unraveling

31.Jan.2018

The stupid, it burns

The American Meteorological Society sent a helpful letter to the President, responding to the word salad he garbled at Piers Morgan on Sunday. (“There is a cooling, and there’s a heating. I mean, look, it used to not be climate change, it used to be global warming. That wasn’t working too well because it was getting too cold all over the place.”) Keith L. Seitter, AMS Executive Director wrote:

"Unfortunately, these and other climate-related comments in the interview are not consistent with scientific observations from around the globe, nor with scientific conclusions based on these observations. U.S Executive Branch agencies such as NASA and NOAA have been central to developing these observations and assessing their implications. This climate information provides a robust starting point for meaningful discussion of important policy issues employing the best available knowledge and understanding.

"There is a wealth of comprehensive and accurate information on climate change available to you and your staff within government agencies, as well as from experts in academic institutions and other organizations...."

The AMS stands ready to help! Maybe some of the cabinet scientists could read the longer blog post and hit the highlights with their boss.

Others may enjoy the take from Weather Underground's Bob Henson, deconstructing the deep state of anti-genius memed by the president. Among the fun facts, the journal Climatic Change started 40 years ago, not quite two years after the presciently titled article in Science magazine, Climatic Change: Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming? (Yes, we were.)

Also, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) turns 30 this year.

We all came from Africa

If only Stephen Miller's grandmother could tell us what she thinks about her grandson's creepy xenophobia. And we had someone who could translate her comments from Yiddish. Jennifer Mendelsohn's #resistancegenealogy, tracing family histories of lawmakers speaking out against immigration.

VP Mike Pence is also the product of "chain migration." His Irish grandfather arrived in 1923, with passage paid for by an older brother who'd arrived a few years earlier. Brother's passage had been paid for by an aunt. Let's stop pretending to be surprised. #resistancegenealogy

— Jennifer Mendelsohn (@CleverTitleTK) January 23, 2018

Congress cuckolded for Vlad

Add this to the timeless collection of oxymorons: a House Intelligence Committee led by Devin Nunes. Hey Mr. Chairman (and former Trump transition team guy), did you work with the White House on that anti-FBI memo?

"I'm not answering."

"[Democrat committee member Mike] Quigley’s question harkened back to Nunes’ history of surreptitiously working with the White House to deflect from the myriad inquiries into possible coordination between Trump’s associates and the Kremlin."

Not featured in last night's State of the Uniom: any mention of the probe into the Trump campaign's numerous inappropriate contacts, or its iniative to neuter the Special Counsel, FBI and DOJ as a whole. He did mention Russia, once:

"Around the world, we face rogue regimes, terrorist groups, and rivals like China and Russia that challenge our interests, our economy and our values."

There's so much more to say! For example, that time when Congress voted 419 - 3 in the House and 98 - 2 in the Senate to make law Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions. (Rand Paul and Bernie Sanders, Justin Amash (MI), John J. Duncan Jr. (TN), and Thomas Massie (KY) in case you're wondering.)

Back in the day, Speaker Paul Ryan's spokeswoman said the bill "would hold three bad actors to account." But now... the White House says there's no need for that. They are not very good at holding bad actors to account. Or, hey, just the threat of sanctions is close enough, amirite?

Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council Anders Åslund notes that section 241 of the law called on the Secretary of the Treasury, Director of National Intelligence and Secretary of State, to submit within 180 days a detailed report identifying “the most significant senior foreign political figures and oligarchs” in Russia, “as determined by their closeness to the Russian regime and their net worth” and an “assessment of the relationship between individuals" and "President Vladimir Putin or other members of the Russian ruling elite” and an “identification of any indices of corruption with respect to those individuals.”

Those 180 days were up midnight on the 29th.

"At the last minute, however, somebody high up—no one knows who at this point—threw out the experts’ work and instead wrote down the names of the top officials in the Russian presidential administration and government plus the 96 Russian billionaires on the Forbes list. In doing so, this senior official ridiculed the government experts who had prepared another report, rendering CAATSA ineffective and mocking US sanctions on Russia overall. By signing this list, the secretary of the treasury took responsibility for it.

"If this excerpt of the Kremlin phone book will have any effect, it will solidify the Russian elite behind Putin, while the authors of CAATSA aspired to split the Russian elite and offer prominent Russians the option to live safely in the West. Many businessmen on the Forbes list are citizens of countries other than Russia and have lived abroad for years. In no way have the US authorities proven that these people have done anything wrong.

"The main beneficiary of this list is Russia’s president. The question arises why the secretary of the treasury derides US sanctions on Russia and legislation signed into law by the president."

Probably also nothing to see here in the director of Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service and guy totally on the sanctions list, Sergey Naryshkin coming in to the US to meet with the CIA director?!

I mean, there's so much to talk about with Russia these days.

CLIP: As President Trump exits the House Chamber, @RepJeffDuncan asks him to #ReleaseTheMemo. #SOTU #SOTU2018 pic.twitter.com/O1hHYFdPxM

— CSPAN (@cspan) January 31, 2018

30.Jan.2018

State of the Uniom

In retrospect, the idea of Lord Orange pleading that it's time to put an end to his version of Watergate on the 44th anniversary is mere nostalgia for the bygone era when we, the people won a round. With the majority in Congress supine and subservient, it doesn't appear about to turn out that well. Summaries can be wedged into the new super-sized Tweet space:

It will never stop being weird to me that after the FBI Director cost Clinton the election — in part on the rationale that the FBI was so anti-Clinton the reopened investigation would leak if he didn't announce it — we are now debating whether the FBI is biased against Trump.

— Ezra Klein (@ezraklein) January 30, 2018

Although "debating" doesn't seem like quite the right choice of word. The talking points memo cooked up by the president's crooked mole Devin Nunes is on its way to publication, once the president (of course he will) declassifies it. Why wouldn't he? His lackey drafted the thing, and stoked the fever under cover of "classified" while blocking the opposition from rebutting it. It'll make a nice nugget for Stephen Miller's State of the Union speech Trump will read tonight.

He'll have to free-lance off the TelePrompTer to toss this word salad just so:

There is a country whose leader is being investigated by an agency that's being investigated secretly by a legislator who was on the leader's transition team, which that agency is investigating for colluding with a nation that's subject to sanctions the leader refuses to enforce.

