For the Record: D'Souza as academic historian, Shapiro as historical hallucinogen

I know everybody's seen this picture, but I can't get over it: the evil, violent criminals invading our country, as Trump sees them, fleeing from tear gas. Photo by Kim Kyung-hoon/Reuters, via NBC.

One of the more fun D'Souza owns, short and sweet:

Woodward clearly never read more than 10 pages of Illiberal Education. He endorsed it on purely ideological grounds, and as John Hope Franklin said it was reprehensible. When Eugene Genovese turned right he also crossed the line from history to propaganda https://t.co/kccrD38bXR

— Yasterisk (@Yastreblyansky) November 26, 2018

And what George Fredrickson said about you? That he hasn't read your book but probably disagrees with one of the points. https://t.co/1NdLy9ReVp Kindly explain how that constitutes praise. pic.twitter.com/0tDCtNSDgj

— Yasterisk (@Yastreblyansky) November 26, 2018

Finally, nobody criticizes you for not being an academic historian, but for doing terrible, shoddy, ideologically distorted, historically illiterate work and being completely unaware of the rules academic and gifted amateur historians follow.

— Yasterisk (@Yastreblyansky) November 26, 2018

And below the fold, an exhausting encounter with a troll and with reference to this:

For the Record: Warren

I was a little perplexed and saddened by this, from the Cherokee Nation to the world, on the subject of Senator Warren's response to the Trumpian challenge ("If a DNA test shows you're an Indian I'll give a million dollars to the charity of your choice), but I figured it couldn't be helped.

It's a valid point the tribal leadership is entitled to make, but it's not helpful, as you say. She was more or less forced to do something like this by Republican ratfucking. The way Obama was forced to indignity of showing the birth certificate as if Trump questions were legit.

— YasGHOUL's Farm (@Yastreblyansky) October 15, 2018

Though not everyone agreed, and that made me kind of sad for a while:

State of the Kavanaugh, continued

Emily Bazelon and Ben Protess for The New York Times have the skinny on Kavanaugh's bar fight, which Chad Ludington,  one of Kavanaugh's Yale basketball teammates, has been trying to convey to the FBI: it was ice, not beer, that Kav threw on his antagonist, and somebody else seems to have done something to rip up the guy's ear and send him to the hospital, though the person who was arrested for this offense continued to deny it:

Mr. Dudley denied the accusation, according to the report. For his part, speaking to the officers, Mr. Kavanaugh did not want “to say if he threw the ice or not,” the police report said.

That's the Brett we know, already refusing to answer questions about his inappropriate or criminal behavior, at such an early age. I wonder if he asked the cops, "Do you ever throw ice at people?" Or does he reserve that rhetorical maneuver for Senators?

The date of the kerfuffle and a tantalizing paragraph of the story enabled me to learn something that others seem not to have noticed:

#Kavanaugh was one of the younger ones with the good IDs (born 2/1965, he was 20 at the time of the incident) https://t.co/LTey1G22CE pic.twitter.com/dpSkwZLqKu

— YasGHOUL's Farm (@Yastreblyansky) October 1, 2018

Yes, a couple of years out of high school and now in Connecticut, he was still drinking underage.

Thanks @emilybazelon for letting me scoop this.

— YasGHOUL's Farm (@Yastreblyansky) October 1, 2018

I wonder if she'll notice me. Probably not, huh?

For the Record: It's Complicated

Dinesh asking the big questions:

One of the things that make him look especially stupid here is the apparent belief that there's some kind of open competition going on—as if, from some point in time or other in history, people had been inspired every few years to put another head on the rock, debated it, and gotten to work, and as if there might still be some room up there. Guess who else is that stupid:

[Rep. Kristi] Noem, who is also running for governor of South Dakota, relayed a conversation she had with the president during her first visit to the Oval Office soon after he took office in January 2017. Speaking with Vermillion resident Mitchell Olson during the filming of a carpool karaoke show, Noem described her first brush with the concept of "Mount Trumpmore" being erected atop the 77-year-old Keystone, South Dakota, landmark.

"He said, 'Kristi, come on over here. Shake my hand,'" Noem said, according to an Argus Leaderreport. "I shook his hand, and I said, 'Mr. President, you should come to South Dakota sometime. We have Mount Rushmore.' And he goes, 'Do you know it's my dream to have my face on Mount Rushmore?'"

