6.16 Saw the Yanks beat the Rays 4-1 with Ginny. Homers by Stanton and Sanchez, two doubles by Judge, 8 shutout innings by Severino
6.15 The Atlantic: In Baltimore, a 20-year gap in life expectancy exists between the city’s poor, largely African American neighborhoods and its wealthier, whiter areas. A baby born in Cheswolde, in Baltimore’s far-northwest corner, can expect to live until age 87. Nine miles away in Clifton-Berea, near where The Wire was filmed, the life expectancy is 67, roughly the same as that of Rwanda, and 12 years shorter than the American average. Similar disparities exist in other segregated cities, such as Philadelphia and Chicago.
6.15 Portugal 3, Spain 3. Ronaldo scores hat trick.
6.15 Lucinda Williams, Steve Earle and Dwight Yoakum at Bethel Woods with Ginny
6.15 Matt Miller to MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell:”We found out today that to the extent the FBI did anything wrong, it helped Donald Trump, not hurt him.”
6.15 FBI IG finds anti-Trump emails, but no influence; Comey reprimanded for “insubordination”
6.15 Trump to Fox and Friends: “He’s the head of a country, and I mean he’s the strong head, Don’t let anyone think anything different. He speaks and his people sit up at attention. I want my people to do the same.”
6.14 Fareed Zakaria in the Post: The real headline of the Trump-Kim summit — ironically held in Singapore, the city-state that Lee built — should have been: “U.S. weakens its 70-year alliance with South Korea.” The most striking elements of Trump’s initiative were not simply that he lavished praise on North Korea’s dictator, Kim Jong Un, but also that he announced the cancellation of military exercises with South Korea, adopting North Korea’s own rhetoric by calling them
6.14 Max Boot in the Post: “When it comes to economics, history, foreign policy, health care, tax policy or any other field that it is important for a president to master, Donald Trump is an invincible ignoramus. But when it comes to salesmanship, Trump is an unparalleled genius — he is Dale Carnegie, P.T. Barnum and David Ogilvy rolled into one. His central insight is that in the post-truth, social media age, it is no longer necessary to achieve anything in order to claim a policy victory. You can just say over and over that you’ve accomplished your goals — and a lot of people will believe you even if it’s just not so.“provocative.”
6.14 Alex Wagner in The Atlantic: “We have this beacon that says you can come in, and we will take you, right?” Chris Cabrera said. “So what does that do? That activates people.” Throughout our conversation, Cabrera returned to what he called “the beacon”—in this case, the promise of freedom that was luring children and their families across the border. “When you find an 11-year-old in the brush, dead, alone, and you could see that he’s got his little Pokemon belt on, it breaks your heart,” he said. “At what point do we turn off this beacon?” But that beacon is the idea of America—the promise of a better life, of freedom from persecution. How might anyone possibly extinguish the idea of America? The Trump administration seems to have come up with its answer in the current “zero tolerance” policy for migrant families, one that appears to be based in deterrence. Practically, this means that, for the families making the dangerous journey to the U.S. border, what awaits them is not respite, but trauma: the separation of families and the potential deportation of parents without their children. It is a clarion call to those considering migration north—here, in America, we will take your children. And you may not see them again for a very long time. This, apparently, is how you turn off the idea of America: take the dreams of a better life in this country, and turn them into nightmares. As a means of deterrence, the policy has failed: Illegal crossings in March saw a fourfold increase since the same time last year. For the families—especially the children—who have already been torn apart in the process, and for whom deterrence is a ship long since sailed, the effects of this policy are profound and deeply disturbing. Alan Shapiro, the senior medical director for community pediatric programs at Montefiore Health System, put it bluntly: “This is government-sanctioned torture of children.”
6.14 Washington Post: Trump‘s sit-down with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un in Singapore is a diplomatic breakthrough, but questions remain about whether the president made a major concession to North Korea — ending U.S.-South Korea joint military exercises — in exchange for what critics say is a paper-tiger promise from North Korea to “denuclearize.” However this plays out, Trump’s overtures to North Korea are so history-making that it will likely make the first paragraph of any assessment of his presidency.
6.14 And what is so rare as a day in June?
6.14 Uri Friedman in The Atlantic: Donald Trump got little of substance out of his summit with Kim Jong Un. But that didn’t stop him from making a triumphant, demonstrably false claim about how things went. Trump declared in an early-morning tweet that North Korea’s threat to America has been somehow neutralized altogether: “There is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea.” In reality, Trump returned to America from the Singapore meeting having secured only a vague promise, not unlike others the North Koreans have broken in the past, about working toward the goal of denuclearization. Yet North Korea has just as many nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles, and nuclear facilities and personnel, and precisely as much fissile material, as before Trump and Kim shook hands and signed a document in which North Korea vowed to “work toward complete denuclearization of the Korean peninsula.” Not only that, but the North Koreans have come away from the summit with a much more immediate pledge from the president to suspend U.S.-South Korea military exercises that the North has long viewed as a threat. The North Koreans may view their denuclearization commitment as a pie-in-the-sky pledge to give up their nuclear weapons once the nuclear-armed United States withdraws its protection for South Korea and ceases all hostile behavior toward North Korea. The statement they endorsed includes no details on how denuclearization will be implemented, how long it will take, or even what first moves the North will make toward that objective.
