11.30 George Herbert Walker Bush, 41st president, dies at 94.
11.30 Barck Obama, quoted in The Atlantic: “There was a reverence there for that [Oval] office that is independent of you, and if you don’t feel that, then you shouldn’t be there. Because a lot of fights, a lot of sacrifices, a lot of bloodshed is represented in that office. Not just soldiers at Iwo Jima. It’s maids in Selma and it’s workers in a coal mine and it’s farmers in the dust bowl. You’re carrying that vessel. I never lost that reverence for that office.”
11.30 Bruce Springsteen in Esquire: “If you grow up in a household where people are refusing to take responsibility for their lives, chances are you’re gonna refuse. You’re gonna see yourself as a professional victim. And once that’s locked into you, it takes a lotta self-awareness, a lotta work to come out from under it. I’m shocked at the number of people that I know who fall into this category. And it has nothing to do with whether you’re successful or not. It’s just your baggage. So that’s important to communicate to your children: They have to take responsibility for who they are, their actions, what they do. They’ve got to own their lives.”
11.29 Life expectancy in the United States declined again in 2017, the government said Thursday in a bleak series of reports that showed a nation still in the grip of escalating drug and suicide crises. The data continued the longest sustained decline in expected life span at birth in a century, an appalling performance not seen in the United States since 1915 through 1918. That four-year period included World War I and a flu pandemic that killed 675,000 people in the United States and perhaps 50 million worldwide. Public health and demographic experts reacted with alarm to the release of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s annual statistics, which are considered a reliable barometer of a society’s health. In most developed nations, life expectancy has marched steadily upward for decades.
11.28 The number of unauthorized immigrants in the U.S. fell to its lowest level in more than a decade, according to new Pew Research Center estimates based on 2016 government data. There were 10.7 million unauthorized immigrants living in the U.S. in 2016, down from a peak of 12.2 million in 2007, according to the new estimates. [B]etween 2007 and 2016, the unauthorized immigrant population shrank by 13%.”
11.28 Trump in an interview with the Washington Post: “ One of the problems that a lot of people like myself — we have very high levels of intelligence, but we’re not necessarily such believers. You look at our air and our water, and it’s right now at a record clean. But when you look at China and you look at parts of Asia and when you look at South America, and when you look at many other places in this world, including Russia, including — just many other places — the air is incredibly dirty. And when you’re talking about an atmosphere, oceans are very small. And it blows over and it sails over. I mean, we take thousands of tons of garbage off our beaches all the time that comes over from Asia. It just flows right down the Pacific, it flows, and we say where does this come from. And it takes many people to start off with.”
11.27 Trump tweets: “The Phony Witch Hunt continues, but Mueller and his gang of Angry Dems are only looking at one side, not the other. Wait until it comes out how horribly & viciously they are treating people, ruining lives for them refusing to lie. Mueller is a conflicted prosecutor gone rogue. The Fake News Media builds Bob Mueller up as a Saint, when in actuality he is the exact opposite. He is doing TREMENDOUS damage to our Criminal Justice System
11.27 NBC’s Jane Timm: “Democrats won the House with the largest margin of [raw votes] in history for either party. Of the more than 111 million votes cast in House races nationwide, Democrats took 53.1 percent — retaking control of the House of Representatives … — while Republicans received 45.2 percent. Democratic House candidates currently hold an 8,805,130 vote lead over Republicans. … [That] smashes the previous record of 8.7 million votes in 1974, won just months after President Richard Nixon resigned from office in disgrace amid the Watergate scandal.” House Dems will pick up 40 seats
11.26 Brad DeLong in the Milken Institute Review: “We are haunted by our Great Recession in a sense that our predecessors were not haunted by the Great Depression. . . . No unbiased observer projects anything other than slow growth, much slower than the years during and after World War II. Nobody is forecasting that the haunting will cease — that the shadow left from the Great Recession will lift. We seem to have fumbled the recovery from the recession. Early in the recovery, left-center economists (like me) warned that cutting off stimulus prematurely in the name of deficit reduction or inflation-fighting would run huge risks.”
11.26 A Chinese scientist claims to have for the first time successfully created two babies whose DNA had been altered through a gene-editing technique known as CRISPR, eliminating a gene that could make the babies resistant to HIV.
