Dinner with David

Pamplemousses Botanical Garden, Mauritius. Photo by RomeoDesign.

Shorter David Brooks, "Where History is Being Made", New York Times, February 7 2017:

James and Deborah Fallows, as I think of them, since I'd like to emphasize that I habitually encounter them together at dinner parties rather than separately in the articles and books that each of them writes, have lived in many interesting places, such as Japan, the District of Columbia, and China, at times when important historical events were taking place in those locations, for instance in the 1980s when the Wall Street Journal dumped me in Brussels, the bastards, which is why everybody thinks Fallows is cooler than me. 

Nowadays they just fly around America in their Cirrus 435SR, because James is a pilot, so that they're frequently absent from dinner parties I go to, allowing me to ask the other guests, as a clever conversational gambit, "Where would you live if you were James and Deborah Fallows?" The beautiful thing about this is it doesn't really matter what they say, because I have so many answers myself.

What Tengrain calls a midday palate cleanser

Pleased to learn via NYTimes that the Senate historian, who I bet is a pretty good historian and all-round fine person, is named Betty K. Koed. That's a dumb excuse for posting a YouTube, and a dumb excuse is better than no excuse at all.

Lede, buried

Drawing by xpapajus at drawception.

Paragraph 23 of the Thrush-Haberman Times story on the White House atmosphere: Emperor Trump is really pissed off with Bannon—"You took too long to tell me what I think!"

Namely, when Trump ordered that Bannon replace the two top national security advisers at meetings of the National Security Council, nobody informed him what he was ordering.

for the moment, Mr. Bannon remains the president’s dominant adviser, despite Mr. Trump’s anger that he was not fully briefed on details of the executive order he signed giving his chief strategist a seat on the National Security Council, a greater source of frustration to the president than the fallout from the travel ban.

Though not enough to demote the grisly eminence from his current spot in the minuet lineup. And it's not that Trump thinks this is an ill-advised plan—he's sticking with it (though he's decided it's OK for the CIA director to come to the meetings too; there is also some hope that Democrats will be able to stop the plan by insisting Bannon's presence on NSC must be subject to Senate confirmation). He just wants "to be looped in earlier" as the teaser copy puts it.

Alex sez: Don't push dark things through super bowels

This is really the greatest moment in the history of Twitter. Screenshot; original is here if he hasn't deleted it, which I bet he hasn't.

The Designated Liar

Another courageous thing Fred Hiatt did once, in 1999. Fortuitously it should help him manage Wapo's opinion coverage of the Trump White House.

Fred Hiatt joins the #Resistance!

Why didn't you say so in the first place?

.@realDonaldTrump You and Bannon fucked up big league. Order should have read "NOBODY WITH BAD INTENTIONS ALLOWED"

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) February 4, 2017

Instead they let themselves get carried away by some of those establishment-elite types like Rudolph Giuliani and their subtle and sophisticated machinations. SAD!

Photo by Reuters via The Independent.

Greatest moment in the history of Twitter

Up for a week now (h/t PalmerReport) and he still hasn't deleted it, but here's a screen shot just in case.

This so-called judge

17th-century woodblock of Peter the Great personally enforcing the fashion code.

When a country is no longer able to say who can, and who cannot , come in & out, especially for reasons of safety &.security - big trouble!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 4, 2017

The opinion of this so-called judge, which essentially takes law-enforcement away from our country, is ridiculous and will be overturned!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 4, 2017

Trump really does have all the instincts of an emperor. He can't accept the legitimacy of a judge who disagrees with him—he can only be a "so-called" judge. Judge Robart isn't even in "our country"—he's off in Seattle. Our country is wherever Donald J. Trump is, saying who can and cannot enter and leave through his lips, resting up in Palm <s>Springs</s> Beach, issuing his morning tweets; coterminous with Donald J. Trump. Donald J. Trump enforces the law, not some so-called judge.

Note on the Bowling Green massacre

We must keep "evil" out of our country!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 3, 2017

Good idea! I always say, there's nothing worse than "evil". It's so great to have a country with no "evil" in it, we really should make an effort to keep it that way.


Kellyanne Thursday:

“I bet it’s brand new information to people that President Obama had a six-month ban on the Iraqi refugee program after two Iraqis came here to this country, were radicalized and were the masterminds behind the Bowling Green massacre,” she said. “Most people don’t know that because it didn’t get covered.”

Friday:

Note on the Oz refugees

Photo via Green Left Weekly.

