Category: Notes and Comment Blog

  • Full clemency

    And at the same time, I saw Julie tweet.

  • Thanks to the MASSIVE FUSS

    Rahaf tweeted her barricade.

    https://twitter.com/rahaf84427714/status/1082212804549959687

    Help was on the way.

    Australia director of Human Rights Watch urges Australia to step up.

    ABC News Middle East correspondent on the scene.

    https://twitter.com/rahaf84427714/status/1082275701330345989

    Sophie McNeill joined her in the barricaded room.

    https://twitter.com/rahaf84427714/status/1082297101239836672

    Human Rights Watch is still on the case.

  • A safe location in Bangkok

    It looks as if Thailand is not going to hand Rahaf Alqunun over to her father after all.

    Rahaf Mohammed Alqunun, 18, will be taken to a safe location in Bangkok, a hotel where U.N. staff members will interview her and process her status determination in coming days. She originally was set to be deported back to Kuwait, where her family was waiting for her.

    …

    Thai authorities had detained her at an airport hotel in Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi Airport since Saturday night and had initially planned to send her back to Kuwait on a flight departing at 11:15 a.m. local time Monday. Alqunun, however, barricaded herself in her room and demanded to meet with the U.N. refu­gee agency, missing the flight.

    Hours later, agency officials were granted access to her “to assess her need for international refugee protection and find an immediate solution for her situation,” according to an emailed statement from Caroline Gluck, a spokeswoman for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).  Immigration officials released photos of her leaving the small hotel room in the airport’s transit area where she was being held, escorted by U.N. officials and Thai authorities.

    The Thai authorities have given her back her passport.

    Alqunun began a social media campaign late Saturday on Twitter chronicling her detention and even posting a photocopy of her passport to prove her identity. The young woman, who is from the city of Hail, in northwestern Saudi Arabia, suffered physical and psychological abuse at the hands of family members, including her brother, according to a 19-year old woman who said she and Alqunun have been friends for several years.

    The woman said Alqunun’s family locked her up for months at one point as punishment for cutting her hair.

    The woman, who lives in Sweden and spoke on the condition of anonymity, said she also fled Saudi Arabia two years ago because her family was abusing her. Alqunun was in contact as she planned her escape, the woman said.

    Sometimes Twitter is a literal life-saver.

    The dramatic scenes and Alqunun’s pleas for help echoed those of other women who have tried to flee abusive or restrictive conditions in Saudi Arabia. In 2017, Dina Lasloom, a 24-year-old Saudi woman, was similarly attempting to seek asylum in Australia when she was stopped at an airport in Manila. She was forced to return to Saudi Arabia and has not been publicly heard from since.

    Better luck to Rahaf.

    H/t What a Maroon

    Updating to add: on Dina Lasloom

  • The flight leaves in 5 hours

    https://twitter.com/miss9afi/status/1082032113069756418

    https://twitter.com/JenDegtjarewsky/status/1082054336383860736

  • Bzzzt

    Oh, how thoughtful.

    Women in Saudi Arabia divorced by their husbands will now be sent a text message to inform them of their new status.

    The move is designed to stop the practice of men ending marriages without telling their wives.

    That nice Saudi Ministry of Justice tweeted it.

    https://twitter.com/MojKsa_EN/status/1081894180908134400

    So nice for her, as she’s walking around in her abaya (which she wouldn’t be, because women aren’t supposed to be walking around on their own) she gets a text telling her she’s divorced. I’m glad it’s such a nice blue-sky day.

    The message will include the divorce certificate number and the name of the relevant court where the women can pick up the documentation.
    Women can also inquire about their marital status through a website and view details of any probate certificates.

    Notice what women can’t do, which is refuse to be unilaterally divorced. Women have no say in the matter, but the government is kindly seeing to it that they will be told they’re divorced.

    Such progress; much reform.

