The cast is notably international

Apr 22nd, 2018 10:46 am | By

Laurence Tribe observed on Twitter that the cast of Casablanca included only two actors born in the US, which I found interesting.

I misspelled Henreid. At any rate, Tribe was making a point about immigrants, and a couple of people replied to pick nits and he deleted the tweet, but it was interesting and he was right. The foreign cast was notable at the time. Wikipedia:

The play’s cast consisted of 16 speaking parts and several extras; the film script enlarged it to 22 speaking parts and hundreds of extras.[13] The cast is notably international: only three of the credited actors were born in the United States (Bogart, Dooley Wilson, and Joy Page).

…

  • Conrad Veidt as Major Heinrich Strasser. He was a refugee German actor who had appeared in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. He fled the Nazis, but was frequently cast as a Nazi in American films. A major star in German cinema before the Nazi era, he was the highest paid member of the cast despite his second billing.[20]
  • Peter Lorre as Signor Ugarte. Born in Austria-Hungary, Lorre fled Nazi Germany in 1933 after starring in Fritz Lang‘s first sound movie, M (1931). Greenstreet and Lorre appeared in several films together over the next few years, although they did not share a scene in Casablanca.
  • Curt Bois as the pickpocket. Bois was a German-Jewish actor and refugee. He had one of the longest careers in film, making his first appearance in 1907 and his last in 1987.
  • Leonid Kinskey as Sascha, the Russian bartender infatuated with Yvonne. He was born into a Jewish family in Russia and had immigrated to the United States.

There are a bunch more in the bit parts.

Much of the emotional impact of the film has been attributed to the large proportion of European exiles and refugees who were extras or played minor roles (in addition to leading actors Paul Henreid, Conrad Veidt and Peter Lorre): such as Louis V. Arco, Trude Berliner, Ilka Grünig, Lotte Palfi, Richard Ryen, Ludwig Stössel, Hans Twardowski, and Wolfgang Zilzer. A witness to the filming of the “duel of the anthems” sequence said he saw many of the actors crying and “realized that they were all real refugees”.[25] Harmetz argues that they “brought to a dozen small roles in Casablanca an understanding and a desperation that could never have come from Central Casting.”

So this isn’t right:

It’s not that simple. Much of Hollywood was always conservative and conventional, sure, but much of it was not. There were plenty of lefties there in the 30s, who were either turned or driven out in the late 40s and 50s, but the purge hadn’t started when Casablanca was made. It was a Popular Front-ish, defeat the Nazis, welcome refugees sort of movie. Tribe’s point was well taken.

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A tendency toward a corrupting belief

Apr 22nd, 2018 9:56 am | By

Jennifer Palmieri has an interesting take on Comey and what he did in 2016.

She’s never met him but they have mutual friends and a lot of DC overlap, since she was director of communications in the Obama administration and then in Clinton’s campaign.

I don’t harbor ill will toward him. Our mutual friends attest to his high character, and his book, A Higher Loyalty, shows him to be a thoughtful person, generous boss and a colleague who—despite being prone to bouts of self-absorption—seems able to laugh at himself. Even though he is a Republican, I have never thought that he allowed his personal political views to drive his decisions as FBI director. I also value Jim Comey’s adherence to a “higher loyalty” beyond the president to upholding the rule of law, and how he stood up to President Trump’s inappropriate pressure even when it was clear it would cost him his job.

But what Comey’s actions and book reveal is a tendency toward a corrupting belief that his “higher loyalty”—which lifted him above partisan politics—somehow bestowed upon him the right to take actions that were well beyond his role as FBI director. It’s a very dangerous attitude, and one that resulted in him taking unprecedented actions in the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails, with devastating consequences.

That’s interesting if true, because so much of his disagreement with Trump revolved around the role of the FBI and its director, around what is appropriate and what is not, around the distance between the political world and the law enforcement world. If he too got it wrong, for however different reasons…isn’t that ironic.

She was impressed by his standing up to Gonzales but alarmed by his advertising of it.

I respected his willingness to stand up to the White House in defense of the law and his boss. But it made me uneasy that he made sure the press knew all about his heroic stand. In my experience, officials like that have a hard time staying in his or her lane and out of the spotlight.

My unease grew in October 2015, when I watched from the campaign trail as Comey gave a speech in which he speculated that a recent rise in murder rates could be due to a “chill wind” police felt in reaction to protests and threats against them after the killing of Michael Brown by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. It was a surprising speech. The FBI Director had veered from the Bureau’s purview of investigating crime into the Department of Justice’s purview of making policy, something I found to be a troubling encroachment and one he would repeat with devastating consequences during the Clinton email investigation.

You know…I wonder if some of this is born of the tv glorification of and fascination with law enforcement. I wonder if that makes it seem just natural and right for prosecutors and district attorneys to be in the limelight giving speeches and contributing to the discourse. The Sam Waterston Effect, one might call it. Sort of an odd parallel to The Apprentice Effect.

His July 5th press conference, in which he appointed himself Hillary Clinton’s investigator, prosecutor, judge and jury, was his original sin. No FBI director had ever made such a public pronouncement at the conclusion of an investigation. Comey justifies the press conference by writing that he sought to wrap up the investigation in a way that would “persuade a majority of fair and open-minded Americans” that the investigation had been done in an honest and non-political manner.

It’s a laudatory goal. But it’s also not his job. If it is anyone’s duty to worry about the public’s reaction to an FBI investigation, it is the job of the Attorney General and his or her deputies. Ironically, Comey’s drive to appear non-political drove him head first into a political maelstrom. And once he had established the practice of publicly commenting on the Clinton case, it made his next devastating step to send the October 28 letter all the easier to justify in his own mind.

The thing about that job division though is that people don’t defend other people’s turf as passionately as they do their own. Yooman nacha. But her point I think is that that’s just too bad: you don’t get to break the rules just because you want to protect your own particular organization.

