Letter of Certification

Golden Lady Justice via LiteracyBase.

“The President, obviously, was aware
of Sen. Graham’s suggestion after he
made it today and he’s fine with that,”
Spicer said Tuesday. “He has no business
in Russia. He has no connections to Russia.
So he welcomes that. In fact, he
has already charged a leading law firm
in Washington, D.C. to send a certified
letter to Sen. Graham to that point, that
he has no connections to Russia,” Spicer
added. “So that should be a really easy look.”
—Via Talking Points Memo.

Bornstein, Bornstein, Wellington and Bornstein

A Very Professional Top Law Firm—The Best

www.winstonbornsteinpc.com

1100 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20004

Senator Lindsey Graham
The Senate
290 Russell Senate Office Building
Washington, DC 20510

May 9, 2017

To Whom My Concern,

I am one of the large contingent of attorneys Mr. Donald J. Trump, currently and actually President of the United States, having won the 2016 elections with the largest majority ever witnessed in the Electoral College so just get over it, is constrained to employ to oversee the huge complexity of his legal affairs, as was my father, Maximilian Bornstein, P.C., before me. Over the past 30 years, I am pleased to report that Mr. Trump has not had any business in Russia of any kind. I have recently taken a desposition from Mr. Trump in which he answered all my questions fully and fairly, and with considerable style, to the effect that he has hardly ever been in Russia for any business purpose and not done any unless it was actually on television.

I would have more to say, but I may have to leave the office early to take up my new post as FBI director,

Sincerely,

Filbert Bornstein, PC

L'Esprit des Lumières

Promising to "defend the spirit of the Enlightenment", from the Turkish French-language newspaper TRT.

I am feeling pretty good about the outcome of the présidentielle in France, though obviously not as thrilled as the Bothsides Twins, who were beside themselves, or at least beside each other, which is virtually the same thing:

@ron_fournier Exactly. It is time America did this. Now.

— Matthew Dowd (@matthewjdowd) May 7, 2017

Right now, Ron! This minute!

For the record

Screenshot from a YouTube video, 1.MOST IMPORTANT MCQ POINTS FOR PASS AUSTRALIAN MEDICAL COUNCIL (AMC) CAT EXAM, credited to "John Smith".

@tedlieu @Monkeyfister1 @realDonaldTrump Jeez, Congressman. He doesn't want to call it #Trumpcare until he finds out what's in it. Which will be never. #TooMuchWork

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) May 7, 2017

Of course the Australians have better healthcare than we do --everybody does. ObamaCare is dead! But our healthcare will soon be great.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 5, 2017

For example, I like the fact that AUSTRALIAN GOVERNMENT DIRECTLY PAYS 83% OF ALL THE COUNTRY'S MEDICAL COSTS.

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) May 8, 2017

You going to get Ryan to write a bill that does that?

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) May 7, 2017

Money pouring in

Trump National Charlotte is a big wedding venue: "The Lakefront Ballroom is every bride’s dream come true. Nowhere else can you find a back wall of the reception hall open to a beautiful beach on Lake Norman. The bride and groom can even plan to enter and leave the reception by boat." It's certainly true that you can't find a wall open to a beach on Lake Norman anywhere other than on Lake Norman.

So golf writer (golf writer?!) James Dodson, hawking a newly published memoir (The Range Bucket List: The Golf Adventure of a Lifetime) on WBUR radio in Boston, was telling the interviewer about his day with the future president on the future president's Trump National Golf Club Charlotte, sometime in early 2014, when he was wondering where Trump was getting the $100 million he claimed to have to finance the purchase of all those golf courses in the middle of the Great Recession, and asked young Grand Duke Eric about it:

"So when I got in the cart with Eric," Dodson says, "as we were setting off, I said, 'Eric, who’s funding? I know no banks — because of the recession, the Great Recession — have touched a golf course. You know, no one’s funding any kind of golf construction. It’s dead in the water the last four or five years.' And this is what he said. He said, 'Well, we don’t rely on American banks. We have all the funding we need out of Russia.' I said, 'Really?' And he said, 'Oh, yeah. We’ve got some guys that really, really love golf, and they’re really invested in our programs. We just go there all the time.' Now that was three years ago, so it was pretty interesting."