  • Equal time for men in feminism now?

    https://twitter.com/tommykinda/status/1081984250054889473

    Nope, that’s exactly what it is. “Feminism isn’t about the liberation of women, it’s about the liberation of people.” That is All Lives Matter in a different outfit. But, you know, it’s only women, so it doesn’t matter.

    NO to that question. NO in thunder.

  • Get out your wrenches

    We haven’t seen enough starvation lately, let’s have more of that.

    The partial government shutdown glided into its third week Saturday with no end in sight. If the government is not reopened before February, millions of Americans who receive benefits from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) — the nation’s food stamp program — could have their assistance disrupted.

    But they can just make an adjustment. Trump said so.

    According to the nonpartisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, 42 million Americans received SNAP benefits in 2017. More than 68 percent of participants were in families with children, and more than 44 percent were in working families.

    Other programs are in even more immediate danger than SNAP. The Food Distribution Program on Indian Reservations and the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) are not receiving federal funds at all during the shutdown, but “can continue to operate at the State and local level with any funding and commodity resources that remain available,” according to the USDA.

    In the first five months of 2018, around 7 million Americans received WIC benefits each month. WIC is provided for pregnant, postpartum and breastfeeding women, infants, and children up to age 5 who fall within the poverty index and are at “nutritional risk.” The WIC program granted nearly $5 billion to every U.S. state and territory in 2018, as of September.

    It’s ok. They can make an adjustment.

  • Rahaf Mohammed al-Qunun

    Human Rights Watch:

    (Bangkok) – Thailand authorities should immediately halt the planned deportation of a Saudi woman who says she is fleeing domestic abuse and fears for her safety if forcibly returned to Saudi Arabia, Human Rights Watch said today. The authorities should also allow her unrestricted access to make a refugee claim with the Bangkok office of the United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR) and should respect UNHCR’s decision under the agency’s protection mandate.

    Rahaf Mohammed al-Qunun, 18, told Human Rights Watch that she arrived at Suvarnabhumi Airport in Bangkok on the evening of January 5, 2019, en route from Kuwait to Australia, but was met by a representative of the Saudi embassy who seized her passport to prevent her from traveling to Australia. Saudi and Thai officials told her she would be forced to return to Kuwait on the morning of January 7, where her father and brother are awaiting her.

    “Saudi women fleeing their families can face severe violence from relatives, deprivation of liberty, and other serious harm if returned against their will,” said Michael Page, deputy Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. “Thai authorities should immediately halt any deportation, and either allow her to continue her travel to Australia or permit her to remain in Thailand to seek protection as a refugee.”

    Al-Qunun said she fled while her family was visiting Kuwait, which unlike Saudi Arabia, does not require a male relative’s approval for an adult woman to depart the country. She said that she was fleeing abuse from her family, including beatings and death threats from her male relatives, who also forced her to remain in her room for six months for cutting her hair.

    Al-Qunun began tweeting about her situation beginning at 3:20 a.m. Bangkok time via a Twitter account she created in January. In an English-language tweet, she wrote, “I’m the girl who run away from Kuwait to Thailand. I’m in real danger because the Saudi embassy trying to forcing me to go back to Saudi Arabia, while I’m at the airport waiting for my second flight.”

    She also tweeted a video in which she says that Saudi embassy officials stopped her after arriving in Bangkok, and she later posted a copy of her passport.

    She tweeted that she was being held in an airport hotel and that Saudi embassy officials told her she would be returned to her family in Kuwait in the late morning of January 7.

    Al-Qunun told Human Rights Watch that at about 5 p.m. on January 6, Thai immigration officers took her from her hotel room and informed her that she could not enter Thailand because her visa was “rejected” and that she must return to Kuwait on January 7. She then returned to her room. However, she had not applied to enter Thailand because her passport was taken, along with her plane ticket to Australia.

