North Korea is pointing out the obvious fact that it rolled Dealmaker Trump.

A day after its leader’s historic talks with President Trump, North Korea wasted no time on Wednesday spinning the results in its favor, claiming it had won major concessions from the United States.

The authoritarian country’s state-controlled news media said that Mr. Trump had promised to eventually lift sanctions against the North and to end joint military drills with South Korea. It also said the United States had agreed to a phased, “step-by-step” denuclearization process for the North, rather than the immediate dismantling of its nuclear capability.

I guess it left unsaid the part about having no intention of denuclearizing at all.

The joint statement that Mr. Kim and Mr. Trump signed on Tuesday contained vaguely worded commitments to “complete denuclearization,” “new” relations between their countries and a “peace regime” on the peninsula. In many ways, it was a rehash of agreements that the two nations had reached in the past but never honored.

It was some words. Apparently Trump doesn’t realize that there have been some words before. It’s too bad he doesn’t listen to anyone but himself.

Only after the signing ceremony did it emerge that more commitments had apparently been made. In a post-summit news conference on Tuesday, Mr. Trump announced that the United States would end joint military exercises with its South Korean allies, which Pyongyang has long denounced as rehearsals for an invasion of the North. The news appeared to catch both the South Korean government and the United States military off guard.

Whoopsie! Gotta be ready for surprises when Trump is involved.

Also on Wednesday, the North’s official Korean Central News Agency reported that Mr. Trump had agreed to “lift sanctions” once bilateral relations improve. Mr. Trump had said on Tuesday that the sanctions would stay in place until North Korea dismantled enough of its nuclear program to make it difficult to reverse course. Mr. Trump said the denuclearization process would begin “very soon” and happen “very quickly.”

But the North Korean news agency said the two leaders had agreed to a phased process in which Pyongyang would bargain away its nuclear arsenal in stages, securing reciprocal actions from the United States at each step. Such a process has been opposed by American hard-liners like John R. Bolton, now Mr. Trump’s national security adviser, who has argued in the past that the North must quickly dismantle and ship out its nuclear weapons program in its entirety, as Libya did more than a decade ago.

Blah blah blah; the Nuclear Threat Is Over; Trump said so!

“President Obama said that North Korea was our biggest and most dangerous problem,” Mr. Trump said Wednesday on Twitter. “No longer — sleep well tonight!”

The god has taken care of it!

Says Trump:

everybody can now feel much safer than the day I took office. There is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea. Meeting with Kim Jong Un was an interesting and very positive experience. North Korea has great potential for the future!

Foreign Policy gives us the background:

Here are the major talks and nuclear milestones that came before Trump:

1985: North Korea acceded to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. It did not, however, complete an International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards agreement.

1992: North and South Korea signed the Joint Declaration on the Denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, agreeing not to test, produce, posses, or deploy nuclear weapons, and agreeing to mutual verification inspections.

In 1994…

the Clinton administration and North Korea signed the “Agreed Framework” to freeze North Korea’s nuclear program. Most experts agree this was the closest Washington came to a successful deal with North Korea: Pyongyang agreed to freeze construction of nuclear reactors and production of plutonium in exchange for aid, fuel shipments, and other economic benefits.

The closest! But then…not so much.

2002: The Agreed Framework set up under Clinton broke down. President George W. Bush, who took a harder-line stance on Pyongyang than his predecessor, accused North Korea of cheating by secretly pursuing a uranium enrichment program. North Korea accused the United States of backing out of its end of the deal.

China hosted talks. No results. North Korea said nope nope nope.

North Korea conducted its first nuclear test in 2006. Talks collapsed over the issue of allowing inspectors in. Kim Jong Il died and his son Jong Un took over.

2012: President Obama tried to push Pyongyang to the negotiating table by ratcheting up sanctions. But Kim Jong Un scuppered a final deal that would have halted North Korea’s nuclear weapons program and allowed in international inspectors in exchange for U.S. aid. (Town says it is likely because Kim had to display strength to consolidate power after his father’s death.) Meanwhile, North Korea continued to make strides in its nuclear weapons program.

But then a miracle occurred, and Donald Trump by the power of his shining presence alone terminated the Nuclear Threat from North Korea.

H/t Leigh Williams

Renowned China scholar and shoe-seller Ivanka Trump tweeted an Ancient Chinese Proverb yesterday, except that it was greeted by many people pointing out that it’s not a Chinese proverb. Oh yeah? Well what is it then?! A commonplace thought.

