you are. No philosophical arguments required, either, no-one else to blame. Hell, I thought Peterson was a psychologist and in that dimension it is very clever indeed.

Update: somewhere about 1500 firms did not report by the deadline. They will be getting a very sharp letter on Monday then it is a month’s grace or you end up in court. And overall the gender pay gap seems to be under 10% with the exercise to be repeated next year.

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 5 comments


A willful and intensely dangerous lie

Apr 5th, 2018 4:40 pm | By

Trump told another giant, walloping lie today while out campaigning.

“In many places, like California, the same person votes many times,” Trump said. “You probably heard about that. They always like to say ‘oh that’s a conspiracy theory.’ Not a conspiracy theory, folks. Millions and millions of people.”

Lie. It’s a lie. It’s a bad, wicked, dangerous lie, and he keeps telling it. He’s been told it’s a lie by many people, but he goes on telling it.

The president stopped talking about voter fraud in public after taking criticism from Republican elected officials for making unsubstantiated charges about misconduct, not only in California but in other states that he lost, such as New Hampshire. But he never completely stopped raising the issue in private, according to people who have spoken with him.

Because he’s both bad and stupid. He doesn’t care that it’s a lie, and he’s too thick to pay attention to how they know it’s a lie.

Allegations of voter fraud have been investigated in California. Although some limited cases have been found, no evidence of large-scale fraud has ever surfaced.

“Millions and millions of people.”<— Big Lie

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 4 comments
Tags:


The new ghetto

Apr 5th, 2018 4:29 pm | By

Some right-wingers are, of course, saying it’s not fair, it’s censorship, it’s plickal krecknis.

Williamson’s hiring in March outraged some liberals, who pointed to 2014 tweets (since deleted) in which he opined “the law should treat abortion like any other homicide” and added, when considering an appropriate punishment for women who undergo abortions, “I have hanging … in mind.”

Williamson’s firing on Thursday prompted equally-angry responses from some of his fellow conservatives in the media, who contended the move shows they are an oppressed minority — “ghettoized,” in the words of the Resurgent’s Erick Erickson.

Ghettoized by the Nazis of plickal krecknis. It will be the gas chambers next, just you wait and see.

Yes, “a different world view” that women should be killed for deciding to stop being pregnant. Opposing abortion rights is one thing, and advocating mass murder is another.

Atlantic editor Jeff Goldberg initially defended Williamson against critics, arguing that isolated remarks on social media should not preclude Williamson from working at the magazine. The liberal watchdog Media Matters on Wednesday resurfaced a 2014 podcast that revealed Williamson’s tweets were not isolated remarks.

“I would totally go with treating it like any other crime, up to and including hanging,” Williamson said of abortion.

“I’m kind of squishy about capital punishment in general, but I’ve got a soft spot for hanging, as a form of capital punishment,” he added. “I tend to think that things like lethal injection are a little too antiseptic. … If the state is going to do violence, let’s make it violence.”

That kind of thing should just be beneath the Atlantic. There are plenty of frankly trashy outlets that are suitable for Williamson’s fantasy about killing lots of women, but the Atlantic should be better than that.

In the Atlantic’s reversal, we find one standard of civil discourse: It is okay — or, at least, forgivable — to tweet that women who undergo abortions should be hanged, so long as the tweet is hyperbolic rhetoric. It is not okay to actually think women who undergo abortions should be hanged.

No that’s not it. It is not okay to say that women who undergo abortions should be hanged and mean it. We can’t know what people actually think, we can merely know what they say and possibly whether or not they were joking or hyperbolizing when they said it.

Anyway, chalk up another win for plickal krecknis.

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 8 comments


His carefully considered views

Apr 5th, 2018 12:22 pm | By

This just in – The Atlantic has fired Kevin Williamson, the “women who get abortions should be hanged” guy.

That’s good, but why was he hired (or signed up) in the first place? It was already known that he thought and wrote that women should be executed for ending their own pregnancies. Would the Atlantic sign up a writer who had written that Jews should be murdered? Bosnians? Muslims? Atheists? Tutsis? I doubt it. It’s weird that women are apparently an exception.

The Daily Beast has more:

Goldberg initially defended Williamson’s hiring, dismissing the fringe view as simply “extreme tweeting” for which he deserved a “second chance.” New York Times conservative columnist Bret Stephens echoed that defense, writing, “[F]or heaven’s sake, it was a tweet.”

However, on Wednesday, Media Matters for America revealed that Williamson’s deadly solution for women who’ve had abortions wasn’t just an aberrant tweet. In a 2014 podcast, the liberal watchdog found, Williamson repeatedly and forcefully defended his view that those women should be executed.

He described current methods of execution—like lethal injection—to be “too antiseptic” and suggested that the state administer more “violent” forms of capital punishment befitting the “violence” of an abortion.

Goldberg decided that might make things awkward with female colleagues. Good call.

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 11 comments


Run away from the subscriber in Albemarle

Apr 5th, 2018 11:09 am | By

Allison Meier at Hyperallergic tells us about a database project to collect fugitive slave ads, which are themselves a source of information on slaves and slavery.