    Thai authorities have so far prevented Al-Qunun from having access to UNHCR to make a refugee claim even though it is evident she is seeking international protection. Under customary international law, Thailand is obligated to ensure that no one is forcibly sent to a place where they would risk being subjected to persecution, torture or ill-treatment, or other serious human rights violations. As a party to the UN Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, Thailand has a treaty obligation not to return anyone to a territory where they face a real risk of torture or ill-treatment.

    The risk doesn’t get much more real than that.

    #SaveRahaf

  • Who are the groups subjected to the most public vitriol for their published work?

    Judith Shulevitz at the Times points out that publishers are starting to add morality clauses to their contracts.

    This past year, regular contributors to Condé Nast magazines started spotting a new paragraph in their yearly contracts. It’s a doozy. If, in the company’s “sole judgment,” the clause states, the writer “becomes the subject of public disrepute, contempt, complaints or scandals,” Condé Nast can terminate the agreement. In other words, a writer need not have done anything wrong; she need only become scandalous. In the age of the Twitter mob, that could mean simply writing or saying something that offends some group of strident tweeters.

    Here’s one problem with that: not all strident tweeters are reasonable. We wouldn’t want Adrian Harrop having a veto over what gets published, for instance.

    Jeannie Suk Gersen, a Harvard Law School professor who writes regularly for The New Yorker, a Condé Nast magazine, read the small print, too, and thought: “No way. I’m not signing that.” Ms. Gersen, an expert in the laws regulating sexuality, often takes stands that may offend the magazine’s liberal readers, as when she defended Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’s rollback of Obama-era rules on campus sexual-assault accusations. When I called Ms. Gersen in November, she said, “No person who is engaged in creative expressive activity should be signing one of these.”

    It’s not that a company should have to keep on staff a murderer or rapist, she added. But when the trigger for termination could be a Twitter storm or a letter-writing campaign, she said, “I think it would have a very significant chilling effect.”

    Twitter being what it is. Would we want Jordan Peterson shutting us down? He’s suing those university inquisitors who said hostile things about him in their meeting with Lindsay Shepherd, after all.

    Masha Gessen, another New Yorker writer, also said she wouldn’t sign her new contract, at least not as it was originally worded. Ms. Gessen, a Russian-American journalist who won the 2017 National Book Award for “The Future Is History,” about the return of totalitarianism in post-Communist Russia, has spent her career challenging prevailing nostrums.

    Last year, as prominent men fell like bowling pins after being accused of sexual misconduct, Ms. Gessen published columns on the New Yorker website describing the #MeToo movement as an out-of-control “moral panic” bent on policing sexual behavior by mob justice. Needless to say, many readers did not agree.

    “I’m extremely uncomfortable with it,” Ms. Gessen said about the contract, “because I have in the past been vilified on social media.” Having once been fired from a job as the director of Radio Liberty in Russia after what she called a disinformation campaign, she added, “I know what it’s like to lose institutional support when you most need it.”

    It’s not as if disinformation campaigns are unknown to Twitter and Facebook.

    Over the past four years, I’ve published articles criticizing the concept of safe spaces and deploring the lack of due process in campus rape hearings. I’ve been called transphobic for an essay I wrote in 2016 about the tension between transgender rights and the right to privacy, and I’m still being called that. If I’d had a book contract with a morality clause when I wrote those, I might have thought twice before indulging my fondness for picking fights.

    It’s remarkably easy to get called (and labeled and forever convicted as) transphobic.

    After our conversation, Ms. Gersen sent me an email pointing out a possible unintended consequence of the Condé Nast clause. Who are the groups subjected to the most public vitriol for their published work, she asked? Who is most viciously trolled? Women and members of minorities. “That is one of the realities of publishing while a woman or minority in this age,” she wrote. “The clause is perversely posing more career risk to women and minorities than to white males.”

    Funny how that works.

  • The one forbidden word

    Oh come on now.

    I don’t see color!

    ALL lives matter!

    Affirmative action is unfair to white men!

    Feminism is about ALL PEOPLE!