“Those who say it can not be done, should not interrupt those doing it.” -Chinese Proverb

— Ivanka Trump (@IvankaTrump) June 11, 2018

Those who say it can not be done, should not interrupt those doing it.

Oh, awesome. Also, those who don’t like what’s for dinner, can go out and get their own. Similarly, those who forget to walk the dog, can damn well clean up the poop right this second before doing anything else. Likewise, those who like to pull in lots of $$$ from expensive dreck, do well to have a rich corrupt daddy to make it all happen. Chinese proverbs, every one of them.

A lack of a clear source for Trump’s tweet has some people speculating the first daughter either made it up or, a more likely explanation, cut and pasted the saying from an unreliable website. In the meantime, the search for this “proverb” through ancient Chinese texts has become something of a viral Quixotic quest in China, filled with many a sarcastic comment:

“Did you get that from a fortune cookie?”

“估计是 fortune cookie 上学来的…”

But

"You can call any old shit a Chinese proverb on the internet."
–Confucius https://t.co/lCcBwtKm5g

— Brendan O'Kane (@bokane) June 11, 2018

Three minutes of googling suggests this is a fake Chinese Proverb. It seems in fact to be American from the turn of the 20th c.—which makes sense, since its spirit is can-do Americanism. But why are Trump WH aides giving our proverbs to China, increasing our proverb deficit? https://t.co/bqjbZhXlQr

— Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) June 11, 2018

Dr. Seuss in 1941:

The reference is to the ships that brought Jewish refugees from the Nazis to US ports only to be turned around and sent back to the Einsatzgruppen and the Zyklon B. Note the “America First” on Mama’s shirt.

Creepy beyond belief – the White House created a propaganda movie to go with the summit.

Reporters crowded into a Singapore auditorium Tuesday, expecting President Trump to walk out and announce the results of his historic meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

Suddenly, two huge screens on either side of the empty podium came to life. Soaring music boomed over the speakers, and the reporters were bombarded with a montage portraying North Korea as some sort of paradise.

Golden sunrises. Gleaming skylines and high-speed trains. Children skipping through Kim Il Sung square in Pyongyang, North Korean flags waving between images of Egyptian pyramids, the Taj Mahal and the Lincoln Memorial.

In a split-screen shot, Kim Jong Un waved to an adoring crowd while President Trump stood beside him with his thumb in the air. The pair appeared over and over again, like running mates in a campaign video.

The film went on like this for several minutes, with brief interludes of missiles, soldiers and warships interrupting the fanfare. Some journalists, unable to understand the Korean-language narration, assumed they were watching one of Pyongyang’s infamous propaganda films. “What country are we in?” asked a reporter from the filing center.

Then it played again, with English narration, then Trump came out and said haha surprise the White House made it, to encourage Kim.

“I hope you liked it,” Trump told the reporters. “I thought it was good. I thought it was interesting enough to show. … And I think he loved it.”

As the president explained it, the video was an elevator pitch — the sort of glitzy production that Trump might have once used to persuade an investor to finance a hotel and that he now hopes will persuade the leader of one of the most repressive regimes in the world to end nearly 70 years of international isolation and militant hostility to the United States.

Deep resonant voice: Will he choose peace or will he choose annihilation?

“Of those alive today, only a small number will leave a lasting impact,” the narrator said near the beginning, as alternating shots of Trump, Kim and North Korean pageantry flashed on the screen. “And only a very few will make decisions or take actions to renew their homeland, or change the course of history.”

Geddit? Geddit? Trump is one of them! Trump is one of the very very very few. Bow down before Trump. Trump is glorious, resplendent, shining, excrorishilated.

“You can have medical breakthroughs, an abundance of resources, innovative technology and new discoveries,” the narrator said, the footage more and more resembling a Hollywood movie trailer as it built to its finale:

“Featuring President Donald Trump and Chairman Kim Jong Un in a meeting to remake history,” the narrator concluded, as Korean words flashed on a black background: “It is going to become a reality?”

STARRING PRESIDENT DONALD DONALD DONALD TRUMP.

Trump admitted that some of the imagery he pitched may have been a little far-fetched, as North Korea is mired in poverty, internationally isolated, and has been mismanaged for decades by a family of dictators — Kim, his father and grandfather.

“That was done at the highest level of future development,” Trump said of his pitch video. “I told him, you may not want this. You may want to do a much smaller version. … You may not want that — with the trains and everything.”