An ironic thing about the Trump-Turnbull dustup where poor old Trump sent his intemperate foolery halfway around the world and hung up on the Oz prime minister—apparently tired and cranky after a long napless day, because as you know he's all about stamina for other people but not so much himself—

Wait, so the WH is admitting @realDonaldTrump is physically unable to handle the stress of the job? https://t.co/QjbimWa9ub

— John Aravosis (@aravosis) February 2, 2017

—an ironic thing, I was saying, is that the Australian policy he's objecting to is fundamentally Trumpian: a selfish and radically un–Judeo-Christian-Muslim refusal to lift a finger in aid of desperate refugees and determination that somebody else should deal with them.

For Australia's conservative Liberal-National coalition (the liberals are Labor), when it came into power in 2013, was determined to cut down the number of refugees of color appearing on their shores all the way to zero, and that's what they did, denying resettlement to any asylum seeker arriving by boat. They took to escorting refugee boats to Indonesia, or paying the governments of Papua New Guinea and Nauru to hold refugees (mostly, The Times tells us, from Iran and Iraq) in island detention centers, prison camps really, horrible places, as Amnesty International noted:

Poem: Honoring it more and more

President Trump cherishing the bust of Dr. King. "Nice Reverend! Doesn't bite, does he?" Via BizPac Review.

Some time after 7:20 PM on January 20 in the Oval Office, during the inauguration festivities for President Donald J. Trump, Zeke Miller of Time Magazine noted that a bust of Winston Churchill by Jason Epstein seemed to have replaced the Charles Alston bust of Martin Luther King, Jr. that President Obama placed to the left of the fireplace in 2009, and sent a couple of tweets to that effect, but realized half an hour or so later that both busts were actually there, deleted the erroneous tweet, and sent a correction at 8:14. It was a "story" for less than an hour. It was never published.

The bust is still there, too, though the rather fine Norman Rockwell picture that hung on the wall above it at the end of Obama's term—of workers, some of them black, restoring the flame of Liberty high above New York Harbor—is gone, and that space is now occupied by a portrait of slaveholder "populist" president Andrew Jackson looming with his fierce Trumpical frown over Dr. King's head, as if he were wielding a whip.

Eleven days later, in any case, at the White House commemoration of African American History Month (also known as Black History Month, but President Trump doesn't use that, because as people in truly American places like Staten Island often suggest, "Black History Month, doesn't that sound a little racist?"—though it is not true that he has officially changed the observance's name), instead of the usual informal remarks, he read an intensely felt and personal poem, in which his pain at the unjust suspicions to which he was almost subjected for half an hour brings him into deeper connection with the African American experience:

You may have some fundamental management issues

Image via Dennis Rutzou Public Relations, Australia.

Iran has been formally PUT ON NOTICE for firing a ballistic missile.Should have been thankful for the terrible deal the U.S. made with them!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 2, 2017

Putting it in ALL CAPS is pretty dramatic, but it doesn't make it any more meaningful. Notice of what? Are you going to turn off their gas? Are you threatening to issue a reprimand?

Via English Language & Usage Stack Exchange.

Do you have a system of goal setting and evaluation with Iran? Can you specify to Iran what goal it is in danger of not meeting? Does your HR department back the process of setting policy by Twitter at 6:30 in the morning while you're watching Morning Joe? Do you have a process? Do you have a state department or national security council that can assist you? 

The emperor at war: Update

Via Indian Express.

Yep, that Yemen raid was a clusterfuck:

U.S. military officials told Reuters that Trump approved his first covert counterterrorism operation without sufficient intelligence, ground support or adequate backup preparations. As a result, three officials said, the attacking SEAL team found itself dropping onto a reinforced al Qaeda base defended by landmines, snipers, and a larger than expected contingent of heavily armed Islamist extremists.

It was what the rest of us call carnage, a horrible scene. Probably 30 killed, including at least 10, maybe 15, women and children, among them that 8-year-old Nara al-Awlaki. "A White House official" insists that the Obama administration had vetted the operation thoroughly, but there's no reason to think he's telling the truth. (I'm guessing right here that it's Spicer, who allows himself to be quoted by name boasting about how successful the mission was.) It's not funny, but everything Trump does has the structure of classic comedy, in which the hubristic villain trips on the banana peel of his own cruelty and vanity. It's just that in real life so many of the good people whose lives he affects are damaged and crushed.

Meanwhile Flynn is threatening Iran with some kind of red line the nature of which he doesn't specify very clearly, Trump is threatening to send a punitive expedition to take care of "bad hombres" in Mexico, and he's apparently managed to enrage the prime minister of Australia, America's most loyal ally over the past century. Just doubled down on that on the Twitter machine:

Do you believe it? The Obama Administration agreed to take thousands of illegal immigrants from Australia. Why? I will study this dumb deal!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 2, 2017

They're also not thousands of illegal immigrants but 1700 boat people refugees entitled to asylum (mostly from Iraq and Afghanistan) who somehow got lost in the South Pacific, generally held in horrible prison camps in Nauru and Papua New Guinea.