    Shouldn’t UN Women change its name now? I mean, why women? Why not people? Why is UN Women being so exclusionary in its very own name?

  • The list requested by the Secret Service as a security precaution

    The LA Times has some questions:

    Trump railed as a candidate and as president about people living in the country without permission, calling them rapists and violent gang members.

    Last year, in a White House meeting discussing so-called sanctuary cities and states with sheriffs and other local California officials, the president said:

    “We have people coming into the country or trying to come in, we’re stopping a lot of them, but we’re taking people out of the country. You wouldn’t believe how bad these people are. These aren’t people. These are animals.”

    If immigrants in the U.S. illegally are so violent and such a danger to society, why did managers of Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, N.J., surreptitiously remove the names of undocumented workers from a list of employees sought by the Secret Service?

    I think I know this one. Trump likes to hire undocumented workers because 1. he can pay them less and 2. they’re not in a position to complain if he cheats or otherwise mistreats them. So, what’s he going to do? Hire them and conceal the fact even from the Secret Service.

    The New York Times, which last month broke the story that golf club managers knowingly hired  workers who had entered the country illegally (including the Guatemalan woman who makes Trump’s bed when he’s there and who received a White House certificate for her “outstanding” service), reported Thursday that the club’s human resources office failed to include the names of workers in the U.S. illegally on the list requested by the Secret Service as a security precaution.

    No doubt that’s because, as part of the vetting, the Secret Service was requesting Social Security numbers; workers in the country illegally do not have valid Social Security numbers.

    Normally presidents aren’t supposed to hide things from the Secret Service.

  • Make an adjustment

    Trump displays his profound understanding of how life is for people who are not rich.

    It’s totally fine to have your salary suddenly cut off, all you have to do is make an adjustment. It’s easy. Student loans? Rent? Mortgage payment? Childcare? Debt for that stay in the hospital? Food? Car payment? Relatives you help support? Don’t worry about any of that, all you have to do is adjust it. There’s a little dial somewhere, just give it a small twist and everything will be fine.

  • “People in this country will go hungry”

    Oh hey, Trump and the Trumplings didn’t realize that the government shutdown would actually do harm, and now they’re scrambling to figure out how they’re supposed to be doing their jobs.

    Food stamps for 38 million low-income Americans would face severe reductions and more than $140 billion in tax refunds are at risk of being frozen or delayed if the government shutdown stretches into February, widespread disruptions that threaten to hurt the economy.

    The Trump administration, which had not anticipated a long-term shutdown, recognized only this week the breadth of the potential impact, several senior administration officials said. The officials said they were focused now on understanding the scope of the consequences and determining whether there is anything they can do to intervene.

    Well thank god they didn’t bother to figure that out before they shut it down.

    The potential cuts to food stamps and suspension of tax refunds illustrate the compounding consequences of leaving large parts of the federal govern­ment unfunded indefinitely — a ­scenario that became more likely Friday when President Trump said he would leave the government shut down for months or even years unless Democrats gave him money to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.

    Oh well. It’s only poor people not being able to eat, so who cares, right?

    “People in this country will go hungry,” said Rep. Rosa L. DeLauro (D-Conn.). “It’s simple. They go hungry. . . . These are working people. We’re not talking about people who are dogging it.”

    The disruption would hurt not only the families that receive the assistance but also grocers and other retailers where the money is spent.

    But it won’t touch people who build gaudy condo towers, so that’s ok then.

  • It would be illegal

    Bruce Ackerman, a professor of law at Yale, explains how illegal Trump’s plan to use emergency powers to build Wall would be. Trump’s plan is to take military funding to pay for Wall, and use the military to build it.

    While it is hard to know exactly what the president has in mind, or whether he has any conception about what it would entail, one thing is clear: Not only would such an action be illegal, but if members of the armed forces obeyed his command, they would be committing a federal crime.

    There are laws against it.

    In response to the Hurricane Katrina disaster in New Orleans, Congress created an express exception to the rules, and authorized the military to play a backup role in “major public emergencies.” But in 2008 Congress and President Bush repealed this sweeping exception. Is President Trump aware of this express repudiation of the power which he is threatening to invoke?

    But, Trump would say, they’re terrorists.

    It is, I suppose, possible to imagine a situation in which the president might take advantage of the most recent exception, enacted in 2011, which authorized the military detention of suspected terrorists associated with Al Qaeda or the Taliban. But despite President Trump’s unsupported claims about “terrorists” trying to cross the border, it is an unconscionable stretch to use this proviso to support using the military for operations against the desperate refugees from Central America seeking asylum in our country.

    There could be terrorists (or a terrorist) among them, just as there could be terrorists anywhere else. But we don’t imprison the whole population because who knows, there might be terrorists or school shooters among them, so why would be unleash the military on refugees because there might be terrorists among them?

    The law is clear; how it would play out is less so. But undoubtedly, we would see a period of passionate debate on Capitol Hill, with scores of representatives, from both parties, condemning the president’s move as an unconstitutional abuse of his powers as commander in chief.

    This would play out in public, with millions of service members watching closely. They would immediately be obliged to decide whether to obey President Trump — and risk criminal punishment. For the president to put these men and women in such a position, simply out of petulance over congressional opposition, would be especially unconscionable.

    …

    What this all adds up to is a potential crisis much graver than whatever immigration emergencies the president has in mind: A legally ignorant president forcing our troops to choose between his commands and the rule of law in a petty political struggle over a domestic political question.

    Let’s hope he doesn’t step over the brink.

  • How to weigh a feeling

    Here again – trans people can absolutely say what it’s like to have gender dysphoria, but no one else can. Trans people and trans people only know what gender dysphoria is and what gender nonconformity is and that they are different and exactly how they are different.

    Let’s be absolutely clear, cis women claiming they had “gender dysphoria” as kids because they were tomboys are lying. They are deliberately conflating gender nonconformity with gender dysphoria, not because they believe it, but because it is useful to muddy the waters.

    But why? Why would that be true? Why should we believe it? Why is it the case that they know all about what it’s like to be what we are, but we don’t know a damn thing about what it’s like to be what they are? Where did they get this absolute knowledge that we have no access to?

    TERF women claiming “I got made fun of for being a tomboy” is the exact same thing as “I wanted to die because everyone kept calling me ‘she,’ and that’s not who I am” need to check themselves. You have no goddamn idea what dysphoria is like.

    How do they know that? How can they know that? If their experience is a black box to us, how can our experience be a transparent box to them? Do they have magic powers?

    Sorry, but none of this adds up. It’s true that we can’t know what anyone else’s experience is like from the inside, but that applies every bit as much to trans people as it does to everyone else. All we can do is talk and describe, and we’re all on the same footing that way. I think it’s probably true that my experience of pretending to be a lot of boy characters (as well as a lot of girl characters) as a kid, and of hating skirts and dresses, was not miserable enough to qualify as gender dysphoria, but I’m not at all sure about it, because it’s not clear exactly what gender dysphoria is. It’s a Feeling in the Head and there’s nothing more precise about it than that.

    We’re not lying and we don’t need to check ourselves.

  • The muck at the bottom of stupidity’s deep barrel

    Terry Glavin on Trump’s Putin-based explanation of the Russian role in Afghanistan:

    We’re now at the half-way mark of Donald Trump’s term in the White House, and the relentless hum of his casual imbecilities, obscenities, banalities and outright fabrications has become so routine to the world’s daily dread that it is now just background noise in the ever-louder bedlam of America’s dystopian, freak-show political culture.

    And yet, now and again, just when you think the president has scraped his fingers raw in the muck at the bottom of stupidity’s deep barrel, the man somehow manages to out-beclown himself. Such was the case this week, in a ramble of fatuous illiteracy that should drive home the point, to all of us, that the Office of the President of the United States of America is currently occupied by a genuinely dangerous maniac.

    It does.

    But then Trump went right off the deep end with a disquisition on the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and his remarks betrayed a perilous, gawping ignorance of the very reason why Afghanistan became such a lawless hellhole in the first place—which is how it came to pass that al-Qaeda found sanctuary there with the deranged Pakistani subsidiary that came to be called the Taliban, which is how al-Qaeda managed to plan and organize the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001—which is the very reason the American troops that Trump keeps saying he wants to bring home are still there at all.

    “Russia used to be the Soviet Union. Afghanistan made it Russia, because they went bankrupt fighting in Afghanistan,” Trump began. “The reason Russia was in Afghanistan was because terrorists were going into Russia. They were right to be there. The problem is, it was a tough fight. And literally they went bankrupt; they went into being called Russia again, as opposed to the Soviet Union. You know, a lot of these places you’re reading about now are no longer part of Russia, because of Afghanistan.”

    They were right to be there.

    You can almost see Putin’s hand making his lips move.

    You’ll want to let that sink in for a moment: on Wednesday, Jan. 2, 2019, Donald Trump endorsed a revisionist lunacy that is currently being championed by a bunch of cranks at the outermost neo-Stalinist fringe of Vladimir Putin’s ruling circle of oligarchs. They’ve already managed to cobble together a resolution in Russia’s Potemkin parliament that is to be voted on next month. It’s jointly sponsored by lawmakers from Putin’s United Russia and the still-existing Communist Party.

    The resolution would overturn a declaration adopted by the Congress of People’s Deputies at the time of Soviet communism’s unravelling in 1989, 10 years after the Soviets’ catastrophic dismembering of Afghanistan. The 1989 resolution frankly declared that the Soviet invasion and the nine-year war the Soviets prosecuted in Afghanistan deserved “moral and political condemnation.” The 1989 resolution was signed by Mikhail Gorbachev himself, who at the time was chairman of the Supreme Soviet.

    Well now who are you gonna believe, Gorbachev or Donnie Twoscoops?

    The resolution slammed the former Soviet leaders Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, Andrei Gromyko and Dimitri Ustinov for turning Afghanistan into an apocalyptic wasteland of more than a million corpses and forcing a third of the Afghan population to flee the country as refugees, costing as well the lives of 15,000 Soviet soldiers, for good measure.

    Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

    And now, Donald Trump, the president of the United States, is saying Gorbachev was wrong, and Brezhnev, Andropov, Gromyko and Ustinov were right, and so are Vladimir Putin’s creepy neo-Stalinist revisionists.

    He belongs to Putin.

  • Harropsplaining

    Okay now I just don’t know what to believe.

    Adrian Harrop tells a woman what her experience is.

    https://twitter.com/DrAdrianHarrop/status/1081360068879241222

    But we are always told it’s Forbidden to deny anyone’s Lived Experience. That’s a big no-no. Subjective experience trumps mere physical facts, we are told over and over and over. So why do the rules suddenly change when it’s someone who doesn’t claim to be trans or to be literally the other sex?

    Also, what in fact is the difference? How can we tell when the difference is present when all it seems to be is “but more so”? Gender nonconformity is totally different from gender dysphoria because gender dysphoria is like gender nonconformity but waaaaaay more so. Oh? So, how do we measure it? How can we tell? How do we know?

    Harrop seems very confident that it’s because of “the agreed and specific definition” but he’s just blowing smoke in the Trumpian fashion.

    All these fiery little radicals, but they’ve apparently never heard a thing about the way medical categories have changed over time, have been shaped by existing prejudices, have been oh so conveniently adapted to fit the needs of the rulers. Remember “drapetomania”?