He waved his hands. “You know, with super everything, to the top. It’s going to be up to them,” he said.

And then, in his usual style, Trump was thinking out loud about the “great condos” that might one day be built on the “great beaches” of North Korea.

“I explained it,” he said. “You could have the best hotels in the world. Think of it from the real estate perspective.”

Condos! Gold-encrusted condos! Golden golf courses! Gold leaf casinos! Gold dogs, gold horsies, gold chocolate cake!

Jesus h christ almighty.

Trump says he trusts Kim Jong Un. And if he's wrong? "I may be wrong, I mean I may stand before you in six months and say, 'Hey I was wrong,'" said Trump, before adding, "I don't know that I'll ever admit that, but I'll find some kind of an excuse." https://t.co/J2k6ehVhW1 pic.twitter.com/onKaUHP2f3

— CNN Breaking News (@cnnbrk) June 12, 2018

Nicholas Kristof doesn’t quite agree with Trump’s take on the hangout with Kim.

Trump made a huge concession — the suspension of military exercises with South Korea. That’s on top of the broader concession of the summit meeting itself, security guarantees he gave North Korea and the legitimacy that the summit provides his counterpart, Kim Jong-un.

Within North Korea, the “very special bond” that Trump claimed to have formed with Kim will be portrayed this way: Kim forced the American president, through his nuclear and missile tests, to accept North Korea as a nuclear equal, to provide security guarantees to North Korea, and to cancel war games with South Korea that the North has protested for decades.

In exchange for these concessions, Trump seems to have won astonishingly little. In a joint statement, Kim merely “reaffirmed” the same commitment to denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula that North Korea has repeatedly made since 1992.

“They were willing to de-nuke,” Trump crowed at his news conference after his meetings with Kim. Trump seemed to believe he had achieved some remarkable agreement, but the concessions were all his own.

Funny how the genius deal-maker is so excited about a mere statement. Kim said something and wham, miraculous solution achieved. Trump knows Kim means it how exactly? How is it different from the Iran deal that he abruptly pulled us out of? These are difficult questions.

The most remarkable aspect of the joint statement was what it didn’t contain. There was nothing about North Korea freezing plutonium and uranium programs, nothing about destroying intercontinental ballistic missiles, nothing about allowing inspectors to return to nuclear sites, nothing about North Korea making a full declaration of its nuclear program, nothing about a timetable, nothing about verification, not even any clear pledge to permanently halt testing of nuclear weapons or long-range missiles.

Kim seems to have completely out-negotiated Trump, and it’s scary that Trump doesn’t seem to realize this.

Scary and a great strain on the organ of credulity.

In 1994 there was a deal to freeze North Korea’s plutonium program, complete with a strict monitoring system; nothing like that here – just “he promised.”

There was also something frankly weird about an American president savaging Canada’s prime minister one day and then embracing the leader of the most totalitarian country in the world.

…the next. Yes, there was.

“He’s a very talented man,” Trump said of Kim. “I also learned that he loves his country very much.”

In an interview with Voice of America, Trump said “I like him” and added: “He’s smart, loves his people, he loves his country.”

Oh god. Baby Idiot strikes again.

He mumbled something about human rights but then quickly mumbled something about human rights in other places too so shut up.

Incredibly, Trump told Voice of America that he had this message for the North Korean people: “I think you have somebody that has a great feeling for them. He wants to do right by them and we got along really well.”

Glorious genius diplomat! Thank god he didn’t prepare, so that he could come out with sapience like that!

My guess is that Kim flattered Trump, as Moon has, and that Trump simply didn’t realize how little he was getting. On my most recent visit to North Korea, officials were asking me subtle questions about the differences in views of Mike Pompeo and Nikki Haley; meanwhile, Trump said he didn’t need to do much homework.

Whatever our politics, we should all want Trump to succeed in reducing tensions on the Korean Peninsula, and it’s good to see that Trump now supports engagement rather than military options. There will be further negotiations, and these may actually freeze plutonium production and destroy missiles. But at least in the first round, Trump seems to have been snookered.

But he’ll never grasp that, so whatever.

Kim played Trump like a violin.

US President Donald Trump says his historic talks with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un that ended in a joint agreement were “tremendous”.

The signed document includes a pledge from Mr Kim to rid the Korean peninsula of nuclear weapons.

But the Kims have been saying that for years, while doing the opposite.

If Trump had done any preparation he might have known that. If he had brought other people into the room with him they might have been able to tell him that. Granted it’s more likely that he would have forgotten the first and ignored the second, but as it is, he made it impossible for either to happen.

