10.31 Truck driver gunman from ISIS kills eight in Manhattan; the Halloween Parade goes on.
10.31 Anne Applebaum in the Post: “If this indictment is correct, Manafort is the living embodiment of this Russian-American convergence. And Trump, of course, is its apotheosis.”
10.31 Susan Hennessey and Benjamin Wittes in Lawfare.com: “[Mueller’s] opening bid is a remarkable show of strength. He has a cooperating witness from inside the campaign’s interactions with the Russians. And he is alleging not mere technical infractions of law but astonishing criminality on the part of Trump’s campaign manager, a man who also attended the Trump Tower meeting. Any hope the White House may have had that the Mueller investigation might be fading away vanished . . . Things are only going to get worse from here.”
10.31 The Washington Post: “The charges are striking for their breadth, touching all levels of the Trump campaign and exploring the possible personal, financial wrongdoing of those involved, as well as what appeared to be a concerted effort by one campaign official to arrange a meeting with Russian officials.”
10.30 Michelle Goldberg in the Times: “Trump, more gangster than entrepreneur, has long surrounded himself with bottom-feeding scum, and for all his nationalist bluster, his campaign was a vehicle for Russian subversion.
10.30 David Leonhardt in the Times: “Having lavished so much money on the wealthy, the tax package — or at least the vague framework that the administration has released — doesn’t have much remaining to spend on middle class and poor families. For them, the package is a mix of pluses and minuses. Many face a lower tax rate, but some face a higher one, and many families lose deductions. The combination creates a lot of losers. Reduced deductions for children, for example, hurt large families, notes N.Y.U.’s Lily Batchelder. And the deduction for state and local taxes — also a target for cuts — now benefits 30 percent of households nationwide. It was the main reason for last week’s House defections, and the tensions over it haven’t been resolved. hen there are the long-term problems I mentioned earlier. First, Trump’s plan takes a skimpy approach to inflation adjustments, which will push many families into higher tax brackets over time. Second, the plan would radically increase the federal deficit, and when it comes to the deficit, what goes up must eventually come down. At some point, the government will need to pay its bills, through a combination of tax increases and spending cuts. Virtually any future deficit-reduction plan — except for a repeal of the Trump tax plan — would hurt most families more than his plan helps them. This chain of events has happened before. The Reagan and George W. Bush tax cuts may have at first seemed to help the middle class and poor. But the deficits led to later cuts in education, medical research, transportation and anti-poverty programs that almost surely erased the benefits of a modest tax cut. Already, today’s congressional leaders are talking about sizable cuts to Medicare and Medicaid.
10.30 Jennifer Rubin in the Post: The intensity of Trump’s frenzy underscores the peril in which the president now finds himself. Beyond the indictments unsealed this morning, Trump does not know what special counsel Robert S. Mueller III has uncovered; which witnesses are flippable; what financial documents have revealed about the Trump business empire; and whether, for example, Mueller finds support for an obstruction of justice charge from Trump’s own public dissembling (e.g., hinting at non-existent tapes of former FBI director James B. Comey). For someone who insists on holding all the cards and intimidating others, Trump finds himself in a uniquely powerless position.
10.30 Manafort indicted
10.28 Albany. Saw the Soldiers and Sailors Monument in Washington Park
10.27 Albany
10.24 Sen. Jeff Flake: When we remain silent and fail to act when we know that that silence and inaction is the wrong thing to do – because of political considerations, because we might make enemies, because we might alienate the base, because we might provoke a primary challenge, because ad infinitum, ad nauseum – when we succumb to those considerations in spite of what should be greater considerations and imperatives in defense of the institutions of our liberty, then we dishonor our principles and forsake our obligations. Those things are far more important than politics.
10.24 Jennifer Rubin in the Post: Whether it is a pregnant Gold Star widow such as Myeshia Johnson or a powerful U.S. senator whose help Trump needs both on Iran and the do-or-die tax plan, Trump is incapable of disengaging from a fight that he is obviously losing. He cannot cede the field to anyone, no matter how destructive the prolonged fight is to his own goals. Everything comes back to a personal battle of wills in which Trump cannot stand to be seen on the losing side. For Trump, all human and personal interactions are reduced to a test of his ego; any perceived defeat is intolerable for him. Extending these exchanges, of course, leads to bigger and more serious defeats, but those he can justify as the result of “fake media” or hapless Republicans. Corker is demonstrating that the GOP sycophants who feed Trump’s ego have it all wrong. The president cannot be cajoled into being a responsible, effective president. He cannot be pinned down to any specific position. No loyalty can be expected from him. Rather than lose one’s political soul and waste endless time trying to placate the impulsive, irrational president, the best course of action is to expose his craziness, minimize his influence and then ignore him.