Indeed it was. So you've heard about that. What I thought was funny was the reaction of some of the reactionary brethren, like Fox News's Brit Hume, to whom the whole concept of Trump being in debt to a Russian bank seemed completely unfamiliar:

Worse than refighting the last war...

...is fighting the war you ran away from last time, regardless of whether this one is worth fighting.

A really annoying Times editorial, in a gravity-defying feat of bothsiderism, denounces both Donald J. Trump and Hillary Rodham Clinton for their failure to move beyond the divisions of the November election and into the healing our nation so desperately needs, as in

Six months on, both Mr. Trump and Mrs. Clinton are still waging last year’s campaign, undermining their promises to help America heal.

To be fair, The Times puts more blame on the Trumpster, "who after all has a nation to run", which he isn't in fact running, which I'm tempted to say is probably something of a good thing, except I don't want to imply that he could run it if he were so minded, or could ever play a role other than to hire and fire advisors according to whether he had a feeling for whether they were making him look pretty or not, which is a pretty terrible management technique—

Yet Mrs. Clinton, a person of greater substance, also seems unable to shake free.

This week, in a conversation with Christiane Amanpour, the television journalist, Mrs. Clinton was asked about Mr. Trump’s approach to North Korea and Syria, and about women’s rights around the world. Her insights were strained by insinuations against the president, whom she still refers to as “my opponent.”

Or, as the next few paragraphs explain, faced with questions from Amanpour on her views about Trump's conduct in office so far, she perversely insisted on talking about Trump's conduct in office so far. How rude, and divisive, is that?

Trump is a terrible, incompetent president! Those who have made sincere efforts to help him, starting with Barack Obama in the immediate aftermath of the election, have found that he does respond to flattery but the response is fleeting, and that he always descends, in the long run, to the stupidest position.

I'm annoyed with Clinton myself, to tell the truth, for proclaiming her support for the pointless Syria cruise missile mission of April 7, but that's not the point. I just want to report my suspicion, which has been growing over the past several years, that the Times and a few organs like it, that these guys feel guilty, for their failure in particular in the George W. Bush administration, and are constantly trying to make up for it.

The Perils of Obamacare

Pearl White in an installment of The Perils of Paulline (1914), via The Hooded Utilitarian.

If you're counting how many lives or near-death experiences the Affordable Care Act has, like a cat's, I think you can say the current one is over, judging from the response of our distinguished Senators, like Jerry Moran of Kansas:

“What I would say is it doesn’t matter that much in the Senate, because we’re going to start from scratch,” Moran, a Kansas Republican, said Friday after he briefed University of Kansas Medical Center researchers on National Institutes of Health funding increases. (Kansas City Star)

I love that little touch of noting that what Moran was in Kansas City KS for was the very opposite of trying to take away everybody's health care—he was taking credit for bringing home some pork. And I mean that in the most positive sense; the kind of pork that can be openly proclaimed, like research funding in a local institution, is a cornerstone of good politics, and the holier-than-thou Republicans who got rid of earmarks in 2010 were attacking democracy (some Republicans understand that, and tried to reinstate earmarks in November, but Ryan shut them down—maybe the idea will be revived this summer). Having nothing to apologize for, he was in better shape than his House Republican colleagues, who mostly seemed to hope that nobody would talk about the tax cut health care bill passed yesterday.

Not one of the 217 House Republicans who voted for the bill was willing to go on Joy Reid's MSNBC show to defend themselves, and Greg Gianforte, the Republican candidate to replace Ryan Zinke, the new Interior Secretary, as Montana's single representative, has been caught in flagrante trying to conceal from Montana voters the fact that he expressed support for it, in a meeting with some of them Washington DC lobbyists. I hear there are not going to be many town halls for Republican House members this recess, and today's with Raul Labrador (R-ID) demonstrates why:

Emperor heads to the front

After the first Saudi airstrikes in March 2015. AP photo via Al Jazeera.

