Guest post: None of the traits of intelligence, and all of the traits of enormous ego

Aug 4th, 2018 11:28 am | By

Originally a comment by iknklast on Shame.

One problem Trump has is that he doesn’t recognize the limits of his knowledge. When he “knows” something, he “knows” it better than anyone else, and anyone disagreeing with him must be wrong. He sees highly intelligent people as stupid because of categories (black, Mexican, woman, Muslim) that are arbitrary in most cases, and have nothing to do with intelligence. And these highly intelligent people speak in a way he cannot understand, and call out his lies, and disagree with him, and since he (DJT) knows everything, even things no one else knows, they must be wrong; therefore, stupid.

Even if they were wrong, being wrong doesn’t equate with being stupid, but only with being wrong. If you are able to realize and recognize the possibility that you might be wrong, that is a sign of intelligence. DJT cannot do that. If you are able to recognize that there are things you do not know, that is not stupid, it is a sign of intelligence. DJT cannot do that. If you are willing to spend hours on end learning, even about the field in which you are an acknowledged expert (because who knows everything even about their own field in this complicated world?), that is not a sign of being stupid, but a sign of being intelligent. DJT cannot do that. If you recognize that you can learn something from everyone, even the most uneducated, unskilled person might know something you don’t know, that is not a sign of being stupid, but a sign of being intelligent. DJT cannot do that.

Because Trump has none of the traits of intelligence, and all of the traits of enormous ego, he can only deal with his inability to engage with these smart people by calling them dumb. And his followers, many of whom also lack one or more of those traits listed in the above paragraph, follow right along with him, because pulling everyone else down underneath you (dumbest, not just dumb – they are all the -est) puts you at the top.

This isn’t to deny that the Trump followers have skill sets and knowledge, at least in their own fields, but to note that those do not necessarily equate to high order intelligence. It may not be in the basic knowledge that they are lacking, but in the ability to recognize their own limitations, and in their ability to have compassion for other people who are not like them.

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Compare

Aug 4th, 2018 10:17 am | By

To expand on the point a little, Trump’s fake “university” (yes fake AND scare quotes because it’s just that fake) charged thousands of dollars for real estate tips you could learn from a pamphlet.

Wikipedia:

Trump University (also known as the Trump Wealth Institute and Trump Entrepreneur Initiative LLC) was an American for-profit education company that ran a real estate training program from 2005 until 2010. It was owned and operated by The Trump Organization. (A separate organization, Trump Institute, was licensed by Trump University but not owned by the Trump Organization.) After multiple lawsuits, it is now defunct. It was founded by Donald Trump and his associates, Michael Sexton and Jonathan Spitalny, in 2004. The company offered courses in real estate, asset management, entrepreneurship, and wealth creation.[2]

The organization was not an accredited university or college. It did not confer college credit, grant degrees, or grade its students.[3]

…

Typically the instruction began with an introductory seminar in rented space such as a hotel ballroom. At the introductory seminar, students were urged to sign up for additional classes, ranging from $1495 seminars to a $35,000 “Gold Elite” program.[9] Records produced indicate 7611 tickets in total were sold to customers attending courses.[10] Approximately 6000 of these tickets were for a $1,500 3-day course and 1000 tickets were for silver, gold or elite mentored courses ranging in price from $10,000 to $35,000.[11][10]

Quartz has more details:

Trump has also opened a school. But in a class-action complaint filed against Trump in 2013, Trump University students alleged that the for-profit organization ripped them off. Among other things, the unaccredited “university” misrepresented Trump’s personal involvement and mischaracterized itself as an elite school with professors, they said.

Says one complaint:

Defendant uniformly misled Plaintiff and the Class that they would learn Donald Trump’s real estate secrets through him and his handpicked professors at his elite “University.” The misleading nature of the enterprise is embodied by its very name. That is because, though Defendant promised “Trump University,” he delivered neither Donald Trump nor a University.

The same complaint quotes marketing material from Trump:

We’re going to have professors and adjunct professors that are absolutely terrific. Terrific people. Terrific brains. Successful. The best. We are going to have the best of the best. And, honestly, if you don’t learn from them, if you don’t learn from me, if you don’t learn from the people that we’re going to be putting forward, and these are all people that are handpicked by me, then, you’re just not gonna make it in terms of the world of success. And that’s okay, but you’re not gonna make it in terms of success.

The New York State Education Department rebuked the now-defunct company for its misleading use of “university,” and the Better Business Bureau has never accredited the organization.

Now what about LeBron James’s school?

