Wednesday, July 31, 2019

Today, Harvard Professor Danielle Allen Offers A Pair Of Quick'n Dirty Solutions To Our Nearly-Paralyzed Gridlocked Government — Expand (By 50 Seats) The US House Of Representatives & Make Ranked-Choice Voting (RCV) The Law Of The Land

This blog is proud to present the best idea of 2019 to ease — or erase — and correct our dysfunctional, gridlocked US government. However, the final paragraph of this prescription is problematic because it challenged each citizen to think . Most people in this troubled land do not want to think because unthinking voters in 2016 contributed mightily to our dismal days in 2019. If this is the (fair & balanced) challenge to the future of the nation, so be it.

[x WaPo — DC Fishwrap]
We Are In Our Articles Of Confederation Moment
By Danielle Allen


TagCrowd Cloud provides a visual summary of the following piece of writing

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We are in our Articles of Confederation moment. By this, I mean we are in a phase in our national life where we need to recognize that our institutions are not serving our interest. This is not because of President Trump. The situation predates his administration, though he has learned to take advantage of institutional dysfunction for factional advantage.

Most fundamentally, our national legislature no longer functions. Budget agreements notwithstanding, Congress cannot pass an actual budget with clear direction and decisions about trade-offs across the 12 conventional areas of appropriation by deadline. It cannot resolve disputes around pressing national issues such as immigration, climate change and health care. Significant expenditures on core functions such as defense are folded into contingency lines. And Congress has no ability to check the executive branch in any meaningful way.

The founding generation sought, in the words of Alexander Hamilton, to balance republican safety and energetic government. Republican safety meant securing basic rights of self-governance, including both personal liberties and freedoms to participate in collective decision-making. Energetic government meant a government that works. The government under the Articles of Confederation was insufficiently energetic. Its collapse would also have put an end to the republican project and therefore to republican safety.

In the design of the Constitution, the founding generation saw the legislative branch as the main threat to both republican safety and energetic government. In various ways, the founders sought to guard against its encroachment on the executive. Their work succeeded beyond their wildest imaginings. The power of the executive branch is what has grown vigorously in the succeeding centuries.

Since the nation’s founding, Congress has overridden only 111 of 2,576 vetoes. Similarly, executive orders have become a prominent part of governance, replacing legislation. Congress was intended to give voice to the will of the people, filtering and synthesizing the national interest to set the national legislative agenda. Instead, Congress has become the servant of the partisan presidents, who get to set the agenda rather than executing the people’s agenda as communicated by the legislature.

To achieve self-government in a large society requires representation — the idea that the people as a whole forms its will through representatives who listen to their constituents, digest, contend and collaborate, achieve a synthesized agenda-setting vision and report back to their constituencies to repeat the process.

In a representative democracy, the legislature is the only institution equipped to present a synthesized expression of “the will of the people.” This is because the minority view is also present in the legislature.

The presidency was never designed to express the will of the people, and it cannot do so. It typically expresses the will of the electoral majority. For this reason, the presidency ought to be subservient to the legislature so that its work of executing the laws is constrained by the will of the people as a whole — minorities as well as majorities. Government by executive order guts the heart of the representative system.

If we care to preserve democracy — to achieve a balance of republican safety and energy — we need to restore our national legislature to well-functioning.

How?

Although this is an Articles of Confederation moment, we do not need a Constitutional Convention. Two critical redesigns can be achieved by state or federal legislation.

First, increase the size of the House of Representatives by 50. The representative branch needs to be a place where majority and minority viewpoints are folded into a working synthesis. Majorities must be blocked from trampling minorities; minorities cannot have a veto on all actions flowing from the majority point of view. As in Goldilocks, the balance must be just right.

Our institutions have always given extra weight to rural minorities, but the tipping of our population to urban centers has exacerbated that weighting. Expanding the House would rebalance our representative body. More populous states currently have more constituents per representatives than less populous states, so we’d use the 50 seats to rebalance the numbers. Wyoming probably wouldn’t get a new seat, for instance, but many more populous states would (and while we’re at it, the District should get one, too). This change would simultaneously rebalance the electoral college.

Second, introduce ranked-choice voting {RCV] in presidential, House and Senate elections. This system would force politicians to campaign and spend money so as to be not only some voters’ first choice but also other voters’ second or third choices, forcing candidates to cease demonizing other candidates whose supporters they hope to win over as a second choice. Ranked-choice voting, as recently adopted in Maine, can be done state by state and would yield a less polarized, more functional Congress.

Our world is very different from the one the founding generation lived in. We can and should adopt the founders’ principles — the need to balance republican safety and energy. But we will need to think for ourselves, in our new circumstances, about how to design our institutions to achieve that balance. Let the thinking begin. ###

[Danielle Allen is the James Bryant Conant University Professor (the highest faculty honor) of Government and also is the Director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics. at Harvard University and a contributing columnist for The Washington Post. Most recently she has written Cuz: The Life and Times of Michael A. (2017), See her other books here. Allen received an AB summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa (classics) from Princeton University (NJ) and as a Marshall Scholar, received both an MPhil and PhD (classics) from Cambridge University (UK) and both an MA and PhD (government) from Harvard University (MA). In 2001, the MacArthur Foundation named her a Fellow (with a "Genius Grant) in recognition of her combining “the classicist’s careful attention to texts and language with the political theorist’s sophisticated and informed engagement.”]