    Drapetomania was a conjectural mental illness that, in 1851, American physician Samuel A. Cartwright hypothesized as the cause of enslaved Africans fleeing captivity. It has since been debunked as pseudoscience and part of the edifice of scientific racism.

    Harrop is peering confusedly out of a window in the edifice of scientific sexism.

  • Tilt tilt tilt

    You can see him say it.

    (Why does he jerk his head back and forth every time he says something? It looks weird.)

  • Didn’t happen

    Another pratfall lie:

    President Donald Trump claimed without evidence on Friday that past presidents have privately confided to him that they regret not building a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.

    But at least three of the four living U.S. presidents — Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama — did no such thing.

    I’m going to go way out on a limb here and say that Jimmy Carter didn’t do it either.

    Asked if Clinton told Trump that he should have built a border wall, Clinton spokesman Angel Ureña said, “He did not. In fact, they’ve not talked since the inauguration.”

    Bush spokesman Freddy Ford also said the two men had not discussed the matter. And Obama, for his part, has not spoken with Trump since his inauguration, except for a brief exchange at George H.W. Bush’s funeral in Washington, D.C.

    Obama has consistently blasted Trump’s pledge to build a border wall. “Suggesting that we can build an endless wall along our borders, and blame our challenges on immigrants — that doesn’t just run counter to our history as the world’s melting pot, it contradicts the evidence that our growth and our innovation and our dynamism has always been spurred by our ability to attract strivers from every corner of the globe,” he said in 2016.

    They said it to him in a dream. Really. They were all there, at a Pizza Hut where Jared Kushner was the pepperoni chef, and they all said it.

    The White House did not respond to a request for an explanation of Trump’s remarks, which came during a lengthy appearance in the Rose Garden in which he insisted he won’t reopen the government until Democrats relent and approve more than $5 billion for the wall.

    “This should have been done by all of the presidents that preceded me and they all know it,” Trump said. “Some of them have told me that we should have done it.”

    Some of them – so that means at least two. That makes half of them. It could mean as many as three. Two of them, or three of them, told him that, according to him. “Some” is a nice relaxed number to use when you’re lying, but it can trip you up if you’re dealing with a very small number. “Some” of four is a little awkward.

    “I think it’s well-known that the incumbent president is very careless with the truth,” former president Carter said last year in an interview with CBS News.

    “I think I went through my campaign and my presidency without ever lying to the people or making a deliberately false statement, and I think that would be a very worthwhile thing to reinsert into politics these days,” he added.

    Sir, sir, any thoughts on the wall while you’re at it?

  • A parallel legal regime

    I read the opening of a piece by Elizabeth Goitein at the Atlantic on Trump and emergency powers the other day, and found it so alarming I stopped reading. Now it appears we’re being dragged over that threshold…which could be game over. It was for Germany, and it could be for us.

    Trump has long signaled his disdain for the concepts of limited presidential power and democratic rule. During his 2016 campaign, he praised murderous dictators. He declared that his opponent, Hillary Clinton, would be in jail if he were president, goading crowds into frenzied chants of “Lock her up.” He hinted that he might not accept an electoral loss. As democracies around the world slide into autocracy, and nationalism and antidemocratic sentiment are on vivid display among segments of the American populace, Trump’s evident hostility to key elements of liberal democracy cannot be dismissed as mere bluster.

    It would be nice to think he couldn’t, but guess what, he can.

    Unknown to most Americans, a parallel legal regime allows the president to sidestep many of the constraints that normally apply. The moment the president declares a “national emergency”—a decision that is entirely within his discretion—more than 100 special provisions become available to him. While many of these tee up reasonable responses to genuine emergencies, some appear dangerously suited to a leader bent on amassing or retaining power. For instance, the president can, with the flick of his pen, activate laws allowing him to shut down many kinds of electronic communications inside the United States or freeze Americans’ bank accounts. Other powers are available even without a declaration of emergency, including laws that allow the president to deploy troops inside the country to subdue domestic unrest.

    You see the problem.