Quick note: Barr lies

Barr certainly lied in a very material way in the press conference when he said "no evidence":

the Special Counsel’s report did not find any evidence that members of the Trump campaign or anyone associated with the campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its hacking operations. In other words, there was no evidence of Trump campaign “collusion” with the Russian government’s hacking.

Rather, as I and others have been explaining since the four-page letter came out a month ago, there may not have been enough evidence, but there was definitely some. This is confirmed in the first-volume executive summary:

p. 9

Especially since the insufficiency is tied to ongoing investigations (the redacted matter, evidently related to Gates and Stone) and to false testimony (by Flynn, Papadopoulos, etc.), or evidence that was destroyed or otherwise denied to the investigators

p. 10

They might have had sufficient evidence if the report had been delayed until the investigation of Gates and Stone was finished, and/or if suspects hadn't withheld it or concealed it in one way and another. (Or I'm totally convinced they would have; it's way too much evidence to ignore.) 

Steele yourself

"“Red Card,” about corruption involving FIFA, soccer’s global governing body, contains supporting roles for the former spy Christopher Steele and a number of Russian oligarchs and government officials." Simon and Schuster.

Can't help seeing this as a sign of how people in the White House are feeling about the release of the redacted Mueller report tomorrow morning:

Wow! FBI made 11 payments to Fake Dossier’s discredited author, Trump hater Christopher Steele. @OANN @JudicialWatch The Witch Hunt has been a total fraud on your President and the American people! It was brought to you by Dirty Cops, Crooked Hillary and the DNC.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 17, 2019

The story to which he's referring goes back, in fact, to last August, when NBC was reporting that the FBI had released 70-odd heavily redacted pages of its correpondence with Steele, recording his service to the FBI as a Confidential Human Source over some  unspecified period of time—every single date is among the things redacted—including the fact that they'd given him or his firm some money for his troubles but obviously not revealing what they'd been paying him for or when.

Now it's been taken up by some of the usual suspects, notably Judicial Watch, the king of rightwing FOIA requests, darkly hinting at a connection to that same Underpants Gnomes story: Bruce Ohr must have been paying Steele to provide him with evidence that would enable him to tape Carter Page's phone calls so that if Trump unexpectedly got elected they could um do whatever it is you do with Carter Page tapes when you want to impeach the president. As you can see, the passage of time is not making this plan any more coherent.

But the thing is it's not at all difficult to guess when and where Steele got most of his payments from the FBI, because it's pretty much a matter of public record, and it had nothing to do with Carter Page of the Trump campaign; it was not long after he'd retired from MI6 and set up his own shop in 2009, and

Cathedral

Parvis of the cathedral in 1699, via Wikimedia Commons.

As Twitter watched the cathedral burn, I was glued to it, teary-eyed sometimes, and found myself startled every so often by a message from some big head person offering condolences to the Roman Catholic church or to French Catholics in particular, generally from a conservative standpoint:

Notre Dame is an iconic symbol of faith to people all over the world – and it is heartbreaking to see a house of God in flames. Our thoughts and prayers are with the firefighters on the scene and all the people of Paris. https://t.co/5Pecbf02em

— Vice President Mike Pence (@VP) April 15, 2019

I'm like really? That's the heartbreak?

And sometimes really offensively, as in the case of young Ben Shapiro, who had to be spoken to sharply:

Sanctuary!

El Cenizo, TX, a town of 5300 on the Mexican border which really is a sanctuary city, officially, and kind of scared that migrants are going to get bused there because they really don't have anyplace to keep them. Via Texas Public Radio.

Realized something hilarious about Trump's immigration policy this morning, when a White House communications flack called Adam Kennedy was on the radio defending it:

INSKEEP: I want to understand this idea of busing people to sanctuary cities. This is an idea of busing people to sanctuary cities. This is an idea - according to the reporting, which I think the White House has acknowledged - that was knocked down by staff, knocked down by Homeland Security lawyers as possibly illegal. Why did they find it to be possibly illegal?

KENNEDY: Well, first of all, I think there was a very narrow option being looked at originally. When the president heard about this idea, he was very interested. And now there is more expansive options being looked at. And I think the real question is, why should the same four cities along the border face the brunt of illegal immigration day in and day out when we have numerous cities across this country that, through their rhetoric and policies, say they want more illegal immigration?