Readers of the May 24, 1796 Pennsylvania Gazette found an advertisement offering ten dollars to any person who would apprehend Oney Judge, an enslaved woman who had fled from President George Washington’s Virginia plantation, Mount Vernon. The notice described her in detail as a “light mulatto girl, much freckled, with very black eyes and bushy black hair,” as well as her skills at mending clothes, and that she “may attempt to escape by water … it is probable she will attempt to pass as a free woman, and has, it is said, wherewithal to pay her passage.” She did indeed board a ship called the Nancy and made it to New Hampshire, where she later married a free black sailor, although she was herself never freed by the Washingtons and remained a fugitive.

The advertisement is one of thousands that were printed in newspapers during colonial and pre-Civil War slavery in the United States. The Freedom on the Move (FOTM) public database project, now being developed at Cornell University, is the first major digital database to organize together North American fugitive slave ads from regional, state, and other collections. FOTM recently received its second of its two National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) digital humanities grants.

So I went to Freedom on the Move.

Throughout the 250-year history of slavery in North America, enslaved people tried to escape. Once newspapers were common, enslavers posted “runaway ads” to try to locate these fugitives. Such ads provide significant quantities of individual and collective information about the economic, demographic, social, and cultural history of slavery, but they have never been systematically collected. We are designing and beginning data collection for a database that will compile all North American slave runaway ads and make them available for statistical, geographical, textual, and other forms of analysis. Some elements of data collection will be crowdsourced, engendering a public sense of co-participation in the process of recording history, and producing a living pedagogical tool for instructors at all levels, in multiple disciplines.

The ads of course provide a very focused and limited kind of information – the kind that would guide strangers in picking them out as “fugitive slaves.” Historians are used to that kind of thing.

Between the seventeenth century and 1865, millions of African-American people were enslaved in the thirteen colonies and the United States. One of the most common ways to resist slavery was to escape. At one point or another, hundreds of thousands of enslaved people tried to run away.

When fugitives escaped, enslavers often placed runaway notices in newspapers. Such ads included any kind of information that might help readers identify the fugitive: the name, height, build, appearance, clothing, literacy level, language, accent and so on of the runaway. Often the ads speculate on where the escapee might be headed and why, when they were most recently sold, and what kinds of scars and marks they had.

Each ad sketches the contours of an individual life, a personality, a story. Taken collectively, the ads constitute a detailed, concentrated, and incredibly rare source of information about a population that is notably absent from most official historical records of the time. We are fortunate that there are an estimated 100,000 or more runaway ads in newspapers that survive from the colonial and pre-Civil War U.S.

If we could collect and collate all of these ads, and make the information in them accessible, we would create what might be the single richest source of data possible for understanding the lives of the approximately eight million people who were enslaved in the history of the U.S.

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 8 comments


Younger people with sad faces

Apr 4th, 2018 4:38 pm | By
Younger people with sad faces

This is just silly. Joe Pompeo at Vanity Fair on the woke young versus the [??] old at the NY Times the night Trump won the election:

Reporters and editors were in overdrive, tearing up one historic front page for another. The story that America’s paper of record had been gearing up to tell in the coming days—months, years—was being obliterated in real time. From a journalistic perspective, that wasn’t exactly a bad thing. The new story, after all, was more fascinating, more chaotic—utterly unprecedented. And Trump’s election was the kind of Earth-shattering event that only comes around once or twice in a newsperson’s career. So for someone like Dean Baquet, the Times’s then 60-year-old executive editor, the dominant emotion was exhilaration about this new national epic.

Ok wait just a god damn minute. Yes, sure it was in a sense good news for journalists, but journalists are also human beings and citizens, and people with thoughts and feelings, and in many cases parents of children who will have to live many decades with whatever messes a new president may decide to make. I can believe an executive editor would be excited about the news possibilities but I can’t believe that would be the dominant emotion, no not even for the executive editor of the Times. The people at the Times have to live here. A glorious flood of stories doesn’t blot out a perpetual horror show.

But it didn’t go unnoticed that, for some in the newsroom, the journalistic mission was not exactly front of mind. “I just remember younger people with sad faces,” a person who was there told me, describing those employees as generally being in roles that are adjacent to reporting and editing. Baquet remarked to colleagues in the coming days about how surprised he was by that. “He’s thinking, We’ve got a great story on our hands,” my source said. “That was the first indication that a unified newsroom in the age of Trump was going to be a very difficult thing to achieve or maintain.”

That’s ridiculous. It’s just ridiculous. If he really did say and think that, there’s something wrong with him. You don’t even have to be on the left to see Trump as a horror show – look at Richard Painter, Bill Kristol, David Frum.

All this is by way of leading into a rather overwrought piece on the political divide at the Times that invokes the usual clichés to not much purpose.

I saw it via some tweets of Chris Stedman’s which sent me to a blog post by Jerry Coyne about the Vanity Fair piece. I very seldom read Coyne these days and I was startled at how…unpleasant he’s gotten.

Now Grania and I always have the argument that Eli referred to: whether the kids will grow out of their Control-Leftism when they enter the work force…

It’s been evident to me for about a year that the New York Times is becoming more and more aligned with the Regressive Left. This likely reflects the election of Trump, but also the currents in universities that were moving even during Obama’s time.  Just look at any front page online, and you’ll see articles conditioned and prompted by intersectionalist Leftism.

