Pale

Apr 2nd, 2018 11:23 am | By

Class photo time again: Trump with the spring class of White House interns:

That’s nearly 100 people; I think I found four who are not white.

Also, how weird is it that all the women have the Trump-women look? The long hair worn down over the shoulders in front in the manner of Princess Ivanka – every single female person in the photo is wearing her hair that way. As a female person who had long hair in her youth I can tell you that’s not a natural or default way to wear long hair; the natural thing is to pull it all back out of the way and just leave it there. It’s weird to drape some of it over your front as if it were fabric. But then long hair gets to be a nuisance in the end, just another way “feminine” presentation is designed to hobble women via inconvenience.

Anyway. Classy diversity there, Trumpies.

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 16 comments


A remarkably dim view of Trump’s intellect

Apr 2nd, 2018 10:53 am | By

Aaron Blake at the Post points out the undeniable fact that people who work for Trump know full well how thick he is.

Lost in the debate over whether President Trump should talk to Robert Mueller is this: The arguments against him doing it often betray a remarkably dim view of Trump’s intellect.

They do, of course. How could they not? Trump makes it blindingly obvious every time he opens his mouth or punches the buttons on his phone that he has no filter, aka is too stupid and heedless to discipline himself even in a situation of legal peril. That’s a remarkable fact, for sure, and with any luck it will soon cause him to perjure himself in his chat with Mueller.

Chris Christie on the TV News made it a matter of marketing skills versus talking to prosecutors skills.

He should never walk into that room with Robert Mueller. Because in the end, one of the things that makes the president who he is, is that he’s a salesman. And salesmen, at times, tend to be hyperbolic. Right, and this president certainly has tended to do that.

That’s okay when you’re on the campaign hustle. That’s okay when you’re working on Congress. It is not okay when you’re sitting talking to federal agents because, you know, 18 USC 1001 is false statements to federal agents. That’s a crime. That can send you to jail.

What’s left implicit is that Trump is too stupid to code-switch from real estate hack to president being questioned about illegal actions.

Christie on Sunday basically came out and said what everyone is saying behind closed doors. In the debate over whether Trump is a habitual fabulist or just a strategic one, Christie seems to be coming down on the side of the former. He seems to confirm that Trump doesn’t really know what the truth is.

Which is odd when you remember how readily and often he accuses other people of lying.

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Let the eggs roll where they will

Apr 2nd, 2018 9:46 am | By

What happens when you let your attention wander for a minute and you elect a toddler to be chief executive of a country with a huge nuclear arsenal:

When Donald Trump was elected president, it quickly became obvious that the traditional national-security briefing a person in his position receives daily would be well beyond his zone of proximal development. The briefings were slimmed down in length, chopped up into easy-to-digest bullet points, and decorated with lots of graphs and pictures. Alas, the Washington Post reports, even the kiddie version of the presidential brief has proven too challenging. Now, Trump gets his briefing verbally.

Michael Wolf is very clear on this in Fire and Fury: Trump won’t read and he won’t listen either.

Trump, the Post reports, “has opted to rely on an oral briefing of select intelligence issues” because reading the brief — which every president has been able to do since its existence began — “is not Trump’s preferred ‘style of learning,’ according to a person with knowledge of the situation.”

Also, Trump does not receive his verbal briefing daily, but instead “about every two to three days on average in recent months, typically around 11 a.m.” That’s when “executive time” ends and Trump has to turn off Fox News to listen to officials for a while, before he gets more screen time later in the day.

So every 3 days or so someone tries to tell Trump a few things, but it’s futile because Trump doesn’t listen. He talks about whatever pops into his head, while the briefers try to use the few minutes left to tell him things, but he doesn’t listen.

Today’s burst of tweets is exceptionally scattershot-plus-obsessive:

An hour later:

Another hour later:

An hour later again:

Scare quotes on the Department of Justice, that’s part of the executive branch, and part of his cabinet.

Then a couple of hours after all that:

Have a productive week.

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Leo Igwe on humanism for Africa

Apr 1st, 2018 5:29 pm | By

Here is Leo Igwe’s talk at a TED conference.

As a humanist, Leo Igwe doesn’t believe in divine intervention — but he does believe in the power of human beings to alleviate suffering, cure disease, preserve the planet and turn situations of poverty into prosperity. In this bold talk, Igwe shares how humanism can free Africans from damaging superstitions and give them the power to rebuild the continent.

This talk was presented at an official TED conference, and was featured by our editors on the home page.

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The oppression of the white man

Apr 1st, 2018 5:17 pm | By

Niall Ferguson feels put upon.

First sentence of his Times (the London one) piece explaining why he feels put upon:

It is not very fashionable to be a man these days, especially a white one.