Steve M will tell us this isn't going to cost him anything with his base, and he's right as usual, but I don't think his base can really help him out much at this point. I think his base is going to be crawling back into their woodchuck holes and we're going to be hearing a little less from them, unless it's when they're protesting against the taking away of their Obamacare. And the Republican establishment will happily throw him under the bus if they think he's not helping them, which I can tell you is just going to get clearer every day. It's going to be awful, but hideously entertaining.

The emperor at war

Wreckage of the downed Osprey (had a "hard landing"), after the crew destroyed it, via Defence-Blog.

That US bombing raid in Yemen on Sunday, first military action of the Trump presidency, killing at least 14 people including an 8-year-old girl who happens to be an American citizen, not that I care what kind of passport she was carrying (or who her father was), and a US commando as well, made me wonder if we were already seeing some kind of collapse in our military's ability to do anything right, akin to what happened to it when George W. Bush was president. It just seemed like a much worse cock-up than anything they'd perpetrated in recent months or years, correct me if I'm wrong. Central Command denies that any civilians were killed.

Sure enough, reporting in the Guardian (Spencer Ackerman, Jason Burke, and Julian Borger) makes it clear that it was an action the Obama administration had refused to approve, for whatever reasons:

This is your emperor on drugs

Sorry, I couldn't help that.

Image via Weed News.

I was pretty startled to hear this read of Trump's meeting with the pharmaceuticals executives yesterday from the APM Marketplace Morning Report:

So the president said the word, that drug prices are "astronomical" and the implication is he's going to work to make them go down. Do you see an emerging alliance here between the president of the United States and Democrats in Congress who might also want drug prices to go down?

No, there is not an emerging alliance between the Trump and the Democrats on drug prices. The opposite is the case. In the early part of the campaign, a year or so ago, when Trump was making friendly noises about the traditional Democratic proposal to use Medicare to force drug prices down, you could have imagined an alliance of that type, if you were naive enough, like the chuckleheads on Matketplace, to believe anything that fucker says, but not after yesterday. That word "astronomical" was the last gasp of this sweet hope as it drowned.

The American People

Via Kevin Drum, November 2014, on reports that "Mr. McConnell indicated that Senate Republicans will turn their attention to peeling back 'pieces of it that are deeply, deeply unpopular with the American people.' He cited the law’s tax on medical devices, its requirement that big employers provide insurance to all workers clocking 30 hours a week or more or pay a fee, and its mandate that most Americans carry insurance or pay a fee." You know what's "deeply, deeply unpopular with the American people"?

Collected by Garry Trudeau:

"One of my proudest moments was when I told Obama, 'You will not fill this Supreme Court vacancy.'"

-- Sen. Mitch McConnell, 2016

"Apparently there's a new standard now, which is to not confirm a Supreme Court nominee at all. I think that's something the American people simply will not tolerate."

-- McConnell, 2017

You already knew that, but you have to admit it packs a punch laid out like this. I think I've noticed before how whenever Mitch McConnell adverts to the views of "the American people" it's a sign he's telling a lie so outrageous you'd expect his tongue to fall out. (Check it out.)

I've been sympathetic to the idea as expressed now and again by Senators Schumer and Sanders and others that Democrats ought to be open to working with the situation as it is and participate in the government, trying to mitigate the harm Republicans are doing wherever they can. Yes, I understand that Tea Party nihilism "worked", but I just don't think that's a reason to emulate it. Toddlers in the terrible-twos year also get a lot of what they want, wearing you down with their crazed desires and inexplicable rages, but adults can't, unless of course they're psychopaths like you-know-who. Government needs to go on—people's lives are at stake.

But in the case of the Supreme Court nomination, I'm ready to say fuck it. An eight-member court isn't ideal, but we can live with it. "The American people", as opposed to the Electoral College, asked for Hillary Clinton to nominate Antonin Scalia's replacement. I'm willing to wait.

The Trump war on science is the Republican War on Science

Drawing by Gary Larson.

Something else to be paranoid about from the Trump White House, as if you didn't have enough already, in yesterday's Guardian:

US statisticians are concerned that Donald Trump’s administration might suppress or manipulate public statistics that don’t fit his narrative of the truth, the Guardian has learned. In a series of interviews, individuals who have recently left high-level positions at federal statistical agencies expressed worry that the administration may stop collecting and publishing data on subjects such as abortion, racial inequality and poverty.

“We should all be starting from the same numbers. I think that’s a fear that many of us have at this point – it’s that picking and choosing your numbers to suit your politics is not the way that we ought to be doing it,” said Katherine Wallman, chief statistician of the United States from 1992 to 3 January this year.