So, for example, they’ve hired Lindy West as a columnist, who, to my mind, is not only absolutely predictable in what she says, but can’t write, either. True, they did hire Bari Weiss, a Leftist who condemns the Regressive Left, but she’s been demonized not just by the RL, but by her own colleagues at The Times, as I described in a recent post.

Control-Left this, Regressive Left that – to describe anyone he doesn’t agree with, which seems to be nearly everyone. He also makes a sharp distinction between reporting facts and editorializing, which I don’t think makes a lot of sense. He takes exception to a video headline: “How Scott Pruitt’s Repeated Disregard For Ethics Is Finally Catching Up To Him.” Is it not factually true that Pruitt has broken some explicit rules and ignored many ethical norms and precedents? I suppose the headline could be worded slightly more neutrally – “Scott Pruitt Has Broken Several Ethical Rules; Now He Is Having Problems” – but I’m not sure it makes a whole lot of difference.

Coyne looks to Woodward and Bernstein for the good old just the facts reporting:

Take the Watergate affair. While the editorial page of The Washington Post was calling out the administration’s perfidy, those who ultimately brought it down, Woodward and Bernstein, were just reporting the facts. You didn’t see either of those two going on the television to call for Nixon’s impeachment. And that’s the way it should be. Journalists give the facts (granted, they can be slanted a tad; we all know the Times has a Leftist tilt), while the op-eds give us fact-based opinions.

Going on tv to call for Nixon’s or Trump’s impeachment is one thing, and giving “the facts” some context is another. Calling for impeachment or reciting the president’s activities for the day are not the only two choices. Good journalism, like good history, requires more than “just the facts.”

And then, there are the comments on Coyne’s post. He comes down like a ton of bricks on people he sees as “breaking the rules” but his rules are rather…self-serving. The first two comments are no problem at all, apparently.

Capture

 

38 Comments

  1. Matt
    Posted April 4, 2018 at 1:21 pm | Permalink

    Taking Lindy West on board is enough to sink any ship.

    Reply
    • mikeyc
      Posted April 4, 2018 at 1:56 pm | Permalink

      omg. I tried not to laugh. Really, I did.

      Reply
    • BJ
      Posted April 4, 2018 at 5:48 pm | Permalink

      Bahahahahahaha.

      Reply

Nice, huh?

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 10 comments


Their reputation as savvy dealmakers

Apr 4th, 2018 3:22 pm | By

Princess Ivanka and Prince Jared tried to get Planned Parenthood to stop providing abortion services in exchange for more $$$.

[Cecile] Richards, who is planning on stepping down as president [of PP] in 2018, reveals in her new book that the President’s daughter and son-in-law offered her an increase in federal funding for Planned Parenthood in exchange for its agreement to stop providing abortion services, according to People magazine.

“Jared and Ivanka were there for one reason: to deliver a political win,” Richards writes in “Make Trouble: Standing Up, Speaking Out, and Finding the Courage to Lead,” which was released Tuesday, People reported. “In their eyes, if they could stop Planned Parenthood from providing abortions, it would confirm their reputation as savvy dealmakers. It was surreal, essentially being asked to barter away women’s rights for more money.”

Yes but more money. Who doesn’t want more money? Planned Parenthood could buy a luxury penthouse on 5th Avenue, and who doesn’t want that? More money, I tell you!

Richards told CNN’s Erin Burnett in an interview Tuesday that she thinks Ivanka Trump isn’t being a champion for women in her role as senior adviser to her father, the President.

“If her job is to advocate for women, I don’t think she’s done a very good job,” Richards said. “And particularly when it comes to women’s rights, we need a strong advocate in this White House.”

That’s never going to be Princess Ivanka.

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 5 comments
Tags:


One step at a time

Apr 4th, 2018 12:39 pm | By

Madeleine Albright was on Fresh Air yesterday to talk about her new book: Fascism: A Warning and about the fascist trend.

Albright was the first woman secretary of state. She was appointed to that position by President Bill Clinton in 1997, after having served as his U.N. ambassador. Her new book examines how fascism took hold in Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy. Then Albright moves on to look at current authoritarian leaders in several Eastern European countries, Turkey, Russia and North Korea. One chapter is devoted to President Trump, whose election, she says, added to her sense of urgency in writing this book. Albright is now a Distinguished Professor of Diplomacy at Georgetown University.

…

MADELEINE ALBRIGHT: …And part of the reason for writing it is to say that in fact this can happen in countries that have democratic systems, that have a population that’s interested in what is going on, that is supportive. Because so many of the things that have happened and happened in Czechoslovakia were steps that came as a result of ethnic issues with the German minority, but mostly steps that seemed not so terrible that there couldn’t be a deal made. And so that’s what’s so worrisome, is that these fascism can come in a way that it is one step at a time, and in many ways then goes unnoticed until it’s too late.

GROSS: One step at a time within the system?

ALBRIGHT: Within the system, and partially because it is a way of undermining democracy and the democratic institutions that are the basis of democracy, or criticizing the press or thinking that there are those that are enemies of the people and are the cause of distress or a bad economic situation. And it kind of works on the fear factor rather than the hope factor.

She talks about the fact that fascism presents different faces, so it’s easy to miss the early stages because the face is different.

GROSS: Would you just do, like, a roll call of democratic countries that you see turning authoritarian today?