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Tuesday, July 30, 2019

Viewing Guide For The Second Round Of Democrats Brawling... Er, Debating — Watch & Listen To The Quiet Guy From Montana Tonight (July 30, 2019)

Sarah (Plain & Not Too Tall) Vowell is another reason why Montana is known as The Treasure State because of her deft turn of phrase and penetrating insights. So, tonight, watch for Vowell's man (Governor Steve Bullock) amidst all of the likely yammering and shouting over one another. Bottom line, Bullock was re-elected in 2016 and Montana gave a 30-point victory to The (LK) Lyin' King in the presidential vote. Imagine how a Democrat.won in the same election that saw a R-landslide. If this is a (fair & balanced) possible dream, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
This Guy Got Republicans To Vote For A Democrat
By Sarah Vowell


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Remember representative democracy? The kind where we voters pick the least objectionable politician to defend the Constitution while we pay our taxes and live our lives? Consider my governor, Steve Bullock of Montana. He is so reasonable, trustworthy and effective that before he started running for president a couple of months ago I would occasionally forget he existed. Reassured that the Helena governor’s mansion was cocooned in competence, I was free to clock in at what has become every dutiful citizen’s unpaid part-time job: monitoring hourly White House flub-ups, each moral or administrative fiasco followed by a succession of time-consuming purification rituals — staring at a grove of aspens, listening to Pete Seeger sing “Shenandoah,” rereading the 25th Amendment, etc.

Introducing himself as the new governor in 2013, Mr. Bullock said, “My name is Steve, and I work for the state.” That is not the voice of a Democrat who wants to do away with the private health insurance of more than half the population. It is the voice of a Democrat who would go on to expand Medicaid coverage — twice — in a blood red state with a Republican majority legislature, a Democrat committed to keeping rural hospitals open, which probably only matters to people who don’t plan their heart attacks two hours ahead.

His is also not the voice of free college or canceling student debt. It is the voice of a Democrat who has shepherded several tuition freezes for residents at the state universities, thereby minimizing the need for loans in the first place. He also beefed up the Montana Registered Apprenticeship Program, a public-private partnership among the state and tribal colleges and more than 500 businesses whose graduates earn $20,000 more than the state average. In Montana, that’s a year’s mortgage, about three years of a kid’s tuition at one of the aforementioned state schools, 1,700 movie tickets — that’s a life.

Does Mr. Bullock, with his modest but concrete progress in a state hostile to Democrats on issues all Democrats hold dear, sound boring compared to charismatic candidates promising revolutionary change? I don’t know. Is winning boring?

Like some leftist Dr. Dolittle, Mr. Bullock has a talent for knowing how to talk Republicans into doing Democratic things (including voting for him). It resulted in his re-election in 2016 in a state President Trump won by over 20 points. His crafty approach involves good manners, logic and a willingness to compromise when he can (and veto when he won’t). He sees the good in Republicans because there is good to be seen: Several of the conservative legislators who voted to support the public universities attended them.

This week, Governor Bullock will make his debate debut. As a Montana Democrat, I look forward to it because I have no idea what he sounds like trying to appeal to members of his own party. I assume that’s how he got and kept his job. When he goes out stumping for one of his squishy liberal plots to get fewer people killed, he tends to choose words that won’t make wheat farmers barf. Why, no, old coot in a feed store cap from Roundup, he’s not going to expand Medicaid, he’s going to “bring our taxpayer dollars home.”

Based on Mr. Bullock’s last gubernatorial debate, his competitors in the next contest have no hope of outfoxing him on questions about the business equipment tax, unless Marianne Williamson has also figured out how to get out-of-state corporations to pay for the fire departments of Yellowstone County. On the off chance there’s a question about the nuts and bolts of actual governance, I wonder how the governor could explain, in under 60 seconds, the coalitions of strange bedfellows he conjures to solve problems in a state with seven sovereign Indian nations that’s crammed into a single ridiculous congressional district the size of Japan.

His counsel on how Montana was going to comply with the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan included a never-boring, ex-miner Republican state senator you definitely want pissing from the tent, the Montana Wildlife Federation, the Farmers Union, energy company executives, a couple of Democrats from the Environmental Quality Council, the chairman of the Crow tribe and for all I know the ghost of Norman Maclean. Is it just me or is this sort of room where everybody’s irked for different civic-minded reasons kind of what James Madison had in mind?

Currently, the top four Democratic front-runners, three of whom are Democrats, all represent the country’s edges, the Left Coast and the Other Left Coast. Theoretically this geography doesn’t matter since the Republican incumbent hails from New York City; but he, like his grasp on reality, exists outside the space-time continuum. Think back: What was the most obvious thing about Barack Obama? That’s right — he came from Illinois. A coastal Democrat has not won the general election in 59 years.