Trump himself doesn't really need statistics, as Sean Spicer explained:

“The president, he’s not focused on statistics as much as he is on whether or not the American people are doing better as a whole.”

I mean, how would a bunch of numbers help him understand something like that? (He probably suffers from math anxiety too, like David F. Brooks, which in turn threatens his masculinity because dudes are supposed to be good at that, and if there's anything that Donald J. Trump can really not get with, it's having his masculinity threatened.)

Or as Steve M puts it,

To conservatives, anecdotes are the news. At right-wing sites, it's impossible to escape the impression that statistics on crime by the undocumented or violence by Muslims are somehow elitist -- the real truth is in the anecdotes, and only effete bubble-dwelling liberals object that these anecdotes may be unrepresentative.

I just want to remind everybody that this is another one of these dreadful savage-Trump stories that turns out, if you think about it for 14 seconds, to be a story about the Republican party, as it is and as it has been for decades, since Ronald Reagan and his killer trees, the Congressional prohibition against research on gun violence (which I have written about fairly often), and much much more.

Enough for a book chiefly about the G.W. Bush administration entitled, The Republican War on Science, which you probably heard about at the time. Repeat after me:

TRUMP IS A TYPICAL REPUBLICAN.

I don't care if Reagan passed an amnesty for immigrants or Trump suggested (briefly) closing the carried-interest loophole or negotiating drug prices with Big Pharma (he's given that up too, after a chummy meeting with Pharma lobbyists). Trump and House Speaker Ryan are in perfect agreement about the handful of issues Ryan gives a shit about, which amount to making America safe for rent-seekers and sticking it to the rest of us. I know this makes David Brooks sad, but it can't be helped.

Faust hoch!

Update 2/2/17: Thanks for the shoutout, Tengrain!

Dr. Faustus dragged to Hell by demons in a production of Marlowe's play at the Oak Park Festival Theater, June 1981; photo by Chris Harris (who designed the set).

Shorter David Brooks, "The Republican Fausts", New York Times, January 31 2017:

Congressional Republicans need to back out of their Faustian bargain with the Mephistophelean Donald Trump before they lose their souls!

Alas, it's not that easy to back out of a Faustian bargain. You give up your soul when you sign, pal. Unless the Virgin Mary intercedes, but frankly that's a revisionist version of the story, and it lacks credibility.

Annotation

Of course I would, if I felt like having some Skittles. Why on earth would I believe anything that silly, especially coming from an idiot like you? You don't even go to the daily briefing.

Trump statement in defense of the indefensible, via PoliticusUSA:

“America is a proud nation of immigrants and we will continue¹ to show compassion to those fleeing oppression, but we will do so while protecting our own citizens² and border. America has always been the land of the free and home of the brave.³ We will keep it free and keep it safe, as the media knows,⁴ but refuses to say. My policy is similar to what President Obama did in 2011 when he banned visas for refugees from Iraq for six months.⁵ The seven countries named in the Executive Order are the same countries previously identified by the Obama administration as sources of terror.⁶ To be clear, this is not a Muslim ban, as the media is falsely reporting.⁷ This is not about religion – this is about terror and keeping our country safe. There are over 40 different countries worldwide that are majority Muslim that are not affected⁸ by this order. We will again be issuing visas to all countries once we are sure we have reviewed and implemented the most secure policies over the next 90 days. I have tremendous feeling⁹ for the people involved in this horrific humanitarian crisis in Syria. My first priority will always be to protect and serve our country, but as President I will find ways to help all those who are suffering.”

¹ Not to be too nitpicky, what compassion-demonstrating activities do you intend to "continue"? If these fleeing oppression are refugees, all you've done as president so far is yesterday's action slamming the door in their faces. Not to mention remorselessly destroying the careers of students, medical professionals, scientists, teachers, and entrepreneurs and violently separating families among the non-refugees as well. You can't "continue" doing something you haven't started yet.

One-percent solutions

You know who else was a fanatic about border protection?

Kellyanne Conway (via Tengrain, and credit for the headline):

“You’re talking about 325,000 people from overseas came into this country just yesterday through our airports... You’re talking about three hundred and some who have been detained or are prevented from gaining access to an aircraft in their home countries and must stay for now.”

“That’s 1 percent,” she pointed out. “And I think in terms of the upside being greater protection of our borders, of our people, it’s a small price to pay.”

Simon Wiesenthal Center:

By 1933, German Jews were largely urban, middle class, prosperous in business, and well represented in the professions (especially medicine and law). They were culturally integrated but represented less than 1 percent of the total population.

Conway's math is wrong, of course; if you accept her numbers, it's a tenth of one percent. But just sayin.