— Walter Shaub (@waltshaub) January 30, 2018

Rick Wilson describes the current moment better than I'm prepared to, wherein President Me has turned the GOP into a conspiracy of dunces. Wilson suggests a way out of the cynically whipped Cray Vortex, if only one man in government and one man in the #FakeNews business could be so bold:

"Two men could solve this problem. The first is Paul Ryan. The conspiracy cancer eating his caucus from the inside may originate with Devin Nunes and his merry band of Freedom Caucus allies, but Ryan can and should take action. Obviously, Ryan is trying to keep the White House happy by letting the Whackjob Caucus spread these absurd theories. However, as speaker of the House and as a man who has sworn an oath to uphold the Constitution, Paul Ryan has a moral responsibility stop them. It takes one phone call and one moment of moral and political courage: “Devin. Cut this shit out. Now.”

"The other person who could act is Rupert Murdoch. Nothing in the current political climate is more vital to Donald Trump’s immunity from political consequence than Fox News. The endless torrent of raw political sewage coming from Fox & Friends, Hannity, Laura Ingraham, and Tucker Carlson comprises the headwaters of a right-wing media ecosystem that feeds the beast. The straight-news folks at Fox are under constant siege, while the Mighty Wurlitzer of the rest of the network churns out story after story on that time Hillary personally ordered Seth Rich’s murder while the Awan Brothers gave her a pedicure. With one phone call, Murdoch could put the brakes on the elements in his organization that have configured themselves not to report, educate, enlighten, or inform but to proselytize for Donald Trump, no matter the cost to the nation."

29.Jan.2018

How democracy dies

This-is-not-the-Onion headline: Trump Says Ice Caps Are "Setting Records" as He Weighs Paris Deal. In fact, this just in, "the amount of the Arctic Ocean frozen over in the coldest points of winter set a record low in 2017 and is declining faster than at any time in the past 1,500 years."

Scroll on down to the next item, about the president "erupting" about a DOJ official warning against release of "the memo" water boy Devin Nunes' pro-Trump/anti-Mueller talking points. So... the House Republicans on the intelligence committee voted to release the secret memo, subject to the president's OK. And they voted not to release the Democrats' rebuttal, that was easy.

Preet Bharara, former US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, and Christine Todd Whitman, former administrator of the EPA and governor of New Jersey are proposing a bipartisan project to mend the gaps in our system and make sure our government is competent and trustworthy." Which sounds slightly precious at the moment. Given that the president "has refused to divorce himself from his business interests," "repeatedly tried to influence federal criminal investigations" and made a practice of attacks on the press. A democracy task force seems like a good idea, and most definitely "not too early to begin mapping out needed change."

The more pressing question is whether it might be too late.

David Leonhardt provides a detailed specification of An Article of Impeachment Against Donald J. Trump, just before the 44th anniversary (it's tomorrow evening) of President Richard Milhous Nixon delivering a State of the Union speech in which he opined that one year of investigating this so-called "Watergate" thing was quite enough.

Nixon on Watergate in State of the Union, 44 years ago tomorrow night: "I believe the time has come to bring that investigation and the other investigations of this matter to an end. One year of Watergate is enough!" pic.twitter.com/F6ndl2kA3n

— Michael Beschloss (@BeschlossDC) January 29, 2018

Tomorrow, and tomorrow night will not be just like that, but the echoes are ghostly. From Greg Sargent's Plum Line opinion on the big danger ahead:

This gets at an important way that the current moment is different from Watergate — a difference that may point to the possibility of a more alarming endgame. The Nunes memo shows there is a massive propaganda apparatus out there — one that reaches deep into the right-wing media and into the Congress that has been pushing the alt-narrative and would back up Trump if he does take drastic steps — that didn’t really exist in Nixon’s time.

“You certainly had very influential columnists who were diehard Nixon men,” [veteran journalist and author Tim] Weiner told me. “But you did not have a Devin Nunes. You did not have a Sean Hannity. And you did not have an alternate universe of conspiracy theories, in which the FBI was painted as the equivalent of the Weather Underground.” Weiner added that we are seeing an “extraordinary echo chamber of dark matter that has gripped part of Washington and part of America.”

It's lonely at the top

The (literal) hero image to kick of the NYT Magazine feature on Selling Airborne Opulence to the Upper Upper Upper Class prompts the headline (for which you can revisit Randy Newman's little ditty if you need a sound track).

Some sort of rhapsody for the blue-lit guy in the suit, but (a) what good is a big leather couch if there's no one to share it with, and (b) wouldn't you be more comfortable in pyjamas?

There's no way in the world I'll make the grade of the "world's 0.0001 percent" (the 7,600 club, aka "the 1 percent of the 1 percent of the 1 percent"), although the private jet image does take me back to a ride or two in the upper level of a no-longer-available 747. Is that Upper Upper? As jolly as it was, I was still stuck in that aluminum tube for an unnaturally and unpleasantly long part of a day, same as the unwashed masses beneath and behind me in coach class.

The admiral of industry with the thousand-mile stare looks to be about my age, give or take, so it's natural for me to wonder what's on his mind. The next big deal? What happened to his escort? When is that elegant liqueur bottle he drained going to get refilled?

The lede for the piece takes a different route, focusing on the royal barge of Lord Orange, carefully discounting its age, service to multiple cut-rate airlines, the "powerfully inefficient Rolls-Royce RB2011 turbofan engines," and a faint whiff of eau de fútbol left over from the most recent owner. Wouldn't a real billionaire buy a brand new plane? Or have several? Yes. Witness "the most disproportionately enplaned administration in history:

According to Forbes, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has a Dassault Falcon; Linda McMahon, the Small Business Administration administrator, has a Bombardier Global; Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and her family maintain a fleet of 12 private jets, including a Boeing and six Gulfstreams, as well as four helicopters; Gary Cohn, the chairman of the National Economic Council, and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross each retain private-jet shares in a fractional-ownership arrangement."

How nice for them that the recent tax "reform" kept their tax loophole intact. The story goes on to say there are only 7,000 or so "truly elite" private planes in the world, roughly one per 1%(1%(1%)), the "globalized confraternity of individual potentates: a commingled class of plutocrats, kleptocrats, oligarchs, financiers, technologists, real-estate and natural-resource barons and blue-chip celebrities."

I was well into the flight of fancy when I realized that the fellow up top, top, top was not just a marketing model, but the owner of Jet Business, the fellow who happily referred to our president as "the mascot of private jets," and the real object of the feature, Steve Varsano. You hardly need the picture with this purple prose in hand:

"Varsano, who says he has sold or helped to sell almost 300 aircraft over the course of his career, is a large, fit, exceptionally good looking and effortlessly agreeable self-made man of 61. He has an imposing head crowned with slicked-back pewter hair, piercing eyes of an Aegean blue, an imperial nose and the resplendent smile of a beloved crooner on a Caesars Palace pension. He wears suits made by the Ghanaian-British Savile Row designer Ozwald Boateng over worn Italian loafers, and carries a weathered gray Louis Vuitton briefcase with a heavy metal clasp. His business card is milled from galvanized metal. By his estimate, the total value of sales he has brokered exceeds $4 billion."