Noem recalled that only one of them thought it was a joke. “I started laughing,” said the state’s lone U.S. representative. “He wasn’t laughing, so he was totally serious.”

But Maureen McGee-Ballinger, public information officer at Mount Rushmore, said it’s not possible to add Trump’s facial carving into Mount Rushmore to join George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln.

"There is no more carvable space up on the sculpture," McGee-Ballinger told the Argus Leader.... (Benjamin Fearnow, Newsweek) 

Annals of Derp: It's also Cognitive Dissonance

Image via Ghoul Friday.

A sighting of the old zombie study proving on the basis of a completely factitious approach to some very dubious data that 5.7 million "illegal aliens"--more than half the total undocumented population--came out to vote in 2008:

This isn’t surprising to those of us who are being honest about the corruption in our political system. https://t.co/p2tc835TB6

— Defend Trump (@Defend_Trump) August 27, 2018

It shouldn't be too surprising, given that the story came out 14 months ago.

But it was always a meaningless extrapolation from unreliable data and it still is. pic.twitter.com/WndyOtTobO

— Yasphalt Jungle (@Yastreblyansky) August 27, 2018

For the Record: V for Vindictive

Love the quotation marks, and that exclamation point! Via Jezebel.

I really should have put a bet on this, which I predicted by some significant number of hours ahead of the Washington Post scooping it:

Trump allowed Scavino to compose a sympathy tweet addressed but not @-ed to the McCain family, complete with a full-length portrait of himself, because what would be better calculated to soothe their grief, but he's evidently refusing to sign off on a formal statement. https://t.co/PnZUqV8vhH

— Yasphalt Jungle (@Yastreblyansky) August 26, 2018

For the Record: Lincoln and Kavanaugh

From (I believe) the 14th-century Libro del Buen Amor by Juan Ruiz, Arcipreste de Hita, via.

Here's some heavy-duty Dinesh, a response to his assertion that Lincoln called himself a conservative (not exactly untrue, but it meant somewhat the opposite of what Dinesh thought it might), and NSFW below the fold, some suggested questions for Senator Kamala Harris to ask Judge Kavanaugh at his confirmation hearings:

Contrary to left-wing claims Lincoln was a progressive, Lincoln himself insisted he was conservative @worldnetdaily https://t.co/xdrMJzBytM

— Dinesh D'Souza (@DineshDSouza) August 20, 2018

Annals of Derp: Our Terrifying Math

Golden Section gif by astrophysicsstudent.

RT comedian Lee Camp passing on a story from Forbes Retirement columnist Laurence Kotlikoff claiming Pentagon spent an unauthorized $21 trillion without noticing it from 1998 to 2015. (That's six times the amount printed by the Quantitative Easing program 2009-15). It's false. https://t.co/4VqdkBEIJg

— Yasty Habits (@Yastreblyansky) August 19, 2018

What's going on was explained by Mick West of Metabunk in May https://t.co/Z2twroXaKQ The number totals all the accounting errors--not even errors, "unsubstantiated adjustments", in all the Pentagon's accounts--not only what they've spent, but what they owe and what they own.

— Yasty Habits (@Yastreblyansky) August 19, 2018

But those numbers--"adjustments" in spending, AND debts and assets, repeated year after year for the same pension and the same ship--don't add up to anything real. The amount they spend in a given year is pretty much the $600 billion they say they spent.

— Yasty Habits (@Yastreblyansky) August 19, 2018

If I owe you $10 and I mistakenly think it's $15 and write it down that way while my accountant has the right figure, that's going to be an unsubstantiated adjustment of $5 in the audit (in my favor: I'm in less debt than I thought I was). And if I don't pay you for 15 years, and keep getting it wrong, it's another $5 unsubstantiated adjustment every year. Then if somebody like Professor Kotlikoff comes around trying to figure out what I'm up to he's going to claim that I secretly spent $75, although in fact I merely saved $5 I thought I was going to have to spend.

Anyway I'm not defending military, I'm defending math. The $21 trillion figure is nuts, and the way it was calculated is worse. Attack the military all you want, they deserve it, but don't use bogus arguments like this, because they're making us stupid.

— Yasty Habits (@Yastreblyansky) August 19, 2018

For the Record: Pushback

Image by PhotoAtelier (I think).

There's a set of talking points floating around the rightosphere about how Emperor Trump can't possibly be Putin's puppet because look at all the ways he's shown his indepedence and pushed back against the Russian strongman's desires; I heard it on the radio yesterday, and again today from a Twitter wingnut with whom I have one of those civility relationships. So I prepared a response, as follows:

He didn't arm the citizens of Ukraine. He bribed the Ukraine government with antitank missiles (Putin has no intention of using tanks in Ukraine) has to stop them from cooperating with Mueller investigation https://t.co/4lrNxYEtcQ

— Dreams and Yaspirations (@Yastreblyansky) July 21, 2018

For the Record: Bad Numbers and Conspiracy Theories

Alphabet Bad Student. Hand-drawn grunge font by Arkady Kazantsev via dreamstime.

Wait until Charlie learns people die pic.twitter.com/lQdlIbnP4B

— jordan (@JordanUhl) July 11, 2018

Not only that. I don't know where young Charlie's getting his numbers from, but they're totally wrong: there were

• 224,603,562 US citizens of voting age in 2016 and
• 200,081,377 registered voters the same year

—24.6 million being a lot more than minus 3.5 million by most calculations. Just so you know.

I'm surprised there are that many registered, almost 89%. Let's get those people off their asses in November.

For the Record: The Self-Denominated Far Left

Drawing by Matthew Diffey, New Yorker via.

So young Master Walker Bragman, the limousine leftist who seems to be aiming at being the HA GOODMAN of the 2018 campaign, took umbrage at a tweet from neoliberal shill Dr. Krugman:

Hey, Roseanne Barr is only worth $80 million, and was being paid only 250K per episode. So her tweets were clearly driven by economic anxiety https://t.co/2SBgBJge0z

— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) May 29, 2018

Promise, what follows is NOT ABOUT ROSEANNE. It's about that zombie "economic anxiety" theory of the Trump vote, which keeps coming back, and bad faith argumentation:

Trump voters aren't suffering from economic anxiety (median income $75K compared to $50K for Clinton, not to mention Roseanne). Poor people and low-wage workers are suffering from it and unfortunately fewer vote than other income groups.

— Post-Impressionist Liberal (@Yastreblyansky) June 1, 2018

For the Record: Pardon me, boys

Updated with music at end

I know, here we are, Dinesh again, sorry if we have been over-attentive to this slimy creature at a time when so many important things are going on, but as he was thanking The New York Times in its coverage of his pardoning with the indulgence of the Emperor for, I guess, not calling him a Nazi, I noticed that their story had, in fact, a couple of errors:

This @nytimes account is largely fair and the writer should be commended for an honest attempt to give both sides https://t.co/14DKtn30A7

— Dinesh D'Souza (@DineshDSouza) June 1, 2018

They should have caught your gratuitous lie about losing your voting rights. As a felon sentenced to five years probation living under California law, you never did. https://t.co/Ml8oufvZ5M same would be true in New York.

— Post-Impressionist Liberal (@Yastreblyansky) June 1, 2018

For the Record: Is Samantha Bee a Traitor to Feminism?

The main thing wrong with the expression used by the comedian Samantha Bee to describe Senior Counselor to the President Ivanka Trump, by which I mean the only thing wrong with it, was that it gave Republicans a way of distracting us from the issue Bee was talking about, which didn't seem to be a part of any of the news stories, but as I learned from Steve, it was the issue that's obsessed me all week. Some idiot kid set me off last night:

If you think feminists call for a double standard and giving women advantages they don't deserve that's because you don't understand.

Feminists call for EQUAL RIGHTS and equal responsibilities. When a woman is vicious and corrupt Bee calls her out just as she would a man.

— Post-Impressionist Liberal (@Yastreblyansky) June 1, 2018

For the Record: Say it ain't so, Scott!

Kind of pleased with this; other undertweeters gave him hell for the lies, but I seemed to be the only one who knew it was the boxer Jack Johnson Trump pardoned:

Actually Trump can't pardon Joe Jackson—only MLB (which banned him for life in the Black Sox scandal) can do that.

And in honor of Trump's rally in Tennessee on behalf of a Republican congressman down there:

For the Record: Haberman Takes a Stand

So Maggie Haberman got upset with the actor John Cusack, because that's how things are nowadays.

Lie - not falsehood - https://t.co/NFrRbGj5Rk

— John Cusack (@johncusack) May 27, 2018

This is really ruining Say Anything for me. Said with respect for you as an actor. But, I’ll quote a person who knows Trump well who messaged me describing the lack of understanding that ppl have about “how Trump’s ignorance and mendacity interact.” https://t.co/XUEjXFHSdj

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) May 27, 2018

It is wrecking her enjoyment of a 1989 movie!

.@jack How come this parody account has a blue checkmark? You guys are falling apart. https://t.co/o0UxQwbEP9

— Post-Impressionist Liberal (@Yastreblyansky) May 27, 2018

Or would a real Haberman be arguing that it's false to call Trump a liar because "ignorance and mendacity interact" in his lies? Ignorance and mendacity make something new and different, the way oxygen and hydrogen make water?

— Post-Impressionist Liberal (@Yastreblyansky) May 27, 2018

But what's funniest is the way she doesn't dare to assert the opinion, but cites an anonymous source for it: "According to persons close to the White House, the president's apparent lies actually represent a subtle and nameless previously undiscovered category of non-truth."

— Post-Impressionist Liberal (@Yastreblyansky) May 27, 2018

For the record: Miscellany

Messing around too much with the Twitter again, no time to concentrate on anything.

DOES KIM JONG-UN REALLY LIKE ME OR IS HE JUST TOYING WITH MY FEELINGS? pic.twitter.com/5ukw1zP3In

— Post-Impressionist Liberal (@Yastreblyansky) May 23, 2018

Update: That turned out to be a little truer than I was expecting, didn't it?

In retrospect, this tweet seems like a preview of Trump's letter. https://t.co/150OewWo0i

— Steve M. (@nomoremister) May 24, 2018

You've decided to take it out on the motorcycle workers instead? Odd approach. https://t.co/gTyeWM8O1j

— Post-Impressionist Liberal (@Yastreblyansky) May 23, 2018

For the Record: Shapiro Goes Godwin

After the 1903 pogrom in Kishinev, state-sponsored gang violence that convinced my grandfather to  come to North America. Nobody in America was worried he might be a gang member, though they may well have worried he could be a Communist. In fact he was too cynical for that.

So as you know the Mare Salvatrucha or MS-13 gang, which arose among criminals of Central Americn origin in southern California prisons in the 1980s, and expanded to Guatemala and Honduras and El Salvador when the Reagan administration started deporting them to their homelands, is a big issue in the mind of the president, who seems to believe all Central American immigrants (who are at this point and for a couple of years now mostly fleeing from gangs of the MS-13 type at home) belong to the thing, as his dad no doubt believed all Italian immigrants were members of the dread Sicilian Mob (as some of them, especially the ones the Trumps worked with in the real estate business, unquestionably were), and he was saying, "They're not people, they're animals!"

When all of our great-great-grandparents came to America they weren’t “animals,” and these people aren’t either.

— Chuck Schumer (@SenSchumer) May 16, 2018

My great-great-grandparents weren’t members of a violent and brutal gang responsible for widespread drug trafficking. Were yours? https://t.co/K4mn5WUT5C

— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) May 17, 2018

How do you know, Ben? Maybe your parents didn't tell you great-great-grandpapa was a horse thief back home in Bessarabia. My zeydi was a draft dodger and a socialist and an atheist who made bubbi cry every Passover by singing obscene parodies of the sacred songs, and she was actually illiterate, in three different languages. I don't know any MS-13 members, but I'll bet most of them don't do the gross things you're worried about.

Los Angeles prisons hadn't created MS-13 when Hitler was alive, but I don't think he'd have liked them much. He was pretty big on law and order, and more importantly they aren't Aryans.

— Post-Impressionist Liberal (@Yastreblyansky) May 18, 2018

And as you know Hitler was an admirer of the 1925 US immigration law, which ended the days of almost open borders (under which your ancestors and mine entered) and instituted quota restrictions. https://t.co/2rKQPVBnFK pic.twitter.com/ThTvz2Ekb8

— Post-Impressionist Liberal (@Yastreblyansky) May 18, 2018

For the Record: D'Souza's wrong about something.

