Disgust Is The Appropriate Reaction ...

... to Laura Ingraham for defending a white supremacist on her show, and to Fox News for defending her offensive segment.

Ingraham defended, among other fringe right-wingers, a man named Paul Nehlen. Click here for the complete article, but here are a couple of paragraphs from CNN's Brian Stelter's "Reliable Sources" column:

Nehlen’s racism has been well-documented, and it’s nothing short of disgusting. In April, for instance, he appeared on a podcast and admitted to wearing a shirt featuring Robert Bowers, the man accused of killing 11 people at a Pittsburgh synagogue.

"Because, I want to make a point that it will ultimately take -- it might not take a million Robert Bowers -- but it's going to take a lot of people all pushing in the same direction to do what needs to be done, and that is to rid white lands of Jews," Nehlen said on the podcast. "Because they are going to undermine our ability to thrive as a race. They are going to wipe us off the face of the earth."

Nehlen has also shared fringe conspiracy theories, including the idea that Bill and Hillary Clinton are murderers. He is so toxic that even Gab, a platform used by members of the alt-right, banned him. In 2017, the far-right website Breitbart also publicly severed ties with him. Not exactly a mainstream conservative!

Trump's Toxic Lies

Click here for an article by Marshall Cohen at CNN entitled "Fact-checking Trump's flurry of falsehoods and lies after Mueller declined to exonerate him."

After Mueller spoke out regarding the media furor over his report, making it clear that the report stood for itself and he had no intention of elaborating, Trump responded with a flurry of lies. As Cohen says:

One day after special counsel Robert Mueller publicly refused to exonerate President Donald Trump and hinted at potential impeachment, the President responded Thursday with an avalanche of widely debunked lies about the investigation and its findings.

Over a few hours Thursday morning, Trump spread at least 21 lies and falsehoods about the Russia investigation, Mueller's findings, the cost of the probe, and the legal restrictions that Mueller faced when grappling with the possibility of a President who broke the law.

I'm not sure I got all Trump's lies Cohen knocks down, but here are most of them:

In a tweet, Trump said the Mueller probe cost "$40,000,000 over two dark years."

In a tweet, Trump said Mueller had "unlimited access, people, resources and cooperation."

In a tweet, Trump said Mueller was "highly conflicted."

In a tweet, Trump said, "Robert Mueller would have brought charges, if he had ANYTHING, but there were no charges to bring!"

In a tweet, Trump called the Mueller probe a "witch hunt," a label he has used for two years to suggest that the investigation was unfairly targeting him and would bring him down at any cost.

In a tweet, Trump said "Russia has disappeared" from the public debate because the Mueller investigation did not establish a conspiracy of collusion between Trump's campaign and Russia.

In a tweet, Trump said, "I had nothing to do with Russia helping me to get elected."

In a tweet, Trump said, "Mueller didn't find Obstruction either."

In comments on the White House lawn, Trump said, "There's no obstruction, you see what we're saying, there's no obstruction, there's no collusion, there is no nothing."

In comments on the White House lawn, Trump repeated lies about Mueller's conflicts of interest that he had shared earlier on Twitter. Trump said: "I think he's totally conflicted, because, as you know, he wanted to be the FBI director and I said no. As you know, I had a business dispute with him after he left the FBI, we had a business dispute, not a nice one, he wasn't happy with what I did, and I don't blame him, but I had to do it because that was the right thing to do."

In comments on the White House lawn, Trump said Mueller "loves Comey," and added, "You look at the relationship that those two -- so whether it's love or deep like -- he was conflicted." Trump later said Mueller's "relationship with Comey was extraordinary" and that they were "best friends."

In comments on the White House lawn, Trump continued harping on Mueller's perceived conflicts, saying that he "should have never been chosen because he wanted the FBI job and he didn't get it and the next day he was picked as special counsel. So you tell somebody, 'I'm sorry, you can't have the job,' and then after you say that, he's going to make a ruling on you."
Trump later said Mueller "requested" the job and "wanted very badly" to be FBI director again.
Trump later tweeted: "Robert Mueller came to the Oval Office (along with other potential candidates) seeking to be named the Director of the FBI. He had already been in that position for 12 years, I told him NO. The next day he was named Special Counsel - A total Conflict of Interest. NICE!"

In comments on the White House lawn, Trump asked why Mueller didn't investigate "Comey and all the lies." He asked, "Why didn't Comey come clean and say the things that he knows are fact?"

n comments on the White House lawn, Trump asked, "Why didn't they investigate the insurance policy?" He continued, "In other words, should Hillary Clinton lose, we've got an insurance policy. Guess what, what we're in right now is the insurance policy."

In comments on the White House lawn, Trump said: "Russia did not help me get elected. Do you know who got me elected? I got me elected. Russia didn't help me at all. Russia, if anything, I think, helped the other side." He later went even further, saying, "I believe that Russia would rather have Hillary Clinton as president of the United States than Donald Trump.

On the White House lawn, Trump said: "You take a look at collusion between Hillary Clinton and Russia. She had more to do in the campaign with Russia than I did. I had nothing to do."

On the White House lawn, Trump said: "President Obama was told in 2016 just before the election in September (2016) that Russia may try to interfere with the election. He did nothing."

On the White House lawn, Trump said, "Nobody has been tougher on Russia than me." He touted his energy policy, which is supportive of oil pipelines and natural gas fracking, his decision to send weapons to Ukraine and the new sanctions imposed on Russian oligarchs. "Whether it's a whole host of things, there is nobody (who's) ever been more tough or difficult for Russia than Donald Trump," he said. "I have to tell you this, I put sanctions on Russia at a level that nobody has seen before. Nobody even wants to write about it."

Trump said on the White House lawn, "There was no collusion. Read volume one. There was no collusion." This is a reference to the first volume of Mueller's report, which focused on Russia.

On the White House lawn, Trump said, "There were no charges. None.... That means you're innocent. That means you're innocent." Trump continued to make the case that because Mueller had not brought any criminal charges, that "he said essentially, you're innocent."
In comments on the White House lawn, Trump cited Article II of the US Constitution, suggesting that it provided powers that he could use to battle charges against him.
"Someday you ought to read a thing called Article II," Trump said. "Read Article II which gives the President powers that you wouldn't believe, but I don't even have to rely on Article II. There was no crime, there was no obstruction, there was no collusion, there was no nothing."

Robert Mueller Fends Off Hecklers (Fake)

This is pretty good, but it foreshadows what might be coming with phony videos:

Preposterous Trump Propaganda - Would Anyone Believe It?

Click here for some outrageous Trump propaganda.

Treason? Deep State Coup? Nope.

Click here for an article by James Comey in The Washington Post entitled "James Comey: No ‘treason.’ No coup. Just lies — and dumb lies at that," explaining the origins of the FBI investigation.

TV Shows To Watch This Summer

Click here for an article in The New York Times entitled "Here’s What to Watch on TV This Summer." We're being inundated with so much TV, how do you decide what to watch? This article is worth revisiting over the next couple of months as the summer series launch.

Driftglass On The Phony Tea Party, Ten Years Later

This is an article by "the redoubtable Driftglass," as Charlie Pierce refers to him, entitled "There. Is. No. Tea. Party: The Epilogue Continues."

Funny story. True story.

Once upon a time, about a fucking decade ago...

...millions of our fellow citizens who had cheered on the Bush Administration (and screamed "Traitor!" and anyone who dared question the infinite wisdom of George W. Bush) had a sudden and urgent need to completely disavow everything they had said and done for the previous eight years (without, of course, taking any responsibility for saying and doing it) so they could get on with the important business of hating America's first African American president with the heat of 1,000 suns. In a normal, health democracy, the idea that millions of wingnuts could build a mile-high bonfire out of their Bush/Cheney lawn signs and then dance around it pretending they had never even heard of George W. Bush would be a problem for the nation's top mental health professionals.

But we do not live in a normal, health democracy, and millions of wingnuts really did leap almost overnight from relentlessly praising George W. Bush to deny!deny!denying! him harder and faster and more desperately than Peter denied Christ.

But that's not the story either, because really, Republicans lying en masse and in lockstep isn't even a story anymore: it's just another day in America.

No the real story is how massively well-funded and coordinated this lie was by Fox News and all the usual loathsome creatures of the Right (Media Matters has a sampling of Fox News' wall-to-wall barrage of "These are just plain folks rising spontaneously up again the Evil Gummit!" propaganda here.) The real story was how quickly and cravenly the "respectable" media went along with this transparent hoax. In Washington D.C., David Brooks turned the act of jogging past one group of protesters into a deep, sociological proof that they were the salt of the Earth, In Chicago, the local PBS affiliate went all-in with the "We've never even paid attention to politics before" teabagger line of bullshit, failing to do even the most minimal research to find out who they were actually interviewing and what their actual political affiliations really were. Even the "liberal" New York Times could only manage a tepid, he said/she said, Both Siderist take on this "tea party" thing in which some people say it's a real movement full of awesome, while others say it's just ten square acres of Koch-funded AstroTurf, so who really knows?

And the only people straight up calling bullshit on the whole scam?

Surprise! Those dirty, disreputable Liberals who no one listens to anyway.

By early 2010, it was absolutely clear to anyone who wasn't a Republican operative or enabler that the "tea party" was emphatically NOT a spontaneous movement of concerned citizens with no previous political affiliation, but was just one more, GOP-manufactured re-branding scam...

But here's the thing. There was absolutely no stomach in the Beltway media for reporting the obvious fact that these idiots in tricorner hats were nothing but the same old Republican wingnuts who, as one wag put it in 2009...

Like German soldiers after the fall of Berlin...have stopped running away from the catastrophe they created only long enough to burn their uniforms.

So here we are, a decade later.

And now that everything we dirty, disreputable Liberals had long since warned about has long since come to pass, what story do I find running away with social media morning? (From the WaPo)

“It turns out a lot of them were not in favor of limiting the size of government, they were just opposed to the president at the time,” said [Justin] Amash, who helped found the tea party-aligned House Freedom Caucus. “The tea party is largely gone. It was replaced with nationalism and protectionism and the general philosophy of the party now under Trump.”

Yet another Republican being elevated to the rank of Patriot Hero First Class by bravely noticing that his Republican party was full of Republicans all along.

So my question is, how the hell can I get myself graded on that curve?

Interstate Highway System

Click here for a cool transit-style map of the U.S. Interstate Highway System.

Disposable Email Address

Click here for a Bob Rankin article entitled "Here's Why You Need a Disposable Email Address."

Trump Loves OANN.

That's One America News Network. Trump's a big fan -- and it's worse than Fox.

Click here for an article at The Daily Beast by Kevin Poulsen entitled "The Hell of Working at Trump’s New Favorite Network", subtitled "Conspiracy theories, racist outbursts, and a whole lot of Putin love. Working for the far-right One America News Network was a deeply weird experience, former employees say."

Founded and helmed by 77-year-old circuit-board millionaire Robert Herring Sr., OANN launched in 2013 as an answer to the chatty, opinionated content of mainstream cable news channels—and a place for viewers too conservative for Fox News. Under Herring’s direction the network embraced Trumpism enthusiastically starting in 2016, and in recent months the once-obscure cable news channel has been basking in a surge of attention from Donald Trump.

And:

If you don’t live in a world where Donald Trump’s inauguration drew record crowds, Roy Moore won the Alabama special election in a landslide, and Hillary Clinton has her political enemies assassinated, viewing OANN for a couple of hours is a surreal experience that inspires the same vague, uneasy dread you get from a David Lynch movie.

Working there is a million times worse.

“It was a really bad chapter in my life,” a former OANN anchor told the Daily Beast in an interview granted on condition of anonymity. “There were lots of afternoons where I would just sit in the car and cry. I didn't understand why they were doing what they were doing.”

And Trump loves it:

If OANN is all about getting Donald Trump’s attention, it’s finally working. After snubbing the network for two years in his frequent media-focused tweet storms, Trump is now mentioning the channel regularly. In a tweet on Monday, he congratulated the network “on the great job you are doing and the big ratings jump.”

Trump's Vulgar Language

Click here for an article at The New York Times by Peter Baker entitled "Trump and the Four-Letter Presidency."

There's no doubt Trump has coarsened political debate with his profanities and obscenities:

His is the profanity presidency, full of four-letter denunciations of his enemies and earthy dismissals of allegations lodged against him. At rallies and in interviews, on Twitter and in formal speeches, he relishes the bad-boy language of a shock jock, just one more way of gleefully provoking the political establishment bothered by his norm-shattering ways.

And he's becoming more comfortable with vulgar speech as time goes on:

An unscientific survey seems to suggest that if anything, Mr. Trump is growing more comfortable with crudeness. He used the word “bullshit” in public just once in his first two years in office, according to the Factba.se database that tracks his speeches, but on four occasions in the last three months.

The article notes that the use of such language is spreading. The New York Times published the word "bullshit" 14 times in its history prior to its first use by Trump; since then, the word has appeared 26 times -- not all in stories relating to Trump.

Of course, typical Trump: He's hypocritical about it.

Yet Mr. Trump feigned shock in January when the newly elected Representative Rashida Tlaib of Michigan said she and her fellow House Democrats were “going to impeach the motherfucker.” The president told reporters that “she dishonored herself” by “using language like that in front of her son and whoever else was there.”

Should Democrats Appear On Fox?

It's a dilemma. Elizabeth Warren pointedly rejected a Fox invitation; Media Matters says that Democratic town halls are "used by the president's propaganda network in its ongoing effort to sanitize its brand." Other Democratic candidates have appeared on Fox, including recently Pete Buttigeig. In response to that, Trump tweeted:

“Hard to believe that @FoxNews is wasting airtime on Mayor Pete, as Chris Wallace likes to call him,” Trump wrote on Twitter. “Fox is moving more and more to the losing (wrong) side in covering the Dems. They got dumped from the Democrats boring debates, and they just want in.”

Interesting. So according to Trump, Fox shouldn't cover the Democrats at all; they should only cover Republicans. "Fair and balanced"? Yeah, right.

I liked the response to Trump's tweet by Brit Hume. Hume is on the news side of Fox, not the opinion side -- but like Brett Baier, another news guy, there's not any doubt where he stands: solidly right-wing conservative, virtually all the time. So I found his response to Trump surprising. Hume said:

"Say this for Buttigieg. He's willing to be questioned by Chris Wallace, something you haven't done since you've been president. Oh, and covering the Democratic candidates is part of the job of a news channel..."

Chris Wallace, another Fox guy on the news side, is a tough interviewer; he doesn't throw the softball questions Trump would get from Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, or Laura Ingraham.

Democracy In Crisis

Click here for an article in the New York Review of Books by Adam Tooze entitled "Democracy and Its Discontents."

It's heavy going, but not too long. It reviews the following books:

The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It
by Yascha Mounk

How Democracies Die
by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt

The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America
by Timothy Snyder

How Democracy Ends by David Runciman

For the American right, Donald Trump’s inauguration as the forty-fifth president of the United States was a moment of political rebirth. Elements of American conservatism had long fostered a reactionary counterculture, which defined the push for civil rights as oppression, resisted the equality of women and the transgression of conventional heterosexual norms, pilloried the hegemony of the liberal media, and was suspicious of globalism and its corporate liberal institutions, including the UN and the WTO. Already in the 1950s this reactionary politics had secured a niche on the right wing of the GOP. It was reenergized by the Goldwater campaign and the conservative backlash against the social revolutions of the 1960s. Reintegrated into the mainstream GOP by Ronald Reagan, it then flared into the open in the ferocious hostility to the Clintons in the 1990s. With Trump it finally claimed center stage. For the right, the explosion of “truth-speaking” by Trump and his cohorts, the unabashed sexism and xenophobia of his administration, and its robust nationalism on issues of trade and security need no justification. His election represents a long-awaited overturning of the consensus of liberalism.

Centrist Democrats also view the administration as historic, but for them it represents the betrayal of all that is best about America. The election of a man like Trump in the second decade of the twenty-first century violated the cherished liberal narrative of progress from the Civil War to the New Deal to the civil rights movement to the election of Barack Obama. This was a self-conception of the United States carefully cultivated by cold war liberalism and seemingly fulfilled in the Clinton era of American power. The election of a man as openly sexist and xenophobic as Donald Trump was a shock so fundamental that it evoked comparisons with the great crises of democracy in the 1930s. Parallels are readily drawn between Mitch McConnell and Paul von Hindenburg. There is talk of a Reichstag fire moment, in which an act of terrorism might be exploited to declare emergency rule. Such references to the interwar period are both rousing and reassuring. They remind us of good battles decisively won. Not for nothing does the anti-Trump movement refer to itself as “the resistance,” recalling memories of midcentury antifascist heroics.

La Dowd Has Doubts About "The Adviser With The Yeti Moustache"

Click here for an op-ed in The New York Times by Maureen Dowd, entitled "Will Trump Be the Sage One?"

The lead picture shows Trump and John Bolton, and the caption is "Many people won’t recognize the adult in the room in this picture. He’s the guy without the mustache."

La Dowd's premise is that Trump is more cautious than his advisers, especially the reckless John Bolton: "... we count on the president to pump the brakes on out-of-control advisers."

She compares and contrasts the situation with W.'s presidency, where a naive and unprepared president was dealing with hawkish advisers.

There is the same feeling of the hawks building a calculated campaign for a Middle East invasion. W.’s administration had a monthslong rollout strategy. “From a marketing point of view,” Andrew Card, W.’s chief of staff, said in the summer of 2002, “you don’t introduce new products in August.” Have the hawks around Trump been waiting to get through two rings of fire — the Mueller threat and Benjamin Netanyahu’s re-election — to roll out their latest ingenious product: World War III?

She says:

W. and Trump are similar in some ways but also very different. As Trump biographer Michael D’Antonio notes: W. was interested in clarity. Trump wants chaos. W. wanted to trust his domineering advisers. Trump is always imagining betrayal. W. wanted to be a war hero, like his dad. Trump does not want to be trapped in an interminable war that will consume his presidency.

Certainly, the biographer says, Trump enjoys playing up the scary aspects of brown people with foreign names and ominous titles, like “mullah” and “ayatollah,” to stoke his base.

But Trump, unlike W., is driven by the drama of it. “It’s a game of revving up the excitement and making people afraid and then backing off on the fear in order to declare that he’s resolved the situation,” D’Antonio said. “Trump prefers threats and ultimatums to action because that allows him to look big and tough and get attention without doing something for which he will be held responsible. This is who he is at his core: an attention-seeking, action-averse propagandist who is terrified of accountability in the form of coffins arriving at Dover Air Force Base.”

She ends with a quote from David Axelrod:

“If part of your brand is that you’re not going to get the U.S. into unnecessary wars,” he said, “why in the world would you hire John Bolton?”

The Problem Isn't Trump - It's The Republican Party

Click here for an excellent article by Charlie Pierce at Esquire entitled "The Question Isn't How the Republican Party Produced This Disastrous President*. It's How It Took This Long." (I like the way Charlie always refers to the president* with an asterisk to signify something lesser, like a steroid cheat.)

The party is the problem, because of what it's become—a vehicle for bigotry, religious fanaticism, rigged elections, retrograde social policies, renegade plutocracy, staggering wealth inequality, scientific ignorance, reflexive stupidity, violent populism, white supremacy, and a view of the American electorate that is all switch and no bait. (Did I miss anything?)

Well, that's a pretty good start, Charlie. He goes on:

Three times since 1981, the Republicans have produced a president who basically embodied all of these things, just to varying degrees. Ronald Reagan played fast and loose with the truth; is that business about trees causing air pollution really any nuttier than whatever it was that El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago tweeted at 5 a.m. this morning? George W. Bush launched a war on false pretenses and made this a nation that tortures people and is proud of it. Is that any better than what's going on at the border now? The question isn't how the Republicans produced this particular disaster of a president*. The question is what took them so long.

What to do, what to do?

The only possible way to change the Republican Party is to force it to answer for itself, over and over again. One of the biggest mistakes ever made in American politics, as the redoubtable Driftglass reminds us almost daily, was the Democratic Party's blunder in letting the Republican Party off the hook for the various catastrophes wrought by the administration of C-Plus Augustus.

