Trump did intend to fire Mueller. He tried to, but his lawyer said he would walk, so the tiny mind was changed.

President Trump ordered the firing last June of Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel overseeing the Russia investigation, according to four people told of the matter, but ultimately backed down after the White House counsel threatened to resign rather than carry out the directive.

The West Wing confrontation marks the first time Mr. Trump is known to have tried to fire the special counsel. Mr. Mueller learned about the episode in recent months as his investigators interviewed current and former senior White House officials in his inquiry into whether the president obstructed justice.

Funny how Trump provides new examples of obstruction of justice as Mueller is looking for the slightly older ones.

After receiving the president’s order to fire Mr. Mueller, the White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, refused to ask the Justice Department to dismiss the special counsel, saying he would quit instead, the people said. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because they did not want to be identified discussing a continuing investigation.

Mr. McGahn disagreed with the president’s case and told senior White House officials that firing Mr. Mueller would have a catastrophic effect on Mr. Trump’s presidency. Mr. McGahn also told White House officials that Mr. Trump would not follow through on the dismissal on his own. The president then backed off.

He’s not the sharpest tool in the shed, is he.

A fine fine story from the Washington Post:

The emailed response from the Guggenheim’s chief curator to the White House was polite but firm: The museum could not accommodate a request to borrow a painting by Vincent van Gogh for President and Melania Trump’s private living quarters.

Instead, wrote the curator, Nancy Spector, another piece was available, one that was nothing like “Landscape With Snow,” the 1888 van Gogh rendering of a man in a black hat walking along a path in Arles, France, with his dog.

The curator’s alternative: an 18-karat, fully functioning, solid gold toilet — an interactive work titled “America” that critics have described as pointed satire aimed at the excess of wealth in this country.

Do admit.

Pleasingly, they had been exhibiting the toilet in a working restroom for the public to use. I hope it was a gender neutral restroom because otherwise no fair.

But the exhibit was over and the toilet was available “should the President and First Lady have any interest in installing it in the White House,” Spector wrote in an email obtained by The Washington Post.

We know Trump loves to slap gilt all over everything – in fact maybe he was the inspiration for the satire aimed at the excess of wealth in this country.

On the face of it, President Trump might appreciate an artist’s rendering of a gilded toilet, given his well-documented history of installing gold-plated fixtures in his residences, his properties and even his airplane. But the president is also a self-described germaphobe, and it’s an open question whether he would accept a previously used toilet, 18-karat or otherwise.

Probably not. But I’m sure he was deeply flattered by the offer.

Speaking of poverty and inequality in the US and how that (along with other faults) makes us not a shining city on a hill – the US has a deep poverty problem.

According to the World Bank, 769 million people lived on less than $1.90 a day in 2013; they are the world’s very poorest. Of these, 3.2 million live in the United States, and 3.3 million in other high-income countries (most in Italy, Japan and Spain).

But if you factor in needs, it’s even worse than that.

An Indian villager spends little or nothing on housing, heat or child care, and a poor agricultural laborer in the tropics can get by with little clothing or transportation. Even in the United States, it is no accident that there are more homeless people sleeping on the streets in Los Angeles, with its warmer climate, than in New York.

The Oxford economist Robert Allen recently estimated needs-based absolute poverty lines for rich countries that are designed to match more accurately the $1.90 line for poor countries, and $4 a day is around the middle of his estimates. When we compare absolute poverty in the United States with absolute poverty in India, or other poor countries, we should be using $4 in the United States and $1.90 in India.

Once we do this, there are 5.3 million Americans who are absolutely poor by global standards. This is a small number compared with the one for India, for example, but it is more than in Sierra Leone (3.2 million) or Nepal (2.5 million), about the same as in Senegal (5.3 million) and only one-third less than in Angola (7.4 million)…

This evidence supports on-the-ground observation in the United States. Kathryn Edin and Luke Shaefer have documented the daily horrors of life for the several million people in the United States who actually do live on $2 a day, in both urban and rural America. Matthew Desmond’s ethnography of Milwaukee explores the nightmare of finding urban shelter among the American poor.

To put it succinctly, we abandon far more people to abject poverty than do most developed countries.

Even for the whole population, life expectancy in the United States is lower than we would expect given its national income, and there are places — the Mississippi Delta and much of Appalachia — where life expectancy is lower than in Bangladesh and Vietnam.

Hmm, the Mississippi Delta, what’s that – oh yes, it’s that place where hundreds of thousands of slaves were imported so that white people could get rich on cotton.

Not much shine.

Trump in Davos is trying to convince us all that he and Theresa May are best friends, best best best best dear close intimate best friends. May is simply saying the UK and the US remain allies.

His elegance and cogency were as usual striking.

“We’re on the same wavelength, I think, in every respect,” Mr. Trump said. “And the prime minister and myself have had a really great relationship, although some people don’t necessary believe that, but I can tell you it’s true.” He expressed respect for Mrs. May, and said he thought “the feeling is mutual from the standpoint of liking each other a lot,” adding that the two were “very much joined at the hip” on military matters.

Remember his visit to the White House during the transition, when he said afterwards that he liked Obama and Obama really really liked him?

Don’t bother watching after 53 seconds in. Anyway: that’s how detached from reality he is. He spent years giving oxygen to the lie that Obama wasn’t born in the US and isn’t a citizen and was therefore a fraudulent president…and then he says “he likes me” like a huge baby. And he says the same thing about May.

Maybe that’s because he doesn’t have the discipline or theory of mind to be polite to people he doesn’t like, so he can’t grasp that other people do.

Anyway. The chances that May actually “likes” him are nil.

Mrs. May was polite but less effusive and offered no personal testimonial to Mr. Trump, keeping her comments focused on their mutual national interests. “We, too, have that really special relationship between the U.K. and the United States,” she said. “It’s at each other’s shoulders. We face the same challenges across the world, and as you say we’re willing to go and to defeat those challenges and meet them.”

That’s how the adults do it; they don’t go prancing around the room exclaiming that Terry or Angie LIKES them.

Missouri dude runs for nomination to Senate on Eww Feminism ticket.

Republican Courtland Sykes posted a statement to Facebook in response to questions about his stance on women’s rights. In the post, he said his wife had “ordered” him to respect women’s rights, but she knows that “I want to come home to a home-cooked dinner at six every night – one that she fixes and one that I expect one day to have daughters learn to fix after they become traditional homemakers and family wives”.

The candidate expanded on what he expected of his daughters, saying he didn’t want them to grow up into “career obsessed banshees who forego home life and children and the happiness of family to become nail-biting manophobic [sic] hell-bent feminist she devils who shriek from the tops of a thousand tall buildings they think they could have leaped over in a single bound – had men not ‘suppressing them’.”

Tragically I can’t find the post now; perhaps he took it down because it got too much attention from banshees and she devils.

Mr Sykes criticised what he called “mean-spirited radical feminists”…

Being so genial and sweet in his own way of speaking.

Mr Sykes is one of four Republican candidates jockeying for the chance to challenge two-term Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill in the November general election. The candidate previously drew condemnation for posting a photo comparing Ms McCaskill and other Democratic women to Disney villains.

He should read some Marina Warner.

At least there’s a screen grab in circulation.

https://twitter.com/CharlotteAlter/status/956599629025628161

“Their own nasty, snake-filled heads” – come on, tell us what you really think.

Russia threat should unite us, not divide us: “It’s not about Republicans or Democrats. They’re coming after America, which I hope we all love equally… And they will be back, because we remain…that shining city on the hill, and they don’t like it. “ Me (Senate Intel 6/8/17)

— James Comey (@Comey) January 25, 2018

Comey:

Russia threat should unite us, not divide us: “It’s not about Republicans or Democrats. They’re coming after America, which I hope we all love equally… And they will be back, because we remain…that shining city on the hill, and they don’t like it.” Me (Senate Intel 6/8/17)

Well, we don’t, really. One, we never were, because slavery and genocide just for a start, and two, we’ve gotten worse in some ways instead of better. Russia is much worse still, yes, but that’s not much of a standard.

One huge flashing-sign reason we are not any kind of shining city on a hill is the disgusting fact that we have a larger proportion of our people locked up than any other country on earth. Our nearest rival is Russia.

There’s also the gulf between rich and poor which has grown in recent decades as opposed to shrinking – that’s not my idea of a shining city on a hill. There’s the shambolic health care non-system; there’s rising homelessness; there’s high infant and maternal mortality; there’s an inadequate social safety net; there’s entrenched poverty and neglect; there’s racism and police violence; there are far too many guns and too many outbursts of violence; money is allowed to decide elections.

All that doesn’t add up to a shining city on a hill, I’m sorry. Putin stinks, the Russian oligarchy stinks, but that doesn’t make us a shining city.

Brendan O’Neill. Spiked. The Presidents Club. Calm down.

Moral outrage…outrage entrepreneurs…raging loudly against the wicked…Britain’s chattering class…the utterly non-shocking news…sassy young women who early in life use their nous and looks to earn a buck…not the most decorous of annual affairs…pink-hued Guardian wannabe…posh fury with Brexit…to jump on the trending bandwagon…grovelling apologies…heads on platters…arrogant instinct…every little thing that displeases them.

…freedom of association…mixing with whomever they choose…a less than PC fashion…whiter than white…the new moral guardians…infantilised the women…the possibly sad or old-fashioned men…hapless, slave-like creatures needing to be saved by the middle-class, clever women…the skills necessary to deal with dickheads…today’s media women…national scandal…men touched their knees…the political and media classes…safe-spaced and prudish…

Every fucking cliché in the book innit. They don’t need Brendan, they could just chop up his old columns and paste the bits in.

A beautiful, blistering series of tweets by MarinaS:

https://twitter.com/marstrina/status/956187451613237249

https://twitter.com/marstrina/status/956187959564304384

https://twitter.com/marstrina/status/956188609400459264

https://twitter.com/marstrina/status/956189689995841538

https://twitter.com/marstrina/status/956190453598183424

Republicans in North Carolina are trying to make NC a one-party state, and the courts are telling them No Can Do, so now they’re trying to make the courts one-party.

Courts have overturned 14 laws passed by the legislature since 2011, including redistricting maps for the House of Representatives and the state legislature that one federal court called “among the largest racial gerrymanders ever encountered by a federal court.” Sweeping voting restrictions passed by the legislature in 2013 suffered a similar fate, with a federal appeals court saying they targeted “African Americans with almost surgical precision.” The legislature’s Republican supermajority hasn’t fared any better in state courts, which have blocked GOP efforts to strip teachers of tenure and to prevent the state’s Democratic governor, Roy Cooper, from appointing a majority of commissioners on state and local boards of elections.

Now the legislature has embarked on an unprecedented plan to transform the state’s courts by gerrymandering judicial maps to elect more Republican judges, preventing Cooper from making key judicial appointments, and seeking to get rid of judicial elections altogether. Cooper calls it an attempt to “rig the system.”

Probably because that’s clearly what it is.

Now the legislature is taking up a host of controversial new proposals in a special session, including redrawing judicial maps for the first time in roughly 50 years to put more Republicans on the bench. The new maps would likely give Republican judges 70 percent of seats on North Carolina’s superior and district courts, according to an analysis by the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, a voting rights group based in Durham. The group calls the new lines “a gross political gerrymander of our state’s legal system, designed to ensure that Republican judges will be elected in a disproportionate number of districts statewide.”

Not good.

The FT reports that the Presidents Club is disbanding.

The Presidents Club has decided to close after a Financial Times report detailing sexual harassment and groping of women at a fundraising dinner it organised.

The group said late on Wednesday that “the trustees have decided that the Presidents Club will not host any further fundraising events”. Remaining funds held by the trust will be distributed to children’s charities and “it will then be closed.”

The BBC:

A man who helped organise a men-only charity dinner, where hostesses were allegedly groped, has quit the Department for Education board.

David Meller quit his non-executive role after claims about the event by an undercover FT reporter.

Charities are refusing donations from the Presidents Club Charity Dinner, at London’s Dorchester Hotel.

Everyone is shocked, shocked.

In a statement, the Presidents Club said: “The organisers are appalled by the allegations of bad behaviour at the event asserted by the Financial Times reporters. Such behaviour is totally unacceptable.

“The allegations will be investigated fully and promptly and appropriate action taken.”

A spokesman for the Artista agency, which recruited the hostesses, said: “I was not aware of any claims of sexual harassment but the kind of behaviour alleged is completely unacceptable.

“I am checking with the staff and any complaints will be dealt with promptly and fairly.”

But what about that nondisclosure agreement?

Suzanne Moore on that boys’ night out for charity gropefest:

But this event has been going for 33 years. It was introduced by a Channel 5 baseball presenter called Jonny Gould, with the words: “Welcome to the most un-PC event of the year.”

Political correctness gone mad, you see, means that you cannot grope 19-year-olds who have been told to wear matching underwear under tight skirts while bunging some dosh to Great Ormond Street.

Indeed. Treating women like actual human beings as opposed to walking holes is suffocating politikul korrektnessss.

The detail is nauseating: the hostesses who have been tracked to the toilet and told to see the organiser if it’s all getting too much. The parading on stage of the girls. The hands up the skirts, and the strange business of attendees holding the women’s hands as though they were possessions.

It is a less exotic version of Jezebels, in The Handmaid’s Tale – except this was the Dorchester, and these men include politicians and business leaders who pay lip service to promoting policies of equality in the workplace.

They may even believe in equality in the workplace, while still expecting freedom for themselves to treat women as sex dolls in someone else’s workplace. “The women I see every day are colleagues; the women I see once a year at the Dorchester are up for grabs.”

And if you want a good cause, here’s one: equality for women. Indeed one might have thought, post-Weinstein, that getting your penis out in front of a student at a fundraising dinner is not the wisest of moves. But the gentlemen’s agreement that it somehow is has been busted. The cover is blown, to reveal that the top of society looks like a bunch of lowlife men who reinforce each other’s scummy behaviour. This isn’t about a few men, though. An entire structure enables this – one that turns giving to charity into a circle jerk over the bodies of young women.

Young women who are forced to sign an NDA that they haven’t been allowed to read.

One section of an interview on Fresh Air on Monday:

LEVISKY: The creed to which Daniel refers and the initial establishment of strong democratic norms in this country was founded in a homogeneous society, a racially and culturally homogeneous society. It was founded in an era of racial exclusion. And the challenge is that we have now become a much more ethnically, culturally diverse society, taken major steps towards racial equality, and the challenge is making those norms stick in this new context.

DAVIES: And you do note in the book that the resolution of the conflicts around the Civil War and a restoration of kind of normal democratic institutions was accompanied by denial of voting rights and basic citizenship privileges to African-Americans in the South. So this hasn’t exactly been a laudable course all the time.

ZIBLATT: Yeah, so this is this great paradox – tragic paradox, really – that we recount in the book, which is that the consolidation of these norms, which we think are so important to democratic life of mutual toleration and forbearance, were re-established, really, at the price of racial exclusion. I mean, there was a way in which the end of Reconstruction – when Reconstruction was a great democratic effort and experiment – and it was a moment of democratic breakthrough for the United States where voting rights were extended to African-Americans. At the end of Reconstruction throughout the U.S. South, states implemented a variety of reforms to reduce the right to vote – essentially, to eliminate the right to vote for African-Americans.

There’s a major howler in that passage. It’s an interview and it’s easy to make howlers in interviews and they probably would have caught it if it had been written…but still.

That “moment of democratic breakthrough for the United States where voting rights were extended to African-Americans” during Reconstruction? Voting rights were not extended to African-Americans during Reconstruction; they were extended to African-American men. They were not extended to African-American women, nor were they extended to white women. It’s odd how women are just not considered part of the population even now, even by academics talking about democracy and norms. It’s odd how easily women are simply forgotten. It’s odd how easily the exclusion of women remains just invisible to so many people even now.

I didn’t know him but I have many friends who did and I can see that Josh Kutchinsky is a great loss.

The IHEU:

Josh Kutchinsky, one of the greatest friends to international humanism, died last night. He had been suffering from an interstitial lung disease diagnosed in 2016.

Josh was a committed organiser and phenomenal personality within the humanist movement, both at home in the UK, and internationally.

During many years of activism, he served as a trustee of Humanists UK, and then Humanists UK’s international representative to the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU), as well as joining IHEU’s Uganda Humanist Schools Advisory Group. He was a founding trustee of the Uganda Humanist Schools Trust. In 2013 he received the IHEU Distinguished Services to Humanism Award at the IHEU General Assembly in Bucharest.

Josh was an early driving force behind the Central London Humanist Group, and he continued this and many other roles for some time even after moving to Montauroux in the south of France.

Josh was deeply enthusiastic and supportive of fellow humanists’ efforts. He loved meeting and whenever possible travelling to participate and encourage humanist activities around the world. Following on from the 2004 IHEU General Assembly in Kampala, Uganda, he founded an online support network sharing “good news and bad” among humanist activists from around the world which is still active today.

Humanists UK:

Josh’s contributions to the growth of humanism around the world were vast. For many, he is best remembered for the key role he played in the development of humanism in Africa, where his work helped change the lives of hundreds of young people for the better. In 2008, he became a founding trustee of the Uganda Humanist Schools Trust, a charity working to provide a liberal, humanist education to some of the region’s poorest and most vulnerable children. He also played a pivotal role in setting up Francophone Africa’s first ever secular conference in 2007. He put in place and maintained digital infrastructure which supported humanist networks to form and develop across the continent.

Josh found his experiences working alongside humanist colleagues from around the world profoundly inspiring. In a poem he wrote following the 2011 World Humanist Congress in Oslo, he found expression for what it was he most celebrated in humanism: ‘Thinking freely, / Touching hands, / Minds conceiving.’ But for all his work overseas, he was no less involved in humanism at home, where he helped lead the UK’s largest and most successful local humanist group – the Central London Humanists – for many years. He also served as a trustee of Humanists UK. The Chair of the Board at the time, Robert Ashby, remembers how he made ‘valuable and carefully considered contributions at all times’ and this was a hallmark of all Josh’s work.

Ros Lyn on Facebook writing from Accra:

We had such a great time in Malta and the gifts we got for each other was such a beautiful surprise including the gift from his wife. Leo Igwe and i are at a loss for words. The 3 of us have such great memories together. We always hang out like old friends after conferences, took long walks, trying new foods or not lol and our conversations got so deep that passers by would wonder what we smoked 😆. Josh was the epitome of a Humanist in all sense of the word. A truly Distinguished Service to Humanism Award Winner, humble, down-to-earth, funny, freethinker, teacher and a good listener. He was always with a smile even when he was ill and allowed me take photos of him anyway. When I last saw him, i was soooo happy because i missed him but i was sad and held back my tears because he was so ill but Leo just had to see him and bring him to join us at the conference in London and i know Josh was so proud to witness Leo receive his Distinguished Service to Humanism Award as well. He was always there to advice and support. I am so proud to have known you and have you as an icon to look up to all your great works and achievements. 

A sad day.