ALBRIGHT: Yes. And that’s what’s so unfortunate about it because what we really do have are – in Europe, for instance, the prime example is Hungary with Viktor Orban, who is now talking about illiberal democracy, which is basically a way to deal with whoever is not, in his description, a Hungarian so he can go after immigrants. There are – then in Turkey we’re seeing a problem where in fact Erdogan, who was elected popularly, has accumulated a lot of power and wants to change the rules and the laws and the constitution in order to be able to be there longer. We have the fact that Poland is kind of mimicking what Hungary did. And then what we have in Europe also – and these are friends and allies – are other countries where there is an element of those that are taking advantage of the fear factor in some way, as I said.

For instance, in Germany, all of a sudden there’s a very far-right party that is now in the parliament. We just saw the elections in Italy, which are also parties that are on extremes are taking advantage of a particular situation. Then we have the issue in the Philippines, where Duterte thinks it’s terrific to kill drug dealers and talks about all the things that he has accomplished in that particular way. And then of course we’ve got what’s going on in Russia with Putin.

And then I have to say what I find – and this all has kind of happened since the book was written – is what in fact has happened in China with the changing of their constitution in order to make Xi Jinping be able to be a lifelong leader of a party. So there are a number of different places, but I think that the ones that really looking at what is happening in Europe and then of course in our own hemisphere, with Venezuela. That is another example of a country where initially Hugo Chavez came in as a result of the fact that the tired old men that were running the place before had not really had a relationship with the people. And then Chavez changes, and he becomes an authoritarian and, I would say, a fascist.

So, given all this variation, it becomes difficult to come up with an overarching explanation. Why is this happening in all these very different places? Add in Brexit, by the way, as Albright says later.

Albright says something generic about technology and divisions.

And then the other part of this, which I think is essential, is there is some leader at the top who takes advantage of these divisions and, in fact, exacerbates them so that the societies are more and more divided and wrangled and looking for scapegoats, which is where the immigrants come in. But mostly, this is something that’s created internally by massive changes in society and some of them due to technology.

I don’t know. I think those divisions are always there. In our case for instance…you could argue this wouldn’t have happened if The Apprentice had never happened, so how central are “the divisions” really?

GROSS: Let’s talk about what’s happening in the United States. I want to read a passage that you write in your book, “Fascism: A Warning,” a passage about President Trump. You write (reading) we’ve never had a president, at least in the modern era, whose statements and actions are so at odds with democratic ideals. Trump has spoken harshly about the institutions and principles that make up the foundation of open government.

In the process, he has systematically degraded political discourse in the U.S., shown an astonishing disregard for facts, libeled his predecessor, threatened to lock up political rivals, bullied members of his own administration, refer to mainstream journalists as enemies of the American people, spread falsehoods about the integrity of the U.S. electoral process, touted mindlessly nationalistic economic and trade policies and nurtured a paranoid bigotry toward the followers of one of the world’s foremost religions.

Do you think that President Trump has the instincts of an authoritarian leader?

ALBRIGHT: I think that he is the most anti-democratic president that we have had in modern history and that his instincts are really in that direction. And I think that that’s what worries [him]. And the passage that you read really does show that what he’s trying to do is undermine the press and has disdain for the judiciary and the electoral process and minorities. And I think that his instincts are not ones that are democratic. And he is interested basically in, I think, exacerbating those divisions that I talked about. And so I am very concerned. And basically, this is – you know, I’d written the book because I have picked up that phrase, see something, say something. And I am seeing some things that are the kinds of things that we’ve seen in other countries. And so I’m saying not only should we say something, but we have to do something about it.

I think she didn’t mean that “him” I put in brackets – it makes more sense as “me” or “us.”

Anyway…I would have put it a lot more firmly, but then I’m not a former government official. Of course Trump has the instincts of an authoritarian leader; there’s no question about it. He makes a display of them every day.

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 5 comments


Enough about you, let’s talk about me

Apr 4th, 2018 11:53 am | By

But to get the full flavor of Trump’s rudeness and mind-blindness you have to watch the video. He starts in a disciplined way, reading the speech with brief interjections of his own, and then after three minutes says thank you everybody, thank you (meaning, normally, “and good bye”)…and then lurching into a rant about China and “the trade deficit” and Mexico! and borders, with brief interjections where he looks directly at his guests and addresses them, as in “you wouldn’t understand this, you have great borders.” It’s obviously grotesquely inappropriate and protocol-violating – it’s a state visit occasion and he simply wrenches it into a diatribe on subjects that are of no interest to his state guests. This is before he even gets any prompts from the journalists, he simply plunges into a rant – starting with “I have to say this” – no, he really doesn’t.

It rivals his shove of Duško Marković in rudeness.

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog
Tags:


Lunchtime with Donny

Apr 4th, 2018 11:25 am | By

The Post gives us a bit of slapstick from yesterday, when Trump threw a lunch party for the presidents of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania and spent most of it telling reporters how grumpy he is about

a

long

list

of

things.

President Trump spent nearly three minutes at a luncheon this week welcoming the presidents of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania — whose difficult-to-pronounce names he never uttered publicly — and saying he should be given “credit” for pressuring countries like theirs to give more money to NATO.

As he concluded, White House staffers started to shepherd a small group of journalists out of the room — but Trump was far from done sharing his complaints. As reporters shouted out questions about the plunging stock market and the brewing trade war with China, Trump quickly engaged.