#EmperorTrump schedules first foreign trip to Saudi Arabia https://t.co/4LXRmFTpKi Who says he hates fundamentalist Muslims? Not rich ones!

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) May 4, 2017

Can now be revealed that's why #EmperorTrump eventually turned against Iraq War: he learned Saddam Hussein was rich af. Same with Qadhafi.

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) May 4, 2017

"If you want to kill a bunch of Arabs why don't you go kill those Yemenis? They don't go to golf clubs!"

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) May 4, 2017

As I've been telling you for quite a while, US engagement in the Saudi war on the people of Yemen may look ugly and is not cheap, but the intention under the Obama administration really was to save lives. That's clearer now that the Trump administration is showing us what really collaborating with the Saudis is like:

You say you want an honest conversation

Well, you know, we all want to change the subject...

Fantasy baseball cards? Via Topps Archives.

My favorite political scientist, Corey Robin, senselessly trolling me again:

Susan Sarandon says Trump’s election may help the revolution. Liberals scream, “IRRESPONSIBLE!”

The Democrats say that Trumpcare’s victory in the House will help the Democrats in 2018. Liberals say, “Strategy.”

Bernie Sanders says abortion shouldn’t be a litmus test. Liberals cry, “SOCIALIST CLASSBRO HATES WOMEN!”

Nancy Pelosi says—twice, second time even more strongly—abortion shouldn’t be a litmus test. Liberals say…almost nothing at all.

It’s almost as if we’re not really having an honest conversation about our disagreements.

It's almost as if Corey would prefer not to have an honest conversation about our disagreements.

Sarandon's celebrated remark (in an MSNBC interview with Chris Hayes)—

Bret Smart

Sugarcane field burning in Brazil, 2007, in a consequence of the drive to replace fossil fuels with "renewable" biofuels. UN photo by Eskinder Debebe via NASA's earthobservatory website, part of the NASA climate research program Donald Trump proposes to shut down because as Mick Mulvaney says, "We're not spending money on that anymore. We consider that to be a waste of your money to go out and do that." But Bret Stephens, while he certainly would say that's not smart, thinks it's more important to remind us that scientists do bad things too.

Shorter Bret Stephens, "Climate of Unintended Consequences", New York Times, May 4 2017:

What part of "I'm smarter than you" don't you understand?

Actually, he wrote his own shorter,  published on Monday, in replies to questions on his awful début:

A decade ago we were plowing money into ethanol subsidies as one response to climate change. But that turned out to be not just environmentally destructive but was also arguably responsible for the spike in food prices that soon followed, as farmers turned away from cultivating corn for human consumption to cultivating it for ethanol production. 

And today, still defending himself, spinning that bit out to 14 paragraphs plus a conclusion tacked on to the effect that we really can't do anything about global warming until we've done some more research because biofuels are a failure, and already Germans are paying the highest electricity bills on earth, which I'm not going to get to in this piece if ever.

Only for one thing the biofuels movement, as it worked out in the US under the George W. Bush administration ethanol push, wasn't a response to climate change.

Annals of Derp: Unemployment in the Le Pen philosophy

Photo by AFP/Getty Images via Daily Mail.

NPR Tuesday morning, interviewing a member of the Le Pen campaign, Mikaël Sala:

GREENE: Let me just step back and look at Europe and the world right now. There was a lot of talk that there was this populist surge across Europe and in the U.S. But, you know, recently Austria rejected a populist candidate for chancellor. Geert Wilders in the Netherlands did not do as well as expected. Angela Merkel seems safer now in Germany than a lot of people thought politically. I mean, is there really still a populist surge that you're seeing?

