So, let’s recap Trump’s latest kerfuffle with Mexico: Donne sees something on the tee-vee that upsets him. So he picks up the only tool he knows how to use and threatens Mexico with tariffs. The GOP, this time, bleats that they’ve had enough. So Trump reaches an “agreement” with the Mexican government, whereby the Mexicans agree to do things that they’ve pretty much already agreed to do. Trump claims victory and gives in on imposing tariffs.
Elizabeth Warren Spends Evenings Tutoring Underperforming Candidates On Creating Comprehensive Policy
AMES, IA—Hoping to give them the tools they will need to succeed in the 2020 election, White House hopeful Elizabeth Warren has been spending her evenings tutoring underperforming presidential candidates on how to craft comprehensive policy proposals, sources reported Thursday.
In June 2018, The Advocate reported, “With the DOD pulling support, the Pentagon’s LGBT group had to design its own promotional posters for its Pride party, something the Pentagon’s design office previously did.”
For six years, DoD published special reports to celebrate the event. Today, when one goes to the DoD “LGBT Pride Month” page (lead image), one can see past stories and posters, but also the message, “You have reached a collection of archived material. The content available is no longer being updated and may no longer be applicable.”
Those words, “no longer applicable,” perhaps inadvertently tell the sad truth.
That is because this year the Department of Defense did not release a memo marking LGBT Pride Month, nor did the State Department send out an official cable with guidelines for marking Pride Month, nor did Pompeo attend the State Department’s annual Pride Day event.
This year, “the State Department began rejecting all embassy requests to hoist rainbow flags outside the mission buildings during LGBTQ Pride Month,” according to the Washington Post.
On this week’s edition of HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, host Bill Maher noted that “Cory Booker was on with Jake Tapper, and Jake Tapper asked him, a couple of times, what in your plan would have stopped the massacre that we had last week at Virginia Beach, and Cory Booker took a very long time to not be able to answer that question.”
“Can I just say this? Journalists have to stop asking that horrible question,” Blow said. “That is a horrible question.”
“Because what we’re doing is picking out one incident out of 30,000 deaths per year and saying ‘How could you solve this one thing?’” Blow continued. “That is not the objective of gun control. The objective of gun control is to reduce capacity to kill people who should not be killed. And once you reframe it that way, maybe the proposal I have today will not solve that problem, but it cuts into this massive number of people that we are losing to gun violence.”
The question rankles because it smacks of pro-gun talking points, but as Blow points out, it also suffers from a serious logical flaw. It’s like asking a scientist what his cure for lung cancer would do to prevent pancreatic cancer.
Where I might differ with Blow’s analysis, though, is that there is no such thing as a horrible question if you have a great answer.
Impeachment may be possible, but only if this President is convicted in the right court.
It is not the House. It will not be the Senate.
And it will not be with any written report.
We are five years away from the half century mark. And conservative lawyer, author, and television personality Ben Stein can still be brought to tears. His voice breaks as we watch on weepy video:
Really sad. And I … I … don’t think any president has been more wrongly persecuted than Nixon. Ever. I just … I think he was a saint.
It seems like a minority opinion. It certainly was back in 1974, as Saint Nixon resigned. A widely accepted poll measured his popularity at 24%.
Hard to imagine sympathy today for a president who we now know ordered a firebombing that subordinates quietly countermanded, who is recorded screaming at aides about a burglary that had not been carried out, who directed government harassment of political enemies. All we knew about back then was the cover-up.
It is not hard to imagine an alternate timeline in which Ben Stein represents a majority, of a successful continuation of his second term, perhaps even more terms with fixed outcomes, for he was an ambitious individual, of continuing popularity.
Jack Jodell at The Saturday Afternoon Post counts the abundance of Democratic candidates and demands that we, as voters, do our civic duty and research each one. Or at least listen to town halls.