LeBron James returned to Ohio this week—but not to play for his former team, the Cleveland Cavaliers.

This time, he was back to welcome the inaugural class of the I Promise school, a public, non-charter school for at-risk kids in Akron, Ohio. James helped create the school via his foundation, the LeBron James Family Foundation, in partnership with Akron Public Schools. The school opened earlier this week to a group of 240 third- and fourth-grade students; by 2022, it is expected to accommodate children in first through eighth grades.

James was motivated to launch the school thanks to his own experience growing up as an inner-city kid in Ohio. As James told ESPN’s Rachel Nichols, part of the reason the school is beginning with kids in third- and fourth-grade is because that’s when he believes kids begin to succumb to chronic absenteeism and outside pressures. “In the fourth grade, I missed 80 days of school,” he told Nichols.

…

At the I Promise school, tuition is free for all students, who were randomly selected among all Akron public school students between one to two years behind their peers in reading. Students get free uniforms, free meals and snacks during the school day, and free transportation to school. Every kid also gets a free bicycle and helmet, as James has said that having access to his own set of wheels gave him a way to escape from dangerous parts of his neighborhood and the freedom to explore during his childhood. And in a nod to the realities of the way schoolwork gets done in the digital age, every kid gets a free Chromebook, too.

And there’s a food pantry, there’s help for parents looking for housing, there’s support for teachers, and more.

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Green light

Aug 4th, 2018 9:49 am | By

I’m seeing people say never mind what he tweets, focus on what he does – but what he says is what he does, and it’s far from mere fluff or distraction. His open shameless angry racism gives the green light to millions of other angry shameless racists, and they do things, from Charlottesville-type riots to not hiring or promoting or renting to people of Other Races to harassment and violence. The proud noisy ragey racism of the PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES encourages and incites racists everywhere. This shit matters.

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Shame

Aug 4th, 2018 9:13 am | By

Racist US president is at it again.

James is a basketball player; Lemon is a CNN news anchor. Both are African-American. This is our president: a deeply stupid corrupt white man who likes to use his position to call influential black people stupid. (See: Maxine Waters, repeatedly.)

Funny thing: I had no clue who Don Lemon was until Trump was elected. Trump’s election prompted me to watch his show now and then, and I tell you what, he is the opposite of “dumb.” It’s because of Trump that I know that.

I know; clearly Trump likes to call prominent highly intelligent black people “dumb” because he feels threatened by them, yadda yadda, but I really don’t care. I care about the scalding shame and disgrace that this loathsome turd of a man is “our” president.

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More bums in beds

Aug 3rd, 2018 4:50 pm | By

Well at least this mess is good for business at Trump’s hotel in Manhattan.

The general manager of the Trump International Hotel in Manhattan had a rare bit of good news to report to investors this spring: After two years of decline, revenue from room rentals went up 13 percent in the first three months of 2018.

What caused the uptick at President Trump’s flagship hotel in New York? One major factor: “a last-minute visit to New York by the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia,” wrote general manager Prince A. Sanders in a May 15 letter, which was obtained by The Washington Post.

The royals didn’t stay at Trump’s hotel because well, frankly, it’s crap, isn’t it, but they sent a crowd of underlings there.

The previously unreported letter — describing a five-day stay in March that was enough to boost the hotel’s revenue for the entire quarter — shows how little is known about the business that the president’s company does with foreign officials.

Such transactions have fueled criticism that Trump is reaping revenue from foreign governments, even as he controls U.S. foreign policy toward those countries.

Let’s put that less evasively, shall we? Such transactions demonstrate that Trump is indeed using the presidency to make money, in other words that he is acting corruptly.

Last week, a federal judge in Maryland gave the go-ahead to a lawsuit alleging that by accepting government business at his properties, Trump is violating the Constitution’s “emoluments clauses” — dusty 18th-century measures meant to prevent presidents from putting their private bank accounts ahead of the public interest.

If it stands, the ruling could force the company to provide new details about its relationships with foreign governments, states and even federal agencies.

Why hasn’t it come up before? I’m guessing it’s because most presidents are content to wait until after they leave office to start raking it in, because they actually don’t want to tarnish their reputations by selling Presidential Hotel Stays right alongside the more serious work they’re supposed to be doing.

On Friday, after this story was published online, New York Attorney General Barbara Underwood announced that she was already conducting a separate investigation asking if Trump had violated the emoluments clause at his businesses in New York.

…

Georgetown University law professor John Mikhail, who has been studying the emoluments clauses, said these inquiries together could shatter the veil of privacy that Trump’s company has maintained — even while its owner is in the White House.

