Sunday, April 30, 2017

Memorial lines from the WHCD

Memorable lines delivered by Hasan Minhaz at the White House Correspondents Dinner:

On Vladimir Putin:
"We have to address the elephant not in the room. The leader of our country is not here. But that's because he's in Moscow."

On Trump's frequent golfing outings:
"Every time Trump goes golfing, the headline should read, 'Trump golfing. Apocalypse delayed. Take the W.'"

Roasting Trump

Hasan Minhaj’s Trump-bashing comedy routine at the White House correspondents’ dinner, annotated
"I get why Donald Trump didn’t want to be roasted tonight. By the looks of him, he has been roasting nonstop for the past 70 years,” Minhaj said

Marginalia


The Necessity of Marginalia in the Age of the Ebook

Marginalia
Francis Bacon once remarked, “some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.”
Reading and writing often go hand in hand. Reading is not a passive skill but rather an active one.
One of the ways we chew and digest what we're reading is to comment on something someone else has written. We do this through Marginalia — the broken fragments of thought that appear scribbled in the margins of books. These fragments help us connect ideas, translate jargon, and spur critical thinking. (One notable downside though, giving away books becomes harder because often these fragments are intimate arrows into my thinking.)
In the world of ebooks, the future of marginalia and reading looks different. With electronic reading devices, the ease of inserting these thought fragments has diminished. I have Kindle and while I'm trying to use it more, there are issues. By the time I've highlighted a section, clicked on make a note, and labored intensively at the keyboard, I've often lost the very thought I was trying to capture. (Ebooks, however, make certain things easier, like searching.)
This excerpt from How to Read a Book, written in the 40s, captures the necessity of marginalia to reading.
When you buy a book, you establish a property right in it, just as you do in clothes or furniture when you buy and pay for them. But the act of purchase is actually only the prelude to possession in the case of a book. Full ownership of a book only comes when you have made it a part of yourself, and the best way to make yourself a part of it— which comes to the same thing— is by writing in it.
Why is marking a book indispensable to reading it? First, it keeps you awake— not merely conscious, but wide awake. Second, reading, if it is active , is thinking, and thinking tends to express itself in words, spoken or written. The person who says he knows what he thinks but cannot express it usually does not know what he thinks. Third, writing your reactions down helps you to remember the thoughts of the author.
Reading a book should be a conversation between you and the author. Presumably he knows more about the subject than you do; if not, you probably should not be bothering with his book. But understanding is a two-way operation; the learner has to question himself and question the teacher. He even has to be willing to argue with the teacher, once he understands what the teacher is saying. Marking a book is literally an expression of your differences or your agreements with the author. It is the highest respect you can pay him.

The First 100 Days


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The Specter of Illegitimacy Haunts Trump’s First 100 Days

By 
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Approaching his 100th day in office, Donald Trump displays maps showing the large amounts of land occupied by his supporters. Photo: Carlos Barria/Reuters
Donald Trump narrowly won his party’s nomination despite the clear misgivings of his party’s professional class, which viewed him as erratic, uninformed, and dangerous. He won the presidency despite losing by an unprecedented three million votes nationwide, with the benefit of extraordinary interventions by the FBI director and Russian intelligence to help criminalize and discredit his opponent. All these things add up to a crisis of legitimacy. And yet, rather than confronting the crisis of legitimacy hovering over them, all the actions Trump and his governing partners have taken over their first 100 days have deepened it.
Trump may have few traditionally defined achievements so far, but he has redefined the institution he occupies. Before Trump it would have been outrageous for a president to withhold his tax returns, and unthinkable for one to retain business holdings in office. Breaching both of those bygone norms together has created a change much larger than the sum of the two. He has constructed a full-on nontransparent oligarchy. The arrangement is more easily recognizable to autocrats than to Americans, which is why China’s government identified Jared Kushner as what is known in their system as a “princeling.”
Trump’s Republican allies have shut down Democratic bills to compel the president to disclose his tax returns, and raised no objection as his family has used his office to leverage their brand across the country and the globe. They have likewise slow-walked investigations into whether his campaign colluded openly with Russian hackers, or whether it was simply the unwitting beneficiary. Whatever comes out, the already-public evidence — from the financial ties between Russia and numerous Trump advisers, to Trump’s open exhortation for Russia to hack his opponent’s emails — implies the most devious subversion of the national interest since Richard Nixon covertly sabotaged the 1968 peace talks in Vietnam.
The most shocking degradation of office is the lowering of the standards of the office he has carried out. Whatever doubts Trump inspired about his fitness for office seem naïve in comparison to what has transpired. The president is childlike, impulsive, ignorant, and ostentatiously lazy. He refuses either to perform his job or to delegate it to others. Instead, his staff tiptoes around as though they have taken custody of a child monarch. “If you’re an adviser to him, your job is to help him at the margins,” one Trump friend told Politico. “To talk him out of doing crazy things.”
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One might even posit that Trump hates this job altogether, but how much?
There is an endless supply of alarmed anecdotes and leaks from inside the administration attesting to this, yet nobody within the administration has quit to warn the public of the president’s dangerous unsuitability. Indeed, essentially all the leaks about his dysfunctional performance have appeared in the mainstream media, which the Republican base has spent years learning to ignore. Trump has held his base because he still commands the loyalty of party officials, and within the conservative news bubble he remains the decisive, alpha-male executive he played (and still tries to play) on television. This may explain why Trump’s tweeting is one of the few aspects of his performance Republican voters dislike — it is their sole, tiny window into his pathology.
The bond fastening Trump with his governing partners is their mutual determination to exploit their majority to the hilt. Republicans routinely depict his popular-vote defeat as a kind of acclamation victory. (“The president won overwhelmingly,” insisted Chief of Staff Reince Priebusrecently, in the sort of absurd lie that has grown so routine that it is no longer corrected.) They have continued to try to jam through a horrific health-care plan, even though three-fifths of the public prefers keeping and improving Obamacare to repealing and replacing it, and less than one-fifth approves of the specific Republican alternative. While three-quarters of the country believes that the wealthy and corporations don’t pay a high enough tax rate, Republicans have made it their priority to reduce it. They have blocked an independent investigation of the president’s ties to Russia even though 73 percent of the public wants to establish an independent investigation.
Trump seems never to have considered the possibility of moving toward the center and working with Democrats on policy. Nor have Republicans shown any inclination to cooperate with Democratic demands to conduct basic oversight of Trump’s corruption and scandals. These two decisions, no oversight and no bipartisan legislation, seem linked. The implicit threat of exposing Trump to investigations is the lever Republicans in Congress have to ensure his fealty to conservative movement dogma rather than adopt more moderate and popular policies. This pact to maintain the Republican monopoly on power at all costs is a strategy shaped by the legitimacy crisis of the Trump presidency.
The story of Trump’s 100 days is in many ways a cheerful one for large- and small-d democrats alike. Trump’s authoritarian tendencies amount to little more than a verbal tic. The party’s legislative agenda has proven astonishingly inept. He attacks journalists as enemies of the people and dismisses the legal authority of the courts, but has proven either unwilling or unable to follow through.
Yet while the fears of what Trump might do to the country out of malevolence have subsided, the fears of what he might do to it out of incompetence have grown. Trump became president because America’s political institutions failed. What remains to be seen is whether those institutions can separate Trump’s failure from the country’s

Saturday, April 29, 2017

Trump's Bogus 100 Days


Wonkblog

The 32-word history of Trump’s first 100 days

  
President Trump surprised everyone by announcing that he'd take a break from pretending he had a [fill in the blank] plan to pretend he had a [fill in the blank] plan,  instead.
That has been the 32-word history of Trump's first 100 days. This week, those blanks are "health-care reform" and "tax reform." Last week, they were "tax reform" and "health-care reform." And the one before that, they were, you guessed it, "health-care reform" and "tax reform." The problem, you see, is that Trump doesn't know enough about what he's trying to negotiate to, well, negotiate. The result is an ouroboros of incompetence that even the most naive people inclined to take Trump's words at face value — Wall Street traders — have begun to tune out.
Take taxes. It wasn't long ago that Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin told the Financial Times that it was "highly aggressive to not realistic" to expect a bill to pass before August. A few days later, though, Trump, to the consternation of his advisers, said that they would unveil the details of their plan by this Wednesday. Now, if this sounds as though Trump just wanted to be able to say that he had "done" taxes before his first 100 days had passed, well, that's because it was. And so the administration has scrambled to come up with the outline of a tax plan that's more or less the same as the one that has been on Trump's website for months now: cutting the corporate tax rate from 35 to 15 percent, slashing individual tax rates across the board, and expanding the standard deduction, big-league.
This attempt to create the illusion of progress is a longtime Trump tactic. As Business Insider's Josh Barro points out, Trump's "The Art of the Deal" brags about how he supposedly tricked Holiday Inn into going into business with him on a casino by having construction crews dig holes and fill them up, making it look as if he was already building it when he wasn't. But assuming that worked then — maybe they thought it was a good deal except for the fact that Trump's workers seemed so inept? — it can't now. That's because you can't threaten to go it alone in government, as you can in business. Trump can work on his tax plan as much as he likes, but he still can't pass it without Congress. And, whether or not he has noticed, they have their own ideas, which they're not going to give up just because he made a big to-do about having some of his own.

Trump thought presidency 'would be easier'

 
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In an interview on April 27, President Trump said he misses aspects of his life before the presidency and that he thought being president "would be easier." (Patrick Martin/The Washington Post)
It's not just that Trump doesn't understand how to negotiate. It's that he doesn't understand what he's trying to negotiate, either. That has been pretty clear when it comes to health care, where Trump knows so little about his own plan that he doesn't realize he has been trying to get Republicans who think it's too stingy to agree with Republicans who think it isn't stingy enough.
But the same sort of thing is true of taxes. The big question there is whether Republicans want to try to permanently reduce tax rates a little or temporarily reduce them a lot. That's due to the rules for what's known as budget reconciliation. Republicans can pass a bill with 51 votes rather than the 60 it takes to break a filibuster — a bar they can't clear — if, and only if, their bill doesn't add to the deficit after a decade. Trump, though, has proposed a corporate tax cut that's too big to pay for and too long-lasting to work with the reconciliation rules. Indeed, the scorekeepers at the Joint Committee on Taxation say that even a three-year corporate tax cut would cost money outside the 10-year budget window. Trump, in other words, has started with a nonstarter. Bad!
The only surprising thing about any of this is that anyone is surprised by it anymore. After all, Trump hasn't filled most of the spots — the undersecretaries and assistant secretaries you can't brag about appointing in your first 100 days — who do the actual work of making policy. Even if he had, though, Trump still wouldn't understand those policies well enough himself to be able to horse-trade their way through Congress. Which, of course, assumes that Trump does in fact know how to make deals, great or otherwise, when the available evidence suggests that he does not.
And so that leaves us with the second part of the history of Trump's first 100 days:
President Trump tweeted that his [fill in the blank] plan is going to be [better/the best], that people are saying [great/terrific] things about how [great/terrific] it is, that they shouldn't believe the fake media that say [it isn't close to passing/would cost 24 million people their health insurance/would blow up the deficit], and that it's all going so well that, for now, he's going back to work on his plan to [fill in the blank].

Friday, April 28, 2017

Arkansas Executes 4th Inmate In 8 Days

NPR
28 April 2017

Arkansas has put to death convicted murderer Kenneth Williams. His was the last of a series of executions accelerated because the state's lethal-injection drugs were about to expire.

Williams was pronounced dead at 11:05 p.m. Central time after the execution began at 10:52 p.m., Arkansas Public Media reports.