Chi-nah – it’s great, he loves it, he loves Xi, but.

Then he explained about the but.

Over the next 15 minutes, White House staffers would try at least a half dozen more times to move reporters out of the room, only to have the president stop them with another gripe or plea for credit. Sometimes, the lead television camera would inch backward toward the door, as Trump grew smaller on the screen, just to be pushed back into place as the president leaped at another chance to defend himself and his presidency.

“Wait, where are you going, I have more to say!”

Trump’s venting in recent days has seemed excessive, even for him. His grievances have come in torrents, littered with inaccuracies he continues to state as facts. The pattern continued Wednesday morning, as he tweeted about the trade fight with China and “very weak” border security laws.

Saying the same crude simplistic things he’s said before, over and over and over and over and over.

Totally normal, folks! No cause for alarm! Relax and enjoy the ride.

It started Saturday morning as he lashed out on Twitter at the “Fake Washington Post,” the “Failing New York Times” and the governor of California while being driven to one of his golf courses in Florida.

It continued Sunday – Mexico! Immigrants! Caravans! The border! Democrats! Liberals!

He kept going Monday morning, as he tweeted about the Postal Service rates paid by Amazon — which was founded by Jeffrey P. Bezos, who also owns The Washington Post — and about his own “Department of ‘Justice.’” Minutes later, at the White House Easter Egg Roll, Trump stood between his stoic wife and a bespectacled Easter Bunny — whose face was frozen in an open-mouthed stare — and bragged to a crowd of children about increasing military spending to $700 billion, one of the few bright points for him in the Republican spending bill.

We’ll always have the photos.

Chip Somodevilla/Bloomberg

The person in the bunny suit went very very still while Trump was telling the children about the military spending.

That night on Twitter, Trump called the country’s immigration laws “an Obama joke” and accused Democrats of needlessly delaying his nominations. The next morning, he falsely accused CNN of requiring its employees to proclaim they are “totally anti-Trump” and labeled CNN chief Jeff Zucker as “little” while misspelling his name. He bragged that his approval rating “is higher than Cheatin’ Obama at the same time” in his tenure; the White House has yet to explain what that nickname meant. He again lashed out at Amazon and accused federal postal workers of not having a clue.

Trump repeated many of those same points Tuesday afternoon as his guests waited for him to finish so they could eat lunch.

He mentioned the “caravan” 10 times, called NAFTA “a cash cow” for Mexico and took swipes at both Obama and “crooked Hillary Clinton.” He announced that he plans to send members of the military to the southern border, an apparent surprise to many Pentagon officials.

In other words he carried on like a lunatic.

He went on and on. He talked about the joys of “getting along with Russia” in front of the presidents of the three Baltic nations, to which Russia is a threat.

The president continued to refer to himself in the third person: “The three presidents just told me that NATO is taking in a tremendous amount of money because of Donald Trump. That would have never happened. So NATO is much stronger.”

Trump instructed one of his guests, Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaite, to praise him on camera, just as he said she had done privately in the Oval Office. She obliged, saying changes to NATO would not be possible without the United States and that its “vital voice and vital leadership” are important.

Trump pressed her: “And has Donald Trump made a difference on NATO?”

Those in the room laughed, as she confirmed he has made a difference. As she continued to speak, Trump cut her off.

“And, again, NATO has taken in billions of dollars more because of me, because I said, ‘You’re delinquent, you’re not paying,’ to many of the countries,” Trump said. “Is that right? Many of the countries weren’t paying.”

Oh, god. He might as well have worn the easter bunny costume.

For a fifth time, White House staffers tried to end this impromptu news conference, but then the president responded to a question about the Baltic states. They tried a sixth time, but the president could not resist another query: “Is it Amazon or The Washington Post, sir? What’s Amazon done that bugs you, sir?”

On the seventh try, reporters began to inch out of the room — and Trump responded to a final question about Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt, who is accused of bypassing the White House to give his aides massive raises, among other irregularities.

“I hope he’s going to be great,” Trump said, even though his aides have said Pruitt’s job is in jeopardy.

“Time to go, guys,” a White House staffer said, finally herding the reporters out of the room. Another coaxed: “Please move along. Please move along. Please move along now.”

“Thank you, everybody,” Trump shouted after them. “Thank you.”

Related image

 

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 2 comments
Tags:


Complaining at random

Apr 3rd, 2018 5:29 pm | By

A little vignette of what it’s like to play at Being the Government with Trump in the room – a slice from a longer piece about ogod ogod it’s chaos he’s so nuts he blows off everything anyone suggests to him ogod ogod.

And now, the little vignette:

Aides often become frustrated with the President’s short attention span. One official described Trump as frequently meandering from the topic at hand in meetings, particularly if he believes the positions being aired by his advisers differ from his own point of view. He’ll stall sessions with non-sequiturs, complaining at random about Amazon’s tax status or proclaiming that he’s only visited Russia once, for the Miss Universe pageant in 2013.

We all know that guy, right? It can be a relative, it can be an acquaintance, it can be a guy who corners you at a party – but we all know that guy. We know that guy who is numbingly voluble yet has nothing to say. We know that guy who obsesses weirdly over three or four outrages and never makes any progress.

It sounds Alzheimersy and it may be, but it may be just one of those empty-headed but nevertheless opinionated and talkative dudes who are always busy explaining something to somebody somewhere.

