Tucker Carlson: White Supremacy Is A Hoax (Like Russia)

Click here for an article at the Daily Beast by Justin Baragona entitled "Tucker Carlson: White Supremacy Is a ‘Hoax’ and ‘Not a Real Problem in America.'"

“It’s a hoax,” he declared. “Just like the Russia hoax, it’s a conspiracy theory used to divide the country and keep a hold on power.”

I don't get Fox and therefore don't see Carlson's program (although I've seen enough Carlson clips to have despised the man for more than ten years). But I've read that it would be difficult to differentiate between a transcript of a Tucker Carlson show and the "Hispanic invasion" manifesto of the El Paso shooter.

Crediting the president for condemning white supremacy while addressing the recent mass shootings, Carlson not only blasted critics of the president but took it a step further and dismissed the issue of white supremacy altogether, saying “the whole thing is a lie.”

Carlson says the white supremacy threat is "actually not a real problem in America. The combined membership of every white supremacist organization in this country would be able to fit inside a college football stadium."

That may or may not be true -- I don't think there are a bunch of well-organized white supremacist organizations with thousands of followers -- but the reality is that these wackos are lone-wolf shooters who do not belong to any "organization," and they draw comfort and support from Trump's bigoted, racist remarks in his tweets and at his rallies.

He opens the piece by saying, "It's not the job of this show to defend the president, everything he says, and some things we're not going to defend." I'd be interested to know just what those things are that you're not going to defend, Tucker.

He goes on to say about Trump: "He never endorsed white supremacy, or came close to endorsing white supremacy. That's just a lie."

Quite the straw man Tucker has set up there. I've never heard anyone say that Trump has said "I'm a white supremacist," or "I endorse white supremacy." He hasn't. It's all done with dog whistles, and the white supremacists hear it loud and clear. And while all Trump supporters are not white supremacists, all white supremacists are Trump supporters, because they know he wants to accomplish the same things they do. David Duke loves him; comments on The Daily Stormer regularly refer to Trump as "the god-emperor."

Hoverboard Channel Crossing

Click here for an article at The Verge, by Andrew Liptak, entitled "French inventor successfully crosses the English Channel on a hoverboard." He reached a top speed of 106 mph on the 22-mile trip, stopping halfway and landing on a platform to refuel. Watch the video: He looks to be a good 100 feet in the air.

When Trump's Promises Go Unkept

Click here for an article by Paul Waldman at The Plum Line, a Washington Post blog, entitled "How Trump’s biggest broken promise will make white supremacist terrorism even worse."

Is Trump's rhetoric inspiring murders? Waldman says:

There’s another vital question we need to ask: not whether Trump is inspiring murderers, but whether he is now, and will in the future, disappoint them in ways that could lead to more deadly violence.

Trump promised "a return to when people like them were on top. The Muslims would be banned, the minorities would be shown their place, a “big beautiful wall” would be built from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico — and Mexico would pay for it."

The problem will arise, Waldman says, when Trump supporters realize he can't fulfill his promises:

As historian Rick Perlstein noted just after the 2016 election, Trump made practical promises he couldn’t possibly keep, but “the biggest, only made implicitly, was the same one fascist strongmen always offer: transcendent national renewal, built upon the cleansing of dangerous untermenschen from the body politic.” Once that promise inevitably fails to be fulfilled, the results could be catastrophic. “The more Trumpism fails, the more, and more violently, scapegoats will be blamed.”

Moscow Mitch!

Joe Scarborough calling McConnell "Moscow Mitch" apparently hit a nerve.

Click here for an article in the Louisville Courier Journal by Ben Tobin, entitled "Mitch McConnell lashes out on Senate floor about 'Moscow Mitch' accusation."

I have to express my appreciation for Scarborough's moniker -- I hope it sticks -- and also for his tweet during the Mueller hearings:

Jesus, forgive me for ever being a Republican.

Which Party Supports The Principle Of Medicare?

Click here for an article in The Washington Post blog, The Plum Line, by Paul Waldman, entitled "Medicare just turned 54. Let’s remember what Republicans said about it."

Medicare was passed in July 1965, when the Democrats enjoyed huge majorities in Congress -- 295/140 in the House and 68/32 in the Senate. Johnson praised it at the time he signed the bill, saying:

No longer will older Americans be denied the healing miracle of modern medicine. No longer will illness crush and destroy the savings that they have so carefully put away over a lifetime so that they might enjoy dignity in their later years. No longer will young families see their own incomes, and their own hopes, eaten away simply because they are carrying out their deep moral obligations to their parents, and to their uncles, and their aunts. And no longer will this Nation refuse the hand of justice to those who have given a lifetime of service and wisdom and labor to the progress of this progressive country.

But the Republicans fought against it with everything they had. Here's what a rising Republican star -- Ronald Reagan, who would be elected to the first of his two terms as governor of California the following year, 1966 -- had to say on the subject:

“One of the traditional methods of imposing statism or socialism on a people has been by way of medicine,” he warned in a famous radio address. If Medicare were not stopped, Reagan said, “one of these days you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children, and our children’s children, what it once was like in America when men were free.”

Republicans have made concerted efforts over the years to rid America of this cesspool of socialism, but with little effect. As Waldman says:

Today there are 59 million people on Medicare and 73 million on Medicaid [132 million people], combining to make up a full 40 percent of the American population. So guess what: We have the socialism Reagan warned about, just not for everyone.

And yet that paragon of honesty, President Donald J. Trump, "wrote in a 2018 op-ed that was stunningly dishonest even for him, 'I also made a solemn promise to our great seniors to protect Medicare. That is why I am fighting so hard against the Democrats’ plan that would eviscerate Medicare.'"

"Josh Hawley Is A Fraud."

Click here for the article with that title at Splinter, by Paul Blest. Hawley is the junior senator from Missouri, and a rising star in the Republican party. He defeated two-term Democrat incumbent Claire McCaskill in 2018.

The premise of the article is that while Hawley purports to represent the downtrodden workers of Missouri, he has a very elitist history:

Hawley’s father Ron is a banker. Hawley himself graduated with a B.A. from Stanford, then went on to receive a law degree from Yale and clerk for Chief Justice of the Supreme Court John Roberts. He then became one of the lead lawyers for the right-wing Alliance Defending Freedom arguing the Hobby Lobby case before the Supreme Court, and was elected the attorney general of Missouri at the age of 36. Josh Hawley has had a privileged childhood, an academic pedigree from two of the top private universities in the world (and then, briefly, was an academic himself), a place in some of most prestigious places in the legal profession all before he turned 35, and is now a United States Senator.

Blest points out that "during his successful run for Senate against Claire McCaskill, Hawley usually glossed over all of these details on the campaign trail in favor of anecdotes about 'hard work' and 'growing up in a small town.'”

Along with Tucker Carlson, Hawley was a keynote speaker at the recent National Conservatism Conference in D.C. Remember the name: He'll be a consequential Republican in years to come.

Something's Happening To The Concept Of "Conservatism"

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Something's stirring in the belly of the Trumpist beast.

Click here for an article at The Washington Post by John Burtka entitled "Under Trump, a very different agenda for conservatives emerges." And if reading that article doesn't make you sufficiently afraid, click here for another article, again at The Washington Post, by Max Boot, entitled "What comes after Trump may be even worse." "President Tucker Carlson"? Now there's a phrase that ought to reduce you to a terrified, quivering lump of jelly.

On July 22, there was a gathering in D.C. called the National Conservativism Conference. It marked the beginning of a movement calling itself "national conservatism," an effort to explain the phenomenon of Trumpism within the conservative movement and the Republican party:

When Fox News host Tucker Carlson took the stage at the National Conservatism Conference last Monday in Washington, his tone was self-deprecating yet triumphant. Former deputy national security adviser Michael Anton has deemed Carlson the “de facto leader of the conservative movement,” and the audience wanted a coronation.

For the next hour, Carlson laid waste to the pieties of a thousand white papers and endless summer seminars promoting the dogmas of radical individualism, unfettered free markets and global hegemony — in short, all the things that made up American conservatism for the last generation. It was time, he said, to climb up into the attic and start tossing out the junk. And down it came: Speech after speech declared independence from neoconservatism, neoliberalism, libertarianism and classical liberalism. In substance and in tone, this was not the conservatism of National Review, the Weekly Standard or the Conservative Political Action Conference, but something consciously distinct and admittedly superior.

There has been much intellectual ferment on the right since the 2016 election but never a public gathering of this scale explaining what Donald Trump’s victory means for the future of the Republican Party. Under the auspices of the Edmund Burke Foundation, a new group of self-described “national conservatives” gathered to proclaim that big business is a greater threat to liberty than big government, that identity politics is a Freudian fraud and nation building is a chimera. In short, the aim of this new conservative politics is not more freedom but strong families, resilient faith communities and a thriving middle class. If the influence of Russell Kirk, American conservatism’s founding father, provided the intellectual framework for the conference, Pat Buchanan’s pitchfork populism replaced William F. Buckley’s Northeastern elitism as its animating spirit.

Here is Burtka's assessment of national conservative policy:

In economics, it would aim to strengthen the middle class, reduce income inequality and develop an industrial policy to ensure economic independence from China for essential military supplies. Policy proposals could include incentivizing investment in capital equipment and research and development; ending tax advantages for shareholder buybacks; federal spending on infrastructure; promoting skilled trades and vocational programs; busting up inefficient monopolies through antitrust enforcement; slowing immigration rates to tighten labor markets and raise wages for the working class; holding universities liable for student loan debt in cases of bankruptcy; and raising tariffs across the board while slashing taxes on the middle class.

As relates to culture, national conservatives would aim to support families by being pro-life for the whole life. Policy ideas might include paid family leave, increasing the child tax credit, federally funded prenatal and maternal care, reducing or eliminating income tax on families with three or more children, and working toward a society in which a mother or father can support a family on a single income. America’s Judeo-Christian roots would be celebrated, and churches and charitable organizations would be given preference in caring for the poor.

In foreign affairs, national conservatives’ goal is to protect the safety, sovereignty and independence of the American people. America’s regime-change wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and Yemen would be recognized as imperial hubris, and anyone involved in their promotion exiled from future positions in Republican administrations. Presidents who ignore congressional authorization for war would be impeached, and members of Congress who eschew their constitutional duties would be stripped of committee assignments and “primaried” in the next election. We would command the seas and space, bring the remaining troops home, secure our own borders and rebuild America.

All that rings a lot of the right bells: Who in the Democratic party could argue against any of the ideas I've put in bold above? Fine-sounding proposals, but how would they look in practice? Max Boot's article gives us an idea of what national conservatism might look like under President Tucker Carlson:

I fear that President Trump may not be an aberration but a prelude to something even uglier under a demagogue who really is a “stable genius.” (Trump is neither.)

A who’s who of Trumpian intellectuals (an oxymoron?) gathered at the Ritz-Carlton in Washington last week to propound an ominous ideology: “national conservatism.” As Reason reported, the conferees want to ditch the old conservative aversion to having the government micromanage the economy. Many speakers argued for an industrial policy based on tariffs and tax credits to reverse what “Hillbilly Elegy” author J.D. Vance described as “family decline, childhood trauma, opioid abuse, community decline, decline of the manufacturing sector.” In response, Rep. Justin Amash (I-Mich.) tweeted: “ ‘National conservatism’ is just collectivism rebranded for the right. It’s a form of socialism built upon fear of the new and different.” (Maybe it should be called “national socialism” instead? If only that term weren’t already taken.)

Boot concludes:

But the real star of the “national conservatism” conference, reports Jacob Heilbrunn in the New York Review of Books, was Fox host Tucker Carlson. An isolationist and nativist, he has called Iraqis “semiliterate primitive monkeys” and said immigrants make “our own country poor and dirtier and more divided.” At the Ritz-Carlton, which is a subsidiary of the largest hotel company in the world, Carlson’s theme was, “Big Business Hates Your Family.” (Maybe not Carlson’s family: His stepmother is an heir to the Swanson frozen-food fortune.)

There has already been talk of Carlson running for president, and, Heilbrunn wrote, “Carlson’s own coy disavowal on the podium was hardly a denial.” Tucker in ’24? Don’t laugh. Weep. The Fox host is more intelligent and disciplined than Trump. He could well be the new leader of authoritarianism in America. If that were to happen, we may look back nostalgically on our present craziness as the calm before the storm.

Click here for a third article at The Washington Post, entitled ""Conservatives want to revive a one-time trick from more than 100 years ago," by Megan McArdle, a discussion of national conservatism's "industrial policy":

Industrial policy was last hot in the 1980s, as an ascendant Japan seemed about to displace us at the apex of the global economy. Center-left policy wonks spent a decade urging us to copy them. By the time they’d convinced everyone, however, Japan was mired in its 20-year “lost decade,” and the United States was entering an unplanned economic boom courtesy of Silicon Valley. Industrial policy abruptly vanished from the national conversation.

She goes on:

The first thing opponents of industrial policy should note is that it can work. But there are some other things we should note, too: that while it can work, it usually doesn’t; that it didn’t cause most of the growth it gets credit for in Asian countries; and that the limited benefits it offers probably can’t be realized by modern-day America.

But first, the concession. Done smartly, strategic trade policy and targeted subsidies can boost a country’s competitive position in growth-promoting industries. And because those industries often cluster, successful national champions can be quite hard to dislodge — just think of Detroit’s decades-long dominance of the global auto market. Once a cluster is established, spillover effects can foster further growth in related sectors.

Unfortunately, industrial policy is rarely particularly smart. Even brilliant planners can’t actually predict the future, and if they guess wrong, they can squander a great deal of taxpayer money while actually making the economy less competitive.

McArdle points out times in history when other countries have adopted similar industrial policies, and gives reasons why she feels these policies would not be successful if applied to the present-day U.S. economy. She concludes:

The problem is, we can’t replicate it because we practically invented it — more than 100 years ago. And it’s a one-time trick that no country ever gets to repeat, no matter how carefully it plans.

Mueller Report Summarized In 5 Minutes

Click here for a celebrity reading of key points in the Mueller report.

Mueller Report For Dummies - With Pictures

Click here for an article at Insider entitled "The Mueller Report," subtitled "Adapted by Mark Bowden, author of 'Blackhawk Down.' With illustrations by Chad Hurd, art director at 'Archer.'"

Speed Up Your Internet Connection

Click here for an article at How-To Geek by Tim Brookes, entitled "How to Speed Up Your Internet Connection."

Doe v. Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein

Click here for the legal document charging Trump and Epstein, Case 1:16-cv-07673, filed September 30, 2016, in the U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York:

JANE DOE v. DONALD J. TRUMP and JEFFREY E. EPSTEIN Complaint for rape, sexual misconduct, criminal sexual acts, sexual abuse, forcible touching, assault, battery, intentional and reckless infliction of emotional stress, duress, false imprisonment, and defamation.

Jane Doe withdrew her case on November 4, 2016, saying she was "afraid to show her face" due to "numerous threats" against her.

Click here for a pertinent Twitter thread.

Seinfeld: George, The Marine Biologist

Earlier in the episode, Kramer came over to Jerry's apartment, and George was there. He asked them if they wanted to come out with him to Rockaway Beach, because his car trunk was full of old Titleist golf balls a friend had gotten him from a driving range, and he was going to drive them into the ocean. (Jerry and George declined.)

George was dating a girl he had idolized in high school, and in order to appear successful, he told her he was a marine biologist. They were at the beach and found a beach whale, and George told the story:

Big Brother (a.k.a. Google) Is Watching You

Click here for Google's activity page. You can sign in, or if you're already signed in, it shows your Google searches in the past. Click here for Bob Rankin's article on the subject, entitled "Everything Google Knows About You (and How to Delete it).

Tag Your Emails

Click here for an article at How-To Geek by Rob Woodgate, entitled "How to Tag Your Emails For Maximum Searchability." Want to find an email you sent or received six months ago? Tags can help.

A Dramatic Reading of the Mueller Report

Use The Windows 10 Game Bar

Click here for an article by Chris Hoffman at How-To Geek entitled "6 Great Features in Windows 10’s New Game Bar" to learn how to capture video clips and other tricks.

Ideas For All Those Photos You've Taken

Click here for an article at lifesavvy.com by Harry Guinness about suggestions for what to do with those thousands of images you've shot.

Big Brother (Google) Is Watching You!

Here's a short video clip from The Washington Post illustrating how cookies snaffle onto you and then follow you around; "in a week of regular browsing, you might get tagged by 10,000 third-party cookies." That's on Chrome: Firefox doesn't allow them, by default.



Click here for the accompanying article by Geoffrey A. Fowler, entitled "Goodbye, Chrome: Google’s web browser has become spy software."

In a week of Web surfing on my desktop, I discovered 11,189 requests for tracker “cookies” that Chrome would have ushered right onto my computer but were automatically blocked by Firefox. These little files are the hooks that data firms, including Google itself, use to follow what websites you visit so they can build profiles of your interests, income and personality.

Holocaust Revisionism

Click here for an article at The Washington Post by Lev Golinkin entitled "‘Never forget’ is dead. And it was killed on our watch." Neo-Nazism -- and worse -- is rampant in Europe.

Gerrymandering Explained

Here's a short, simple explanation from The Washington Post of how gerrymandering works:

Just Because You're Paranoid Doesn't Mean They're Not Watching You

Click here for an article at How-To Geek by Chris Hoffman entitled "How to See Which Apps Are Using Your Webcam on Windows 10."

Your webcam’s light is on, but which applications are watching you? Windows 10 now has an easy, built-in way to find out. You can also see which apps have previously used your webcam—and the precise time they last accessed it.

Google Home

Click here for an article at How-To Geek by Cameron Summerson entitled "How to Set Up Whole House Audio Using Google Home."

I Like Night Skiing, But ...

... I like to do it on a green or blue run that I'm familiar with. I wouldn't ski this run in the daylight.

Archive Your Stuff!

Click here for an article by Rob Woodgate at How-To Geek entitled "The Best Way to Organize Your Emails: Just Archive Them." Finally, clear out those hundreds of superfluous messages (but you don't want to get rid of them forever). OHIO -- Only Handle It Once!

Mohammed bin Zayed, Crown Prince Of Abu Dhabi

Mohammed bin Zayed, crown prince of Abu Dhabi, de facto ruler of the United Arab Emirates, is arguably the most powerful leader in the Arab world:

“Prince Mohammed is almost unknown to the American public and his tiny country has fewer citizens than Rhode Island. But he may be the richest man in the world. He controls sovereign wealth funds worth $1.3 trillion, more than any other country.

“His influence operation in Washington is legendary… His military is the Arab world’s most potent, equipped through its work with the United States to conduct high-tech surveillance and combat operations far beyond its borders.

“For decades, the prince has been a key American ally, following Washington’s lead, but now he is going his own way. His special forces are active in Yemen, Libya, Somalia and Egypt’s North Sinai. He has worked to thwart democratic transitions in the Middle East, helped install a reliable autocrat in Egypt and boosted a protégé to power in Saudi Arabia.”

Republicans Gradually Came To Support The Nixon Impeachment

Click here for an article at The Washington Post by William S. Cohen entitled "When will the Republican silence on Trump end?"

Cohen is a former Republican congressman, senator and defense secretary who served on the House Judiciary Committee in 1974 during the Watergate impeachment inquiry. And the point he makes is that originally, when the Watergate burglars were arrested and the story began to develop, Republicans were solidly behind Nixon, a popular president who won reelection by a massive margin in 1972.

Commenting on the present state of affairs, he says:

With the exception thus far of Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.), Republicans have taken the position that Mueller’s redacted report has resolved all issues of alleged presidential collusion with the Russians and obstruction of justice. Case closed.

This is not a tenable position. The Mueller report has raised nearly as many questions as it has answered. But more important, as someone who legislatively helped craft the original Office of Special Counsel, I can attest that Congress never intended to subcontract out its investigative powers to the executive branch.

He goes on to say:

At the moment, public opinion polls indicate that a majority opposes impeachment proceedings against Trump. It also appears unlikely that two-thirds of the Senate would support removing the president from office based on the evidence currently available.

And:

During the Watergate scandal, the majority of the American people initially opposed impeachment proceedings being launched against President Richard M. Nixon.

But as the hearings moved forward, we learned that, among other activities, the president had authorized the payment of “hush” money to those who had engaged in criminal activity; urged his subordinates to commit perjury before Congress; attempted to have the CIA derail an ongoing FBI investigation; and sought to use the IRS to punish those on a list of his political enemies.

[All of those findings apply to Trump.] Cohen goes on to say:

The silence of Republicans today in the face of presidential behavior that is unacceptable by any reasonable standard is both striking and deeply disappointing.

When one talks privately to some Republican members about a president who lurches from tweet to taunt; who, according to those who have worked closely beside him, is incapable of telling the truth even in mundane situations; who accepts the word of Vladimir Putin and rejects the unanimous judgment of our intelligence community that Russia launched a cyberattack at the very heart of our democracy; and whose toxic combination of egotism and insecurity distorts the basic process of governing, they express their disdain and even alarm at how he conducts the nation’s affairs.

Yet, the same members are reluctant to speak out publicly even in the face of behavior they would find intolerable by any previous occupant of the Oval Office.

Republicans who do not venture outside the Fox bubble believe the propaganda they are being force-fed: No collusion, no obstruction, the president was exonerated, the crimes involved were perpetrated by the corrupt investigators. When they learn the truth, the tide will turn.

Tucker Carlson: "Mexico Is A Hostile Foreigh Power"

Who knew?

Click here for a short article at MediaMatters entitled "Tucker Carlson: Mexico is a "hostile foreign power" and America "must strike back."

It has a link to the Fox News broadcast, and says:

TUCKER CARLSON (HOST): When the United States is attacked by a hostile foreign power it must strike back. And make no mistake Mexico is a hostile foreign power. For decades the Mexican government has sent its poor north to our country. This has allowed that country's criminal oligarchy to maintain power and get even richer but at great expense to us. The flood of illegal workers into the United States has damaged our communities, ruined our schools, burdened our healthcare system and fractured our national unity.

Oooookay ... When I first read (at another publication) that Carlson had said "When the United States is attacked by a hostile foreign power it must strike back. And make no mistake Mexico is a hostile foreign power," I thought Carlson must simply have misspoken, and meant to say "Russia" or "China." But no, he's attacking Mexico as an enemy of the United States.

Russia, China, North Korea, Egypt, Turkey, the Philippines, Saudi Arabia, and other repressive autocracies are fine, but Mexico is an enemy. Is Canada next?

Trump Arrives In Britain!

Here's how Sky News is advertising Trump's arrival in Britain on June 3 (paste this address into your browser):

https://twitter.com/i/status/1134833983261413376

Mueller v. Hannity

Click here for an article in WaPo by Erik Wemple entitled "Mueller ruins Hannity’s parade of deception." As Wemple says, Hannity's reaction the day the Mueller report was released was as follows:

“We begin tonight with a Fox News alert. The witch hunt is officially over. The Mueller report is out. And the president of the United States has been totally and completely vindicated,” said Hannity on that night. More: “Tonight, thankfully, for the sake of this country, truth has prevailed. As the president’s attorneys put it, quote: This vindication of the president is an important step forward for the country and a strong reminder that this type of abuse must never be permitted to occur again.”

I've seen several accounts of Republicans who only listen to Fox and other right-wing TV and radio shows that say words to the effect of, "All I've seen and heard is that the president was totally vindicated, and the investigation was bogus from the start and should never have happened." They don't know what the Mueller report says; all they know is what Hannity, Limbaugh and the rest of the right-wing crowd have told them. I read of one such Republican who was shocked to see Mueller on TV saying that if they had found that Trump did not commit the crime of obstruction, they would have said so. That's not what she had been led to believe, and she said that as a result of hearing Mueller speak, she would read the second volume of the report (the one that deals with obstruction). She had thought, based on Barr's "summary" of the report, that Trump had been exonerated, and she was surprised to learn, from Mueller himself, that that was not the case.

Great! If only they could take the blinders off and expose themselves to information that doesn't come from the Fox News bubble, they would learn that reality is entirely different from what they have been deceived into believing.

Of course, Hannity cannot let Mueller's statement stand on its own:

“Now, today, he officially resigned from the Office of Special Counsel but not before showing the world, of course, what we already know on this program, his partisan hackery true colors, if you will,” said Hannity, in his typical spitfire delivery.

In his statement, Mueller said:

“If we had had the confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so. We did not however make a determination as to whether the president did commit a crime.”

Hannity, with a nice assist from Alan Dershowitz, professed to be shocked that Mueller would say such a thing. Wemple replies:

Thing is, Mueller had already said as much — in his report, which hit the public realm more than a month before his statement. Here’s the relevant passage from Volume II of the report: “If we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state. Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, however, we are unable to reach that judgment.”

Of course he did! I already knew that, from reading and seeing non-Fox coverage of the report. But statements like that in the report weren't reported in the Fox world.

This very spectacle — the special counsel, in his first public remarks on the investigation — forced Hannity and many others to reckon with the Mueller team’s actual findings. As opposed to the findings that Hannity had been announcing to his viewers in the intervening weeks:

On May 2: “The witch hunt is done. Mueller has gone home. No collusion, no obstruction.”
On May 22: “We now have four separate investigations that have all cleared President Trump of the spurious charges leveled against him and his campaign. No collusion, fact. No obstruction, fact.”
On May 27: “Now, the truth has been laid bare for all to see. No collusion. No obstruction. No truth to the lies that have been peddled daily.”

Folks who place trust in Hannity — and there are many — might have been confused, accordingly, upon hearing Mueller state, “If we had had the confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so.” So Hannity had to reassure his fans: Mueller doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

Dilemma for Fox: If the report actually showed "no collusion" -- it didn't, but that's the Hannity line -- then the report has to be praised for its thoroughness in coming to such a laudable conclusion; but if the report actually implicated wrongdoing -- which it did -- then the report has to be trashed as a bunch of lies from a partisan hack. Which is it to be, Fox?

Propagating misinformation, as it turns out, is a complicated business. To properly air the “no collusion” mantra, Hannity has to hype the Mueller probe’s investigative thoroughness. To properly air the “no obstruction” mantra, Hannity must simultaneously aver that Mueller is “basically full of crap.” It’s one of the luxuries of Hannity’s bubbled existence at Fox News that he will never be forced to choose between the two.

Disgust Is The Appropriate Reaction ...

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

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

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

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

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

Trump's Toxic Lies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Robert Mueller Fends Off Hecklers (Fake)

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

Preposterous Trump Propaganda - Would Anyone Believe It?

Click here for some outrageous Trump propaganda.

Treason? Deep State Coup? Nope.

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

TV Shows To Watch This Summer

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

Driftglass On The Phony Tea Party, Ten Years Later

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

Funny story. True story.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So here we are, a decade later.

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

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

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

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

Interstate Highway System

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

Disposable Email Address

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

Trump Loves OANN.

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

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

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

And:

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

Working there is a million times worse.

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

And Trump loves it:

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

Trump's Vulgar Language

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Should Democrats Appear On Fox?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Democracy In Crisis

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

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

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

How Democracies Die
by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt

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

How Democracy Ends by David Runciman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She says:

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

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

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

She ends with a quote from David Axelrod:

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

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

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

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

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

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

What to do, what to do?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They Teach Arabic Numerals In School!

More evidence of the Muslim takeover of American society

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A trickle of immigrants became a flood:

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

According to the mayor:

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

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

The Green New Deal, John Oliver Style

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

Paul Krugman On Trump's Trade Policy

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

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

Donald and Rudy's Excellent Ukrainian Adventure

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

It begins:

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

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

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

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

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

Here's Guiliani's slant on it:

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

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

Waldman says:

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

The article concludes:

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

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

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

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

Saving Screenshots, Using Snipping Tool

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

WaPo Fact Checker On The Uranium One "Scandal"

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

Hamilton, Jefferson, and Betsy DeVos

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

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

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

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

Keyboard Shortcuts for VLC

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

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

Teach Dave To Cook

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

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

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

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

Here are a few pointers about opening the command prompt:

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

I like the last one, with administrative privileges.

**********

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