That said, a viable candidate doesn’t have to come from a state whose county fairgrounds put the farmers’ market next to the gun show. She could use her humid summer vacation in Iowa to learn how to fake it. It could even be relaxing. I swear Steve Bullock spends half his workday just sitting around listening.

What with too much far left jibber-jabber threatening to Mondale-up the electoral map, I tend to agree with our neighbor Heidi Heitkamp (D-ND), a former North Dakota senator, when she asked the recent convention of Montana Democrats to raise their hands if they thought the president would probably be re-elected. She admonished them, “All of you should have your hands up.” On the other hand, I understand their unwarranted optimism. In Montana, just as trees grow out of rocks, sometimes the Democrat wins. ###

[Sarah Vowell is a historian, author, journalist, essayist, social commentator and actress. She was a contributing editor for the radio program "This American Life" on Public Radio International from 1996 to 2008, where she produced numerous commentaries and documentaries and toured the country in many of the program's live shows. She was also the voice of Violet Parr in the animated film "The Incredibles" and its 2018 sequel. "The Incredibles 2." She has written seven books on US history and culture, most recently Lafayette in the Somewhat United States (2015). Vowell received a BA magna cum laude (modern languages and literatures) from Montana State University and an MA (art history) from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.]

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Monday, July 29, 2019

Life In 2019 — A Living Funhouse Mirror

In the e-mail that contained today's TMW 'toon, Tom/Dan wrote:

Hey all,

I know that Mueller wasn’t the most compelling witness, and there was no “at long last have you no decency” moment of drama during his testimony. But if we look beyond the theatrics, he re-stated a couple of important points from the report — there *was* a concerted effort by the Russian government to interfere with the 2016 election, and Donald Trump *did* try to obstruct his investigation into it.

That second should absolutely be reason enough for impeachment, on its own. And as I’m writing this on Friday evening, it’s just been announced that Democrats have taken the first tentative steps toward an impeachment inquiry. This was unexpected enough to me that it necessitated replacing a panel in this cartoon chastising them for not doing this! Despite the personal inconvenience, I welcome the news, and hope that it doesn’t just turn out to be some sort of fake-out to mollify the base.

And hey, next week is a new week. And these days, I literally never know what any new week is going to bring.

Until next time,

Dan/Tom

The 'toonist's soliloquy illustrates life on the front lines of the Resistance — dreary days puntuated by outbursts of WWE-villain snark.If this is a (fair & balaned) account of daily life, 2019, so be it.

[x TMW]
Meanwhile On Parallel Earth
By Tom Tomorrow (Dan Perkins)


[Dan Perkins is an editorial cartoonist better known by the pen name "Tom Tomorrow." His weekly comic strip, "This Modern World," which comments on current events from a strong liberal perspective, appears regularly in approximately 150 papers across the U.S., as well as on Daily Kos. The strip debuted in 1990 in SF Weekly. Perkins received the Robert F. Kennedy Award for Excellence in Journalism in both 1998 and 2002. When he is not working on projects related to his comic strip, Perkins writes a daily political blog, also entitled "This Modern World," which he began in December 2001. More recently, Dan Perkins, pen name Tom Tomorrow, was named the winner of the 2013 Herblock Prize for editorial cartooning. Even more recently, Dan Perkins was a runner-up for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning.]

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Sunday, July 28, 2019

From The Better Late Than Never Department — The Cobra (Maureen Dowd), Incensed By The Travesty On July 4, 2019, Delivers Virtual Bites Filled With Exquisite Snarky Venom To The LK (Lyin' King)

A little more than a week ago, this blogger placed today;s essay in the "Possible Items For Posting" folder and finally, here 'tis. The Cobra (Maureen Dowd) is DC-native who resents the defilement of her city, the nation's capital, and the United States of America itself. Her essay is an exquisite statement of patriotic resistance to the LK (Lyin; King) in the Oval Office and his minions. If this is (fair & balanced) unshouted national outrage, so be it.

PS; The source of this blog's noms de stylo serpent reference to the three women on the NY Fishwrap's Op-Ed staff began with this 2001 essay by The Cobra (Maureen Dowd) who's been joined by her distaff colleagues: The Krait (Gail Collins), and — most recently — The Viper (Michelle Goldberg

[NY Fishwrap]
Rail-Splitter v. Hate Spitter
By The Cobra (Maureen Dowd)


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Sorry, Abe.

I can’t come down to your memorial on a sultry night for my usual midsummer outing of mindful meditation and astral projection.

The time is out of joint, as Hamlet said. And it is too discombobulating to spend precious hours with Honest Abe in the specious era of Dishonest Don.

How do you commune with a Republican president known for his spiritual stability in a constitutional crisis when a mere mile away sits a Republican president known for his amoral instability in a constitutional crisis?

How do you commune with the man who sacrificed his life to bring the races together when nearby dwells the man who is soiling his life — and ours — driving the races apart?

I love all the luminous white marble monuments and the landmarks in my hometown, the permanent Oz within our transient capital. I still shiver when I think that the 9/11 terrorists might have destroyed any one of them.

But my favorite has always been the Lincoln Memorial, because on its north chamber is engraved the brief, inexpressibly beautiful Second Inaugural Address — the most poetic expression of what the American soul should be.