“He has very constantly refused to conform to well-established norms about conflict of interest and corruption and the appearance of corruption,” Mikhail said. “At some point in time, he may be told by a court: ‘You lose. You have to comply.’”

Here’s hoping.

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Some sunny day

Aug 3rd, 2018 11:41 am | By

On the one hand CNN and the Post and the Times are The Enemy, and on the other hand…

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4,229 lies

Aug 3rd, 2018 11:18 am | By

Trump is lying more than ever.

As of day 558, he’s made 4,229 Trumpian claims — an increase of 978 in just two months.

That’s an overall average of nearly 7.6 claims a day.

When we first started this project for the president’s first 100 days, he averaged 4.9 claims a day. But the average number of claims per day keeps climbing the longer Trump stays in office. In fact, in June and July, the president averaged 16 claims a day.

Put another way: In his first year as president, Trump made 2,140 false or misleading claims. Now, just six months later, he has almost doubled that total.

He loves doing it, and so far he’s gotten away with it…plus of course he has no shred of any sense that he ought not to do it.

On July 5, the president reached a new daily high of 79 false and misleading claims. On a monthly basis, June and July rank in first and second place, with 532 and 446 claims, respectively.

Trump has a proclivity to repeat, over and over, many of his false or misleading statements. We’ve counted nearly 150 claims that the president has repeated at least three times, some with breathtaking frequency.

Much of it is on economics, where he takes credit for things he didn’t do; much is on immigration and “the wall”; much is on “the witch hunt” that is in no sense a witch hunt.

Misleading claims about taxes — now at 336 — are also a common feature of Trump’s speeches. Eighty-eight times, he has made the false assertion that he passed the biggest tax cut in U.S. history.

On foreign policy, the president consistently misstates NATO spending. More than 60 times, he has falsely said the United States pays as much as 90 percent of the alliance’s costs and that other NATO members “owe” money. But he is conflating overall defense spending with NATO obligations — and the United States, unlike many NATO allies, has global responsibilities.

Susan Glasser at the New Yorker:

These astonishing statistics were compiled by a small team overseen by Glenn Kessler, the editor and chief writer of the Post’s Fact Checker column, who for much of the last decade has been truth-squadding politicians and doling out Pinocchios for their exaggerations, misrepresentations, distortions, and otherwise false claims. At this point, Kessler practically has a Ph.D. in the anthropology of the Washington lie, a long and storied art form which has always had skilled practitioners of both parties. But Trump has challenged the Fact Checker, Kessler told me over coffee this week, in ways that have tested the very premise of the column. The President, for example, has a habit of repeating the same falsehoods over and over again, especially as they concern his core political causes, such as trade or immigration or getting European allies to contribute more to NATO. What should Kessler do, he often asks himself, when Trump repeats a four-Pinocchio whopper?

And what should we do? What can we do?

History books will likely declare the last few months a turning point in the Trump Presidency, and Kessler’s laborious work gives us metrics that confirm what is becoming more and more apparent: the recent wave of misstatements is both a reflection of Trump’s increasingly unbound Presidency and a signal attribute of it. The upsurge provides empirical evidence that Trump, in recent months, has felt more confident running his White House as he pleases, keeping his own counsel, and saying and doing what he wants when he wants to. The fact that Trump, while historically unpopular with the American public as a whole, has retained the loyalty of more than eighty per cent of Republicans—the group at which his lies seem to be aimed—means we are in for much more, as a midterm election approaches that may determine whether Trump is impeached by a newly Democratic Congress. At this point, the falsehoods are as much a part of his political identity as his floppy orange hair and the “Make America Great Again” slogan. The untruths, Kessler told me, are Trump’s political “secret sauce.”

Which makes sense because he’s always been famous for that, as well as for the vulgarity and bullying and cheating. He’s a big hit with his “base” because he’s a shameless nonstop liar. This is where we are.

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With each denunciation, the crowd jeered and screamed

Aug 3rd, 2018 8:38 am | By

Meanwhile Trump attacked the press again at his rally last night.

President Donald Trump is renewing his campaign against the media, claiming at a Pennsylvania rally that the media is the “fake, fake disgusting news” and casting journalists as his true political opponent.

Is he enough of a Hitler-clone yet?

Trump barnstormed Thursday night in a state that he swiped from the Democrats in 2016 and that is home to a Senate seat he is trying to place in the Republicans’ column this fall. But the race between GOP U.S. Rep. Lou Barletta and two-term incumbent Democratic Sen. Bob Casey took a back seat to Trump’s invectives against the media, which came amid a backdrop of antagonism to journalists from the White House and hostility from the thousands packed into a loud, overheated Wilkes-Barre arena.

“Whatever happened to the free press? Whatever happened to honest reporting?” Trump asked, pointing to the media in the back of the hall. “They don’t report it. They only make up stories.”

Time and time again, Trump denounced the press for underselling his accomplishments and doubting his political rise.

As an aspiring dictator would.

With each denunciation, the crowd jeered and screamed at the press in the holding pen at the back of the arena.

The inflammatory performance came just hours after White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders refused to distance herself from Trump’s previous assertions that the media is the “enemy” of the American people. Pressed during a White House briefing on the issue, Sanders said Trump “has made his position known.”

In a heated exchange with reporters, she recited a litany of complaints against the press and blamed the media for inflaming tensions in the country.

I don’t see this ending well.

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Repeated attacks on the free press

Aug 3rd, 2018 8:31 am | By

The UN comments on Trump’s rhetoric attacking the press:

UN and Inter-American experts on freedom of expression have condemned U.S. President Donald Trump’s repeated attacks on the free press and urged him and his administration to cease efforts to undermine the media’s role of holding government accountable, honest and transparent.

“His attacks are strategic, designed to undermine confidence in reporting and raise doubts about verifiable facts,” said David Kaye and Edison Lanza, the Special Rapporteurs on freedom of expression for the United Nations and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, respectively.

The President has labelled the media as being the “enemy of the American people” “very dishonest” or “fake news,” and accused the press of “distorting democracy” or spreading “conspiracy theories and blind hatred”.

“These attacks run counter to the country’s obligations to respect press freedom and international human rights law,” the experts said. “We are especially concerned that these attacks increase the risk of journalists being targeted with violence.”

Kaye and Lanza said that, over the course of his presidency, Mr. Trump and others within his administration have sought to undermine reporting that had uncovered waste, fraud, abuse, potential illegal conduct, and disinformation.

“Each time the President calls the media ‘the enemy of the people’ or fails to allow questions from reporters from disfavoured outlets,” the experts added, “he suggests nefarious motivations or animus. But he has failed to show even once that specific reporting has been driven by any untoward motivations.

“It is critical that the U.S. administration promote the role of a vibrant press and counter rampant disinformation. To this end, we urge President Trump not only to stop using his platform to denigrate the media but to condemn these attacks, including threats directed at the press at his own rallies.

“The attack on the media goes beyond President Trump’s language. We also urge his entire administration, including the Department of Justice, to avoid pursuing legal cases against journalists in an effort to identify confidential sources, an effort that undermines the independence of the media and the ability of the public to have access to information.

“We urge the Government to stop pursuing whistle-blowers through the tool of the Espionage Act, which provides no basis for a person to make an argument about the public interest of such information.

“We stand with the independent media in the United States, a community of journalists and publishers and broadcasters long among the strongest examples of professional journalism worldwide. We especially urge the press to continue, where it does so, its efforts to hold all public officials accountable.”

The experts encouraged all media to act in solidarity against the efforts of President Trump to favour some outlets over others.

“Two years of attacks on the press could have long term negative implications for the public’s trust in media and public institutions,” Kaye and Lanza said. “Two years is two years too much, and we strongly urge that President Trump and his administration and his supporters end these attacks.”

Of course, negative implications for the public’s trust in media and public institutions are the whole point, so it’s an exercise in futility to tell Trump to stop attacking the press for that reason. But they’re not really addressing Trump, they’re talking to the rest of us.

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Step right up, only $200 k per customer

Aug 2nd, 2018 5:35 pm | By

Another nice little angle for Trump, it appears – selling tours of Air Force One. Nothing at all tacky about that, no indeed.

Four Democratic senators are calling for an investigation into who has received Air Force One tours under the Trump administration, following reporting by BuzzFeed News that found that some members of the president’s private Florida clubs appeared to have received those tours.

In a letter to the inspectors general of the Air Force and Department of Defense, Sens. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Tom Carper of Delaware, Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, and Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island cite the BuzzFeed News report as “particularly troubling.”

“If true, these reports could mean that the President or his family have used government property for private gain — giving tours of Air Force One as a perk for club membership — or that some citizens have potentially been able to buy access to Air Force One via their personal payments to the President’s private club,” the letter states.

The whole thing is just a big Adventure Playground to them.

BuzzFeed News first reported last month that some Mar-a-Lago members appeared to have received Air Force One tours, based on heavily redacted records received through a Freedom of Information Act request.