11.25 Migrants approaching the border from Mexico were hit with tear gas fired by U.S. agents after several tried to breach a fence separating the two countries. The gas left children screaming and coughing in the mayhem.
11.25 Alan Dershowitz on ABC’s “This Week” “I think the report is going to be devastating to the president.”
11.23 Washington Post: Fox’s Ed Henry hosted “The Story” on Friday night, when he and three panelists discussed how a pair of Ocasio-Cortez’s shoes are set to go on display at Cornell University, in its “Women Empowered: Fashions from the Frontline” exhibit. A Twitter user pointed out to the Democrat from New York that a four-person discussion about her shoes was taking place on prime-time television. “No, no es amor/ Lo que tú sientes, se llama obsesión,” Ocasio-Cortez tweeted. The lyrics to Obsesión, by Aventura, translate to, “No, it’s not love, what you feel is called obsession.” After another user asked whether she was really going to make Fox hire a translator to read the tweet, Ocasio-Cortez took her shot: “Don’t worry, Fox News has made it clear that they are far superior to + more intelligent than me, who they’ve called a ‘little, simple person,’” she wrote. “So I’m sure catching up to me in spoken languages shouldn’t be a problem for them.”
11.23 Washington Post: “The federal government on Friday released a long-awaited report with an unmistakable message: The effects of climate change, including deadly wildfires, increasingly debilitating hurricanes and heat waves, are already battering the United States, and the danger of more such catastrophes is worsening. The report’s authors, who represent numerous federal agencies, say they are more certain than ever that climate change poses a severe threat to Americans’ health and pocketbooks, as well as to the country’s infrastructure and natural resources. And while it avoids policy recommendations, the report’s sense of urgency and alarm stands in stark contrast to the lack of any apparent plan from President Trump to tackle the problems, which, according to the government he runs, are increasingly dire.”
11.22 Eugene Robinson in the Washington Post: Trump’s reaction — or non-reaction — to the Saudi regime’s brutal killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi is a holiday-season gift to autocrats around the globe. It shows them that if you just shower Trump with over-the-top flattery, feed him some geopolitical mumbo jumbo and make vague promises to perhaps buy some American-made goods in the future, he will literally let you get away with murder.”
11.21 Fred Ryan at the Washington Post: A clear and dangerous message has been sent to tyrants around the world: Flash enough money in front of the president of the United States, and you can literally get away with murder. In a bizarre, inaccurate and rambling statement — one offering a good reminder why Twitter has character limits — President Trump whitewashed the Saudi government’s brutal murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. In the process, the president maligned a good and innocent man, tarring Khashoggi as an “enemy of the state” — a label the Saudis themselves have not used publicly — while proclaiming to the world that Trump’s relationship with Saudi Arabia’s 33-year-old crown prince was too important to risk over the murder of a journalist. Whatever objections people may have to our turning a blind eye to Khashoggi’s assassination, the president argued, they do not outweigh the (grossly inflated) revenue we can expect from U.S.-Saudi arms deals.
11.21 Max Boot in the Washington Post: Democracy is under siege in the United States — but not just in the United States. It’s a worldwide crisis. Democracy has already been destroyed in Turkey, Egypt, Venezuela, Thailand and Russia, and it is now being undermined in Poland, Hungary and the Philippines. Chancellor Angela Merkel, the bulwark of the West, is on her way out in Germany. Emmanuel Macron, France’s centrist president, is battling record-low approval ratings. And in Britain, the Conservative Party is tearing itself apart over Brexit, making more likely an election that could bring to power a Labour Party led by an anti-Semitic neo-Marxist. What in the name of John Stuart Mill is going on? How did we go from hopes of an “end of history” in the 1990s to fears of an “end of democracy” today? We are confronting two intersecting crises: an economic crisis and a refugee crisis. The economic crisis has been brought about by the Information Revolution, which, like the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century, is transforming society beyond all recognition. The Industrial Revolution created immense fortunes for the Rockefellers, Carnegies, Goulds and other “robber barons” but also great misery for millions of ordinary people who had to leave the countryside to live in grimy cities and work in backbreaking factories. The result was what Benjamin Disraeli described as “two nations” — the “rich and the poor” — “between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets.” The growing inequality and social dislocation of the industrial era gave rise to radical new ideologies such as Marxism, fascism and anarchism at the very time that new technologies — principally printing presses that made it possible to produce cheap newspapers and magazines, followed by radio and film — gave radical ideologues access to a mass audience for the first time. As T.E. Lawrence said: “The printing press is the greatest weapon in the armory of the modern commander.” The Information Revolution is just as destabilizing. It is creating vast fortunes for the Gateses, Bezoses, Jobses and Zuckerbergs while impoverishing millions of blue-collar workers. Economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman found that wealth inequality, after falling from 1929 to 1978, has been rising ever since “almost entirely due to the rise of the top 0.1% wealth share, from 7% in 1979 to 22% in 2012 — a level almost as high as in 1929.” Meanwhile, the United States has lost5 million factory jobs since 2000, and the manual labor that remains is generally lower-paying and less secure than in the past. These trends are driven mainly by automation, but it is easy for demagogues to put the blame on supposedly disloyal elites such as international bankers, trade partners that are supposedly ripping us off, and immigrants who are supposedly stealing jobs and bringing crime. Conveniently enough, the nostrums pushed by autocratic populists exacerbate the very problems they claim to be addressing, deepening the crisis that gives them the excuse to rule. (Trump-supporting counties have done worse under Trump than counties where the majority voted for Hillary Clinton.) Xenophobia is an easy sell at the moment because we are in the midst of the largest refugee crisis in history. According to the United Nations, the number of displaced people in the world has grown from 33.9 million in 1997 to 65.6 million in 2016. This mass migration has been sparked by conflicts in Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Congo, Sudan, Libya, Ukraine and other countries — and by crime and poverty in countries such as Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua. Europe saw an influx of almost 1.2 million migrants in 2015-2016. This migration created the conditions for the passage of Brexit and led to a wave of illiberalism across the continent, even in countries such as Hungary and Poland that aren’t seeing any influx of newcomers. Just as the technological advances of the Industrial Revolution made it easy for Karl Marx to propagate his “Communist Manifesto,” so the Information Revolution has given these populists the perfect medium for getting their message out. The rise of social media and cable television allows them to spread propaganda free of mainstream media fact-checking, which they cynically denigrate as “fake news.” History suggests that economic upheavals such as the Industrial and Information revolutions eventually play themselves out and leave the entire world better off. Refugee crises also abate sooner or later. But a lot can happen in the meantime. The crisis of the old order in Europe produced nearly 80 years of often bloody conflict between democracy and its foes from 1914 to 1991. Buckle your seat belts. The entire world is in for another bumpy ride.
11.21 Trump: “Sorry Chief Justice John Roberts, but you do indeed have ‘Obama judges,’ and they have a much different point of view than the people who are charged with the safety of our country.”
11.21 John Roberts: “We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges. . . .What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them.”
11.20 Trump in a statement: “Our intelligence agencies continue to assess all information, but it could very well be that the Crown Prince had knowledge of this tragic event—maybe he did and maybe he didn’t! We may never know all of the facts surrounding the murder of Mr. Jamal Khashoggi. In any case, our relationship is with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.”
11.19 Carter Eskew in the Post: When Donald Trump’s political autopsy is written, the exact time of death will be uncertain, but it will be fixed sometime around the 2018 midterm elections when enough of the country decided that it had had enough. Cause of death, somewhat unexpectedly, will not be a single event, not his racist reaction to Charlottesville, or his siding with Vladimir Putin over his own intelligence branches, or his obstruction of justice, or his threatening to cut off federal aid for the burned-out citizens of California’s fires, or any of his other misdeeds, but rather the accumulation of all of them. In medical terminology, the cause will be “death by misadventure.” This accident of democracy will have politically expired, due to “deliberate assumption of unreasonable risk by the victim.” In other words, he came too close to the edge too many times and finally fell.”
11.18 Fred Hiatt in the Post: There “is a question the crown prince of Saudi Arabia should be asked at every opportunity. “Thank you for granting me an audience, Your Majesty,” everyone should say. “Why bring a bonesaw to a kidnapping?”