10.24 Greg Sargent in The Washington Post: When Corker told the New York Times this month that he worries Trump might trigger World War III and that most Senate Republicans know Trump must be regularly constrained by his inner circle from unleashing large-scale global damage, Corker revealed two things. Corker didn’t just unmask the fact that Trump’s temperament and character pose an ongoing danger to the country and the world. Corker also revealed that Republicans are fully aware of this threat and that their failure to testify to it constitutes a massive abdication that could have unthinkable consequences.
10.24 A Montreal man received a $117 traffic ticket for singing in his car. In September, Taofik Moalla was driving home and singing along to “Gonna Make You Sweat,” a 1990 dance music smash by C+C Music Factory. Y’know, the one that goes, “Everybody dance now!”
10.24 Steve Bannon: “There’s nobody in the United States that wants to be engaged in combat operations, special forces operations, drone operations (for multiple generations.) That’s just not where the American people are. It’s not the way our country was founded or formed. … We’re prepared to be allies. What we don’t want is these countries to be protectorates. It’s not our fight.” He said Petraeus was too focused on “nation building.” “We have to build a nation called the United States of America. The way you can have Pax Americana is if we’re a robust and strong society ourselves, not trying to impose our way of life and our beliefs on other people. . . .In Afghanistan, I believe . . . I believe we’re trying to impose a liberal democratic system on a society that clearly to me doesn’t seem to want it. … We’re not looking to transform the world into our values. The world has got to come to its own conclusions about how it wants to govern themselves.”
10.24 Within the next three decades, floods that used to strike the New York City area only once every 500 years could occur every five years, according to a new scientific study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “[R]ising sea levels could mean that floods of 7.4 feet … or more that struck the New York city area roughly once every 500 years before 1800, and which occur roughly every 25 years now, could happen once every five years between 2030 and 2045.”
10.24 Michael Gerson in the Washington Post: Thirty years ago, University of Chicago professor Allan Bloom’s “The Closing of the American Mind” began with the words: “There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: Almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative.” Bloom found this deeply problematic, because the ability to determine truth from falsehood, right from wrong, is essential to personal flourishing and civic health. I wonder what Bloom would make of a political philosophy in which truth is determined by 25,000 screaming partisans and reality is a function of fabulism. Conservatives were supposed to be the protectors of objective truth from various forms of postmodernism. Now they generally defend our thoroughly post-truth president. Evidently we are all relativists now.Not quite all. Some of us still think this attack on truth is a dangerous form of political corruption. The problem is not just the constant lies. It is the dismissal of reason and objectivity as inherently elitist and partisan. It is the invitation to supporters to live entirely within Trump’s dark, divisive, dystopian version of reality. It is the attempt to destroy or subvert any source of informed judgment other than Trump himself. This is the construction of a pernicious form of tyranny: a tyranny over the mind.
10.23 Dinner with Chris Napolitano at Cafe Centro
10.23 An annual survey published last month by the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center found that 37 percent of Americans cannot name even one of the five rights guaranteed under the First Amendment. About half of those surveyed got freedom of speech but couldn’t get any of the others.
10.23 John McCain: “One aspect of the conflict, by the way, that I will never ever countenance is that we drafted the lowest income level of America and the highest income level found a doctor that would say that they had a bone spur. That is wrong. That is wrong. If we’re going to ask every American to serve, every American should serve.”
10.22 Reuters: Zookeepers at Berlin’s main animal park are hoping to cure a young female panda’s habit of walking backwards by introducing her to sex.
10.22 New York Times: “Last January, six months after Fox News ousted [Roger Ailes], … Bill O’Reilly, struck a $32 million agreement with a longtime network analyst [Lis Wiehl] to settle new sexual harassment allegations. The next month, 21st Century Fox “granted him a four-year extension that paid $25 million a year.
10.21 Washington Post: “[A]nalysts … see signs that Mount Mantap, the 7,200-foot-high peak under which North Korea detonates its nuclear bombs, is suffering from ‘tired mountain syndrome. Chinese scientists … have warned that further nuclear tests [by North Korea] could cause the mountain to collapse and release the radiation from the blast.”
10.21 The Astros eliminate the Yankees, four games to three
10.21 The 37th Annual Dutchess County Sheep and Wool Festival
10.19 George W. Bush: “We’ve seen nationalism distorted into nativism – forgetting the dynamism that immigration has always brought to America. We see a fading confidence in the value of free markets and international trade – forgetting that conflict, instability, and poverty follow in the wake of protectionism. We have seen the return of isolationist sentiments – forgetting that American security is directly threatened by the chaos and despair of distant places, where threats such as terrorism, infectious disease, criminal gangs and drug trafficking tend to emerge. In all these ways, we need to recall and recover our own identity.”
10.19 Barack Obama: “Why are we deliberately trying to misunderstand each other and be cruel to each other and put each other down? That’s not who we are!”