Obama let the Bush/Cheney merry band of war criminals off entirely too easy.

A Very Discouraging Look At Alabama's Vicious New Anti-Abortion Law

Click here for an article at Slate by Lili Loofbourow entitled "The GOP Has Its Final Anti-Abortion Victory in Sight," subtitled "Stripping voter rights. Rigging the Supreme Court. Dull procedural tricks. It’s all paying off at once." The link to the article in WaPo says, "Every anti-abortion move the GOP has made for years is paying off at once." Discussing the law, Loofbourow says:

The point is this web-like convergence, across multiple states, that’s closing like a net around Americans capable of getting pregnant. Multiple states, with multiple paths to the Supreme Court. A law passed to invoke the high court can’t be dismissed as a “strategy” or a “tactic”—the law is exactly what it says. And it was passed to satisfy the beliefs of a minority. Take Georgia: 70 percent of Georgian voters and 68 percent of American voters don’t believe Roe v. Wade should be overturned.* It doesn’t matter. That isn’t stopping Georgia’s government. We’re long past democracy working, even if many have yet to realize it, because so much of its dismantling has been invisible to the public thanks to dark money, gerrymandering, voter suppression, and maneuvers like Ainsworth’s, all of which we’ve been encouraged to consider merely improper. A long campaign to hobble and constrain our representative government at every turn is now paying off dramatically. For decades, extremists have been seizing control through the kind of procedural malfeasance that gets continually mislabeled as assholery or poor etiquette. Over and over, Americans have made the mistake of responding to Republican misbehavior by treating each case as an isolated insult to be transcended. The mature thing, we’ve been told, is to “rise above.”

Republicans have been working diligently at this for the last 40 years; finally, under Trump, it's all coming together. A key element was the recent tainted election in Georgia, where controversies were ruled on by the Georgia Secretary of State, Brian Kemp, in favor of the Republican candidate -- Brian Kemp. That's right; Kemp supervised his own election, controversy be damned. As Loofbourow says:

Yes, a judge found that Kemp’s practices raised “grave concerns for the Court about the differential treatment inflicted on a group of individuals who are predominantly minorities.” It didn’t matter. He’s the governor now. In the name of what he called “voter maintenance,” the man canceled 1.4 million voter registrations in his tenure as secretary of state. He “won” his election by 55,000 votes. The thousand cuts he inflicted on Georgia worked: By the time that court decision came around, it was only a week before the election. Too much damage had been done. Kemp won—technically, but technical wins are all you need—and that yearslong series of cheats has empowered him now to sign a bill that would authorize punishing women for exercising their constitutional right to an abortion.

The damage inflicted by a Trump presidency is going to take decades to repair.

Use Windows 10's "Your Phone" App To Sync Your Phone And PC

Click here for an article at howtogeek.com by Josh Hendrickson entitled "Why Android Users Need Windows 10’s 'Your Phone' App." Apparently it does all sorts of good stuff, but I can't try it out because I'm in France, with a French SIM card and phone number. I'm saving this article here so that I can set it up on my phone at home.

The Your Phone app is a powerful and often overlooked part of Windows 10. If you’re an Android user, you can use it to text right from your PC, see all your phone’s notifications, and quickly transfer photos. If you have the right phone and PC, you can even use the Your Phone app to mirror your phone’s screen and see it on your PC.

You can text from your PC, transfer photos wirelessly, mirror your phone screen to your PC, and other good stuff.

They Teach Arabic Numerals In School!

More evidence of the Muslim takeover of American society

A group called Civil Science polled 3,200 Americans and found that:
- 29% said that Arabic numerals should be taught in school
- 16% had no opinion on the subject
-  56% said they should not be taught

Regardless of the clear findings of this poll, Arabic numerals continue to be taught in American classrooms.

Willmar, Minnesota, pop. 21,000: The Times, They Are A-Changin'.

I'm not a big fan of Thomas Friedman, but I like his article in The New York Times entitled "President Trump, Come to Willmar." It's about Willmar, Minnesota, a town of 21,000, has absorbed a large number of immigrants over the last 20 years -- and has thrived while doing so. The high school has students from 30 different countries.

It has almost zero unemployment. If you can fog up a mirror, you can get a job in Willmar — whether as an agriculture scientist or as a meatpacker for the Jennie-O turkey plant. The math is simple: There just aren’t enough white Lutheran Scandinavians to fill those jobs.

Some small towns in Minnesota, like Willmar, are doing well; others are in decline, plagued by unemployment and an opiate problem:

In Minnesota, the towns that are rising are places “that have said we need a trained work force with a good work ethic and we’ll embrace a redefined sense of community to get that,” explained Dana Mortenson, C.E.O. of World Savvy, a global education organization that also works in Minnesota towns. And the ones that are struggling — and losing both jobs and population — “are often the ones who can’t manage this new inclusion challenge.”

Social networks, globalization, climate change, economic opportunity, demographics and war are throwing more people together with more “other” people in more remote places than ever before. What’s happening in Willmar tells you just how deep this is going and why every town in America needs to get caught trying to make diversity work — or it will wither. It’s that simple.

A trickle of immigrants became a flood:

Diversity came to Willmar slowly, gradually — and then quickly. First, in the 1980s and 1990s, came a trickle of Latino seasonal farm workers who mostly went back south for the winter. Then the growing Jennie-O turkey processing plant needed a steady supply of meatpackers, and that led some to stay. And then, about 12 years ago, Somali and Karen refugees to the U.S. got word through their networks that there was work in Willmar and cheap housing. They, too, first came in a trickle, which became a large wave about five years ago — some arriving directly from African refugee camps.

According to the mayor:

“We had 1,200 to 1,600 Somalis when I started as mayor in 2014 and now we have 3,500 to 3,800,” said Calvin. “We also have 800 Karen people from Burma.” Add to that over 4,000 Latinos and you have a town of 21,000 that had been virtually all white and Christian its entire existence become nearly half new immigrants in the blink of two decades.

🎵 Come gather 'round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You'll be drenched to the bone.
If your time to you
Is worth savin'
Then you better start swimmin'
Or you'll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin'.🎵

The Green New Deal, John Oliver Style

Includes Bill Nye The Science Guy like you've never seen him before:

Paul Krugman On Trump's Trade Policy

As far as I can tell, [Trump] isn’t getting a single thing about trade policy right. He doesn’t know how tariffs work, or who pays them. He doesn’t understand what bilateral trade imbalances mean, or what causes them. He has a zero-sum view of trade that flies in the face of everything we’ve learned over the past two centuries. And to the (small) extent that he is making any coherent demands on China, they’re demands China can’t/won’t meet.

Which of the two has the Nobel for economics -- Krugman or Trump?

Donald and Rudy's Excellent Ukrainian Adventure

Click here for an article by Paul Waldman at The Plum Line, a WaPo blog, entitled "Trump is already colluding with a foreign government to get reelected."

It begins:

There are some news stories so jaw-dropping that you have to read them two or three times to make sure you’re not hallucinating. So it is with a story in the New York Times in which Rudolph W. Giuliani announces to the world that he is going to Ukraine to pressure that country’s government to use its official resources to assist in President Trump’s reelection effort — by mounting an investigation he hopes will produce dirt on Joe Biden.

Yes, Trump is trying to collude with a foreign government in an attempt to aid his campaign by creating negative stories about a potential opponent. Again.

“Oh come on,” you’re saying. “You’ve got to be exaggerating.” I’m not. The Trump team is apparently streamlining its previous pattern, which was to try to secretly work with a foreign government on its campaign, angrily deny it when it’s revealed and then, when caught by incontrovertible evidence, insist that there was never anything wrong with doing it in the first place.

They’re now skipping over the secrecy and denial parts, and just doing it openly.

Rudy's foray into the Ukraine has two objectives: to downplay the depredations of Paul Manafort, Trump's jailbird former campaign manager; and to attempt to smear Joe Biden because of his son's seat as a board member on a possibly shady Ukrainian energy company, Burisma Holdings.

Here's Guiliani's slant on it:

“We’re not meddling in an election, we’re meddling in an investigation, which we have a right to do,” Mr. Giuliani said in an interview on Thursday when asked about the parallel to the special counsel’s inquiry.

“There’s nothing illegal about it,” he said. “Somebody could say it’s improper. And this isn’t foreign policy — I’m asking them to do an investigation that they’re doing already and that other people are telling them to stop. And I’m going to give them reasons why they shouldn’t stop it because that information will be very, very helpful to my client, and may turn out to be helpful to my government.”

Waldman says:

So to be clear: The president of the United States is, through his lawyer, pressuring a foreign government to mount an investigation in order to tarnish his potential general-election opponent.

The article concludes:

This is like a crew of bank robbers stopping on their way into the bank to hold a news conference to announce that they’re going to hold the customers at gunpoint, tie up the tellers, blow the door to the safe, grab the money, then escape through the back entrance where their getaway car is waiting. Any questions?

I’ve argued that Trump is going to mobilize the resources of the federal government to destroy his eventual opponent. Trump has already told Sean Hannity that Attorney General William P. Barr is looking into what he called “incredible” charges involving Ukraine and Hillary Clinton, no doubt at his suggestion. This is only the beginning of what Trump is going to pull, and there’s every reason to think that he feels utterly unrestrained by law or ethics.

That Trump would do this at all is shocking and despicable. That he would do it so openly is proof that he really does think he can get away with anything.

C'est la vie. Just another day in Trumpland. Move along; nothing to see here.

Saving Screenshots, Using Snipping Tool

Click here for an article at How-To Geek by Raihul Saigal entitled "How to Take Screenshots in Windows 10." You can also save a screenshot to a file, and save all or part of a screen. For more flexible options, it tells how you can use a Windows 10 snipping tool.

WaPo Fact Checker On The Uranium One "Scandal"

Click here for an article by Glenn Kessler, Fact Checker at The Washington Post, providing information on the Clinton "Uranium One scandal."

Hamilton, Jefferson, and Betsy DeVos

Click here for an article at ThinkProgress by Ian Millhiser entitled "Betsy DeVos appears to have no idea who Alexander Hamilton was."

It's a good short explanation of the ideological struggle between Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton:

The early history of the United States was, to a large extent, a battle between a Jeffersonian model built on agriculture, small government, and slavery; and a Hamiltonian model built on capitalism, economic expansion, and a robust centralized government.

Betsy DeVos, of course, has no idea of the philosophies of either man, and while head of a government department dedicated to fostering public education, says she intends to fight for "freedom from government." Sigh.

Keyboard Shortcuts for VLC

Click here for an article at How-To Geek by Chris Hoffman entitled "Master VLC With These 23+ Keyboard Shortcuts."

Examples: "Control" with the up or down arrow increases or decreases volume (VLC's slider volume, not the main system volume); "T" displays time remaining and time elapsed (only for a few seconds); "Shift" with the left or right arrow jumps 3 seconds forward or back; "Alt" with left or right arrow jumps 10 seconds; "Control" with left or right arrow jumps 1 minute; "Control-Alt" with left or right arrow jumps 5 minutes; "Control-T" jumps to a specific time in the video (enter time with number keys).

Teach Dave To Cook

Click here for a short (five-part) series of videos from The Washington Post entitled "Teach Dave to Cook."

Cook a steak, make salad with vinaigrette and croutons, make chicken Scarpariello (shoemakers' chicken) with sausage.

Keyboard Shortcuts for the Windows Command Prompt; Write an AutoHotKey Script

Here are a couple of interesting articles from How-To Geek: Click here for an article at How-To Geek by Walter Glenn entitled "34 Useful Keyboard Shortcuts for the Windows Command Prompt."

Here are a few pointers about opening the command prompt:

Windows (or Windows+R) and then type “cmd”: Run the Command Prompt in normal mode. Win+X and then press C: Run the Command Prompt in normal mode. (New in Windows 10) Win+X and then press A: Run the Command Prompt with administrative privileges. (New in Windows 10)

I like the last one, with administrative privileges.

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Click here for an article by Anthony Heddings entitled "How to Write an AutoHotKey Script."