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.

**********

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

Presidential Popularity (Average Poll Ratings)

This is a tweet from CNN producer Ryan Struyk:

Average presidential approval ratings through this point in term via ABC/Post and Gallup polling:

Kennedy 73%
W. Bush 71%
H.W. Bush 70%
Johnson 69%
Eisenhower 67%
Nixon 58%
Truman 56%
Obama 55%
Reagan 55%
Carter 52%
Clinton 51%
Ford 47%
Trump 38%

An unrelated, but pleasant, side note: Democrats have won the popular vote in six of the last seven presidential elections.

Joe Biden, Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas

Click here for an article in The Washington Post by Elise Viebeck entitled "Joe Biden was in charge of the Anita Hill hearing. Even he says it wasn’t fair."

Krugman Does It Again

Hits it out of the park, that is. Click here for his article in The New York Times entitled "The Great Republican Abdication," subtitled "A party that no longer believes in American values."

In the face of Trump's disregard for the law, "the modern G.O.P. is perfectly willing to sell out America if that’s what it takes to get tax cuts for the wealthy."

Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt co-authored a book entitled "How Democracies Die." They maintain:

that when mainstream politicians abdicate responsibility in the face of a leader who threatens democracy, it’s usually for one of two reasons. Either they have the misguided belief that he can be controlled, or they’re willing to go along because his agenda overlaps with theirs — that is, they believe that he’ll give them what they want.

Krugman points out the deep unpopularity of Republican positions:

By large margins, the American public believes that corporations and the wealthy don’t pay their fair share in taxes. By even larger margins, the public opposes cuts to safety-net programs like Medicaid. Yet as far as I can tell, every G.O.P. budget proposal over the past decade has combined big tax cuts for the rich with savage cuts in Medicaid.

Why, then, do Republicans keep getting elected?

Partly by lying about its policies. But mainly the G.O.P.’s political achievements depend on identity politics — white identity politics. Exploiting racial resentment to capture white working-class voters, while pursuing policies that benefit only the wealthy, has been the core of the party’s political strategy for decades. That’s why, in an increasingly diverse country, Republican support has stayed overwhelmingly white.

Has Trump delivered? Yes:

In 2017 he passed a huge tax cut, largely for corporations, that disproportionately benefited the wealthy, and almost succeeded in repealing Obamacare, in the process gutting Medicaid.

Krugman draws two conclusions about this Republican behavior:

First, anyone expecting bipartisanship in dealing with the aftermath of the Mueller report — in particular, anyone suggesting that Democrats should wait for G.O.P. support before proceeding with investigations that might lead to impeachment — is being deluded. Trump is giving the Republican establishment what it wants, and it will stick with him no matter what.

Second, it’s later than you think for American democracy. Before 2016 you could have wondered whether Republicans would, in extremis, be willing to take a stand in defense of freedom and rule of law. At this point, however, they’ve already taken that test, and failed with flying colors.

The simple fact is that one of our two major parties — the one that likes to wrap itself in the flag — no longer believes in American values. And it’s very much up in the air whether America as we know it will survive.

Excellent Exposure Of Fox News Hypocrisy

This is a series of short cuts from Fox News criticizing Obama -- for playing golf, vacationing in Florida, tweeting, being obsessed with cable TV (?!), legislating by executive action, criticizing former presidents and media outlets, increasing the deficit, not being transparent, concealing records, "pandering to the worst regimes, and thugs, and dictators," ignoring the rule of law, constantly campaigning, blaming others, never making any concessions, treating his opponents as enemies, will never admit he's wrong, for insecurity and vanity, failing to set the correct tone for the country, dividing the country and pandering to his base, doesn't like being mocked (thin-skinned?), trash talking, name-calling, failing to be positive and uplifting, acting like a schoolyard bully, not being able to scare Putin.

Of course, Trump is worse on all these counts by several orders of magnitude.

Must Read - Rupert Murdoch

Click here for a long, long article at The New York Times by Jonathan Mahler and Jim Rutenberg, entitled "How Rupert Murdoch's Empire of Influence Remade the World."

The article includes:

Part 1: Imperial Reach. Murdoch and his children have toppled governments on two continents and destabilized the most important democracy on Earth. What do they want?

Part 2: Internal Divisions. President Trump’s election made the Murdoch family more powerful than ever. But the bitter struggle between James and Lachlan threatened to tear the company apart.

Part 3: The New Fox Weapon. The Disney deal left the Murdochs with a media empire stripped to its essence: a hard-core right-wing news machine — with Lachlan in charge.

Brian Stelter comments:

Murdochland was quiet when the NYT published its three-part investigation of "Planet Fox" two weeks ago. But one of Rupert's top execs, News Corp CEO Robert Thomson, has something to say. In a Tuesday evening speech, he "dismissed the NYT's investigation as a 'rancid hatchet job' that was 'distant from the truth,'" according to the Sydney Morning Herald.

Thomson called it "multi-generational muck-spreading in which the facts were incidental, if not accidental, and the journalistic jaundice and corporate self-interest were fundamental." Hmmm, which facts? I don't see any corrections on the story!

Tip For Copy-And-Paste

If the material you're copying contains images or other weird stuff, copy as usual, but paste into your document using the command Control-Shift-V. That usually copies only the plain text.

Magic Jack

Click here for a Bob Rankin article entitled "Will MagicJack Replace Your Landline?"

Customize the Windows 10 Start Menu

Click here for an article at How-To Geek by Walter Glenn entititled "10 Ways to Customize the Windows 10 Start Menu."

Thomas Massie (R-Kentucky) Is A Fool

Click here for an article in Rolling Stone by Tim Dickinson entitled "Is This the Dumbest Moment in Congressional History?" Congressman Thomas Massie (R-Kentucky)was questioning John Kerry at a congressional hearing on “The Need for Leadership to Combat Climate Change and Protect National Security." Dickinson says:

Kerry is an expert on climate change who helped broker the Paris climate accord and recently criticized president Trump for proposing to set up a task force that seeks to counter the scientific consensus on climate change. Massie calls advocates of climate action “alarmists” and believes that the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide is “plant food.”

Here's part of a transcript of the questioning:

Massie: Sec. Kerry, I want to read part of your statement back to you: “Instead of convening a kangaroo court, the president might want to talk with the educated adults he once trusted his top national security positions.” It sounds like you’re questioning the credentials of the president’s advisers, currently. But I think we should question your credentials today. Isn’t it true you have a science degree from Yale?
Kerry: Bachelor of arts degree.
Massie: Is it a political science degree?
Kerry: Yes, political science.
Massie: So how do you get a bachelor of arts, in a science?
Kerry: Well it’s a liberal arts education and degree. It’s a bachelor…
Massie: OK. So it’s not really science. So I think it’s somewhat appropriate that someone with a pseudo-science degree is here pushing pseudo-science in front of our committee today.
Kerry: Are you serious?! I mean this is really a serious happening here?

Freedom Works actually posted a 38-second video clip of the exchange, under the heading: .@RepThomasMassie takes John Kerry to SCHOOL! 😎 #ampFW #SassyWithMassie. I guess they're proud of it.

Massie responded to the resulting ridicule, defending(?) himself as follows:

"When I asked Kerry if he had a science degree, he answered 'no' but forgot to turn his microphone on," Massie wrote on Twitter Thursday. "The left has been using his flub to conceal what this exchange proved which is Kerry admitted he doesn't have a science degree, even though his degree says 'science.'"

Former national security adviser under President Barack Obama, Susan Rice, replied to Massie's tweet, "The idiocy is shocking. Even now."

Massie responded to Rice:

"Big government is the religion. Climate change is the hymnal," Massie fired back. "Have the audacity to tell a priest he has no clothes and all of the Obama administration has-beens will clear the bleachers to jump in the dumpster fire."

It's shocking to learn that Massie has two engineering degrees from MIT.

Mike Lee Makes A Fool Of Himself Mocking Green New Deal

Click here for a 15-minute presentation on the House floor by Mike Lee: see Reagan riding a flag-waving velociraptor, firing a machine gun with a rocket strapped to his back; Star Wars creatures to ride in Alaska, 20-foot seahorses to ride in Hawaii, Lee's description of his conversations with cows, the governor of Utah using a tennis racket to fight off a shark in his office in Sharknado 4 -- and then the most ludicrous part of the speech, where Lee proposes his "serious" solution to climate change: have more babies.

Russia And The Trump Campaign

Click here for an article at Mother Jones, by David Corn, entitled "Here’s the Real Trump-Russia Hoax (It’s Trump defenders and lefty Russiagate skeptics claiming there is no scandal)." The Trump campaign essentially aided and abetted Russia in its interference in the election.

Trump's Barrage Of Lies After Barr's Letter

Trump let loose with a barrage of lies and exaggerations on Hannity's show. Click here for a WaPo article by Aaron Blake entitled "Trump and Hannity binge on conspiracy theories in Trump’s first post-Mueller Fox News interview."

And click here for another cloud of lies at Trump's first post-Barr rally, at Grand Rapids, Michigan. This is an article by Linda Qiu at The New York Times, entitled "Trump’s Inaccurate Claims on Mueller, Health Care and the Great Lakes." "Inaccurate Claims"? More pussyfooting by the NYT.

Task Manager

Click here for a useful article at How-To Geek entitled "Windows Task Manager: The Complete Guide."

Ari Fleischer Can't Stop Lying - Get That Man A Job In The Trump Administration!

Click here for an article at Esquire by Charlie Pierce entitled "Ari Fleischer and the Iraq War Ghouls Are Proof the Republican Party Needs a Total Reset."

God, I thought we'd heard the last of Ari Fleischer. But here he is crawling out from under a rock lying again in defense of the war criminals in the W administration who engineered the Iraq invasion.

Aviation Safety Features Optional - If You Pay For Them?

Click here for an article at Esquire by Charlie Pierce entitled "Boeing's 'Optional' Safety Equipment on the 737 Max Is a Monument to Corporate Greed."

One Boeing 737 Max coming right up. Would you like some added safety features with that?

Patricia and Girls Girls Girls - Whiskey A-Go-Go

Mind Games: The Checker Shadow Illusion

Click here for an article entitled "Do we perceive reality? The checker shadow illusion."

Two squares on a checkerboard -- a dark-colored square in full light and a light-colored square in shadow -- appear to be vastly different, but are in fact the same shade of gray.

Steve King Fantasizes About Civil War

Click here for an article at WaPo by Reis Thebault, entitled "Steve King posts meme warning that red states have '8 trillion bullets' in event of civil war."

The Iowa Republican broached the subject in a Saturday evening Facebook post — a meme of two fighting Frankenstein figures, one red and one blue, each an amalgamation of states based on their political leanings. The art was ripped and uncredited, as meme art usually is, from a New York Times book review in 2013, and was originally designed by Yarek Waszul.

“Folks keep talking about another civil war,” the meme read. “One side has about 8 trillion bullets, while the other side doesn’t know which bathroom to use.”

Richard Painter, chief ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush, tweeted “This is treason. Steve King should be expelled from the House immediately.”

In reply, Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe commented that King “isn’t actually COMMITTING treason, but he is fomenting and inciting it. Ample reason to expel him.”

Just another congressman joking about civil war and how his side would win. Move along, folks -- nothing to see here.

Cool Mathematical Trick

x% of y = y% of x

An easy example: Let x=10, y=60.
Then x% of y -- 10% of 60 -- is 6.
But y% of x -- 60% of 10 -- is also 6.

Those calculations are rapidly performed in your head. But what if the calculation is just a little more difficult: What is 4% of 75?

You can divide 75 by 100 to get .75, and multiply by 4: .75x4=3

Or you can flip the equation; instead of doing 4% of 75, do 75% of 4.

"Fox News has become an American plague."

That's the closing line of an article by Margaret Sullivan at The Washington Post entitled "It’s time — high time — to take Fox News’s destructive role in America seriously." Click here.

Kavanaugh Hearing Revisited

When Michael Cohen was testifying in open session, at one point Trump lieutenant Mark Meadows was trying to rebut the idea that Trump is racist. During this bit, he had a black woman named Patton, apparently one of the few black people who work for Trump, come and stand beside him. She just stood there awkwardly for 30 seconds or so, not saying anything and not mentioned; and when a junior Democrat accused Meadows of using her as a prop in a racist way, Meadows hit the roof. Paul Waldman at the Plum Line compared the incident to the Kavanaugh hearing:

You’ll recall that when Christine Blasey Ford testified, she was calm, controlled, deferential and polite, because she knew that if she displayed any anger she’d be called a lunatic and her allegations dismissed out of hand. Kavanaugh, on the other hand, was utterly unhinged — crying, shouting, sneering, interrupting senators — and his anger was taken not as evidence that he was unreliable but just the opposite. It was considered proof that he was the true aggrieved party and the victim of a terrible injustice that had to be remedied.

Seth Myers, Green Book Criticism

More Coal-Fired Plants Close In Trump's First Two Years Than In Obama's Eight

Click here for a Reuters article by Scott DiSavino entitled "President Trump can't stop U.S. coal plants from retiring."

First sentence: "More U.S. coal-fired power plants were shut in President Donald Trump’s first two years than were retired in the whole of Barack Obama’s first term..."

More:
"The number of U.S. coal plants has continued to decline every year since coal capacity peaked ... "in 2011, and is expected to keep falling as consumers demand power from cleaner and less expensive sources of energy."

"Cheap natural gas and the rising use of renewable power like solar and wind have kept electric prices relatively low for years, making it uneconomic for generators to keep investing in older coal and nuclear plants."

Increase Top Marginal Tax Rates

Click here for an article in The New York Times by Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman entitled "Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Tax Hike Idea Is Not About Soaking the Rich." Here are a few points from the article:

From 1930 to 1980, the top marginal income tax rate in the U.S. averaged 78%; it exceeded 90% from 1951 to 1963. These rates applied to extraordinarily high incomes only. In 1960, the top marginal tax rate of 91% started at what today would be $6.7 million a year. For incomes in the hundreds of thousands (in today’s dollars) marginal rates were 25% to 50%.

The income per adult of the lowest 50% was $16,000 in 1980 (adjusted for inflation), and it still is around $16,000 today. At the same time, for the highest 0.1 percent of earners, incomes have grown more than 300 percent; for the top 0.01 percent, incomes have grown by as much as 450 percent. And for the tippy-top 0.001 percent — the 2,300 richest Americans — incomes have grown by more than 600 percent.

A common objection to elevated top marginal income tax rates is that they hurt economic growth. Consider the examples of Japan and Russia.

The United States grew more strongly — and much more equitably — from 1946 to 1980 than it has ever since. But maybe in those years the United States, as the hegemon of the post-World War II decades, could afford “bad” tax policy? The United States occupied Japan after the war, imposed democracy and a top marginal tax rate of 85% on it (in the U.S., the rate was 86% in 1947). The goal was to prevent the formation of a new oligarchy. In 1982, the top rate in Japan was still 75%. Yet between 1950 and 1982, Japan grew at one of the fastest rates ever recorded, one of the most striking economic success stories of all time.

When Communism fell, Russia was also a poor country, with income and life expectancy well below that of Western economies. Russians got fast privatization and a top tax rate of 30 percent — again modeled on what was prevailing in the United States at the time (31 percent in 1991). That rate was replaced in 2001 by an even lower flat rate of 13 percent. That shock therapy created a new oligarchy, led to negative income growth for the bottom half of the population, fostered a general discontent with democracy and produced a drift toward authoritarianism.

Democracy or plutocracy?

Bits and Pieces

- Under the Trump administration, EPA civil penalties have fallen 85 percent compared with the previous two decades. The inflation-adjusted figures from Trump’s first two years in office were the lowest since the EPA’s Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance was established. Former agency officials expressed alarm that the decrease in fines could affect the EPA’s ability to deter wrongdoing. (Juliet Eilperin and Brady Dennis)

Leonard Cohen - You Want It Darker (2016)

Sand Dunes Base Jump

Good Riddance, Paul Ryan

That's the title of an article by Paul Waldman in the Washington Post.

https://s2.washingtonpost.com/camp-rw/?e=cnNwcm94dG9uQG91dGxvb2suY29t&s=5c1bfbd0fe1ff6164aca695d

And here's another one, from Charlie Pierce, entitled "Paul Ryan's Career Ends as It Was: As Full of Sh*t as a Christmas Goose:

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a25634032/paul-ryan-farewell-speech-full-of-shit/

John Kelly, White House Chief of Staff: Goodbye and Good Riddance

Here's an article on the subject at Intercept: https://theintercept.com/2018/12/09/john-kelly-was-a-bully-bigot-and-liar-for-trump-goodbye-and-good-riddance/?wpmm=1&wpisrc=nl_todayworld

New Browser: Vivaldi

Here's a link to a Bob Rankin article on a new browser, Vivaldi, seen as a rival to Chrome. Privacy is an important aspect of Vivaldi, but it apparently has lots of great features. I'm a Firefox guy, but Vivaldi looks like something to keep an eye on, and maybe I'll give it a try. https://askbobrankin.com/browser_wars_vivaldi_20_takes_on_chrome.html?awt_l=OKbfN&awt_m=JPgzYLwp8OP6SL

EPA Penalties Plummet Under Trump

In Trump's first year, EPA penalties which had been $20.1 billion in Obama's year 7 and $23.9 billion in Obama's final year to -- $1.46 billion.

The Real Story On The Steele Dossier

Click here for an article in The New Yorker by Jane Mayer, entitled "Christopher Steele, the Man Behind the Trump Dossier."

This is the complete story of Christopher Steele, whose dossier provoked a firestorm of controversy when he presented it to the FBI out of concern over Russian interference on Trump's behalf in the 2016 election.

Important Article By Paul Waldman, The Plum Line, In The Washington Post

I don't like to do this -- it's lazy blogging -- but I've reproduced in full an article by Paul Waldman at his Plum Line blog at The Washington Post, entitled "The entire Republican Party is becoming a Russian asset":

In the past few days, President Trump has given at least some Republicans reason to express displeasure over his relationship with Russia. First he performed a pathetic ritual of subservience before Vladimir Putin, standing beside the Russian leader — after a private meeting between the two, which no aides were permitted to attend — and dismissing the copious evidence of a Russian attack on the 2016 election in deference to Putin’s word.

Then we learned that Putin had suggested that we make Americans available to the Kremlin for questioning, including Michael McFaul, the former U.S. ambassador to Russia, in exchange for allowing us to question some of the agents who carried out the cyberattack. Trump had called it “an incredible offer,” and the White House said he was considering it, before finally backing down after the Senate unanimously passed a resolution condemning the idea.

But look past the modest number of Republicans saying that Trump has gone a bit too far here or there, and you see a very different picture. The truth is that the entire GOP is well on its way to becoming a Russian asset.

Are there a few Republican dissenters? Sure. But perhaps we’re having difficulty viewing that whole picture because what’s happening is so utterly bonkers that we can’t quite bring ourselves to see it clearly. So let’s review just some of the things we know:

- In 2016, the campaign of the Republican nominee for president was approached multiple times by representatives of the Russian government offering to help them win the election. These offers were welcomed with enthusiasm. The campaign was also led for a time by a political consultant with deep financial and personal ties to a Russian oligarch and a Kremlin puppet in Ukraine.

- Multiple members of the Trump team had contacts with the Russian government that they later lied to conceal.

- As part of its attack on the American electoral system, Russian intelligence hacked into Democratic Party systems. Some of the information it found there was released publicly and promoted gleefully by Republicans at all levels in order to help the Trump campaign; information relating to down-ballot campaigns was passed to Republicans, who used it in order to maintain their hold on the House of Representatives.

- Amid the insistence from the intelligence community that in 2018 Russia will likely attempt to once again penetrate the computer systems of state election agencies, Republicans this week killed an effort to provide funding to states to bolster the security of their election systems.

- As part of a lengthy effort to infiltrate the National Rifle Association, an important Republican interest group, an alleged Russian spy began a romance with a Republican activist, met multiple Republican leaders and fostered a relationship between American gun advocates and Russians. On the night of Trump’s victory, she messaged “I am ready for further orders” to her handler, a Russian banker named Alexander Torshin who is close to Putin.

- The NRA dramatically increased its spending on the 2016 presidential campaign from past years, pouring $30 million into their effort to elect Trump. The FBI is investigating whether that money may have illegally come from Russia, funneled to the organization by Torshin.

- The Trump administration has announced a change to IRS rules so that groups like the NRA will no longer have to identify their donors on their tax forms, making such money almost impossible to trace in the future.

- Over the last few years, the Christian right, another key part of the GOP coalition, has grown increasingly close to Putin, whom they see as an ally in a global clash of civilizations between Christianity and Islam.

- In Congress, Republicans have undertaken an aggressive campaign to discredit and, many of them plainly hope, shut down the probe into the Russian attack on America. Though they mounted seven separate investigations of Benghazi, they are nearly united in their position that no further investigation into a hostile foreign power’s attempt to manipulate the American electoral system is necessary.

- Fox News, which functions as the propaganda arm of the Republican Party, has aired relentless attacks on the Russia investigation and calls for it to be shut down.

- Despite the mountain of unambiguous evidence of the Russian attack in 2016, the overwhelming majority of Republican voters continue to say no such attack occurred.

- Hard-core Trump supporters are beginning to argue that even if Russia did attack the American electoral system, it was actually a good thing because it helped Donald Trump get elected.

That last argument has not yet filtered up to more mainstream Republican figures, but give it some time. When Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III closes his investigation and presents all his evidence (and more indictments, surely), no one will really be surprised to hear Republican members of Congress and prominent conservative media figures saying that it all worked out for the best because Hillary Clinton isn’t president, and we should just move on.

The president himself has laid the groundwork for that argument to spread. Not only has he repeatedly cast doubt on whether the attack occurred, he insists that he himself didn’t “collude” with Russia, and no matter what, there’s no proof that the attack changed votes, as though that would somehow make the whole thing okay. And you may recall that when news broke that his son, son-in-law and campaign chairman met with a group of Russians in hopes of getting dirt on Clinton, an outreach that had been presented to them as “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump,” the president claimed that “I think from a practical standpoint most people would have taken that meeting,” as though working with Russia to defeat his opponent was the most natural thing in the world.

We can speculate on exactly why Trump has been so eager to become Putin’s flunky; it’s obviously a complicated story with roots that go back decades. But what about the rest of the GOP? Some of them have embraced the annexation of their party with gusto, while others are clearly more reluctant. But let’s not forget that they were reluctant to make peace with Trump’s takeover of the GOP, too. Eventually, they realized that since Trump had captured the hearts of the Republican base, they had no choice but to get on board if they wanted to survive.

The same has happened, and will likely continue to happen, with Russia. Had you told them 10 years ago that Russian intelligence was going to mount a comprehensive assault on an American election, they’d say that they would respond to such an attack with a furious rage and leave no stone unturned in learning every detail about it so that any collaborators could be mercilessly punished and no such attack could ever occur again. Today though, they’re mostly eager to get everyone to think about something else.

It may be because they’ve convinced themselves that no tactic is too repugnant, no alliance is too distasteful, and no moral compromise is too loathsome when you’re serving the lofty goal of keeping Democrats from power. Or it may be that they’re terrified that their rabid base will decide that they are insufficiently devoted to the cult of Trump. Whatever the reasons, they’ve traveled a long way down this road already, and it doesn’t look like they’re turning back.

Arnie v. Trump

Click here for a three-minute video of Arnie (The Terminator) challenging Trump's support for coal -- bring back Blockbuster! (It's interrupted by a couple of annoying advertisements.)

Reverence For The Dear Leader

Click here for an article at Crooks & Liars by Frances Langum (Blue Gal), entitled "Open Thread: Fox News, Or NoKo State TV? YOU Decide!"

Accompanied by swelling, inspirational martial music, and video clips of Kim and Trump before their adoring fans, Fox News and Korean state TV praise their leaders -- notice any similarity?

President Trump has now accomplished what no other American president has ever had the vision or the courage to even attempt.

With our venerable Supreme Leader's acute intelligence and courageous leadership, the world is able to witness this zenith of world peace and a vital moment for our humanity.

*****

Only days ago, President Trump ushered in a new era of diplomacy.

Our venerable Supreme Leader comrade opened a new, triumphant era of diplomacy.

*****

This is something that many analysts and pundits thought was totally impossible.

Who could have imagined that this moment was possible?

*****

The president's continued success in his every undertaking, whether in domestic politics, international trade or foreign policy, President Trump standing taller than ever on the world stage ...

The venerable statesman, whose leadership has been verified by the world, our Supreme Leader comrade is a hero revered by all people.

*****

Donald Trump has instincts that are different than ours, but most often, 99% of the time, they tendd to be better than ours.

We have this world-respected outstanding statesman, a once-in-a-lifetime great man as our leader.

*****

And it's topped off with this expression of praise by Jeanine Pirro:

You simply can't comprehend the genius of Donald Trump. Our president has no fear!

How to Automatically Enable Windows 10's Dark Theme at Night

Click here for an article at How-To Geek entitled "How to Automatically Enable Windows 10's Dark Theme at Night."

(I did this, so I may need this article to find out how to make changes to -- or undo -- what I've done.)

Windows 10, Video Editor

Click here for an article at HTG (How-To Geek)by Chris Hoffman entitled "Hot to Use Windows 10's Hidden Video Editor."

Lippmann v. Dewey (1910s & 1920s)

Click here for an article dated October 2, 205, at The Electric Agora, entitled "Lippmann and Dewey: Debating Democracy in the Age of Metropolis."

Walter Lippmann, a journalist and social critic, made a name for himself through a series of works published in the 1910’s and 1920’s, in which he questioned the logic behind democracy and the capacity of the ordinary citizen to fulfill their civic obligations, in the industrial age. Having been disabused of any romantic notions about electoral politics and the machinery of democratic legislation by his teacher, British political scientist Graham Wallas, Lippmann would go on to argue for the idea that men commonly were not rational, and that the modern world was too complex for them to play the role that liberal democracy expected.

Philosopher and educator John Dewey agreed with Lippmann about the fundamental problem of an unenlightened populace to democracy, but where Lippmann advocated appointing advisory boards of experts to advise government, Dewey advocated political education of the masses. Lippmann saw the problem and sought a way around it; Dewey saw the same problem and sought to correct it. This article is relevant today, when a know-nothing demagogue has manipulated an ignorant, gullible populace into supporting changes detrimental to the well-being of American citizenry.

Trump Knows The Words To "God Bless America"! (nah, just kidding)

Click here to watch the president* sing along to some of the words to "God Bless America." (Courtesy of Charlie Pierce at Esquire.)

This Is Scary

Here is a chart of the popularity of post-war presidents among members of their own party after their first 500 days:



W., of course, was extraordinarily popular because he was still basking in the glory of his enormous popularity in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, when the people would have rallied behind any president. That anomaly aside, Trump's the most popular president (among members of his own party) since they started tracking these things.

Skijoring!

Skijoring in Wisdom, Montana:

Waltzing Matilda

According to Charlie Pierce, this is the best anti-war song ever:



And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda - The Pogues

Now, when I was a young man I carried me pack
And I lived the free life of the rover
From the Murray's green basin to the dusty Outback
I waltzed my Matilda all over.

Then in nineteen fifteen my country said, "Son
It's time to stop rambling, there's work to be done"
So they gave me a tin hat and they gave me a gun
And they sent me away to the war.

And the band played Waltzing Matilda
As the ship pulled away from the quay
And amid all the tears, flag-waving and cheers
We sailed off for Gallipoli.

Well I remember that terrible day
When our blood stained the sand and the water
And how in that hell that they called Suvla Bay
We were butchered like lambs at the slaughter.

Johnny Turk he was ready, oh, he primed himself well
He rained us with bullets, and he showered us with shell
And in five minutes flat we were all blown to hell
Nearly blew us back home to Australia.

And the band played waltzing Matilda
When we stopped to bury our slain
And we buried ours and the Turks buried theirs
Then it started all over again.


Those who were living just tried to survive
In that mad world of blood, death, and fire
And for ten weary weeks I kept myself alive
Though around me the corpses piled higher.

Then a big Turkish shell knocked me arse over head
And when I awoke in my hospital bed
And saw what it had done, then I wished I were dead
I never knew there were worse things than dying.

For no more I'll go waltzing Matilda
All around the green bush far and near
For to hump tent and pegs, a man needs both legs
No more waltzing Matilda for me

They collected the wounded, the crippled, the maimed
And they shipped us back home to Australia
The armless, the legless, the blind, the insane
Those proud wounded heroes of Suvla.

And when the ship pulled into Circular Quay
I looked at the place where me legs used to be
And thanked Christ there was no one there waiting for me
To grieve and to mourn and to pity

And the band played Waltzing Matilda
As they carried us down the gangway
But nobody cheered, they just stood there and stared
Then they turned all their faces away

So now every April I sit on me porch
And I watch the parade pass before me
And I see my old comrades, how proudly they march
Renewing their dreams of past glory

I see the old men, all tired, stiff, and sore
The weary old heroes of a forgotten war
And the young people ask, "What are they marching for?"
And I ask myself the same question

And the band plays Waltzing Matilda
And the old men still answer the call
But as year follows year more old men disappear
Some day no one will march there at all

Waltzing Matilda, waltzing Matilda
Who'll come a-waltzing Matilda with me?
And their ghosts may be heard as they march by the billabong
Who'll come a-waltzing Matilda with me?

The Media, Bumfuzzled By Trump's Lies

The media allow Trump's lies to dominate the national conversation. Click here for an article at The Washington Post entitled "Time to Stop Chasing Trump's Lies Down the Rabbit Hole," by Paul Waldman.

In reaction to Trump's preposterous claims about the farce he himself (but no one else) calls "Spygate," surprise! The day after the meeting with the FBI that Trump breathlessly claimed would blow the lid off Washington, no one is talking about the meeting at all. Why not? Because there was nothing there. It was all based on Trump's lies. Here are Trump's first tweets on the subject:

Look how things have turned around on the Criminal Deep State. They go after Phony Collusion with Russia, a made up Scam, and end up getting caught in a major SPY scandal the likes of which this country may never have seen before! What goes around, comes around!

SPYGATE could be one of the biggest political scandals in history!

Waldman says:

This reveals the absurd pattern we’ve fallen into. It goes like this: President Trump makes a ridiculous accusation that almost everyone immediately understands to be false. Then we in the media, because it’s the president, treat that accusation as though it’s something that has to be taken seriously. Then governmental resources are mustered to deal with the accusation. Then Republicans try to twist the mobilization of those resources to give them the answer they’re seeking. But because it’s all based on a lie, they fail once Democrats force some measure of truth to be revealed.

Glenn Kessler and Meg Kelly run through some of the iterations of this maddening pattern. Barack Obama tapped my phones! The Obama administration illegally “unmasked” Americans caught up in surveillance of Russian targets! The Democrats colluded with Russia! The whole Russia investigation happened because of the Steele dossier!

How far can this go? I like Waldman's take on it:

No matter what ludicrous charge Trump makes, the entire political system reacts as though it might be true. If tomorrow the president said that “Robert Mueller” never existed and the person claiming to be him is actually Nancy Pelosi in elaborate makeup, we’d all find ourselves debating whether Mueller is a real person while House Republicans angrily demand that he produce a DNA sample.

He believes that Trump's lies "... should have been greeted with headlines reading, 'President Trump Lies to Public About Russia Investigation.'"

The North Korean propaganda machine regularly lies about the superhuman exploits of the Dear Leader:

So we should treat [Trump's] statements the way we do press releases from the North Korean state news agency. They may be newsworthy in that they show what the regime would like people to believe, but we don’t assume that they have any relationship to actual facts. When they claim that Kim Jong Un could drive at age 3 and win yacht races at age 9, or that his father Kim Jong Il wrote 1,500 books while at university and once sank 11 holes-in-one in a single round of golf, we don’t set about to determine whether they’re true.

Can You Guess? I Knew That You Could!

Jimmy Kimmel plays a "FUN GAME: Can you guess which one of these people is the business partner of Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen?"

Bill Maher: "A Spy In The Trump Campaign"?

Bill Maher on Real Time, May 18, 2018:

The latest theory from the bubble, that the FBI has planted a spy in the Trump campaign. No, not a spy; this is just what the FBI does for a living. Trump, sorry, man, you have ties to the American mob, the Russian mob, to Russian hookers, to the Kremlin, to indicted co-conspirators, to goons and shady lawyers and tax evaders and fraudulent businesses and fake charities and bribes and hush money and porn stars. This is what the FBI does: They investigate shady people like you.

Witch Hunt?

Click here for an article at fivethirtyeight.com by , entitled "How Mueller's First Year Compares To Watergate, Iran-Contra And Whitewater (and what those past investigations tell us about where the Russia investigation might go next.)"

I like one particular eye-opening chart contrasting the length of each special counsel and independent counsel investigation and the indictments and guilty pleas obtained in each:



The article was published on May 17, 2018, the date when the Mueller investigation had been in operation for one year. The Whitewater (Clinton) investigation lasted more than seven years, 77% of the time from Clinton's election win to the time he left office. Iran-Contra lasted more than six years; Watergate was just over four.

The article looks in some detail at those three previous major investigations. Here's one comparison it draws:

As the Russia investigation enters its second year, the most important variable may be how long Mueller can keep his job. Watergate, Iran-Contra and Whitewater all had one thing in common: They lasted at least four years. Given the reports that Trump has already twice considered ordering Mueller’s removal, it’s not clear that the investigation can survive that long — at least, with Mueller at the helm.

Robert Mueller v. Ken Starr

Click here for an article by Digby at Hullabaloo entitled "From the columns I wish I'd written file." It's a comparison of the Kenneth Starr and Robert Mueller investigations.

"... the White House will be adorned by a downright moron."

H.L. Mencken:

As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

Pence: Worse Than Trump, Says George Will

Click here for George Will's devastating beatdown of the groveling Mike Pence at The Washington Post, in an article entitled "Trump is no longer the worst person in government."

Don't Forget What Ollie North (Now NRA President) Did

That handsome young Marine colonel sure looked good in his uniform, didn't he?

Click here for Charlie Pierce's article at Esquire, entitled "The NRA's New President is the Most Famous Arms Trafficker in American History."

Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh, who investigated the Iran-Contra affair, said of George H.W. Bush, who pardoned Ollie North, "It’s hard to find an adjective strong enough to characterize a president who has such contempt for honesty.”

Welcome to TrumpWorld, Larry.

Blankenship: Ditch Cocaine Mitch!

Don Blankenship, imprisoned for a year after the Big Branch mine explosion killed 29 miners, is running for a U.S. Senate seat in West Virginia. Click here for an article at The Hill by Brett Samuels, entitled "Blankenship releases ad calling McConnell 'cocaine Mitch.'" (The ad has since been removed.)

The article gives a possible explanation for the "Cocaine Mitch" handle:

Politico reported that Blankenship may be referring to a 2014 report in the left-leaning Nation magazine that drugs were once found on a shipping vessel owned by McConnell’s wife, Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao.

"We're going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business"

During the 2016 presidential campaign, I heard repeatedly that Hillary Clinton had callously remarked that in coal country, "We're going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business." (I just watched the Anthony Bourdain "West Virginia" episode and saw a W.W. miner using it to explain why Trump had defeated Clinton decisively in West Virginia.)

Well, she did say exactly those words. But when you put them in context, it's a message of empathy and concern for the coal workers:

Look, we have serious economic problems in many parts of our country. And Roland is absolutely right. Instead of dividing people the way Donald Trump does, let's reunite around policies that will bring jobs and opportunities to all these underserved poor communities.

So for example, I'm the only candidate which has a policy about how to bring economic opportunity using clean renewable energy as the key into coal country. Because we're going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business, right?

And we're going to make it clear that we don't want to forget those people. Those people labored in those mines for generations, losing their health, often losing their lives to turn on our lights and power our factories.

Now we've got to move away from coal and all the other fossil fuels, but I don't want to move away from the people who did the best they could to produce the energy that we relied on.

So whether it's coal country or Indian country or poor urban areas, there is a lot of poverty in America. We have gone backwards. We were moving in the right direction. In the '90s, more people were lifted out of poverty than any time in recent history.

Because of the terrible economic policies of the Bush administration, President Obama was left with the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, and people fell back into poverty because they lost jobs, they lost homes, they lost opportunities, and hope.

So I am passionate about this, which is why I have put forward specific plans about how we incentivize more jobs, more investment in poor communities, and put people to work.

The Trials And Tribulations Of H.R. McMaster

Click here for an article in The New Yorker by Patrick Radden Keefe, entitled "McMaster and Commander."

It tells the story of H.R. McMaster's year-long stint as Trump's national security adviser. Tough job! A warrior/scholar, McMaster has written a book entitled "Dereliction of Duty," published in 1997, which described the failure of the advisers around President Lyndon Johnson to tell him the truth about the Vietnam war. I was struck by this paragraph:

McMaster describes Johnson as “a profoundly insecure man who craved and demanded affirmation,” and notes that Johnson—who came into office after the assassination of John F. Kennedy—suffered from a sense of illegitimacy, a fear that he was “an illegal usurper.” McMaster points out that Johnson had “a real propensity for lying,” and that he surrounded himself with “advisers who would tell him what he wanted to hear.” The book’s title refers to the reluctance of military advisers to offer Johnson unvarnished assessments of the war’s progress. McMaster argues that they should not have allowed themselves to be politicized, sanctioning the lies that the Johnson Administration told the public.

Remind you of anyone?

Hillary Clinton Killed Kennedy!

Sean Hannity on Fox, by Stephen Colbert:

This Is Extremely Dangerous To Our Democracy

Here is a video from an article by Scarce, at Crooks & Liars, entitled "Sinclair Broadcasting Enlists Journalists To Wage Trump's War On 'Fake News'":



Sinclair Broadcasting Group consists of 200 stations across the U.S.

The script, as transcribed by ThinkProgress based on the KOMO (Seattle) version, reads:

Hi, I’m(A) ____________, and I’m (B) _________________…

(B) Our greatest responsibility is to serve our Northwest communities. We are extremely proud of the quality, balanced journalism that KOMO News produces.

(A) But we’re concerned about the troubling trend of irresponsible, one sided news stories plaguing our country. The sharing of biased and false news has become all too common on social media.

(B) More alarming, some media outlets publish these same fake stories… stories that just aren’t true, without checking facts first.

(A) Unfortunately, some members of the media use their platforms to push their own personal bias and agenda to control ‘exactly what people think’…This is extremely dangerous to a democracy.

(B) At KOMO it’s our responsibility to pursue and report the truth. We understand Truth is neither politically ‘left nor right.’ Our commitment to factual reporting is the foundation of our credibility, now more than ever.

(A) But we are human and sometimes our reporting might fall short. If you believe our coverage is unfair please reach out to us by going to KOMOnews.com and clicking on CONTENT CONCERNS. We value your comments. We will respond back to you.

(B) We work very hard to seek the truth and strive to be fair, balanced and factual… We consider it our honor, our privilege to responsibly deliver the news every day.

(A) Thank you for watching and we appreciate your feedback.