Wednesday, February 28, 2018

Andy Borowitz


Trump Wonders Who Will Read Classified Documents Aloud to Him Now That Jared's Gone

Photograph by Drew Angerer / Getty

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—With Jared Kushner losing his top security clearance, Donald J. Trump is concerned that there will be no one to read classified documents aloud to him anymore, White House aides have confirmed.

The aides, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that Kushner's recitation of top-secret documents had become something of a bedtime ritual for Trump.

"Jared would kind of tuck him in and then start reading aloud a document about, say, North Korea's nuclear program or whatnot," one aide said. "It got to be something that the President would look forward to."

Whenever Kushner was away on business trips to the United Arab Emirates, China, or other foreign countries, other members of the White House staff would try to fill in for him at bedtime, but Trump would always petulantly reject them.

"He'd be, like, 'You're no good. I want Jared,' " the aide said.

According to the aide, Kushner had a "special way" of reading classified documents to Trump, "very slowly and leaving out any long words."

"He'd read in kind of a high, whispery voice that the President found soothing," the aide said. "Within seconds, he was fast asleep."



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Juan
 
Patriotism is not a short and frenzied outburst of emotion but the tranquil and steady dedication of a lifetime.
- Adlai Stevenson





Tuesday, February 27, 2018

Andy Borowitz


Trump Hides Under Desk After Diet Coke Can Opens Loudly

Photograph by Olivier Douliery / Pool / Getty

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—In a moment of high drama at the White House on Tuesday morning, Donald J. Trump dove under his desk after a can of Diet Coke opened with an unexpectedly loud sound.

Moments earlier, Trump had pressed a button on his desk, summoning Vice-President Mike Pence to the Oval Office to serve him the frosty beverage.

According to one aide, when Pence opened the can, it made "an unusually loud noise," sending Trump ducking under his desk in a millisecond.

At a news conference, minutes later, the press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, attempted to tamp down speculation that Trump had acted in a cowardly manner during the Diet Coke incident. "The President prudently repositioned himself under his desk in an aggressive crouch," she said. "He was ready for anything."

Pence agreed with her assessment. "The President was putting himself in a position where, if need be, he could defend the entire country against an attack," he said. "I, for one, am honored to serve a man of such valor."

The White House physician, Ronny Jackson, also had high praise for Trump. "He has the ability to flee a loud noise of a man half his age," the doctor said.




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Juan
 
Patriotism is not a short and frenzied outburst of emotion but the tranquil and steady dedication of a lifetime.
- Adlai Stevenson





Something to Know - 27 February



David Brooks seems to write a lot about the "Y" Generation (born between the 80s and the early 90s), probably because he has a daughter enrolled at Pitzer College.  This column is a brief visit with students who leave us with a sense, or at least what I think, of confusion as to what it is to be an American Citizen.  They inherit a country that is flawed, polarized, and rife with nothing of value.  It is almost as if the Constitution and Founding Fathers are some distant past not very well related to today.   Yes, we have done a lousy job of preparing the future for them.  The kids will be left to their own devices to pick some of the idealism and values that we have so diligently screwed up, and try to cobble something to live with.  The old days of just getting an education, getting a job, and not making any waves while securing a future are over.  

https://nyti.ms/2F8nkbi

Photo
Yale students gathered for a class about happiness in January. CreditMonica Jorge for The New York Times

I've been going around to campuses asking undergraduate and graduate students how they see the world. Most of the students I've met with so far are at super-competitive schools — Harvard, Yale, the University of Chicago and Davidson — so this is a tiny slice of the rising generation. Still, their comments are striking.

The first thing to say is that this is a generation with diminished expectations. Their lived experience includes the Iraq war, the financial crisis, police brutality and Donald Trump — a series of moments when the big institutions failed to provide basic security, competence and accountability. "We're the school shooting generation," one Harvard student told me. Another said: "Wall Street tanked the country and no one got punished. The same with government."

I found little faith in large organizations. "I don't believe in politicians; they have been corrupted. I don't believe in intellectuals; they have been corrupted," said one young woman at Yale. I asked a group of students from about 30 countries which of them believed that the people running their country were basically competent. Only one young man, from Germany, raised a hand. "The utopia of our parents is the dystopia of our age," a Harvard student said, summarizing the general distemper.

It's not that the students are hopeless. They are dedicating their lives to social change. It's just that they have trouble naming institutions that work. A number said they used to have a lot of faith in the tech industry, but they have lost much of it. "The Occupy strategy was such a visible failure, it left everyone else feeling disillusioned," one lamented. "We don't even have a common truth. A common set of facts," added another.

The second large theme was the loss of faith in the American idea. I told them that when I went to public school the American history curriculum was certainly liberal, but the primary emotion was gratitude. We were the lucky inheritors of Jefferson and Madison, Whitman and Lincoln, the Roosevelts, Kennedy and King. Our ancestors left oppression, crossed a wilderness and are trying to build a promised land.

They looked at me like I was from Mars. "That's the way powerful white males talk about America," one student said. When I asked how they were taught American history, a few said they weren't taught much of it.

"In my high school education the American Revolution was a rounding error," one young woman said. Others made it clear that the American story is mostly a story of oppression and guilt. "You come to realize the U.S. is this incredibly imperfect place." "I don't have a sense of being proud to be an American." Others didn't recognize an American identity at all: "The U.S. doesn't have a unified culture the way other places do," one said.

I asked them to name the defining challenge of their generation. Several mentioned the decline of the nation-state and the threats to democracy. A few mentioned inequality, climate change and a spiritual crisis of meaning. "America is undergoing a renegotiation of the terms of who is powerful," a woman from the University of Chicago astutely observed.

I asked the students what change agents they had faith in. They almost always mentioned somebody local, decentralized and on the ground — teachers, community organizers. A woman from Stockton, Calif., said she was hoping to return there. A woman from Morocco celebrated the uneducated local activists who operate from a position of no fear. They are just fighting for the basics — education, health care and food. "We want change agents that look like us. We want to see ourselves moving the country forward," one Chicago woman told me.

The students spent a lot of time debating how you organize an effective movement. One pointed out that today's successful movements, like Black Lives Matter and #MeToo, don't have famous figureheads or centralized structures. Some students embraced these dispersed, ground-up and spontaneous organizations. If they flame out after a few months, so what? They did their job. Others thought that, no, social movements have to grow institutional structures if they are going to last, and they have to get into politics if they are going to produce any serious change.

A woman from the Middle East at Yale's Jackson Institute noted that the Muslim Brotherhood spent decades debating whether to remain outside the system as a community organization or to go into politics. That was the sort of debate I saw playing out in front of me on campus after campus.

I came away from these conversations thinking that one big challenge for this generation is determining how to take good things that are happening on the local level and translate them to the national level, where the problems are. I was also struck by pervasive but subtle hunger for a change in the emotional tenor of life. "We're more connected but we're more apart," one student lamented. Again and again, students expressed a hunger for social and emotional bonding, for a shift from guilt and accusation toward empathy. "How do you create relationship?" one student asked. That may be the longing that undergirds all others.

 

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Juan
 
Patriotism is not a short and frenzied outburst of emotion but the tranquil and steady dedication of a lifetime.
- Adlai Stevenson





Monday, February 26, 2018

Andy Borowitz

Trump Orders Parade to Celebrate His Hypothetical Act of Heroism in Florida School



Photograph by Evan Vucci / Pool / Getty

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Shortly after he declared that he would have run into a Florida high school unarmed to thwart a mass shooting, Donald J. Trump announced that he was planning a parade in Washington, D.C., to celebrate his hypothetical act of heroism.

"Anyone can act with bravery in the moment," Trump told reporters in the White House. "But it takes a very special kind of hero to tell people about the incredibly brave thing he would have done weeks after the thing happened."

He added that it was one of his greatest regrets that bone spurs prevented him from serving in the Vietnam War, "because the really courageous things I would have done during that war would have been off the charts."

"As soon as the Tet Offensive happened, I would have run unarmed right into that mess," he said. "We probably would have won the war right after I did that."

Trump said that the parade he was ordering would honor not only him but all of America's "last responders."

According to a new poll, Trump's assertion that he would have run into the Florida high school unarmed was believed by his daughter Ivanka.




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Juan
 
Patriotism is not a short and frenzied outburst of emotion but the tranquil and steady dedication of a lifetime.
- Adlai Stevenson





Saturday, February 24, 2018

Something to Know - 24 February



Roger Cohen uses the characters of a Joseph Conrad short story to define White House Chief of Staff John Kelly.  In an exercise of journalistic prose, we are taken into the plot of a guy who is dealing with the demons of a character who sucking out the worst of his being.  You might enjoy this:


Photo
Chief of Staff John F. Kelly at the White House in October. CreditTom Brenner/The New York Times

In Joseph Conrad's great short story, "The Secret Sharer," the captain of a ship comes to harbor a secret. A murderer named Leggatt slips on board in the night, and the captain, without exactly knowing why, chooses to hide him in his cabin. Desperate to save the man, and safeguard his deception, the captain almost drives the ship aground as he steers it close enough to shore for the killer to plunge into the water and escape.

The captain, new to the ship, asks himself a question at the outset: "I wondered how far I should turn out faithful to that ideal conception of one's own personality every man sets up for himself secretly." Yet, faced by events that seem to awaken some personal demon, he is unmoored. "It was, in the night, as though I had been faced by my own reflection in the depths of a somber and immense mirror."

What does the captain see reflected that leads him to an almost fatal compromise? It could be a personal memory of some act of violence; it could be Leggatt's desperate humanity; it could even be that he draws this doppelgänger out of his subconscious, an apparition, as he anxiously embarks on a ship to which he is a stranger, with a crew he does not know.

I have been thinking of "The Secret Sharer" as I contemplate the American carnage of the Trump administration after 13 months. Everybody who serves President Trump is faced with his or her "own reflection in the depths of a somber and immense mirror." Everyone is compromised, whether fatally or not. How could it be otherwise serving a man who does not know the difference between reality and make-believe?

When it comes to Trump's intentions, there is, as Gertrude Stein remarked of her native Oakland, no there there; and so people are driven crazy trying to imagine what is.


Some, notably members of his own family, have survived, but none has escaped the moral toll of entwinement in the web of a man whose narcissism demands absolute power; whose greatest talent lies in inserting a knife into others' weak spots; and who, when asked by Joe Scarborough whom Trump talked to, responded: "The answer is me. Me. I talk to myself," according to Michael Wolff's "Fire and Fury."

It's natural, if misguided, to believe one can change somebody, especially if that somebody has come from nowhere to be president of the United States. Surely, Trump would come to learn elements of decorum. I've no doubt that Sean Spicer, Reince Priebus and Dina Powell, among others who have come and gone, believed they could help bring order. (Steve Bannon thought Trump should defer to his war plan for Western civilization, and thought itself was foreign to Anthony Scaramucci, but these are different issues.)

But in no case does the "somber and immense mirror" leading to dark compromise loom as large as in the case of Chief of Staff John F. Kelly, the retired four-star Marine general who moved from secretary of Homeland Security last summer to instill basic command principles at the White House.

Kelly was the straight shooter. He was the good soldier. He was the decent man dedicated to process. He was the moderate of strong traditional values. He was the adult in the room.

Except that he was not what he appeared to be and, once sucked into Trump's maelstrom of turpitude, another side of his nature began to emerge.

Kelly has, it turns out, an uncertain relationship with truth. He maligned a black congresswoman, Frederica S. Wilson, with a falsehood, and declined to apologize. He presented a misleading account of the departure of a staff secretary, Rob Porter, whom he admired but who was accused by two ex-wives of domestic violence.

This was consistent with Kelly's past defense of a Marine colonel accused of sexually harassing two female subordinates. Kelly called him a "superb Marine officer;" the man was later arrested for "indecent liberties with a child."

Some of Kelly's "sacred" values turn out to be pretty ugly.

Kelly led the zealous pursuit of the eviction of undocumented immigrants resulting in a doubling of "noncriminal" arrests in fiscal year 2017 by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents; he dismissed many kids eligible for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program as "too lazy to get off their asses;" and he evinces a Trump-like nostalgia for the world of "Mad Men," if not quite the 1860s world of the Confederacy.

Now, post-Porter, in what looks like an attempt at redemption, Kelly wants to take on Jared Kushner on the issue of White House security clearances.

But there is no redemption in Trump World. There is only the vortex. Kelly, like the captain, must have wondered "how far I should turn out faithful to that ideal conception of one's own personality every man sets up for himself secretly." He must be pondering, as the rocks loom, just how far he has fallen short and just what in his nature his acts betray.