A friend of mine who is a Trump supporter told me I should call this piece “Dear Madam Director,” because a female FBI director would never have made the same decisions he did. I think there’s some truth to that. His ego clearly got in the way. Despite Comey’s claims he took the actions he did to protect the FBI’s reputation and make sure a President Hillary Clinton wasn’t elected under a cloud of suspicion, I suspect his concern was more about his own ego and protecting his own reputation from attacks from Republican members of Congress.

But even if his only motivation in taking these actions had been to explain his decisions for the good of the FBI and the new president, it was still beyond the scope of his role. I am sure it would have been frustrating for him to sit mute while partisans attacked the FBI for its decision not to pursue a case against Clinton, but it would have been the right thing to do.

What if the thought is that the attacks on the FBI would fatally weaken it just when it needed to investigate what Putin and his pals were doing?

I don’t know. I’m not an insider. I can’t be sure who has it right.

Told you it was interesting.

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Not applicable

Apr 22nd, 2018 8:18 am | By

There are, we are told, two sides to every question. We must not, we are told, live in a bubble where we never encounter dissenting views. Free speech, we are told, requires inviting and welcoming every opinion no matter how distasteful or threatening.

I give you Great Hearts Monte Vista charter school:

A Texas charter school is apologizing after a teacher gave an assignment to an eighth grade American History class, asking students to list the positive aspects of slavery.

“When I first read it, I thought, this was b.s.,” said Great Hearts Monte Vista eighth-grade student Manu Livar.

Students in the class were supposed to complete an assignment on the “positive aspects” and “negative aspects” of the life of slaves, giving a “balanced view.”

A balanced view. A balanced view of slavery. Can we have a balanced view of the Holocaust? The Rwandan genocide? The Srebrenica massacre? Can we hear about the “positive aspects” of all of those?

When his mother picked Manu up, he showed her the assignment; she immediately sent a picture of it to her husband.

“What the hell is this revisionist history lesson trying to achieve here?!?” said Roberto Livar, Manu’s father, who posted it to Facebook on Wednesday.

That post.

Manu’s worksheet:

No automatic alt text available.

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Quietly removed

Apr 21st, 2018 11:37 am | By

The SPLC removed the list that included Maajid Nawaz as an “Anti-Muslim Extremist” (their words). The National Review has details…and so far no equivalent on the left that I can find seems to, which as Maajid frequently points out is pathetic.

The Southern Poverty Law Center has removed the “Field Guide to Anti-Muslim Extremists” from their website after attorneys for Maajid Nawaz, a practicing Muslim and prominent Islamic reformer, threatened legal action over his inclusion on the list.

The report, which had been active on the SPLC’s website since it was published in December 2016, was intended to serve as a resource for journalists to identify promoters of hateful propaganda; but it included a number of liberal reformers such as Nawaz, a former Islamic extremist who has since dedicated his life to combating the hateful ideology.

And who doesn’t promote “hateful propaganda.”

Nawaz, who founded the anti-extremist think tank Quilliam, said during a Wednesday night appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience, a popular podcast hosted by comedian Joe Rogan, that the report was removed from the SPLC website under legal threat sometime in the last two days.

“We have retained Clare Locke, they are writing to the Southern Poverty Law Center as we speak. I think they’ve got wind of it — the Southern Poverty Law Center — and as of yesterday, or the day before, they’ve removed the entire list that’s been up there for two years,” Nawaz said on the podcast.

But that’s all they’ve done, and Maajid is still pursuing the lawsuit.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali-born liberal feminist who fled her home country amid civil war and now works at the Hoover Institution, was also branded an “anti-Muslim extremist” by the SPLC.

Like Nawaz, Ali routinely criticizes inhumane practices that are common in majority-Muslim countries, including female genital mutilation, which she herself was subjected to before fleeing Somalia. The report branded her discussion of such topics “toxic.”

The inclusion of Nawaz and Ali on the “anti-Muslim extremist field guide” was the subject of criticism by conservative commentators and prompted a petition on Change.org, which drew thousands of signatures.

But not exclusively conservative commentators, dammit. I’m not conservative.

The SPLC did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

No, it always didn’t. It stonewalled. It’s a disgusting thing to see.

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Yes but what did you FEEL?

Apr 21st, 2018 11:05 am | By

The Times suggests the Republicans may have made a booboo in demanding that Rosenstein hand over the Comey memos. All the memos have done is show that Comey has been consistent.

Democrats said the memos helped establish that Mr. Comey was not a disgruntled employee who made up stories about the president.

“Thanks @HouseGOP for urging release of the Comey memos!” Representative Jackie Speier, Democrat of California, gleefully wrote on Twitter.

That made me laugh quite a lot.

But. Some Republicans say no it all shows that Comey somethingsomethingsomething.

Some Republicans continued to assail Mr. Comey, casting doubt on his judgment and suggesting that he had been motivated by resentment over his firing.

In a statement about the memos, the three Republican committee chairmen who had pressed for their release wrote that Mr. Comey never explicitly said in his memos that the president was trying to interfere in the Russia investigation.

“While former Director Comey went to great lengths to set dining room scenes, discuss height requirements, describe the multiple times he felt complimented, and myriad other extraneous facts, he never once mentioned the most relevant fact of all, which was whether he felt obstructed in his investigation,” they wrote.

You have got to be kidding. They’re saying the most relevant “fact” of all is what Comey felt? Come on. If somebody robs you and you don’t “feel” robbed that doesn’t mean that somebody did not rob you. The issue is not what Comey felt, ffs, it’s what Trump did. The law deals in actions, not feefees. In no other context would Republicans ever ask what someone “felt” – they consider feelings sissy stuff, except when it comes to religious maniacs not being allowed to interfere with other people’s rights.

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Respect

Apr 21st, 2018 10:28 am | By

Funniest headline ever:

Trump won’t attend Barbara Bush funeral ‘out of respect’ for family, White House says

Aka he wasn’t invited and they had to explain it somehow, so they chose an absurd non sequitur. The usual form of “respect” in this sitch is to go to the funeral. The White House is saying that Trump’s presence at the funeral would be a token of disrespect. Why? Well because Trump is so disreputable.

But also of course there’s just the hilarious transparency of it – “They don’t want me there and it’s because I’m SO AWESOME I might spoil it for everyone else.”

President Donald Trump will not join first lady Melania Trump in attending the funeral services for Barbara Bush, the White House said in a statement, citing a desire to “avoid disruptions” stemming from the increased security presence and “out of respect for the Bush Family and friends.”

Sure, because the Bushes are totally unused to all the fuss and muss that follows a president, so they’d be freaked out by it. Excellent choice of explanation for embarrassing absence.

A spokesperson for former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton confirmed they will attend the funeral, as will former President Barack Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama, according to Bush family representative.

But the current president has to stay home to tidy his sock drawer.

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No more thank you and sorry

Apr 21st, 2018 9:33 am | By

This is, in a way, small, but the sheer malice and hatefulness of it are huge.

BREAKING: Trump DHS has formally directed Citizenship and Immigration Services to remove all instances of “thank you” & “we regret to inform you” from denials of #immigration apps.

Not the most important immigration news happening today, but just thought you’d like to know.

Yeah that’s what we need – less “I’m sorry to have to tell you” and more “No.” Less compassion and more brutality. Less generosity and more rudeness. Less kindness and more pure fucking meanness. That will make the world a better place.

He doesn’t have a published public source.

I hope reporters follow up.

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Guest post: Why Priss Choss is unlikely to say No

Apr 20th, 2018 5:38 pm | By

Originally a comment by Screechy Monkey on So what does a British person look like?

I’m not an expert in British constitutional law, but I’m fairly confident that the Queen does not have the power to decide who will or will not succeed her, without an Act of Parliament. So any rumor about some secret decision to disinherit Charles shouldn’t be taken seriously.

Of course Charles could refuse to accept the Throne when the time comes, or officially relinquish his place in the line of succession. I’ve heard it argued over the years that he ought to do so because of his unpopularity and/or unsuitability to the job. And occasionally there’s a rumor that he will do so, and I have no idea how much stock to put in those. My inclination is to doubt it very much, for at least four reasons I can think of:

1) It would take an extraordinary person to say, effectively, “I have been given an extremely privileged life with the understanding that I would eventually have one job, for which I was trained my entire life. But despite all of that training and support and preparation, it turns out that I would be so desperately bad at the job, or at least, my subjects all think that I would be so desperately bad at it, that I would jeopardize the very institution that it represents, and so I must decline and instead live out a life of privilege with no responsibility.” I’m not sure if I mean extraordinary in a positive sense here. Certainly it would require a great deal of humility. I don’t have any particular insight into Prince Charles, but he does not strike me as that sort of person.

2) I don’t know how seriously to take the series The Crown, but I have heard it remarked that one thing it gets right is the reaction of the Windsors to the Abdication, i.e. that they viewed Edward’s actions as the worst sort of selfishness and dereliction of duty. It seems unlikely to me that the Queen’s son would view passing on the job as any kind of noble or humble act, but rather as a fairly selfish one. Like it or not, it was Charles’s job from birth to prepare for the role, and to refuse to take it would be an admission of failure on a level I can’t imagine.

3) I don’t think it would help save the monarchy. It might do the opposite. If Charles is to pass on the job — the second man in three generations to do so — because William has better poll numbers and a younger, prettier, wife, then it seems to me that this precedent just invites more questions about the monarchy than Charles’s accession would. If it turns out that Princess Charlotte is smart and charming and popular but her older brother George is a bit of a dolt, then will there be clamoring for George to yield his place just like Grandpa did? And if you’re going to start choosing monarchs based on their popularity and public image or perceived ability, then why not just go the whole way and elect them, or have Parliament appoint them to fixed terms like Governors-General in Canada and Australia? Then at least you’d have an entire nation of talent to choose from rather than a single family.

4) If it was going to happen, I think it would have been done a long time ago. The time to do it — if at all — would have been when Charles got divorced and his popularity cratered, and there was the prospect that Charles might spend three or four decades on the throne. Or at least after William became of age. Now, my understanding is that Charles has bounced back a bit in popularity (although I agree with Ophelia that there’s still plenty to dislike) and the public has warmed to Camilla a bit, and it’s unlikely he’d be in for a long reign. No doubt there will be a ton of “abolish the monarchy” think pieces written when the Queen passes, but I think that would happen even if Charles was out of the picture.

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External standards

Apr 20th, 2018 1:58 pm | By

Comey was on the Colbert show the other day. The Times took some notes.

In recent days Trump has been furiously tweeting about Comey, even suggesting he should be put in jail.

Colbert asked him how he felt about Trump’s twitter insults.

Comey told Colbert that the episode seemed to reflect the reasons he decided to write “A Higher Loyalty”: to remind the country that it should not take the president’s public acts too lightly.

“My first reaction to those kinds of tweets is a shrug — like, ‘Oh, there he goes again.’ But actually then I caught myself and I said, ‘Wait a minute. If I’m shrugging, are the rest of the country shrugging? And does that mean we’ve become numb to this?’ It’s not O.K. for the president of the United States to say a private citizen should be in jail. It’s not normal, it’s not acceptable, it’s not O.K. But it’s happened so much, there’s a danger we’re now numb to it, and the norm has been destroyed. And I feel that norm destroying in my own shrug. So we can’t allow that to happen. We have to talk about it and call it out. It’s not O.K.

That’s one good thing about social media, and blogs, even though that also cuts the other way. We now have the ability to refrain from shrugging things off; we can make a fuss now, a public fuss. That cuts both ways because so can everyone else and some of everyone else=Trump and people who like Trump and people who use this new tool to insult women and other underlings. We can make a fuss and they can make a fuss.

Comey was also on Fresh Air.

GROSS: And he asked for your loyalty again, and how did it end?

COMEY: He came back to loyalty again and said, I need loyalty. And I paused, and I said, I will always be honest with you. And he said, after a pause, that’s what I want – honest loyalty. And I paused, desperately looking for a way to get out of this incredibly awkward conversation. I said, you’ll get that from me, knowing what I meant and believing that given the conversation that had happened since we started the meal, he understood what I meant by that. And then we were out of that particular part of the conversation.

GROSS: That’s one example of the times that you compare the president’s behavior to the Mafia. And you’re familiar with the Mafia because you prosecuted them when you were in the New York office. So usually with the Mafia, there’s transactional relationships. You know, I’m going to give you this. I expect something in return. I expect your loyalty. But beneath all of that is a threat. Like, if you don’t give me your loyalty or if, you know, in spite of all my compliments to you, you betray me in some way, something’s going to happen. Did you sense that beneath this conversation there was any kind of threat?

COMEY: Well, certainly not the kind of threat that La Cosa Nostra, the Mafia, would make explicit or implicit. And I don’t mean by comparing Donald Trump’s leadership culture to that of a Mafia boss to suggest he’s out there breaking legs or, you know, bombing shops when people don’t make their payments. And I didn’t get a sense of any kind of dark threat like that. But what I mean by the comparison is they’re strikingly similar in the centrality of the boss and in there being no external reference points other than the boss.

Most ethical leaders make judgments, hard judgments, by calling on some external reference points – a religious tradition, philosophy, logic, history, practice, something external to the leader but in the Mafia, and in my experience in Donald Trump’s world, there are no external reference points. It’s what is best for the boss? What will serve the boss best? How do we get the boss what he wants? It’s all about me as the leader.

Yes. It’s all about one giant all-encompassing ego. That’s no good. No one person is that important, and certainly not a Mafia boss or Donald Trump. But really no one is. Everyone has rights, and no one has extra rights.

It’s interesting that Comey doesn’t cite human rights as one of his examples of an external standard. It’s a pretty good one.

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Turn of the worm

Apr 20th, 2018 12:05 pm | By

You know how Trump treats even people close to him like shit? Maybe it’s going to bite him in the ass now.

For years, a joke among Trump Tower employees was that the boss was like Manhattan’s First Avenue, where the traffic goes only one way.

That one-sidedness has always been at the heart of President Trump’s relationship with his longtime lawyer and fixer, Michael D. Cohen, who has said he would “take a bullet” for Mr. Trump. For years Mr. Trump treated Mr. Cohen poorly, with gratuitous insults, dismissive statements and, at least twice, threats of being fired, according to interviews with a half-dozen people familiar with their relationship.

“Donald goes out of his way to treat him like garbage,” said Roger J. Stone Jr., Mr. Trump’s informal and longest-serving political adviser, who, along with Mr. Cohen, was one of five people originally surrounding the president when he was considering a presidential campaign before 2016.

Now, for the first time, the traffic may be going Mr. Cohen’s way. Mr. Trump’s lawyers and advisers have become resigned to the strong possibility that Mr. Cohen, who has a wife and two children and faces the prospect of devastating legal fees, if not criminal charges, could end up cooperating with federal officials who are investigating him for activity that could relate, at least in part, to work he did for Mr. Trump.

May it prove true.

Trump has always felt he had leverage over Cohen, but his goons say the raid has flipped that.

For years, Mr. Cohen has described himself as unflinchingly devoted to Mr. Trump, whom he has admired since high school. He has told interviewers that he has never heard Mr. Trump utter an inaccuracy or break a promise. He has tweeted about Mr. Trump nearly 3,000 times.

In a Fox News interview last year, Mr. Cohen declared: “I will do anything to protect Mr. Trump.’’ He told Vanity Fair in September that “I’m the guy who would take a bullet for the president,” adding, “I’d never walk away.”

Image result for brando godfather

Over the years, Mr. Trump threatened to fire Mr. Cohen over deals that didn’t work out, or snafus with business projects, people who were present for the discussions said. He was aware that Mr. Cohen benefited in other business projects as being seen as affiliated with the Trump Organization, and it irked him.

Which is funny, when “the Trump Organization” itself is what it is only because of Trump’s gigantic tower of lies.

But this part is really sad: Trump loves Lewandowski more than Cohen. A lot more.

Particularly hurtful to Mr. Cohen was the way Mr. Trump lavished approval on Mr. Lewandowski in a way he never did for Mr. Cohen. When Mr. Cohen told Mr. Trump that he believed that Mr. Lewandowski had been behind a negative story about Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump dismissed the comments as simple jealousy, and didn’t pay attention, according to two people familiar with the incident.

Aw. Ouchy.

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The President pointed his fingers at his head

Apr 20th, 2018 11:12 am | By

Chris Cilizza comments on some highlights from the memos:

3. “The conversation, which was pleasant at all times, was chaotic, with topics touched, left, then returned to later, making it very difficult to recount in a linear fashion…..It really was conversation-as-jigsaw-puzzle in a way, with pieces picked up, then discarded, then returned to.”

No observation anywhere in these memos rings truer of Trump than this one, which comes from the one-on-one dinner the two men at the White House eight days after Trump had been sworn in.

Watch any Trump press conference or speech and you are immediately struck by the massively haphazard nature of it. Trump can jump — as he did earlier this week — from his Electoral College win to the situation in North Korea without blinking an eye. To his supporters, it shows an able mind unbound by needing to stay “on message.” To his critics it shows someone incapable of focusing on much of anything for any extended period of time.

Comey’s recounting of the logical hops in the conversation — from Trump’s inaugural crowd size to the nastiness of the 2016 campaign to how tall his son, Barron, was is perhaps the most powerful moment in the memos. It captures Trump’s approach and mindset perfectly.

It’s not just the inability to focus on one thing – it’s the absence of a coherent through-line, in other words it’s the absence of thought. Non-stop babblers like Trump are story tellers as opposed to diccussers; they’re all narrative and no analysis. That’s a really very drastic disability for a president.

4. “I said I don’t do sneaky things. I don’t leak. I don’t do weasel moves.”

Comey critics will fixate on these lines because we know that he leaked parts of these memos after he was fired in an attempt to have a special prosecutor appointed to examine whether — among other things — Trump was secretly taping conversations in the White House. By Comey’s own standard — as laid out above — his purposeful leak was ‘weasel move.”