As you can see, there's no way he's going to explain why it's possibly illegal, because it's certainly illegal (as I was saying, it would be hugely expensive, and Congress won't appropriate the funds). I think the four cities are San Diego, El Paso, Laredo, and Brownsville, all of which are sort of sanctuary cities, though the mayors of Laredo and Brownsville really wish we wouldn't say so. I don't know what kind of "rhetoric and policies" he would be talking about; of course since his job is trolling, not defending any actual policies, he doesn't have to explain himself. But the thing that really made me laugh was when he was trying to claim that the president was doing something positive:

INSKEEP: And different and better visa rules? I mean, why wouldn't the president be putting his effort into actually changing some of the laws that he complains about?

KENNEDY: Steve, the president's been advocating this for two years. He's advocating for closing different loopholes that force catch and release to be the policy of this country, which he doesn't like, which he opposes; for changing credible fear standards so that we're not, over and over again, seeing 90 percent of the people rejected by asylum courts. The president's been advocating for changes to stop this catch-and-release policy, really, since the beginning. So the two things you've said - more resources and changes to our laws - are exactly what the president wants.

Actually they succeeded in ending "catch-and-release" with the "zero tolerance" policy they began implementing two years ago. I'm sure they must have told the president that he'd changed things already, though perhaps because it was Sessions's accomplishment Trump refused to listen. This was also the basic reason for the border crisis, as I've said before, since because the government was stopping the asylum seekers from joining relatives and friends (many or most living in "sanctuary cities") while they awaited their hearings, it now had to take care of them, at the same time as observing the Flores Agreement rule of not holding minors apart from parents or guardians longer than 20 days, hence the cages and the tent cities and the enormous backups (which they made worse by deliberately slowing the processing in various ways—

Actually, you know what "catch-and-release" used to do? It distributed all these people to sanctuary cities taking the pressure off San Diego and El Paso in a way that was totally legal and didn't cost taxpayers a dime! "Catch-and-release" did exactly what Trump supposedly wants to do!

Honest to God

Parable of the Mote and the Beam, print by Jan Collaert after Ambrosius Francken, 1585,  British Museum.

Here's National Review writer and conservative Catholic Ramesh Ponnuru criticizing Pete Buttigieg (not that I'm that crazy about Buttigieg, as yet) for bringing religion into his presidential campaign:

Buttigieg's argument about the progressive implications of Christianity is heartfelt. It is also partisan nonsense. @bopinion https://t.co/sNuNCItfDe

— Ramesh Ponnuru (@RameshPonnuru) April 16, 2019

It struck me as kind of upside down. After all, most people get their religious indoctrination starting pretty early in life, and start thinking about politics later; wouldn't the former inform the latter rather than the other way around? If Buttigieg was brought up a liberal Episcopalian, wouldn't that idea of Christianity lead him to think Christianity favors liberal political principles? Indeed, Ponnuru writes,

Moar stupid Trump tricks

Via tenor.

Speaking of bestial topics, I guess it's part of the emperor's privilege to set the conversation, and we seem to be giving in more and more to his wishes, but this one about proposals to ship asylum seekers from the border to "sanctuary cities" is so ridiculous even Jonah Goldberg recognizes it as "trolling in place of public policy", in his morning chat with NPR, and yet we go on talking about it.

It's pretty clear that, riffing off what Steve says, Trumpy Republicans believe that all white people hate immigrants as much as they do and only pretend not to out of "political correctness" or just to be bloody-minded or to pick up on all those imaginary illegal-immigrant votes that keep Republicans from making it a one-party state, and the way this arose must have been some time last November, no doubt from one of his Fox friends, I'd guess Lou Dobbs (who was pretty much attributing the Republicans' loss of the House to those votes), and Trump was screaming around the West Wing why wasn't his worthless piece of shit DHS secretary just sending those shithole illegals to San Francisco since Nancy Pelosi loves them so much, and deputy policy coordinator May Davis sent out a query to DHS, in the hope of shutting him up, as The Times broke the story on 11 April:

Bestial Topics of Conversation

Relief from the Sanchi Stupa in Sanchi, Madhya Pradesh, representing the three favored residences of the Buddha at Jeta's Grove, photo by Anandajoti Bhikku, Photo Dharma of Sadao, Thailand via Wikipedia.

From the Kathavatthu Sutta, translated from the Pali by Thanissaro Bhikkhu; I landed on this text when I was looking for something else:

on one occasion the Blessed One was staying in Savatthi at Jeta's Grove, Anathapindika's monastery. Now at that time a large number of monks, after the meal, on returning from their alms round, had gathered at the meeting hall and were engaged in many kinds of bestial topics of conversation: conversation about kings, robbers, & ministers of state; armies, alarms, & battles; food & drink; clothing, furniture, garlands, & scents; relatives; vehicles; villages, towns, cities, the countryside; women & heroes; the gossip of the street & the well; tales of the dead; tales of diversity, the creation of the world & of the sea; talk of whether things exist or not.

Then the Blessed One, emerging from his seclusion in the late afternoon, went to the meeting hall and, on arrival, sat down on a seat made ready. As he was sitting there, he addressed the monks: "For what topic of conversation are you gathered together here? In the midst of what topic of conversation have you been interrupted?"

Short story shorter—this is a kind of shaggy dog story which gets bulked up by repeating the list of bestial topics three or four times—the Buddha reproaches the monks for their foolish preoccupations and urges them to talk about things that are worth talking about;

"It isn't right, monks, that sons of good families, on having gone forth out of faith from home to the homeless life, should get engaged in such topics of conversation.... There are these ten topics of [proper] conversation. Which ten? Talk on modesty, on contentment, on seclusion, on non-entanglement, on arousing persistence, on virtue, on concentration, on discernment, on release, and on the knowledge & vision of release. These are the ten topics of conversation. If you were to engage repeatedly in these ten topics of conversation, you would outshine even the sun & moon, so mighty, so powerful — to say nothing of the wanderers of other sects."

It's a little disappointing that he ends up motivating them with the thought of competition with rival monks instead of just being better people and liberating themselves from the endless cycle of rebirth, but that initial list is a beautiful summary of what idle everyday talk really consists of, two and a half millennia later, and what we call punditry as well (a pandit is a Sanskrit scholar, of course, and the kind of self-satisfied thinker against whom the Buddha was originally protesting).

The Church of 9/11

One of the Reflected Absence pools at the September 11 Memorial in downtown Manhattan, photo via Concrete Decor.

The inestimable Talia Lavin asking a big question:

i meant this as a genuine question. it was indisputably tragic, world-changing, evil and despicable, and a turning point of history. but “sacred” is a particular word with its own religious meanings, and i wanted to pinpoint what it means to call such a day “sacred” specifically.

— Talia Lavin (@chick_in_kiev) April 14, 2019

Which apparently drew a lot of fire from people who thought she was mounting an attack on Republicans:

Underpants Gnomes in the Russia Investigation

Via IresPuestas.com.

Just to refresh everybody's memory, when Trump howls "They SPIED on me!!!" what he means is that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court approved an order of federal surveillance on a former foreign policy adviser to candidate Donald Trump called Carter Page, in October 2016, on evidence that included some raw intelligence gathered by a former MI6 Russia expert called Christopher Steele for a firm called GPS Fusion which had a contract with the Democratic-connected Perkins Coie law firm to do opposition research on Trump, which is incontrovertible proof, according to certain Republicans, that the Democratic Party and the entire leadership of the Federal Bureau of Investigation had a plan (an "insurance policy") to remove Trump from office in the unlikely event he got elected, which they would accomplish by recording Carter Page's phone calls.

Let's just lay that out as an Underpants Gnomes scenario:

1. FBI does electronic surveillance on Carter Page
2. Trump wins the presidential election
3. ???
4. IMPEACH!

This schema is what Attorney General Barr was referring to, not without a little healthy skepticism, when he was talking to the Senate Appropriations Committee on Wednesday. A very little skepticism, so little a lot of people didn't even notice it, which may be what he intended, as we heard Thursday on NPR:

Non-Hot Take

Quito, via National Geographic.

One thing I think everybody needs to note about the Assange story is that at this point it's not about the United States, not about Sweden, not about WikiLeaks—not driven by the preoccupations of these people we think about when we think about Julian Assange. It's really, at the moment, an Ecuador story.

That is: the previous president, hero of free speech Rafael Correa*, left his chosen successor, the less heroic Lenín Boltaire Moreno (yes, he's named after the Bolshevik leader, as well as Voltaire, only his parents spelled the latter wrong), with a problem in the country's London embassy in the form of Assange squatting there, failing to clean the bathroom or change the kitty litter, while avoiding extradition to Sweden, where he was wanted on rape charges, and from where he claimed he would be extradited to the US and buried like the Man in the Iron Mask. Moreno has been trying to get rid of this national embarrassment since he took office almost two years ago (one of the things that has enraged his former patron Correa), and he's finally succeeded, and that is the story, and it's not even all that interesting.


*Some Ecuadoreans have an alternative view on Correa's commitment to free speech:

Correa had a poor record on free speech at home. In 2011, he closed a string of radio and television stations in a bid to silence critics. According to Human Rights Watch, five journalists were jailed for “disrespecting” the government between 2008 and 2011.

Literary Corner: The Size of Texas, the Surprise of Death

From the president's press conference, San Antonio, Wednesday, 10 April, reported by Seahorse at GardenWeb, a remarkable pair of sonnets taking a long walk through his current preoccupations, the need for a wall, the fact that Texas is larger than the Upper East Side of Manhattan, which Central Americans don't realize, and the unexpected relationship between walking and death:

Two Border Sonnets

by Donald J. Trump

I. A Vast State

If we had the wall, the good people
will not be able — you’ll see them on the other
side of the wall. Number one, they won’t
come, because they’ll see there’s no way
of getting through. Right now they think there’s a
way to get through. And the people back home
never hear about that, they start to walk.
They tell them Houston’s half a mile away,

but it’s 300 miles. It’s desert. This
is a vast state, it’s a vast area. You look
at it, the state’s tremendous. I come from
New York. You have Fifth Avenue and that connects you
to Park Avenue, it's not too far away,
but this is hundreds of miles between places.

Late 17th-century print of an etching, ca. 1520, by Daniel Hopfer of Augsburg, Death and the Devil Surprise Two Women, from the collections of the Victoria and Albert, London.

The Drunk Uncle of Our Country

Siri, how come everybody has forgotten George Washington? Eliana Johnson and Daniel Lippman in Politico:

During a guided tour of Mount Vernon last April with French president Emmanuel Macron, Trump learned that Washington was one of the major real-estate speculators of his era. So, he couldn’t understand why America’s first president didn’t name his historic Virginia compound or any of the other property he acquired after himself.

“If he was smart, he would’ve put his name on it,” Trump said, according to three sources briefed on the exchange. “You’ve got to put your name on stuff or no one remembers you.”

Front parlor, Mount Vernon, as decorated by President Washington in 1787, and in his view "the best place in my House", where the household spent evenings reading, discussing political news, and playing games; photo by Gavin Ashworth.

Trump triplex, Manhattan, designed by Angelo Donghia in Louis XIV style, "the epitome of elegance and perfection" according to the iDesignArch website; photo by Sam Horine. Inconceivable that anybody has ever sat on one of those chairs.

Also, still not The Onion:

Trump asked whether Washington was "really rich," according to a second person familiar with the visit.... If Trump was impressed with Washington’s real estate instincts, he was less taken by Mount Vernon itself, which the first president personally expanded from a modest one-and-a-half story home into an 11,000 square foot mansion. The rooms, Trump said, were too small, the staircases too narrow, and he even spotted some unevenness in the floorboards, according to four sources briefed on his comments. He could have built the place better, he said, and for less money.

Vixen was also thunderstruck.

West of Eden: Listing Terrorists

Brian Hook, a State Department Iran policy adviser,  on NPR to propagandize for Trump's (or Prime Minister Netanyahu's, or Crown Prince Mohammad's, depending who you ask) decision to list the Iranian Revolutionary Guard as a foreign terrorist organization, offered a list of terrorist things they're said to have been responsible for, including the 1983 bombing of the US Marine Barracks in Beirut, which killed 305 people including 241 US military,  the 1992 bombing of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires, killing 29 including four Israeli employees and 25 Argentines, the 1994 bombing of the Associación Mutual Israelita Argentina building in Buenos Aires, a local Jewish community center, killing 85, the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers complex in Khobar, Saudi Arabia, which killed 19 US Air Force personnel and a Saudi national, and detaining US citizens—

Wait, what? Not that I approve of these cruel and unlawful imprisonments, which include four or five people still jailed at the time of writing, but is it the IRGC that did it, as opposed to other organs of the Iranian government, and is it correctly described as terrorism?

T]he term 'terrorism' means premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents. (US Code, via Wikipedia)

“Calling for atheist thought in any form, or calling into question the fundamentals of the Islamic religion on which this country is based” and anyone who questions the King or the government or supports any group, party, organization other than that of the ruling elite inside or outside the Kingdom is a terrorist (Saudi Arabia, same source) 

Also, Trump's best friend Kim Jong-un runs a government that's holding US citizen Kim Dong-chul on bogus charges with a 10-year prison sentence, and Vladimir Putin's Russia has held Paul Whelan since December.

But if you leave it out, it looks like 22 years since the IRGC was involved in any terrorist acts, by the US State Department's count, which makes listing it as a terrorist organization now seem like some peculiar timing. Especially since it's election day in Israel, whose embattled prime minister (under threat of indictment for bribe-taking) jumped in to make sure voters understood it as an example of his pull in Washington, Trump's personal favor to him:

“Thank you, my dear friend, the president of the United States, Donald Trump, for having decided to designate Iran's Revolutionary Guards as a terrorist organization,” he wrote in Hebrew on Twitter on Monday. “Thank you for responding to another of my important requests, which serves the interests of our countries and countries of the region.”

Jameh Mosque, Isfahan, via.

For the Record: Why not compare it to the Holocaust?

"Binary" is so grating. What about something softer, like "Sophie's"? https://t.co/YlbET3j9pk

— Jonathan Chait (@jonathanchait) April 9, 2019

I don't see why not, Ben. He wouldn't be the first to notice a family resemblance https://t.co/H2fsafQjgG

— Oranges of Species (@Yastreblyansky) April 9, 2019

https://t.co/aYKA0QI2A7

— Oranges of Species (@Yastreblyansky) April 9, 2019

Chait's in pretty good company on this. What kind of company are you in, Ben? https://t.co/sUsQ8NSrYA

— Oranges of Species (@Yastreblyansky) April 9, 2019

The Boy Who Cried "Invasion!"

The Los Laureles water reservoir, which supplies water to the Honduran capital Tegucigalpa, except not when it doesn't have any water, as in this photo taken 10 March (by Orlando Sierra/AFP).

Cute headline from the Washington Post:
Power Up: Nielsen's ouster signals even tougher Trump border rhetoric

Rhetoric alert! We can expect severe invective storms over the next few weeks, with frequent outbreaks of junior-high sarcasm, malicious lies, and sweeping stereotypes.

One of the things about Trump's border policy that's not getting enough attention is that, while we're knee deep in rhetoric, the policy itself has been a huge fail in its own terms, in its key aim of discouraging asylum applicants from Central America, now arriving in record numbers and overwhelming the border authorities, who are driven to expedients like that El Paso encampment of the end of March:

Ah, the 90s—People had more hair then!

C-Span, May 2018.

Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, explains why the best choice you could make in American history was to get born, like him, in 1979 ("The Best Year of Our Lives"):

The sneerers argued that the Ocasio-Cortezans exaggerate the burdens borne by twentysomethings, which is fair — this is still a rich country whose young people are relatively privileged.

But as a statement about generational experiences, [Charlotte] Alter was basically right. If you were born around 1980, you grew up in a space happily between — between eras of existential threat (Cold War/War on Terror, or Cold War/climate change), between foreign policy debacles (Vietnam/Iraq), between epidemics (crack and AIDS/opioids and suicide), and between two different periods of economic stagnation (the ’70s and early Aughts). If you were born later, you experienced slow growth followed by financial crisis followed by a recovery that’s only lately returned us to the median-income and unemployment stats of … 1999.

Given that the Cold War and the crack "epidemic" were both basically over by 1991 or 1992; and the US involvement in civil wars in Nicaragua (1978-89) El Salvador (1979-92) Guatemala (1981-93), arms sales to Iran (1981-85) and Iraq (with intelligence backing, 1982-88), invasion of Panama (1979-80), and conquest of Grenada (1983) surely added up to something debacle-like; and the federal response to AIDS started getting serious in 1993; and the bottom 50% emerged from wage stagnation between 1995 and 2002 and then stopped—

Via Washington Post.

—I guess he must mean what our friend Boswood suggested:

https://t.co/JLWzFB60GE Douthat writes a column about how great things were in 1999 without mentioning the name "Clinton." @Yastreblyansky @Mr_Electrico @bluegal

— Boswood (@Bosengood) April 7, 2019

Or maybe it was something else. But when he says

it was the just-enough-internet era. There was just enough internet to boost economic productivity (the Facebook-Amazon era has not had a similar effect), just enough to encourage subcultural ferment, just enough to challenge cultural gatekeepers and give lonely teenagers succor

Something tells me he just misses being a teenager himself. Which is kind of cute when you think about it.

Joe

Valedictory: 2017 Cornell University Convocation; photo by Michael Suguitan for the Cornell Sun.

I think Steve is 100% right when he accuses old Joe Biden of Trumpiness in this game he's playing at the moment, hugging male persons up on stage and grinning his sweet open-hearted grin and telling the audience, "I want you to know I had permission to do that," as much as to say "unlike some of these new-fangled ladies who for some unaccountable reason think they feel threatened by my goofy and harmless old self," which as any fool can see is insane and perhaps insanely self-regarding. He's almost the Trump who says he couldn't possibly have assaulted some given woman because she's not hot enough, but makes it about what a silly old good he is.

Then he turns around and says some proper words about understanding that he needs to listen etc. etc. But he's winking, not in the obvious clown Trump way—he's a million times smarter than Trump anyway—but winking nevertheless.

Then blogfriend Lance Mannion comes out to do some handicapping, which, like me, he rarely does, and suggests that Biden's going to win the nomination, because he's kind of "our" Trump:

Literary Corner: Mr. President, tear down those hotels!

A year ago, Ishaan Tharoor at Washington Post was using the most famous windmills in European literature as a metaphor for Mexico (I think that's the Mexican flag in upper left, though the color process has made the green bar awfully blue), and our president's other fantasy enemies, but no, he's really got a serious issue with literal windmills!

Which goes back at least in part, as is well known, to his long war with the Scottish government over his golf course and resort near the village of Balmedie in Aberdeenshire, which he bought in 2006 under what he believed or claimed to believe were assurances from then chief minister Alex Salmond that no wind farm was going to be constructed within sight of the course (the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds opposed both the proposed wind farm and the golf course, but Salmond helped Trump out with the permitting for the latter, I assume in the name of job creation). But by the time the course was ready to open in 2012, the wind farm had been more or less decided on, and Trump was threatening to back out of his own commitment (Salmond would be "known for centuries" as "the man who destroyed Scotland", he threatened, and when RSPB withdrew its objection to the energy project, since the number of birds killed by wind turbines is minuscule compared to the vast numbers that die or are never born because of the effects of fossil-fuel energy production, he said it should change its name to "Royal Society for the Killing of Birds"). But the threat was empty, like most of his threats, and he opened the place anyway, and lost his last appeal, during the presidential transition, as it happened, in December 2016.

So we know he never forgives or abandons his hope for revenge at all costs against those who give him a defeat, whether it's the NFL thwarting his longing to own a team or Mrs. Clinton not inviting him to her daughter's wedding, and that ought to be enough to explain his feelings about wind power, but I can't help feeling it's somehow more than that, that windmills truly creep him out in some irrational way, as you could hear in the tone of his remarks to the National Republican Congressional Committee on Tuesday, where the tone mounted to the macabre, with a childlike hardness, a little Christina Rossetti:

Brooks on Poverty

Town Square of Waterloo, Ontario, via Hogg Fuel and Supply.

Some really remarkable goings-on in the current David F. Brooks, I mean qualitatively different from the usual dishonesty we like to tax him with over here, presenting a truly original view of, of all things, poverty reduction in his native Canada, which Brooks claims is being handled better up there than down here on the other side of the border, which doesn't sound surprising at all, since they have a much more effective government than we have, but that's not what Brooks is saying: he's claiming that Canada is doing a better job of poverty reduction than the US because they're thinking more like, not to put too fine a point on it, David F. Brooks ("Winning the War on Poverty"):

According to recently released data, between 2015 and 2017, Canada reduced its official poverty rate by at least 20 percent. Roughly 825,000 Canadians were lifted out of poverty in those years, giving the country today its lowest poverty rate in history.

How did it do it?.... They begin by gathering, say, 100 people from a single community. A quarter have lived with poverty; the rest are from business, nonprofits and government.

Well, on the other hand, at first blush the reality doesn't look anything like the way David Brooks thinks, according to the available online information, which I have access to, no thanks to David F. Brooks, who provides no links, but because I own a Google, where they tell how they did it, in the following terms:

Got Paranoia? Barr's Narratology

Would you buy a used funeral from this man? Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images via Time.

I should be writing an "I told you so" post on the revelation showing up in The New York Times last night that Mueller's staffers are starting to complain that Barr's letter made Trump look less implicated than he actually is:

WASHINGTON — Some of Robert S. Mueller III’s investigators have told associates that Attorney General William P. Barr failed to adequately portray the findings of their inquiry and that they were more troubling for President Trump than Mr. Barr indicated, according to government officials and others familiar with their simmering frustrations....

The special counsel’s investigators had already written multiple summaries of the report, and some team members believe that Mr. Barr should have included more of their material in the four-page letter he wrote on March 24 laying out their main conclusions, according to government officials familiar with the investigation.

But it strikes me as coming a little late. Barr has already succeeded in shaping the discourse in a way that may end up being really hard to remedy. I'm talking about that that weirdly incommensurate treatment of the two chosen aspects of the criminal investigation:

Psychopaths on Parade

Feral Britain. Forest of Dean, 2008, photo by David Slater/Alamy via Times Literary Supplement.

Stephen Castle and Ellen Barry in the New York Times:

“When it came down to it, she was just too sensible,” said Rosa Prince, the author of a biography of Mrs. May. “She’s got to be thinking of her legacy now, and if people are dying for lack of medicine, if there are food shortages, if Britain goes feral, that’s not how she wants to be remembered.”

It's not such a big deal that Britain might go feral, but that might lead to people saying unkind things about Theresa May.

All the Dems in this hipster Applebees are nuts about Mayor Pete

Via Thundra, vintage 2011. Requires some mouse hovering.

It's the world's greatest concern troll David F. Brooks, jumping on the Buttigieg train ("Why You Love Mayor Pete"):

Pete Buttigieg has some kind of magic right now. His campaign bio, “Shortest Way Home,” was the 25th-best-selling book on Amazon when I checked on Monday. That put him just a few dozen places behind Michelle Obama, and thousands or tens of thousands of places ahead of Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders and the other candidates who have campaign books out now.

If anybody has the stats on correlation between campaign biography sales 14 months before the conventions and nomination success, @ me.

International Fact-Checking Day

Ceci n'est pas un cigare volant, this is not a flying cigar, by Bonny Doon Vineyard, via Vincent Pousson.

In honor of International Fact-Checking Day, I would like to check a fact:

In 1998, Rep.Jerry Nadler strongly opposed the release of the Starr Report on Bill Clinton. No information whatsoever would or could be legally released. But with the NO COLLUSION Mueller Report, which the Dems hate, he wants it all. NOTHING WILL EVER SATISFY THEM! @foxandfriends

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 2, 2019

One of the signal differences between the Starr report and the Mueller report is, in fact, that while Attorney General Barr is intent on making redactions in the Mueller report before allowing members of Congress to see it, of

grand jury material, sensitive intelligence, matters that could affect ongoing investigations, and infringements on the privacy rights of “peripheral third parties.”

Attorney General Reno gave the Starr report to every member of Congress with no redactions at all (it was over his own grand jury testimony that Clinton was accused and subsequently acquitted of committing perjury, or, as I would prefer to call it, gentlemanly obfuscation of the unpleasant facts), and what Nadler was talking about was something he'd been allowed to read.

April Fool: I'm glad with that

Big Donald did an excellent April Fool funny, that unfortunately not too many people noticed:

Unless, you know, Donald still hasn't found out what Obamacare is or what Republican senators are up to and isn't joking at all, which is a possibility, I guess. Senator Rick Scott (FL-Death Eaters) had showed up on NPR in the morning to provide some of the evidence:

Untitled

For the Record: Channel Your Paranoia

Not waving but drowning, via Dr. Sophie Hay.

I went to a lot of political meetings in my youth, which is as I've noted somewhere one reason I can never truly get behind Bernie (every meeting had one, barking a bit, a few years older than the rest of us and deeply convinced of his rightness, never entertaining an idea he hadn't already had, dismissive of the hippies and shouting down the women), and it came to be a personal signature thing I would do to tell the others to "channel your paranoia"—limit the range of things you're going to be panicky about to those you've got a plan for, not that you're accepting the other awfulnesses, but you're not going to look as if you're desperate and drowning.

Nobody really paid any attention, usually. But while I'm up, I want to post a little experimentation I've been doing on the Twitter on the tone with which one talks about Trump, meant in the first place to sound less "hysterical" without minimizing the horror of what's going on:

#EmperorTrump https://t.co/DsqNSqlQc8

— Collusion Delusion (@Yastreblyansky) March 31, 2019

Nevertheless the harm he can do while failing is immense, to children https://t.co/ensN2ySpEp https://t.co/QAr48vdfVr, environment https://t.co/EWVbGzTwiJ, farmers https://t.co/khE3cscimK really appalling

— Collusion Delusion (@Yastreblyansky) March 31, 2019

For the Record: Alexandria Duet

Ancient Alexandria as imagined by the 16th-century Netherlandish painter Maarten van Heemskerck, via Short History.

Wingnuts went crazier than usual when Alexandria Ocasio-Córtez seemed to be saying that after overwhelming Democratic majorities pushed through the New Deal the Republicans stopped FDR from winning a third election by passing term limits, which makes no sense (how could they, if Democrats had overwhelming majorities?) and is also historically not true (that's the part the wingnuts noticed). Hahahaha, is your cute congresswoman really that ignorant?