That's all lovely except for the "galvanized metal" business card. Zinc, over steel? That's nice for guard rails, but I wouldn't want it in my wallet, even if it matched my pewter hairdo. A small quibble for an entertaining journey of the imagination.

"Or else" marketing

The NRCC is turning up the heat on me, their second warning has the subject "[Deliquency] Important," and talks of the "delinquency mark on [my] record" in the text of the message. My permanent record? There's a ***WARNING*** that I have just two days to renew [sic] my membership. Or else... face a barrage of "final" notices, I suppose.

In a less existential realm, Quicken needs some new business from me now that they've separated from Intuit. They pushed advertising on startup with a pre-checked "remind me" if I didn't want to go for "buy now," and somehow UNchecking it didn't serve for "do not remind me." After a dozen or so tries at that, they've upped the ante. They now tell me of their plans to discontinue the "connected services" of Quicken 2015 on April 30, with both email and U.S. mail to my home.

Our phone deal with Verizon had a useful bit of cloud storage bundled, 5GB to receive auto-uploaded photos, videos, contacts, etc. That's minimal enough these days that I had to look after the photos and videos once in a while to keep from overflowing (and triggering an overage charge), but it was handy to be able to download a month's worth of photos to my earthly storage. Now they're telling me they're going to cut me off, unless I start paying that overage charge on a monthly basis; $5/month for 50GB worth of storage.

That might seem fair and alluring had I not become accustomed to what I thought was part of the deal. I was never inclined to send the NRCC money, I don't care to send Quicken money for a new version (new versions have been inconvenience than benefit for 10 years or more) just to download stock quotes quotes once in a while, and I don't want to send Verizon more than their already generous monthly stipend for the service I've already been paying for.

For the commercial products, this approach strikes me as remarkably stupid. "We feel you are a captive audience, so give us more money, or we will annoy you." For the political begging, it's just a weird form of free entertainment.

25.Jan.2018

Wingnuttery

We're not all rightwing nutjobs out here in Idaho, but we seem to have more than our fair share. Ron Nate is in the vanguard, representing District 34 in the House. Don't take my word for it, just look at the picture of him beaming with the blackguard gang in Capitol Park, sent to illustrate his most recent legislative update:

Let's just say they're not sending their best people. I'd be like the fellow third from left who just happened to drop in on Rep. Nate's photo opportunity.

Anyhoo, what kind of legislation might we look for from Mr. Nate? Something about healthcare? That's the lead piece in his update, featuring (what else) "More Freedom" in the headline. It seems everything the state is contemplating (as he witnessed yesterday in a presentation by the Department of Health and Welfare and the Department of Insurance) sounded just like the Affordable Care Act redux,

"replac[ing] somewhat free markets and freedom with socialized medicine and it has failed miserably. Idaho policymakers were also duped into a broken-from-the-get-go system. They created the Idaho health insurance exchange to lower costs and provide more coverage options. Since then, we've only seen costs (both deductibles and premiums) soar, insurance providers leave the Idaho market, and fewer options for Idahoans. Every government health insurance program could be summed up as, "promises unrealized."

Is there a counter-proposal pony in there somewhere? We see that it's too complicated for Nate, anyway, and on down to the punchline:

"The good news is, freedom doesn't require geniuses. Let's try it."

So the sub-genius solution is... what? Do away with the Department of Insurance? Who needs state regulation of any sort? When you're on the back bench and tasked with occasionally shouting slogans, I guess it doesn't have to make sense.

What we heard from the Department of Insurance was less than satisfying too. AP reporter Rebecca Boone boiled it down to "cheap policies that ditch key provisions of the Affordable Care Act" for her lede.

"Idaho Department of Insurance Director Dean Cameron said the move is necessary to make cheaper plans available to more people. Otherwise, he said he fears the state's individual health insurance marketplace will eventually collapse as healthy residents choose to go uninsured rather than pay for expensive plans that comply with the federal law."

Given how wildly successful the federal government has been at piecewise dismantling the ACA, our state is ready to have a go at it, too. Eliminating the individual mandate would cause the system to collapse, who could have guessed? (Besides everyone, that is.)

“There are other states that have been talking about it, but we may be out in front,” Cameron said. “They may look to follow us should be we successful.”

Or, they may learn from our mistakes, which is the more usual sort of example Idaho provides. The description has us going back to exclusions for pre-existing conditions, annual caps, individual underwriting, and so on. I'll go way out on a limb here and suggest that in spite of all that infinite wisdom, medical costs for everyone will continue to go up, as we inevitably share the cost of paying for rock-bottom, inadequate, emergency room-based care for those who can't afford even substandard policies, or who play their personal lottery and don't buy insurance at all.

But, freedom.

22.Jan.2018

Delinquency Mark On Record

The National Republican Congressional Committee is upping the ante in the fundraising emails. Today's from their regular "info" address, spoofed as urgent@nrccvictory.org threatens me with the the subject line above. Delinquency, you say, on my record?!

They offer a current headline from the Washington Post as motivation: "New alarm among Republicans that Democrats could win big this year." (They didn't go as far as providing a link to the story, but I'm happy to do that.)

"The concern has grown so acute that Trump received what one congressional aide described as a 'sobering' slide presentation about the difficult midterm landscape at Camp David last weekend, leading the president to pledge a robust schedule of fundraising and campaign travel in the coming months, White House officials said."

The NRCC goes on to warn that "without the House Majority, our President's agenda will be stonewalled by the Democrats," which seems like they're lowballing the threat. Without the GOP maintaining its House majority, the President seems an odds-on favorite to be impeached.

In the meantime, feel free to mark me deliquent in the eyes of the NRCC; I'll wear it as a badge of honor.

20.Jan.2018

Happy anniversary

Mrs. Betty Bowers ("America's Best Christian") is on a roll, in general, but this, for our present celebration:

What more fitting commemoration of the Trump administration's one year anniversary could there be than the whole government shutting down through complete incompetence?😂

— Mrs. Betty Bowers (@BettyBowers) January 20, 2018

In last night's slo-mo cliffhanger, we had no less than Mitch McConnell decrying "a cynical decision," if you can believe it. For the sake of "irresponsible political gains," no less.

This is a man who knows from cynical decisions for irresponsible political gains. As he blames the Democrats for using the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP) for bargaining leverage. That would be the program that the GOP-controlled Congress and White House have failed to renew funding for, for three-and-a-half months now.

"I don't think it makes the institution look very responsible," he added.

And after Chuck and Don were so close to a deal over cheeseburgers yesterday. What E.J. Dionne said:

"The pattern that led to the shutdown is clear--right to the last minute. Dems come up with compromises that Trump could buy. He says yes. Then hardline aides tell him no. So Trump flip-flops & says no. Then he retreats to nativism and partisanship."

You can't trust anything Art of the Deal tells you. He takes negotiating in bad faith to new depths.

And everybody in the foggy bottom swamp retreats to their respective microphones. With the House done early with a RWNJ-flavored poison pill the Senate was sure to reject, Idaho's junior Congressman and governor-wannabe Raúl Labrador had time to gleefully splutter about his next appearance on state media:

Looking forward to being on @FoxNews @TuckerCarlson at 6:30 pm MT. I'll be talking about the possible government shutdown, and how the Democrats want to shut down the government over #immigration. Hope you can tune in! #SchumerShutdown

— Raúl R. Labrador (@Raul_Labrador) January 20, 2018

That just after he'd appeared on Laura Ingraham's show to pump up THE MEMO that the Republican chairman Devin Nunes and his staffers on the House Intelligence Committee wrote trying to discredit Robert Mueller's investigation, because, apparently, the Russian twitter bot campaign wasn't getting the job done.

So many stories colliding at once, the whole fake MEMO thing ended up lost in the swamp ooze around the #TrumpShutdown. (It's the biggest, believe me. Top trending hashtag WORLDWIDE.)

Let's just say THE MEMO is undoubtedly more useful as a teaser for the next episode than it would be in the light of day:

A source with knowledge of the memo told Business Insider that it was "a level of irresponsible stupidity that I cannot fathom," adding that it "purposefully misconstrues facts and leaves out important details."

18.Jan.18

Something there is that does not love a wall

Pardon the incredulity, but given the president's recent performance as a dumb weather vane ("I'll sign anything you all put in front of me," was it?), I'm a bit skeptical of the durability of his Chief of Staff's having "educated" the president, who has now "evolved" on the wall.

I'm not calling it fake news, I'm just saying Mr. Tee is at least as fickle in policy as he is in sexual partners. Ah, there it is, in the third paragraph:

"But President Trump directly contradicted the chief of staff on Thursday, saying his position on building the wall had not “evolved.”

"In an early-morning Twitter post, Mr. Trump said, “The Wall is the Wall, it has never changed or evolved from the first day I conceived of it.” He added in a second tweet, “The Wall will be paid for, directly or indirectly, or through longer term reimbursement, by Mexico, which has a ridiculous $71 billion dollar trade surplus with the U.S.”

Is the NY Times trying to undercut Kelly? Or is he trying to undercut himself? In the current game of 3D checkers, the most important thing seems to be that everything must be the president's idea, no matter who is whispering it into his ear.

And the now-usual follow-up to candor of any sort, GOP members with memory loss.

Marc T. Short, the White House director of legislative affairs, denied the Democrats’ characterization of Mr. Kelly’s comments about the president’s familiarity with immigration issues, telling CNN in an interview: “I don’t recall General Kelly saying the president was uninformed.”

That doesn't quite rise to a "denial," it's just another unreliable witness. He might have dozed off. Anyway, whether it's going to be 30 feet high, or 50 feet, sea to shining gulf, or interrupted by "vicious rivers" and mountains, the question before Congress is, how many lives have to be ruined to provide tens of $billions to satisfy the president's need for a monument to his stupidity? (While you contemplate that question, enjoy this year-ago scenic feature from CNN, What the US-Mexico border looks like before Trump's wall.)

While we're on the topic of economic imbalance, the original Wall builders have a five times larger trade surplus with the US. Shouldn't we get them to pay for a wall across the Pacific Ocean?

17.Jan.2018

Steering users to healthier interactions

Reading about this year as a possible "inflection point" on the morality graph (who knew we were graphing that?) and Mark Zuckerberg's expressed "responsibility to make sure our services aren't just fun to use, but also good for people's well-being," I got an idea for a Facebook app, which I'll just throw out to any interested party, in case no one has done it already. Call it what you like, but I'll suggest Time's up!

The user can specify how many minutes, or hours s/he wants to spend on Facebook in a given day (or week, etc.) and the app keeps track, and when you hit your quota, you're blocked for the rest of the term.

Remember when it was a vague mystery how in the world Facebook could make money if they didn't charge anyone to use it? They figured that out: says there, the company reported $4.7 billion in profits in Q3, says there. Nice to have them concerned about our well-being, too.

Time magazine (what else?) did offer a shaming route, 4 years ago, and close to Facebook's 10th birthday: How Much Time Have You Wasted on Facebook? (Sorry, says "due to a change in the Facebook data stream, this interactive no longer works for all users.")

Update: Farhad Manjoo thinks It’s Time for Apple to Build a Less Addictive iPhone, too.

16.Jan.2018

Season I coming to a close

Even a blind squirrel finds a nut once in a while. Here's a surprisingly believable statement from the President of the United States:

“I don’t know what the word ‘permanent’ means.”

(Also, object permanence, what's up with that?) That was in the Wall Street Journal interview last week, responding to the question of whether POTUS' break with Steve Bannon was "permanent." As seen in today's news, Guess Who's Coming To Testify.

Dunno if we've made any progress in draining the foggy bottom swamp, but there sure are a lot of laywers running around these days.

"Mr. Bannon has hired William A. Burck of the Washington office of the Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan law firm to represent him in the defamation threats from Mr. Trump and the congressional inquiries. Mr. Burck also represents several current and former administration officials who have been interviewed as witnesses by Mr. Mueller’s investigators. Among them are the White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, and the former White House chief of staff, Reince Priebus."

Meanwhile, in the debris left from a functioning federal government, there's considerable talk of the can being kicked down the road (3½ months into FY2018 without an actual budget for the whole year) dropping into the "shutdown" manhole, with perfectly scripted timing, midnight, January 19th. That's what Margaret Hartmann's NY mag Daily Intelligencer "Everything you need to know" said, but midnight is tricky. Is that... the end of the 19th, or the beginning?

Here, someone has obtained the domain whenwillthegovernmentshutdown.com to help us keep track. Their Jan. 2 blog post quoted somebody's 60% odds for "11:59 pm on January 19, 2018." That's the time that "midnight, January 19" brings to mind, isn't it? Even though it's a minute shy of a whole day later. So, midnight on January 20th, 00:00 (Eastern Time, I guess), the government will be shut down (unless X, Y and Z), which would make the most fitting celebration imaginable for the one-year anniversary of Inauguration Day, 2017.

PredictIt's price for the question "Will the federal government be shut down on January 22?" is a bit lower. 34¢ at last check, so just under two-thirds of the bettors think not. The end date for the gamble is made explicit, 01/22/2018 11:59 PM (ET), which is to say "at the end of the day." (So... it could shut down on the 20th, and be re-opened before the closing bell on the bet.)

If you don't like the persistent uncertainty in D.C., you can appreciate this summary of the rules: "PredictIt’s decisions and determinations under this rule shall be at PredictIt’s sole discretion and shall be final." You pays your money and you takes your chances.

Martin Luther King Day, 2018

The moral crossroad

He's the poster child for the Dunning-Kruger effect, among other things, so forgive us on this federal holiday for not accepting his protestation that he's not a racist as keen self-assessment, while he arrives for yet another taxpayer-funded weekend and business boost to his Mal-a-lago resort in Florida. (Spot check: what percentage of the freeloading guests are white? And what percentage of the waitstaff are people of color?)

Not to belabor the obvious, but Charles Blow: Trump Is a Racist. Period. Complete with the formerly unprintable obscenity, now part of the URL. And the definitive list of Trump's racism, going back to the 1970s, from David Leonhardt and Ian Prasad Philbrick.

The question of the day is not about him, but about us: Will America Choose King’s Dream or Trump’s Nightmare?

"We desperately need each other at this moment of moral crisis and malicious racist divisiveness. Will we raise our collective voices against Mr. Trump’s white racism and those who make excuses for it or submit and thereby self-destructively kill any chance of fully becoming our better selves? Dr. King also warned us that “there comes a time when silence is betrayal.” To honor Dr. King, we must not remain silent, we must not betray his legacy."

NoMoGoPro?

Hard to imagine a world without ubiquitous footage from helmet-mounted (and what-not-mounted) cameras capable of surviving all manner of environmental extremities. But then back when Comdex was a thing, some of us in the computer world couldn't imagine that going away. It did.

From Farhad Manjoo's downbeat report of this week in tech, it sounds like CES might be tailing toward oblivion, too. Consumer Electronics running out of gas? How could that be? But right there in the headline, "Power Outage." Which would have put a kink in the experience of more than 4,000 exhibitors sprawling over 2.6 million square feet. Maybe they were trying to process too many BitCoin transactions at once. Anyway, this seems a little sad:

"As I’ve been saying for a while now, traditional “gadgets” seem to be dying. We saw more evidence of that trend this week when GoPro, the extreme-camera company, lowered its revenue forecast, shut down its effort to build a drone, laid off 20 percent of its staff and said it would be open to a sale."

And it goes downhill from there: last Monday, Twitter said the tweets of world leaders got special deference from the company; world leaders can now essentially say anything on Twitter. But as it takes us to hell in a bucket, it won't go without Manjoo's brilliant tweet-length description:

"a platform meant for people to yell things at the news, usually without nuance."

While we have a codger-dotard president wanting to yell things less funny than "hey you kids, get off my lawn," it might occur to the company to introduce some hysteresis (at least), and maybe save the world. Just a thought. Call it a fantasy, but it's not misguided.

Back in the real world of make-believe, without reading any of the text of the report from Whitney Richardson and Brian X. Chen on CES 2018, the opening time-lapse of the throng provided by Roger Kisby for the NYT is freaky, wonderful and horrific. I sometimes joke about getting a touch of agoraphobia, but I'm super-happy about not experiencing that first hand.

The second video-bite in the article of bedazzled attendees herding through a serpentine passage lined with surround-view displays stitched into sunset over the clouds, taking their own videos of the video is meta-fabulous.

13.Jan.2018

Underground railroad

Fascinating feature in last week's NYT Magazine: The Case for the Subway. Needs to be made great again, but it's still really something.

5.66 million riders a day

8,477 trains a day

600V on the 3rd rail

0 zones

1 fare

24/7 schedule

13 million gallons of water pumped out "on a dry day"

665 miles of track

$111 billion of maintenance and upgrade projects needed (for starters)

$1.7 trillion NYC's Gross Metro Product in 2016

"Like most regular riders, I tend to think of the subway as a necessary evil, the least worst way to get where I’m going, which made it a little disorienting to spend time with someone who rides the subway for fun. But in its early years, hundreds of thousands of people did just that every Sunday. According to the historian Clifton Hood, it was called “doing the subway.” Diamond calls it “railfanning.”

"The subway is a very different sort of marvel today. What’s miraculous at this point is that it still works at all. The fact that it does, that even after decades of neglect it is still somehow managing to carry New York’s economy on its back, may be the best argument for giving it everything it needs, and then a whole lot more."

12.Jan.2018

The quick and the dead

Michael J. Socolow weighs in for academe, giving a Columbia Journalism Review raspberry to bestselling author Michael Wolff and his flaming-hot book about you-know-who. The "industry" is rotting, and Wolff is laughing his way to the bank, how do you like that, not very much, thank you.

They all knew Wolff was a snake, and just for example, that thing about Rupert Murdoch 9 years ago, with this precious foreshadowing bauble on a reviewer's tongue:

"The book is a strangely alluring artifact, with huge gaps in execution and stylistic tics that border on parody; it will nonetheless provide a deeply satisfying experience for the media-interested."

That sounds just like both the Trump administration and this latest book about it, in fact. (Any opinions I have about F&F are unsullied by actually having read it for myself, I should note.) Huge gaps in execution and stylistic tics that border on parody, if not a deeply satisfying experience for all concerned. "They are a pair, these two," Carr wrote, about Wolff and Murdoch, or Wolff and Bannon, or Trump and the world. "Both adore gossip and revel in their unpleasantness, and neither gives a rip what anyone else thinks of him." There are probably more eerie parallels, but life is short, and I didn't finish that old review of a book about some other tabloid hack, either.

Who knew there was a time when journalists made good money, "as much as the average doctor or lawyer," according to H.L. Mencken's reported 1927 complaint? (He was worried they were making too much money.) We seem to have leveled that playing field well enough.

"Journalism never paid as well as people think, and most of the journalists I know haven’t had raises in years. The entire culture of American journalism is suffering, as President Trump and his supporters attack a “media elite” that doesn’t actually exist anymore outside of a very few select people in New York City and Washington, DC. Everyone else in the business is barely scraping by."

That's what I figured, anyway.

Basket of deplorable

It's probably not just me that has "Trump Is a Racist" in "Trends for you" on Twitter this morning. Yesterday, Keith Boykin tweeted the question, "When did you know?" with 9 choices, going back to housing discrimination on up to pardoning Joe Arpaio and Nazis are "very fine people," and yesterday's obscenity. I'm sure it's not just me who felt like my head was exploding yesterday.

How can this be happening?

The alternative point of view is it's just business as normal at Conservative HQ, leading with the headline, "Trump says what normal Americans think, establishment goes nuts."

That should have been enough, but god help me, I took the jump to see that not only are they fine with normalizing bigotry, they're doing it with gaslighting to boot. "They" (George Rasley, CHQ editor writes in the royal plural) thinks it's liberals who are not "normal." He (or should I say they?) did go so far as to acknowledge the president's execrable characterization was "inelegant."

We don't have to take Rasley's or CHQ's word for what normal Americans think. There are professionals who ask those questions day in and day out. The NY Times provides an interactive presentation of Morning Consult's year-long tracking polls. The "normal" (or, seems apt, "the mean") of the president's job approval is trending downward, across the board. Women, men, all adults, off 6 points.

Private sector workers, unemployed workers, homemakers, retired workers, self-employed workers, students, government workers, off, off, off, off, off, off, off, and below 50% in every category.

All religious categories, even if, evangelicals and protestants remain, inexplicably, above 50%. (Roman Catholics and "all Christians" off 8, and 7 points, and below half now.) Not exactly mainstream religions' finest hour, by the way, that the "Christianity" was mostly in favor to begin with.

What eventually matters, though, is voting (and the arcane state-wise gerrymandering of the electoral college), and even though everyone of the "voted" categories is down (from 3 to 6 percentage points), "voted Trump in 2016" started at 90%, and after year one, the confirmation bias is still strong. What is normal is remarkable and persistent polarization.

Such greatness our demented narcissist-in-chief has wrought. Countries around the world look at the U.S. in abject horror and disgust. A fraudulent con-man's "negotiation style" has set back foreign relations for a generation.

Before this most explicit obscenity, there was that made-for-TV meeting with Congressional leaders from both parties, apparently intended, as Charles Blow put it to counter the "mentally small and possibly insane" image left by the Fire and Fury with one of "lucidity and acumen, his grasp of the issues and his relish for rapprochement with his political adversaries." As if only.

"But instead what came through was the image of a man who had absolutely no idea what he was talking about; a man who says things that are 180 degrees from the things he has said before; a man who has no clear line of reasoning; a man who is clearly out of his depth and willing to do and say anything to please the people in front of him."

And speaking of religion, this:

"Trumpism is a religion founded on patriarchy and white supremacy."

In the meantime (!), we hear from James Comey once in a while, and appreciate his point of view. He's not the only one to think of the gift of the people of France, and Emma Lazarus' timeless sonnet. (She wrote it in 1883, as a fundraiser to make a place for the Lady to stand.)

The New Colossus

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
MOTHER OF EXILES. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

9.Jan.2018

Aim high

This just in, a fundraiser email informing that no longer-Sheriff but still amply contemptible Joe Arpaio just filed papers to run for the U.S. Senate to fill Jeff Flake's seat.

Seems like a scam, doesn't it? But with what's going on in the White House and the Senate these days, there are probably a ton of angry codgers picturing themselves joining the fray. Surely room for both Grampa Simpson and Yosemite Sam in his dotage? We just don't have enough octogenarians on the job.

Unlike most of the fundraising pitches with a handful of suggested amounts coded into "Donate now" hyperlinks, this one has a tall stack, eleven of them (plus "another amount" if you need it), running from $5 on up to $2,700. Doesn't hurt to ask, right?

8.Jan.2018

The best penny stock and the worst currency in the world

There is no shortage of opinion about how wonderful Bitcoin is, and enough confusion to go around the world. Mention of a piece on NPR today (which I did not succeed in tracking down) by a friend who was somewhat baffled generated interesting comments and links to follow.

One was a 2014 piece about what was then the nation's biggest Bitcoin mine, tucked behind the Cascades east of Seattle where the Columbia river's hydropower has made electricty cheap for a long time, because you need a ton of electricity to make this stuff up.

A company I'd never heard of, named after a familiar prefix and unit, Giga Watt bills itself the "Best Home for your Mining" and features an offer of 2.8¢ kW/h electricity (right next to another for 4.7¢, go figure), by which they presumably mean killowatt-hour, not kW per hour. (On the other hand... the derivative of power, thousands or millions or billions of Joules per second per second would be the units for tracking the growing absorption of physical resources to make this virtual currency. That may yet prove the more important measure.)

They're building "pods" as the dollars (or BTC! or "ETH coming soon"—look for it to appear on Wikipedia first, maybe?) roll in and enable them, as seen in Google Sketch-up renditions, and tallied in Moses Lake and Pangborn... Drive, in Wenatchee. Oh, there's the same Dave Carlson fellow from the 2014 story about MegaBigPower, CEO of this now thousand times bigger thing. (Meanwhile... megabigpower.com "is a totally awesome idea still being worked on. Check back later.")

A fellow I don't know in the FB thread stated definitively that Bitcoin "is sound," followed immediately by "We def need to work out the wrinkles." In another reply, "Decentralized currency is the wave of the future and people need to get on board."

Whoof! We'd better start learning up, then? Here's a start, Matt O'Brien's WaPo Wonkblog piece, Bitcoin is teaching libertarians everything they don't know about economics.

"[E]ven in a world where bitcoin actually did work, it still might not be worth using. At least not from a societal perspective. That's because it's not just a matter of how much bitcoins cost people to use, but also how much it costs everyone else when they do — which could be quite a bit. The type of computers that can quickly solve bitcoin's cryptographically complex equations aren't cheap to run. In fact, they're energy hogs. They already consume more than 0.1 percent of all electricity (or about as much as Denmark), which is remarkable when you consider how little bitcoin is actually used right now. If that ever went up, so would its energy needs — perhaps substantially so. The important thing to understand is that the more bitcoin costs, the more incentive there is to “mine” for it, but the more that happens, the more computing power you need to win new coins. So the amount of energy it uses should go up hand in hand with its price."

"Bitcoin, in other words, is one big negative-externality machine. That's what economists call a cost that someone else has to pay for something you did."