SALA: Sure. I'm going to tell you why it is really powerful in France. In France, we have two problems. We have a problem with mass immigration that we cannot afford anymore, and we have a problem with our economy which is unable to grow. And it so happens that in the Netherlands and in Austria, they have one of those two problems. They're facing mass immigration, but their economies are still going about all right. So it's not that we're not compassionate, it's that we can't afford, you know, welcoming any more people because we are on the brink of bankruptcy.

Doesn't that suggest anything to you? Like maybe if the Dutch and Austrian economies are growing in the teeth of all those immigrants—to say nothing of immigrant-friendly Germany and Sweden and Belgium—maybe immigrants aren't the problem?

It is the best and the fastest and the most beautiful

Wessex landscape, via YoungsRPS.

Wes

Wes

And the same

Wessex and Wessex

It is the best and the fastest and the most beautiful

TV and Radio, TV, Radio, TV and TV

Business, Finance, Real Estate, Real Estate, Real Estate, Real Estate

And the same

TV and Radio, TV, TV and Radio

TV and Radio, TV, Radio, TV, TV, TV,

Business, Finance, Banking, Finance, Banking, Finance, Banking, Finance, Banking, Finance, Insurance,

It is the best and the fastest and the most beautiful

And the same

(Arabic—typed consonants in Roman, allowed Google Translate to transliterate and choose the vowels, if any):

Lede, Buried: She's not promoting it

Via Mic.

Paragraph 10 of a massive interview story in the Times by Jodi Kantor (didn't she use to be a reporter? when did she join the Palace?), Rachel Abrams (late of Variety), and Maggie Haberman, on how "her goal was to be a moderating influence on the administration of her father, President Trump":

By inserting herself into a scalding set of gender dynamics, she is becoming a proxy for dashed dreams of a female presidency and the debate about President Trump’s record of conduct toward women and his views on them. Critics see her efforts as a brash feat of Trump promotion — an unsatisfying answer to the 2005 “Access Hollywood” recording that surfaced during the campaign and the seas of pink, cat-eared “pussy hats” worn by protesters after the inauguration — by a woman of extraordinary privilege who has learned that feminism makes for potent branding. (Ms. Trump is not promoting her book for ethics reasons.)

I misread the parenthesis there, as meaning, "Ethics reasons are not the reasons for which she is promoting her book," i.e., she has some other reasons for promoting it. What? Why would she be promoting it for ethics reasons—why wouldn't she just be promoting it as part of her marketing strategy? And then realized it was supposed to read, "She's not promoting it. For ethics reasons."

What book? Coyly introduced in paragraph 9:

For the record

Jackson in 1844 or 1845, via Wikimedia Commons. He'd have been 93 at the outset of the Civil War.

I want to add, to yesterday's poem, that Trump's rewrite of history isn't just silly ignorance. Who introduced Trump to the history of the Jackson presidency, as Peter Baker reminds us in today's Times, is Stephen Bannon, and as Baker fails to remind us, it's a pretty sinister, white supremacist story. Trump himself doesn't tell it right, so, in brief:

President Andrew Jackson, who died 16 years before the Civil War started, saw it coming and was angry. Would never have let it happen!

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

Donald doubles down. This isn't just pulled out of his ass, though he doesn't understand it very well or at all. Maybe from #PresidentBannon https://t.co/RHyhxRB29m

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) May 2, 2017

Mazel tov

Mazel tov to Brooks and Snyder, who tied the knot on Sunday, as reported by our trusty Driftglass, who had the date a week ago and was too nice to write anything explicit about it:

So this happened.

I sincerely wish them all the best.https://t.co/16wSo8dqFk

— driftglass (@Mr_Electrico) May 1, 2017

I'm not as nice a person as Drifty, mostly just too busy with the Trumpery, but I have followed these kids through their romance on and off for a long time now, and I don't want to let it go without saying anything.