A spokesperson for the White House previously said in an email, “It is common for friends/family of the President to receive tours of Air Force One,” pointing out that “Mar-a-Lago has been the President’s home for many years.”

But customers are not the same thing as friends (and I’m not sure I believe it is all that common).

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No idling

Aug 2nd, 2018 2:03 pm | By

From the New Yorker:

For the past decade, an uptown mortgage broker named George Pakenham has been predicting that the scourge of engine exhaust caused by needless automobile idling will soon become as socially unacceptable as secondhand smoke. After years of rapping on the windows of passenger cars and delivery vans, reminding drivers that the law prohibits idling for longer than three minutes within the city limits, and only occasionally being rebuffed with remarks like “Go move to China” and “You are not human,” he felt like he had reason to be optimistic. He has produced a children’s book devoted to the subject, “Big Nose, Big City,” and also a documentary, “Idle Threat,” which has screened in Nevada City, California, and at Westfield High School, in New Jersey, where he was, as he recalls, “treated regally,” as a member of the class of ’68. He has FaceTimed with officials at the American Embassy in Sofia, Bulgaria—a city that is known, apparently, for its terrible air quality. In May, he visited P.S. 31, in Greenpoint, where students showed off anti-idling posters they’d made (the legal limit in a school zone is sixty seconds) and took turns wearing a gas mask that he’d brought. But the broader wave of concern about the wasted oil and smog produced by idling engines, Pakenham confessed recently, is “way behind schedule.”

This is something that’s been driving me crazy for years, and it’s gotten even worse lately. In my neighborhood there can be one or two people sitting in an idling car on every block.

Why do people do that?

Partly, I guess, it’s to have air conditioning or heat while you sit in your car…but why sit in your car? Especially if you need to keep it running in order to sit in it comfortably? I can see why electricians and plumbers and the like do it: they’re on the job and it costs time and money to drive somewhere for lunch. But everyone else? Why are they using up their gas, adding to their carbon footprint, and poisoning the local air, just to squat in a car playing with a phone?

It needs to stop.

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Shameful

Aug 2nd, 2018 1:06 pm | By

Welllllll, this is appalling.

Jim Acosta apparently walked out at that point.

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Press the BBC to catch up with the 21st century

Aug 2nd, 2018 12:45 pm | By

Rupert Read just said no.

ike most Greens, I typically jump at opportunities to go on air. Pretty much any opportunity: BBC national radio, BBC TV, Channel 4, Sky – I’ve done them all over the years, for good or ill. Even when, as is not infrequently the case, the deck is somewhat stacked against me, or the timing inadequate for anything more than a soundbite, or the question up for debate less than ideal.

But this Wednesday, when I was rung up by BBC Radio Cambridgeshire and asked to come on air to debate with a climate change denier, something in me broke, and rebelled. Really? I thought. This summer, of all times?

So, for almost the first time in my life, I turned it down. I told it that I will no longer be part of such charades. I said that the BBC should be ashamed of its nonsensical idea of “balance”, when the scientific debate is as settled as the “debate” about whether smoking causes cancer. By giving climate change deniers a full platform, producers make their position seem infinitely more reasonable than it is. (This contributes to the spread of misinformation and miseducation around climate change that fuels the inaction producing the long emergency we are facing.)

This idea that they need to let “the other side” have a turn is like thinking hurricanes and earthquakes should get to present their case in the news. Deniers can’t stop climate change by skepticaling about it on the BBC, they can only bollix up attempts to delay and mitigate it. Is that part of the mission of journalism? I wouldn’t think so.

In the end, the broadcast went ahead without me. Much of it wasn’t bad. The scientists interviewed were excellent. But the framing of the debate was awful, and framing is everything, so far as the message that most listeners receive is concerned. The presenter introduced the segment by asking, “Is climate change real?” The journalist doing vox pops bombarded ordinary people with canards such as, “Maybe it’s just a natural cycle?” And, of course, a climate change denier was given a huge and undeserved platform on an equal basis to his opponent.

In August 2018, this is unacceptable and it seems that quite a lot of people agree with me.

However, here’s the exciting thing. If we get more momentum behind the idea of refusing to participate, it will force a change of coverage methods by the BBC, which experts have been calling for for years. For if we all refuse to debate with the climate change deniers on public platforms, and press the BBC to catch up with the 21st century, it will be forced to change its ways, because the BBC cannot defend the practice of allowing a climate change denier to speak unopposed. If we truly want to see change on this issue, we need to be willing to let it know exactly how we feel. So, now I’m going to get on with filing my official complaint to the BBC …

So spread the word. (Rupert Read asked people to do just that on Facebook, so seriously, spread the word.)

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First and last appearance

Aug 2nd, 2018 12:24 pm | By

Skeletor told us “At least she’s meeting with local school kids and doing her best to garden with them” – she being Melania Trump.

No, she’s not. The Post this past April:

Thus far, the Trump administration has erred on the side of silence regarding the vegetable garden, mirroring the silence in Congress around the impending farm bill deadline. In February 2017, a news release from the Office of the First Lady confirmed the White House vegetable garden would not be removed. Come April, however, there was no spring planting event such as Michelle Obama had held; instead, the secretary of agriculture announced that he would “Make School Lunches Great Again” by relaxing Obama-era HHFKA nutrition and sourcing regulations. Public tours of the garden continued last summer, but the White House occupants kept their distance both legislatively and physically from local food production and childhood nutrition efforts.

Melania Trump finally made her first appearance in the garden on Sept. 22. (The Internet was quick to note that her ostensibly modest flannel shirt cost $1,380.) While the first lady harvested the turnips and kale she had declined to help plant, she encouraged children to “continue to eat a lot of vegetables and fruits, so you grow up healthy and take care of yourself,” while avoiding calls for structural change. Exactly a week later, however, the Trump administration pushed back deadlines for updating nutrition labels on packaged foods, which would have mandated disclosure of added sugars, the most common of which is high-fructose corn syrup, second only to ethanol and animal feed in importance to the U.S. corn industry.

This spring, planting dates have come and gone; visitors are invited to tour gardens again planted by Park Service staff. But it seems clear that by reducing their involvement, the Trumps are trying to erode the symbolism of the garden to placate their agribusiness allies. If those priorities carry over to a draft of a new farm bill, they will doom us to another round of partisan warfare.

It looks as if that photo-op appearance in the garden last September is the only time Queen Melania has been there, so no, that doesn’t count as an ongoing attempt to meet with local school kids and do her best to garden with them.

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In Saudi Arabia there is no civic space left to shrink

Aug 2nd, 2018 11:58 am | By

Trump’s BFF Saudi Arabia is not behaving well.

The UN has expressed concern over the continuing and “apparently arbitrary” crackdown on Saudi human rights activists after two more prominent female campaigners were arrested in the kingdom.

Samar Badawi, an internationally recognised activist, and Nassima al-Sadah, a co-founding member of Al-Adalah Center for Human Rights, were detained earlier this week.

At least 15 prominent activists have been held as part of a government campaign that began in the run-up to the much publicised lifting of the ban on women driving. Many other cases are thought to remain unreported.

That’s interesting – so the “run-up” to the removal of one violation of women’s rights consisted of trashing other women’s rights. How does that work? Is there some principle of nature that Saudi Arabia has to keep the number of women’s rights below a certain threshold, so that if it restores one it has to take away others? “You wanna be allowed to drive, bitches? Ok then, we’re busting some of you. Enjoy your rides.”

Khalid Ibrahim, executive director of the Gulf Centre for Human Rights, said the crackdown was unprecedented.

“When you describe the human rights situation in other countries you say the space for civil society is shrinking. In Saudi Arabia there is no civic space left to shrink. They are putting every peaceful voice behind bars,” he said. “If you are a human rights defender you will be treated worse than a criminal.”

But that, remember, is the majority-Muslim country that Trump thinks is just wonderful and a friend and not at all a source of theocratic murderers.

Badawi, a recipient of the International Women of Courage award, was a prominent figure in the call to end the driving ban for women, a landmark reform passed in June and credited to Saudi prince Mohammed bin Salman.

Al-Sadah was barred from standing as a candidate in local elections in 2015, the first year in which women were allowed to run.

Both al-Sadah and Badawi had challenged the country’s male guardianship system, which requires women to obtain permission from their fathers, brothers, husbands or even sons for a range of basic life decisions.

How dare they expect to be treated as adults and equals?

More than 30 human rights groups have warned of a growing climate of fear among female campaigners in both Saudi Arabia and Egypt.

In a recent open letter to the UN special rapporteur on the situation of human rights defenders, the groups wrote: “Saudi authorities, government-aligned media, and troll accounts on social media launched a public smear campaign and labelled women human rights defenders as ‘traitors’ and a ‘danger to Saudi society and national security.’”

I guess that explains why Trump admires them.

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Public confession of official misconduct

Aug 2nd, 2018 11:07 am | By

Max Boot at the Post explains how Trump is flouting the law right out in the open where we can watch.

There’s the tweet yesterday saying Sessions “should” stop the investigation.