Lincoln tried to knit his unraveled country, knowing his side was right, yet accepting those on the other side as God’s children: “With malice toward none; with charity for all.”

“Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other,” Lincoln said. “It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged.”

It is a travesty that Donald Trump, 154 years after Lincoln tried to bind the wounds of the nation on race to keep the dream of America viable, is pouring salt into those wounds to keep himself viable.

Lincoln tried to wrestle down a clash of civilizations. Trump is ginning one up to get re-elected.

He doesn’t worry about inciting violence against those he slimes. When I asked him about that in 2016, he said that he thought the rabid mood and physical altercations at his rallies added an air of excitement, and that his political journey into the heart of darkness is what got him to No. 1, so why wouldn’t he continue on it?

The president who hates flies is like flypaper. No matter how you come at him, buzzing past his outrages and lies like the Republicans or landing hard on them like the Democrats, you get stuck.

Both parties end up caught and struggling in the sticky mess.

Nancy Pelosi was trying to keep the Democrats in the center-left lane, where their best chance of beating Trump lies. But with his vile “go back” rant against four American Democratic congresswomen, the president — at least for now — achieved his stated aim of “marrying” the speaker to the far-left squad.

Given some of the hyper-liberal ideas tossed out by the Democrats in the first round of debates, Pelosi will have to work harder than ever to keep her party’s image where it needs to be with the real base, as opposed to the Twitter base.

The Republicans typically prefer a more subtle racism to rev up the base. In the past, they have handed the racist ploys off to hidden allies, then denied knowledge of Willie Hortonesque efforts to rouse hate. It’s ugly and disorienting — even to many Republicans — to see the toads jumping directly from the mouth of a president.

But as the boorish Trump has told reporters, “I don’t really care about offending people.”

He doesn’t rely on division only for elections, like his predecessors; he uses it to govern. And while that is a tad embarrassing for Republicans, they know from half a century of experience that it works to stir up racial animus and label foes wild-eyed socialists and commies.

[Senate Majority Leader] Mitch McConnell [D-KY] admitted this on Thursday when he told Fox Business that “the president is on to something” with his fragging, though he denied Trump was a racist.

While it is awful to contemplate, this trade-off of our national ideals for strong stock returns and more millions for billionaires could be working.

As The Times’s Nate Cohn wrote on Friday [7/19/2019], Trump’s Electoral College edge could grow in 2020 because “a strategy rooted in racial polarization could at once energize parts of the president’s base and rebuild support among wavering white working-class voters.”

After pretending fleetingly that he had been unhappy that some in the crowd at his North Carolina rally chanted “Send her back” about Representative Ilhan Omar, the president returned to his natural habitat of hate. On Friday, he also resumed attacking the squad as “terrible” and a “disgrace,” praising himself because he said he could have filled the North Carolina stadium 10 times and calling the rallygoers “incredible patriots.”

As with Charlottesville, he will never disavow his people. He loves even the hardest of his hard-core base because they boost his crowd size, his electoral count and his ego.

We’re all stuck on the flypaper. Democrats need to up their game to avoid the traps Trump is constantly setting for them.

Abraham Lincoln led us through a tragedy. Donald Trump is one. With malice toward all; with charity for none. #'#'#'

[Maureen Dowd received the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1999, with the Pulitzer committee particularly citing her columns on the impeachment of Bill Clinton after his affair with Monica Lewinsky. Dowd joined The New York Times as a reporter in 1983, after writing for Time magazine and the now-defunct Washington Star. At The Times, Dowd was nominated for a 1992 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting, then became a columnist for the paper's editorial page in 1995. Dowd's first book was a collection of columns entitled Bushworld: Enter at Your Own Risk (2004). Most recently Dowd has written The Year of Voting Dangerously: The Derangement of American Politics (2017). See all of Dowd's books here. She received a BA (English) from Catholic University (DC).]

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Saturday, July 27, 2019

A Wish For January 2021 — Laissez Les Bons Temps Rouler Will Be Sung As Laisser Rouler Les Actes D'accusation De Collusion Et De Donspiration ("Let The Good Times Roll" Becomes "Let The Collusion And Conspiracy Indictments Roll")

The Krait (Gail Collins) hisses and bites the LK (Lyin' King) in the Oval Office frequently and often. She omits another obvious take on the TV spectacle of Robert Mueller III (age 74) facing the US House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees in back-to-back hearings on Wednesday, July 24, 2019 — is old and tires quickly. Take that from this blogger who Mueller's elder by 4 years. If this is a (fair & balanced) appeal for geriatric leniency, so be it.

PS; The source of this blog's noms de stylo serpent reference to the three women on the NY Fishwrap's Op-Ed staff began with this 2001 essay by The Cobra (Maureen Dowd) who's been joined by her distaff colleagues: The Krait (Gail Collins), and — most recently — The Viper (Michelle Goldberg)

[x NY Fishwrap]
How To Take Down Trump
By The Krait (Gail Collins)


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When it comes to tamping down excitement, Robert Mueller is a genius. He soldiered on through two much-anticipated House committee hearings, full of politicians eager to make a splash. The result was… muted.

