Ann Coulter v. Trump

Click here for an article by Karoli Kuns at Crooks & Liars entitled "Ann Coulter Tees Off On Trump: 'Another Roy Moore Fiasco.'"

Wow! Coulter doesn't hold back. The following are all tweets from Sunday, May 24:

The most disloyal actual retard that has ever set foot in the Oval Office is trying to lose AND take the Senate with him. Another Roy Moore fiasco so he can blame someone else for his own mess.

Another, same day:

COVID gave Trump a chance to be a decent, compassionate human being (or pretending to be). But he couldn't even do that.

Here's a Coulter tweet in response to a Trump tweet attacking Jeff Sessions for recusing himself from overseeing the Mueller investigation:

Sessions HAD to recuse himself, you complete blithering idiot. YOU did not have to go on Lester Holt's show and announce you fired Comey over the Russian investigation. That's what got you a Special Prosecutor.

Again, same day, apparently criticizing Trump's endorsement of no-hoper Roy Moore for the Alabama Senate race in 2018:

GREAT WORK IN THE LAST ALABAMA SENATE RACE, MR. PRESIDENT! Keep it up and we'll have zero Republican senators. The next Republican president will be elected in the year 4820.

And finally (at least so far; it's still May 24, 2 p.m. Eastern):

I will never apologize for supporting the issues that candidate Trump advocated, but I am deeply sorry for thinking that this shallow and broken man would show even some remote fealty to the promises that got him elected.

Click here for an article by Digby at Hullabaloo entitled "Why Trumpie won’t read."

The New York Times reported today on Trump’s insistence that the Intelligence Community didn’t adequately warn him about the coronavirus pandemic. Even if true, it shouldn’t have made a difference. All you had to do was read the papers. And his own public health experts were running around with their hair on fire. He just didn’t want to hear it.

In fact, he doesn’t want to read anything or hear anything that doesn’t apply directly to what people are saying about him. It is literally all he cares about:

Mr. Trump, who has mounted a yearslong attack on the intelligence agencies, is particularly difficult to brief on critical national security matters, according to interviews with 10 current and former intelligence officials familiar with his intelligence briefings.

The president veers off on tangents and getting him back on topic is difficult, they said. He has a short attention span and rarely, if ever, reads intelligence reports, relying instead on conservative media and his friends for information. He is unashamed to interrupt intelligence officers and riff based on tips or gossip he hears from the former casino magnate Steve Wynn, the retired golfer Gary Player or Christopher Ruddy, the conservative media executive.

Mr. Trump rarely absorbs information that he disagrees with or that runs counter to his worldview, the officials said. Briefing him has been so great a challenge compared with his predecessors that the intelligence agencies have hired outside consultants to study how better to present information to him.

Working to keep Mr. Trump’s interest exhausted and burned out his first briefer, Ted Gistaro, two former officials said. Mr. Gistaro did not always know what to expect and would sometimes have to brief an erratic and angry president upset over news reports, the officials said.

More from the article:

Trump’s non-reading evinces not stupidity so much as incuriosity. Narcissists are easily bored, and Trump is no exception. In his 1990 book, Surviving at the Top, which he didn’t write, Trump says that travel, exercise, and successful people bore him. “I get bored too easily,” he says. “My attention span is short.”

Trump’s former National Economic Council director Gary Cohn allegedly wrote in an email, “Trump won’t read anything — not one-page memos, not the brief policy papers; nothing. He gets up halfway through meetings with world leaders because he is bored.”

The only information that interests Trump is information that affirms his self-image. He’s rich, handsome, and popular — that’s what he wants to hear, which is why he regularly says it himself.

Trump, we are told, processes information orally. If you process information orally, you likely process little information. And if you process little information, you exude even less. Every time Trump comments on a subject, he reveals how little he knows about it. He wondered aloud why the Civil War was fought. He said he’s been treated worse than Abraham Lincoln, who was assassinated. He didn’t know what happened at Pearl Harbor. He’s too dumb to know he’s ignorant, and he’s too narcissistic to care.

As John McWhorter, a linguistics professor at Columbia University, observed, oral communication is personal, focuses on emotions, and “reinforces what you know,” whereas the written word “collects information we don’t memorize.” The latter is conducive to prolonged thinking.

And:

Trump, putative author of three books with “think” in the title, doesn’t like to think. He doesn’t even think about himself — his favorite subject — much less about public health. He lives and acts in the moment, chasing instant gratification, which reading does not provide. That’s why he prefers television and Twitter to reading and thinking: they are immediate, visceral, and cognitively undemanding.

Reading doesn’t necessarily make you a good president — James Buchanan, America’s second-worst president, was well-read — but not reading is sure to make you a bad one. In his book Call Sign Chaos, former Secretary of Defense James Mattis writes, “If you haven’t read hundreds of books, you are functionally illiterate, and you will be incompetent, because your personal experiences alone aren’t broad enough to sustain you.” Trump’s personal experiences include being on TV a lot and watching a lot of TV.

One of the purposes of reading is to learn, but it’s pointless to learn if you already know everything. Trump is convinced of his own omniscience. Last month, he claimed to “know a lot about helicopters” and to “know South Korea better than anybody,” right before he got the population of Seoul wrong. “I know windmills very much,” he said in December. “I’ve studied it better than anybody.”

The president has claimed to possess superior knowledge about drones, ISIS, courts, lawsuits, America’s system of government, trade, renewable energy, banks, taxes, tax laws, debt, campaign finance, money, infrastructure, construction, technology, the economy, Democrats, polls, steelworkers, the word “apprentice,” environmental impact statements, “the power of Facebook,” “offense and defense,” Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), COVID-19, and “things.”

None of this is true. Trump is a know-it-all who knows almost nothing and refuses to read anything except his own name. His bibliophobia would be funny if it weren’t so deadly.

Lindsey Graham Nailed

Click here for a post by Digby at Hullabaloo an ad against Lindsey Graham as he runs for re-election in South Carolina.

He's Back! (Ronny Jackson, That Is)

Remember Ronny Jackson? A Navy rear admiral, he was appointed president's physician by W in 2006, and kept on by Obama and then Trump. He was quiet, apolitical, and liked by many in the Obama administration. He first became controversial in January 2018 when he gushed about Trump's extraordinary health (preposterous on its face; the man is sedentary, obese, and a junk food addict), "incredible genes," and said "Based on his cardiac assessment, hands down, there is no question he is in the excellent range," and "I told the President that if he had a healthier diet over the last 20 years he might live to be 200 years old." Many people in the Obama administration who had known Jackson defended him at that point because he was well liked.

Controversy boiled over in March 2018, when Trump nominated Jackson, who had no previous managerial experience, to be secretary of Veterans Affairs, a bureaucracy with 375,000 employees. He was assailed for his total lack of experience, and stories came out that he generously doled out prescription drugs left and right, earning the nickname "Candyman," and that he was frequently drunk on duty. Though the allegations were disputed and never really proven, Trump abandoned the nomination.

Jackson retired from the Navy in December 2019 and announced a week later that he was running for a seat in Congress as a Republican (a sitting Republican congressman was retiring). Once seen to be apolitical, he is now an outspoken Trump supporter. Click here for an article by Kevin Liptak at CNN entitled "Former White House physician Ronny Jackson dives headfirst into 'Obamagate' and angers former colleagues."

To the consternation of his former Obama administration friends, he said last week on Twitter, without offering any proof, "President Obama weaponized the highest levels of our government to spy on President Trump. Every Deep State traitor deserves to be brought to justice for their heinous actions." The following day, he doubled down:

On Wednesday, Jackson released a new statement "regarding recent false accusations from former Obama officials and the mainstream media."

"I stand by my comments calling out President Obama's administration for weaponizing our government to spy on President Trump and his supporters," Jackson wrote. "I will never apologize for standing up to protect America's national security interests and constitutional freedoms, even if that means triggering liberals and the 'mainstream media.'"

In his statement, Jackson says he's "proud to call President Trump a close friend."

Former acquaintances feel blindsided: "During my time in the White House Ronny Jackson was my colleague, my friend and my doctor. I thanked him in my book for his good care," tweeted Alyssa Mastromonaco, a former deputy chief of staff. "His comments yesterday and today leave me confused, angry, and heartbroken. I don't recognize this version of Ronny at all."

An Explanation Of The Flynn Mess

Click here for an article in The New York Times by Adam Goldman and Mark Mazzetti entitled "Trump White House Changes Its Story on Michael Flynn."

Don't lose sight of the fact that Flynn twice pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about telephone conversations he had had with the Russian ambassador, Sergey I. Kislyak. The view expressed by the White House three years ago was that "Mr. Flynn ... had lied to Vice President Mike Pence and other aides about the nature of his calls to the ambassador, had lied repeatedly to F.B.I. agents about the calls, and might have made himself vulnerable to Russian blackmail."

Marshall L. Miller, a former top prosecutor in Brooklyn and the principal deputy of the Justice Department’s criminal division, says “Mr. Flynn admitted twice under oath that he lied to the F.B.I. Political appointees at D.O.J. are now trying to rewrite the law to erase the crime.”

Mr. Flynn’s troubles began with a phone call.

It was Dec. 29, 2016, the day the outgoing Obama administration announced sanctions against Russia for the country’s widespread effort to disrupt the 2016 presidential election. Mr. Flynn, who was Mr. Trump’s incoming national security adviser, urged Mr. Kislyak in a phone call not to escalate tensions with a retaliatory move against the United States — perhaps by kicking American diplomats and spies out of Russia.

Given the circumstances, the call was remarkable. The United States government had just determined that its longtime adversary had launched a concerted effort to sabotage a presidential election, and the incoming national security adviser was having a back-channel discussion with a top Russian official that might lead to the new Trump administration gutting the sanctions its predecessor put in place to punish the Russians.

As time went by, "The matter took on greater urgency when Mr. Flynn’s discussions with Mr. Kislyak were revealed publicly by David Ignatius, a Washington Post columnist."

Top Trump transition officials — including Mr. Pence as well as Reince Priebus, who was to be White House chief of staff, and Sean Spicer, the incoming White House press secretary — questioned Mr. Flynn about the Washington Post column. Mr. Flynn denied that he spoke about sanctions with Mr. Kislyak, and Mr. Spicer repeated those claims to members of the news media. "Days later, on Face the Nation, Pence stated what Flynn had told him: "'They did not discuss anything having to do with the United States’ decision to expel diplomats or impose censure against Russia,' the vice president said."

Mr. Pence’s interview set off alarms at the F.B.I. and the Justice Department. If Mr. Flynn had lied to the vice president, the Russians knew that and could use it as leverage over Mr. Flynn. Newly disclosed documents made public in Mr. Flynn’s criminal case show officials were also concerned that Mr. Pence might have been lying, as well.

“The implications of that were that the Russians believed one of two things — either that the vice president was in on it with Flynn, or that Flynn was clearly willing to lie to the vice president,” Mary B. McCord, a former top national security at the time, said in an interview with the special counsel’s office.

That was when the FBI decided to find out what was going on. Comey sent a pair of FBI agents to interview Flynn, who by then was a few days into his job as national security adviser. That was when Flynn lied repeatedly, denying that he had discussed sanctions with the Russian ambassador [how could he not have known that Kislyak's phone calls were tapped, and the FBI knew he was lying?]

“McGahn [White House counsel] and Priebus [White House chief of staff] concluded that Flynn could not have forgotten the details of the discussions of sanctions and had instead been lying about what he discussed with Kislyak.”

Mr. McGahn and Mr. Priebus decided that Mr. Flynn needed to go and made that recommendation to Mr. Trump.

So it was Trump and his White House staff who made the decision to fire Flynn for what they believed was good cause, although they are now maintaining that Flynn is a victim of bullying by the Obama administration as part of a "silent coup" to take Trump down. In June of 2019 Flynn got a new lawyer, a woman named Sidney Powell, who stated that “it is increasingly apparent that General Flynn was targeted and taken out of the Trump administration for concocted and political purposes.”

Why People Support Trump (It's Frightening)

Click here for an excellent article at The New York Times by Thomas B. Edsall entitled "Trump Is Staking Out His Own Universe of ‘Alternative Facts,'" subtitled "The president’s re-election strategy isn’t based on reality. How could it be?"

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

In less than a year, from May 2019 to March 2020, the share of weekly church-attending white Protestants convinced that Donald Trump was anointed by God to be president grew from 29.6 percent to 49.5 percent.

Good lord. "Anointed by God"? What's wrong with these people?

The Trump campaign’s digital sites serve a dual purpose. His supporters are able to enter a self-contained, self-reinforcing arena where Trump reigns supreme, and the campaign gets detailed marketing information about those who go through the elaborate sign-up process — information subsequently used for voter mobilization, fund-raising and volunteer recruitment.

The article says that Stefan Smith, a Democratic tech strategist, says the Trump campaign is "trapping people inside an ecosystem of dangerous misinformation, conspiracy theories, and grievance politics. And it’s doing so while making the experience as fun and exciting as possible."

“The new Trump campaign app uses gamification to drive voter outreach and valuable data collection,” CNN reported on April 23. “Share the campaign app with a friend, win 100 points. Earn 5,000 points and you can redeem a campaign store discount. Earn 100,000 points, and you can get a picture with President Donald Trump.”

Those who download the Trump app can “watch live ‘shows’ hosted by senior campaign aides and surrogates,” according to CNN, and receive tutorial videos from top campaign aides and surrogates like Lara Trump, who explains how to become a “digital activist” on social media and host a “MAGA meet up.” Kimberly Guilfoyle, the girlfriend of Donald Trump Jr, explains how to become a fund-raising “bundler” and political director Chris Carr discusses how to be a grass roots “team leader.”

Parscale himself [Brad Parscale, Trump's campaign manager] told viewers that his favorite item at his Florida home is Hillary Clinton toilet paper: “I have boxes of it,” he said, “and I take it into the bathroom and it’s just enjoyable since she said so many mean things about me and our campaign and our president.”

A scholarly article about the phenomenon, “The Authentic Appeal of the Lying Demagogue: Proclaiming the Deeper Truth about Political Illegitimacy,” published in 2018 in the American Sociological Review by Oliver Hahl, Minjae Kim and Ezra W. Zuckerman Sivan, of the business schools at Yale, Northwestern and M.I.T., pose the question: “How can a constituency of voters find a candidate authentically appealing (i.e., view him positively as authentic) even though he is a ‘lying demagogue’ (someone who deliberately tells lies and appeals to nonnormative private prejudices)?”

How does a lying demagogue attract and keep supporters? Well, “the lying demagogue claims to be an authentic champion of those who are subject to social control by the established political leadership.” The target audience is those who believe that their interests are not represented by the political establishment. The established political leadership is repelled by the actions of "the lying demagogue," and this just reinforces the followers' belief that the demagogue is on their side, fighting their fight, enraging the right people.

People may feel anxious or angry about the political landscape they see around them -- and the demagogue tries to keep them angry.

When people are anxious they tend to seek out new information. Anxiety rouses people from a sort of ‘autopilot’ mode and causes them to re-evaluate their beliefs.

Anger, in contrast, has the opposite effect. When people are angry they tend to mentally retreat and dig in on the things that they know and believe to be true.

The result?

The psychological nature of anger essentially precludes any sort of attitudinal change against Trump. Anger causes Trump’s supporters to become more reliant on information they receive from him, the RNC, Fox News, etc.

Here's some scary stuff: Jim Messina, Barack Obama’s campaign manager, warned in an April 9 appearance on David Plouffe’s podcast, that

the numbers are pretty stark. Joe Biden has 4.6 million Twitter followers. Donald Trump has 75 million. Joe Biden has 1.7 million Facebook fans. Donald Trump has 28 million.

And: “Biden’s first virtual online chat got 5,000 people. Just one with Lara Trump gets 945,000.”

Fintan O'Toole On Trump

I'm attaching a copy of an article by Fintan O'Toole (a noted journalist with The Irish Times who spends a good part of every year in the U.S.), entitled "THE WORLD HAS LOVED, HATED AND ENVIED THE U.S. NOW, FOR THE FIRST TIME, WE PITY IT":

Over more than two centuries, the United States has stirred a very wide range of feelings in the rest of the world: love and hatred, fear and hope, envy and contempt, awe and anger. But there is one emotion that has never been directed towards the US until now: pity.

However bad things are for most other rich democracies, it is hard not to feel sorry for Americans. Most of them did not vote for Donald Trump in 2016. Yet they are locked down with a malignant narcissist who, instead of protecting his people from Covid-19, has amplified its lethality. The country Trump promised to make great again has never in its history seemed so pitiful.

Will American prestige ever recover from this shameful episode? The US went into corona virus crisis with immense advantages: precious weeks of warning about what was coming, the world’s best concentration of medical and scientific expertise, effectively limitless financial resources, a military complex with stunning logistical capacity and most of the world’s leading technology corporations. Yet it managed to make itself the global epicentre of the pandemic

As the American writer George Packer puts it in the current edition of the Atlantic, “The United States reacted … like Pakistan or Belarus – like a country with shoddy infrastructure and a dysfunctional government whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering.”

It is one thing to be powerless in the face of a natural disaster, quite another to watch vast power being squandered in real time – wilfully, malevolently, vindictively. It is one thing for governments to fail (as, in one degree or another, most governments did), quite another to watch a ruler and his supporters actively spread a deadly virus. Trump, his party, and Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News became vectors of the pestilence.

The grotesque spectacle of the president openly inciting people (some of them armed) to take to the streets to oppose the restrictions that save lives is the manifestation of a political death wish. What are supposed to be daily briefings on the crisis, demonstrative of national unity in the face of a shared challenge, have been used by Trump merely to sow confusion and division. They provide a recurring horror show in which all the neuroses that haunt the American subconscious dance naked on live TV. If the plague is a test, its ruling political nexus ensured that the US would fail it at a terrible cost in human lives. In the process, the idea of the US as the world’s leading nation – an idea that has shaped the past century – has all but evaporated.

Other than the Trump impersonator Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, who is now looking to the US as the exemplar of anything other than what not to do? How many people in Düsseldorf or Dublin are wishing they lived in Detroit or Dallas?

It is hard to remember now but, even in 2017, when Trump took office, the conventional wisdom in the US was that the Republican Party and the broader framework of US political institutions would prevent him from doing too much damage. This was always a delusion, but the pandemic has exposed it in the most savage ways.

Abject surrender

What used to be called mainstream conservatism has not absorbed Trump – he has absorbed it. Almost the entire right-wing half of American politics has surrendered abjectly to him. It has sacrificed on the altar of wanton stupidity the most basic ideas of responsibility, care and even safety. Thus, even at the very end of March, 15 Republican governors had failed to order people to stay at home or to close non-essential businesses. In Alabama, for example, it was not until April 3 that governor Kay Ivey finally issued a stay-at-home order.

In Florida, the state with the highest concentration of elderly people with underlying conditions, governor Ron DeSantis, a Trump mini-me, kept the beach resorts open to students travelling from all over the US for spring break parties. Even on April 1, when he issued restrictions, DeSantis exempted religious services and “recreational activities.”Georgia governor Brian Kemp, when he finally issued a stay-at-home order on April 1, explained: “We didn’t know that [the virus can be spread by people without symptoms] until the last 24 hours.”

This is not mere ignorance – it is deliberate and homicidal stupidity. There is, as the demonstrations this week in US cities have shown, plenty of political mileage in denying the reality of the pandemic.

It is fuelled by Fox News and far-right internet sites, and it reaps for these politicians millions of dollars in donations, mostly (in an ugly irony) from older people who are most vulnerable to the virus draws on a concoction of conspiracy theories, hatred of science, paranoia about the “deep state” and religious providential-ism (God will protect the good folks) that is now very deeply infused in the mindset of the American right.

Trump embodies and enacts this mindset, but he did not invent it. The US response to the coronavirus crisis has been paralyzed by a contradiction that the Republicans have inserted into the heart of US democracy. On the one hand, they want to control all the levers of governmental power. On the other they have created a popular base by playing on the notion that government is innately evil and must not be trusted.

The contradiction was made manifest in two of Trump’s statements on the pandemic: on the one hand that he has “total authority”, and on the other that “I don’t take responsibility at all”. Caught between authoritarian and anarchic impulses, he is incapable of coherence.

Fertile ground

But this is not just Donald Trump. The crisis has shown definitively that Trump’s presidency is not an aberration. It has grown on soil long prepared to receive it. The monstrous blossoming of misrule has structure and purpose and strategy behind it.

There are very powerful interests who demand “freedom” in order to do as they like with the environment, society and the economy. They have infused a very large part of American culture with the belief that “freedom” is literally more important than life. My freedom to own assault weapons trumps your right not to get shot at school. Now, my freedom to go to the barber (“I Need a Haircut” read one banner this week in St. Paul, Minnesota) trumps your need to avoid infection.

Usually when this kind of outlandish idiocy is displaying itself, there is the comforting thought that, if things were really serious, it would all stop. People would sober up. Instead, a large part of the US has hit the bottle even harder. And the president, his party and their media allies keep supplying the drinks. There has been no moment of truth, no shock of realisation that the antics have to end. No one of any substance on the US right has stepped in to say: get a grip, people are dying here.

That is the mark of how deep the trouble is for the US – it is not just that Trump has treated the crisis merely as a way to feed tribal hatreds but that this behaviour has become normalised. When the freak show is live on TV every evening, and the star is boasting about his ratings, it is not really a freak show any more. For a very large and solid bloc of Americans, it is reality.

And this will get worse before it gets better. Trump has at least eight more months in power. In his inaugural address in 2017, he evoked “American carnage” and promised to make it stop. But now that the real carnage has arrived, he is revelling in it. He is in his element.

As things get worse, he will pump more hatred and falsehood, more death-wish defiance of reason and decency, into the groundwater. If a new administration succeeds him in 2021, it will have to clean up the toxic dump he leaves behind. If he is re-elected, toxicity will have become the lifeblood of American politics. Either way, it will be a long time before the rest of the world can imagine America being great again.

News Flash: Trump Lies!

Click here for an article in The New York Times by Michael D. Shear, Maggie Haberman, and Linda Qiu, entitled "White House Orders Staff to Wear Masks as Trump Misrepresents Testing Record."

Declaring once again that “if somebody wants to be tested right now, they’ll be able to be tested,” Mr. Trump said that his administration was working with states to allow them to conduct 12.9 million tests in May, insisting that the testing ability in the United States compares favorably with other countries.

“We are testing more people per capita than South Korea, the United Kingdom, France, Japan, Sweden, Finland and many other countries,” he said, ignoring countries where testing on a per capita basis is higher, including Germany, Russia, Spain, Canada, Switzerland and at least 20 others, according to statistics compiled by Our World in Data.

Shades of W's "Mission Accomplished":

Flanked by large posters that proclaimed “America leads the world in testing,” Mr. Trump also declared victory over the pandemic, saying that “we have met the moment and we have prevailed.” Later, under questioning, he revised his comments, saying he only meant to say the country had prevailed on increasing access to testing.

Trump v. Scarborough

There's a Twitter feud going on between Trump and Scarborough. Trump tweeted:

“‘Concast’ [I guess he means Comcast?] should open up a long overdue Florida Cold Case against Psycho Joe Scarborough ... I know him and Crazy Mika well, used them beautifully in the last Election, dumped them nicely, and will state on the record that he is “nuts”. Besides, bad ratings! #OPENJOECOLDCASE.”

In 2001, while Scarborough was serving as a Republican congressman from Florida, a 28-year-old intern, Lori Klausutis, was found dead in his Florida constituency office. The death was ruled to be unsuspicious; she had a heart condition and suffered an attack which caused her to fall, and she struck her head.

Scarborough responded on the MSNBC show, "Morning Joe," that Scarborough co-hosts with his wife, Mika Brzezinski (who Trump has also viciously attacked in the past):

I know you meant to be extraordinarily cruel to me by attacking me, by bringing up a conspiracy theory that has lived in the gutters of the Internet for some time now. But just like the Seth Rich conspiracy murder that was pushed by your allies, you don’t understand the pain you cause.”

He said that the president’s accusations dredge up pain for “the families who’ve already lost a loved one. Not me. Not my children. Not anybody that knows me. They know the truth. You once again drag a family through this and make them relive it again, just like Seth Rich’s parents, as if losing a loved one the first time isn’t enough.”

Biden Ad Highlights Trump's Incompetence

Click here for a Biden ad retweeted by Joe Scarborough.

Do We Really Want "Freedom," American Style?

Click here for an article in The New York Times' "Opinion Today," by editorial page editor James Bennet.

It's all worth the read, but here's the section I like, on Finland -- and check out the bolded paragraph at the end:

Before our office shut down and we all dispersed, one of the last editorial board meetings we held in person was with the prime minister of Finland, Sanna Marin. At 34, she’s the youngest female prime minister in the world.

She spoke about Finland’s challenges in coping with climate change, immigration and a movement of people to cities that is hollowing out rural communities. Again and again, as she talked about sustaining political consensus to confront these challenges, she returned to the importance of the sense of security Finns feel because of their strong social safety net, including free health care and university.

“It gives people freedom when you have a very strong welfare state,” she told us.

That formulation stands the American politics of freedom on its head. Franklin Roosevelt may have envisioned freedom from want, but in recent decades freedom here has come to mean freedom from taxes, freedom from regulation, freedom from having to wear a mask in public. The American left has largely conceded the rhetoric and even the idea of freedom to the right.

Told that some Americans look at Finland and fear socialism, the prime minister smiled. As neighbors of the Soviet Union, Finns had seen a socialist experiment up close and wanted no part of it. “We are an open-market society,” she said proudly.

Our columnist Nicholas Kristof, in a deeply reported exploration of the Nordic model, had the brilliant idea to look at what it’s like to work for McDonald’s in Denmark. The answer is that, even though Denmark has no minimum wage, you make about $22 an hour and get “six weeks of paid vacation a year, life insurance, a year’s paid maternity leave and a pension plan.” All that plus the Danish guarantees of medical insurance and paid sick leave.

Trump, High School Hero? Not So Much

Click here for an article at the Daily Beast by Jamie Ross, entitled "Box Scores Show Trump Lied His Ass Off About Being a High School Baseball Legend."

Here’s a shock—President Trump, who has repeatedly boasted about how great he was at baseball in high school and how he could totally have gone pro if he’d wanted to, actually pretty much sucked at it. Slate has managed to unearth nine box scores from Trump’s time at New York Military Academy, which showed a four-for-29 batting record in his sophomore, junior, and senior seasons, with three runs batted in and a single run scored. Trump’s batting average in the nine games Slate found box scores for stood at a disappointing .138. Slate asked The Athletic’s Keith Law, a senior baseball writer, if Trump’s numbers sounded like those of someone who could have gone pro. “You don’t hit .138 for some podunk, cold-weather high school playing the worst competition you could possibly imagine,” Law said. “It’s absolutely laughable. He hit .138—he couldn’t fucking hit, that’s pretty clear.”

Trump, The Showman

Click here for an article at The Plum Line, a WaPo blog by Paul Waldman, entitled "Trump knows exactly how to save his reelection: With a show."

Trump knows how to do it: He's done it before.

"In the early 2000s, after a couple of casino bankruptcies and other business failures, Trump’s fortune had collapsed, almost no bank would lend to him, and he was hugely in debt. How did he bring himself back? He got an offer to star in a reality TV show.

“The Apprentice” saved him, not only providing him a stream of direct income but giving him incalculably valuable PR. What’s relevant for our current moment is the way it covered Trump’s shabby reality in a layer of gold leaf, and in doing so revived him. Here’s how the New Yorker described it:

“The Apprentice” portrayed Trump not as a skeezy hustler who huddles with local mobsters but as a plutocrat with impeccable business instincts and unparalleled wealth — a titan who always seemed to be climbing out of helicopters or into limousines. “Most of us knew he was a fake,” [editor Jonathan] Braun told me. “He had just gone through I don’t know how many bankruptcies. But we made him out to be the most important person in the world. It was like making the court jester the king.” Bill Pruitt, another producer, recalled, “We walked through the offices and saw chipped furniture. We saw a crumbling empire at every turn. Our job was to make it seem otherwise.”

The TV producers used all their skills, and it worked, reinforcing for Trump a principle on which he had built his career: If you’re relentless enough, you can create a false image that eventually turns into reality, or at least something close. Tell everyone you’re the very embodiment of wealth and success, and you can con people into giving you so much money that you actually become wealthy and successful.

What is Trump going to do?

So Trump is now saying that before the pandemic he delivered the greatest economy the world had ever seen (itself a ridiculous lie), and he’ll do it again. How is he going to do that?

It’s not going to be with a repeat of his prior economic policies, which basically came down to cutting taxes for the wealthy and corporations, slashing regulations on things such as environmental protection and worker safety, and launching a destructive trade war with China. In fact, don’t be surprised if there are little or no significant policy moves at all on the administration’s part.

What Trump does is PR. So that’s what he’ll do.

He’ll visit factories carefully chosen with MAGA hat-wearing CEOs who will play their part and thank him profusely for getting America back on its feet. He’ll hold events at the White House where he can sit inside a truck and honk the horn like a real big boy. He’ll tout the progress of the stock market. He’ll have rallies again — so many rallies — where he’ll say that no one has ever seen such an amazing comeback, it’s fantastic, it’s incredible, world leaders are calling me to say how impressed they are. He’ll remind us that the pandemic was the fault of China and Democratic governors and Barack Obama, but he brought prosperity back.

Every Republican will repeat the message: America suffered a blow, but Trump has saved us and now everything is great again.

The fact that by November the economy will almost certainly not be great will not be part of the show. Just as today Trump is utterly incapable of feeling or communicating empathy for those who have lost family and friends to the coronavirus, he will have no time for the unemployed, the bankrupt, the fearful or the uncertain. Only Trump-haters could dwell on that, he’ll say. The truth is that we’re in paradise, thanks to me.

Can this show actually persuade people to ignore the reality of their own lives and communities? One would hope not, but you never know. Given his own experience, Trump is probably sure that it will. And it’s about all he has left.

More McConnell Iniquity

In October 2019, Justin Walker -- a protégé of Mitch McConnell -- was confirmed by the Senate for a lifetime appointment to the U.S. District Court in Kentucky. He's 37 years old. Upon graduation from law school, he served as a law clerk to Judge Brett Kavanaugh, who was then sitting on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. (He gave 119 media interviews during the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings for SCOTUS.) He was appointed despite the fact that the ABA (the American Bar Association) rated Walker "not qualified," saying that Walker “has a very substantial gap, namely the absence of any significant trial experience.”

According to The New York Times, "The District of Columbia appeals court is considered a steppingstone to the Supreme Court and is also viewed as a highly influential arbiter of many of Washington’s disputes over federal policy and separation of powers."

The Walker appointment, first to the federal bench in Kentucky and then to the second-highest court in the U.S., is typical of McConnell's drive to cement his legacy: appointment of extreme right-wing Trump appointments to U.S. federal courts (and young ones at that, who may continue to infect the country's judicial findings for the next 40 years).

But here's a new wrinkle to the poisonous McConnell legacy. Click here for an article in The New York Times by Carl Hulse, entitled "Appeals Court Vacancy Is Under Scrutiny Ahead of Contested Confirmation Hearing."

The chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit publicly advanced a call by a progressive group for an ethics investigation into the circumstances of a plum vacancy.

There's an allegation that McConnell may have contacted Judge Thomas B. Griffiths to get him to retire, opening a vacancy for Walker.

With the number of federal judicial vacancies to fill nearly exhausted, Mr. McConnell has been urging those contemplating retirement to step aside this year if they want to assure that their successors will be nominated by a Republican president and confirmed by a Republican-controlled Senate.

Also:

"The coordinated manner of Majority Leader McConnell’s involvement in the judges’ decision-making is quite unprecedented and raises significant ethical questions for the judges who heed his advice,” the group said in its letter requesting an investigation. It said a “thorough inquiry into the judge’s announcement and scheduled retirement, including when and how the decision to retire was made, and with whose input, is crucial.”

Covid-19 Peaks in New York, not in U.S.

Incidence of the virus is on a downward path in New York, but no peak is yet apparent in the U.S. as a whole. Click here for an article at The New York Times by Julie Bosman, Mitch Smith and Amy Harmon, entitled "With New Hot Spots Emerging, No Sign of a Respite."

While cities like New York have seen a hopeful drop in cases, upticks in other major cities and smaller communities have offset those decreases.

Kevin Hassett's Record Of Being Wrong

Click here for an article at The New York Times by Paul Krugman, entitled "Trump and His Infallible Advisers," subtitled "Beware men who never admit having been wrong." (Like Trump, for example.)

Kevin Hasset, a "former chairman of Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers," has emerged as Trump's champion for reopening the economy (at a cost of tens of thousands of lives).

He first attracted widespread attention as co-author of a 1999 book claiming that stocks were greatly undervalued, and that the Dow should be 36,000 (which would be around 55,000 today, adjusting for inflation). It quickly became clear that there were major conceptual errors in that book; but Hassett never admitted error.

In the mid-2000s Hassett denied that there was a housing bubble, suggesting that only liberals believed that there was.

In 2010 Hassett was part of a group of conservative economists and pundits who warned in an open letter that the Federal Reserve’s efforts to rescue the economy would lead to currency debasement and inflation. Four years later Bloomberg News tried to reach signatories to ask why that inflation never materialized; not one was willing to admit having been wrong.

Finally, Hassett promised that the 2017 Trump tax cut would lead to a big boost in business investment; it didn’t, but he insisted that it did.

But Hassett is far from being alone among Trump's misguided economic advisers:

And Hassett isn’t even uniquely bad. Unlike, say, Stephen Moore, who Trump tried to put on the Federal Reserve Board, he does not, as far as I know, have a history of simply getting basic numbers and facts wrong.

And, as for Trump:

Yes, Trump’s insecurity leads him to reject expertise, listen only to people who tell him what makes him feel good and refuse to acknowledge error. But disdain for experts, preference for incompetent loyalists and failure to learn from experience are standard operating procedure for the whole modern G.O.P.

Trump’s narcissism and solipsism are especially blatant, even flamboyant. But he isn’t an outlier; he’s more a culmination of the American right’s long-term trend toward intellectual degradation. And that degradation, more than Trump’s character, is what is leading to vast numbers of unnecessary deaths.

Covid-19 Response: Canada v. U.S. (Part 2)

Click here for an article at Hullabaloo by Tom Sullivan entitled "Read 'em and weep."

Canada is doing a measurably better job responding to the pandemic. Orders of magnitude better, writes Zack Beauchamp at Vox:

“We have a federal government that is supporting provinces’ responses,” says David Fisman, an epidemiologist at the University of Toronto. “You have a chief executive who is directly undermining the public health response.”

Another quote from the article:

Unlike polarized state governors to the south, leaders in Canada’s provinces — Liberals and Conservatives — agreed on implementing extreme measures to halt the virus’ advance. The dysfunctional U.S. response is illustrated in the graph above that compares U.S. and Canadian COVID-19 cases per capita since the outbreak began. “The comparison is a case study in how a dysfunctional political system can quite literally cost lives,” Beauchamp explains.

But at this point in the crisis, the worst you can say about the Canadian response is that it has been basically competent — what you would expect from a country with a functioning political and health care system. The United States, by contrast, hasn’t cleared this lowest of bars. Our lack of attention to public health, poorly designed national health care system, and deep political dysfunction have contributed to the greatest public health crisis of our lifetimes.

How Sad It Must Be

I saw this on Twitter but was unable to figure out where to attribute it:

How sad it must be -- believing that scientists, scholars, historians, economists, and journalists have devoted their entire lives to deceiving you, while a reality TV star with decades of fraud and exhaustively documented lying is your only beacon of truth and honesty.

Trump Battles Congressional Oversight

Click here for an article at The Daily 202 (a WaPo blog) by James Hohmann entitled "The Daily 202: White House moves to shield Trump from oversight of his coronavirus response."

The White House revealed on Monday that members of its coronavirus task force – and their deputies – are barred from testifying before Congress unless they get special permission from chief of staff Mark Meadows. The reason being given for blocking public health officials is that they’re busy trying to get control of a contagion that has now killed at least 68,172 and infected 1,175,000 Americans.

But this is just the latest in a growing list of power plays by President Trump to thwart congressional oversight and independent watchdogs from scrutinizing his administration’s response to the novel coronavirus and the way trillions of dollars are being distributed by the government.

A memo to congressional staff directors said this restriction on testimony also applies to the departments of Health and Human Services, Homeland Security and State. It decrees that committees are limited to no more than four virus-related hearings this month. “Given these competing demands in these unprecedented times, it is reasonable to expect that agencies will have to decline invitations to hearings to remain focused on implementing of COVID-19 response, including declining to participate in multiple hearings on the same or overlapping topics,” the memo states.

Last week, the White House blocked Tony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious diseases official, from testifying before a House committee, which is controlled by Democrats. But Fauci received permission from Meadows to testify next week before the Senate’s health committee, which is controlled by Republicans.

Trump hinted at a more partisan motivation than the memo let on as he boarded Marine One on Tuesday morning, telling reporters that Fauci is not being allowed to testify before the House because its members are “Trump haters.” During his Fox News interview on Sunday night, the president grumbled that House Democrats are trying to embarrass him. “When you see all these committees, seven or eight committees, we haven’t even started, and they have all these committees looking for trouble, just looking for trouble,” Trump said at the Lincoln Memorial. “Every enemy I have is put on a Democrat committee.”

Democrats are outraged. “President Trump should learn that by muzzling science and the truth, it will only prolong this health and economic crisis,” said Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.). “The president’s failure to accept the truth, and then his desire to hide it, is one of the chief reasons we are lagging behind so many other countries in beating this scourge.”

There's much more about Trump's efforts to escape congressional oversight.

Covid-19 Response: Canada v. U.S.

Click here for an article at Vox by Zack Beauchamp entitled "Canada succeeded on coronavirus where America failed. Why?" Lots of reasons -- not just Donald Trump's profound incompetence.

CoronaLola: A Parody

Trump's Multiple Lies On A Fox News Interview, May 3

Click here for an article at CNN by Daniel Dale, Marshall Cohen and Tara Subramaniam, entitled "Fact check: Trump peppers Fox News town hall with false claims on coronavirus and other topics."

A Collection Of Bushisms

Remember W? The guy who used to be the worst U.S. president in history? Here's a good list of his verbal stumbles, copied from Özkan Altay on Quora:

Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.”—Washington, D.C., Aug. 5, 2004

“I know how hard it is for you to put food on your family.”—Greater Nashua, N.H., Chamber of Commerce, Jan. 27, 2000

“Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning?”—Florence, S.C., Jan. 11, 2000

“Too many good docs are getting out of the business. Too many OB/GYNs aren’t able to practice their love with women all across the country.”—Poplar Bluff, Mo., Sept. 6, 2004

“Neither in French nor in English nor in Mexican.”—declining to answer reporters’ questions at the Summit of the Americas, Quebec City, Canada, April 21, 2001

“You teach a child to read, and he or her will be able to pass a literacy test.”—Townsend, Tenn., Feb. 21, 2001

“I’m the decider, and I decide what is best. And what’s best is for Don Rumsfeld to remain as the secretary of defense.”—Washington, D.C., April 18, 2006

“See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda.”—Greece, N.Y., May 24, 2005

“I’ve heard he’s been called Bush’s poodle. He’s bigger than that.”—discussing former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, as quoted by the Sun newspaper, June 27, 2007

“And so, General, I want to thank you for your service. And I appreciate the fact that you really snatched defeat out of the jaws of those who are trying to defeat us in Iraq.”—meeting with Army Gen. Ray Odierno, Washington, D.C., March 3, 2008

“We ought to make the pie higher.”—South Carolina Republican debate, Feb. 15, 2000

“There’s an old saying in Tennessee—I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee—that says, fool me once, shame on—shame on you. Fool me—you can’t get fooled again.”—Nashville, Tenn., Sept. 17, 2002

“And there is distrust in Washington. I am surprised, frankly, at the amount of distrust that exists in this town. And I’m sorry it’s the case, and I’ll work hard to try to elevate it.”—speaking on National Public Radio, Jan. 29, 2007

“We’ll let our friends be the peacekeepers and the great country called America will be the pacemakers.”—Houston, Sept. 6, 2000

“It’s important for us to explain to our nation that life is important. It’s not only life of babies, but it’s life of children living in, you know, the dark dungeons of the Internet.”—Arlington Heights, Ill., Oct. 24, 2000

“One of the great things about books is sometimes there are some fantastic pictures.”—U.S. News & World Report, Jan. 3, 2000

“People say, ‘How can I help on this war against terror? How can I fight evil?’ You can do so by mentoring a child; by going into a shut-in’s house and say I love you.”—Washington, D.C., Sept. 19, 2002

“Well, I think if you say you’re going to do something and don’t do it, that’s trustworthiness.”—CNN online chat, Aug. 30, 2000

“I’m looking forward to a good night’s sleep on the soil of a friend.”—on the prospect of visiting Denmark, Washington, D.C., June 29, 2005

“I think it’s really important for this great state of baseball to reach out to people of all walks of life to make sure that the sport is inclusive. The best way to do it is to convince little kids how to—the beauty of playing baseball.”—Washington, D.C., Feb. 13, 2006

“Families is where our nation finds hope, where wings take dream.”—LaCrosse, Wis., Oct. 18, 2000

“You know, when I campaigned here in 2000, I said, I want to be a war president. No president wants to be a war president, but I am one.”—Des Moines, Iowa, Oct. 26, 2006

“There’s a huge trust. I see it all the time when people come up to me and say, ‘I don’t want you to let me down again.’ “—Boston, Oct. 3, 2000

“They misunderestimated me.”—Bentonville, Ark., Nov. 6, 2000

“I’ll be long gone before some smart person ever figures out what happened inside this Oval Office.”—Washington, D.C., May 12, 2008

“The people in Louisiana must know that all across our country there’s a lot of prayer — prayer for those whose lives have been turned upside down. And I’m one of them. It’s good to come down here.” — Sept. 3, 2008, at an emergency operations center in Baton Rouge, La., after Hurricane Gustav hit the Gulf Coast.

“I just want you to know that, when we talk about war, we're really talking about peace."

“Well, I mean that a defeat in Iraq will embolden the enemy and will provide the enemy – more opportunity to train, plan, to attack us. That's what I mean. There – it's – you know, one of the hardest parts of my job is to connect Iraq to the war on terror."

“More and more of our imports come from overseas”.

"I call upon all nations to do everything they can to stop these terrorist killers. Thank you. Now watch this drive." (Swings)

“The future will be better tomorrow”

“Republicans understand the importance of bondage between a mother and child."

“We have a firm commitment to NATO, we are a part of NATO. We have a firm commitment to Europe. We are a part of Europe.”

“For NASA, space is still a high priority."

“It's time for the human race to enter the solar system”

Shockingly Inhumane Treatment Of Prisoners In El Salvador

Click here for an article at hrw.org (Human Rights Watch) entitled "El Salvador: Inhumane Prison Lockdown Treatment."



This is not a photo that was taken undercover and sneaked out of a San Salvador prison; President Nayib Bukele publicized the photo, bragging about his harsh treatment of "criminals and gang members."

The crackdown on gangs came less than two weeks after Bukele dismissed multiple Supreme Court rulings that said that security forces couldn’t lawfully arrest people for breaking quarantine. Since he mandated a nationwide lockdown on March 21, hundreds of violators have been arrested and sent to “containment centers” where healthy individuals have been reportedly held with COVID-19 positive detainees in poor conditions. In the first month of the lockdown, El Salvador’s human rights ombudsmen received 778 complaints.

More Disgrace Heaped On Mitch McConnell

Click here for an article in The Washington Post by Colbert I. King entitled "McConnell bringing the Senate back is an irresponsible act of partisan selfishness."

McConnell is bringing the Senate into session next Monday, May 4. Nancy Pelosi, on the other hand, is not convening the House. As King says, "House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.), based upon guidance received from attending Capitol physician Brian Monahan, announced that House lawmakers will not return to Washington next week."

McConnell won't say whether he even consulted Dr. Monahan.

What is so important that the Senate must convene next week? Senate confirmation of more of Trump's nominees for federal judgeships, including 37-year-old Justin Walker.

A Kentucky native and McConnell protege, Walker was confirmed for a federal judgeship in western Kentucky in a party-line vote only last October, despite having been judged “not qualified” by the American Bar Association, which cited his insufficient legal experience. Undeterred, Trump then nominated Walker to the second-most powerful court in the land, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. McConnell’s mission is to make it happen.

McConnell, who denied even a hearing for Merrick Garland, Obama's nominee for SCOTUS following the death of Antonin Scalia with 11 months remaining in Obama's term of office, sees appointing partisan Republican judges -- especially young ones like Walker, who will conceivably be exercising their right-wing political views for the next 40 years -- as his legacy issue. Good luck to minorities and labor unions with their court decisions for the next 40 years.

What Does Your Cat Do While You Sleep?

Are you sure you want to know? Okay . . .

Trump Snapshots

Here's a tweet by The Washington Post's Philip Rucker on April 30, 2020:

Since the U.S. death toll surpassed 60,000 yesterday, Trump has tweeted about:
-Michael Flynn
-CNN
-MSNBC
-Brian Williams
-Don Lemon
-Joe Scarborough
-Sweden
-Roger Stone
-His poll numbers
-Jim Comey
-Hillary Clinton’s campaign
-Rep. Jim Ryun’s birthday

And here's a quote from an article dated May 1 by NewsHound Ellen at Crooks & Liars, entitled "Trump Boasts: ‘Our Death Totals … Are Really Very, Very Strong’":

On the day that the U.S. death total from the coronavirus pandemic topped 60,000 and remains the highest in the world, Donald Trump boasted that nobody’s done a better job than he.

TRUMP: I don’t think anybody’s done a better job -- with testing, with ventilators, with all of the things that we’ve done. And our death totals — our numbers per million people — are really very, very strong. We’re very proud of the job we’ve done.”

From an interview with Steve Holland of Reuters:

"I don't believe the polls," Trump said. "I believe the people of this country are smart. And I don't think that they will put a man in who's incompetent."

Sorry, Donald. That ship has sailed. Or, as Stephen Colbert put it:

"You're right; the people of this country wouldn't. The Electoral College, on the other hand -- they're fine with it."