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 4 comments


The authority

Apr 3rd, 2018 4:27 pm | By

In Mueller news – he does have the authority to investigate the things he’s investigating.

Paul Manafort’s legal strategy for evading the charges filed against him by special counsel Robert Mueller was fairly straightforward. His attorneys argued, among other things, that many of the charges Manafort faces — which include fraud, tax evasion and conspiracy — are largely outside the scope of Mueller’s authority. After all, Mueller was appointed to investigate collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign during the 2016 race. What does Manafort’s allegedly having laundered money by buying real estate in Brooklyn have to do with any of that?

Trump fans have been saying that, noisily all along. Problem: it’s not true.

Late Monday night, Mueller’s team answered, in the form of a 53-page response to Manafort’s motion to dismiss the charges. Not only did Mueller explain why he had the authority to prosecute Manafort for alleged financial crimes, but, in a footnote, he explained why he also has the authority to investigate any attempts to obstruct his probe — including, presumably, by the president of the United States.

Short version: Rosenstein said so back in May when Mueller was appointed.

When he was appointed by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein in May (after Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s recusal from any investigations involving the 2016 presidential campaign), Rosenstein issued a public outline of the scope of Mueller’s authority. We’ve walked through this before; it includes three main things:

  • “Any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump.”
  • “Any matters that arose or may arise directly from the investigation.”
  • “Any other matters within the scope of 28 C.F.R. § 600.4(a).”

That section of the Code of Federal Regulations — 28 C.F.R. § 600.4(a) — allows Mueller to investigate “federal crimes committed in the course of, and with intent to interfere with, the Special Counsel’s investigation,” including lying to authorities.

Matters that may arise directly from the investigation. Manafort’s matter done ariz.

But the response memo also reveals that Rosenstein issued a confidential memo in August detailing areas that Mueller had the authority to investigate. Among those were specific allegations involving “crimes arising out of payments he received from the Ukrainian government before and during the tenure of President Viktor Yanukovych.” Those payments are at the heart of the indictments filed against Manafort. The allegation is that he laundered the money he received and didn’t properly report its receipt or his advocacy for Ukraine.

And there’s more. Mueller’s got permission piled on permission. Trump fans can’t scream it out of existence.

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 3 comments


Big things

Apr 3rd, 2018 11:06 am | By

Now he wants to get the military involved in his war on immigrants.

President Trump said on Tuesday that he planned to order the military to guard parts of the southern border until he can build a wall and tighten immigration restrictions, proposing a remarkable escalation of his efforts to crack down on migrants entering the country illegally.

Mr. Trump, who has been stewing publicly for days about what he characterizes as lax immigration laws and the potential for an influx of Central American migrants to stream into the United States, said he had been discussing with Jim Mattis, the secretary of defense, about resorting to military deployments.

“We have very bad laws for our border, and we are going to be doing some things — I’ve been speaking with General Mattis — we’re going to be doing things militarily,” Mr. Trump said at the White House, seated beside the defense secretary at a meeting with visiting leaders of Baltic nations. “Until we can have a wall and proper security, we’re going to be guarding our border with the military. That’s a big step. We really haven’t done that before, or certainly not very much before.”

We’re going to do some things. Big things. Big things we will do. That’s a big step for a big boy. We haven’t done that before. I know that because I just said it. Now let’s all go and militarily.

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 5 comments
Tags:


Patently

Apr 3rd, 2018 10:33 am | By

It’s entirely completely and utterly coincidental that Scott Pruitt got a sweet deal on a condo from a lobbyist and it just so happened that at the very same time the lobbyists client got a sweet deal from the EPA. There is NO CONNECTION WHATEVER and it’s very rude to say otherwise. People have such awful corrupt minds, you know? Seeing a connection where there is none.

The Environmental Protection Agency signed off last March on a Canadian energy company’s pipeline-expansion plan at the same time that the E.P.A. chief, Scott Pruitt, was renting a condominium linked to the energy company’s powerful Washington lobbying firm.

Both the E.P.A. and the lobbying firm dispute that there was any connection between the agency’s action and the condo rental, for which Mr. Pruitt was paying $50 a night.

“Any attempt to draw that link is patently false,” Liz Bowman, a spokeswoman for Mr. Pruitt, said in a written statement.

Patently, PATENTLY. It’s crystal clear and totally obvious that there is no link. How? It just is, god damn it!

The March 2017 action by the E.P.A. on the pipeline project — in the form of a letter telling the State Department that the E.P.A. had no serious environmental objections — meant that the project, an expansion of the Alberta Clipper line, had cleared a significant hurdle. The expansion, a project of Enbridge Inc., a Calgary-based energy company, would allow hundreds of thousands more barrels of oil a day to flow through this pipeline to the United States from Canadian tar sands.

The signoff by the E.P.A. came even though the agency, at the end of the Obama administration, had moved to fine Enbridge $61 million in connection with a 2010 pipeline episode that sent hundreds of thousands of gallons of crude oil into the Kalamazoo River in Michigan and other waterways. The fine was the second-largest in the history of the Clean Water Act, behind the penalty imposed after the Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Now to be fair, it is true, and even patently true, that it’s wholly consistent with Trumpist ideology that the Trump EPA would say “sure go right ahead with your expanded pipeline!” even though the company had already sent hundreds of thousands of gallons of crude oil into Michigan rivers and waterways. It is true that Trump and his gang make a point of not giving a flying fuck about things like polluted rivers when there’s a buck to be made. It is true that Pruitt’s EPA probably would have approved that project even if Pruitt had spent his DC nights on a bench in Lafayette Park. But the fact remains that there are rules against accepting favors from people who are in a position to need and request a favor in return.

