From the large to the tiny:

The account manager at the Tiny Jewel Box, which calls itself Washington’s “premier destination for fine jewelry and watches,” had promised to expedite the order of a dozen customized silver fountain pens — each emblazoned with the seal of the Environmental Protection Agency and the signature of its leader, Scott Pruitt.

Obviously a basic need.

Now all that the EPA staff member working with the store needed was for a top Pruitt aide to sign off on the $3,230 order, which also included personalized journals.

“The cost of the Qty. 12 Fountain Pens will be around $1,560.00,” the staffer emailed Aug. 14 to Millan Hupp, Pruitt’s head of scheduling and advance and a trusted confidante dating to his Oklahoma days. “All the other items total cost is around $1,670.00 which these items are in process. Please advise.”

“Yes, please order,” Hupp responded later that day. “Thank you.”

The exchange, included among thousands of pages of emails released this week as part of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by the Sierra Club, offered another glimpse of the high-end tastes of the EPA chief, who has faced months of scrutiny over his expenditures of taxpayer money on first-class travel, an unprecedented security detail, a $43,000 phone booth, a top-of-the-line SUV and other office upgrades.

Well you wouldn’t want the head of the EPA using some plebeian ordinary fountain pen would you?

Edward Burmila at The Nation says we should be looking at why ABC decided to resurrect Roseanne in the first place.

The simplest, least satisfying explanation of why this happened is money. An industry reduced to mining nostalgia for an endless parade of reboots, remakes, and sequels could not resist reviving one of the essential, culture-defining sitcoms of the nineties. In this light, ABC saw the new Roseanne as no different than Fuller House—mindless, derivative, easy to churn out, and profitable.

The more complicated answer involves the media’s drive to “humanize” and explain those who see Trump as their long-awaited salvation. Like the endless journalistic forays into the Rust Belt to profile Trumpers with shuttered steel mills as a photo backdrop, the Roseanne reboot intended to show what the media kept calling the “white working class” sympathetically. The latest iteration of Roseanne Conner would demonstrate that the real-life people her character represents are not racist caricatures. This is, after all, what we would like to think about our fellow Americans—that we have differences, but we can still come together as one nation.

We would like to think that if it were true – but having differences is one thing, and being a fan of Trump is another. That’s not some little difference you can just overlook by talking about baseball instead.

But so often the actual Trump supporters ruin that narrative. Journalists and researchers are now finding that the veneer of “economic anxiety” among Trump supporters is built on a foundation of hate. Fans of Trump say little about the president’s Gilded Age economic policies, but boy do they fume over kneeling NFL players. And because this racism, xenophobia, and paranoia is not what we want to find, we go looking again and again until we find an answer that is more comforting.

Exactly. It’s not about misogyny and racism, it’s about elitism, the story goes. I wrote a Free Inquiry column about it last year:

What do we talk about when we talk about elites?

We should talk about power and money, but too much of the time we talk about snobbery, speaking French, flavored coffee drinks and similar social markers that may be psychologically wounding but do not, say, keep millions of children in inferior schools or workers in minimum wage jobs with no benefits.

In July 2016 Rod Dreher at The American Conservative asked J. D. Vance, author of Hillbilly Elegy, a leading question about this more touchy-feely version of elitism:

I’m not a hillbilly, nor do I descend from hillbilly stock, strictly speaking. But I do come from poor rural white people in the South. I have spent most of my life and career living among professional class urbanite[s], most of them on the East Coast, and the barely-banked contempt they — the professional-class whites, I mean — have for poor white people is visceral, and obvious to me. Yet it is invisible to them. Why is that? And what does it have to do with our politics today?

It’s obvious to Rod Dreher but then he’s been primed to find it obvious, hasn’t he. We all have. It’s been a cliché of political campaigns for decades that liberals are effete snobs while conservatives are salt of the earth workin’ folks constantly wounded by the scorn of the pointy-headed intellectuals (aka the Jews). We hear about snooty consumer choices, instead of policies on unions and worker protections. Given that background I have to wonder how much Dreher really does experience professional class urbanites displaying obvious contempt for poor white people, and how much he just imagines he does because we’ve all heard about it a million times.