Libertarian Michael A. LaFerrara makes the case that the reasons many of us want open information about election funding (untraceable dark money, transparency) are actually “hollow catchphrases meant to equate free speech to some sinister underworld.” I’m so ashamed. How could we promote such distortions?
At The Moderate Voice, Robert Levine says we don’t know for sure whether Putin has kompromat on my President. But we know for sure that Trump feels he owes, really owes, Putin. And we know that Putin has Trump in a subservient position.
Ted McLaughlin at jobsanger discovers outspoken opposition to Trumpism from a surprising source. It comes from a while before he became President, in fact 19 centuries and 75 years before.
Here’s the funny old thing about evil: Hannah Arendt wrote a very famous thing about the banality of evil. Evil is a commonplace. It really is. Wars. Murders. Shitty government policies. People are ruined by degrees and massacred by inches. They lose their homes because of mere cents’ worth of debt. They go to jail because of unrecognizable infractions. They languish in solitary confinement for reasons of mere identity. The people who carry out shitty actions against other people look so bland and mild and seem so self-effacing. While they watch over women giving birth to stillborn children while in leg-irons, or send drones to an area thick with innocent civilians to stop some supposed terrorists. And they go home and love their families and their pets and are great members of their community and donate to the church jumble.
And there’s your Uncle Bill. Bland and not even showy. Just wrong and harmful in his fleece vest and serious expression. If he were your uncle, you’d have unfriended him on Facebook back in 2016 for supporting Trump after the Access Hollywood tape with disparaging comments about the women who said Trump was abusive because it crossed a line you knew always was there. And here he is, running the DOJ for that norm-abusing guy.
Here’s why I need Congress to grab Trump by the Article 1, Section 2, Clause 5 of the Constitution; because if you are a co-equal branch of government, they just let you do it. Because there is no respite from DOJ. The Mueller Report was never anything final. Because we need the public to know by seeing on tv the contents of the Mueller report which they did not read.
I suppose what I’m saying here is that when people express love for each other online — whether it’s to a spouse, or a parent, or a child, or a friend — consider that it’s not fake, or an inverse relationship, or a harbinger of trouble for that relationship. It is possible for people to be sincere online. It’s not all fake relationship news. And if sometimes it *is* fake relationship news, it’s okay to hope that by presenting that aspirational picture, the people involved are putting up a signpost for where they want that relationship to go, and will find a way to get there.
My father’s death has changed me in more ways than I can list or even understand, but one of the things it’s done is to remind me of the separations coming. I am more and more aware of the way our time with people actually works: we add memories all while losing seconds—addition and subtraction in concert. Many days I catch myself inventorying the relationships with those I love, and realizing that they too will all reach this place I reached with my father on that day five years ago: the spot where one of us is gone and the other left behind. I’m trying to make better use of the time before then.
The moment we meet the people we love, the clock starts ticking. The very second our paths cross with another human being, we are actually counting down. Every meaningful relationship we have in our lives, exists in the ever-shrinking time before we say goodbye to them. We should love and move and speak with the urgency befitting this truth.
I wonder how differently we’d treat the ordinary moments with people we love if we realized that they were anything but ordinary, if we could somehow in those very seconds, sense that we are rapidly losing daylight—not to depress or frighten us, but to wake us up.
Just a reminder of what a miserable place Republicans have made of our country, here’s a quick list of stories in my news feed today- no comment needed:
“Carmakers See $17 Billion Wiped Out by Trump’s Mexico Threat”
“Trump sells Qatar $12 billion of U.S. weapons days after accusing it of funding terrorism”
“Paul Manafort to Be Sent to Rikers, Where He Will Be Held in Isolation”
“Child porn charges for Trump-tied Mueller witness raise questions”
“US bans cruise ships and group tours from visiting Cuba”
“Merkel rebukes Trump politics in Harvard commencement speech: ‘Tear down walls of ignorance'”
“Alabama Mayor Calls for Killing LGBTQ People in Facebook Post”
