Tweet du Jour

pic.twitter.com/GMzPbguGKK

— Curly J (@CurlyJ86) February 17, 2019

With thanks to commenter Lazycrockett at Joe.My.God.

You Can't Make This Stuff Up

Via Ed Brayton at Dispatches from the Culture Wars, this little tidbit -- Trump's latest rationale for "illegal voters":

In an interview with conservative outlet The Daily Caller, the president claimed that “potentially illegal votes” were responsible for Republicans candidates’ losses, which he claimed resulted from voters returning to their homes or vehicles, exchanging clothes and returning to voting places.

“The Republicans don’t win and that’s because of potentially illegal votes,” Trump told the Caller.

“When people get in line that have absolutely no right to vote and they go around in circles. Sometimes they go to their car, put on a different hat, put on a different shirt, come in and vote again. Nobody takes anything. It’s really a disgrace what’s going on,” he added.

As Brayton points out, it doesn't work that way: you have to prove who you are, and when you receive your ballot you're checked off on the list.

Digby has a transcript of the full interview here, if you can stomach it. It's really pretty wild.

Idiot du Jour, Trump Family Edition

Looks like Eric is making a strong bid for dumbest Trump:

It is a very scary day for America when the House Minority Leader threatens to weaponize the legal system against political rivals using “Subpoena Power”. This is what they do in third world countries. Disgusting concept and a slippery slope that America wants no part of. https://t.co/XmsOxf6Zte

— Eric Trump (@EricTrump) October 22, 2018

Anyone who passed a civic class in high school knows what a load that one is.

And as for McDaniel's tweet, I have one word: "Benghazi".

Some of the responses are hysterical. Click through to read them all.

How to Lose Friends and Infuriate People

We know that Trump himself is no diplomat. He doesn't even come close. But isn't there someone in the White House who's supposed to avoid things like this?

The Polish government did everything it could to turn Tuesday’s visit into one of Trump’s more enjoyable moments.

Yet, somehow, Trump managed to offend the Poles so deeply that the fallout was all over Polish news sites on Wednesday morning.

What happened? At the end of their meeting, the two leaders agreed to sign a strategic partnership pact to boost defense, energy, trade and security ties. But what could have been a peaceful moment for both presidents immediately took an awkward turn.

While signing the document, Trump sat comfortably in his chair while the Polish leader was forced to stand next to him and awkwardly reach over the table to sign. Poland’s Duda still somehow managed to smile at the camera, as Trump looked on with a stern face. The scene was captured on camera by the White House and was tweeted out shortly after — much to the bewilderment of Polish journalists, politicians and researchers.

The reaction in Poland was not positive:

“It’s nice of President Trump that he moved a bit, because otherwise our president would have had to sign the document on his knees,” Polish radio correspondent Pawel Zuchowski sarcastically commented on Twitter.

There's a lot more at the link.

This is not even about protocol, it's about common courtesy, which is not in Trump's repertoire. In Trump's world, everyone is either an enemy or an employee. Either way, they get treated like dirt. He simply has no clue, not only about how to deal with other world leaders, but how to deal with people, period.

Via Joe.My.God.

Can You Say "Clueless"?

Trump takes ignorance to a new level:

Democratic U.S. Congressman John Lewis of Georgia is one of this nation's top and most-recognized civil rights leaders. He was the chairman of one of the primary civil rights organizations that organized Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, during which King delivered his famous "I Have a Dream" speech. Lewis also delivered a speech at that historic event and was the youngest man to do so. He has been beaten, arrested, and jailed in his fight for civil rights.

Rep. Lewis has decided he cannot stand on the same stage as President Donald Trump this Saturday, when Trump will visit the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum. . . .

The White House saw fit to denounce them for it.

"We think it’s unfortunate that these members of Congress wouldn’t join the President in honoring the incredible sacrifice civil rights leaders made to right the injustices in our history," Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in a statement to reporters. "The President hopes others will join him in recognizing that the movement was about removing barriers and unifying Americans of all backgrounds."

If if were anyone but Trump -- and parrot-in-chief Sanders -- I wouldn't believe it.

Footnote: Digby caps it nicely:

That's Sarah Huckabee Sanders explaining that the civil rights movement wasn't really about black people.

Tweet du Jour

Going to be awkward at 5/25 Nato summit when Merkel, May, & Macron have to switch to non-classified topics when the US president joins them

— David Frum (@davidfrum) May 7, 2017

Snap!

They Just Don't Get It

From a filing by Melania Trump in her libel suit against the Daily Mail as reported by WaPo:

An attorney for first lady Melania Trump argued in a lawsuit filed Monday that an article falsely alleging that she once worked for an escort service hurt her chance to establish “multimillion dollar business relationships” during the years in which she would be “one of the most photographed women in the world.”

The suit — filed Monday in New York Supreme Court, a state trial court, in Manhattan — against Mail Media, the owner of the Daily Mail, said the article published by the Daily Mail and its online division last August caused Trump’s brand, Melania, to lose “significant value” as well as “major business opportunities that were otherwise available to her.” The suit said the article had damaged her “unique, once in a lifetime opportunity” to “launch a broad-based commercial brand.”

“These product categories would have included, among other things, apparel accessories, shoes, jewelry, cosmetics, hair care, skin care and fragrance,” according to the lawsuit, which was filed on Trump’s behalf by California attorney Charles Harder.

To the Trumps, occupying the White House is a business opportunity.

They don't see anything wrong with that.

Today's Must-Read: How to Run an Administration

Advice from Obama to Trump, as reported by Brian Beutler:

“[H]ow you put a team together to make sure that they’re getting you the best information and they are teeing up the options from which you will ultimately make decisions, that’s probably the most useful advice, the most constructive advice that I’ve been able to give him,” he said. “That if you find yourself isolated because the process breaks down, or if you’re only hearing from people who agree with you on everything, or if you haven’t created a process that is fact-checking and probing and asking hard questions about policies or promises that you’ve made, that’s when you start making mistakes. And as I indicated in some of my previous remarks, reality has a way of biting back if you’re not paying attention to it.”

Trump ignored it. Given what we know of Trump's personality, Obama might as well have been talking to the wall. What he put together is just the opposite:

Heeding Obama’s advice might have helped Trump avoid making an obvious and monumental error, but Trump either lacks the capacity to run the government in an orderly fashion or intentionally discarded Obama’s recommendations, or both. When reality quickly asserted itself, as Obama promised it would, Trump claimed (out of ignorance or malicious dishonesty) that he was merely reprising “ what President Obama did in 2011 when he banned visas for refugees from Iraq for six months”—a “ban” that quite literally never happened.

Of course, the author assumes that Trump wants to run an administration that actually functions to the benefit of the country. I've seen no evidence of that. He thinks it's a reality show, and is acting accordingly.

Read the whole thing, needless to say.

Via Balloon Juice, which has some interesting additional information.

This Would Be Funny

If it weren't my country. Sort of like the Keystone Kops taking over the government:

One day before U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s first meeting with a foreign leader, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Japanese officials said they had not finalized when or where in New York it would take place, who would be invited, or in some cases whom to call for answers. . . .

Japanese and U.S. officials said on Wednesday the State Department had not been involved in planning the meeting, leaving the logistical and protocol details that normally would be settled far in advance still to be determined.

“There has been a lot of confusion,” said one Japanese official.

The Japanese are masters of understatement.

In spite of Trump's denials, the picture that's coming out of his "transition" is one of a bunch of amateurs under the direction of a five-year-old trying to stage Der Ring des Nibelungen.

Today's Must-Read, Part Two: Congratulations

Via Digby again, this is pretty much how I feel right now:

It goes on:

This is by the cartoonist David Horsey:

I’m sure thousands of bottles of Budweiser will be raised tonight in those white, working-class neighborhoods of the upper Midwest that put Donald Trump over the top in the electoral college. You folks should enjoy your moment and don’t trouble yourselves with the thought that plenty of celebratory champagne is being poured in corporate board rooms, country clubs and in the spacious mansions of hedge fund managers.

Thanks to your votes, Mr. and Mrs. White Working Class, all those rich people will soon get a massive tax cut and relief from the environmental regulations that have kept them from polluting your air and water and from the financial oversight that has restrained them from milking every last penny from their employees and the victims of their big-money schemes.

Yes, congratulations. At the same moment you elected a billionaire who claimed he would drain the special interest “swamp” in Washington, you kept in power insiders such as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, one of the biggest snakes in the swamp, plus all the other Republicans in Congress who have fought to keep the mighty flow of corporate dollars streaming in.

You think you have struck a blow against the “elites” on the coasts who look down on “real Americans” in the heartland. You say you have been forgotten or misunderstood by the powers that be. That may be true. But I must say that those of you who act as if you are the only ones in the country who work hard, care for your families and love your country are pretty damn elitist, as well.

I look around at my friends and neighbors here on the West Coast and I see lots of patriotic people who put in long hours of labor to put food on the table and put their kids through school.

There is Keith, a guy with whom I recently got acquainted when we discovered our common affinity for good drinks, good ribs and good jazz. Keith is a muscular black man who would likely be subject to unfair and unfriendly scrutiny from the local sheriff if he showed up in a small Midwestern town, but forget the stereotype. Keith had a career in the Marines before taking a job managing security for Hollywood celebrities. In his free time, he works to help the homeless in downtown Los Angeles.

There is the Korean family that runs the laundry down the street from my apartment who never seem to take a vacation or even a day off. There are the Latino men I see laboring every day in the Southern California heat cutting lawns and repairing houses. There are the men of every race I pass by on my way to work who are hauling steel, handling jackhammers, driving trucks and raising girders as they build new subway lines and raise up towering skyscrapers.

And there are my colleagues in the newsroom, both the seasoned veterans of the news business and the charged-up millennials. There’s nothing elite about them, unless being able to spell and use proper grammar are now elite attributes. The men and women around me are working harder than ever for wages that are not rising in an industry threatened by rapid change. Sound familiar?

Most of us here do not live in Beverly Hills. We live in more modest places such as Pasadena, East Los Angeles, Inglewood and Long Beach. Of course, the working class here is a lot more brown than where you might live. They sweat just as hard, though, and put in long hours just like you — maybe longer, and maybe for less money. But you have not done them a favor by electing a guy who threatens to start a trade war based on an illusion. The illusion is that if America cuts itself off from the global market, all those manufacturing jobs your fathers once had will come flooding back. It won’t happen. The robots have taken over the assembly lines. But what a disruption in trade would do is shut down the West Coast ports and, according to expert estimates, kill more than 600,000 working-class jobs in California.

I know you didn’t think about that sort of effect when you cast your protest vote to Make America Great Again, but what exactly were you thinking? Whenever one of you was interviewed by a TV reporter all I heard was you parroting the vague generalities being spouted by your candidate: America doesn’t win anymore; we need a wall to keep out immigrants; political correctness sucks.

Trump’s careless ignorance could make him the world’s most dangerous man[.]

I didn’t hear any of you say you were happy with the longer droughts, bigger storms and more vicious wildfires that are devastating farms, ranches and rural communities. But your new president has promised to rip up the international treaty that might mitigate some of the extreme weather caused by climate change.

I didn’t hear any of you say you were tired of the peace and order created by the NATO alliance and would rather have a cozier relationship with the Russians. But you just elected a man who has denigrated NATO and has warm and fuzzy feelings about Vladimir Putin.

I did hear plenty of you say you hated big government, but is that because you are someone who got fined by the EPA because your industrial plant was poisoning a river? Or because you are a rancher who doesn’t want to pay grazing fees when you exploit publicly owned land? Or because you are a farmer who doesn’t want to admit that government price supports are what keep your business viable?

Does your hatred of government mean you voted for more pollution? With your vote, were you demanding that big banks be set free to run the economy into the ground? Were you eager for less consumer protection? Did you insist that more of the tax burden be put on average Americans and less of it on the super-rich? I hope those are the things you wanted because that is what you will get from a Republican Congress and a Republican president.

