;)
The Commentariat -- January 1, 2018
Washington Post readers choose their 2017 quote of the year. They also name several other reader favorites. AND the winner is: "
You're saying it's a falsehood, and they're giving -- our press secretary, Sean Spicer, gave alternative facts to that. -- Kellyanne Conway to Chuck Todd, January 22, 2017 ...
Daniella Diaz of CNN: "Veteran journalist Carl Bernstein said Sunday that ... Donald Trump's lawyers are telling him what he wants to hear about the probe ending soon to prevent Trump from firing [Robert] Mueller. 'There are many times he has expressed, I'm told by people in the White House, the desire to fire Mueller, the desire to pardon people under investigation including his family,' Bernstein, a CNN contributor, told CNN's Dana Bash on 'State of the Union.' 'His lawyers are telling him what he wants to hear -- that's what I'm told -- by lawyers in the White House..., to keep him from acting precipitously and to go off and fire Mueller in a rage, or fire (Deputy Attorney General) Rod Rosenstein in a rage. They have an out-of-control client.'" ...
... Amy Remeikis of the Guardian: "The Australian prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, has not denied a report that information from senior diplomat Alexander Downer helped spark the FBI investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 US election." ...
... Here's some background on Downer. ...
... Karoun Demirjian of the Washington Post: "Rep. Devin Nunes, once sidelined by an ethics inquiry from leading the House Intelligence Committee's Russia probe, is reasserting the full authority of his position as chairman just as the GOP appears poised to challenge special counsel Robert S. Mueller III's investigation.... Nunes has stepped up his attacks on Mueller's team and the law enforcement agencies around it, including convening a group of Intelligence Committee Republicans to draft a likely report on 'corruption' among the investigators working for the special counsel. Although Nunes has not officially wrested his panel's Russia probe back from the Republicans he deputized to run it, the chairman's reemergence as a combative Trump loyalist has raised alarm among Democrats that the future of the investigation may be clipped short or otherwise undermined. Even some of Nunes's GOP allies [like Trey Gowdy (S.C.)] have expressed concern about his tactics, prompting rare public warnings that he should temper his attacks on federal law enforcement.... Last month..., Nunes began threatening contempt citations for FBI Director Christopher A. Wray and Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein.... Nunes's moves coincide with what Democrats say is a coordinated GOP effort to shutter the House Intelligence Committee's Russia probe, publicly absolve President Trump of the most serious allegations against him, and refocus the House's resources against the law enforcement officials ... who continue to investigate Trump."
Rachel Tillman of ABC News: "The United States faces a greater threat of nuclear conflict on the Korean peninsula than at any previous time, said a former head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under both presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. 'We're actually closer in my view, to a nuclear war with North Korea and in that region than we have ever been,' Ret. Navy Adm. Michael Mullen told ABC News 'This Week' co-anchor Martha Raddatz in an interview Sunday. 'I don't see the opportunities to solve this diplomatically at this particular point.'... 'I think President Trump has made China move more than they have in the past. Whether they continue to do that to help resolve this is the open question,' he said. 'A real measure of how this all comes out is whether China is going to commit to a peaceful resolution here. If they don't, then I worry a great deal that it's much more likely there will be conflict.'" ...
... Simon Denyer of the Washington Post: "North Korean leader Kim Jong Un boasted in an annual New Year's Day speech Monday that he had a nuclear button on his desk and that the entire United States was within range of his weapons -- but he also vowed not to attack unless threatened. Kim promised to focus this year on producing nuclear warheads and missiles for operational deployment." ...
... Choe Sang-Hun of the New York Times: "North Korea's leader, Kim Jong-un, moved Monday to ease his country's isolation by offering to send a delegation to the Winter Olympics in South Korea next month, even as he claimed to have accomplished the ability to launch a nuclear missile at the mainland United States. Mixing the nuclear threat with an overture for easing tensions on the divided Korean Peninsula, Mr. Kim proposed immediate dialogue with South Korea to discuss the North's participation in the Olympics. If such talks were held, they would mark the first time the two Koreas have had an official dialogue since the South's new president, Moon Jae-in, took office in May. Mr. Moon has doggedly championed dialogue with the North, even as President Trump has threatened military action to stop the North's nuclear weapons program."
Oliver Milman of the Guardian: "For the first time in more than 40 years, the largest source of greenhouse gas pollution in the US isn't electricity production but transport -- cars, trucks, planes, trains and shipping. Emissions data has placed transport as the new king of climate-warming pollution at a time when the Trump administration is reviewing or tearing up regulations that would set tougher emissions standards for car and truck companies. Republicans in Congress are also pushing new fuel economy rules they say will lower costs for American drivers but could also weaken emissions standards.... Americans are buying larger cars and taking more flights -- domestic aviation emissions grew 10% between 2012 and 2016 -- and face little opposition in doing so."
Quinta Jurecic in a Washington Post op-ed: "Under E. Scott Lloyd, the antiabortion activist appointed by President Trump to lead the [Office of Refugee Resettlement], ORR has prohibited pregnant undocumented minors from attending counseling at anywhere other than 'life-affirming' crisis pregnancy centers. In fact, Lloyd requires federally funded shelters to request his personal permission before 'facilitating' any access to abortion. What's most striking about Lloyd's memo refusing [to allow 'Jane Poe' to have an abortion] ... is the utter lack of legal analysis. As a person within the United States, Poe had a constitutional right to an abortion. But Lloyd focused instead on his own religious convictions. 'To decline to assist in an abortion here is to decline to participate in violence against an innocent life,' he wrote. 'Moral and criminal responsibility for the pregnancy lies with [Poe's] attacker, and no one else.'... Lloyd's memo displays this same confusion between ORR's responsibilities as a government agency and Lloyd's imagined role as a private guardian."
AP: "Minnesota Lt. Gov. Tina Smith [D] is vowing to 'hit the ground running' as she joins the U.S. Senate this week while preparing to run in November. Gov. Mark Dayton [D] appointed Smith, his second-in-command, to replace Democratic Sen. Al Franken, who announced his resignation after a string of sexual misconduct allegations. The resignation takes effect Tuesday; Smith will be sworn in by former Vice President Walter Mondale on Wednesday.... Smith plans to run for the remaining two years of Franken's term in a special election in November, just 10 months away." Mrs. McC: You can't call her Al.
Ben Casselman of the New York Times: "Democrats in high-cost, high-tax states are plotting ways to do what their states' representatives in Congress could not: blunt the impact of the newly passed Republican tax overhaul. Governors and legislative leaders in New York, California and other states are considering legal challenges to elements of the law that they say unfairly single out parts of the country. They are looking at ways of raising revenue that aren't penalized by the new law. And they are considering changing their state tax codes to allow residents to take advantage of other federal tax breaks -- in effect, restoring deductions that the tax law scaled back. One proposal would replace state income taxes, which are no longer fully deductible under the new law, with payroll taxes on employers, which are deductible. Another idea would be to allow residents to replace their state income tax payments with tax-deductible charitable contributions to their state governments."
Adam Liptak of the New York Times: "Responding to the retirement of a prominent appeals court judge accused of sexual harassment, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said the federal court system must do more to protect law clerks and other employees from abusive conduct. 'Events in recent months have illuminated the depth of the problem of sexual harassment in the workplace,' the chief justice wrote in his year-end report on the state of the federal judiciary, released Sunday, 'and events in the past few weeks have made clear that the judicial branch is not immune.' That was an unmistakable reference to the sudden retirement of Judge Alex Kozinski two weeks ago after The Washington Post reported that some 15 women had accused him of sexual harassment.... Chief Justice Roberts said he had assembled a task force to examine whether the court system's procedures for addressing inappropriate conduct were adequate."
Bigot-in-Chief Loses Court Fight. Amanda Arnold of New York: "After Donald Trump attempted to bar transgender people from joining the U.S. military this July, various civil-rights groups and five transgender soldiers sued his administration, with four federal courts blocking the ban. Starting tomorrow, transgender people will be able to openly enroll, the Week reports. Two days ago, the Department of Justice announced that it would not appeal two rulings in Washington and Virginia that blocked Trump's ban. Pentagon spokesperson Heather Babb confirmed to Reuters in a statement that on January 1, transgender recruits will be accepted."
Steve Lohr of the New York Times: "For the first time, helped by recent advances in artificial intelligence, researchers [at Stanford University] are able to analyze large quantities of images, pulling out data that can be sorted and mined to predict things like income, political leanings and buying habits. In the Stanford study, computers collected details about cars in the millions of images it processed, including makes and models.... By pulling the vehicles' makes, models and years from the images, and then linking that information with other data sources, the project was able to predict factors like pollution and voting patterns at the neighborhood level.By pulling the vehicles' makes, models and years from the images, and then linking that information with other data sources, the project was able to predict factors like pollution and voting patterns at the neighborhood level.... This kind of research, if it expands, will raise issues of data access and privacy. The Stanford project only made predictions about neighborhoods, not about individuals."
Beyond the Beltway
Tom McGhee of the Denver Post: "The gunman who killed a Douglas County[, Colorado,] deputy and wounded four law enforcement officers Sunday ambushed them after they responded to a domestic disturbance call at a Highlands Ranch apartment complex, Sheriff Tony Spurlock said. 'He knew we were coming,' Spurlock said. He said the gunman used a rifle and fired at least 100 rounds. The gunman, identified as a 37-year-old former soldier and lawyer, was killed in a shootout with officers.... After the officers entered the suspect's apartment, he barricaded himself inside a bedroom and then unleashed a volley of gunfire. All the officers were wearing bulletproof vests but were struck in unprotected parts of their bodies.... Spurlock said the gunman had no apparent criminal history, but he was well known to law enforcement. Spurlock declined to provide further details. The sheriff's office identified the gunman as Matthew Riehl, an Iraq war veteran who has posted a number of anti-law-enforcement videos on YouTube."