Really? In what sense? Have men lost all their power, their privilege, their advantage over women?

Of fucking course not. What he means is that many of us have noticed the advantage and are trying to make things less unbalanced in the direction of always calling a man. He feels aggrieved because we’re no longer just taking it for granted that men should dominate everything and women should be an afterthought at best.

Last month I organised a small, invitation-only conference of historians who I knew shared my interest in trying to apply historical knowledge to contemporary policy problems. Five of the people I invited to give papers were women, but none was able to attend. I should have tried harder to find other female speakers, no doubt. But my failure to do so elicited a disproportionately vitriolic response.

Who gets to decide what is “proportionate” in these situations? Eh? Who gets to decide how annoyed we’re allowed to be when Michael Shermer says “it’s more of a guy thing” or Sam Harris talks about “that estrogen vibe” or conference after conference after conference somehow forgets to invite any women, or remembers to invite a couple but then is left in a condition of helpless bewilderment when those two say no, and can’t manage to figure out how to find more women to invite until some say yes? Who? Niall Ferguson? Why should he get to decide? He’s not a member of the class that’s been forgotten all this time, so why is it up to him to say how much and how crossly we can talk about it?

Under a headline that included the words “Too white and too male”, The New York Times published photographs of all the speakers as if to shame them for having participated. Around a dozen academics took to social media to call the conference a “StanfordSausageFest”.

Well obviously much more shocking and outrageous than the mere fact that women and non-white people were shut out of his conference. Oh no, the Times ran a story about it!

Now let’s be clear. As I recently and rather vehemently explained to the novelist Will Self, I was raised to believe in the equal rights of all people, regardless of sex, race, creed or any other difference. That the human past was characterised by discrimination of many kinds is not news to me. But does it really constitute progress if the proponents of diversity resort to the behaviour that was previously the preserve of sexists and racists? Publishing the names and mugshots of conference speakers is the kind of thing anti-semites once did to condemn the “over-representation” of Jewish people in academia. Terms such as “SausageFest” belong not in civil academic discourse but in the pages of male-chauvinist comics such as Viz.

Oh well if he vehemently explained it to the novelist Will Self, there’s no more to be said, is there. He knows. We don’t need to tell him; he’s aware. He’s not aware of how ludicrous he sounds pretending to think publishing photos of the invited men in the Times is akin to what anti-semites used to do, but he totally is aware the human past was characterised by discrimination of many kinds. Isn’t that enough?!! What kind of fanatic would expect him to act on the awareness? It’s political correctness run mad.

What we see here is the sexism of the anti-sexists; the racism of the anti-racists.

Oh, clever, no one has ever said that before!

There’s more, but it’s no better than the rest.

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Bots stand with Laura

Apr 1st, 2018 4:41 pm | By

Russian bots are springing to the defense of Fox bully Laura Ingraham, according to Business Insider.

As companies yank their ads from Fox News commentator Laura Ingraham’s show in droves, she continues to draw support from one key Twitter demographic: Russian bots.

The advertiser exodus comes after Ingraham insulted Parkland shooting survivor David Hogg’s grades on Twitter. The Fox News host announced Saturday that she would be taking a “pre-planned vacation” amid the controversy.

“Controversy” is too dignified for it. She’s a grown-ass adult who didn’t just see a bunch of her friends shot to death and felt entitled to bully a teenager who did. That’s not a controversy, it’s just hateful mindless shitty bullying in the style of Donald Trump.

On Saturday evening, #istandwithlaura was the top trending hashtag among Twitter accounts linked to Russian influence operations, according to Hamilton 68, a website launched last year that tracks Russian propaganda campaigns in near-real time.

Per the site’s data, the frequency with which the accounts tweeted the hashtag jumped by 2800% on Friday and Saturday.

“This is why we can’t have nice things” is not a joke any more. It’s the literal flat-footed truth.

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Will you look at that

Apr 1st, 2018 4:13 pm | By

Photo of the day. Or week, or year.

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Deep broadcast

Apr 1st, 2018 10:56 am | By

Another part of the takeover:

Seattle-based ABC affiliate KOMO-TV says its owner, the conservative-leaning Sinclair Broadcast Group, is forcing its reporters to air pre-scripted segments about fake news media, in an attempt to undermine non-Sinclair stations.

Sinclair has long produced “must-run” segments for its stations, dispersing them to its various subsidiaries and requiring the local stations to run controversial, typically conservative commentary promos alongside their regular news coverage. However, in recent weeks, it’s begun turning its sights on the competition, throwing in mentions of “fake news,” among other things.

In other words it’s helping Trump’s authoritarian attacks on independent journalism.