Do I sound angry? That is because I am. I’m mad because your misguided hissy fit is messing with the country I love. I am as much a patriot as you are. I choke up when I visit the Lincoln Memorial or the graves of the Kennedys. I love the flag and do not cringe from the Pledge of Allegiance. When I ride a horse across open country, I feel a link with all my ancestors — the first of whom arrived on the Maryland shore in the 1640s. Those family members who came before me slowly made their way West, generation after generation, until they finally found a home within sight of the Pacific. I am about as “real” an American as you can get.

But I am fed up with those of you who think there is only one way to be American. Some of the truest Americans I have met are among those whose ancestors came here in slave ships. Some of the Americans who give me the most hope are the children of parents who slipped across the border in search of a better life; young dreamers working hard for an education and a chance to contribute to our society. Some of the Americans I admire the most are like my friend Jack who left the narrow-mindedness of his home state and came West to Los Angeles, where he met and married the man he loved. America is great because it has room for all these people and more.

If, ultimately, the real reason you voted for Trump was because he promised to start shutting doors that have been opened for people who do not fit a narrow definition of American, you should understand you are in for a fight. It’s now my turn to say it: I want my country back.

I wish I could think that those who voted for a neo-fascist adolescent for president were in for a rude awakening and might see the light, but at this stage, he'll just blame someone else for shafting them and they'll buy it, lock, stock and barrel.

Out of It

As an indicator of how I just blipped on the world in general this summer, this post from Digby stopped me, especially this part:

Red panda cubs at Lincoln Park Zoo are named in honor of the other Cubs who call Chicago home. The cubs are named Sheffield and Waveland, the streets on each side of Wrigley Field.

"Wait a minute," I said to myself. "That's not right. They were named Clark and Addison." The other two streets that border Wrigley Field.

I checked, just to make sure.

The cubs at the Kovler Lion House—a male (above) and a female (below), as yet unnamed—are the second in two years for breeding pair Leafa and Phoenix, following male Clark and female Addison, now at San Diego Zoo and Northeastern Wisconsin Zoo respectively. Together, all the cubs highlight the strength of zoos’ collaborative efforts to keep their population sustainable over the long run.

I even saw them a couple of weeks ago, and remarked how small they were.

I guess I'd better start paying attention.

Trump's America: Beyond Tone Deaf

This is the kind of candidate we're getting in the Trump era:

NBC 4 New York reports that Jon Girodes, the Republican candidate for New York’s 30th District, told the news station that he planned to hand out “Kool-Aid, KFC and watermelons” to people who attended a Harlem campaign rally in the coming weeks.

Harlem, of course, is a majority black neighborhood, and watermelons and fried chicken are two foods that are used to stereotype black Americans. All the same, Girodes doesn’t think there’s anything offensive about his stunt since people in the neighborhood should be grateful that they’re getting free food.

“What I think is anyone who gives free food to people is doing them a favor,” Girodes told NBC 4 New York’s I-Team. “Get a bunch of people who say it’s offensive and let me go into their neighborhood and give it out for free and see if they take it.”

Residents of the community did not respond favorably:

Meanwhile, another resident responded to Girodes’s “donation” of food by offering to “donate various foots in his ass.”

It never fails to amaze me that, with all the attention being called to the intrinsic racism in this country, anyone can be that oblivious.

In fairness, its seems the state GOP is disavowing this clown. There's more info on him at the link -- he sounds like a loser from the get-go, but then, look at what the GOP is offering for president.

Clinton Derangement Syndrome

Now that Benghazi!!1! is dead and buried -- for the moment -- it's E-mails!!1!. I've been thinking a bit about the press reaction to this (among other things), and once again, Digby to the rescue. First, quoting Brien Beutler:

What made this episode unique is that the same media that expected Republicans to overreach played a critical role in increasing their expectations of a political windfall.

Republicans in Congress and their conservative media allies largely brought this upon themselves. They were the ones who made right-wing sop out of baseless speculation that Clinton might be indicted for violating a law nobody’s ever been convicted of violating.

But due to a strange brew of incentives that proved toxic—the competition for eyeballs, the lack of subject matter expertise, the industry standard of reportorial balance—the mainstream media did nothing to puncture this myth. To the contrary, it treated the threat of indictment as a permanent question mark hovering over Clinton’s campaign like a dark cloud. In a different media ecosystem, this wouldn’t have happened. A mix of common sense and truly basic research and reporting would have established a consensus that Republicans were trying to gin up intrigue and damaging innuendo, but that an indictment was extraordinarily unlikely. Instead, the remote odds of one came to be seen as something like a 50-50 proposition, to the point where even professional Democrats began to worry Clinton might be charged with a felony and prosecuted.

I don't know that this is particularly unique. The media, for lack of a better term, ceased to practice journalism a long time ago, with a few exceptions -- most of them on Comedy Central. We're seeing the same kind of bullshit mantras repeated again in the wake of the Dallas shooting, and we've seen it time and time again in the aftermath of just about every high-profile event over the past couple of decades. The idea of any news anchor or interviewer holding anyone's feet to the fire over obvious distortions, or even challenging their bullshit, is simply not in the mix.

Digby's summation is, I think, pretty much on the mark:

I would just add that liberal journalists are also subject to a herd mentality and seem to find themselves searching for reasons to reassure the public that they aren't political hacks so they add to the atmosphere by being heavily critical on the "optics, judgment and narrative" aspects of these scandals which leads to a different kind of distortion. These dynamics play into each other creating the sort of febrile environment that characterizes these passion plays.

This is what leads to a sort of political establishment consensus that "something is terribly wrong" that the rest of the country finds confusingly out of touch.

I would just add that what's "terribly wrong" is the fact that the political establishment is so completely out of touch. It's at the point where Washington is damned near a closed system, and entropy is taking its toll. (Note that one reason the Republicans -- and even a few Democrats, although they tend to be quiet about it -- hate the Clintons so much is that they were "outsiders" -- they weren't part of the Village.)

Maybe it would help if the news departments were not part of the entertainment division.

Saturday Science? Another Creationist Museum

They're everywhere. This one seems to be fairly standard:

The Dinosaur and Fossil Museum is the property of Otis Kline, who has some real fossils on display, but has used them to stitch together a very different narrative of the planet’s history than the one commonly accepted by scientists.

The Tribune sent a reporter to take a tour of the museum and reported back that guests are being told that:

•The Bible is an accurate, literal history of the world. The world is about 6,000-6,400 years old and a six-day divine creation.

•The flood of the Bible’s book of Genesis, the Noah’s Ark flood, split the continents apart with water called from the deep and set off a worldwide cataclysm that buried the creatures that would become fossils in one mass event. The long flood, ensuing volcanic eruptions and an ice age radically changed the planet.

•Dinosaurs and humans lived at the same time. Dinosaurs were on the ark.

•Life can not be traced back as branches to a trunk. God created “kinds,” like dog kind from whence sprung dogs, wolves, coyotes. Humans and primates don’t come from the same “kind.” Neanderthals, Cro-Magnon and humans are all of “humankind,” which came from Adam and Eve.

I've probably mentioned this before, but anyone who takes sacred texts literally is not playing with a full deck. Sorry, that's just the way it is.

In My Country, We Call That "Projection"

From the clueless Marco Rubio, on the president's visit to an American mosque:

Republican presidential candidate Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) somehow found a way to criticize President Barack Obama's speech on Wednesday denouncing anti-Muslim bigotry.

Rubio, who often stresses religious liberty and his own faith on the campaign trail, said Obama's words at a Baltimore mosque were intended to divide, rather than unite, the American people.

"I'm tired of being divided against each other for political reasons like this president's done," Rubio said at a Wednesday campaign stop in Dover, New Hampshire. "Always pitting people against each other. Always! Look at today: He gave a speech at a mosque. Oh, you know, basically implying that America is discriminating against Muslims."

"Implying"? When the entire Republican stable is demanding discrimination against Muslims?

This counts as a WTF? Moment, I think.

Footnote: Mustang Bobby has a good comment on this at Bark Bark Woof Woof.

Speechless

We've all heard what a total loss Fox News is as far as actual information is concerned, but the degree of ignorance displayed by their hosts and anchors is genuinely astonishing. We have another Ten Commandments battle, this time in Oklahoma, where the state supreme court ordered the government to remove a monument on the capital grounds.

