Jamie Malanowski

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OCTOBER 2018

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10.14 A CNN poll gives Former Vice President Joe Biden 33% of Democrats; Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders 13%; California Senator Kamala Harris 9%; Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren 8%; New Jersey Senator Cory Booker 5%; Former Secretary of State John Kerry 5%; Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg 4%; Texas Congressman Beto O’Rourke 4%; Former Attorney General Eric Holder 3%; Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti 2%; Attorney Michael Avenatti 1%; New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand 1%; Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar 1%; Former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick 1%; Someone else (vol.) 2%; None/No one (vol.) 2% No opinion 6%
10.14 Robert J. Samuelson in the Washington Post: “If there were any doubt before, there should be none now. “Solving” the global climate change problem may be humankind’s mission impossible. . . . Unless we make dramatic reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions (carbon dioxide, methane and others), warns the IPCC, we face a future of rapidly rising temperatures that will destroy virtually all the world’s coral reefs, intensify droughts and raise sea levels. We need to take action immediately, if not sooner.
10.13 Rocky Horror Picture Show in Tarrytown, with Shannon, Cara, Ginny and Molly.
10.12 Trump: “It’s in Turkey, and it’s not a citizen, as I understand it. But a thing like that shouldn’t happen.”
10.12 The Turkish government has told U.S. officials that it has audio and video recordings that prove Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi was killed inside the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul this month
10.12 AP: A Georgia process for verifying voters’ information has left the applications of over 53,000 people in jeopardy, and 70 percent of those applications are from black people. The stark disparity drew scrutiny because Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp (R), the state’s top elections official, is running for governor. He is locked in a tight race with Stacey Abrams, the former Democratic leader in the Georgia statehouse who, if elected, would be the first black woman to serve as a governor in the United States.
10.12 Washington Post: With less than a month before the midterm elections, endangered Republican lawmakers are mounting a defense against attacks they’re trying to dismantle a core element of the health-care law they fought to eliminate.
10.11 Kathleen Madigan at the Paramount Theater in Peekskill. Funny!
10.11 Historian Timothy Naftali: “President Trump has effectively turned the Oval Office into ‘Trump Space.’ It’s a performance space now.”
10.11 S.E. Cupp on CNN: “I thought that was really sad. You had there a man who’s clearly not okay and a president willing to exploit that. And worse, really willing to exploit that under the auspices of race relations and black communities, joblessness, mental health — all the things that ended up in this bucket of issues that were sort of addressed in this free for all. I don’t know that any of them were very well served by this circus.”
10.11 Kanye West visited the White House, said Trump “might not have expected to have a crazy motherfucker like Kanye West supporting him.”
10.11 Pew Research Center: Over 60% of young adults in the U.S. say the primary way they watch television now is via streaming services on the internet. Only 31% say they mostly watch via a cable or satellite subscription.
10.11 Melania Trump to ABC: “I could say I’m the most bullied person on the world.”
10.11 The Washington Post reports the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, widely referred to as MBS, had ordered an operation to lure Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi to Saudi Arabia and detain him. The story is based on U.S. intercepts of Saudi officials discussing the plan: “The intelligence, described by U.S. officials familiar with it, is another piece of evidence implicating the Saudi regime in Khashoggi’s disappearance last week after he entered the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul. Turkish officials say that a Saudi security team lay in wait for the journalist and killed him. . . Several of Khashoggi’s friends said that over the past four months, senior Saudi officials close to the crown prince had called Khashoggi to offer him protection, and even a high-level job working for the government, if he returned to his home country. Khashoggi, however, was skeptical of the offers. He told one friend that the Saudi government would never make good on its promises not to harm him. . . .The intelligence … has fueled speculation by officials and analysts in multiple countries that what transpired at the consulate was a backup plan to capture Khashoggi that may have gone wrong. A former U.S. intelligence official … noted that the details of the operation, which involved sending two teams totaling 15 men, in two private aircraft arriving and departing Turkey at different times, bore the hallmarks of a ‘rendition’ . . . . But Turkish officials have concluded that whatever the intent of the operation, Khashoggi was killed inside the consulate. The intelligence poses a political problem for the Trump administration because it implicates Mohammed, who is particularly close to Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser. … Kushner’s relationship with Mohammed … has long been the subject of suspicion by some American intelligence officials.