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 2 comments
Tags: ,


It’s in the contract

Apr 3rd, 2018 10:14 am | By

Learn something new every day. Today-I-learned that Sinclair has employment contracts that say employees have to pay Sinclair MUCH MONEY if they quit or are fired. That sounds illegal to me, but apparently it’s not.

https://twitter.com/mattdpearce/status/980811757726810112

If you can’t read the screenshot – it basically just says “employees have to pay Sinclair MUCH MONEY if they quit or are fired” in more legalese and detail.

That helps explain why they can’t just say “No” when Sinclair tells them to read lying canned bullshit on camera.

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 7 comments


Expel and replace

Apr 3rd, 2018 9:35 am | By

Remember how last week, to the surprise of all, Trump joined the UK and other allies in expelling Russian diplomats?

He was just kidding. Russia can totally send new ones to replace the expellees.

Julian Borger is the Guardian’s world affairs editor.

Julian Borger in the Guardian yesterday:

The White House has confirmed that Donald Trump has raised with Vladimir Putin the possibility of a White House summit in the “not-too-distant” future.

The news of a White House invitation, first revealed by the Kremlin, came as the state department confirmed that Russia would be able to replace the diplomats the US expelled last week in response to the nerve agent attack in the UK. Both developments cast doubt on the effectiveness of what the US presented last week as a strong gesture of solidarity with the British government for the attack on the Russian ex-spy living in Salisbury, Sergei Skrypal and his daughter Yulia.

That’s a nice way of putting it. A blunt way of putting it would be that Trump was bullshitting us all last week.

A Putin aide, Yuri Ushakov, told Russian news agencies that Trump made the offer when he called Putin to congratulate him on his election win – a call that caused controversy because Trump’s critics argued that congratulations were inappropriate for elections that few saw as being free and fair, and because of Russian aggression in Ukraine and Syria as well as Moscow’s interference in western elections.

Oh that.

Asked about the invitation, the White House spokeswoman, Sarah Sanders, issued a statement saying: “As the President himself confirmed on 20 March, hours after his last call with President Putin, the two had discussed a bilateral meeting in the ‘not-too-distant future’ at a number of potential venues, including the White House. We have nothing further to add at this time.”

In other words: shut up, peasants. Question not our motives.

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 2 comments
Tags:


The gang on the annual picnic

Apr 3rd, 2018 9:21 am | By

Taslima asks a pointed question.

I have to say, I’m a little grossed out by all those shameless naked hands poking out. They’re obviously doing it on purpose – carefully pushing their naked nude unclad hands out front so that we can’t not see them. The sluts.

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 3 comments


A year and a half of nightmare

Apr 2nd, 2018 5:39 pm | By

Oh, damn, this is heartbreaking and infuriating. Jill McCabe on why she decided to accept the urging to run for state office, and how badly that turned out for them.

I am an emergency room pediatrician and an accidental politician — someone who never thought much about politics until I was recruited to run for state office after making a statement about the importance of expanding Medicaid. That decision — plus some twisted reporting and presidential tweets — ended up costing my husband, Andrew, his job and our family a significant portion of his pension my husband had worked hard for over 21 years of federal service. For the past year and a half of this nightmare, I have not been free to speak out about what happened. Now that Andrew has been fired, I am.

They met as sophomores at Duke. He’s always been a Republican; she’s voted for people in both parties.

As we have raised our children, I tried to vote more regularly and pay more attention to the issues that affect our community. And with my work in a hospital emergency room in Virginia, I saw the impact of how government decisions hurt my patients, especially when the state decided not to accept the federal government’s funding to expand Medicaid.

I was providing care in the most expensive setting — the emergency room — and only once a patient’s condition became more serious, because he or she had no other options. In addition, our state’s decision was increasing the cost of health care for everyone, ultimately raising prices, premiums and taxes, while thousands of patients suffered. The whole thing just made no sense.

In 2014 when some pols came through her hospital a reporter asked her how Medicaid expansion would affect her patients, and apparently as a result people later suggested she run for state Senate.

A few days later, I got another call: Clark Mercer, chief of staff to then-Lt. Gov. Ralph Northam, asking me to at least speak to Ralph, who is a pediatric neurologist. I was moved by Ralph’s story about how he had used his medical background to advocate for the needs of the children he serves.

So unlike the corruption and self-interest of some people I can think of.

I started to become more interested, thinking, “Here’s a way I can really try to help people on a bigger scale than what I do every day.” While I was considering the possibility, Andrew and I went to Richmond to meet with various politicians, including then-Gov. Terry McAuliffe. The subject of Hillary Clinton never came up — the story about her emails had not even broken when I was first approached by Northam. All the governor asked of me was that I support Medicaid expansion.

But she was concerned about her husband’s job, and told him she wouldn’t do it if he thought it would be any kind of problem.

(Do I think that’s fair, consistent with feminism, etc? Sure.)