State Rep. Mike Ritze (R), whose family funded the monument, told Doocy that he was shocked because the judges had never ruled against a Ten Commandments display before.

“Well, you know, it’s curious because in many instances like this, Mike, things in state capitals and on public ground are regarded as historical because that’s where our laws and our heritage comes from, came from in the beginning when this nation was first founded,” [host Steve] Doocy opined.

Hmm -- Enlightenment philosophy, English common law, Roman law, even some Iroquois law, but the Ten Commandments? Sorry, no.

The real problem here is that the Fox audience doesn't seem to value critical thinking skills very much, and they're likely to take this kind of blatant ignorance as gospel. Can I suggest that this has more than a little to do with the state of public discourse in this country these days?

Tweet du Jour

Under the heading "Do they even hear what they're saying?"




Words fail me.

Via Mahablog.

Evidence? We Don't Need No Stinkin' Evidence!

The pope has weighed in on gender, the way it's supposed to be:

"Let's think of the nuclear arms, of the possibility to annihilate in a few instants a very high number of human beings," he continues. "Let's think also of genetic manipulation, of the manipulation of life, or of the gender theory, that does not recognize the order of creation."

"With this attitude, man commits a new sin, that against God the Creator," the pope says. "The true custody of creation does not have anything to do with the ideologies that consider man like an accident, like a problem to eliminate."

"God has placed man and woman and the summit of creation and has entrusted them with the earth," Francis says. "The design of the Creator is written in nature."

I honestly can't remember, right now, when I've seen a clearer example of the impermeable membrane with which so many Christians wrap themselves. "The design of the Creator is written in nature." Where does he think our recent (relatively) rethinking of gender and sexuality in general come from? Psychologists and biologists aren't in the habit of making these things up. (Unlike, say, Catholic bishops.)

What more is there to say? Except maybe, "Open your eyes, Francis, and take a look at the world around you."

Footnote: This attitude probably accounts for most, if not all, of the problems we're having with the environment today: "God has placed man and woman and the summit of creation and has entrusted them with the earth[.]" It's a slightly different take on the old "dominion over all things" idea, but the seed is still there, to which I can only respond, "You're doin' a heckuva job, Brownie."

Idiot du Jour

Bryan Fischer is, among his other accomplishments, an expert epidemiologist, who knows all about transmission vectors and incubation periods.

Of course, in real life Fischer is a raving rabble-rouser who will say anything that will get him some attention, as well as being an everything denialist. (Denial seems to be as much a part of the Christianist toolbox as projection.)

It's people like him that make me sometimes regret that we have free speech in this country -- but then, unlike Fischer and his ilk, I have no intention of setting myself up as the arbiter of who gets to say what.

I wonder if he realizes how ridiculous he is to sane people.

Via Joe.My.God., where you will also find this article on the origins of HIV. Like, real science.

Today In "Christian" Self-Absorption

OneMilion(minus 999,000)Moms is outraged at a Guinness ad because it uses a Christian hymn as background. Via Joe.My.God.:

Guinness & Co. is currently airing a commercial for its beer with a popular gospel hymn as background music. The song "Leaning on the Everlasting Arms" is played during the entire ad and even though there are no lyrics it is unmistakably the beloved hymn Christians know and love. The cherished "Everlasting Arms" hymn has no place in a beer commercial. Christian music should not be associated with an advertisement promoting drinking. The choice of including this hymn in the ad disrespects the Christian faith.

If you actually watch the ad, you get a very different -- and arguably very Christian -- message. (Although I don't know that it's specifically Christian -- it's very human, and approaches the very best of very human.) Maybe if the OMM could realize that the universe does not revolve around them, they wouldn't have so much trouble keeping their blood pressure down. (I use the plural only as a matter of grammar -- I had heard that their membership is something like 40,000, but I remain convinced that the active arm is composed of one intern with an Internet connection.)

Judge for yourself:

I confess to getting a bit misty-eyed at this one.

And thanks to commenter "b" at Joe.My.God., I was reminded of this one:

Do you suppose OMM missed it somehow?