10.19 George W. Bush: “We have seen our discourse degraded by casual cruelty. At times, it can seem like the forces pulling us apart are stronger than the forces binding us together. Argument turns too easily into animosity. Disagreement escalates into dehumanization. . . . .Bigotry or white supremacy in any form is blasphemy against the American creed.”
10.18 New York Law Journal: Paul Feinman on Wednesday was sworn in as an associate judge on the state’s highest court, making him the first openly gay member of the Court of Appeals. Feinman, a former appellate justice in Manhattan, was nominated by Gov. Andrew Cuomo in June . . . “Our judiciary was built to help us navigate tumultuous times. When our ship is battered by storms of controversy, when waves of fear and anger and anxiety send us off course. When tides of emotion drives us from paths of reason, the Constitution of New York and the Constitution of the United states are the compasses that steer us forward,” said Cuomo’s top counsel Alphonso David.
10.18 Forbes: “America’s richest are richer than ever” Forbes releases its list of the 400 richest Americans … The minimum net worth hit a record high of $2 billion, up from $1.7 billion in 2015 and 2016 … 169 billionaires who did not make the cut … Average net worth of a Forbes 400 member hit $6.7 billion, also a record high, up from $6 billion last year.
10.17 David von Drehle in the Washington Post: “I don’t think we’ve ever been led by a person with such a low opinion of America. . . .The president insists that football players show respect for the national anthem, yet he has no respect for the good faith of those who served before him. He complains that critics are unfair to him even as he unfairly maligns his predecessors. At 71, Trump is experiencing public service for the very first time. We can but hope that the value of it will eventually dawn on him.”
10.17 Tom Verducci in si.com: “Stop for a moment and appreciate it, the way you might by pulling your car over to the side of the road to dwell on the majesty of a mountain or the expanse of a river. We’ve never seen anything like it. The largest position player to ever play Major League Baseball heaved his 6’ 7”, 282-pound body at the culmination of sprints into a wall and into the turf to make catches of hard-hit line drives. In between, he smashed a high-and-tight 93-mph cutter into the first row in leftfield for a three-run homer. Aaron Judge is, in the manner of the highest complement to athleticism, a freak. The Yankees rightfielder played an astounding game in an 8–1 New York win over Houston in Game 3 of the American League Championship Series. He is a natural wonder.”
10.17 The Dow Jones Industrial Average hit 23,000 for the first time today.
10.16 Michael Gerson in the Washington Post: Do religious right leaders have any clue how foolish they appear? Rather than confidently and persistently representing a set of distinctive beliefs, they pant and beg to be a part of someone else’s movement. In this case, it is a movement that takes advantage of racial and ethnic divisions and dehumanizes Muslims, migrants and refugees. A movement that has cultivated ties to alt-right leaders and flirted with white identity politics. A movement that will eventually soil and discredit all who are associated with it.”
10.17 Trump: “There’s no such thing as Obamacare anymore.”
10.17 Steve Bannon: “McConnell and the GOP Establishment have sown the wind — now be prepared the reap the whirlwind.”
10.17 Trump: “I’m not going to blame myself, I’ll be honest.”
10.17 David Jolley, ex GOP congressman: “We do know that we have a president who very well might put this nation at risk and this Republican Congress has done nothing to check his power,” he added. “Democrats could, and we might be better off as a republic if they take the House in 2018.”
10.16 Trump: “The traditional way, if you look at President Obama and other presidents ― most of them didn’t make calls. A lot of them didn’t make calls. I like to call when it’s appropriate, when I think I’m able to do it,” Trump said. “They have made the ultimate sacrifice, so generally I would say that I like to call. I’m going to be calling them. I want a little time to pass.”
10.16 Washington Post: Scientists detect gravitational waves from a new kind of nova, sparking a new era in astronomy
10.16 Rep. Ro Khanna in the Washington Post: “ This is a defining moment for the valley — a chance to respond to the challenges facing our country. Techies are no longer the iconoclasts or the math whizzes who didn’t quite fit in at homecoming. They are now the largest winners in a 21st-century global economy. Their platforms are used by the vast majority of citizens. The hope is that they will answer the nation’s call to advance the common good, from expanding job opportunity to communities across the country to ensuring that online platforms do not contribute to polarization or misinformation. Tech companies must offer an aspirational vision of how all Americans, regardless of geography, can benefit from a tech-driven economy. This means making investments not just in California, Massachusetts and New York, but also in start-ups and entrepreneurs in cities and rural communities across the nation. It means offering apprenticeships to help build tech capability in the heartland.”