“The promos, which began airing on the station last week, are part of a Sinclair campaign that forces local anchors to read Sinclair-written scripts warning of the dangers of ‘one-sided news stories plaguing our country,’” the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported on Thursday.

The Post-Intelligencer published one of the scripts this week; in it, the authors lament the “trend of irresponsible, one sided news stories” and the “sharing of biased and false news,” referencing President Trump’s preferred term for the press, “fake news.”

The script begins:

Hi, I’m(A) ____________, and I’m (B) _________________…

(B) Our greatest responsibility is to serve our Northwest communities. We are extremely proud of the quality, balanced journalism that KOMO News produces.

(A) But we’re concerned about the troubling trend of irresponsible, one sided news stories plaguing our country. The sharing of biased and false news has become all too common on social media.

(B) More alarming, some media outlets publish these same fake stories… stories that just aren’t true, without checking facts first.

(A) Unfortunately, some members of the media use their platforms to push their own personal bias and agenda to control ‘exactly what people think’…This is extremely dangerous to a democracy.

Which is kind of funny, given that this is a script written by the corporation, not by journalists. The script itself is fake news, because it puts words in the mouths of the unwilling presenters.

According to the Post-Intelligencer, employees at Sinclair-owned stations were upset about the script.

“They’re certainly not happy about it. It’s certainly a forced thing,” one KOMO employee told the outlet.

So, that’s fake right there. It’s a forced thing, so what they’re saying, using “we” and “our,” is fake.

Sinclair regularly runs disinformation segments favorable to President Trump: one of its staples is a recurring pre-taped segment featuring Sinclair’s chief political analyst, Russian-born former Trump adviser Boris Epshteyn. As ThinkProgress previously reported, those segments frequently include misleading talking points and misinformation from the Trump administration, packaged as actual political analysis and news coverage.

Another previously recurring segment, “Behind the Headlines” with Mark Hyman, Sinclair’s vice president for corporate relations, frequently parroted administration talking points on controversial subjects like health care, immigration, free speech, and extremism, functioning as right-wing and white nationalist propaganda.

More recently, Sinclair pushed a must-run segment featuring former Trump adviser Sebastian Gorka complaining about the existence of the so-called “Deep State,” and unelected group of government officials who are supposedly manipulating policy and controlling the public narrative. The segment was reportedly produced by Sinclair national correspondent Kristine Frazao, who previously worked at Russian state-run media outlet RT.

Uh…that’s astounding.

In December, the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, admitted that the Trump campaign had struck a deal with Sinclair during the 2016 election in order to obtain more favorable coverage. Scott Livingston, Sinclair’s vice president of news, later told Politico that the company had offered a similar deal to Trump’s rival, Hillary Clinton, but said that Clinton declined.

What was that in the forced script again?

(A) Unfortunately, some members of the media use their platforms to push their own personal bias and agenda to control ‘exactly what people think’…This is extremely dangerous to a democracy.

Like for instance striking “deals” with presidential candidates to offer more favorable coverage.

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Far-reaching implications

Apr 1st, 2018 10:24 am | By

Jennifer Rubin at the Post on the emoluments case ruling that granted standing:

In a decision with far-reaching implications for President Trump, a federal court ruled this week that a lawsuit could go forward claiming he unconstitutionally received foreign emoluments — that is, monies from foreign governments explicitly prohibited by the Constitution — from his hotel in Washington. The Associated Press reported:

A federal judge Wednesday allowed Maryland and the District of Columbia to proceed with their lawsuit accusing President Donald Trump of accepting unconstitutional gifts from foreign interests, but limited the case to the president’s involvement with the Trump International Hotel in Washington.

There are other hurdles but that was the biggest one.

If Maryland and the District are successful, Trump may be ordered to do something he has so far avoided and which spineless Republicans have refused to demand — namely, disclose what his businesses receive from foreign governments, and either permanently jettison his ties to those operations or reject payments and other things of value from foreign governments (e.g. trademarks in China).

But that would be treating him like everyone else, and he won’t stand for it. He’ll either quit or spontaneously combust.

Rubin talked to Norm Eisen and Laurence Tribe about the case. RT=Rubin (her blog/column is Right Turn).

RT: Why did this case make it past the first hurdle and not the New York case? Will the New York case be appealed?

TRIBE: We are appealing the decision in the Southern District of New York dismissing our suit there. One reason for the different results is that Judge Messitte considered but rejected as wrong some of the grounds Judge Daniels erroneously gave for dismissing the SDNY case. In particular, Judge Messitte correctly rejected Judge Daniels’s conclusion that because Trump’s patrons chose to stay at his hotel, there was nothing a court could do to redress the injuries caused by the emoluments violations; he also rejected Judge Daniels’s conclusion that only Congress, and not the courts, could enforce the foreign emoluments clause. Judge Messitte’s rejection of these key conclusions from Judge Daniels suggests that the appeals court in New York could similarly reject those arguments. Further, the cases involve different plaintiffs, and as Judge Messitte recognized, the District of Columbia and the state of Maryland are not typical litigants: They are afforded “special solicitude.” That means a lower hurdle to jump to prove standing.

RT: What is the significance of suing in Trump’s personal capacity?

EISEN: At oral argument, Judge Messitte recognized the emoluments clauses present a unique question among constitutional provisions. Unlike nearly all other provisions which involve the exercise of government authority, the emoluments clauses govern the public and private behavior of officers as an obligation of their office. Adding a claim against the president in his personal capacity helps ensure that the court will be able to reach the full scope of the his transgressions and maximizes the chance of success as the case proceeds.

Plus, also, besides, it’s Trump wot done it. It’s personal, man. (Not a legal opinion, just mouthing off.)

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Self-defining

Apr 1st, 2018 9:52 am | By

Benjamin Butterworth at Pink News yesterday:

Labour’s shadow equalities minister hosted a string of anti-trans activists in parliament for an official meeting on ‘trans inclusion’, PinkNews has learned.

Dawn Butler, Labour’s lead MP on LGBT rights, met with activists opposed to transgender women being included on all women shortlists in an official capacity on Wednesday.

…

A spokesperson for the Labour Party told PinkNews: “All women shortlists are and always have been open to all women, which of course includes trans women.

…

“The Labour Party recognises the vital importance of self-declaration for the Trans community, which is why we are calling on the Government to reform the Gender Recognition Act and the Equality Act 2010 to change the protected characteristic of ‘gender reassignment’ to ‘gender identity’ to support self-declaration.”

…

Labour is currently facing legal action from activists opposed to transgender women being allowed to participate in women’s reserved spaces.

After a surge in anti-trans rhetoric, a fringe group of women’s rights campaigners within the party led calls for transgender women to be banned from standing on women-only shortlists for parliament, which are used in a bid to boost the number of female MPs.

There has never been an openly trans MP, but vocal activists complain that women they refer to as “male-bodied transgenders” are taking away women’s places in politics.

A leaked copy of Labour’s proposed policy on trans women, expected to be adopted in May, explicitly affirms that “All Women Shortlists and women’s reserved places are open to self-defining women”.

Now we go back 6 years to March 2012.

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He comes from Serious Criminal Law Land

Mar 31st, 2018 4:23 pm | By

Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern on what Trump’s inability to get good lawyers to work for him has revealed about the US legal system.

The ongoing and increasingly worrying problem for Trump is that he has lived for so long in the world of rich-man business-mogul law that his conception of lawyers and lawyering is badly skewed. He genuinely believes that attorneys like Michael Cohen—who is now embroiled in a wrestling match with a pugnacious Stormy Daniels and her lawyer—and Marc Kasowitz—who has represented Trump in litigation ranging from his divorce and bankruptcy proceedings to the Trump University lawsuit—can handle any type of legal proceeding…What’s really new here isn’t so much that no serious lawyer wants to work for Donald Trump; we’ve known that for more than a year. The revelation is that corporate America is built less on a formal system of laws and rules and norms than on an elaborate and expensive set of mechanisms for getting around that formal system.

In New York Real Estate Land, Multiple Divorce Land, and Repeated Bankruptcy Land, one can string together a lifetime’s worth of mandatory arbitration clauses, nondisclosure agreements, prenups, and frivolous lawsuits. The only legal system Trump can comprehend—and the only legal system the Cohens and the Kasowitzes are good at navigating—is one that consists entirely of loopholes and workarounds. That system, which runs on threats and intimidation and huge sums of cash, has made a lot of men who look and sound like Donald Trump obscenely wealthy. It is, like it or lump it, the American way.

It’s lump it, then, because I sure as hell don’t like it.

Robert Mueller doesn’t practice rich white guy law, and he didn’t cut his teeth in Alito Land. He comes from Serious Criminal Law Land, which adheres to precedents and principles over and above what powerful men can contract around. Mueller, James Comey, Rod Rosenstein, Andrew McCabe, and the myriad lawyers who have said “no” to Donald Trump are, on balance, Republicans and small-c conservatives. But they don’t believe the rule of law exists to enrich their bosses, and they don’t believe you can buy or bully your way out of that fact.

Trump doesn’t know how to deal with Serious Criminal Law Land. He can’t keep anybody from that world on his payroll, and nobody from that world is eager to tag in now. That’s why he’s kept his “fixer”—Michael Cohen—and glommed onto the likes of Jay Sekulow.

Why wouldn’t serious criminal lawyers rush to take a seat at Trump’s counsel table? One after the other has said that the notion of representing a man who doesn’t take legal advice, insists he is his own master legal tactician, and is likely to fire you at 5 a.m. in a tweet is not a smart career move. Ted Boutrous, a prominent lawyer at Ted Olson’s firm of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, told CNN that the president is a “notoriously difficult client who disregards the advice of his lawyers and asks them to engage in questionable activities.” Lawyers, especially inside-the-Beltway lawyers, trade in decadeslong relationships that put courts and law before any one case. The prospect of blowing up a lifetime of professional goodwill for a three-week stint working for a ticking time bomb of potential liability probably isn’t an attractive prospect.

The question isn’t why wouldn’t they but why would they.

Bob Bauer, who served as White House counsel in the Obama era, told us that lawyers “are understandably wary of Trump as a client: he has unreasonable expectations (Fire Mueller! Tell Sessions to ignore the recusal rules!), he abuses them verbally, interviews their replacements behind their backs, and to top it off, the kind of lawyer he likes should be prepared to advance personal funds and tell tall tales to cover up extramarital trysts.” Bauer added that, on the pro side, “it is probably a memorable professional experience.” Also, “they might even get the chance to testify before a grand jury.”

Perhaps that’s the simplest answer to the mystery of Trump’s missing lawyers. Work for the president, and you might soon wind up in front of a grand jury getting grilled by Bob Mueller. That might make for exceptional reality television. It doesn’t look so good on a résumé.

Not worth it for only one scoop of ice cream.

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Fewer than 100 returned

Mar 31st, 2018 12:35 pm | By

The Guardian reported on the march in memory of Mireille Knoll on Wednesday.

Silent marches are taking place in Paris and other large French cities in memory of an 85-year-old woman who survived the Holocaust but was stabbed to death last week, in what is being investigated as an antisemitic attack.

A huge crowd walks during a silent march in Paris, France, in commemoration of 85-year-old Jewish woman Mireille Knoll

Photograph: Yoan Valat/EPA

After killing Mireille Knoll, her attackers set her local authority flat alight in a poor area of the French capital. Two men, aged 22 and 29 – one of them a neighbour known to the victim since he was a child, have been arrested and placed under formal investigation.

Family members and friends gather at the funeral of Mireille Knoll, who was stabbed to death in her home

Photograph: Christophe Ena/AP

Other marches were due to be held in the French cities of Lyon, Marseille and Strasbourg.

Knoll fled occupied Paris at the age of nine, narrowly escaping the infamous Vel d’Hiv roundup of Jewish families by French police on behalf of the Nazis. Around 13,000 people, including more than 4,000 children, were herded into the Vel d’Hiv velodrome in Drancy, a northeastern suburb of the French capital, in 1942. They were then deported to Auschwitz – fewer than 100 returned.

After travelling to southern Europe and then Canada, Knoll returned to Paris. Even after her grandchildren moved to Israel, she remained.

Mirellie Knoll

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Not great

Mar 31st, 2018 12:24 pm | By

More on the murder of Mireille Knoll:

An 85-year-old woman who as a child narrowly escaped France’s most notorious wartime roundup of Jews has been murdered in Paris, and the authorities are calling it a hate crime.

The body of the woman, Mireille Knoll, was found on Friday in her apartment in the city’s working-class 11th Arrondissement.

Thomas Samson/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

That’s the building – an ordinary council block.

Ms. Knoll was a child in Paris when, in the summer of 1942, the French police, cooperating with the Germans, rounded up thousands of the city’s Jews, stuffing them into a cycling stadium, the Vélodrome d’Hiver. Virtually all were subsequently murdered at Auschwitz.

Ms. Knoll’s mother, summoned to the stadium like other Parisian Jews, was able to escape at the last minute with her daughter because she had a Brazilian passport, said Meyer Habib, a member of Parliament who has spoken with one of Ms. Knoll’s sons.

…

A number of anti-Semitic episodes have shaken France, including the murder last year of Sarah Halimi, an elderly Jewish woman, by a man of Malian origin who shouted, “God is great” before throwing her out a window.

If God were really great, God wouldn’t inspire people to murder elderly women while shouting about how great God is. The God in that sentence is evil.

Other anti-Semitic crimes that have rattled France include the 2015 attack on a kosher supermarket in Paris by Amedy Coulibaly, a heavily armed Frenchman, who killed four people, and the 2012 assault on a Jewish school in Toulouse by Mohammed Merah, who killed three children and a teacher after killing three soldiers.

Coulibaly was working with the Kouachi brothers, who slaughtered 12 people in and near the offices of Charlie Hebdo. There’s video of one of them shouting “Allahu akbar” in the street shortly before killing a cop…who happened to be Muslim.

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Mireille Knoll

Mar 31st, 2018 12:06 pm | By

A horror in Paris:

Every morning, in a part of the 11th Arrondissement of Paris that has not yet gentrified, Mireille Knoll would sit at home watching television as she waited for her personal care aide.

The aide, Leila Dessante, would clean the small second-floor apartment, cook lunch and keep company with Ms. Knoll, a 85-year-old grandmother and Holocaust survivor. “She would take my face in between her hands and always ask, ‘How are you doing today, sweetheart?’” Ms. Dessante recalled on Wednesday.

Ms. Knoll’s gentle routine was brutally interrupted last week when she was killed in her apartment. The attack shocked her neighbors, France’s Jewish community and the country as a whole. Two suspects, men in their 20s, have been placed under formal investigation on charges of murder with an anti-Semitic motive.

Édouard Philippe, the prime minister, cited a strain of anti-Semitism in France that shape-shifts but doesn’t go away. (France is not alone in that.)

“She survived the Holocaust in the last century, I think she had a happy life, and yet she was killed at home in 2018, frail, and defenseless,” Ms. Dessante said as she was leaving Ms. Knoll’s apartment building after laying flowers on the doorstep. “What world are we living in?”

A bad one. Not as bad as during the Holocaust, but still bad; one in which hatred and rage have become a popular sport.

Thousands gathered in Paris on Wednesday to honor Ms. Knoll, marching from the Place de la Nation, on the eastern side of the capital, to her apartment building, a nondescript housing block where mourners had placed candles and flowers on the railings.

Many marched in silence, waving French flags or wearing badges with a picture of Ms. Knoll. Samuel Cohen, 74, who was at the march with his wife, Léa, 70, was one of several who carried a sign that read, “In France, we kill grandmothers because they’re Jewish.”

…

Ms. Knoll was stabbed 11 times, and her body was found partly burned after her attackers tried to set her apartment on fire. One suspect was a neighbor who had often been hosted by Ms. Knoll, while the other was a homeless friend of his.

An official close to the investigation, who was not authorized to speak publicly about the case, said that the friend had told investigators that he had heard Ms. Knoll’s neighbor say “God is great” in Arabic during the killing. But the official said the two suspects had given conflicting statements to the police.

Damn it to hell. She must have been terrified.

A picture of Ms. Knoll on a fence outside her building.

Lionel Bonaventure/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The authorities say it may have started as a robbery.

But they have also characterized the attack as a worrying sign of anti-Semitism in France, which has been shaken by several recent episodes, including the killing last year of another elderly Jewish woman, Sarah Halimi, which the authorities were much slower to characterize as anti-Semitic.

Gérard Collomb, the interior minister, said on Tuesday that one of the suspects in Ms. Knoll’s murder had told the other, “She is a Jew, she must have money.”

…

Her son Daniel was not immediately reachable on Wednesday, but in interviews with the French news media he described his mother, who had Parkinson’s disease, as a woman of limited means and boundless generosity.

“Everybody came to see her,” Mr. Knoll told Europe 1 radio. ”If she could have, she would have welcomed the entire world into her home.”

…

President Emmanuel Macron referred to Ms. Knoll’s killing at a ceremony on Wednesday morning that paid tribute to Lt. Col. Arnaud Beltrame and to the other victims of a terrorist attack in southern France last week.

France “is confronted today with a barbaric obscurantism, with the only goal of eliminating our liberties and our solidarities,” Mr. Macron said, drawing a parallel between the “terrorist in Trèbes” and Ms. Knoll’s killer, “who assassinated an innocent and vulnerable woman because she was Jewish.”

Mr. Macron attended Ms. Knoll’s funeral later on Wednesday, according to the Élysée Palace.

In an interview, Meyer Habib, a Franco-Israeli lawmaker in the National Assembly, said that “in the same day, I have a ceremony for a hero who gave his life to save a hostage, then I attend the funeral of an 85-year-old lady who was killed because she was a Jew, and then I’m going to honor her memory at a march.”

“That’s my schedule today, and I don’t find it normal,” he said.

Non, ce n’est pas normal.

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Trump roughing up public confidence

Mar 31st, 2018 9:57 am | By

The Post, with offended dignity and dignified offense, corrects Trump’s flailing claims about Amazon and the Post and the Post Office.

The president also incorrectly conflated Amazon with The Post and made clear that his attacks on the retailer were inspired by his disdain for the newspaper’s coverage. He labeled the newspaper “the Fake Washington Post” and demanded it register as a lobbyist for Amazon. The Post operates independently of Amazon, though the news organization is personally owned by Jeffrey P. Bezos, the founder and chief executive of Amazon.

