8.31 Henry Eyring: “When you meet someone, treat them as if they were in serious trouble: you will be right more than half the time.”
8.28 John McCain in The Restless Wave: The moral values and integrity of our nation, and the long, difficult, fraught history of our efforts to uphold them at home and abroad, are the test of every American generation. Will we act in this world with respect for our founding conviction that all people have equal dignity in the eyes of God and should be accorded the same respect by the laws and governments of men? That is the most important question history ever asks of us.
8.28 Alex Castellanos, Republican operative in the Post: “We’ve kind of elected this apex predator, and you don’t sit T. rex down at the dinner table. I think civilized society doesn’t want him behaving crudely at the dinner table, and he has no interest in their pretensions.”
8.28 Axios: 40% of American families struggled to meet a basic need last year — food, health care, housing or utilities — according to an Urban Institute survey of 7,600 adults. 18% didn’t seek care for a medical need because of the cost. 23% of households struggled to feed their family at some point during the year. 13% missed a utility payment. 10% didn’t pay the full amount of their rent or mortgage, or paid it late
8.28 Odell Beckham Jr. signs $95 million deal with Giants
8.28 According to a new study out of the London School of Economics and Political Science, watching shows like “Keeping Up With the Kardashians” can make you less sympathetic to the plight of the poor. The researchers found that even 60 seconds of exposure to materialistic media ― content that “glamorizes fame, luxury, and wealth” ― was enough to significantly increase anti-welfare beliefs.
8.28 John McCain‘s valediction: Fellow Americans, that association has meant more to me than any other. I lived and died a proud American. We are citizens of the world’s greatest republic, a nation of ideals, not blood and soil. We are blessed and are a blessing to humanity when we uphold and advance those ideals at home and in the world. We have helped liberate more people from tyranny and poverty than ever before in history, and we have acquired great wealth and power in the progress. We weaken our greatness when we confuse our patriotism with tribal rivalries that have sown resentment and hatred and violence in all the corners of the globe. We weaken it when we hide behind walls, rather than tear them down; when we doubt the power of our ideals, rather than trust them to be the great force for change they have always been. We are 325 million opinionated, vociferous individuals. We argue and compete and sometimes even vilify each other in our raucous public debates. But we have always had so much more in common with each other than in disagreement. If only we remember that and give each other the benefit of the presumption that we all love our country, we will get through these challenging times. We will come through them stronger than before, we always do.
8.27 The New York Times: Mr. Giuliani shrugged off suggestions that he was a discombobulated advocate, ill serving a client who happens to be the so-called leader of the free world. “You probably can’t do this without making a mistake or two,” he said, then quickly noted with evident satisfaction that “[Robert] Mueller is now slightly more distrusted than trusted, and Trump is a little ahead of the game. So I think we’ve done really well,” said the president’s lawyer. “And my client’s happy.”
8.26 Neil Simon dies at 91
8.25 John McCain dies at 81
8.25 BlacKKKlansman at the Burns Center with Ginny
8.23 Michael Gerson in the Post: “There is, again, a cancer on the presidency.”
8.23 Alternate cover of November issue of Spider Woman shared
8.23 Jonathan Chiat in New York Magazine: “Dean famously testified about Nixon’s obstruction of justice. Nobody claims Dean lied about Nixon. The sin in Trump’s eyes is that he flipped, violating the omerta. Trump even uses Mafia lingo, ‘rat,’ to describe Dean’s cooperation with law enforcement [in a Sunday tweet]. … It is obviously quite rare to hear a high-ranking elected official openly embrace the terminology and moral logic of La Cosa Nostra. But Trump is not just a guy who has seen a lot of mob movies. He has worked closely with Mafia figures throughout his business career. Like a mobster, Trump takes an extremely cynical view of almost every moral principle in public life, assuming that everybody in politics is corrupt and hypocritical. Since the greatest threat to a mafia don’s business is that subordinates will betray him, he typically surrounds himself with family members, even if they are not the smartest or best criminals. Trump has accordingly surrounded himself with his children, or demonstrated loyalists who would have trouble finding remotely comparable jobs at another business.
8.23 Trump on Fox: “It’s called flipping, and it almost ought to be illegal. They just make up lies, I’ve seen it many times. … It’s not fair because if … somebody defrauded a bank and he’s going to get 10 years in jail or 20 years in jail, but if you can say something bad about Donald Trump … you’ll go down to two years or three years, which is the deal (Cohen) made. In all fairness to him, most people are going to do that, and I’ve seen it many times.”
8.22 We’re now in history’s longest-running bull market. It’s been exactly 3,453 days since the benchmark S&P 500 index hit a bear-market low of 676 on March 9, 2009.
8.22 Max Boot in the Post: “There is growing evidence that the president is, to use the word favored by Richard Nixon, “a crook.” Even buying the silence of his reputed playmates could by itself have been enough to swing an exceedingly close election decided by fewer than 80,000 votes in three states. Trump certainly would not have authorized the payments unless he thought it was politically imperative to do so. There is also considerable evidence, as I previously argued, that Russia’s intervention on Trump’s behalf affected the outcome. Even more than Nixon, Trump is now an illegitimate president whose election is tainted by fraud.”
8.21 Manafort is convicted on eight counts at the same time Michael Cohen pleads guilty to making payments to Stormy Daniels at the direction of the president.
8.21 Students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill stormed a controversial Confederate statue–Silent Sam– on Monday night, and toppled it with their own hands. The students said they had grown frustrated by the inaction of university leaders and their school’s “institutional white supremacy.”
8.21 Frank Bruniin the Times: “Maybe someday, when the history of Donald Trump’s presidency is written, we’ll pinpoint this week as his pivot into complete derangement and come up with a pithy name for it. Maybe we’ll call it Melania Monday. We’ll note that on Aug. 20 the first lady, again with a pussy bow, publicly chided cyberbullies at the same time that her husband ranted and raged on Twitter, likening Robert Mueller to Joseph McCarthy and demonstrating a grasp of history commensurate with his grip on civility. We’ll admire the wickedness of her announcement, just hours later, that she’d be making a solo trip — her farthest and flashiest yet as an official ambassador — to Africa, whose nations the president can’t pronounce, let alone respect. She didn’t choose that destination randomly, throwing a dart at a map. She chose it defiantly, throwing shade at her husband. Surely Melania Trump is getting under his skin. Certainly she’s making the effort. If she would just turn these fitful baby steps into full-length strides, she might finally undo him and set us free. Melania the Savior. A pussy-bow coup. Stranger things have happened. Less exhilarating fantasies have been born.”
8.21Plea bargained my speeding ticket in Milan NY
8.19 Rudy Giuliani on Meet the Press: “When you tell me that, you know, he should testify because he’s going to tell the truth and he shouldn’t worry, well that’s so silly because it’s somebody’s version of the truth. Not the truth.” Chuck Todd: “Truth is truth.” Giuliani: “No, no, it isn’t truth. Truth isn’t truth. …” Todd: “Truth isn’t truth?” Giuliani: “No, no, no.”
8.18 Crazy Rich Asians with the Schmidts and Ginny