Wait. Comey said that as the FBI director. He said it on the job, in his official capacity. He was saying what his interactions with the president would be as head of the FBI. When he was no longer in that job and thus not reporting to the president, he was free to make his own rules.

Plus, on a human level, Trump deliberately fired him in the most abrupt embarrassing caught in LA without a ride home way possible. I have a hard time seeing it as a “weasel move” for Comey to share his own memos after that.

7. “He then went on to explain that he has serious reservations about Mike Flynn’s judgment….the President pointed his fingers at his head and said ‘the guy has serious judgment issues.'”

Reminder: This comment by Trump comes just eight days after he has become President! Which means that he harbored doubts about Flynn long before January 20, 2017. And yet he still chose Flynn as a his national security adviser. Which is curious except when you remember that dogged loyalty is by far the most important thing to Trump. And there was no one more loyal to Trump in the campaign than Flynn.

Yes. That one is just stunning.

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So what does a British person look like?

Apr 20th, 2018 10:43 am | By

Priss Choss met a woman in a receiving line and royally asked her where she’s from.

I met Prince Charles this week at the Commonwealth People’s Forum at which I was a speaker (on a day whose itinerary was entitled Politics of Hope: Taking on Injustice in the Commonwealth). It was part of the buildup to the Commonwealth heads of government meeting, the summit of leaders of 53 countries representing more than 2 billion people.

I shook the prince’s hand with my right hand. In my other, I was holding a copy of an anthology, We Mark Your Memory: Writing from the Descendants of Indenture, in which I have an essay published. I told him that my mother was born in Guyana and that the anthology had collected hidden histories of indenture.

“And where are you from?” asked the prince.

“Manchester, UK,” I said.

“Well, you don’t look like it!” he said, and laughed. He was then ushered on to the next person.

Hahaha; so funny. Doesn’t look like it how? Because Mancunians all have five eyes, or three arms, or solid gold hair? No, because I’ve been there, and that was not the case. So…?

Prince Charles was endorsed by the Queen, in her opening speech to the heads of government, to be the future head of the Commonwealth: it’s her “sincere wish” that he become so. That the mooted next leader of an organisation that represents one-third of the people on the planet commented that I, a brown woman, did not look as if I was from a city in the UK is shocking.

Well, you see, it’s like this: we want the cheap labor and the resources, but we don’t want the people. That’s fair enough isn’t it?!

So what does a British person look like? A British person can look like me. A British person can have black or brown, not only white, skin and still be just as British (this shouldn’t need to be spelled out in black and white). I could have proven that I was born in Manchester and that I am British, as I had my passport in my handbag – I’d needed it to get through the venue’s security.

Yet I can’t tell Prince Charles exactly where I am from originally – that old chestnut. Why? Because the British destroyed much of the evidence that my ancestors were shipped over from India in the 19th century to toil for the empire as indentured labourers on sugar colonies in the Caribbean.

I have been to the National Archives in Georgetown, Guyana, to search for my ancestral history and stared down a gaping hole where records of lives should have been. The British destroyed so much that could properly explain and evidence our identities.

Have a nice cup of tea.

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Height clearance in submarines

Apr 20th, 2018 9:55 am | By

Reading the Comey memos this morning. Notice that they were no sooner handed over to Congress than they were leaked. So much for that whole pesky law and order idea that evidence from an ongoing investigation should not be handed over to Congress.

On page 3 the memo of the dinner for two begins. Comey reports that he had a chance to chat with the two servers before Trump got there, and that they were both retired Navy submariners and the three of them “had a fun discussion about height clearance in submarines.”

The conversation, which was pleasant at all times, was chaotic, with topics touched, left, then returned to later, making it very difficult to recount in a linear fashion.

I bet. That’s the Trump we’ve come to know and to loathe more than we did before in the happy days when we knew little of him and cared less. He’s a very prolific talker, but a very bad one: he just takes off, as if he were in a competition for “how long can you keep talking?” He babbles. He makes you wish language had never been invented to be abused by a goon like him.

The president spoke an overwhelming majority of the time.

Sums.it.up.

Trump asked, “So what do you want to do?” They talked about Comey’s job in detail.

There was no acknowledgement by him (or me) that we had already talked about this twice.

With a babbler like Trump it can be hard to tell if that’s just more babbling or early Alzheimer’s. Or both.

Trump says Obama and Holder were close, and Comey agrees and then says that’s a thing presidents keep getting wrong – they think because problems come from the Justice Department that it’s a good idea to “try to bring Justice close” when in fact it’s a very bad idea. He cited Mitchell, Meese, Gonzales, and Trump added Bobby Kennedy.

Then there’s a startling bit, with names redacted, where Trump tells Comey he (Trump) doubts Flynn’s judgement. Oh, really, sir?

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The stories John Barron told

Apr 20th, 2018 9:07 am | By

Investigative journalist Jonathan Greenberg tells a long detailed story in the Post about Young Donald Trump’s obsessive campaign to get himself onto the Forbes 400 list by means of prolific lies about how many $$$ he really had.

In May 1984, an official from the Trump Organization called to tell me how rich Donald J. Trump was. I was reporting for the Forbes 400, the magazine’s annual ranking of America’s richest people, for the third year. In the previous edition, we’d valued Trump’s holdings at $200 million, only one-fifth of what he claimed to own in our interviews. This time, his aide urged me on the phone, I needed to understand just how loaded Trump really was.

The official was John Barron — a name we now know as an alter ego of Trump himself. When I recently rediscovered and listened, for first time since that year, to the tapes I made of this and other phone calls, I was amazed that I didn’t see through the ruse: Although Trump altered some cadences and affected a slightly stronger New York accent, it was clearly him. “Barron” told me that Trump had taken possession of the business he ran with his father, Fred. “Most of the assets have been consolidated to Mr. Trump,” he said. “You have down Fred Trump [as half owner] . . . but I think you can really use Donald Trump now.” Trump, through this sockpuppet, was telling me he owned “in excess of 90 percent” of his family’s business. With all the home runs Trump was hitting in real estate, Barron told me, he should be called a billionaire.

