Guest post: There could be conservative political virtues

Dec 31st, 2017 3:43 pm | By

Originally a comment by Jeff Engel on Still never.

President Clinton would have made for a glorious 4-8 years of moaning and crying from the right, able to pick on every peccadillo and declaim about the moral superiority of the Republican Party who – they’d be happy to say – ultimately rejected Trump while the Democrats embraced Her Satanic Majesty. So yeah, it’s not that expensive being a Never Trumper from the op-ed pages.

Still – I don’t believe I can take fully seriously the complaints about Trump’s character combined with the delight in his policies. Bullying, pettiness, aggressive ignorance – these are the same things that will underlie the preferred conservative society of “ordered classes”, people “knowing their place”, and the eager trampling of every protection against well-understood environmental threats. Crassness, bigotry – again, where else do you suppose the dismantling of minority protections comes from? Toadyism as the form of public service – this is what comes of the tireless elevation of business culture as the model of efficiency to which government should aspire, and setting the lobbyists to work drafting the regulations for their industries.

There could be conservative political virtues. There’s a lot to be said for preserving working institutions and reforming them carefully, rather than replacing them wholesale; for insisting on genuine character in leaders and for acknowledging it respectfully regardless of policy differences; for regarding society as an organism more than a mechanism and treating governance as more the work of a doctor than an engineer.

Bret Stephens really could have had all of that with a President Hillary Clinton. He wouldn’t have the policies he’s crowing about, precisely because those come from the vices he supposedly condemns.

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Religious texts instruct women to surrender their bodies

Dec 31st, 2017 3:07 pm | By

Vidhi Doshi at the Post reports on a growing investigation into a sinister religious sect in India.

At least 48 underage girls have been rescued in police raids on the sect’s ashrams in New Delhi since Dec. 19, officials say. Officials say they have found women and girls kept in prisonlike conditions, behind barbed wire and multiple locked gates. Authorities say there are hundreds more properties and potentially thousands of women and girls living in them.

The sect, Adhyatmik Vishwa Vidyalaya (AVV) preaches that its leader is an incarnation of various Hindu gods and has descended to earth to unite people of all faiths and transform them into deities. Little is known about the sect’s origins or its leader, Virendra Dev Dixit, though followers say it is an offshoot of Brahma Kumaris — a large, international sect with over three dozen centers in the United States and millions of followers worldwide. Brahma Kumaris distanced itself from Dixit’s organization and denounced it decades ago.

There’s nothing like a “sect” for giving men access to captive women, is there.

Dixit claims to be an incarnation of, among others, the Hindu god Krishna, who according to myth has 16,000 wives. Swati Maliwal, chairwoman of Delhi’s government agency for women’s affairs, said that investigators found 200 women and girls in miserable conditions.

“The ashram has been running illegal activities,” Maliwal said. Investigators, she said, found substances that induce dizziness and unprescribed medicines that may have been used to drug and pacify women. She also said religious texts found during a raid instruct women to “surrender” their bodies to Dixit.

In a very Spiritual and Enlightened way, of course.

Maliwal went with police on the December 19 raid, which found squalid conditions at the ashram and removed 41 minors. They didn’t have the authority to remove adult women against their will. All the women appeared drugged.

The AVV case comes months after the rape conviction of another popular guru, Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh. The sect’s existence for more than a decade, despite at least 10 complaints to police over the years, illustrates the unaccountability of holy men in India, where religious leaders have huge financial and political power.

The inquiry into AVV offers hope to hundreds of families with relatives in the sect. Police all over northern India are raiding other ashrams associated with Dixit. In Delhi, Maliwal said, five of at least eight ashrams have been searched by authorities. But many of the sect’s ashrams are in still unknown locations.

The US is very like India in this way. Mormons and wack Christian groups can basically imprison women and children and abuse them freely because the authorities don’t want to take on the goddy gang.

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Still never

Dec 31st, 2017 11:40 am | By

A Republican who likes many of Trump’s policies and actions nevertheless would prefer Clinton to have the job. The surprise there is only that there aren’t more like him.

And want to preserve your own republican institutions? Then pay attention to the character of your leaders, the culture of governance and the political health of the public. It matters a lot more than lowering the top marginal income tax rate by a couple of percentage points.

This is the fatal mistake of conservatives who’ve decided the best way to deal with Trump’s personality — the lying, narcissism, bullying, bigotry, crassness, name calling, ignorance, paranoia, incompetence and pettiness — is to pretend it doesn’t matter. “Character Doesn’t Count” has become a de facto G.O.P. motto. “Virtue Doesn’t Matter” might be another.

But character does count, and virtue does matter, and Trump’s shortcomings prove it daily.

It’s not even a contest.

Trump demands testimonials from his cabinet, servility from Republican politicians and worship from conservative media. To serve in this White House isn’t to be elevated to public service. It’s to be debased into toadyism, which probably explains the record-setting staff turnover of 34 percent, according to an analysis from the Brookings Institution.

In place of presidential addresses, stump speeches or town halls, we have Trump’s demagogic mass rallies. In place of the usual jousting between the administration and the press, we have a president who fantasizes on Twitter about physically assaulting CNN. In place of a president who defends the honor and integrity of his own officers and agencies, we have one who humiliates his attorney general, denigrates the F.B.I. and compares our intelligence agencies to the Gestapo.

Not worth it, is it.

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$750 tickets

Dec 31st, 2017 10:39 am | By

Again the scumbag profits from his presidency while we pay his expenses.

President Trump is set to ring in the new year the same way he has for about two decades — at the lavish party he hosts at his private club here.

But this weekend’s gala at Mar-a-Lago, his first since becoming president, will be a little different: The security will be tighter. The crowds will probably be bigger. And the tickets will run $750 a guest, a hike from last year, according to members and guests.

That ticket hike is profiteering from public office.

Critics said the boost in prices for Sunday’s party and Trump’s regular trips to Trump Organization properties — this is the president’s tenth visit to Mar-a-Lago this year — show how he is using his position to promote his brand.

“The president continues to find ways to profit from public office, by exploiting the fact that there are people who will pay to spend time with him and to be seen with him,” said Kathleen Clark, a government ethics expert at the Washington University School of Law in St. Louis.

Walter Shaub too.

https://twitter.com/waltshaub/status/947530088639279104

And they won’t talk about it.

The White House and Trump Organization officials did not respond to requests for comment. A woman who answered the phone at Mar-a-Lago declined to share details about the party with a nonmember and said there was no press office to respond to inquiries.

They have no right to stonewall questions or decline to share details. He’s doing all of this at our expense and while holding public office. None of this is “private.”

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I’m not seeing the well-ordered militia

Dec 31st, 2017 9:59 am | By

In today’s US Gun Terrorism news so far:

The Denver Post:

One Douglas County deputy died and four more were wounded along with two civilians Sunday morning at a Highlands Ranch apartment complex. The shooter was also shot and is believed dead, the Sheriff’s Office said in a tweet at 9:32 a.m.

Deputies were responding to a domestic disturbance call.

CBS News:

Police in Houston say they arrested a man found with guns and ammunition in his hotel room early Sunday, as authorities across the country remain on high alert ahead of planned New Year’s Eve celebrations.

The guy was drunk and tottering around hassling other guests, so police asked him to go to his room and when he refused they escorted him there preparatory to escorting him with his belongings out of the hotel.

When officers arrived at his room, they found “several” firearms and rounds of ammunition in the room. Cintillas said there were “several” firearms but “not a huge amount.”

The man was taken into custody. Police would not comment on the exact type of firearms nor on why the suspect had the weapons and ammunition in his room. Cintillas said the officers’ intervention “averted a potentially bad situation.”

And it’s not even afternoon yet.

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Hijab on a stick

Dec 31st, 2017 9:31 am | By

A clear photo via Fariborz Pooya:

Image may contain: 1 person, tree and outdoor

Maryam’s new Facebook cover photo:

No automatic alt text available.

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Sheriff Bully

Dec 31st, 2017 8:44 am | By

Trump’s good buddy former Milwaukee County sheriff David Clarke:

I am UNINTIMIDATED by lib media attempts to smear and discredit me with their FAKE NEWS reports designed to silence me. I will continue to poke them in the eye with a sharp stick and bitch slap these scum bags til they get it. I have been attacked by better people than them #MAGA

https://twitter.com/SheriffClarke/status/947225820493426688

BREAKING NEWS! When LYING LIB MEDIA makes up FAKE NEWS to smear me, the ANTIDOTE is go right at them. Punch them in the nose & MAKE THEM TASTE THEIR OWN BLOOD. Nothing gets a bully like LYING LIB MEDIA’S attention better than to give them a taste of their own blood #neverbackdown

Nothing like getting under the skin of lefties like I did today. I fight to win. You come at me libs you better bring a hard hat, some aspirin and your veggie wrap because it’s going to be a long day and I’m going to smack you around until you crawl back to your mom’s basement.

This man used to be in law enforcement, until he resigned last August. People like that should not be in law enforcement, nor should they be on Twitter. I’ve reported him a couple of times now.

This is not normal and it should never become normal.

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War on “the regulatory state”

Dec 30th, 2017 5:22 pm | By

Princess Ivanka is pleased that Daddy is getting rid of all those pesky regulations protections that might eat into her profits a little bit.

A couple of weeks ago he did a photo op with the Big Pile of Protections that he promises to kill.

Salon says wait.

There’s only one problem. That mountain of paper Trump used as a prop symbolizes hard-won measures that protect us.

To refresh the president’s memory, back in the 1960s, smog in major U.S. cities was so thick it blocked the sun. Rivers ran brown with raw sewage and toxic chemicals. Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River and at least two other urban waterways were so polluted they caught on fire. Lead-laced paint and gasoline poisoned children, damaging their brains and nervous systems. Cars without seatbelts, airbags or safety glass were unsafe at any speed. And hazardous working conditions killed an average of 14,000 workers annually, nearly three times the number today.

In response, Congress enacted the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, Safe Drinking Water Act and other landmark pieces of legislation to protect public health and safety. Some of those laws also created the Consumer Product Safety Commission, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), National Highway Traffic Safety Commission, Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and other federal agencies to write and enforce safeguards.

But Trump wants more workers killed in hazardous working conditions, more smog, more filthy rivers, more species going extinct, more people killed in car crashes because they weren’t wearing seat belts – the glorious land of FREEEEEEEEEEEEEEDOM.

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Welcome to the Marshalsea

Dec 30th, 2017 4:44 pm | By

From the ACLU:

During the holiday season, many of us think about what we can do to help people struggling with poverty. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, on the other hand, decided just before Christmas to rescind a guidance meant to protect low-income Americans.

The 2016 guidance, issued by former President Obama’s Justice Department, urged state and local courts nationwide to abide by constitutional principles prohibiting the jailing of poor people who cannot afford to pay court fines and fees. Jeff Sessions’ action makes clear that he and his Justice Department are unconcerned by courts trampling on the rights of poor people.

The Obama Justice Department issued the 2016 letter after reports and lawsuits by the ACLU and other groups revealed how modern-day debtors’ prisons function in more than a dozen states, despite the fact that the U.S. two centuries ago formally outlawed jailing people simply because they have unpaid debts.

These efforts revealed that poor people were being locked up in Georgia, Washington, Mississippi, and elsewhere without court hearings or legal representation when they could not pay fines and fees for traffic tickets or other civil infractions or criminal offenses. These efforts also show that modern-day debtors’ prisons result from state laws allowing or requiring the suspension of driver’s licenses for unpaid court fines or fees without first requiring confirmation that the person could actually pay.

Modern-day debtors’ prisons received unprecedented national attention in 2015 when the Justice Department issued a 185-page report in its investigation of the Ferguson Police Department after the shooting of teenager Michael Brown. It documented how Ferguson police sought to advance the “City’s focus on revenue rather than … public safety needs,” leading to the routine incarceration of poor people to elicit court fine and fee payments, which raised due process concerns and reflected racial bias.

This wave of attention on draconian debtors’ prisons spurred the Justice Department to issue the 2016 letter on fines and fees.

But Jeff Sessions wants to see poor people locked up and/or made poorer by fines. It’s how he rolls.

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It wasn’t the dossier

Dec 30th, 2017 4:08 pm | By

The hot Donnie-news today is what got the FBI started on the Russia investigation. It turns out it was Papadopoulos blabbing to an Australian diplomat.

During a night of heavy drinking at an upscale London bar in May 2016, George Papadopoulos, a young foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign, made a startling revelation to Australia’s top diplomat in Britain: Russia had political dirt on Hillary Clinton.

About three weeks earlier, Mr. Papadopoulos had been told that Moscow had thousands of emails that would embarrass Mrs. Clinton, apparently stolen in an effort to try to damage her campaign.

Exactly how much Mr. Papadopoulos said that night at the Kensington Wine Rooms with the Australian, Alexander Downer, is unclear. But two months later, when leaked Democratic emails began appearing online, Australian officials passed the information about Mr. Papadopoulos to their American counterparts, according to four current and former American and foreign officials with direct knowledge of the Australians’ role.

The hacking and the revelation that a member of the Trump campaign may have had inside information about it were driving factors that led the F.B.I. to open an investigation in July 2016 into Russia’s attempts to disrupt the election and whether any of President Trump’s associates conspired.

July 2016. That early.

The information that Mr. Papadopoulos gave to the Australians answers one of the lingering mysteries of the past year: What so alarmed American officials to provoke the F.B.I. to open a counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign months before the presidential election?

It was not, as Mr. Trump and other politicians have alleged, a dossier compiled by a former British spy hired by a rival campaign. Instead, it was firsthand information from one of America’s closest intelligence allies.

Via one of Trump’s own people, babbling as he sucked down the gin. The FBI, on the other hand, did the opposite.

Once the information Mr. Papadopoulos had disclosed to the Australian diplomat reached the F.B.I., the bureau opened an investigation that became one of its most closely guarded secrets. Senior agents did not discuss it at the daily morning briefing, a classified setting where officials normally speak freely about highly sensitive operations.

There was debate about whether to go public or not, and the agency decided not.

Ultimately, the F.B.I. and Justice Department decided to keep the investigation quiet, a decision that Democrats in particular have criticized. And agents did not interview Mr. Papadopoulos until late January.

So we’re now living in Putin’s world.

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Shackled to the words of their ancestors

Dec 30th, 2017 12:49 pm | By

Jonathan Freedland wrote a book about the American revolution almost 20 years ago. The timing was not great.

The American revolution, I argued, was our inheritance, a part of our patrimony mislaid across the Atlantic. From a written constitution to a system of radically devolved power to the replacement of monarchy with an elected head of state, it was time for us to bring home the revolution that we had made in America.

Mere months after publication came the impeachment of Bill Clinton.

“So you want us to live the American dream?” one interviewer asked. “All a bit of nightmare now, isn’t it?”

And that was then.

That, or something like it, has happened at intervals ever since. If it wasn’t a hideous, only-in-America mass shooting, it would be an election in which a man with fewer votes defeated an infinitely more qualified opponent who had won more.

Usually, I have managed to deflect these challenges, arguing that my book was a homage to a founding ideal, not to the necessarily flawed reality. But it’s time for me to admit my doubts about its core idea – its admiration for the US constitution and system of government. For this first year of the Donald Trump presidency has exposed two flaws in the model that I cannot brush aside so easily.

The first is the one we keep talking about, the one we were talking about only yesterday – the fact that much of what we think is mandatory is actually a matter of custom, and thus worthless in the face of someone like Trump.

The first is that Trump has vividly demonstrated that much of what keeps a democracy intact is not enshrined in the written letter of a constitution, but resides instead in customs and conventions – norms – that are essential to civic wellbeing. Trump trampled all over those as a candidate – refusing to disclose his tax returns, for example – and has trampled over even more as president.

Convention dictated that he had to divest himself of private business concerns on taking office, to prevent a conflict of interest – but in the absence of a law explicitly forcing him to do so, he did no such thing. The same goes for appointing unqualified relatives to senior jobs, sacking the director of the FBI with no legitimate cause, or endorsing an accused child molester for the US Senate. No law told him he couldn’t, so he did.

There’s not even anything ruling out complete incompetence or mental dissolution.

[T]his year of Trump has also shown the extent to which the US has an unwritten constitution that – just like ours – relies on the self-restraint of the key political players, a self-restraint usually insisted upon by a free press. Yet when confronted with a leader unbound by any sense of shame – and shamelessness might just be Trump’s defining quality – America is left unexpectedly vulnerable.

There’s impeachment, but it turns out that impeachment is entirely political. Trump could eat babies on camera and still the Republican Congress would not impeach him.

In 2017 we saw with new clarity that the strength of the US constitution depends entirely on the willingness of those charged with enforcing it to do their duty. And today’s Republicans refuse to fulfil that obligation. They, like Trump, are without shame. This was a fatal oversight by Hamilton, James Madison and their fellow framers of the constitution. They did not reckon on a partisanship so intense it would blind elected representatives to the national interest – so that they would, repeatedly, put party ahead of country. The founders did not conceive of a force like today’s Republican party, willing to indulge a president nakedly hostile to ideals Americans once held sacred.

And to the most basic everyday inhibitions and ethical considerations.

And these weaknesses in the US model have prompted me to see others. The second amendment does not compel Americans to allow an unrestricted flow of guns into the hands of the violent and dangerous, but the fact that the argument hinges on interpretations of a text written more than two centuries ago is itself a problem. It means America, in the words of that great revolutionary Thomas Paine, is too often “like dead and living bodies chained together”, today’s generation shackled to the words of their ancestors.

Yes. It’s not working out well at present.

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Wobblies and gender

Dec 30th, 2017 11:09 am | By

Weirdness.

A tweet by Lindsay Shepherd:

Oof – the writing and thinking in that post is so bad I have to go look at the Facebook group. I’m especially curious about what any of that has to do with the IWW – the Industrial Workers of the World aka Wobblies.

The About page sounds IWW-compatible, ish, sort of.

The General Defense Committee (GDC) acts in defense and solidarity for those oppressed by capitalism. We advocate for a model of community self-defense, where marginalized people are provided with a platform to speak and organize.

The GDC works in tandem with the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), a grassroots labour union, with the understanding that a broad strategy is needed for the defense of persecuted communities.

But the front page is another story.

The first item is the one Lindsay Shepherd tweeted.

No, Deborah. Trans students deserve an apology.

This troubling release has made Wilfrid Laurier University‘s position absolutely clear and it’s thoroughly unsurprising. Deborah MacLatchy has decided to inform us about some elusive “independent fact-finder report” (invisible to us commoners) seemingly created to entertain the alt-right’s favourite weapons “do non-binary people really exist?” and “cis people need a safer space too”. The MacLatchy administration has, once again, made it blatantly clear that Wilfrid Laurier University is not safe for their students nor the surrounding community. For shame.

No, Deborah. Showcasing blatant transphobia is not a “reasonable classroom teaching tool”. You wouldn’t showcase Peterson’s blatant misogyny- would you? Would you showcase it if it was aired on TVO? Your followers think that you would.

No, Deborah. You don’t do enough to ensure that your school has “necessary supports and tools to help those who have experienced marginalization and discrimination to engage fully”. Should you have had a postering campaign demanding an apology for trans students? Should the victim’s complaint been registered through unofficial channels? Your followers think that you should.

No, Deborah. We absolutely refuse to “turn the page on a very unfortunate incident”. We absolutely refuse to let you call trampling on our existence the “politicization of an issue”. We absolutely refuse to let you admonish us with your call to “put an end to it.”

Your followers, the far-right, aren’t going to stop. Your centrism will continue to cater to them. You’ve made it clear that our community must defend itself, and we absolutely refuse to take this sitting down.

What does any of that have to do with the IWW? Or capitalism?

A post December 25:

For all my trans and nonbinary siblings out there at holiday gatherings today, I hope it goes as smoothly as possible. For all the individuals whose pronouns won’t be respected or names will be ignored, chin up and try to stay strong. For everyone whose families might treat them with intolerance or bigotry, know that I love you, and that your worth isn’t determined by them. For anyone who can’t present the way they want to today, I hope that you get through it as quickly as possible, and maybe you can wear something that at least feels not whollly uncomfortable. For the people out there wearing binders, remember to stretch as you eat, your binder can get tight as your stomach fills up. For the transfem people out there who can’t shave or wear makeup today, you are still beautiful, you are always beautiful. And for the people who don’t have a family or place to go today, I hope you can find some safety and comfort.

What does that have to do with the IWW?

I don’t know, it seems to be a very small group; I wouldn’t have been aware of it if Lindsay Shepherd hadn’t tweeted it; maybe it’s just one person dressed up as a group. But I do wonder why the IWW is being arbitrarily attached to this touchy-feely gender idennidee stuff, especially when actual labor issues don’t seem to get a mention at all. It makes me wonder if there’s a fashion for co-opting labor and socialist groups to promote gender idennidee instead.

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A clinical study of a man in severe cognitive decline

Dec 29th, 2017 4:12 pm | By

Charles Pierce at Esquire writes that Trump’s conversation with the Times reporter shows that he (Trump) is falling off a cognitive cliff.

In my view, the interview is a clinical study of a man in severe cognitive decline, if not the early stages of outright dementia.

Over the past 30 years, I’ve seen my father and all of his siblings slide into the shadows and fog of Alzheimer’s Disease. (the president’s father developed Alzheimer’s in his 80s.) In 1984, Ronald Reagan debated Walter Mondale in Louisville and plainly had no idea where he was. (Would that someone on the panel had asked him. He’d have been stumped.) Not long afterwards, I was interviewing a prominent Alzheimer’s researcher for a book I was doing, and he said, “I saw the look on his face that I see every day in my clinic.” In the transcript of this interview, I hear in the president*’s words my late aunt’s story about how we all walked home from church in the snow one Christmas morning, an event I don’t recall, but that she remembered so vividly that she told the story every time I saw her for the last three years of her life.

Trump’s obsessive repetition does seem very Alzheimer’s like, and so do some of his blurts of incoherence.

In this interview, the president* is only intermittently coherent. He talks in semi-sentences and is always groping for something that sounds familiar, even if it makes no sense whatsoever and even if it blatantly contradicts something he said two minutes earlier. To my ears, anyway, this is more than the president*’s well-known allergy to the truth. This is a classic coping mechanism employed when language skills are coming apart.

An apparent hope that speed and momentum can conceal the confusion and missing pieces.

There’s a lively discussion on the Esquire Politics page on Facebook. One comment is particularly grim:

Cognitive decline on top of pathological narcissism is extremely dangerous. As a clinician (retired) who specialized in personality disorders, it is obvious to me that Trump’s narcissism is extreme and when he implodes, he will lash out violently which is probably what the rest of the world is worried about. Cognitive decline will only accelerate his lashing out as he will have diminished ability to control his impulses. Simply put, we haven’t seen anything yet in terms of this man’s potential destructiveness.

Like General Jack D. Ripper only a lot worse.

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Guest post: A weird bit of cultural judo

Dec 29th, 2017 1:00 pm | By

Originally a comment by Patrick on Something as simple as holding a purse.

It’s both. The real cultural “masculine ideal” is to be so clearly manly that you can wear a pink shirt or carry a purse without anyone blinking because your masculine dignity or whatever is so strong that not even a purse would cause anyone to question you. See Dwayne Johnson for reference. He can wear a pink shirt or a tutu or whatever and it’s fine because his masculinity is unassailable. The culturally ideal move for a guy asked to hold a purse or buy tampons or whatever is to simply do so with a bearing that makes it clear that nothing funny or embarrassing is happening- obviously you are doing these things on behalf of a woman or female child, because you are a gentleman.

Image result for dwayne johnson

It’s a weird bit of cultural judo. The embarrassing (because people will make fun of you and say it’s your purse or whatever) transforms into a point of masculine superiority (because you have so much more masculine dignity than anyone who would play childish games by teasing you in that manner, with a subtext of “the fact that I’m holding a girly purse proves my masculinity by evidencing that I have attracted and obtained a woman”).

Masculinity is dumb and a lot of work and particularly annoying because being above it (not caring) looks exactly like being really into it (pretending you’re too cool to care). And by the time you figure out you shouldn’t care you’ve probably internalized a bunch of stuff. I don’t dress like the whisky guys but you would definitely find that aesthetic in my wardrobe and chosen accessories (real leather, real wool, dark colors, etc). Do I like that because I like it or because I was programmed to like it? Oops! That’s not a valid distinction.

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Fore!

Dec 29th, 2017 12:44 pm | By

This is a small thing, but telling.

Photo and video crews were stymied in their attempts to film President Trump on a golf course Wednesday, an apparent response to CNN’s recent footage of the commander-in-chief on the links.

As the president completed another round at Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Florida, a large white truck obscured nearby journalists — who were positioned on public property — from getting a shot of Trump on their cameras.

When CNN’s photojournalist moved his camera, the truck likewise moved, blocking the picture.

On Tuesday, CNN recorded a shot of the president on the course in West Palm Beach. The network did the same on Saturday and Sunday, shooting the footage through a gap in the hedges while positioned on a public sidewalk.

The Secret Service said it wasn’t the Secret Service. The Palm Beach County sheriff’s office said it wasn’t the Palm Beach County sheriff’s office. “A White House spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment” – and I’m betting the White House spokesperson did not respond in the fullness of time, either. I think we get to conclude that it was Trump’s gang who shielded his golfing self from view.

Wednesday’s outing marked the 87th day Trump has spent at one of his golf properties since taking office.

87 out of about 240 – so more than a third.

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265 paychecks

Dec 29th, 2017 12:30 pm | By

In the least surprising news of the day:

It pays to be a chief executive officer in the United States, according to a new report revealing that the pay gap between U.S. CEOs and their employees is larger than in any other country.

The report may be new, but I’m pretty sure the finding is not. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen it before, more than once, because we’ve been arranging things this way for a long time.

The U.S. CEOs of the top publicly traded companies came in first on Bloomberg’s 2017 ranking of Global CEO Pay-to-Average Income ratio. According to the analysis, CEOs in the U.S. averaged $14.3 million in annual pay, making 265 times more than their average worker.

The analysis examined benchmark stock indexes across 22 nations. China and Norway ranked at the bottom of the list. Norway had the smallest pay gap with CEOs making $1.28 million compared to the income of its average worker at $64,346, an income “roughly equal to the income generated by 20 people,” according to Bloomberg.

This is not a stat to be proud of.

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Can we handle the truth?

Dec 29th, 2017 12:09 pm | By

With all its faults, Twitter can produce interesting conversations, like this one in which a lot of people press Maggie Haberman on the question of why the Times does such softball interviews with Trump, why Times reporters don’t ask for detail or source or evidence when Trump makes a wild claim, why they simply transcribe instead of interviewing.

As at least one person rejoined, it’s funny that she frames the cross-examination in A Few Good Men that way, because what happens there is that the cross-examination elicits the truth. Do we not want that to happen in press interviews with Trump?

https://twitter.com/ezlusztig/status/946589679004061696

https://twitter.com/neeratanden/status/946592144025882624

https://twitter.com/aravosis/status/946593143943778304

That’s the one I was thinking of.

https://twitter.com/EvaChanda/status/946608860671901696

And so on.

I sort of get the claim that he exposes himself the best, but I also think he should be treated like any other president, and asked grown-up questions.

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Hangin’ with Don

Dec 29th, 2017 10:42 am | By

So yesterday a couple of New York Times reporters were hanging around Mar-a-Lago and Donald “president” Trump finished lunch and sat down to chat with them. He was as modest, cogent, and informed as ever.

During an impromptu 30-minute interview with The New York Times at his golf club in West Palm Beach, the president did not demand an end to the Russia investigations swirling around his administration, but insisted 16 times that there has been “no collusion” discovered by the inquiry.

“It makes the country look very bad, and it puts the country in a very bad position,” Mr. Trump said of the investigation. “So the sooner it’s worked out, the better it is for the country.”

Hm. Interesting take. From where I sit it’s not the investigation that makes us look bad, it’s Trump that makes us look bad. Isn’t perspective fascinating.

Asked whether he would order the Justice Department to reopen the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails, Mr. Trump appeared to remain focused on the Russia investigation.

“I have absolute right to do what I want to do with the Justice Department,” he said, echoing claims by his supporters that as president he has the power to open or end an investigation. “But for purposes of hopefully thinking I’m going to be treated fairly, I’ve stayed uninvolved with this particular matter.”

Having “the power” to do something is one thing, and having an “absolute right” to do it is another. Trump thinks like a dictator – like, precisely, an absolutist. He does that because he’s a bossy bullying authoritarian asshole, but he also does it because he’s stupid and simple-minded. He translates everything into the simpler, cruder terms that he can understand, and spits it back out in this trumpified version. It takes a very childish mind to announce to the world “I have the absolute right to do what I want to do with the Justice Department,” especially when the subject is his own alleged wrongdoing.

He chatted a little about how furious he is with China and how he’s not going to sit with them at the lunch table any more.

Despite saying that when he visited China in November, President Xi Jinping “treated me better than anybody’s ever been treated in the history of China,” Mr. Trump said that “they have to help us much more.”

I wonder how much Trump knows about how other people have been treated “in the history of China.” My guess would be that the answer is Nothing.

Mr. Trump gave the interview in the Grill Room at Trump International Golf Club after he ate lunch with his playing partners, including his son Eric and the pro golfer Jim Herman. No aides were present for the interview, and the president sat alone with a New York Times reporter at a large round table as club members chatted and ate lunch nearby.

In other words…”well that was weird.”

Mr. Trump disputed reports that suggested he does not have a detailed understanding of legislation, saying, “I know the details of taxes better than anybody. Better than the greatest C.P.A. I know the details of health care better than most, better than most.”

Later, he added that he knows more about “the big bills” debated in the Congress “than any president that’s ever been in office.”

Then he said he has the biggest penis that’s ever been measured, and that he can fly, and that he knows how to shoot flames out of his nostrils.

Mr. Trump said he believes members of the news media will eventually cover him more favorably because they are profiting from the interest in his presidency and thus will want him re-elected.

“Another reason that I’m going to win another four years is because newspapers, television, all forms of media will tank if I’m not there because without me, their ratings are going down the tubes,” Mr. Trump said, then invoked one of his preferred insults. “Without me, The New York Times will indeed be not the failing New York Times, but the failed New York Times.”

He added: “So they basically have to let me win. And eventually, probably six months before the election, they’ll be loving me because they’re saying, ‘Please, please, don’t lose Donald Trump.’ O.K.”

Yes, it’s all about the ratings.

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That good old Global Warming

Dec 29th, 2017 10:06 am | By

Trump decided to remind us again how stupid and uninformed he is. (Does he think we don’t realize?)

As severe cold and record amounts of snow swept across the US east coast, Trump wrote on Twitter that his people “could use a little bit of that good old Global Warming that our Country, but not other countries, was going to pay TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS to protect against”.

“Bundle up!” he added.

The president was reheating two favourite tropes: the conflation of weather with climate to pour scepticism on global warming, and the supposed cost to the American taxpayer of the Paris climate accord, from which he has confirmed the US will withdraw.

Bundle up.

On Friday, Anthony Leiserowitz, director of Yale University’s project on climate change communication, said Trump’s tweet was “scientifically ridiculous and demonstrably false”.

“There is a fundamental difference in scale between what weather is and what climate is,” he said. “What’s going on in one small corner of the world at a given moment does not reflect what’s going on with the planet.”

Oh now come on. You can’t expect Trump to understand words like “demonstrably” and “scale” and “planet.”

Matthew England, a climate scientist from the University of New South Wales, called Trump’s comment “an ignorant misconception of the way the earth’s climate works”.

“Nobody ever said winter would go away under global warming, but winter has become much milder and the record cold days are being far outnumbered by record warm days and heat extremes,” he said. “Climate change is not overturned by a few unusually cold days in the US.”

It is if you’re the president of the Yoonited States.

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Guest post: The needs of the heartland

Dec 28th, 2017 5:18 pm | By

Originally a comment by iknklast on Maybe it’s time for Vanity Fair to do one.

Vanity Fair, which looks like it is on its last legs

That’s the same thing he says about every news source he doesn’t like – looks like it is on its last legs. He has no imagination, no creativity, no ability to hold enough phrases in his head to even say anything that isn’t a repeat of what he’s said dozens of times before.

And I wish everyone would shut the hell up about Hillary and focus on what we need to focus on – Donald J. Trump, toddler-in-chief. I am sick of hearing pundits who have never been to the midwest for any reasonable length of time, and mostly drive/fly through (where they are greeted with smiles by polite people who seem nice), but think they can parse the election by accusing her of ignoring the heartland and their needs.

The needs of the heartland are the same as the rest of the country – they need jobs, income, health care, child care, food, clothing, housing, affordable education – all the things that Hillary and Bernie both focused on. She ignored the wants of the heartland – criminalizing abortion, forcing everyone to read the Bible/pray in the schools, keep them furriners out of our country, and re-criminalize same sex orientation. While their at it, they want to force women to take up knitting and quilting as a hobby (see, Vanity Fair? You’re right with the picture here in the hate-filled heartland!), cook and clean, and be “feminine” (i.e. frilly and attractive until they are 30, and then disappear from view into the kitchen, known to exist only by the steady stream of yummy things that emanate from within).

As for Sarah Sanders, her New Years resolution should be to stop lying for money.

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