10.10 Hurricane Michael hits the Florida panhandle as a Category 4 storm
10.10 Sophie Turner in New York.
10.9 Hillary Clinton: “You cannot be civil with a political party that wants to destroy what you stand for.”
10.9 Boston eliminates Yankees
10.9 With the end of their season, the Cleveland Indians retired Chief Wahoo after a 71 year run
10.9 Mitt Romney criticized the Trump administration’s zero-tolerance immigration policy that led to the separation of families at the border, calling it “a heartbreak” and “a dark chapter in American history.” ,” Romney said. “This is inexcusable and can’t go on.”
10.9 Andrew Napolitano on “Fox & Friends.” “I do not think the best thing that was said was ‘evil’ or ‘hoax,’ and I honestly wish that the president and his people would get past that.”
10.9 Rep. Mark Sanford, on MSNBC shortly after Haley’s resignation: “Something doesn’t smell right. Something’s weird.”
10.9 Nicki Haley resigns as UN Ambassador
10.9 Brookings’ Homi Kharas and Kristofer Hamel report that the world has reached “A global tipping point: Half the world is now middle class or wealthier. . . For the first time since agriculture-based civilization began 10,000 years ago, the majority of humankind is no longer poor or vulnerable to falling into poverty.” As of September, “just over 50 percent of the world’s population, or some 3.8 billion people, live in households with enough discretionary expenditure to be considered ‘middle class’ or ‘rich. About the same number of people are living in households that are poor or vulnerable to poverty.” Why it matters: “So September 2018 marks a global tipping point. After this, for the first time ever, the poor and vulnerable will no longer be a majority in the world. Barring some unfortunate global economic setback, this marks the start of a new era of a middle-class majority.”
10.8 Richard Cohen in The Washington Post: If you grew up with all sorts of chest-thumping statistics on what a wonderful place the United States was, you now must learn that our vaunted middle class is cratering, that the lower classes have sunk even lower, that income disparity is increasing and that rich American men live 15 years longer than poor American men, “who endure only as long as men in Sudan or Pakistan.” Ah, America — not so exceptional anymore. The rich now are very rich. The ultrarich are even more ultra. Yet, all this wealth has had “zero impact on the average pay of 117 million Americans,” writes Giridharadas. Since 1980, the income of the top 1 percent of Americans has more than tripled. In that same period, the income of the bottom 50 percent had remained nearly exactly the same. As for the top 0.001 percent, their income has increased sevenfold. It turns out that a rising tide may not lift all boats, but it does turn some into superyachts. What has caused such an imbalance? Many things, of course, but certainly the reluctance of the government to deal with income disparity is a factor. The new tax law — mislabeled by Republicans as a “reform” — in fact lowered the tax rate for the richest of Americans and gave corporations a windfall without ensuring that they pass on a bit to their workers. Ever since President Ronald Reagan’s ultimately pernicious assertion in his first inaugural address that “government is the problem,” the Republican Party had endeavored to make things worse — and it has succeeded. The middle class it so extols has suffered for the GOP’s electoral success. The vaunted American Dream is now the sheerest of fantasies. The poor stay poor — but company is tumbling their way. The floor under the middle class is buckling.
10.9 Roby Rose will play Batwoman as an “out lesbian and trained street fighter”
10.7 The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: The oft-cited goal of keeping warming below 2 degrees Celsius is riskier than many imagine. A 1.5-degree goal would be far less dangerous, but the world has only about a decade to make the “rapid and far-reaching” changes required to meet that goal. The difference between 1.5 degrees and 2 degrees would be substantial. Coral reefs would go from mostly gone to almost entirely gone. More sea-level rise would put up to 10 million more people in danger. High heat would kill more people. It would be much hotter on land and in cities. Deadly mosquito-borne illnesses such as malaria and dengue fever would spread farther. Droughts would be more likely. So would deluges. Tropical fisheries would empty further. Staple crop yields, particularly in some of the world’s poorest nations, would decline more. Disastrous loss of the Antarctic ice sheet would be more likely. Feedback loops could push warming further than anticipated, as, for example, thawing permafrost releases gases the frozen ground has trapped for centuries. Up to nearly 1 million additional square miles of permafrost would thaw at 2 degrees of warming.
10.7 Taylor Swift endorsed two Democratic candidates in Tennessee, and urged her 112 million Instagram followers to vote in this year’s midterm elections. In the 48 hours following her post, 240,000 people registered. “As much as I have in the past and would like to continue voting for women in office, I cannot support Marsha Blackburn. Her voting record in Congress appalls and terrifies me.”
10.7 The Washington Post: The world stands on the brink of failure when it comes to holding global warming to moderate levels, and nations will need to take “unprecedented” actions to cut their carbon emissions over the next decade, according to a landmark report by the top scientific body studying climate change.
10.6 In Schoharie NY, 20 people were killed when the brakes failed on a 2001 Ford Excursion limousine. It was the transportation-related accident in the U.S. since 2009
10.6 Philip Bump in the Post: Kavanaugh, though, has a distinct honor: He will be the first justice nominated by someone who lost the popular vote to earn his seat on the bench with support from senators representing less than half of the country while having his nomination opposed by a majority of the country.
10.5 At an auction in Sotheby’s in London, Banksey’s 2006 spray-paint-on-canvas work “‘Girl with Balloon’ was sold for $1.4 million. Once the sale was completed,“ the piece’s clunky frame erupted into an alarming and persistent beeping sound. The canvas descended through the bottom of the frame and emerged on the other side in tatters. The shredding process froze about halfway through, leaving the top portion of the painting intact. The bottom, however, appeared to be macerated into tiny ribbons.” Said a Sotheby’s official, “It appears we just got Banksy-ed.” .
10.5 Kavanaugh confirmed


10.4 Amazon’s Jeff Bezos ($160 billion) unseats Bill Gates ($97 billion) atop the Forbes 400. Gates had been in first place for 24 consecutive years. He is now ranked at No. 2. Warren Buffett, worth $88.3 billion, comes in third. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg holds spot No. 4 with $61 billion, despite losing $10 billion poorer during the last year. Oracle’s Larry Ellison is worth $58.4 billion.
10.4 In Gilbert MN, birds are getting drunk from eating fermented berries. There have been several reports of birds that appear to be ‘under the influence’ flying into windows, cars and acting confused, drifting around town looking disoriented, narrowly avoiding getting hit by cars. An early frost caused the berries to ferment earlier than usual, before the birds had migrated south
10.3 Three tweets from Steve Schmidt. For some reason, the first won’t embed
“The Senior Senator from South Carolina has shown his mettle by saying “shit” on CNN. Though all the world sees an emasculated hypocrite revelling in the glory of his submissiveness to the repugnant Grifter in Chief, Lindsey sees something else. Strapped in his sidecar


10.3 A weird goblin planet has been found on the edge of the solar system
10.3 A government study has found that 1 in 3 U.S. adults eat fast food on any given day. That’s about 85 million people
10.3 Thomas L. Friedman in the Times: For much of the period after World War II, most Americans were sure that they’d be in the middle class and that their kids would follow. Strong unions, a slower pace of technological change and only limited globalization meant an average worker, with middle skills, could be middle class. There was something called a “high-wage, middle-skilled job.” Also, the fact that the Soviets held a nuclear gun to our heads meant we had to stick together to some degree. It made compromise in Washington a necessity, not a luxury, on many issues. But in the early 2000s, most high-wage, middle-skilled jobs disappeared. Now there is only a high-wage, high-skilled job and a low-wage, low-skilled job. And that has fractured the middle class and left a lot of people behind. The end of the Cold War has meant that no foreign enemy cements us together anymore, save for a brief period after 9/11. And the G.O.P. has lost its way. That’s why our generation’s civil war is so hard to bring to a truce. There are so many fronts. There’s the battle between those who feel the American dream has slipped from their grasp and those who can easily pass it on to their kids. There’s the one between rural small-town Americans and “globalized” city slickers, who, the small-town folks are sure, look down upon them. There’s the fight between the white working-class Americans who feel that their identities are being lost in an increasingly minority-majority country and the Americans who embrace multiculturalism. And there’s the struggle between men who believe that their gender still confers certain powers and privileges and the women challenging that. There are so many fields of dispute. And not only have we lost the buffers and cushions we once had, but a generation of leaders has come along, led by Donald Trump, who have made fueling our divisions their business model.
10.3 EJ Dionne in the Post: Trump’s lying, mocking, despicable verbal mugging of Christine Blasey Ford during a Mississippi rally on Tuesday night may not be a new low for him because there have been so many other lows. But his willingness to suggest that Ford is one of the “evil people” and his twisted account of her testimony about Kavanaugh before the Senate Judiciary Committee ripped the mask of respectability off the campaign to confirm Trump’s appointee. The president made it harder than ever for those who vote for Kavanaugh to claim they are still taking Ford’s testimony seriously. If you claim that Ford is part of some wicked left-wing operation to destroy a good man, you are saying that her story is just that — a made-up, untrue or exaggerated “story” with a political purpose.


10.2 Benjamin Wittes in The Atlantic: His opening statement was an unprecedentedly partisan outburst of emotion from a would-be justice. I do not begrudge him the emotion, even the anger. He has been through a kind of hell that would leave any person gasping for air. But I cannot condone the partisanship—which was raw, undisguised, naked, and conspiratorial—from someone who asks for public faith as a dispassionate and impartial judicial actor. His performance was wholly inconsistent with the conduct we should expect from a member of the judiciary.. . . What is important is the dissonance between the Kavanaugh of Thursday’s hearing and the judicial function. Can anyone seriously entertain the notion that a reasonable pro-choice woman would feel like her position could get a fair shake before a Justice Kavanaugh? Can anyone seriously entertain the notion that a reasonable Democrat, or a reasonable liberal of any kind, would after that performance consider him a fair arbiter in, say, a case about partisan gerrymandering, voter identification, or anything else with a strong partisan valence? Quite apart from the merits of Ford’s allegations against him, Kavanaugh’s display on Thursday — if I were a senator voting on confirmation —would preclude my support
10.2 Trump: “ ‘Thirty-six years ago this happened. I had one beer.’ ‘Right?’ ‘I had one beer.’ ‘Well, you think it was [one beer]?’ ‘Nope, it was one beer.’ ‘Oh good. How did you get home?’ ‘I don’t remember.’ ‘How did you get there?’ ‘I don’t remember.’ ‘Where is the place?’ ‘I don’t remember.’ ‘How many years ago was it?’ ‘I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.’ ‘What neighborhood was it in?’ ‘I don’t know.’ ‘Where’s the house?’ ‘I don’t know.’ ‘Upstairs, downstairs, where was it?’ ‘I don’t know. But I had one beer. That’s the only thing I remember.’ ”
10.2 James Gazzale, a spokesman for the New York Department of Taxation and Finance: “The Tax Department is reviewing the allegations in the [Times] article and is vigorously pursuing all appropriate avenues of investigation.”
10.2 New York Times: President Trump participated in dubious tax schemes during the 1990s, including instances of outright fraud, that greatly increased the fortune he received from his parents, an investigation by The New York Times has found. Mr. Trump won the presidency proclaiming himself a self-made billionaire, and he has long insisted that his father, the legendary New York City builder Fred C. Trump, provided almost no financial help. But The Times’s investigation, based on a vast trove of confidential tax returns and financial records, reveals that Mr. Trump received the equivalent today of at least $413 million from his father’s real estate empire, starting when he was a toddler and continuing to this day. Much of this money came to Mr. Trump because he helped his parents dodge taxes. He and his siblings set up a sham corporation to disguise millions of dollars in gifts from their parents, records and interviews show. Records indicate that Mr. Trump helped his father take improper tax deductions worth millions more. He also helped formulate a strategy to undervalue his parents’ real estate holdings by hundreds of millions of dollars on tax returns, sharply reducing the tax bill when those properties were transferred to him and his siblings. These maneuvers met with little resistance from the Internal Revenue Service, The Times found. The president’s parents, Fred and Mary Trump, transferred well over $1 billion in wealth to their children, which could have produced a tax bill of at least $550 million under the 55 percent tax rate then imposed on gifts and inheritances. The Trumps paid a total of $52.2 million, or about 5 percent, tax records show.
10.2 Tracie Ruckle Bath on Facebook: I drank too much when I was in High School which led to some clumsy behavior both humorous and painful. Once I fell off a pier dressed up for a school dance while trying to jump on my friends boat in Middle River in Baltimore. On Christmas Eve I had too much wine and decided to go to Mid Night Mass. I saw my old Church boyfriend and blurted out that I had always loved him, when he rejected me I tried to walk home in tears but I fell off the side walk in front of Church, a friend took me back to Mass. Probably a bad plan. I sang with my Folk Group at Mid Night Mass just a “wee bit too loud” needless to say my friends discouraged me from sipping more wine at Communion, even if it was the blood of Christ I argued. The sad part, I really did love the boy from Church and he never knew, he took off for College in PA and it took me years to get over him.
10.1 Ron Brownstein in The Atlantic: Kavanaugh’s behavior has irrevocably marked his possible tenure on the Court. With such a partisan route as his pathway, a Justice Kavanaugh would arrive at the Supreme Court as a patient zero, carrying a virus of illegitimacy to its decisions. Since Kavanaugh declared his hostility to the Democratic Party and the left so openly and with such ferocity, it has seemed inevitable that tens of millions of Americans will never see him as an impartial judge. That would create a stark equation for Roberts, who must surely realize that much—perhaps most—of the nation would question the validity of every 5–4 party-line decision in which Kavanaugh would provide the deciding vote. In the past, fear of further eroding the Court’s legitimacy has provided a limited (though hardly uniform) check on Roberts’s willingness to force major decisions on party-line votes. But if the Senate confirms Kavanaugh, it will present Roberts with a justice whose every decision will be viewed through the lens of the partisan and tribal animosities he inflamed to defend his nomination.
10.1 Eliot A. Cohen in The Atlantic: It was, however, in the epic clash over the testimony of Christine Blasey Ford that the collapse of conservatism in the Republican Party became most evident. Eleven men, most of them old, hid behind a female prosecutor wheeled in from Arizona, because they could not, apparently, trust themselves to treat a victim of sexual assault with consideration and respect. So much for courage. Their anger at Democratic shenanigans was understandable, but virtually without exception. When they did summon up the nerve to speak (during Kavanaugh’s turn), their questions consisted almost exclusively of partisan baying at the opposition. Genuine conservatives might have snarled initially, but would have, out of regard for the truth, tried to figure out exactly what happened to Ford 35 years ago, and whether the character of the man before them was what it was said to be. Perhaps the collapse of modern conservatism came out most clearly in Kavanaugh’s own testimony—its self-pity, its hysteria, its conjuring up of conspiracies, its vindictiveness. He and his family had no doubt suffered agonies. But if we expect steely resolve from a police officer confronting a knife-wielding assailant, or disciplined courage from a firefighter rushing into a burning house, we should expect stoic self-control and calm from a conservative judge, even if his heart is being eaten out.
10.1 Richard Cohen in The Washington Post: This moment is not likely to pass. Women’s anger will not subside. Many older white men will not wise up because they are trapped in their own skin and experiences. The very hard work of thinking this through — of rerouting ossified synapses — will not be done. It is more comforting for some of them to rely on bromides and use the appalling sexist formulas of yesteryear for explanations.But like Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), who was confronted last week by protesters in an elevator, there is no escape. The revolution, gentlemen, is here.
10.1 Axios: The Trump administration is struggling to provide shelter and find homes for a record-breaking 13,000+ migrant children in its custody
10.1 Donald Trump: “I’m not a drinker. I can honestly say I never had a beer in my life. It’s one of my only good traits. I never had a glass of alcohol. I never had alcohol, for whatever reason. Can you imagine if I had? What a mess I would be. I would be the world’s worst.

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