So there, Mister President, Sir.

It got in an excellent covert dig though.

In Trump’s first of two Amazon tweets, sent at 8:45 a.m., he wrote: “While we are on the subject, it is reported that the U.S. Post Office will lose $1.50 on average for each package it delivers for Amazon. That amounts to Billions of Dollars. The Failing N.Y. Times reports that ‘the size of the company’s lobbying staff has ballooned,’ and that…”

The president continued with a second tweet sent seven minutes later: “…does not include the Fake Washington Post, which is used as a ‘lobbyist’ and should so REGISTER. If the P.O. ‘increased its parcel rates, Amazon’s shipping costs would rise by $2.6 Billion.’ This Post Office scam must stop. Amazon must pay real costs (and taxes) now!”

Geddit? It took him seven minutes to compose that one tweet. Seven minutes.

Trump is typically motivated to lash out at Amazon because of The Post’s coverage of him, officials have said. One person who has discussed the matter repeatedly with the president explained that a negative story in The Post is almost always the catalyst for one of his Amazon rants.

Or to put it less indirectly, he’s abusing his power.

The Post on Friday afternoon published online an exhaustive account of the Trump Organization’s finances “under unprecedented assault” because of three different legal inquiries: Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s Russia investigation; the $130,000 payment to secure the silence of adult-film actress Stormy Daniels after her alleged sexual encounter with Trump; and lawsuits alleging that Trump is improperly accepting gifts, or “emoluments,” from foreign or state governments through his businesses.

Oh I missed that one; will have to read it.

Beyond Trump’s use of his bully pulpit to single out Amazon, the White House has indicated that there are no plans to take action against the behemoth.

Lindsay Walters, a White House spokeswoman, told reporters traveling aboard Air Force One on Thursday, “The president has expressed his concerns with Amazon. We have no actions at this time.”

But White House officials have struggled to back up Trump’s theories about the retailer. Asked why Trump believes Amazon is hurting the Postal Service when experts say it ships so many packages it helps keep the Postal Service in business, Walters offered no explanation.

Still, Trump’s attacks, irrespective of their factual accuracy, could impact damage public confidence in the company. After Axios reported Wednesday that Trump was “obsessed” with Amazon, shares fell more than 4 percent. They continued their tumble on Thursday, when Trump tweeted, falling more than 3.8 percent in morning trading.

Textbook abuse of power.

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Remaining steadfast

Mar 30th, 2018 4:07 pm | By

Trump…

takes deep breath

Trump proclaims April as National Sexual Assault Awareness and Prevention Month.

During National Sexual Assault Awareness and Prevention Month, we remain steadfast in our efforts to stop crimes of sexual violence, provide care for victims, enforce the law, prosecute offenders, and raise awareness about the many forms of sexual assault. We must continue our work to eliminate sexual assault from our society and promote safe relationships, homes, and communities.

Unless the sexual assaulter is Donald Trump. Then we sue the accusers.

Sexual assault crimes remain tragically common in our society, and offenders too often evade accountability. These heinous crimes are committed indiscriminately: in intimate relationships, in public spaces, and in the workplace.

Donald Trump should know; he’s committed them in all three of those environments…and evaded accountability.

We must respond to sexual assault by identifying and holding perpetrators accountable. Too often, however, the victims of assault remain silent. They may fear retribution from their offender, lack faith in the justice system, or have difficulty confronting the pain associated with the traumatic experience. My Administration is committed to raising awareness about sexual assault and to empowering victims to identify perpetrators so that they can be held accountable. We must make it as easy as possible for those who have suffered from sexual assault to alert the authorities and to speak about the experience with their family and friends.

We must? For real? But then why aren’t you?

Together, during Sexual Assault Awareness Month, we recommit ourselves to doing our part to help stop sexual violence. We must not be afraid to talk about sexual assualt and sexual assult prevention with our loved ones, in our communities, and with those who have experienced these tragedies. We must encourage victims to report sexual assault and law enforcement to hold offenders accountable, and we must support victims and survivors unremmittingly. Through a concerted effort to better educate ourselves, empower victims, and punish criminals, our Nation will move closer to ending the grief, fear, and suffering caused by sexual assult. The prevention of sexual violence is everyone’s concern.

NOW, THEREFORE, I, DONALD J. TRUMP, President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim April 2018 as National Sexual Assault Awareness and Prevention Month. I urge all Americans, families, law enforcement, healthcare providers, community and faith-based organizations, and private organizations to support survivors of sexual assault and work together to prevent these crimes in their communities.

IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this thirtieth day of March, in the year of our Lord two thousand eighteen, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and forty-second.

He’s really got one hell of a nerve.

H/t Screechy Monkey

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Character

Mar 30th, 2018 11:18 am | By

No automatic alt text available.

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The duty of care

Mar 30th, 2018 11:08 am | By

Joggers are nuts.

Ok I’ll amend that a little – joggers can be ridiculously entitled, to the point of aggression. Joggers somehow think they have the right of way over everyone else, I guess because their hearts will explode if they slow down or stop for anyone.

A man who sued a young girl and her grandparents after he was injured when he jogged into the back wheel of her bike has lost his case in B.C. Supreme Court.

Like that. He jogged into her but he tried to sue her and her grandparents.

According to the judgment, the girl was cycling alongside two friends on Robson Street when the accident occurred.

Her friends were on the sidewalk and she was on the road. All three were riding against traffic, on the only side of the road with a sidewalk.

Perilli was jogging behind the trio when he caught up with them and tried to pass the girl on the right. The girl testified that she had moved closer to the sidewalk after she looked back and saw Perilli about to pass.

The girl also testified that when she looked back again, the jogger had fallen behind. No longer expecting him to overtake them, she moved back into her spot farther from the sidewalk.

That’s when Perilli struck her back wheel, causing him to fall and injure his shoulder severely enough that he later required surgery.

And he considered that her fault. She was in the road, where bicycles belong, and he too was in the road, where pedestrians do not belong except to cross. He didn’t have to “strike her back wheel”; he could have just stopped, or slowed down, or moved to the sidewalk.

Perilli alleges that the girl breached the duty of care by contravening Motor Vehicle Act laws governing cyclists on the road — including cycling without due care and attention, changing direction or speed without signalling and cycling on a sidewalk while riding abreast with other cyclists.

He also alleged that she failed to “maintain an adequate lookout” and failed to “take any or adequate steps to avoid colliding with the plaintiff.”

But as the judge pointed out – he was behind her, so it was easier for him to “maintain an adequate lookout.”

Joggers; they’re nuts, I tell you. I’ve had them grab me and shove me aside on sidewalks and trails, including trails that are signposted No Joggers.

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In his pocket

Mar 30th, 2018 9:47 am | By

That story last week about Kushner sharing intel with the Saudi prince who then placed over 200 of his relatives under arrest – it seemed like a huge thing to me but it didn’t get much attention. It is huge, isn’t it? This random bozo who can’t get a security clearance having access to the intel in the first place and sharing it with a Saudi dictator in the second place, causing >200 people to be arrested in the third place – that should be a big deal, shouldn’t it?

Some Dems think so, at least.

The FBI should immediately investigate senior White House adviser Jared Kushner to find out whether he leaked classified information to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, whom he has a close relationship with, six House Democrats demanded on Thursday.

“We request the FBI open an immediate investigation to determine if these reports are accurate and to explore the extent to which information and sources may have been [compromised],” Democratic Representatives Ted Lieu, Gerald Connolly, Donald Beyer, Pramila Jayapal, Peter Welch and Ruben Gallego wrote to FBI Director Christopher Wray in a letter obtained by CNN.

The FBI has purview for the “integrity of classified information,” the letter states, and “while the President has the authority to declassify and share information, the President’s advisers do not.”

And Kushner doesn’t even have a top security clearance, and the reason he doesn’t is apparently because he’s too dirty. Surely that should mean he can’t see classified information! Before we even get to the fact that he shared it with a Saudi dictator.

Crown Prince Mohammed told confidants that Kushner had talked about Saudi leaders who were disloyal to him, three sources told The Intercept earlier this month. According to that report, the crown prince bragged that Kushner was “in his pocket.”

That’s no good.

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It’s happening, but we have no idea why

Mar 29th, 2018 5:30 pm | By

Also…

In recent weeks, we’ve learned that global carbon emissions rose last year, defying (optimistic) expectations that they had reached a peak. We also learned that no country on Earth is on track to fulfill its emissions-cutting commitments under the Paris climate treaty; that even if all of them somehow fulfill those commitments, nonetheless, their actions would still be insufficient to avert a two-degree increase in global temperatures; and that, in a two-degree warmer world, 150 million more people will die as a result of air pollution, than would in a 1.5-degree warmer one.

And as this flood of climate research revealed that humanity was (and is) hurtling toward an ecological holocaust of unprecedented proportions — one that can only be preempted by radical changes in our species’ use of fossil fuels — the top agency for environmental regulation, in the most powerful nation on the planet, was instructing its staffers to tell the public that there is no scientific consensus about “the role of human activity” in climate change, nor about “what we can do about it.”

That’s us. We’re that most powerful nation, and Trump’s EPA is that top agency that’s telling its staffers to lie to us.

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