OK, actually kind of boring. Not, of course, anything like the scene Donald Trump described later, in which it sounded as if Mueller fell weeping to the floor, admitting his whole investigation was a pile of lies.

“The administration, our president, me, we’ve done a great job,” Trump boasted as only he could. The probe into Russian interference in the election and his own attempts at obstruction of justice, he claimed, had “totally folded.”

“Robert Mueller had no material,” Trump said of the former special counsel, who authored a 448-page report on presidential misdeeds.

In the real world, Mueller didn’t say anything unexpected when he was called before two different committees on the same day. He testified once again about Russia’s assault on American democracy and said very clearly that the president was not exonerated on any count.

However, the man is just not good at drama. Think of him as Robert “I’d Refer You to the Report for That” Mueller.

The hearing was a miscalculation on the part of the Democrats, who were a little frustrated that Mueller’s report, although damning for Trump, did not have the kind of juicy language that makes for memorable headlines. His big quote, after all, was: “If we had had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime we would have said so.”

Plus, how many Americans were going to read 448 pages? One clue came when the FBI director admitted he’d just kind of skimmed. A CNN poll found 3 percent of the country had read the whole thing.

And even at that, how much of that 3 percent do you think were fibbing?

A) A lot

B) 2.9 percent

C) Everybody but vicious political science professors who assigned it as a term paper.

To get the story out, some House Democrats decided to bring Mueller himself before the cameras. Once Americans heard the report’s conclusions in his own words, how could they not get ready to impeach? The most riveting bits would be all over Twitter and Facebook and the evening news. What could go wrong?

Zzzzzzzz.

The result was the political equivalent of a movie that makes you want to avoid reading the book. Either through all-purpose weariness or determination not to be pushed, Mueller was pretty consistently … unexciting.

“We decided we would not make a determination as to whether the president committed a crime,” he said, um, determinedly.

The Trump forces seemed to feel the day was a big triumph for their side, which was true only if you’d be encouraged by the news that the world doesn’t think you’re any more wretched today than it did yesterday.

Even the 97 percent of Americans who don’t claim to have read the report know that the Russians interfered with the 2016 election, and Trump did everything but jump up and lead a cheer with pom-poms when WikiLeaks dumped a ton of hacked Clinton emails on the nation.

The president’s defense was somewhere between outrageous and pathetic. He refused to talk with Mueller, even though — as Representative Eric Swalwell (D-CA) noted — during the time he was rejecting those invitations, he met with Vladimir Putin six times.

The Russian connection more than disturbed Mueller, even though he tried to avoid saying anything news-making about it. The closest he came was when someone mentioned Trump’s WikiLeaks euphoria. “Problematic is an understatement,” he said, in what was the equivalent of a howl of fury.

Mueller had warned that he wasn’t going to say anything that wasn’t in the report, and you can’t claim the man didn’t try to keep his word.

I can’t speak to that.”

I defer to you on that. I can’t get into the details.”

I am not going to answer that question, sir.”

If that’s what was written in the report, yes.”

I can’t go into it.”

Congressional hearings can be worthy and boring at the same time. Honestly, if you want to complain about something, there are lots of better targets. Tax cuts for the wealthy. Overpopulated Democratic debates. Bicyclists who ride on the sidewalk. “The Secret Life of Pets 2.”

And even if Mueller had been way, way more forthcoming, it’s unlikely it would have given the impeachment crowd much help. The nation is so divided on the subject of Donald Trump that it’s almost impossible to imagine anything would get him kicked out of office.

If he got caught standing with a knife and a pile of murdered puppies, he’d claim that he had actually protected innocent children from a pack of small fuzzy sharks. And around a third of the country would shrug, while Senate Republicans muttered something about danger at the beaches.

Looks like the Democrats are just going to have to run a strong presidential campaign about how to make the country better. If they do that, Donald Trump will not be in the White House in 2021. At which time, we can let the collusion and conspiracy indictments roll. ###

[Gail Collins joined the New York Times in 1995 as a member of the editorial board and later as an op-ed columnist. In 2001 she became the first woman ever appointed editor of the Times editorial page. At the beginning of 2007, she took a leave in order to complete America's Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates and Heroines. See other books by Gail Collins here. She returned to the Times as a columnist in July 2007. Collins received a BA (journalism) from Marquette University (WI) and an MA (government) from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.]

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Friday, July 26, 2019

It's Possible That Handy Andy Borowitz Imagined Queen Elizabeth's Thoughts Upon Receiving The News Of The New Prime Minister —' "I'm Too Old For This $hit, I'm Movin' To Canada!"

It's not difficult to feel sad for the Brits. Not only Brexit, but a new Prime Minister who is a clone of the LK (Lyin' King) in the Oval Office. Nor is it difficult to imagine that Queen Elizabeth II is dismayed at the prospect of regular meetings with the most clownish of British politicians. If this is a (fair & balanced) illustration of the British predicament, so be it.

[x The New Yorker]
Queen Elizabeth II Moving to Canada
By Andrew (Andy) Borowitz


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Queen Elizabeth II is moving to Canada “immediately” and should take up full-time residence there by the end of the week, Buckingham Palace confirmed on Tuesday.