11.18 Robert Samuelson in the Post: “The CBO study. . . confirms that the rich have catapulted ahead of most Americans, including many with six-figure incomes. The richest 1 percent of U.S. households had average pretax incomes of $1.855 million in 2015. The growth has been astonishing. From 1979 to 2015, pretax incomes of the top 1 percent jumped 233 percent. That’s more than a tripling. (All figures are corrected for inflation.) But it’s not true that no one else had gains. If the bottom 99 percent experienced stagnation, their 2015 incomes would be close to those of 1979, the study’s first year. This is what most people apparently believe. The study found otherwise. The poorest fifth of Americans (a fifth is known as a “quintile”) enjoyed a roughly 80 percent post-tax income increase since 1979. The richest quintile — those just below the top 1 percent — had a similar gain of nearly 80 percent. The middle three quintiles achieved less, about a 50 percent rise in post-tax incomes.
11.18 Chris Wallace to President Trump on “Fox News Sunday: “Where do you rank yourself in the pantheon of great presidents?” Trump: “I would give myself, I would — look, I hate to do it, but I will do it: I would give myself an A+. Is that enough? Can I go higher than that?”
11.18 Ret. Admiral William McRaven: “The president’s attack on the media is the greatest threat to our democracy in my lifetime. When you undermine the people’s right to a free press and freedom of speech and expression, then you threaten the Constitution and all for which it stands.”
11.17 Widows, with Paul and Anne, followed by dinner at Pub Street
11.15 NY Times: “If you make it to your 65th birthday in the U.S. today, you can expect about 20 more years and have a good chance at 30.
11.14 Jason de Grom wins the NL Cy Young Award. Somebody named Blake Snell won in the AL
11.14 Trump in an interview with The Daily Caller: “The Republicans don’t win and that’s because of potentially illegal votes. When people get in line that have absolutely no right to vote and they go around in circles. Sometimes they go to their car, put on a different hat, put on a different shirt, come in and vote again. Nobody takes anything. It’s really a disgrace what’s going on.”
11.13 Axios: In private conversations after the midterms, many top Republicans and Democrats said that President Trump seemed to be heading into his 2020 re-election race in a relatively strong position. They couldn’t be more wrong. In fact, all the big trends are working against Trump and the GOP, based on factors that are hiding in plain sight. Despite the conventional wisdom, many people around Trump and in GOP leadership share this dim view. Here are three factors that should worry Trump: (1) The midterm results were actually a terrible leading indicator for him. Turns out that without Hillary atop the ticket, Midwest states like Wisconsin are tough for Trump, and Southern states with rising Hispanic populations are slowly growing more Democratic. Long term, the GOP should be freaking out about this. (2) Trump and the GOP face two years of public investigations, coming from three different and dangerous directions: Robert Mueller, the state of New York and Congress. (3) The prolonged recovery is on borrowed time, and a recession could well hit at the worst possible time for Trump — in the thick of the presidential race. . . .Trump has locked his party into a white-man strategy — using the pre-midterm rallies to amp up fears of immigrants and change. The strategy held the Senate for the GOP, since this year’s battlegrounds were largely rural. But white men are shrinking, and will continue to, as a proportion of the electorate. There’s not a single demographic trend in America that benefits Republicans.
11.12 Stan Lee dies at 95. From The Atlantic in 2007:
11.12 Axios: House Democrats plan to probe every aspect of President Trump’s life and work, from family business dealings to the Space Force to his tax returns to possible “leverage” by Russia, top Democrats tell us. One senior Democratic source said the new majority, which takes power in January, is preparing a “subpoena cannon,” like an arena T-shirt cannon. . . . Based on our reporting and other public sources, [the Democrats have] assembled a list of at least 85 potential Trump-related subpoena targets for the new majority
11.11 The Washington Post: November 11 “In the shadow of a grand war memorial here, French President Emmanuel Macron marked the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I by delivering a forceful rebuke against rising nationalism, calling it a “betrayal of patriotism” and warning against “old demons coming back to wreak chaos and death.” His words during a solemn Armistice Day ceremony under overcast skies at the foot of the Arc de Triomphe in the heart of the French capital were intended for a global audience. But they also represented a pointed rebuke to President Trump, Russian President Vladimir Putin and others among the more than 60 world leaders in attendance.