6.14 Meeting with Kim was a breakthrough; the agreement was not
6.14 Trump and his children are accused of charity fraud: The Trump Foundation wasn’t really a charity; it was a “personal piggybank” for the president to advance his business and political interests for at least the past decade, the New York attorney general
6.13 BAIER: You know you call people sometimes killers; he is a killer. He’s clearly executing people.
TRUMP: He’s a tough guy. Hey, when you take over a country, tough country, with tough people, and you take it over from your father, I don’t care who you are, what you are, how much of an advantage you have. If you can do that at 27 years old, I mean that’s one in 10,000 that could do that. So he’s a very smart guy. He’s a great negotiator. But I think we understand each other. BAIER: But he’s still done some really bad things TRUMP: Yeah, but so have a lot of other people done some really bad things. I mean, I could go through a lot of nations where a lot of bad things were done.
Just landed – a long trip, but everybody can now feel much safer than the day I took office. There is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea. Meeting with Kim Jong Un was an interesting and very positive experience. North Korea has great potential for the future!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 13, 2018
6.12 A raccoon scaled the 25-plus story UBS Tower in Minneapolis
6.12 Trump: ““I think he might want to do this as much or maybe even more than me, My whole life has been deals. I know when somebody wants a deal. … I just feel very strongly – my instinct… – they want to make a deal.”
6.12 Trump on Hannity: “I think without the rhetoric, we wouldn’t have been here,” Trump told Hannity in Singapore. “I really believe that. You know, we did sanctions and all of the things that you would do. But I think without the rhetoric — you know, other administrations, I don’t want to get specific on that, but they had a policy of silence. If [North Korea] said something very bad — very threatening and horrible — just don’t answer. That’s not the answer. That’s not what you have to do. So, I think, the rhetoric — I hated to do it. Sometimes I felt foolish doing it. But we had no choice.”
6.12 As a former developer, Trump appeared to hint at that real estate could be the key to North Korea’s economic development as a country. “As an example, they have great beaches,” Trump said to reporters. “You see that whenever they’re exploding their cannons into the ocean. I said, ‘Boy, look at that view. Wouldn’t that make a great condo?'” Trump added that North Korea could be a great location for hotels, too. “You could have the best hotels in the world right there,” Trump said. “Think of it from a real estate perspective. You have South Korea, you have China, and they own the land in the middle. How bad is that, right? It’s great.”
6.12 Tim Kaine to Jonathan Capehart: “The Trump administration is filled with people with glass jaws who they love to punch people, but if somebody punches back? They just can’t believe it. They’re crybabies. President Trump can name-call everybody all day long. And somebody gets in his face a little bit and they melt into a pool of lukewarm water.”
6.11 Mitch McConnell to the Faith and Freedom Coalition conference: “In my view, the last 16 months have been the single best period for conservative values since I came to Washington . . . in 1985. And this is not hyperbole.”
6.11 Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic: “The best distillation of the Trump Doctrine I heard, though, came from a senior White House official with direct access to the president and his thinking. I was talking to this person several weeks ago, and I said, by way of introduction, that I thought it might perhaps be too early to discern a definitive Trump Doctrine. “No,” the official said. “There’s definitely a Trump Doctrine. The Trump Doctrine is ‘We’re America, Bitch.’ That’s the Trump Doctrine.”
6.11 The G7 summit ended on an acrimonious note. Trump retracted his support for the leaders’ joint communiqué after he left the summit, lashing out his allies, and singling out Canada’s Justin Trudeau in particular. French president Emmanuel Macron condemned Trump for his “fits of anger and throwaway remarks,” while German chancellor Angela Merkel called his actions “disappointing and depressing.” White House aide Peter Navarro said “there’s a special place in hell” for leaders who stab Trump in the back
6.10 The Tony Awards. Highlight: a moving performance by students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, who honored their award-winning drama teacher, Melody Herzfeld, by singing “Seasons of Love.” Highlight? Robert DeNiro: “I’m just gonna say one thing. Fuck Trump. It’s no longer down with Trump. It’s ‘Fuck Trump.’”
6.10 Jennifer Rubin in the Post: After President Trump’s atrocious and irrational behavior leading up to and at the Group of Seven summit, the disintegration of the liberal world order in place since the end of World War II and the potential for a serious international crisis no longer seem hard to imagine. The president, unmoved by history, ignorant of facts and guided by sycophants, has not been forced to grapple with the real world nor to hear views that don’t coincide with his twisted worldview, in which allies are ripping us off and aggressive strongmen are to be admired and accommodated.
June 10 Paul Krugman in the Times: “There has never been a disaster like the G7 meeting that just took place. It could herald the beginning of a trade war, maybe even the collapse of the Western alliance. At the very least it will damage America’s reputation as a reliable ally for decades to come; even if Trump eventually departs the scene in disgrace, the fact that someone like him could come to power in the first place will always be in the back of everyone’s mind. What went down in Quebec? I’m already seeing headlines to the effect that Trump took a belligerent “America first” position, demanding big concessions from our allies, which would have been bad. But the reality was much worse. He didn’t put America first; Russia first would be a better description. And he didn’t demand drastic policy changes from our allies; he demanded that they stop doing bad things they aren’t doing. This wasn’t a tough stance on behalf of American interests, it was a declaration of ignorance and policy insanity.”
June 9 Trump calls Justin Trudeau “weak”
June 9 Justify wins the Belmont Stakes and the Triple Crown
6.9 Olana, then lunch at Terrapin in Rhinebeck
June 8 The Golden State Warriors win their third NBA title in four years
June 8 Saw Larry Campbell and Teresa Williams at the Colony Hotel with Greg and Susan