The Queen offered no reason for the move, but the palace indicated that she had been packing her bags for the past several weeks.

In a sign that the Queen’s decision is irrevocable, the palace revealed that her beloved corgis had already been flown to Toronto.

In a brief farewell statement to the British people, the Queen explained why she had chosen Canada as her new home. “We speak the language, and our picture’s on the money there,” she said.

She said that she had “no regrets” about abdicating the throne to her son, Charles. “At this point, there’s nothing he can do to make the UK more messed up than it already is,” she said. ###

[Andrew (Andy) Borowitz is the creator the Borowitz Report, a Web site that is a lot funnier than the stuff posted by Matt Drudge and his ilk. Borowitz is a comedian and writer whose work appears regularly in The New Yorker. He is the first winner of the National Press Club's humor award and has won seven Dot-Comedy Awards for his web site. His most recent book (and Amazon's Best Kindle Single of the Year) is An Unexpected Twist (2012). Borowitz received a BA, magna cum laude (English) from Harvard University (MA).]

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Thursday, July 25, 2019

Roll Over, Richard Linklater — After July 24, 2019, We''re Dazed & Confused, But Not Alright, Alright, Alright... We're All Wrong, All Wrong, All Wrong

In the aftermath of Black Wednesday, Jly 24, 2019, this blogger thought of Adlai Stevenson's concession speech catch-phrase after the election of 1952 (quoting Abraham Lincoln): "It hurts too much to laugh, but I'm too old to cry."The filthy legend of the LK (Lyin' King) in the Oval Office lives on and we face the horror of 6 more years of no accountability for the absolute worst occupant of the Oval Office in this country's history. If this is (fair & balanced) disillusion, so be it.

[x The New Yorker]
“Accountability”? The Mueller Hearing Is How Trump Escapes It
By Susan B. Glasser


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After so much waiting—a hundred and twenty-four days, to be precise, since Robert Mueller’s report was delivered—perhaps it was bound to be a disappointment. Still, three hours after the former special counsel took the witness stand on Wednesday to testify about his investigation of President Trump and Russian interference in the 2016 election, the MSNBC anchor Brian Williams described it as a “disaster,” the White House press secretary, Stephanie Grisham, called the hearing an “epic embarrassment” for the Democrats, and the pro-Trump Drudge Report ripped the septuagenarian former FBI director as “dazed and confused.” The President, who had said he wouldn’t watch Mueller’s testimony but clearly could not restrain himself, seemed gleeful. “I would like to thank the Democrats for holding this morning’s hearing,” he tweeted after a few hours. Finally, there was something that Trump-era Washington could agree on: Mueller had bombed.

Whatever their seemingly shared views about Mueller’s performance, Democrats and Republicans started the day with competing, non-intersecting versions of the Mueller investigation, and they ended the day in exactly the same place. The politics surrounding that investigation are toxic, divisive, and still divorced from a reality that should be awful for Trump: the President not only has been implicated in obstructing justice but has been brazenly lying about the conclusions of the investigation.

Trump has claimed “complete and total EXONERATION” by Mueller, and triumphantly went on even more in this vein after the hearing was over. There was no such vindication, of course. Wednesday’s hearing reinforced, and powerfully so, the Mueller report’s conclusions that Russia had, in fact, interfered in the US election on Trump’s behalf, that the Trump team welcomed this intervention, and that Trump subsequently acted to impede the investigation of it. If the Democrats’ goal was to put on the record the facts that were already in the public record, they accomplished that. The chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Jerry Nadler, who ran the morning’s hearing, and the chairman of the Intelligence Committee, Adam Schiff, who ran the afternoon session, both gave lucid, powerful, and damning opening statements.

If only the hearing had ended there. But it didn’t. For hours, Mueller refused, more than a hundred times during the morning alone, to reply to even basic questions. He appeared unfamiliar with the material in a report that bears his name; at times, he seemed unable even to construct statements of any legal or investigative clarity at all. His comments were invariably grudging, cautious, defensive, and opaque. “It is not a witch hunt,” Mueller said of his investigation, responding to the dozens of times the President has declared his probe a “WITCH HUNT.” This was hardly a rousing defense of his office’s work—or, really, any defense at all. “The President was not exculpated for the acts he allegedly committed,” Mueller replied, when Nadler asked whether he had totally exonerated Trump, as the President has claimed. Even when invited by Representative Jackie Speier to tell the American people clearly and plainly what they should glean from the report, Mueller managed only a word salad. He merely defended the “integrity” of its findings and suggested that it should be a “flag to those of us who have some responsibility” not to “let this problem continue to linger,” an apparent reference to Russian election interference. Mueller seemed sharper and more alert in the afternoon, largely because the questioning centered more on what he plainly considers the outrage of Russian interference and less on the awkward questions surrounding the problematic behavior of the President of the United States with regard to that interference.