11.7 Trump skirmishes with Jim Acosta. Washington Post: “The heated exchange occurred Wednesday when CNN reporter Jim Acosta continued to question Trump after the president dismissed himd uring a news conference about the 2018 midterm elections. Acosta had brought up the Central American migrant caravan, asking the president why he characterized it as “an invasion.” “I think you should let me run the country, you run CNN and if you did it well, your ratings would be much better,” Trump told Acosta. Then when Acosta tried to question Trump about the Russia investigation, the president shouted: “That’s enough. That’s enough. That’s enough. That’s enough,” telling him to “put down the mic.” Trump then told the reporter: “CNN should be ashamed of itself having you working for them. You are a rude, terrible person. You shouldn’t be working for CNN. … You’re a very rude person. The way you treat Sarah Huckabee is horrible. And the way you treat other people are horrible. You shouldn’t treat people that way.” NBC News reporter Peter Alexander tried to stand up for Acosta, saying he is a “diligent reporter.” Trump responded: “Well, I’m not a big fan of yours, either.”
11.7 Attorney General Jeff Sessions hands in his resignation
11.6 Pro-Trump brothel owner Dennis Hof is elected to Nevada’s state legislature, despite having died nearly a month ago.
11.6 Democrats score tremendous results in the midterm elections. picking up 40 seats in the House of Representatives (more House seats than they have in any midterm election since 1974), as well as key governorships in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Kansas. In New York, Gov. Cuomo scores a resounding victory. The Dems young stars do not fare well, as O’Rourke, Gillum and Abrams all lose. Gov. Cuomo win in a rout. Democratic victors include women, Muslims, American Indians, vets. Suburbanites desert the Republicans, repudiating Trump. Botton line: red states are redder, blue are bluer.
11.1 Pam Grier, quoted in Vulture: “When you’re young, you can have an orgasm in a couple of minutes. Two times, maybe, in an hour or so. You try to have an orgasm at my age? It’s seven hours! It’s gonna hurt, to your teeth! All day, I have to rest. I’m not a cougar! Leave me alone!”
11.1 Bret Stephens in the Times: For years, conservatives have rightly pointed out that Islamist terrorists don’t spring from an ideological or cultural vacuum. It usually takes a village, real, virtual or proverbial, to make an Islamist terrorist — one composed of hate-spewing imams, TV programs saturated with anti-Semitic and anti-Western conspiracy theories, neighborhood vigilantes enforcing fundamentalist religious strictures, and political leaders excusing, reflecting or disseminating many of the same beliefs and attitudes. The villagers are rarely terrorists themselves. They often condemn terrorism. Sometimes they are its victims. Yet they also provide the soil in which the seeds of terror germinate. What are the villages from which Sayoc and Bowers hailed? For Sayoc it was the real-world villages of the Trump rally, with its mob-like intensity and unquestioning fidelity to one supreme leader. For Bowers, it was the virtual villages of Twitter and alt-right social networks, digitally connecting angry loners who follow nobody. They are different villages, with somewhat different values, and different views of the admissibility of violence. The approximate Islamist analogues would be the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda — the former generally committed to working within the political system, the latter to destroying it, yet both profoundly hostile to the values animating open societies. Just so with the Trumpist and alt-right villages. Different methods and values — but not altogether different.
11.1 New York Times: “Will Mr. Cuomo run for president in 2020, despite his denials? Or will he stay in Albany and run for a fourth term, and succeed where his father faltered? Would that be enough to propel Mr. Cuomo into the pantheon of New York’s most celebrated governors? The list includes Franklin D. Roosevelt, Alfred E. Smith, Nelson A. Rockefeller and the man Mr. Cuomo hailed this May as the “greatest governor in the history of New York”: his father. It’s a club Mr. Cuomo seems to envision himself in. . . . .Mr. Cuomo certainly has accomplishments. He oversaw one of the nation’s strongest gun-control measures and a minimum wage hike, the passage of gay marriage and paid family leave, a property-tax cap and spending restraints, plus eight mostly on-time budgets. He has built new bridges and launched a limited free college tuition program. Along the way, he has cemented a reputation as a win-at-all-costs chief executive. His bulldozer personality and zero-sum approach to power in New York — the more you have, the less he has — have led to fierce fights with fellow Democrats, most recently Mayor Bill de Blasio. Liberal activists complain that he has stalled key priorities — driver’s licenses for the undocumented, recreational marijuana, limits on campaign money — and too often must be pressured to act. So as the Democratic Party searches for its voice in the age of President Trump, few seem to rank Mr. Cuomo high among the party’s hopes, despite his prominence and lengthy list of victories. “I find him to be astonishingly productive and maddeningly unacknowledged,” said Harold Holzer, who worked for Mario Cuomo and remains close to the Cuomo family. “Why? I don’t know.”