He consulted with the ethics experts at the FBI and committed to follow their advice. We tried to go even beyond what the rules required — Andrew kept himself separate from my campaign. When the kids and I went door-knocking, he did not participate; he wouldn’t even drive us. He could have attended one of my fundraisers but never did. One day he put on a campaign T-shirt so we could take a family picture and share it with my proud parents. You may have seen it — it seems to have taken on a weird life of its own — but that was it, just a family picture at a swim meet.

Meanwhile, my campaign received funding from the state Democratic Party and the governor’s PAC — on par with what other candidates in competitive races on both sides of the aisle received. All those contributions were publicly reported. And of course, again, Clinton’s emails never came up — if they had, I would have found that alarming, immediately reported it and likely pulled out of the campaign. I know enough from being married to Andrew for 20 years to know what is right and what is wrong.

She lost the race. It was disappointing, but she was glad to get back to normal life.

But then in October 2016 a reporter called her asking about contributions to her campaign and whether there had been any influence on her husband’s decisions at the FBI.

This could not be further from the truth. In fact, it makes no sense. Andrew’s involvement in the Clinton investigation came not only after the contributions were made to my campaign but also after the race was over. Since that news report, there have been thousands more, repeating the false allegation that there was some connection between my campaign and my husband’s role at the FBI.

After the 2016 election, I thought for a while that it was all over — at least now that President-elect Trump won, he would stop coming after us. How naive that was. After then-FBI Director James B. Comey was fired, we knew that Andrew could be the next target of the president’s wrath.

And then sure enough Trump started tweeting his lies about both of them.

To have my personal reputation and integrity and those of my family attacked this way is beyond horrible. It feels awful every day. It keeps me up nights. I made the decision to run for office because I was trying to help people. Instead, it turned into something that was used to attack our family, my husband’s career and the entire FBI.

Nothing can prepare you for what happens when your life is turned upside down by current events. Nothing prepares you for conversations you have to have with your teenage children. Nothing prepares you for the news crews staking out your house, your back yard, your place of business. Nothing prepares you for the fear you feel every time you receive a package from a stranger.

I have spent countless hours trying to understand how the president and so many others can share such destructive lies about me. Ultimately I believe it somehow never occurred to them that I could be a serious, independent-minded physician who wanted to run for office for legitimate reasons. They rapidly jumped to the conclusion that I must be corrupt, as part of what I believe to be an effort to vilify us to suit their needs.

I don’t think it’s as respectable as that. I think it’s simply that Trump wanted to harm Andrew McCabe in any way he could, and that’s the way he came up with. He never cared about whether it was true or not; he never does. He just got pissed off, and acted accordingly. That’s what he is.

Throughout this experience, my work has been a sanctuary. I walk into the hospital, and everybody there knows me as a professional. The patients know me as a doctor and not a news story. It is not easy, but I have to put all of our challenges aside to focus on the patients and families I treat.

…

While I have no intention of running for office again, I believe in what my campaign stood for, and I still hope we can see our way to Medicaid expansion in Virginia. The patients who inspired me to run continue to come to the ER every day, and they need our help.

That’s the woman Donald Trump called a “loser” in a phone call to Andrew McCabe.

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 6 comments
Tags: ,


Up steps the latest victim

Apr 2nd, 2018 3:37 pm | By

Suzanne Moore has a lot of sympathy for Niall Ferguson and other endangered guys like him.

Up steps the latest victim, poor Niall Ferguson, author, history professor and lover of empire, who wrote in the Sunday Times that he had to endure a “disproportionately vitriolic response” for organising a conference that featured only white male historians. How he has suffered, I can only imagine.

Jordan Peterson, another minor academic, became major simply by outlining how wrong we are to talk of the various ways in which western culture has been deemed oppressive to women. Excuse me, but didn’t Camille Paglia do that 20 years ago?

To such men, any notion of inclusiveness, or of the dread “diversity”, becomes a threat. The very presence of women, except as tokens, is difficult and somehow invasive for such men. Never mind the debate over trans women in women-only spaces, the issue here is really one of any women at all in any space.

The brand of truth-telling these battle-scarred men are revered for situates men as both always naturally in control but as now having to fight for their position.

Or not so much having to fight for their position as having to fight not to hear it. They don’t want to hear it; they’re sick of it; they wish we would shut up already. They don’t hate women, ok? They like women just fine. They try to include some women, when they remember, and it always turns out the women have to polish the baby that day or something so they say no so what are the poor men supposed to do? Think of even more women to invite? That would be a superhuman effort, and no one can expect that – so enough already. We know; everybody knows; we do our best, when we think of it; now stop pointing out how absent-mindedly sexist we still are and let us get on with the conversation we’re having with these nice gentlemen here.

The call to victimhood of this “endangered” species is heard everywhere, from Nigel Farage to John Humphrys to Jeremy Clarkson to Piers Morgan. These men who dare to speak out are everywhere in public life, at the top of every organisation, having meetings about how to employ more women. They are forced into this by Europe, modernity or some godawful HR directive. They like to say they care about FGM or the massacre of the Rohingya, but see complaints about equal access or equal pay as white noise.

Or not so much white noise as excruciatingly irritating high-pitched complaining by ungrateful bitches who weren’t on the list of women they remembered to ask.

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 11 comments