Trump’s team, on cleanup duty, claimed the president is offering an opinion, not issuing a formal order. But when a boss tells a subordinate he “should” do something, it’s not just an innocent opinion like “that’s a nice shirt.” Last year, then-White House press secretary Sean Spicer said that the president’s tweets are “official statements.” Indeed, the president fired then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson by tweet. If Trump was just expressing a nonbinding opinion, why isn’t Tillerson still on the job?

When the president tells his attorney general he “should” stop an investigation of his alleged misconduct, that is strong evidence of obstruction of justice. It doesn’t matter, from a legal perspective, whether the directive is whispered in secret or shouted for all to hear. It doesn’t even matter whether the investigation is actually stopped or not. A crime is still a crime even if it’s not carried out to a successful conclusion.

Boot collects several self-incriminating tweets.

Little wonder that Mueller is reportedly investigating Trump’s tweets, which form the most public confession of official misconduct in U.S. history. Trump’s lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, may call “obstruction by tweet” a “bizarre and novel theory,” but what’s truly “bizarre and novel” is Trump’s behavior. The president is engaged in a cynical and all-too-successful campaign to diminish public support for the Mueller investigation, potentially setting the stage for Mueller to be fired and the inquiry terminated. On at least two occasions (in both June and December of 2017), Trump tried to fire Mueller, only for alarmed aides to dissuade him.

If the Republicans help him enough he could still get away with it.

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Let’s get that dirt back into our god-given air

Aug 2nd, 2018 10:34 am | By

The Trump admin has been working hard for a long time on a plan to make sure we have dirtier more climate-damaging fuel economy standards. Thanks, Trump admin.

The Trump administration Thursday pushed ahead with plans to unravel the federal government’s most effective action to fight climate change — aggressive fuel economy standards aimed at getting the nation’s cars and trucks to average more than 50 miles per gallon by 2025.

After months of discussion and drafts, the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration formally unveiled their plan to rewrite those rules and replace them with ones so lax even automakers are wary.

More dirt please, more smog, more carbon, more global warming.

The administration’s plan would freeze miles-per-gallon targets in 2020. It would also move to end California’s power to set its own, higher standards. The administration’s proposal asserts that “attempting to solve climate change, even in part” is “fundamentally different” from the Clean Air Act’s “original purpose of addressing smog-related air quality problems.”

The administration’s plan could set off a high-stakes legal battle with California and the 13 other states that follow its more stringent rules. Those states argue the Clean Air Act empowers them to keep the Obama-era fuel economy standards in place in their markets.

The admin claims that by saving money on those pesky fuel standards we can improve safety standards on cars and thus save lives.

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His shameful career

Aug 2nd, 2018 9:42 am | By

A former federal prosecutor tells us what it’s like to watch Jeff Sessions be the Attorney General.

I guess I tried to put out of my mind that Jeff Sessions, the hand-picked Trump-appointed attorney general, lost his nomination for a federal judgeship in the 1980s because of racist remarks he’d made while working at the Alabama U.S. attorney’s office. And, it’s only recently that I learned of Sessions’ claim that the American Civil Liberties Union and the NAACP are “un-American,” and that he voted as a senator against hate crime bills, the Violence Against Women Act, and Loretta Lynch as attorney general because President Barack Obama’s nominees had “ACLU DNA.”

Against the backdrop of Sessions’ historical shame, I’ve tried to come to terms with the fact that he had contacts with members of the Russian government and then lied about those contacts to Congress during his confirmation hearing.

I’ve tried to put the best spin on that fact that Sessions left President Donald Trump in a room alone with then-FBI Director James Comey, likely knowing that Trump was going to try and extract an oath of loyalty from Comey and a promise to drop the investigation of national security adviser Michael Flynn. I tamped down my feelings of anger and injustice when Sessions directed DOJ attorneys to file a series of briefs and internal memos ensuring that raw discrimination is protected and encouraged when it is frosted with a claim of religious freedom.

And when Sessions supported the nomination of anti-civil rights attorney Eric Dreiband to be in charge of DOJ’s civil rights division and Brian Benczkowski, a former attorney for a Russian bank, to run the criminal division at DOJ, I bit my tongue — hard. When Sessions directed federal law enforcement officers to rip children from their parents, who were seeking legal asylum in this country, I did what I needed to do to hold back the tears.

Each of these daggers to the heart of DOJ made me question if the DOJ I knew and dedicated my professional career to still existed in some semblance of what I knew it to be. Then, a story hit the internet recently that the attorney general of the United States, while at a rally of right-wing high school students, chimed in with chants from students who were screaming “Lock her up.” And, according to reports, while repeating the mob-inspired anti-Clinton creed, Sessions laughed.

I didn’t believe it so I searched for the video and found it. There was the head of law enforcement in the United States laughing and joining the crazed chants of an angry gang of teenagers calling for Trump’s defeated political opponent to be locked up.

He felt sick, not figuratively but literally.

Don’t we all.

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But his skillz

Aug 2nd, 2018 9:09 am | By

Now for some comic relief.

President Trump pushed his lawyers in recent days to try once again to reach an agreement with the special counsel’s office about his sitting for an interview, flouting their advice that he should not answer investigators’ questions, three people briefed on the matter said on Wednesday.

Mr. Trump has told advisers he is eager to meet with investigators to clear himself of wrongdoing, the people said. In effect, he believes he can convince the investigators for the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, of his belief that their own inquiry is a “witch hunt.”

That would be gratifying – if his own belief in his own awesome powers caused him to incriminate himself to Mueller’s team.

He fails to understand that what his awesome powers consist of is a knack for appealing to racist misogynist bullies and highly self-serving rich people, and that such a knack is useless for his situation with respect to the Mueller investigation.

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How democracies die

Aug 2nd, 2018 9:00 am | By

Lawrence Tribe got my attention.

So let’s read that Times article:

In the back of a fairground auditorium in Tampa, Fla., on Tuesday night, as President Trump presided over a rally dedicated to denigrating his enemies, the journalists dispatched to cover the proceedings attracted their own raucous crowd.

“Stop lying!” shouted a man in an American flag T-shirt, one of dozens of Trump supporters who hurled invective at the assembled press corps. Facing the reporters’ work space — and away from the stage where Mr. Trump was set to speak — they flashed middle fingers and chanted “CNN Sucks!” as Jim Acosta, a CNN White House correspondent, attempted to speak on-air.

The “hate the media” theme was already big during Trump’s campaign, but it’s been ratcheting up.

In Tampa, though, several journalists described an atmosphere of hostility that felt particularly hard-edge. And far from condemning these attacks on the press, the president and his team have endorsed them.

That night, Mr. Trump tweeted out a video of his supporters jeering Mr. Acosta, along with an approving comment from his son Eric: “#truth.” When the White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, was invited at Wednesday’s press briefing to condemn the menacing behavior, she declined.

“While we certainly support freedom of the press,” Ms. Sanders said, “we also support freedom of speech. And we think that those things go hand in hand.”

Without freedom of speech, how can fascists work up mass hatred of the media, the Jews, the blacks, the Mexicans, the Bosnians, the Tutsis, the Rohingya?

The president has recently revived his “enemy of the people” line about the mainstream news media, sprinkling the phrase into his public remarks. The new White House communications chief, Bill Shine, a former president of Fox News, signaled a tougher approach to press relations when he barred a CNN reporter from a public event last week in the Rose Garden. The reason? She asked questions of Mr. Trump in what the White House deemed an inappropriate manner for an event in the Oval Office.

The trouble with an independent news media is, they can and sometimes do expose the lies of the Beloved Ruler.

Sean Hannity, perhaps Mr. Trump’s most reliable defender on cable news, directly addressed Mr. Acosta on Tuesday night at the start of his program on Fox News.

“The people of this country, they’re screaming at you for a reason,” Mr. Hannity said. “They don’t like your unfair, abusively biased treatment of the president of the United States.”

The one who lies to us multiple times every single day.

Press freedom groups have long warned that Mr. Trump’s rhetoric — and the accompanying criticism from his supporters — is endangering journalists domestically and abroad, particularly under autocratic regimes that have adopted his language in cracking down on independent journalism.

Never mind that, the principle of absolute freedom of rhetoric makes warnings of that kind an infringement on our precious right to work up hatred and rage.

After Trump lied on Twitter about his conversation with Sulzberger, he opened a new front.

Ms. Sanders picked up on that theme at her briefing on Wednesday, the press secretary’s first question-and-answer session with reporters in nine days. (Ms. Sanders held only three formal news briefings in July, compared with nearly once a day in the early part of her tenure.)

“The media routinely reports on classified information and government secrets that put lives in danger and risk valuable national security tools,” Ms. Sanders told reporters, going on to cite a debunked story that a report about Osama bin Laden in the 1990s had harmed national intelligence efforts. (President George W. Bush has made the same claim, that a report about Bin Laden’s use of a satellite phone had tipped him off to surveillance; the information had been released by the Taliban two years earlier.)

Be careful out there.

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