Also the gift registry, which Driftglass discovered last week, from Zola, a marvelous name for an online trousseau supplier (one of Émile Zola's steamiest novels is Au Bonheur des Dames, a tale of the origin of Parisian luxury-goods department stores during the Second Empire), is still up, and if you hurry you can still pick up something that they will receive with gratitude, as symbols of the community that upholds them.

Welcome! Thank you for rejoicing in our marriage-to-be. We're touched by your presence in our lives. Here's a registry we put together, whose gifts we will receive with gratitude, and as symbols of the community that upholds us. Thanks for your love and generosity.

Because it's naturally not stuff they want, they have plenty of that, but symbols, like the Eucalyptus pewter napkin rings, the Graham champagne flutes, the Wildflower Study apron, with matching potholder and oven mit [sic], the Crate & Barrel Como Swirl dinner plates, the $44 apparently wrought iron cookbook holder, and the Vitamix Professional Series Heritage 750 blender ($598.99), because it's all about heritage, isn't it?

This, too:

Andrew Jackson has done an amazing job that is being recognized more and more

Grave of Rachel Jackson (1767-1828) at The Hermitage near Nashville. It's not surprising that President Jackson should have visited it every day (probably, like Trump, only when he was in Tennessee), since it was in his back yard. He himself was also buried there, after his death in 1845, so that people nowadays often think of it as his grave too. Photograph via Trip Advisor.

Had Andrew Jackson Been a Little Later

by Donald J. Trump

The Great West is the size of the world

J.M.W. Turner, Rain, Steam, and Speed: The Great Western Railway via Wikimedia Commons.

Smut has been experimenting with the recursive neural net algorithm of Google Translate, which breaks down in surprising ways when confronted with certain kinds of meaningless repetition in the source language (particularly in non-Roman alphabets)—which as Language Log has noted can create wholly unfamiliar kinds of poetry, Gertrude Stein texts, Talking Heads lyrics, and other strangenesses—to create his own work,

Your Yastreblyansky, obviously unwilling to be left behind wherever there is some really difficult and utterly pointless work to be done, has thought of a way of making it still more difficult and still more pointless, by trying it out on a language with an ideographic writing system, namely Chinese, where there are two translation algorithms at work, one to convert the input (in this case Hanyu Pinyin wihout tone marks, where the system's default choices can be unrelated to your intentions) into characters, which have fixed meanings (often very vague out of context) and one to "read" the characters into an English framework.

It didn't work all that well (and I'm afraid I may keep trying), and I threw away some examples that may have been better than anything I've got here. But here it is, anyway. The first is baed on repeatedly typing the sequence "xigeda".

Cicada

West slightly larger than big
West slightly larger than big
The Great West is the size of the world
West slightly larger than the big West slightly larger
West slightly larger than the big West slightly larger slightly larger
Saxom Saxom Saxom Saxom Saxom Saxom Saxom Saxom Saxom Saxom
West slightly larger than the big West slightly larger slightly larger slightly larger slightly larger
The Great West is the size of the world

Ross is Right

Arturo Reque Meruvia, Alegoría de Franco y la Cruzada (1948), via.

Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, evidently a little miffed at all the attention the new reactionary troll is getting, tries upping his own superior troll game ("Is There a Case for Le Pen?"). Shorter:

Say what you will, Marine Le Pen is probably better than Trump.

Yes, and I'd probably be better off drinking gasoline than prussic acid. I mean with the gasoline I won't get lead poisoning, right? Actually I have no idea.

Or I guess I could say there are at least two cases for Le Pen:

• the "publishing violent images" case, for the tweeting of graphic images of ISIS terror, over which the European Parliament has stripped her of her parliamentary immunity, and which could at least theoretically land her with three years and a €75,000 fine; and 
• the criminal fraud case, in misuse of European Parliament funds, €339,000 she took to pay a couple of Front National cadres for non-Parliamentary work (underlings have been indicted, but she still has EP immunity on this for the time being).