Greenberg suspected some of that was untrue, and he did a lot of poking, and was proud for years of the job Forbes had done calling Trump on his distortions.

But it took decades to unwind the elaborate farce Trump had built to project an image as one of the richest people in America. Nearly every assertion supporting that claim was untrue. Trump wasn’t just poorer than he said he was. Over time I have learned that he should not have been on the first three Forbes 400 lists at all. In our first-ever list, in 1982, we included him at $100 million, but Trump was actually worth roughly $5 million — a paltry sum by the standards of his super-monied peers — as a spate of government reports and books showed only much later.

That’s Trump for you – he tells so many and such huge lies that he gets away with many of them because people don’t realize they’re only at the first level. It’s worked, in a sense, but at the cost of being a known asshole to anyone with working radar.

I was a determined 25-year-old reporter, and I thought that, by reeling Trump back from some of his more outrageous claims, I’d done a public service and exposed the truth. But his confident deceptions were so big that they had an unexpected effect: Instead of believing that they were outright fabrications, my Forbes colleagues and I saw them simply as vain embellishments on the truth. We were so wrong.

This was a model Trump would use for the rest of his career, telling a lie so cosmic that people believed that some kernel of it had to be real. The tactic landed him a place he hadn’t earned on the Forbes list — and led to future accolades, press coverage and deals. It eventually paved a path toward the presidency.

It also got him the fortune he does have, because people believed enough of his lies that they wanted his name on their buildings, so now he gets to make millions just as a brand.

Trump knew I had doubts about his assertions, so he had his lawyer, Roy Cohn, call me. Cohn spent most of his time threatening lawsuits, schmoozing with mobster clients and badgering reporters with off-the-record utterances that made his clients look good and their enemies look bad. Cohn surprised me at my Forbes desk that summer: “Jon Greenberg,” a scrappy voice bellowed, before I could connect my tape recorder. I took notes by hand. “This is Roy. Roy Cohn! You can’t quote me! But Donny tells me you’re putting together this list of rich people. He says you’ve got him down for just $200 million! That’s way too low, way too low! Listen, I’m Donny’s personal lawyer, but he said I could talk to you about this. I am sitting here looking at his current bank statement. It shows he’s got more than $500 million in liquid assets, just cash. That’s just Donald, nothing to do with Fred, and it’s just cash.” He concluded: “He’s worth more than any of those other guys in this town!”

I offered to have a messenger pick up the bank statement at his office. Cohn protested that the document was confidential. “Just trust me,” he said. I told him I wouldn’t take his word without seeing the paperwork. “It’s confidential!” Cohn yelled.

So, to sum up, Cohn calls up this investigative reporter to say Trump is MUCH richer than the reporter thinks, and he has the documentary evidence right there in his hand, and no way is he going to show it to the reporter, because it’s confidential, man.

What self-respecting reporter would not take Roy Cohn’s word for it? Isn’t that what reporters do: take people’s word for things? Especially contested things, things that are the very core of the reporting and that the crooked lawyer is calling them up about?

I was a leading New York real estate reporter through the 1980s. I left the Forbes staff in 1983 but continued to freelance for the magazine while writing major investigative features as a contributing editor for the new Manhattan, Inc. magazine, as well as New York, Avenue and New York City Business. I knew all the key players. I thought I had a handle on this material.

But Trump was so competent in conning me that, until 35 years later, I did not know I had been conned. Instead, I have gone through my career in national media with a misinformed sense of satisfaction that, as a perceptive young journalist, I called Trump on his lies and gave Forbes readers who used the Rich List as a barometer of private wealth a more accurate picture of his finances than the one he was selling.

The joke was on me — and everyone else. Trump’s fabrications provided the basis for a vastly inflated wealth assessment for the Forbes 400 that would give him cachet for decades as a triumphant businessman.

Which is how he got to play one on tv and thus how he got to be president.

“The more often Forbes mentioned him, the more credible Donald’s claim to vast wealth became,” O’Brien said, arguing that Trump and the list were “mutually reinforcing”: “The more credible his claim to vast wealth became, the easier it was for him to get on the Forbes 400 — which became the standard that other media, and apparently some of the country’s biggest banks, used when judging Donald’s riches.”

He wasn’t wrong to be hell-bent on getting onto the Forbes list; it worked for him.

(Also, tip of the hat for naming his son “Barron.” The kid is named after a gigantic fraud. That will be nice for him.)

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Make him an offer he can’t

Apr 19th, 2018 5:40 pm | By

Oh gawd these people. Rudy Giuliani has joined Trump’s “legal team.”

Former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, a combative former prosecutor and longtime ally of President Trump, told The Washington Post on Thursday that he has joined the president’s legal team dealing with the ongoing special counsel probe.

“I’m doing it because I hope we can negotiate an end to this for the good of the country and because I have high regard for the president and for Bob Mueller,” Giuliani said in an interview.

What is this “negotiate an end” shit? It’s not a war, it’s not a strike, it’s not a boycott – it’s a criminal investigation, and suspects / targets / subjects don’t get to “negotiate an end” to investigations. That’s now how that works. If Trump is criminally involved in what Mueller is investigating, then we need to stop him, not back off and tell him to have a nice day.

“Rudy is great,” Trump said in the statement issued by Sekulow. “He has been my friend for a long time and wants to get this matter quickly resolved for the good of the country.”

Please. For the good of the Trump, he means. He doesn’t give a rat’s ass about the good of the country.

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No daughters please

Apr 19th, 2018 12:02 pm | By

Now, we get why people prefer to have male children rather than female. It’s totally understandable. Girls are floppy and worthless, and they’re likely to turn out to be whores, and they’re a terrible drain on the wallet without giving anything back. If only humans could figure out a way to have male children exclusively.

A combination of cultural preferences, government decree and modern medical technology in the world’s two largest countries has created a gender imbalance on a continental scale. Men outnumber women by 70 million in China and India.

Yay! Now to get to no women at all.

Out of China’s population of 1.4 billion, there are nearly 34 million more males than females — the equivalent of almost the entire population of California, or Poland, who will never find wives and only rarely have sex. China’s official one-child policy, in effect from 1979 to 2015, was a huge factor in creating this imbalance, as millions of couples were determined that their child should be a son.

India, a country that has a deeply held preference for sons and male heirs, has an excess of 37 million males, according to its most recent census. The number of newborn female babies compared with males has continued to plummet, even as the country grows more developed and prosperous. The imbalance creates a surplus of bachelors and exacerbates human trafficking, both for brides and, possibly, prostitution.

Well not really “brides” as normally understood. If they’re trafficked then they’re slaves, even if there is a “marriage” of sorts.

In short? It’s a problem. The devaluation of women and girls has consequences.

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The president grew angry

Apr 19th, 2018 10:49 am | By

Speaking of Trump and tv and temper and tantrums…

President Trump was watching television on Sunday when he saw Nikki R. Haley, his ambassador to the United Nations, announce that he would impose fresh sanctions on Russia. The president grew angry, according to an official informed about the moment. As far as he was concerned, he had decided no such thing.

It was not the first time Mr. Trump has yelled at the television over something he saw Ms. Haley saying. This time, however, the divergence has spilled into public in a remarkable display of discord that stems not just from competing views of Russia but from larger questions of political ambition, jealousy, resentment and loyalty.

Or, less tactfully, from the fact that the president is an out of control egomaniac.

…the episode highlighted the crossed circuits over foreign policy in an administration with no secretary of state, an increasingly marginalized White House chief of staff and a national security adviser who has only been on the job for a week and has pushed out many of the senior national security officials in the White House but has yet to bring in his own team.

A situation which only an out of control egomaniac could or would engineer. Nobody in the administration told Haley that Trump had changed course on the Russia sanctions.

“It damages her credibility going forward and once again makes everyone, friend and foe alike, wonder that when the United States says something, approves something, calls for something, opposes something, is it for real?” said Representative Gerald E. Connolly, Democrat of Virginia and a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. “Should we wait to see what Trump does the next day?”

The clash was reminiscent of various occasions when Mr. Trump has directly undercut subordinates, as when Mr. Tillerson broached the idea of negotiations with North Korea and the president scolded him on Twitter not to waste his time. Many in Washington and at the United Nations were riveted by the sharp exchange on Tuesday between the White House and its senior international diplomat.

It’s like an episode of The Apprentice but with nukes.

Beyond the immediate disconnect, though, is a deeper strain between Mr. Trump and Ms. Haley, according to administration officials and other insiders. Ms. Haley has been perhaps the most hawkish voice on Russia on a team headed by a president who has emphasized his fervent desire for friendship with President Vladimir V. Putin.

At times, that serves the president’s interests because she can say what he will not. But at other times, he has grown exasperated by her outspokenness.

At one point recently, he saw Ms. Haley on television sharply criticizing Russia over its intervention in Ukraine. “Who wrote that for her?” Mr. Trump yelled angrily at the screen, according to people briefed on the moment. “Who wrote that for her?”

A former governor of South Carolina, Ms. Haley has assumed a more prominent role than most of her predecessors, at times eclipsing the secretary of state. And along the way, Mr. Trump has grown suspicious of her ambition, convinced that she had been angling for Mr. Tillerson’s position and increasingly wondering whether she wants his own job.

Well somebody ought to be doing it.

Aides to both scoff at such suggestions, but the slightest hint of such a pairing would be likely to enrage Mr. Trump, who has made it clear that he plans to run for re-election. The talk was exacerbated in recent days when Mr. Pence named Jon Lerner, Ms. Haley’s deputy, as his new national security adviser, while allowing him to keep his job at the United Nations.

That plan collapsed within 48 hours when Mr. Trump grew angry at reports that Mr. Lerner had made anti-Trump ads for the Club for Growth, an economic conservative advocacy group, during Republican primaries in 2016. Mr. Lerner stepped down from the job in Mr. Pence’s office.

He’s like a rabid dog that no one can get rid of.

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He wanted to be seen as backing up a series of bellicose tweets

Apr 19th, 2018 9:40 am | By

Oh god. I suppose I knew this but seeing it spelled out is another story. Trump rushed to bomb Syria so that his tweets would be true.

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis urged President Trump to get congressional approval before the United States launched airstrikes against Syria last week, but was overruled by Mr. Trump, who wanted a rapid and dramatic response, military and administration officials said.

Because he’s mentally a toddler. Rapid and dramatic=illegal and reckless and authoritarian.

Mr. Trump, the officials said, wanted to be seen as backing up a series of bellicose tweets with action, but was warned that an overly aggressive response risked igniting a wider war with Russia.

He wanted to be seen as backing up a series of bellicose tweets with action.

He wanted to be seen as backing up a series of bellicose tweets with action.

Think about that, and notice how doomed we are.

He could bellicosely tweet anything. He could threaten to nuke North Korea or China or Russia or anywhere else. He could threaten to declare war, he could threaten invasion, he could threaten to firebomb Mexico or Iran or Germany or any other country he takes a dislike to. He could, and it’s not even unlikely. He talks smack every single day on Twitter, and now we know he wants to be seen as backing that shit up. Why isn’t this code red everywhere?

What inspired the bellicose tweets in the first place? You’ll never guess.

Last Tuesday — amid reports that the U.S. was considering a strike against the Assad regime, in response to an alleged chemical weapons attack against civilians in Douma — Russia’s ambassador to Lebanon Alexander Zasypkin warned that “if there is a US missile attack, we … will shoot down U.S. rockets and even the sources that launched the missiles.”

The Fox & Friends morning crew took exception to this bluster, with one host arguing, “What we should be doing is telling the Russians, ‘Every Syrian military base is a target and if you’re there, it is your problem.’”

Minutes later, one of the program’s most dedicated viewers echoed that belligerent note.

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/984022625440747520

So Fox News holds everyone’s fate in its evil hands.

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It’s a secret

Apr 19th, 2018 8:45 am | By

So, Scott Pruitt spent thousands of government dollars on a junket to Morocco during which he promoted the export of natural gas…an activity which has nothing to do with the agency he heads. Funnily enough the agency to protect the environment does not lobby for natural gas export.

He’s also doing his best to conceal nearly everything about it.

Newly released calendars for one of the most controversial trips of Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt’s tenure were largely blacked out before being shared with ABC News.

The 47-hour journey in Morocco was already drawing congressional scrutiny and criticism from outside groups because of the lack transparency over why Pruitt was in the country and what he was doing while he was there.

In Morocco, he spent at least a portion of his time promoting exports for U.S. energy firms. Conservative congressional estimates put the cost of the trip at more than $40,000, and because of travel snags, Pruitt and his aides spent two days in Paris at high-end hotels.

Or because of “travel snags.” Oh, oh, the plane is dusty, we have to stay in Paris for a couple of days, what a shame.

Pruitt did not publicly announce he was going ahead of time, did not bring reporters along, and when he finally released copies of his itinerary in response to Freedom of Information requests from ABC News and other news organizations, the bulk of the schedule was blacked out.

The bulk of the schedule was blacked out. How does he even justify that? The EPA is not the CIA; where does he get off refusing to tell us what he did in Morocco? Why would it be secret?

“The substantial redaction of calendars from his trip to Morocco, in which he apparently spent substantial taxpayer money to work on an issue that could benefit donors and those with ties to him, seems like just the latest example of the inappropriate secrecy he has brought to every aspect of his job,” Noah Bookbinder, the executive director of the nonpartisan watchdog Citizens for Responsible Ethics in Washington, said in a statement.

It’s not a secret agency. It’s not an agency that is supposed to keep secrets*.

What is known about Pruitt’s trip to Morocco last December comes from a press statement he released as he departed to fly back to D.C. According to the EPA press release, he discussed U.S. environmental priorities and the U.S.-Morocco Free Trade Agreement with Moroccan leaders and, to the surprise of some, promoted benefit of liquid natural gas imports in Morocco.

At the time of the trip, the only U.S. company that exported liquid natural gas was represented by a top Washington lobbyist who arranged $50-a-night housing for Pruitt when he first moved to town. The company, Cheniere, and the lobbyist, Steven Hart, both told ABC News they did not ask Pruitt to promote the exports in Morocco.

Oh, thank god, that’s all right then.

Sleaze piled on sleaze.

The massive redactions were justified according to team Pruitt by the “deliberative process privilege” allowed under the Freedom of Information Act.

Typically, that’s an exception used to avoid releasing the details of internal policy discussions before they are finalized, so as to prevent confusing the public, according to the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press website.

The EPA cites the exemption repeatedly to justify deletions throughout the 350 pages of schedules the EPA released this week, including his activities on New Year’s Day.

Whitehouse wrote in a letter earlier this month that he has reviewed copies of Pruitt’s schedule that show he traveled with his family to the Rose Bowl and Disneyland during that time.

Deliberating, were they? Engaging in the deliberative process while they watched the football? The whole family deliberating on EPA matters at Disneyland?

Adam Marshall, an attorney with the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press, said the use of the Deliberative Process Privilege is problematic in this case because previous court cases have said it can’t be used to redact purely factual information like the date, time, or who attended a meeting.

Marshall called it the “withhold it because you want to” exemption because agencies routinely overuse it.

“We know from past experiences that [the exemption is] used to withhold embarrassing and politically inconvenient information from the public,” he said in an interview with ABC News.

Which covers pretty much everything Scott Pruitt does.

*Correction, courtesy of iknklast: “I learned during my tenure with Oklahoma Department of Envrionmental Quality, which works closely with the EPA, that trade secrets are to be protected. If a company wishes to poison us with something, they declare it a trade secret, and it won’t show up in the files by name…”

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Evidence 101

Apr 18th, 2018 5:27 pm | By

Kris Kobach was held in contempt of court today for being such a vote-suppressing asshole.

Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach was held in contempt of court Wednesday afternoon by a federal judge for failing to follow a court order to register voters in Kansas. Kobach, who led President Donald Trump’s election integrity commission and is the country’s most prominent advocate for restrictions on voting, “willfully failed to comply with the preliminary injunction” against the state’s law requiring proof of citizenship law for voter registration, Judge Julie Robinson, a George W. Bush appointee, ruled.

In 2013, Kobach pushed Kansas to enact a law requiring people to provide certain forms of documentation, such as a birth certificate, passport, or naturalization papers, to register to vote. The law prevented 35,000 Kansans from registering between 2013 and 2016. The ACLU filed suit and won a preliminary injunction in May 2016 blocking the law for the November 2016 election.

Not everybody has a birth certificate or passport, let alone naturalization papers. It’s difficult to get them if you don’t have them. Making voting difficult=voter suppression.

As part of the settlement, Kobach was supposed to mail a postcard to voters who were blocked from registering letting them now that they were now eligible to vote. He was also instructed by the court to update the state’s election manual, which Robinson called “the policy and training Bible for the 105 county election officials,” to let local officials know that the proof of citizenship law would not be in effect. But Kobach did neither.

Because he’s an evil toad who wants to throw the lower classes off the voting rolls. It’s that simple.

Kobach was repeatedly humiliated in court when he defended the law from a challenge by the ACLU in a March trial. Robinson scolded him for not following her earlier order, telling Kobach, “I made it clear they’re fully registered voters,” and pounding on her desk for emphasis. Despite Kobach’s assertion that “the illegal registration of alien voters has become pervasive,” his own hand-picked witnesses could not cite a single instance where votes by non-citizens decided an election, nor did they support his debunked claim that Trump lost the popular vote in 2016 because of illegal votes. The judge repeatedly lectured Kobach on “Evidence 101” when he tried to present evidence that was not properly submitted to the court.

Evil but incompetent.

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