7.Jan.2018

Sunday morning follies

CNN's Jake Tapper chats with Stephen Miller over accusations in Michael Wolff's book. Miller was rocking with anticipation during his introduction with the lede he was about to unfurl:

"Steve Bannon's 'eloquent' description notwithstanding, it's... tragic and unfortunate [looking sidelong at the desk in front of him as he recites his memorized line] that Steve would make these grotesque... comments... so... out of touch with reality and obviously so vindictive, and the whole White House staff is deeply disappointed in his comments... which were grotesque [did I say "grotesque" already? I wanted to be sure to get that in] and with respect to the, um, Trump tower meeting that he's talking about, he wasn't even there when this went down, so he's not really a remotely credible source on any of that. It reads like an angry, vindictive person who's spouting off to a... highly discredible [huh, is that actually a word? It should be, I'm going to start using that more often]. The book is best understood as a work of very poorly written fiction."

It's a whole paragraph, of sorts. But wait, there's more to his opening statement. He also wanted to say that "the author is a garbage author of a garbage book," which my god, is Trump putting words in Miller's head?!

It's vindictive, grotesque, garbage, tragic, unfortunate, pure fiction, a pile of trash through and through, "pure false," completely and totally fraudulent, fiction, and just in case I didn't mention it, grotesque. Hysterical. Spectacularly embarrassing false reporting.

So contrary to the experience of people who work with him? Ah, that's not what his ghost-writer for The Art of the Deal says.

The fundamental insights in Michael Wolff's book are 100 per cent consistent with my experience of Trump. Anyone who spends 15 minutes with Trump knows this to be true.

— Tony Schwartz (@tonyschwartz) January 7, 2018

But Miller knows the story he's there to tell. "I saw a man who was a political genius." Seriously? Seriously.

"...we would be landing in descent, there would be a breaking news development, and in 20 minutes, he would dictate 10 paragraphs of new material to address that event, and then deliver that flawlessly in front of an audience of 10,000 people."

Ten paragraphs. From Trump. Delivered flawlessly. Man. If I'd been across that desk, I hope I would have been able to do a 10 second take, just looking at Miller, and then ask him,

Are you high right now? No, seriously, are you on some kind of drugs?

But Tapper tried to stick to the news, the allegations, the responses, and so on. Then after his snide, sneering, condescending, fabulist guest got tired of trying to support his own bullshit, he launched into accusing Tapper (and all of CNN) for being condescending. Later, "hysterical." And "toxic."

He just wanted three minutes to tell his "truth"... which, actually, we just did that, and it was super-truthy.

Miller's list of greivances for what CNN was not covering included "the people getting slaughtered in sanctuary cities." (Did they cover the Bowling Green massacre, for instance?)

Miller wanted to re-spin that you-have-got-to-be-kidding-me "10 paragraphs in 20 minutes" story and it hit me: RUMPLESTILTSKIN!

He's "tapped into something magical that's happening in the hearts of this country."

Epiphany

In the dark

5.Jan.2018

Burning down the house

Bruce Newcombe, talking about his time as Speaker of the Idaho House, in the too-aptly named Legislative Breakdown podcast, Episode One: Herding Cats And Goat Rodeos:

"There was always 9 to 15 people, that you could put a rock on the red button and send 'em home and it wouldn't make any difference; they'd vote 'no' on everything. So you'd never look to those people to be part of the solution.

"But the difference between sending people home and a rock on the red button and now is I didn't have people that wanted to burn the place down. And, I think there's a certain amount of people that just want to destroy government and just start all over again."

That could be a reference to the self-proclaimed "Liberty Legislators," coloring themselves "conservatives" when they need camouflage. They got together for a first annual Legislative preview (called a "Review") of their own, and posted the video on the Redoubt News Facebook page. Complete with patriotic rituals, introduced with instructions for proper behavior, no irony intended, I'm sure, and commands to a very sad quartet of girls acting as Color Guard. Halt. Advance the Colors. Prepare to post the Colors. Post the Colors. Salute.

And so on. Then the free-wheeling opening prayer, to "Holy Father," but sounding like he was talking to the audience, not to a God. "We pray that you will forgive our country for our pride, our arrogance, and our self-reliance." Self-reliance? Also, calling for a "massive movement of repentance," and the whole shebang "in Jesus' name."

Or he could be thinking about Raúl Labrador, a back bencher when Newcombe was in charge, who was promoted to the back bench of the big House, goading the Tea Party nut-jobs in D.C., and now thinking about coming back to Idaho to be governor, on a program of slashing the state budget, by say a third. For starters.

As luck would have it, I got a phone call from a Labrador volunteer as I was writing this, wanting to know if I was going to vote for him in the upcoming primary. I answered (honestly) that I hadn't decided who I was going to vote for. Or which party, for that matter. What issues were most important to me? My pause was long enough to get him to offer up a short list to choose from. Abortion? Second amendment? Education = GET RID OF COMMON CORE? Cutting taxes? Keeping public lands open?

OMG. Education was the only category that even made sense, so I mumbled something about that, which I guess means I'm a tick for anti-Common Core on his sheet. The volunteer was ready to quit before I was, and I had to ask him, "Are you interested in my input, or just looking for my support?"

Of course, oh yes, yes, he'd love to hear more from me. I brought up the issue of the gross blunder in the Dec. 22 Labrador Letter that I brought up last month, preamble to his self-righteous indignation about the "whoppers" he says other people were telling about the Republican tax plan.

He said he'd pass that on.

In the meantime, the clock is ticking, and the careless self-aggrandizing blunder has ripened into a five Pinocchio stinking lie. To wit, the original and as-yet uncorrected Labrador claim:

"For the average family that is working paycheck to paycheck, this tax bill will lower their taxes by an average of 60 percent. The average single mother will receive a 70 percent tax cut."

That is nowhere close to reality. We don't know what group of "average families" he might have been talking about, but no one is getting a 60 percent tax cut. The Congressman would know that if he'd read the tax bill he voted for.

As noted two weeks ago, taxpayers in the bottom quintile (income less than $25,000) will see an average tax cut of 60 dollars. Not 60 percent.

4.Jan.2017

Views of the population density divide

Outside the paywall, the WSJ offers up a set of datagraphics about The Divide Between America’s Prosperous Cities and Struggling Small Towns. Lots to think about and discuss.

The caption next to "Change in population since 2007" ends with "populations have shrunk" (in rural areas and small towns), even though that's not what the source data say. It's +0.4%, which is small compared to 7.1, 9.0, 9.5%, but it's still plus. Higher death rate. Double the percent that is foreign-born (like everywhere else), but from a much lower starting point. 2% vs. 12% in large metro back in 1980, now 3.8% vs. 22.3%. Median household income topped out at the turn of the millennium.