Don't know if there is any chance of legal action relating to the party's default on a €9 million loan from the First Czech-Russian Bank, now defunct—in January the Russian Bank Deposit Insurance Agency was trying to collect on the debt on behalf of the dead bank's cheated depositors, but that case seems to have gone away since she visited Putin in late March. Like Trump and even more so, thanks to the French constitution, she'll be in a better legal situation if she wins the presidency, with five years of total immunity.

But mostly I'd just like to say that I think Ross may well be right, in his own terms at any rate: if you're a reactionary Roman Catholic franquista who hates being called a fascist but loves the scent of heliotrope and veiled racism ("What's that perfume, darling? Where do you get it?" "I'll never tell!"), then Le Pen is better than Trump.

For the rest of us, meh. It's not a very interesting question. 

Bret and Butter: Update

Also, Stephens has a truly nasty private-school bully's smirk. Photo via Daily Wire.

Finally got around to reading Steve's terrific take on the Bret Stephens premiere performance, and found something I could have used for a unifying close to my own piece:

He's still telling readers that they're wrong if they accept the scientific consensus on global warming. He's still arguing that advocates for a strong response are tyrants drunk with power. But he's trying to sell this argument to people who believe the science, so he's conceding some of their points. 

That's it in the terms of Vincenz's parable of the Hasidic cart driver: as Stephens distracts us with this elaborate painting of the environmental movement as totalitarian, the 100% hooligans who will never acknowledge any merit on the part of the freedom-loving opposition, what he's actually accomplishing is billing himself as 55% right, the pleasant antagonist we'll be happy to surrender to. Not me! #NeverBret!

Bret and Butter

Update: Now with a newly improved paragraph somewhere near the bottom!

The "butter" in the headline refers to the oleaginous tone with which Stephens tries to lull or perhaps lubricate the reader into acquiescence in his revolting project.

Klezmer band from Munkács, Hungary, in the Subcarpathian Rus' region, between the wars. From the World Holocaust Remembrance Center at Yad Vashem.

Rectification Central welcomes Bret Stephens, late of the Wall Street Journal, to the pages of The New York Times, and his maiden effort, "Climate of Complete Certainty", which showed up online Friday afternoon. Shorter:

Hillary Clinton thought she was 100% right or thereabouts in the presidential election last November, and yet she didn't win. In the same way, global warming crusaders think they're 100% right, but there's a chance they could be wrong. Even the liberal Andrew Revkin agrees people would take it more seriously if you'd admit it might be trivial.

Yes, it's pretty dispiriting. It seems a lot longer than it really is, too, perhaps because it wanders so widely, and starts off with a rather lengthy epigraph:

The Jesus Bug Columnist

Photo by An-Drake/Deviant Art.

"Jesus bug" is an alternative name for gerrids or water striders, the splayed-legged insects you see darting across ponds and pools looking for airborne bugs that have fallen into the water; so called, obviously, because of their ability to "walk on water" like you-know-who in Matthew 14:25, floating on the surface tension, with their hydrophobic feet. We called them water bugs or water skippers (a name that doesn't even appear in the University of Wisconsin dialect survey), and former New York Times columnist David Brooks calls them pond skaters (also missing from the Wisconsin list), as in "The Pond-Skater Presidency", in which he compares our Emperor to one:

a man who is a political pond skater — one of those little creatures that flit across the surface, sort of fascinating to watch, but have little effect as they go.

The problem with Trump being, as it turns out, that he's just so superficial. Not that he's corrupt on a Berlusconi scale, openly asking government to devote itself to his personal business interests foreign and domestic, and pretty much inviting his cabinet officers to do the same, and not that foreign powers seem to have a secret hold on him (people like Brooks presumably think he proved he wasn't Putin's puppet by sending that single irrelevant bombing mission to Syria). And not that he bears all the distinguishing marks of the fascist except for maintaining his own private army (except to the extent, you know, that he does that too). To Brooks, Trump has left all that behind, made his pivot, and turned into a garden-variety Republican: