Official BBO Hijacked Thread Thread

[PassedOut]

Who do you watch? Jennifer Rubin in WaPo describes one network:

And Ms. Rubin is an anti-Obama, anti-Clinton conservative who pens the column Right Turn.

[kenberg]

And Ms. Rubin is an anti-Obama, anti-Clinton conservative who pens the column Right Turn.

 

Jennifer Rubin, Michael Gerson and George Will are three long time conservative columnists for WaPo who seem to be trying to outdo each other in their criticism of Trump. Of course Gerson worked in the GWB White House but I think it goes well beyond that. I guess they qualify as part of the dreaded elites. I can remember when "elite" was a compliment.

 

Still, if not for your post referencing her article I would have missed this: "White House aide Kelly Sadler says aloud at a White House meeting that McCain’s opposition to CIA nominee Gina Haspel doesn’t matter because he is “dying anyway” ". Wherever this stands as a matter of strategic accuracy, it is really beyond belief. Except I believe it. His boss, as noted, prefers people who don't get captured. It all seems like it could have been lifted from Dr. Strangelove. As the headline in Ms. Rubin's piece asks: What is wrong with these people?

[johnu]

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/new-law-kansas-cops-cant-have-sex-during-traffic-stops/ar-AAx85cA?li=BBnbcA1

 

"A new Kansas law makes it a crime for police to have sex with people they pull over for traffic violations or detain in criminal investigations."

 

File this one under the "Just WOW" folder. Do we really need such a law in this country? :o Apparently yes. :(

[Winstonm]

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/new-law-kansas-cops-cant-have-sex-during-traffic-stops/ar-AAx85cA?li=BBnbcA1

 

"A new Kansas law makes it a crime for police to have sex with people they pull over for traffic violations or detain in criminal investigations."

 

File this one under the "Just WOW" folder. Do we really need such a law in this country? :o Apparently yes. :(

 

However, the sheep in the back of the pickup truck are in for a rude awakening and a very bad day. :o

[Winstonm]

It appears Kim Chump-Trump has been outplayed by Kim Jong-un

 

DEVELOPING

North Korea expands threat to cancel Trump-Kim summit

The communist government called planned U.S.-South Korea joint air force drills a “provocation,” and a senior official later said his country would have no interest in a summit with the United States if it’s going to be a “one-sided” affair where it’s pressured to give up its nukes.

[Winstonm]

Well, this is reassuring. :(

 

Daily Beast

Exclusive: U.S. Government Can’t Get Controversial Kaspersky Lab Software Off Its Networks

The law says American agencies must eliminate the use of Kaspersky Lab software by October. U.S. officials say that’s impossible—it’s embedded too deep in our infrastructure.

[Winstonm]

And now I see that ex-WWE wrestler Dotard Dennison has body slammed the NFL.

 

The NFL on Wednesday approved a new policy to intercept national anthem protests before they happen, according to the league.

 

The measure mandates that players who are on the field must stand for the national anthem but can remain in the locker room if they choose.

 

Teams could be fined by the league if their players sit or kneel, as many have done in protest of racial injustice and police brutality in recent seasons after NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s initial kneeling protest in 2016 earned nationwide attention.

[Winstonm]

This is disturbing. What are federal prosecutors doing using a Project Veritus film as evidence against anti-Trump protesters?

[Winstonm]

Irish Voters Set To Liberalize Abortion Laws In Landslide, Exit Poll Signals

Vote counting will begin Saturday.

 

DUBLIN (Reuters) - Irish voters are set to liberalize one of the world’s most restrictive abortion laws by a margin of 68 percent to 32 percent, an exit poll showed on Friday, following one of the highest reported turnouts for a referendum

 

Now, if we could only pull Iowa out of the dark ages, we'd be all set.

[Winstonm]

Three cheers to ABC for cancelling Roseanne due to her racists tweets.

[Winstonm]

As with Watergate, when your own party starts to turn against the president, he is in deep trouble.

 

House Oversight Committee Chairman and House Intelligence Committee member Trey Gowdy (R-SC), who sat in on a DOJ briefing last Thursday on the FBI's use of a confidential informant, says the FBI acted exactly as it should have.

 

Politico:

 

“I am even more convinced that the FBI did exactly what my fellow citizens would want them to do when they got the information they got,” he said in an interview on Fox News. He added that the information also suggested that the effort had “nothing to do with Donald Trump.”

 

Gowdy’s comments are a significant pushback against Trump and his allies who have contended that the FBI’s use of an informant amounted to explosive political proof that the Obama administration embedded a spy in his campaign — an accusation that hasn’t been backed up by any available evidence.

[y66]

It's interesting to hear Gowdy

about the problem of thinking that the end justifies the means, that winning is everything because the country will go to hell in a handbasket if my team doesn't win. Ditto for "what you miss you can never get back", "I don't have a lot to show for the last 7 years", the distinction he makes between raising issues and resolving them and especially that the guy we think of when we hear his name is not who he really is in contrast to, say, Mueller, who he does not mention in that interview but who, I think, he admires greatly not least of all for being incredibly effective at what he does and for being who we think he is.

[Winstonm]

https://politics.theonion.com/inconsolable-jeff-sessions-tries-to-commit-suicide-by-s-1826462420

[Winstonm]

NYT:

 

A report by RAND shows that in 1980 the United States spent 11 percent of its G.D.P. on social programs, excluding health care, while members of the European Union spent an average of about 15 percent. In 2011 the gap had widened to 16 percent versus 22 percent.

 

Although this is a modest divergence over time, Mr. Anderson says it could be significant nonetheless. “Social underfunding probably has more long-term implications than underinvestment in medical care,” he said. For example, “if the underspending is on early childhood education — one of the key socioeconomic determinants of health — then there are long-term implications.”

 

Slow income growth could also play a role because poorer health is associated with lower incomes. “It’s notable that, apart from the richest of Americans, income growth stagnated starting in the late 1970s,” Mr. Cutler said.

 

The results of Reaganomics 40 years later.

[Winstonm]

An aide to Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt says she was asked to inquire whether Pruitt could purchase a used mattress from the Trump International Hotel, The Washington

 

Unreported is that he also wanted a black light. You don't want to know what he was looking for. :blink:

[y66]

From David Blight's review of Ron Chernow’s biography of Ulysses S. Grant and his personal essays at NYRB:

 

For a century and a half Ulysses S. Grant has been a baffling and inspiring presence in the American literary and historical imaginations. Born in 1822 and raised by a pious Methodist mother, as a young man he was quiet, given to depressions, and lacking much ambition. Only his love of horses seemed to animate him and give him a reason to excel in his education at West Point, which his scheming father desired for him more than he did. In his thirties, he was a complete failure, at times a drunkard, destined to die forgotten. He found his vocation and success on America’s killing fields; his meteoric trajectory in the Civil War makes him a remarkable case of a nobody who became almost everything.

 

He comes down to us like a figure out of the tangled mythology of Horatio Alger: Grant in his muddy boots, silently contemplating how to kill and capture more Confederates, smoking and chewing eighteen to twenty cigars per day, and writing dozens of clear dispatches to his commanders. Herman Melville envisioned this Grant in his poem “The Armies of the Wilderness”:

 

A quiet Man, and plain in garb—

Briefly he looks his fill,

Then drops his gray eye on the ground,

Like a loaded mortar he is still:

Meekness and grimness meet in him—

The silent General.

 

In the end he ruthlessly crushed the experiment of the Confederacy and became a national hero. He has variously been considered a military icon who won a total victory; a presidential model for overcoming his own considerable flaws and a tragic weakness for scoundrels to achieve fame and glory; a literary phenomenon who crafted the most famous deathbed writing in American letters; and a celebrity who was a paragon of humility and modesty. For decades biographers, from the midcentury historian Lloyd Lewis to contemporary scholars like Ronald C. White, have invoked Grant to explore how passivity and dynamism can exist in the same personality. Ron Chernow, the author of prize-winning biographies of George Washington, John D. Rockefeller, and Alexander Hamilton, has written an expansive new life of Grant. It is a work of striking anecdotes, skillful pacing, and poignant judgments. Chernow’s primary subject—and that of numerous previous Grant biographies—is the nature of Grant’s character. We see him survive an odyssey during which many enemies tried to destroy him, including formidable demons within himself.

 

Grant never mentioned his drinking problem in his Memoirs, but Chernow makes it a leitmotif of his book. After a distinguished if bracing experience in the Mexican War, a conflict he thought “unjust,” Grant served in a series of frontier postings, first in the Midwest, and then in lonely, sometimes meaningless duty on the West Coast. He usually took to drinking when he had idle time, lived without his wife and children, or fell into one of his depressions and went on a bender. Stationed at Fort Humboldt on the coast of California in 1853, he received a promotion to captain, but he could no longer bear the loneliness and resigned from the army. Grant would always either deny or lie about his alcoholism, although, as Chernow shows, he conquered it in the presidency and beyond. We hear of many banquets at which the guest of honor turned his glass over as wine was poured.

 

In 1854, with borrowed funds, the “guileless” Grant made it to New York, where he was cheated out of his money on the streets and managed to be jailed for drunkenness. By the time the hapless soldier borrowed more money from his West Point friends James Longstreet and Simon Buckner—later to become Confederate foes—and made it to Ohio, he was broke, a failure, and at odds with his domineering father. In the next five years Grant, with his wife, Julia, and his growing family of four children, tried farming and real estate in her native Missouri. He failed miserably at those as well and then sold firewood on the streets of St. Louis in an old faded army coat, prompting Chernow to call him “a bleak defeated little man with a mysterious aura of solitude.”

 

Here Chernow falls into one of the traps of Grant biography: presenting his years as a down-and-out as a kind of inevitable prelude to his later greatness. Grant’s “momentary disgrace,” he writes, “can be seen in retrospect as his salvation, preserving him for the starring role in the Civil War.” Walking around with a “stoop” in 1859, he hardly looked fit for anything so lofty. Historians should resist the teleology of destiny, no matter how good the story.

 

On Grant’s ideologically divided families, Chernow shines. Julia Dent, whom the young officer met through a West Point roommate, came from a slaveholding family; her father, “Colonel” Frederick Dent, presided over a plantation, White Haven, southwest of St. Louis. In 1850 the Dents owned thirty slaves. Julia would change her views drastically during the war, partly through loyalty to her husband. She became a Unionist, but her family remained staunch Confederates. Grant’s father and mother were abolitionists. He grew up in Ohio, rigorously opposed to slavery at least “in theory,” as Chernow points out. But in the tumultuous 1850s, because of his marriage, Grant was obliged to live in the midst of slavery and was nearly disowned by his own family for it. His parents refused to attend his wedding.

 

Chernow sometimes glides over major historical and political developments. But he does demonstrate that the secession crisis “clarified” Grant’s politics and transformed him into an “outright militant” intent on preserving the Union and ending slavery. Not so the Dents; Grant’s domestic world became a scene of “sectional warfare.” Before the war, he not only “dithered” away his talent, says Chernow, he was also trapped between—and almost smothered by—two very different fathers. His own father vicariously lived out ambitions through his son, interfering with him, chastising him, and ultimately basking in the glory he achieved. His father-in-law looked down on the failed army officer who could never be good enough for his precious daughter, then fully supported Confederate independence and slavery during the war that made his son-in-law the most famous man in America. Both fathers, who could not have represented more opposite political positions, ended up living in the White House in their old age, playing the pathetic foils for each other and providing comic relief for the biographer.

[Winstonm]

Anthony Bourdain is dead; Donald Trump is alive. This should prove once and for all there is no god.

[kenberg]

From David Blight's review of Ron Chernow's biography of Ulysses S. Grant and his personal essays at NYRB:

I read about half of Chernow's Hamilton before my attention wandered. My failing, it's a fine book. I might give Grant a try.

 

Life is complex, and people are complex. Perhaps we do not need to get into all of the complexities when we educate our children, but we should avoid giving them the idea that it is all simple. I started high school in 1952. At that time, even in my not all that great a high school, we had to do various theme papers on subjects of our choosing. I wrote a paper on Douglas MacArthur. Not simple. "I shall return" and he did. Post-war relations with Japan. The Inchon Landing in Korea. He was removed from command by Truman after very public disagreements (I approved, but nobody asked me). "Old soldiers never die, they just fade away". His supporters hoped he would run for the presidency in 1952. Not simple.

 

So maybe I will read it. Right after the twenty or so other books I hope to read!

I have always understood that Grant was an interesting case. Most cases are.

 

[y66]

I read about half of Chernow's Hamilton before my attention wandered. My failing, it's a fine book. I might give Grant a try.

 

Life is complex, and people are complex. Perhaps we do not need to get into all of the complexities when we educate our children, but we should avoid giving them the idea that it is all simple. I started high school in 1952. At that time, even in my not all that great a high school, we had to do various theme papers on subjects of our choosing. I wrote a paper on Douglas MacArthur. Not simple. "I shall return" and he did. Post-war relations with Japan. The Inchon Landing in Korea. He was removed from command by Truman after very public disagreements (I approved, but nobody asked me). "Old soldiers never die, they just fade away". His supporters hoped he would run for the presidency in 1952. Not simple.

 

So maybe I will read it. Right after the twenty or so other books I hope to read!

I have always understood that Grant was an interesting case. Most cases are.

People are complex? The older I get, the more sense this makes to me.

[Winstonm]

Good read from WaPo about the next bubble to burst.

 

Welcome to the Buyback Economy. Today’s economic boom is driven not by any great burst of innovation or growth in productivity. Rather, it is driven by another round of financial engineering that converts equity into debt. It sacrifices future growth for present consumption. And it redistributes even more of the nation’s wealth to corporate executives, wealthy investors and Wall Street financiers.

[y66]

Daniel Negreanu is teaching a master class on poker.

 

I've looked at a few of these, including classes by Steph Curry, Alice Waters and Helen Mirren. They are well done. In addition to covering the fundamentals in interesting ways, Curry includes Google spreadsheets for tracking improvement!

[Winstonm]

Ranked-choice voting may be our last hope to reconcile the country.

[Winstonm]

This is sick.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/kim-jong-un-more-popular-than-pelosi-among-republicans-exclusive-poll-results?ref=home

Self-identified Republicans now have a marginally more favorable view of Kim Jong Un than they do for House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), ....according to a new Ipsos poll done exclusively for The Daily Beast....19 percent of Republicans indicated they had a favorable view of Kim....slightly better than the perception of Pelosi, who had a 17 percent favorable

 

The good news is that the 19% probably reflects Dennison's so-called "base".

[Winstonm]

Sara Netanyahu, the wife of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, was indicted on Thursday for alleged systematic fraud involving hundreds of thousands of shekels in connection with meal expenses incurred at the Prime Minister's Residence.

 

This food is mine,

God gave this food to me

This great, expensive food to me

And when I need a feast

I take shekels from the very least

And buy myself

a chef and a fine dine

[Al_U_Card]

A classic, never-seen on network TV at the time but well worth the watch, especially the David Steinberg skit.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbNQzLFN8fs