Sadly, no, as a great blog team used to say. She's not perfect, but what she did was to blow a line she's been using correctly since well before her election:

First Semester Report Card @AOC

US History F
Econ 101 F
Math 101 F
Meteorology F
Interpretive Dance A https://t.co/lkM1PCTkLe

— Eric Bolling🇺🇸 (@ericbolling) March 31, 2019

She knows perfectly well what happened, as she has noted before at her Facebook page. https://t.co/8lGzxUIH1F This is a trivial flub, not ignorance. pic.twitter.com/v5dJqCxDYF

— Collusion Delusion (@Yastreblyansky) March 31, 2019

It's Kairos time again, you're gonna leave me

Outtakes from yesterday's Brooks that I can't process but can't quite let go of.

1. More on kintzugi:

I don’t know about you, but I feel a great hunger right now for timeless pieces like these. The internet has accelerated our experience of time, and Donald Trump has upped the pace of events to permanent frenetic.

Please don't eat the teacups.

"Timeless" has to be one of the most vicious words in the advertising lexicon. I remember especially from my magazine days how it used to be applied to watches. You'd be talking about this grotesquely ugly $30,000 diamond-studded time-keeper and the copy would be gushing over the "timeless masterwork". The hell you say. And there's nothing more time-ful than a kintzugi bowl, with all the vicissitudes of its life literally glowing through its body like streaks of pure pain.

Literary Corner: The Internet Cleanse Cycle, Part I

Korean tea bowl, 16th century, with gold kintsugi repair work, Ethnologisches Museum Berlin, via Wikipedia. 

From David Brooks, "Longing For an Internet Cleanse":

Kintsugi¹

By David F. Brooks

They look like they have golden veins
running through them, making them more
beautiful and more valuable² than
they were in their original condition.
There’s a dimension of depth³ to them. You sense
the original life they had, the rupture and then
the way they were so beautifully healed.
And of course they stand as a metaphor⁴
for the people, families and societies
we all know who have endured their own
ruptures and come back beautiful,
vulnerable and whole in their broken places.⁵

¹ The Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with lacquer colored with the dust of precious metals, so that the break remains visible as a gold or silver seam, and the associated philosophical view that an object has its own life, of service, which is not ended by breakage, and can be restored.

² In the first wave of its popularity in the late 15th century, it's said collectors often smashed valuable pieces for the opportunity to turn them into kintsugi bowls, the way our wealthy philanthropists vote against a government-run social safety net in order to ensure a supply of broken people they can fix.

³ Unlike unmended bowls, which are always two-dimensional?

⁴ Of course! In reality, making the thing into a metaphor is the most un-Japanese thing you can possibly do with it. The deepest idea of the kintzugi philosophy is that of the mono no aware, the poignancy of things, in themselves, not as representatives of something else; as deserving the same tenderness we want for ourselves.

⁵ "The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places." Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms. Most, I think the point is, aren't. The old tea bowl is in fact as strong as ever after the kintsugi work, though the Japanese beauty of the gold seam consists in its reminder of past suffering; the damaged human rarely is. You can send your broken human to the shop to see what they can do, but it really would have been better if it hadn't happened.

Designed to Lose

Ten-minute drawing by Bonnie-Hop/DrawCeption, November 2016.

Piggybacking on Steve's post yesterday on the new Trump Justice Department policy on the Affordable Care Act—and the ongoing appeal process over the December ruling by federal judge Reed O'Connor of Fort Worth in a suit brought by 18 Republican state attorneys general announcing that the whole law, including mandatory coverage for pre-existing conditions, coverage of children up to age 26 on their parents' policies, regulations requiring insurers to give some kind of value for money, and health insurance for some 17 million people through the Marketplace and expanded Medicaid programs, is invalid—

That was OK with President Chucklehead, of course, who thinks consequences are for little people—

President Donald Trump was quick to take a victory lap, and pressed Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and the presumed incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., to fix the problem. The president tweeted Friday night: "As I predicted all along, Obamacare has been struck down as an UNCONSTITUTIONAL disaster! Now Congress must pass a STRONG law that provides GREAT healthcare and protects pre-existing conditions. Mitch and Nancy, get it done!"

—but the DOJ announced it would be defending part of the law, though not the pre-existing conditions part, presumably under the advice of lobbyists for insurers anxious to get around the Obama regulations against junk insurance that doesn't cover much of anything.

Now they've changed their minds and decided not to defend any of it at all, which seems like a pretty weird move from the political standpoint; healthcare is the most important issue on voters' minds, and they like what the ACA provides, though most of us really wish there was more of it. They showed it pretty clearly in the November elections, too, as seemed instantly clear the day after the elections: