10. That said, pro-Islamic State channels on Telegram are hungrily sharing updates on their supposed "brother." See below: pic.twitter.com/vd5f1eZ66R

— Rukmini Callimachi (@rcallimachi) October 31, 2017

The crying with laughter emojis are nice.

The Times reports:

Eight people were killed when a man drove 20 blocks down a bike path beside the Hudson River in Lower Manhattan on Tuesday afternoon before he crashed his pickup truck, jumped out with fake guns and was shot by police officers, the authorities said.

Federal authorities were treating the incident as a terrorist attack and were taking the lead in the investigation, a senior law enforcement official said. Two law enforcement officials said that after the attacker got out of the truck, he was heard yelling, “Allahu Akbar.”

Mayor Bill de Blasio said at a news conference: “Based on information we have at this moment, this was an act of terror, and a particularly cowardly act of terror aimed at innocent civilians.”

Two law enforcement officials said the driver of the truck, a 29-year-old man who came to the United States in 2010, was in grave condition. One official said he had rented the truck in New Jersey.

He’s dead now.*

The motorist, driving south down the path in a Home Depot rental truck, hit numerous people as nearby Stuyvesant High School was letting out for the day, officials said. At least 15 people were injured, but officials were still working to assess the extent of the casualties.

Sarah Sanders wants us to stop saying slavery was wrong.

During a White House news briefing on Tuesday, Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders defended Chief of Staff John Kelly’s praise of Robert E. Lee and remarks about how “the lack of an ability to compromise led to the Civil War,” not the Confederacy’s refusal to abolish slavery.

“Look, all of our leaders have flaws — Washington, Jefferson, JFK, Roosevelt, Kennedy — that doesn’t diminish their contributions to our country, and it certainly can’t erase them from our history,” she said. “And General Kelly was simply making the point that just because history isn’t perfect doesn’t mean it’s not our history.”

No, he was not. He said what he said and not some other thing. He did not say “Just because history isn’t perfect doesn’t mean it’s not our history.”

“And to try to create something and push a narrative that simple doesn’t exist is just frankly outrageous and absurd,” Sanders continued. “I think the fact that we keep trying to drive, the media continues to want to make this and push that this is some sort of a racially charged and divided White House — frankly the only people I see stoking political racism right now are the people in the groups that are running ads like the one you saw take place in Virginia earlier this week. That’s the type of thing that I think really is a problem, and I think it is absurd and disgraceful to keep trying to make comments and take them out of context and mean something they simply don’t.”

Well…she’s not the smartest person in the world. Maybe she really doesn’t grasp that saying the confederacy was acting in good faith and according to its conscience is a gross sanitization of why the South seceded. Maybe she really doesn’t, but then she shouldn’t be in that job.

The latest Civil War-related controversy to envelope the White House was not, however, a media invention. Kelly went out of his way to praise Lee and the Confederacy during an interview on the debut edition of Laura Ingraham’s new Fox News show Monday night. Kelly was responding to a question about the removal of Confederate plaques.

Lee “was a man that gave up his country to fight for his state, which 150 years ago was more important than country. It was always loyalty to state first back in those days,” Kelly said. “But the lack of an ability to compromise led to the Civil War, and men and women of good faith on both sides made their stand where their conscience had them make their stand.”

At no point did Kelly mention the role that the South’s determination to preserve the institution of slavery play in sparking the Civil War. Nor did Sanders mention it on Tuesday. As she left the podium, a reporter repeatedly tried to ask her, “Does this administration believe slavery was wrong?” Sanders didn’t answer.

The reporter in question is April Ryan, of “are they friends of yours?” fame. She’s tweeting about it now…saying she’s still waiting for an answer.

This again.

We older women (I’m much older than JHB) have a way with words and a look. ‘Punch you in the face’ covers it Women are not wilting wimps! https://t.co/PLU8blt2Av

— Rt Hon Nadine Dorries (@NadineDorries) October 31, 2017

Oh please. It’s not always that easy, to put it mildly.

Plus people shouldn’t have to “have a way” to deal with various forms of personal interference. We don’t expect to be pushed and slapped and jostled in the street if we happen not to look ferocious for a second. We expect ordinary everyday respect for boundaries. It’s not everyone’s responsibility to scare off attackers, it’s everyone’s responsibility not to be an attacker.

Perhaps you could follow every intimidated, nervous junior member of staff who is terrified of losing her job saying that for her.

— Rebecca Reid (@RebeccaCNReid) October 31, 2017

Do you realise in saying that you are ‘not the type to be messed with’ you are saying those who do suffer are weak & somehow responsible?

— Marie Donn (@Marie_Donn) October 31, 2017

https://twitter.com/SimonAttwood/status/925299415627325440

It’s fine to be tough and strong and not a pushover but it’s also fine not to be any of those things. The onus is on the aggressor, not the person aggressed.

Not very complicated, is it.

So the White House chief of staff is a fan of the Southern secessionist defenders of slavery.

Kelly was interviewed on Fox last night and delivered this pile of crap.

Kelly was asked about the decision of a church in Alexandria to remove plaques honoring George Washington and Robert E. Lee.

“I would tell you that Robert E. Lee was an honorable man,” Kelly said. “He was a man that gave up his country to fight for his state, which 150 years ago was more important than country. It was always loyalty to state first back in those days. Now it’s different today. But the lack of an ability to compromise led to the Civil War, and men and women of good faith on both sides made their stand where their conscience had them make their stand.”

Men and women of good faith; their conscience.

It’s just rhetoric to put the label “good faith” on a military defense of the custom of holding people captive and forcing them to do hard labor for life. Sure, no doubt many of them had persuaded themselves there was nothing morally wrong with that at all, and in that very limited sense they were acting in “good faith,” but so what? People can convince themselves of anything.

And it’s a perversion to say their “conscience” had them violently defend slavery. Slavery is not morally defensible, so violently defending it is not a matter of “conscience.”

“That statement could have been given by [former Confederate general] Jubal Early in 1880,” said Stephanie McCurry, professor of history at Columbia University and author of “Confederate Reckoning: Politics and Power in the Civil War South.”

“What’s so strange about this statement is how closely it tracks or resembles the view of the Civil War that the South had finally got the nation to embrace by the early 20th century,” she said. “It’s the Jim Crow version of the causes of the Civil War. I mean, it tracks all of the major talking points of this pro-Confederate view of the Civil War.”

And he’s a general and the president’s chief of staff – he should have a much better grasp of US history than that.

Kelly makes several points. That Lee was honorable. That fighting for state was more important than fighting for country. That a lack of compromise led to the war. That good people on both sides were fighting for conscientious reasons. Both McCurry and David Blight, professor of history at Yale University and author of “Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory,” broadly reject all of these arguments.

“This is profound ignorance, that’s what one has to say first, at least of pretty basic things about the American historical narrative,” Blight said. “I mean, it’s one thing to hear it from Trump who, let’s be honest, just really doesn’t know any history and has demonstrated it over and over and over. But Gen. Kelly has a long history in the American military.”

Exactly. In his jobs, he should know better.

Blight described Kelly’s argument in similar terms as McCurry — an “old reconciliationist narrative” about the Civil War that, in the last half-century or so has “just been exploded” by historical research since.

The idea that compromise might have been possible was rejected out of hand by both McCurry and Blight.

“It was not about slavery, it was about honorable men fighting for honorable causes?” McCurry said. “Well, what was the cause? . . . In 1861, they were very clear on what the causes of the war were. The reason there was no compromise possible was that people in the country could not agree over the wisdom of the continued and expanding enslavement of millions of African Americans.”

There’s also a sickening pseudo-Romantic story in the background.

Kelly’s framework is “also rooted, frankly, in a Lost Cause mentality that swept over American culture in the wake of the war, swept over Northerners,” Blight said, “this idea that good and honorable men of the South were pushed aside and exploited by the ‘fanatical’ — ironically — first Republican Party.”

You can see that dopy story in the way Gone With the Wind was filmed, in 19fucking39.

Both historians, though, held particular disdain for the idea that putting state over nation was the essence of the fight.

“My God, where does he get that from?” Blight asked. “That denies the very reason to be, the essential reason for the existence of the original Republican Party, which formed in the 1850s to stop the expansion of slavery and ended up developing a political ideology that threatened the South because they really were going to cordon off slavery.”

…

“It’s just so absurd,” Blight said. “It’s just so sad. It’s just so disappointing that generations of history have been written to explode all of this and yet millions of people — serious people; experienced, serious people and now people with tremendous power — have grown up believing all this.”

Absurd and sad and worse, because of the tremendous power. Kelly repeated his absolute refusal to apologize for his vicious lies about Representative Wilson.

There was, however, a small silver lining.

“This Trump-era ignorance and misuse of history is forcing historians — and I think this is a good thing — to use words like ‘truth’ and ‘right or wrong,’ ” Blight said. “In the academy we get very caught up in relativism and whether we can be objective and so on, and that’s a real argument.”

“But there are some things that are just not true,” he said. “And we’ve got to point that out.”

Ahahaha…why truth matters. Yes indeed.

Originally a comment by Bruce Gorton on Easier than persuading the laws of physics to change their minds.

You can in fact have both a growing economy and good environmental standards.

The thing about the economy that a lot of people miss is that a strong economy is basically everyone, not just the richest chunk of it. If you have to pay people to properly maintain your factory – that money isn’t vanishing into a void, it is going into their pockets where it will then be spent on the stuff that they need.

Not only that but regulation creates those jobs, and creates sub-industries which otherwise wouldn’t exist. For example, with mining, what happens when the mine runs out? Well in a well regulated country the mine has to fund land recovery – which requires people to do it.

Which means that in an area where a mine has run out of whatever was being mined environmental regulation provides for at least some continued employment – generally at a cost to people who would otherwise not spend the money as effectively.

The main motive for investment is to turn a profit. If you have a situation where there is no redistribution of wealth from the rich to the poor, over time the demand for goods will drop as the money pools in the hands of the rich (Because there is only a certain amount of stuff one person can want), which means you will get a corporate emphasis on cost cutting rather than growth because there is no room for that growth.

Which in turn means that there will be even less demand for goods as people lose their jobs and supply is constrained to cut those costs further, which in turn means that all of the investment the American right talks about isn’t going to happen because there is no demand, and thus the best potential for growth is – sticking your money in a bank account.

The net cost to the economy for regulation is pretty much nothing, and generally it works out at a profit. The net cost for de-regulation however?

That is when you end up with money going stagnant, essentially taken out of the system. Not only that, but a lot of regulation is basically designed to reduce cross contagion from bad business practices.

One business going under can have a domino effect where multiple industries collapse, bankruptcies screw the supplied and the supplier, and what causes bankruptcies in America?

Health issues mostly – and those are made much worse by poor environmental regulations. Hurricanes and fires are also not good.

The very basis of Republican economic thought is a complete clusterfuck which undermines economic growth, in favour of growing the bank accounts of the rich. Having people becoming too rich is a symptom of a sick economy, because that means money is going stagnant.

Money needs to constantly change hands for the economy to grow, at least if what you care about is the actual economy rather than the bank accounts of like eight people. Regulation is thus largely a good thing on a macro-economic level.

Susan Hennessey and Benjamin Wittes do a quick summing up:

The first big takeaway from Monday morning’s flurry of charging and plea documents with respect to Paul Manafort Jr., Richard Gates III and George Papadopoulos is this: The president of the United States had as his campaign chairman a man who had allegedly served for years as an unregistered foreign agent for a puppet government of Vladimir Putin, a man who was allegedly laundering remarkable sums of money even while running the now-president’s campaign, a man who allegedly lied about all of this to the FBI and the Justice Department.

The second big takeaway is even starker: A member of President Trump’s campaign team admits that he was working with people he knew to be tied to the Russian government to “arrange a meeting between the Campaign and the Russian government officials” and to obtain “dirt” on Hillary Clinton in the form of thousands of hacked emails—and that he lied about these activities to the FBI. He briefed President Trump on at least some of them.

…

President Trump, in short, had on his campaign at least one person, and allegedly two people, who actively worked with adversarial foreign governments in a fashion they sought to criminally conceal from investigators. One of them ran the campaign. The other, meanwhile, was interfacing with people he “understood to have substantial connections to Russian government officials” and with a person introduced to him as “a relative of Russian President Vladimir Putin with connections to senior Russian government officials.” All of this while President Trump was assuring the American people that he and his campaign had “nothing to do with Russia.”

It looks bad, doesn’t it. Shady.

Mueller’s opening bid is a remarkable show of strength. He has a cooperating witness from inside the campaign’s interactions with the Russians. And he is alleging not mere technical infractions of law but astonishing criminality on the part of Trump’s campaign manager, a man who also attended the Trump Tower meeting.

Any hope the White House may have had that the Mueller investigation might be fading away vanished Monday morning. Things are only going to get worse from here.

Which could mean that larger things will eventually get better.

But now that we’re talking about Emmett Till…I missed the news last January that Carolyn Bryant Donham admitted that most of what she testified about Till was false. It was a week after Trump’s inauguration and I was a little preoccupied.

The woman, Carolyn Bryant Donham, spoke to Timothy B. Tyson, a Duke University professor — possibly the only interview she has given to a historian or journalist since shortly after the episode — who has written a book, “The Blood of Emmett Till,” to be published next week.

In it, he wrote that she said of her long-ago allegations that Emmett grabbed her and was menacing and sexually crude toward her, “that part is not true.”

…

Emmett, who lived in Chicago, was visiting relatives in Money, a tiny hamlet in the Mississippi Delta region when, on Aug. 24, 1955, he went into a store owned by Roy and Carolyn Bryant, a married couple, and had his fateful encounter with Ms. Bryant, then 21.

Four days later, he was kidnapped from his uncle’s house, beaten and tortured beyond recognition, and shot in the head. His body was tied with barbed wire to a cotton gin fan and thrown into the Tallahatchie River.

Roy Bryant and his half brother, J. W. Milam, were arrested and charged with murder.

What happened in that store is unclear, but it has usually been portrayed as an example of a black boy from up North unwittingly defying the strict racial mores of the South at the time. Witnesses said that Emmett wolf-whistled at Ms. Bryant, though even that has been called into doubt.

Days after the arrest, Ms. Bryant told her husband’s lawyer that Emmett had insulted her, but said nothing about physical contact, Dr. Tyson said. Five decades later, she told the F.B.I. that he had touched her hand.

But at the trial, she testified — without the jury present — that Emmett had grabbed her hand, she pulled away, and he followed her behind the counter, clasped her waist, and, using vulgar language, told her that he had been with white women before.

“She said that wasn’t true, but that she honestly doesn’t remember exactly what did happen,” Dr. Tyson said in an interview on Friday.

Now here’s a surprise – she told Dyson that Roy Bryant abused her. Who would have thought that a guy who could torture and murder a teenage boy would also abuse his wife?

Dr. Tyson said that in 2008, he got a call from Ms. Donham’s daughter-in-law, who said they had liked another book of his, and wanted to meet him.

It was in that meeting that she spoke to him about the Till case, saying, “Nothing that boy did could ever justify what happened to him.”

Dr. Tyson said that motivated him to write about the case.

Ms. Donham told him that soon after the killing, her husband’s family hid her away, moving her from place to place for days, to keep her from talking to law enforcement.

She has said that Roy Bryant, whom she later divorced, was physically abusive to her.

“The circumstances under which she told the story were coercive,” Dr. Tyson said. “She’s horrified by it. There’s clearly a great burden of guilt and sorrow.”

A nightmare all around.

Times headline:

Trump, Responding to Manafort Indictment, Says Democrats Should Be Focus of Inquiry

A few tweets:

MSNBC: Manafort indicted
CNN: Manafort indicted
Fox: Are feet shoes

— Jazz. (@LeaderoftheNew) October 30, 2017

https://twitter.com/PalmerReport/status/925030233811668993

Oh, it’s Princess Ivanka’s birthday? Sad.

Paul Manafort just agreed to turn himself in to the FBI. What should we report on?
CNN: Manafort
MSNBC: Manafort
Fox News: Hamburger emoji pic.twitter.com/Wjsvkb2coW

— Roberto Aram Ferdman (@robferdman) October 30, 2017

How the Manafort news is playing on Fox right now pic.twitter.com/vSYsVQ3oED

— Jonathan Cohn (@CitizenCohn) October 30, 2017

Now. Manafort has been indicted.

President Trump’s campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, was indicted Monday on charges that he funneled millions of dollars through overseas shell companies and used the money to buy luxury cars, real estate, antiques and expensive suits.

The charges against Mr. Manafort and his longtime associate Rick Gates represent a significant escalation in a special counsel investigation that has cast a shadow over Mr. Trump’s first year in office.

Separately, one of the early foreign policy advisers to Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign, George Papadopoulos, pleaded guilty to lying to the F.B.I. about a contact with a Russian professor with ties to Kremlin officials, prosecutors said on Monday.

Separately. Separate investigation? We’re going to have our work cut out keeping track of all this, aren’t we.

The indictment of Mr. Manafort and Mr. Gates makes no mention of Mr. Trump or election meddling. Instead, it describes in granular detail Mr. Manafort’s lobbying work in Ukraine and what prosecutors said was a scheme to hide that money from tax collectors and the public. The authorities said Mr. Manafort laundered more than $18 million.

“Manafort used his hidden overseas wealth to enjoy a lavish lifestyle in the United States without paying taxes on that income,” the indictment reads.

Mr. Gates is accused of transferring more than $3 million from offshore accounts. The two are also charged with making false statements.

Speaking of Corinthian Colleges…the Post reported last year:

Nearly 80,000 students of defunct for-profit giant Corinthian Colleges are facing some form of debt collection, even though the U.S. Department of Education unearthed enough evidence of fraud to forgive their student loans, according to an investigation by the staff of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.).

Before it shut down last year, Corinthian, which ran Everest Institute, Wyotech and Heald College, became an example of the worst practices in the for-profit education sector, including high loan defaults and dubious programs. Amid allegations of deceptive marketing and lying to the government about its graduation rates, Corinthian lost its access to federal funds in 2014, forcing the company to sell or close its schools.

If its marketing is deceptive, then it should be giving refunds, not setting collection agencies on students.

On Thursday, Warren sent a letter urging Education Secretary John B. King Jr. to provide the immediate debt relief that Corinthian students are entitled to under federal law. The department has broad authority to cancel federal student loans when colleges violate students’ rights and state law, exactly what education officials accused Corinthian of doing. Yet the agency continues to collect on debt owed by tens of thousands of people eligible for forgiveness.

That was September 2016, so it was Obama’s Education Secretary, not Trump’s.

“It is unconscionable that instead of helping these borrowers, vast numbers of Corinthian victims are currently being hounded by the department’s debt collectors — many having their credit slammed, their tax refunds seized, their Social Security and Earned Income Tax Credit payments reduced, or wages garnished — all to pay fraudulent debts,” Warren wrote to King.

…

All of those borrowers attended Corinthian when education officials discovered the school committed widespread fraud by lying about its job placement rates, making a clear case for their loans to be discharged under a process known as borrower defense to repayment, Warren said. Anyone who can show a school used illegal or deceptive tactics to persuade them to borrow money for college can file a defense claim. Just 23,185 former Corinthian students had filed claims as of June, and just 3,787 of them have been approved.

And the rest? Still being fleeced.

The right-wingers are stepping up efforts to suppress the Mueller investigation.

Shortly before a federal grand jury reportedly filed the first charges in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election, conservatives were renewing their calls for the attorney to resign.

Mueller, who is leading the Justice Department’s investigation as special prosecutor, is a former FBI director, which critics say creates a conflict of interest in the case.

Puerto Rico is telling Whitefish it’s all over between them.

The Puerto Rico electric power company said Sunday that it is canceling a controversial $300 million contract it had signed with a small Montana-based company and tasked with a central role in repairing the territory’s hurricane-ravaged electric grid.

The move came after Gov. Ricardo Rosselló said the contract was a distraction and should be canceled after critics in the electric power industry, Congress and the Federal Emergency Management Agency raised questions about whether the company, Whitefish Energy, was well equipped to respond to the hurricane damage.

And whether it got the contract because of cronyism, or worse.

Whitefish Energy, which had just two employees the day Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico, now has about 325 people working on restringing transmission lines, clearing debris and erecting fallen poles. It has been working under contract with PREPA.

Whitefish, Mont[ana] is the home of Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, although the company said he played no role in securing the business. One of Zinke’s sons worked for Whitefish Energy over the summer.

But it’s sheer coincidence that Whitefish Energy with its two employees got the contract. Ok…..

The company’s chief executive, Andrew Techmanski, has extensive experience in the electric transmission business, but the company has focused mostly on unsuccessfully trying to set up a plant to manufacture transformers. It has also received small grants from the Energy Department. It is backed by HBC Investments’ partners fund, a Dallas-based private equity firm whose members have a long record of financial support for the Republican Party.

But they were the obvious choice for the job because…erm………

Many people in the utility business had said that PREPA would have been better off tapping into the well-established networks of utilities that have formed mutual aid groups expressly for the purpose of emergency relief.

In addition, many in the industry have suggested that Whitefish Energy’s pay scales — as high as $462 an hour — were much higher than is typical even in an emergency such as the one facing Puerto Rico. The contract rates included costs, administrative expenses and profits for Whitefish.

While the conditions in Puerto Rico are difficult and lineman work is dangerous, there are companies and agencies seeking to do the work for substantially less, according to people familiar with figures from four companies from the mainland.

The Army Corps is doing essentially the same work as Whitefish in Puerto Rico and has been offering to pay as much as $195.04 an hour for a journeyman lineman and $230.32 an hour for a general foreman, according to a document provided to The Post.

The average rate for a lineman who helped restore electric power to Florida residents after Hurricane Irma hit there was $165 per hour — and that included some high-priced crews from the Northeast. Five local firms charged $116 per hour, said a source familiar with the rates.

But Whitefish was a better choice because…errrm………

The Whitefish Energy contract also had a clause that said that the pay rates and other terms of the agreement could not be audited or reviewed by FEMA, the commonwealth, the comptroller general or PREPA.

Fun clause! And not at all hinky.

The contract also required that PREPA, before signing, had confirmed that FEMA had reviewed and approved the agreement to ensure that money spent would “qualify for funding from FEMA.”

FEMA said Friday that it had not approved the Whitefish Energy agreement.

Errrmmmm……….

“Based on initial review and information from Prepa, FEMA has significant concerns with how Prepa procured this contract and has not confirmed whether the contract prices are reasonable,” the agency said in a statement.

See? All totally legit and above board.