Watching this performance, Republicans chose to pile on against Mueller, a lifelong Republican they once hailed as a model of integrity but now treated as a hostile witness. They challenged Mueller’s legal interpretations, his writing of the report, his staff, and, in one case, the evidence regarding Russian intervention. They obsessed over the murky origins of the probe. One congressman even called Mueller’s report “un-American.” But they did not dispute the alleged examples of Trump’s obstruction; they studiously avoided them, except to point out that Mueller was never fired, even though Trump talked about it.

On Tuesday night, Laurence Tribe, the Harvard law professor who had been one of the President’s toughest critics and an outspoken proponent of impeachment, tweeted that he expected Mueller’s testimony to “shatter” the “mirage” of no collusion, no obstruction that has been Trump’s mantra since the report was released. By early Wednesday afternoon, Tribe recognized that it hadn’t happened. “Much as I hate to say it, this morning’s hearing was a disaster,” he wrote. “Far from breathing life into his damning report, the tired Robert Mueller sucked the life out of it. The effort to save democracy and the rule of law from this lawless president has been set back, not advanced.” Tribe felt better by the late afternoon, arguing that Mueller was issuing a “loud wakeup call” on Russian interference. But the damage was done.

The concerns about Mueller’s halting performance were not mere theatre criticism. He was unable to defend his report and its findings beyond simply referring lawmakers to the text, over and over again. In his effort not to be trapped by Democrats into suggesting that Trump should be impeached, Mueller did a disservice to his own work. He did not need to make new assertions of law or fact but merely explain in clear terms the conclusions he reached and why. There was not one moment when he did so.

For days before the hearing, the members of Congress who brought us Mueller’s testimony suggested that, because the American public (and many of their fellow-representatives) had largely failed to read the report, it would now be dramatized and dumbed down in video form. “We want Bob Mueller to bring it to life,” Schiff told “Face the Nation,” on Sunday. To say that didn’t happen would be an understatement of major proportions. “This was supposed to be the movie” that went along with the book, Williams said on MSNBC, during a break in the testimony. “Well, they’re not even left with that today.” It’s all a reminder of something I’ve long believed: the book is almost always better than the movie. History will very likely judge that to be the case with the Mueller report.

Those who bothered to read all four hundred and forty-eight pages discovered a gripping document, painstakingly footnoted and verified. It is a portrait of White House dysfunction and lies unlike any we’ve seen. None of this was mentioned at Wednesday’s hearing. But it is the essence of the challenge this extraordinary Presidency poses to Congress and the American people: the legislative branch alone has the power to do something about this dysfunction, especially where, as in the case of Trump’s obstructive behavior, it seems clearly aimed at crossing a legal line. For reasons of electoral math alone, the House was unlikely ever to pursue Trump’s impeachment, knowing that the Senate, controlled by Republicans, would never convict him. Wednesday’s hearing revealed another problem—Mueller was not going to provide a compelling public and legal argument for proceeding with impeachment anyway.

Promptly at eight-thirty Wednesday morning, Nadler began the hearing by solemnly affirming that no one, not even the President, is “above the law.” But he also got at the essence of the problem for Democrats: Trump was not exonerated, but holding him accountable requires congressional action that is not forthcoming. By the time Schiff brought down the gavel, six hours and fifty-nine minutes later, and Mueller left the room with his formidable reputation barely intact, it was painfully obvious that he had done nothing to help push congressional Democrats toward taking action. There would be no accountability.

This is something that Donald Trump has demonstrated a remarkable knack for avoiding throughout his public life. Trump has gone bankrupt and bounced back, been investigated more times than anyone can count, and has learned what it takes to win. As President, he has deployed the same tactics that helped him survive allegations of mob ties and tax fraud in his private life. He has hired aggressive lawyers, he has stalled, he has threatened. It has worked.

Late on Wednesday, many, many hours into the Mueller testimony, Representative Sean Maloney, of New York, helped to clarify just how successfully President Trump had played the prosecutor. Mueller had told Trump’s lawyers that his testimony was “vital” to resolving the investigation, Maloney pointed out, so why had Mueller finished his probe without getting it? “We understood we could subpoena the President,” Mueller allowed, but he also acknowledged that Trump would fight the subpoena all the way through the courts. And that would have taken too long, Mueller said, “because of the necessity of expediting the end of the investigation.” Running out the clock, refusing to participate, stonewalling: the Trump playbook worked. This, in the end, is the lesson of the Mueller investigation. That may not be what the Democrats who run the House of Representatives expected us to learn at Wednesday’s hearing, but it was the day’s inescapable conclusion. ###

[Susan B. Glasser is a contributing writer for newyorker.com, where she writes a twice-monthly column on life in Trump’s Washington. She is Politico’s chief international-affairs columnist and the host of its weekly podcast, “The Global Politico.” Glasser has served as the top editor of several Washington publications; most recently, she founded the award-winning Politico magazine and went on to become the editor of Politico throughout the 2016 election cycle. She previously served as the editor-in-chief of Foreign Policy, which won three National Magazine Awards, among other honors, during her tenure. Before that, she worked for a decade at the Washington Post, where she was the editor of "Outlook" and national news. She also oversaw coverage of the impeachment of Bill Clinton, served as a reporter covering the intersection of money and politics, spent four years as the Post’s Moscow co-bureau chief, and covered the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. She is the author of Kremlin Rising: Vladimir Putin and the End of Revolution (2005), which she co-wrote with her husband, Peter Baker. Glasser received a BA cum laude (government) from Harvard University (MA).]