Adam Elmahrek of the Los Angeles Times: "An Imperial County high school football player must be allowed to kneel during the singing of the national anthem and can't be ordered by his school to stand for the performances, a federal court has ruled. The decision temporarily strikes down rules set by the San Pasqual Valley Unified School District that prohibited 'kneeling, sitting or similar forms of political protest' at athletic events and required students and coaches to 'stand and remove hats/helmets ... during the playing or singing of the National Anthem,' according to the Dec. 21 ruling by the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California. The school district set the rules after students from a rival high school in neighboring Arizona yelled racial slurs at San Pasqual Valley High School students and threatened to force the football player at the center of the controversy to stand, the ruling said." The player who knelt was Native American. Students at the school "are primarily Native American and Latino." Students at the Arizona school are primarily white.
Brian Melley of the AP: "Californians may awake on New Year's Day to a stronger-than-normal whiff of marijuana as America's cannabis king lights up to celebrate the state's first legal retail pot sales. The historic day comes more than two decades after California paved the way for legal weed by passing the nation's first medical marijuana law, though other states were quicker to allow the drug's recreational use." Mrs. McC: The headline is (probably unintentionally) funny: "Anticipation high as California rolls out retail pot sales."
Daniel Politi of Slate: "An elementary school in Cache Valley, Utah fired an art teacher after claiming that students became uncomfortable by postcards that depicted classical paintings, a few of which contained nudity. One parent even called the police, accusing the teacher of showing the students pornography.... [Teacher] Mateo Rueda had fifth and sixth grade students ... go to the library and look through art books and boxes of postcards so they could select which paintings best exemplified the color relationships they had been studying. That's when Rueda realized that some of the postcards, which he claims had been in the library long before he started teaching there, included some nude paintings.... He took some of the nude pictures back and then went through the pack to remove paintings he thought were inappropriate. Still, he explained to the students that nudity in art is normal.... One anonymous school official told the local Herald Journal that the firing had more to do with the way the teacher talked about the nudity than the nudity itself." ...
... Mrs. McCrabbie: Looks to me like a clearcut case of wrongful termination. If those prudish yokels didn't want the kiddies to see portraits of nude or semi-nude bodies, maybe they shouldn't have made them available in the school library. Did they fire the librarian, too?
Way Beyond
Nasser Karimi & Jon Gambrell of the AP: "At least 12 people have been killed in the ongoing protests in Iran, and armed protesters have tried to take over police stations and military bases, state TV reported Monday.... The state TV report said 10 were killed during clashes Sunday night, without elaborating. Two demonstrators were killed during a protest in western Iran late Saturday." ...
... Martin Fackler & Rick Gladstone of the New York Times: "After four days of rare protests that shook Iran, President Hassan Rouhani tried to calm the nation on Sunday, saying that people had the right to protest and acknowledging public concerns over the economy and corruption.... But he also exhorted Iranians not to resort to violence, after reports of protesters attacking banks and municipal buildings across the nation, including a local government building in Tehran."
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Reader Comments (4)
While I have no doubt about the Russian game in our election, I doubted there was any 'collusion'. Thanks to Trump, Nunes and others it looks like I might be wrong. Do these idiots have no idea that trying to hide something is serious evidence there is something to hide?
"They have an out-of-control client.'" which means we have an out of control president.
And welcome to 2018, also known as Trump2.
The firing of the art teacher in Cache Valley, Utah is emblematic of small town prudishness that always seems to disguise the moral and ethical failings of its dwellers.
Ian Frazer, writing about Larry McMurtry's Texas trilogies ("The Last Picture Show" one of many of Larry's books that became films, is in my estimation one of the most in-depth, beautifully rendered portrait of a small Texas town.) Frazer writes that what's hard about small towns is that, if you grow up in one, you have to leave when the growing up is through. You will probably never get to know any place better, you'll never get another language fixed as intricately in your heart. But if you stay you run the risk of a slow decay and a feeling of becoming invisible.
"I think of all the millions of kids who left those towns, and the kids who decided to stay––a perfectly reasonable option...Now those who left are probably blue, and those who stayed are probably red, and not much of anything about America today feels like home."
Zealots preventing abortion by young, helpless, immigrants is typical. The word abortion never passes the lips of the wealthy or even the middle class members that have family doctors.
An inconvenient pregnancy is a small medical problem that is quickly solved.
Minorities, the young, the working class, the poor are the people that have abortions. Roe passed because these people were being butchered by quacks in motel rooms and garages. Zealots would put the butchers back in business, providing punishment for a sin.
Carlyle
Don't think I'm merely imagining multiple links between the prudishness at play in Cache Valley's dismissal of the art teacher and a culture founded on the premise that intimate relations with a series of thirteen year old girls is divinely countenanced.
One of those links goes like this: Because of my unique relationship with God, my behavior is ordained. Yours, not similarly cloaked in my piety, is sinful.
That off my chest, thanks P.D., for the Frazier. When I read it last week was struck by the same passage because I am one of those youths who did leave a small town and its parochial comforts. I returned after some years of formal education and vastly informal experience in a distant land (in the early 1960's, all other lands were far) to circle the same area but deliberately stayed away from the home town itself---until so many years had passed that when I took a retirement job there only a few still there remembered me.
I thought it a neat trick. I learned you can go home again--if you wait long enough.
Happy New Year, All.
Would have said it last night, but was asleep by 10:30 PST.