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Juan
 
Patriotism is not a short and frenzied outburst of emotion but the tranquil and steady dedication of a lifetime.
- Adlai Stevenson





Friday, February 23, 2018

Something to Know - 23 February




The media is going uncontrollably nuts hashing out the news from Trump about arming classroom teachers to combat mass school shootings.  That is an insane idea, and originates from NRA propaganda from Wayne LaPierre at the CPAC mob rally.  There is absolutely no good to come from this idea.  The issues from the unintended consequence boggles the mind.  Somehow, I just can't picture my school teacher mother (a career teacher with the LAUSD), trying to hold a gun and firing it.   The big reason to offer this chum out for debate, is that it takes the pressure off of the cowardly legislators on their failure to do their jobs.   The best way to stop a bad idea is with some smart people with better ideas.

Photo
CreditRose Wong

President Trump on Thursday repeated his call for "highly trained" schoolteachers to pack heat in their classrooms. If they were armed, the president said, they could fire back immediately at school shooters like the young man with an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle who took 17 lives in Parkland, Fla. Beyond that, he tweeted, the knowledge that teachers have guns of their own would deter "the sicko" from heading to a school in the first place. With his usual fondness for capital letters, he added, "ATTACKS WOULD END!"

Thus did Mr. Trump parrot a tired shibboleth repeated once again on Thursday by Wayne LaPierre, the executive vice president of the National Rifle Association. "To stop a bad guy with a gun, it takes a good guy with a gun," Mr. LaPierre told a gathering of conservative activists. Actually, it's hard to tell who was parroting whom. The president said much the same in a morning tweetstorm that said "a 'gun free' school is a magnet for bad people."

Let's ask someone who's in the trenches every day what he thinks of arming teachers. "It's hard to begin to count the number of ways this is a bad idea," said Chris Magnus, police chief of Tucson.

For starters, the number of gunslinging educators would be huge. In the United States, there are about 3.5 million elementary and secondary school teachers in public and private institutions. Arming 20 percent of them, as Mr. Trump suggested, would mean 700,000 or so teachers with Glocks and the like on their hips — an armed force half as large as America's real armed forces on active duty. One can envision parents with the means to do so swiftly yanking their children out of that sort of environment.

More to the point, many deranged mass murderers expect to die themselves during their killing sprees. It's almost laughable to believe that the president's proposal would deter them.

"Why would we think someone who has those kinds of problems is going to make rational decisions based on the fact that someone in the school might be armed?" Chief Magnus said.

And then there's this inescapable reality: Teachers are human. It means they would most likely react to stress-induced fear the same as anyone else, with unintended consequences that could put even more people in peril.

You want people highly trained in the use of firearms? The New York Police Department has about 36,000 of them. Generally, despite an impression held by some people, they are restrained in firing their weapons. But in high-stress situations, they're human, too. "Police officers miss a lot in combat situations," said John Cerar, a former commanding officer of the department's firearms and tactics section.

Nationwide statistics on police shooting accuracy are not to be found. But if New York is typical, analyses show that its officers hit their targets only one-third of the time. And during gunfights, when the adrenaline is really pumping, that accuracy can drop to as low as 13 percent. While Mr. Cerar thinks armed teachers could provide some deterrence, he said that experience shows, "Whatever you do, there's going to be a problem associated with it."

One problem is shooting bystanders. It isn't routine, but it does happen. To cite just one example, from 2012, two New York officers shot and killed a gunman on a busy street outside the Empire State Building. But they also wounded nine other people who were hit directly or struck by shrapnel from ricochets.

It takes little imagination to foresee a situation in which a frightened teacher, thrown into a combat situation — in a crowded space like a school hallway or classroom — wounds students in the process of trying to take out a gunman.

The best way to prevent the threat of a bad guy with a gun is to keep him from getting the sort of battlefield weapon the Parkland killer used, by banning assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, and by tightening background checks.

In his remarks, the mendacious Mr. LaPierre said gun restriction advocates seek to "eradicate all individual freedoms." In fact, sensible gun laws would give people, especially children, a better chance to enjoy the first of the inalienable rights mentioned in the Declaration of Independence: life.



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Juan
 
Patriotism is not a short and frenzied outburst of emotion but the tranquil and steady dedication of a lifetime.
- Adlai Stevenson