Back to Burmila:

Roseanne is inseparable from this quest to find evidence that Trumpers are ultimately good, kindhearted people whose fears and economic insecurity are being exploited by a charlatan. It makes us uncomfortable to face the reality that tens of millions of Americans need no encouragement at all to support authoritarian and racist politics. Try as we may to tell ourselves that the masses are tricked into supporting far-right regimes in the United States or Europe, the uncomfortable reality is that many are willing, even eager.

…

It worked briefly. The show was lauded initially for being “incredibly honest” about who Trump voters are. Conservatives loved the ratings success of a show they saw as a rebuke of leftist Hollywood. After the initial surge of interest, the show appeared to settle into a consistent ratings generator for ABC.

Ultimately, the real Roseanne undermined the fictional one. Roseanne the character could humanize the show’s white, Midwestern, salt-of-the-earth types only if Barr kept up appearances, at least well enough for viewers to suspend disbelief. She could not. Rather than celebrate the network and the show’s famous co-stars for speaking out now, it is better to reconsider their initial motives. If they did this simply for the money, they are unprincipled. If they did it to show audiences relatable and “normal” Trump-loving Americans, they are misguided.

Barr may have wanted to use a fictional version of herself to prove that white people who love Donald Trump—people like her, in short—are not racists who traffic in ludicrous conspiracy theories and detest anyone who isn’t like them. She failed because that is exactly what she is. ABC, in abetting this mess, found that even Hollywood magic can’t make sympathetic characters out of such people, although I suspect it will keep trying. The alternative is confronting the fact that the beliefs of a substantial number of Americans are malevolent and dangerous, not mere differences of opinion that can be resolved in 20 minutes, with a hug.

And it’s nothing to do with coffee.

Joining torturer Joe Arpaio…

Will be giving a Full Pardon to Dinesh D’Souza today. He was treated very unfairly by our government!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 31, 2018

https://twitter.com/Susan_Hennessey/status/1002197913282457600

It is hard to overstate what a naked abuse of the pardon power it is for the president to use it almost exclusively to reward criminal members of his own party.

— Matthew Miller (@matthewamiller) May 31, 2018

Trump’s Dinesh D’Souza pardon today, on top of his pardons of Scooter Libby and Joe Arpaio, make sense only as an elephant-whistle to Michael Cohen & all who know damning things about Trump: protect me & I’ll have your back. Turn on me & your goose is cooked. More obstruction!

— Laurence Tribe 🇺🇦 ⚖️ (@tribelaw) May 31, 2018

https://twitter.com/waltshaub/status/1002185438633787393

.@PreetBharara in 2014 said D’Souza’s illegal campaign contributions was “wilfully undermining the integrity of the campaign finance process…he has had to answer for this crime – here with a felony conviction.” https://t.co/KwDZYyy7P9

— Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) May 31, 2018

Bill McKibben on Justin Trudeau and Big Oil:

In case anyone wondered, this is how the world ends: with the cutest, progressivest, boybandiest leader in the world going fully in the tank for the oil industry.

Justin Trudeau’s government announced on Tuesday that it would nationalize the Kinder Morgan pipeline running from the tar sands of Alberta to the tidewater of British Columbia. It will fork over at least $4.5bn in Canadian taxpayers’ money for the right to own a 60-year-old pipe that springs leaks regularly, and for the right to push through a second pipeline on the same route – a proposal that has provoked strong opposition.

Uh oh.

That opposition has come from three main sources. First are many of Canada’s First Nations groups, who don’t want their land used for this purpose without their permission, and who fear the effects of oil spills on the oceans and forests they depend on. Second are the residents of Canada’s west coast, who don’t want hundreds of additional tankers plying the narrow inlets around Vancouver on the theory that eventually there’s going to be an oil spill. And third are climate scientists, who point out that even if Trudeau’s pipeline doesn’t spill oil into the ocean, it will spill carbon into the atmosphere.

Lots of carbon: 173 billion barrels of oil’s worth.

[T]he one half of 1% of the planet that is Canadian will have awarded to itself almost one-third of the remaining carbon budget between us and the 1.5 degree rise in temperature the planet drew as a red line in Paris. There’s no way of spinning the math that makes that okay – Canadians already emit more carbon per capita than Americans. Hell, than Saudi Arabians.

More than US Americans? I didn’t know that was possible.

Is this a clever financial decision that will somehow make Canada rich? Certainly not in the long run. Cleaning up the tar sands complex in Alberta – the biggest, ugliest scar on the surface of the earth – is already estimated to cost more than the total revenues generated by all the oil that’s come out of the ground. Meanwhile, when something goes wrong, Canada is now on the hook: when BP tarred the Gulf of Mexico, the US was at least able to exact billions of dollars in fines to help with the cleanup. Canada will get to sue itself.

So why is he doing it? Politics, McKibben says. Doesn’t seem like much of a reason, does it.

Meanwhile…

The Ministry of Environment and Climate Change Strategy says that approximately 100 litres of crude oil have leaked from the Trans Mountain pipeline in Darfield B.C.

…

Since 1961 Trans Mountain says they have reported approximately 82 spills to the National Energy Board — around 67 spills occurred with oil products. They add that 69.5 per cent of spills occurred at pump stations or terminals, and the remaining 30.5 per cent along the pipeline.

The news comes just four days before Kinder Morgan, the company who operates the Trans Mountain pipeline, will announce if they will continue with their pipeline twinning construction project.

The $7.4-billion Trans Mountain pipeline expansion would parallel the 1,150-kilometre route of the existing Trans Mountain Pipeline — which was built in 1953.

Pipeline capacity would increase from 300,000 to 890,000 barrels of oil per day if the project goes through.

The expansion project has been the centre of intense debate both within the public and between the province and Alberta and Federal Governments.

Gotta keep those SUVs humming.

Fact checker Linda Qiu checks facts:

During the rally, Mr. Trump also reiterated many claims that The Times and others have previously debunked: that Representative Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California, supported MS-13 (she never said this), that illegal border crossings had declined 40 percent (they recently increased), and that tax cuts he signed into law last year were the largest in history (they rank 12th). He also incorrectly described other countries as not “sending their best” through the diversity visa program (applicants enter of their own volition), claimed construction had begun on his border wall (it hasn’t), and said that the suspect in the Manhattan truck attack in October had sponsored two dozen family members through “chain migration” (this is implausible).

And the crowd cheered.

Barr is scorching the earth and sowing it with salt.

Roseanne Barr’s Twitter saga didn’t end with the cancellation of her show Tuesday. Early Wednesday morning, she was back at it, first blaming Ambien and defensively comparing ABC’s response to her racist and otherwise offensive tweetstorm to those of other celebrities who have made controversial comments.

But what she said yesterday wasn’t just “controversial” – in fact in sane circles it wasn’t controversial at all, it was unmistakably and crudely racist. “Ape” is not ambiguous.

Barr seemed to liken the reaction from her co-stars and those a supporter called “her underlings” to the way President Trump complains about members of his administration being “disloyal.” In response to tweets calling out Gilbert and Emma Kenney, who plays Barr’s granddaughter, Barr wrote, “i feel bad for @POTUS-he goes thru this every single day.”

Hmm yes POTUS feels bad for POTUS too, but neither of them has any business feeling sorry for him, because he spends his life insulting people in public. “Pocahontas.” “Cryin’ Chuck.” “Failing New York Times.” “Crooked Hillary.” Heidi Cruz:

"@Don_Vito_08: "A picture is worth a thousand words" @realDonaldTrump #LyingTed #NeverCruz @MELANIATRUMP pic.twitter.com/5bvVEwMVF8"

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 24, 2016

Trump will probably give Barr a cabinet post soon.

https://twitter.com/JasonGussen/status/991873349465788416

We need to deal with everyday racism, Don Lemon says.

CNN’s @donlemon: I give ABC credit for cancelling “Roseanne” – but this wasn’t the first time, so why was she given this opportunity in the first place? https://t.co/XuT2RWthhp pic.twitter.com/rvLNVSOD1X

— The Situation Room (@CNNSitRoom) May 29, 2018

Preet Bharara said a thing.

"It's hard not to be proud of John McCain." Agreed. Whatever your politics. Yes, I'm watching the HBO special.

— Preet Bharara (@PreetBharara) May 29, 2018

“It’s hard not to be proud of John McCain.” Agreed. Whatever your politics.

Wellll, thought I. No. No it’s not. He chose Sarah Palin as his vice president. That means he chose her for president should he win the election and then die in office. That all by itself makes it not hard to refrain from being unmixedly proud of John McCain.

A friend pointed out another one, that I don’t think I was aware of. Ed Pilkington in the Guardian in September 2008 (two months before McCain lost to Obama):

Imagine the stink that would erupt were David Cameron to stand up in front of a dinner of rich Conservative backers and make a “joke” that implied that Sarah Brown had had a lesbian affair with Jacqui Smith and produced a love child (and an ugly one to boot). Can you imagine British papers deciding to downplay the story because it was in such bad taste, allowing Cameron to carry on with his assault on Downing Street?

Cross the pond and that is exactly what happened to John McCain at a fundraising dinner in Arizona a decade ago. “Do you know why Chelsea Clinton is so ugly?” he told a handful of big Republican funders. “Because Janet Reno is her father.”

Jesus. Misogyny much?

The remark packed into its 15 words several layers of misogyny. It disparaged the looks of Chelsea, then 18 and barely out of high school; it portrayed Reno as a man at a time when she was serving as the first female US attorney general; and it implied that Hillary Clinton was engaged in a lesbian affair while the Monica Lewinsky scandal was blazing. Not bad going, Senator McCain.

Any one of those elements would seem potentially terminal for a public figure. Yet here he is 10 years later presenting himself as a champion of feminism by appointing Sarah Palin as his running mate.

And according to Pilkington the US press barely touched it, which is why most of us didn’t know about it. (That was long before Twitter, of course…) They did him the favor of looking fixedly in the other direction. He still lost the election but he wasn’t outed for that shitty mean joke.

After his misogynist joke, McCain said sorry to Bill Clinton (though he made no direct apology to the three women involved) and the incident was all but forgotten.

Brilliant. He apologized to the bro but not to the women he actually taunted.

Whatever your politics, that’s shitty.

CNN reports:

The Supreme Court on Tuesday cleared the way for a controversial Arkansas law that blocks medication-induced abortions to go into effect.

The law, passed in 2015, says that any physician who “gives, sells, dispenses, administers, or otherwise provides or prescribes the abortion-inducing drug” shall have to have a contract with a physician who has admitting privileges at a nearby hospital.

So that will make it much harder to get the drug.

Planned Parenthood said it will “swiftly” make another challenge to block the law in US district court.

“Arkansas is now shamefully responsible for being the first state to ban medication abortion,” Planned Parenthood Executive Vice President Dawn Laguens said in a statement. This dangerous law also immediately ends access to safe, legal abortion at all but one health center in the state. If that’s not an undue burden, what is? This law cannot and must not stand. We will not stop fighting for every person’s right to access safe, legal abortion.”

That should be every woman’s right to access to safe, legal abortion. Men don’t need access to safe, legal abortion. If you disguise the class who is affected by this law you make it harder to explain the law and the ideology behind the law. This isn’t random; it’s part of the age-old policing of women’s reproductive capacities in the interests of men. If you don’t even understand that how can you know how to resist?