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Wednesday, July 24, 2019

Read This Book If You Want To Understand Today's Immigration Issues

What a difference three decades make. This blogger was was in his early thirties when he read My Ántonia in a minor field (English) lit course and today's essayist read the same novel a few years later than the blogger when the essayist was in high school. The age gap is insignificant compared to the reaction of a grad student and a high schooler to the power and beauty of Willa Cather's writing. If this is a (fair & balanced) awakening to basic truths, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
The Perfect Antidote To Trump
By Bret L. Stephens


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When I was in high school I read Willa Cather’s My Ántonia (1918, 2019) and loved it for the love story it told. This week, I borrowed my daughter’s copy and read it again. It turns out to be a book for our times — and the perfect antidote to our president.

The novel, set mostly in late 19th-century Nebraska, tells the story of Ántonia Shimerda — the first name is pronounced An’-ton-ee-ah — the eldest daughter of a family from Bohemia, in what would now be the Czech Republic. The Shimerdas are immigrants who know very little about farming. And Nebraska isn’t yet the global breadbasket it would later become.

“There was nothing but land,” Cather writes. “Not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.”

Ántonia’s family sets out to make the country, alongside immigrants named Pavel and Peter, Otto and Ole, Lena and Yulka. In 1888, the Nebraska State Journal noted that “the great west has received the largest share of the immigration which has poured into this country since the last census was taken,” roughly doubling populations in the Western states.

These were the people who made the Midwest great. Their English, on arrival, was generally poor or nonexistent. Their skills were often ill-suited to the needs of the places to which they came. Their religious beliefs were not those of their American neighbors. They were accused of being clannish, and they were not always grateful to be here.

“He not want to come, nev-er!” Ántonia says of her father, after the young American narrator in the story opines, “People who don’t like this country ought to stay at home.” That sounds familiar.

The immigrants came, for the most part, because they were fleeing hard circumstances, much as immigrants from Central America do today. But they also came because our borders were practically open until 1882, when the Chinese Exclusion Act was shamefully passed.

Otherwise, the American dream was available to anyone who could pay a 50-cent tax (about $12 in current dollars) and was not a “convict, lunatic, idiot or any person unable to take care of himself or herself without becoming a public charge.” The Immigration Act of 1891 [PDF] slightly expanded the list of proscribed persons, but not by much, and went out of its way to welcome political asylees.

To fourth- or fifth-generation Americans who now say their ancestors came here legally, unlike today’s undocumented workers, that’s largely because the getting in was easy. Today, the average wait-time for an immigrant visa is about six years and can stretch past a decade, according to the Cato Institute’s David Bier — time desperate people usually don’t have.

What hasn’t changed is that immigrants, on the whole, succeed. “Foreign farmers in our county were the first to become prosperous,” Cather’s (grown-up) narrator notes. “After the fathers were out of debt, the daughters married the sons of neighbors — usually of like nationality — and the girls who once worked in… kitchens are to-day managing big farms and fine families of their own.” Yet many of the locals saw them as “ignorant people who couldn’t speak English.” That sounds familiar, too.

To read My Ántonia more than a century after its publication is a reminder of the timelessness of America’s bigotries, whose loudest and most dangerous champion sits in the White House.

But, more powerfully, Cather’s novel is a story of a country that can overcome prejudice. The narrator’s grandfather offers succor to the destitute Shimerdas, forgives them their debts, puts petty quarrels aside, and consoles them in their grief. After Ántonia’s father commits suicide, he prays “that if any man there had been remiss toward the stranger come to a far country, God would forgive him and soften his heart.”

It’s in such moments that “My Ántonia” becomes an education in what it means to be American: to have come from elsewhere, with very little; to be mindful, amid every trapping of prosperity, of how little we once had, and were; to protect and nurture those newly arrived, wherever from, as if they were our own immigrant ancestors — equally scared, equally humble, and equally determined.

That’s the “real America” that today’s immigrant-bashers, starting with the president, pretend to venerate and constantly traduce. You don’t have to favor sanctuary cities and the abolition of ICE to be on the right side of this debate. But you do have to recognize that the newest immigrants have as much claim to the country and its lawful freedoms as any other American. That would certainly include Minnesota’s Representative Ilhan Omar, whose rights must be defended every bit as vigorously as many of her views should be opposed.

That we have a president who doesn’t believe this, and a party bending constantly to his prejudices, is a stain on the United States. We can erase it by recalling what we’re really about, starting by re-reading My Ántonia. ###

[Bret L. Stephens joined The New York Times as an Op-Ed columnist in April 2017, joining The Times after a long career with The Wall Street Journal, where he was most recently deputy editorial-page editor and, for 11 years, foreign affairs columnist. He is the author of America in Retreat: The New Isolationism and the Coming Global Disorder (2014). See his other books here. Stephens received a BA (political philosophy) from the University of Chicago (IL) as well as an MS (comparative politics) from the London School of Economics (UK).]

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