The one that jumped out and shouted at me is that violent crime has dropped dramatically, such that all four categories have rates below half of what the safest, least populated areas had in 1993.

Male labor force participation rate, age 16 and older varies from 65-67% in large metro areas and their suburbs, down to 56% in rural/small towns. (For some odd reason, that one graph is not zero-based; all the others are.) "Small bank loans, change since 2005, adjusted for inflation" started from zero, plunged deeply sub-zero with the Great Recession, never recovered in the medium/small and rural areas.)

Death rates for cardiovascular disease and cancer are down all over. Diabetes is up all over, highest in rural/small towns. Maternal death rates are up all over, highest in rural/small towns, which have rates more than three times what they were in 2000.

Suicide is up, all over, worse as you get away from large metro.

(Irksome: "print preview" shows they didn't bother providing for making a hard copy. Cut and paste shows that all the charts are composited with HTML and images, and so that doesn't work either. Their "print" button does not lead to a printed version of the story as shown on the web.)

A mind is a terrible thing to waste

Looking for that semi-comic garbled version of the iconic ad slogan, I came across a more worthy item from David Sable in AdAge, celebrating the 40th anniversary of the original, in 2011.

“A Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Waste” has become emblematic of some of the best values of America—a belief in equal opportunity, in education, in human dignity and hope. And some of the best values in advertising, too: the timelessness of great emotional creative that’s rooted in insight, in emotion, in a great story that has the power to create a legacy.

The author is (still) the Global CEO of Y&R (once Young & Rubicam), which bills itself as "one of the world's most iconic global agencies" and with the motto, "We resist the usual." Back in 1971, it was Y&R that came up with that motto for what was then the United Negro College Fund and is now UNCF. They're still busy! They have a STEM Scholars program, they're hosting MLK celebrations across the country, supporting interns and fellowships, and had a statement about the resignation of the White House Director of Communications for the Office of Public Liaison, calling for a "reboot" on their recommendations for historically black colleges and universities.

"The Trump administration should make good on its promises and commitments to the HBCU community. These actions must include providing additional resources and investments that will enable these historic institutions to grow their educational and economic impact and innovate for the future."

That brief excursion down memory lane sprang to mind this morning upon the pull quote in the lede of the written statement from the POTUS—that's right, it was written, not stubbed into tweets (@realDonaldTrump hasn't figured out threads yet, and besides, we all know he couldn't piece together four coherent paragraphs).

Talk about your brilliant marketing, Michael Wolff is getting a ton for his Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House via the NYMag excerpt burning up the intertubes right now.

The POTUS statement took some doing, but give the media team that did it credit for capturing the essence of their boss, if not the full Bizarro verbal styling. Let us parse.

"Steve Bannon has nothing to do with me or my Presidency."

In the "I alone can fix it" vein; his campaign manager for the final stretch that brought him into office, nothing.

"When he was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind."

Whatever Bannon needs, a White House job isn't on the list any more. Been there, done that. His Seinfeld residuals are all the annuity he'll ever need and running Breitbart is a lot more fun than playing suck-up to Lord Tweet-oh. It seems quite certain Bannon's mind is intact, which, you know, we're not so sure about the author of that particular sentence.

"A staffer." "Very little to do with our historic victory." (The royal "our," that's nice.) Roy Moore is his fault. A pretender. A leaker. Rarely in a one-on-one meeting with me. (Wait, not "us"?) But this is the pièce de resistance:

Steve doesn't represent my base—he's only in it for himself.

New Year's Day, 2018

There were some celebratory explosions last night, way louder than the nearest transformer blowing up a squirrel has ever been, and I wondered if the power went out (it didn't) and whether the spectators on hand had their ears ringing (I'm sure they did) or whether it was a terrorist attack (haven't checked the news, but presumably no, not out here next-door to the middle of nowhere).

This after a non-gun toting friend offered up advice validated by Mythbusters (he said), that "if you're going to fire off guns tonight, make sure you aim straight up!" That way (the myth-busting theory goes), the bullet loses more energy and won't be be traveling fast enough to seriously injure anyone, unlike when you shoot at an angle, and the bullet maintains lethal velocity on the way back down.

None of the gun handling instruction I had contemplated the question; I can't imagine anyone thought it was even necessary to state the obvious safety rule to Don't Do That At All There Are Such Things As Stupid Questions. But apparently shooting at midnight is a Thing, given that lighting off not-safe and not-sane fireworks has mostly been done already? Especially in the South? And up here among the Southern attitude folk. From a resident of Florida last night:

Well, it's New Years Eve in The South.

The celebratory gunfire has started right on time.

— Stonekettle (@Stonekettle) January 1, 2018

Relatively peaceful up here this morning, anyway, that's nice. Sunny, not too cold. Let's see if we can arrange for a more generally peaceful and happy new year, why don't we?

This new year, ENOUGH

The list of insults would have just—barely—fit in a 280-character tweet, but not with a link to the context provided by Peter Baker's Sunday front-page contribution to the NYT "Trump's Way" series, with a forgettable title in the web version about "reinventing."

Repurposing is more like it.

The print version was closer to the mark: "Under Trump, a Once Unimaginable Presidency Becomes Reality."

And in the subheads, "jettisoning" or "discarding" "conventions" and "norms" are too normal-sounding. Blunders with a near-total ignorance of history, as he and his family rob the American people blind and soil the nation.

Do give the man credit for reinventing communication from the executive branch, starting with the hysterical crowd-counting debasement of his first press secretary, and continuing with his daily Twitter feed of Bizarro World statecraft.

From his campaign on into his term of office, a stream of insults, expressive, in his inimitable smash-and-grab style. In all the spears he jabs out with his stubby Twitter fingers, you can hear the echoes of the father he was never good enough for.

Crazy, psycho, short and fat, crooked, totally inept, a joke, dumb as a rock, disgusting, puppet, weak and out of control, sleazy, wacky, totally unhinged, incompetent, lightweight and the dumbest man on television. "Among others."

It all boils down to Loser.

Even when he's conned his way to winning something. E.J. Dionne Jr.: in the Washington Post: This new year, tell Trump: Enough.

"In 2018, Trump’s abuses of power, his indifference to truth and his autocratic habits will be the central issues in our politics. Nothing else comes close.

"This means there is no more vital business than containing Trump and, if circumstances demand it, removing him from office. This applies not only to progressives and liberals but also to everyone else, from left to right, who would defend our democratic values and republican institutions."

raveling

Tom von Alten