Egyptian-born singer Dalida congratulating socialist François Mitterand on his plans to seize the leadership of the revolutionary proletariat, Château Chinon, May 1981. Pinterest.

Ah yes, I remember Prime Minister Atlee's reign of terror https://t.co/GwywAXU42x

— Post-Impressionist Liberal (@Yastreblyansky) May 13, 2018

And how Lee Kuan Yew seized the means of production and exiled SIngapore's bourgeoisie https://t.co/94PAcXstI5

— Post-Impressionist Liberal (@Yastreblyansky) May 13, 2018

More nationalization of industry was accomplished in France under the conservative de Gaulle than in socialist Sweden or Denmark https://t.co/obTM17p2Sh

— Post-Impressionist Liberal (@Yastreblyansky) May 13, 2018

You know fuck all about history beyond the dumb bibliography you've been recycling since the 90's, Dinesh. You should really give up.

— Post-Impressionist Liberal (@Yastreblyansky) May 13, 2018

For the Record: Is Rosie O'Donnell a criminal?

Jaywalking 1940, via HowStuffWorks.

Spoiler: No. During this year's primary campaign, it's alleged, the actor and former talk show host has been donating compulsively on ActBlue, clicking like a slot machine addict, animated as many of us are by fear and hatred of Trump but also so wealthy she doesn't have to think about how much money she's spending, and she didn't think about it, and ended up donating a lot more money than you're allowed to donate in some of those campaigns:

“If $2,700 is the cut off — [candidates] should refund the money,” she told the Post. “I don’t look to see who I can donate most to… I just donate assuming they do not accept what is over the limit.”

The Post found that she gave $2950 to Adam Schiff’s primary campaign, $3450 to Omar Vaid’s primary campaign, $3600 to Conor Lamb’s special election campaign, $4200 to Lauren Underwood’s primary campaign, and $4700 to Doug Jones’s special election campaign.

I'm guessing from those names she's got MSNBC on the TV while she's doing it, too. She's donating the way Trump tweets, in TV-driven bursts. But although this conduct is against the law, it doesn't even rise to the level of a misdemeanor; it is not handled by the court system but the Federal Elections Commission, and the appropriate penalty is that the candidate refunds you the excessive money. I haven't yet found a case of anybody having to pay a fine.

Our old fascist friend Dinesh D'Souza, however, is seeing or pretending to see an equivalence between this and his own notorious crime in 2012 of funneling money through straw donors—including his wife and his mistress of the moment, I've just learned, or as the DOJ report coyly put it "a woman with whom D'SOUZA was romantically involved":

For the Record: Three Fifths

Kwame Ture/Stokely Carmichael in 1966, via Wikipedia. I just learned, apropos of almost nothing, that he was a classmate of Samuel R. Delaney, of all people, at the Bronx High School of Science, where as it happens my son studied some decades later, when it was a far less diverse school, though still pretty good. This post is dedicated to the kid, who thoughtfully said, "Please don't blog about Kanye," which was surely good advice.

I just learned something totally new to me about American history, and specifically about the origins and significance of the Three-Fifths Compromise, which, as all literate Americans are expected to know, was the arrangement in which enslaved persons were counted as part of the population of the individual states, along with other people without full civil rights such as women and children, but at the rate of three fifths of a person, splitting the difference between the North, which didn't want to count them at all, and the South, which wanted to count them entirely, not because of differing opinions as to whether the African American was in fact a person or not but because the count was going to be the basis of deciding how many representatives each state would get in the financially powerful Lower House and the Electoral College, and counting the enslaved would give the Southern states more members and the Northern fewer.

Only it turns out that this story is actually completely wrong, almost as wrong as the view of the lunatic to whose tweet I was responding:

Just the opposite. The 3/5s compromises was established because the slave holders wanted their slaves to have equal votes, which could have given enough representation to keep slavery legal.

Oh my God. https://t.co/Wd5XI6F4qB

— The Red-headed Libertarian (@TRHLofficial) May 6, 2018

Oh my god.