But in an extraordinary media conference later, Mr Trump announced details not in the paper.

He said he would halt US military exercises in South Korea, something widely seen as a concession.

Widely seen as because it is. What else would it be?

In a post-summit interview with ABC News, the president said he was confident that the agreement meant full denuclearisation.

“Yeah, he’s de-nuking, I mean he’s de-nuking the whole place. It’s going to start very quickly. I think he’s going to start now,” he said.

“I think he trusts me and I trust him,” Mr Trump added.

Oh, whew. That’s all right then. If Trump trusts Kim then there’s no more to be said – his radar is that good. He said so himself.

Ari Berman on why the Supreme Court ruling on Ohio’s voter suppression matters:

In 1965, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act to end the disenfranchisement of black voters in the Jim Crow South. The law was remarkably successful in dismantling barriers to the ballot box like literacy tests and poll taxes, but a few decades later, Congress recognized that more still needed to be done to boost political participation. In the 1988 presidential election, for example, barely half of eligible African American voters cast a ballot.

In response to persistently low voter turnout, Congress passed the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 to allow voters to register at Department of Motor Vehicles offices and other public agencies. President Bill Clinton called it “a sign of a new vibrancy in our democracy.” The “motor voter” law had an immediate impact: More than 30 million people registered or updated their registrations through the NVRA in its first year in effect. Roughly 16 million people per year have used it to register ever since.

That’s good; it’s a good thing; we don’t want people to have to make “a little effort” to vote when they were prevented from voting for a century after the Civil War. We want to eliminate as much need for “a little effort” as possible, because what are minor obstacles to people with cars and internet access and free time are prohibitive barriers to people with two or three badly-paid jobs and no car and children and no nearby internet access or bus route.

One of the key features of the law was to protect voters from being wrongly removed from the voter rolls. The NVRA stipulated that someone could not be removed from the rolls “by reason of the person’s failure to vote.” But in a 5-4 decision Monday, the Supreme Court ruled that the state of Ohio could remove infrequent voters from the rolls, severely weakening the power of the NVRA and opening the door to wider voter purging.

Ohio purged more than 2 million registered voters between 2011 and 2016, more than any other state. Black voters in the state’s largest counties were twice as likely as white voters to be removed from the rolls. In a dissent to Monday’s ruling, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that the court’s opinion “entirely ignores the history of voter suppression against which the NVRA was enacted and upholds a program that appears to further the very disenfranchisement of minority and low-income voters that Congress set out to eradicate.”

This is why talking about having more respect for people who make a little effort to vote is so wrongheaded.

An exchange on a public Facebook post.

Guy: I hate to say this but she doesn’t look like someone who’d be an expert of love…

Me: No, you were right the first time, don’t say it.

Guy: Ophelia Benson Well, she certainly doesn’t.

Me: But that’s not relevant, and it’s just crude sexist bullying.

Guy: Ophelia Benson No, it’s bullying a religious idiot and that is perfectly OK.

Me: No it is not.

Guy: Ophelia Benson I love your sense of humour.

Me: And yet you started with “I hate to say this but” so you know perfectly well what I’m talking about. Insulting people’s looks is a worthless way to dispute the content of what they say.

Guy: Ophelia Benson Relax Ophelia, take a deep breath.

Me: Don’t patronize me.

Evolve more, people.

Taslima has another piece of bad news.

Shahzahan Bacchu, an atheist poet and publisher was killed today by Islamists in Bangladesh. He was a target, but did not get protection from govt.

— taslima nasreen (@taslimanasreen) June 11, 2018

The Dhaka Tribune reports:

The owner of Bishaka Prokashoni, a publishing house, has been gunned down in his home town in Munshiganj.

Shahzahan Bachchu, 60, was shot and killed in his village, Kakaldi, in the district’s Sirajdikhan upazila around 6:30pm on Monday, Munshiganj Superintendent of Police Jayedul Alam told the Dhaka Tribune.

There were five assailants on two motorcycles, the SP said.

Shahzahan had gone to meet friends at a pharmacy near his home before iftar, when the assailants came into the area. They blasted a crude bomb outside the pharmacy, creating panic.

They then dragged Shahzahan out and shot him, Jayedul said.

Allahu akbar?

Bad news.

The Supreme Court on Monday upheld Ohio’s aggressive efforts to purge its voting rolls.

The court ruled that a state may kick people off the rolls if they skip a few elections and fail to respond to a notice from state election officials. The vote was 5 to 4, with the more conservative justices in the majority.

The case concerned a guy who voted in 2004 and 2008 but not 2010, 2012, and 2014. In 2015 he wanted  to vote against a ballot initiative to legalize marijuana and found he’d been stricken from the voting rolls.

Federal laws prohibit states from removing people from voter rolls “by reason of the person’s failure to vote.” But they allow election officials who suspect that a voter has moved to send a confirmation notice.

The central question in the case was whether a failure to vote could be the reason to send out the notice.

Ohio is more aggressive than any other state in purging its voter rolls. After skipping a single federal election cycle, voters are sent a notice. If they fail to respond and do not vote in the next four years, their names are purged from the rolls.

A few other states use similar approaches, but not one of them moves as fast.

So it’s the most voter-suppressive state in the failure-to-vote column, and the stolen vote on the court just ruled that okie doke.

A Reuters study in 2016 found that at least 144,000 people were removed from the voting rolls in recent years in Ohio’s three largest counties, which are home to Cleveland, Cincinnati and Columbus.

“Voters have been struck from the rolls in Democratic-leaning neighborhoods at roughly twice the rate as in Republican neighborhoods,” the study found. “Neighborhoods that have a high proportion of poor, African-American residents are hit the hardest.”

Twelve states, generally led by Democrats, filed a brief supporting Mr. Harmon. Seventeen states, generally Republican, filed a brief on the other side.

So to sum up poor and/or black and brown voters are being systematically shut out by the party of the rich and white.

The Post on Representative Pramila Jayapal’s visit to the detention center where women are being held apart from their children:

Although Seattle is some 1,500 miles north of the U.S.-Mexico border, the debate over family separations hit closer to home for the Evergreen State after dozens of undocumented immigrants were transferred last week to the Federal Detention Center in SeaTac, near Seattle-Tacoma International Airport.

Nearly all of those migrants — 174 out of 206 — were women, said Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), who spent about three hours Saturday morning meeting with the recently moved detainees at the SeaTac facility.

Most of them were from Cuba, El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala, she said, but there were also people from as far away as Eritrea. Many spoke of fleeing threats of rape, gang violence and political persecution, Jayapal said.

She asked the women to raise their hands if they’d been forcibly separated from their children, and more than half did.

Some said that their children had been as young as 12 months — and many no longer knew where their children were being held.

“It was absolutely heartbreaking. And I’ve been doing immigration-rights work for almost two decades. I am not new to these stories,” Jayapal told The Washington Post on Sunday. “I will tell you there was not a dry eye in the house. … Some of them heard their children screaming for them in the next room. Not a single one of them had been allowed to say goodbye or explain to them what was happening.”

It sounds all too familiar.

Back to the Post and the present day:

On Saturday, Jayapal and others gathered in front of the detention center to denounce the practice of separating children that had produced the “heartbreaking” stories they said they had heard inside. They spoke over the din of protesters demanding that arriving migrants should be allowed by law to seek asylum.

“We’ve gathered here to say one central message: Cruelty to children should not be part of American policy,” Gov. Jay Inslee (D) told the crowd. “Intentional infliction of injury to children is below the standards of America. In America, the willful infliction of trauma against children is not acceptable. America is better than this. Inhumane, callous indifference and willful injury to children must stop.”

Right now America is not better than this. Right now America is just this horrendous.

That photo of Merkel facing down Defiant Toddler Trump? It is an art history lesson.

Ok, because I'm feeling pedantic as fuck, I need to point out that this photo does not look like a Renaissance painting. It looks like a Baroque painting. pic.twitter.com/LvlvcSZjmu

— Palle! (@Palle_Hoffstein) June 10, 2018

How so?

This is a Renaissance Painting. The subjects are evenly spaced across the canvas, equidistant to the viewer as if on a stage. The postures are quite mannered instead of natural. This is Primavera by Botticelli btw. pic.twitter.com/MmMug6A0tT

— Palle! (@Palle_Hoffstein) June 10, 2018

Ah yes, so they are – although I will say, advertisers still pose women with their feet pointed like that.

Now here is a Baroque piece. The subjects are positioned naturally in the room, some have their backs to viewer, and postures reflect energy between the subjects. This is Caravaggio btw, a favorite of mine. pic.twitter.com/Gao6qL5xXA

— Palle! (@Palle_Hoffstein) June 10, 2018

We’ve learned something. Thank you Palle Hofstein.