State officials initially scheduled eight condemned inmates to die over 11 days — the fastest pace of executions in decades. Some executions were blocked by the courts.

The state accelerated the schedule because its supply of midazolam expires at the end of April and has been hard to acquire for death penalty purposes.

Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson pressed for the fast pace of executions and said that they are a way to bring justice for the families of the victims. In a statement issued shortly after officials announced Williams' execution had been carried out, Hutchinson said:

"The long path of justice ended tonight and Arkansans can reflect on the last two weeks with confidence that our system of laws in this state has worked. Carrying out the penalty of the jury in the Kenneth Williams case was necessary. There has never been a question of guilt."

Family members of the victim thanked Gov. Hutchinson and the Arkansas Department of Correction for "flawlessly carrying out" the execution, member station KUAR Public Radio reports.

Williams "lurched and convulsed 20 times during the lethal injection," according to an Associated Press reporter who witnessed the execution. "A prison spokesman said he shook for approximately 10 seconds, about three minutes into the procedure," the AP reports.

The spokesman for Gov. Hutchinson, J.R. Davis, responded that Williams' reaction was a "known" involuntary reaction to one of the drugs used, KUAR reports.

Critics have characterized the packed schedule as reckless and error-prone. Hours before the execution, Williams' lawyers continued to try to stop it.

A filing Thursday morning at the Circuit Court of Pulaski County said Williams had medical conditions such as "sickle cell trait, Lupus and organic brain damage" that make complications more likely during an execution by lethal injection.

Ultimately the U.S. Supreme Court, in a two-sentence order issued late Thursday night, denied the application for a stay of execution, clearing the way for the execution to proceed.

Williams, 38, was "serving a life sentence for the 1998 murder of a college student when he escaped from prison and killed a local farmer, for which he was sentenced to death," KUAR's Chris Hickey tells our Newscast unit.

"All of his crimes were described as random with money as the motive," according to local broadcaster Fox 16. The station added that he was moved to the Cummins unit Wednesday in preparation for the execution.

On Monday night, Arkansas put to death two inmates — Marcel Williams and Jack Jones Jr. It was the first double execution in the U.S. in 17 years. As The Two-Way previously reported:

"Of the four executions scheduled prior to Monday, three were ultimately stayed. One man, Ledell Lee, was killed last week, just four minutes before his death warrant was set to expire; it was the first execution Arkansas carried out in 12 years."

NPR's James Doubek contributed to this report.

Thursday, April 27, 2017

The Games of Trump

Donald Trump’s North Korea briefing was a political stunt to get senators to come to him

"I didn't hear anything new," John McCain told CNN about Trump's emergency North Korea summit at the White House 

The Same Old Republican Con Job

Trump release an outline of his so-called tax reform proposal.  It's the same old Republican tax cut for the wealthiest with enough sop thrown in to get the rest of us to fall for it.  Nothing changes in the Republican world

Tuesday, April 25, 2017

The Cruelest Month?

April is not necessarily the cruelest month, but its faints and dives and false starts does give me reasons to wonder.

Monday, April 24, 2017

Old Times Here Are Not Forgotten

Attention, Alabamians!
Monday, April 24 is Confederate Memorial Day in Alabama.
Only two states - Alabama and Mississippi - continue to mark the day with an official state holidays. Georgia ended its commemoration of Confederate Memorial Day in 2015, replacing it with a day dubbed "State Holiday." Other states, including Florida and South Carolina, mark the day at different times, but not as a state holiday.
The day traces its roots back to 1866 when the Ladies Memorial Association of Columbus, Georgia passed a resolution to set aside a day to honor Confederate soldiers who lost their lives in the Civil War.
How shall I celebrate? I need to do something as a native Alabamian After all, old times here are not forgotten. Put Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Sweet Home Alabama" on my iPod? Oh shucks. I don't own an iPod. Go down to Clanton and pick some strawberries? Wave the Confederate flag? Only problem is that I don't have one. Only Alabama and Mississippi. Go figure.