10.16 John McCain: “To fear the world we have organized and led for three-quarters of a century, to abandon the ideals we have advanced around the globe, to refuse the obligations of international leadership and our duty to remain ‘the last best hope of earth’ for the sake of some half-baked, spurious nationalism cooked up by people who would rather find scapegoats than solve problems is as unpatriotic as an attachment to any other tired dogma of the past that Americans consigned to the ash heap of history. We live in a land made of ideals, not blood and soil. We are the custodians of those ideals at home, and their champion abroad. We have done great good in the world. That leadership has had its costs, but we have become incomparably powerful and wealthy as we did. We have a moral obligation to continue in our just cause, and we would bring more than shame on ourselves if we don’t. We will not thrive in a world where our leadership and ideals are absent. We wouldn’t deserve to. I am the luckiest guy on earth. I have served America’s cause – the cause of our security and the security of our friends, the cause of freedom and equal justice – all my adult life. I haven’t always served it well. I haven’t even always appreciated what I was serving. But among the few compensations of old age is the acuity of hindsight. I see now that I was part of something important that drew me along in its wake even when I was diverted by other interests. I was, knowingly or not, along for the ride as America made the future better than the past.”
10.16 Trump on Obamacare: “It’s dead. It’s gone. It’s no longer — you shouldn’t even mention. It’s gone.”
10.14 Blade Runner 2049. Yecch.
10.14 Axios: Jaw-dropper from NBC News, on Paul Manafort‘s “$60 million relationship with a Russian oligarch”: “Manafort’s spokesman, Jason Maloni, … released a statement … saying, in part, ‘Mr. Manafort is not indebted to former clients today, nor was he at the time he began working for the Trump campaign.’ He later revised the statement, removing that sentence entirely.”
10.13 31 dead in California fires
10.13 85 percent of Puerto Rico without power
10.13 Karen Attiah in the Washington Post: “With Pence’s stunt, Trump’s tweets, Jones’s edict and NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell’s statement saying players should stand, the debate about players standing for the national anthem is no longer about the flag. This is not about the anthem. This is not about supporting the troops. This is about putting outspoken black people back in their place in America — subordinate, and silent about the racism, police brutality and white supremacy that affect our lives everyday. This is about controlling what are considered “acceptable” ways for black people to protest. ”
10.12 Trump: “It’s frankly disgusting the way the press is able to write whatever they want to write. And people should look into it.”
10.12 Trump twice threatened to shut down media outlets. After posturing to pull NBC’s broadcast license on Monday, the president sent another tweet saying network news licenses “must be challenged and, if appropriate, revoked.” An NBC report about Trump reportedly wanting a tenfold increase in the country’s nuclear arsenal was what provoked his ire.
10.12 Trump signs executive order to unravel ObamaCare, bypassing Congress
10.11 Eminem wows BET Awards with “The Storm”: “That’s an awfully hot coffee pot Should I drop it on Donald Trump? Probably not But that’s all I got ’til I come up with a solid plot Got a plan, and now I gotta hatch it Like a damn Apache with a tomahawk I’ma walk inside a mosque on Ramadan And say a prayer that every time Melania talks She gets a mop–ahh, I’ma stop But we better give Obama props ‘Cause what we got in office now’s a kamikaze That’ll probably cause a nuclear holocaust And while the drama pops and he waits for shit to quiet down He’ll just gas his plane up and fly around ’til the bombing stops Intensities heightened, tensions are rising Trump, when it comes to giving a shit, you’re stingy as I am Except when it comes to having the balls to go against me, you hide ’em ‘Cause you don’t got the fucking nuts like an empty asylum Racism’s the only thing he’s fantastic for ‘Cause that’s how he gets his fucking rocks off and he’s orange Yeah, sick tan, that’s why he wants us to disband ‘Cause he can not withstand The fact we’re not afraid of Trump Fuck walkin’ on eggshells, I came to stomp That’s why he keeps screamin’, ‘Drain the swamp’ ‘Cause he’s in quicksand It’s like we take a step forwards, then backwards But this is his form of distraction Plus, he gets an enormous reaction When he attacks the NFL so we focus on that Instead of talking Puerto Rico or gun reform for Nevada All these horrible tragedies and he’s bored and would rather Cause a Twitter storm with the Packers Then says he wants to lower our taxes Then who’s gonna pay for his extravagant trips Back and forth with his fam to his golf resorts and his mansions? Same shit that he tormented Hillary for and he slandered Then does it more From his endorsement of Bannon Support from the Klansmen Tiki torches in hand for the soldier that’s black And comes home from Iraq And is still told to go back to Africa Fork and a dagger in this racist 94-year-old grandpa Who keeps ignoring our past historical, deplorable factors Now, if you’re a black athlete You’re a spoiled little brat for tryna use your platform or your stature To try to give those a voice who don’t have one He says, ‘You’re spittin’ in the face of vets who fought for us, you bastards’ Unless you’re a POW who’s tortured and battered ‘Cause to him, you’re zeros ‘Cause he don’t like his war heroes captured That’s not disrespecting the military Fuck that, this is for Colin, ball up a fist And keep that shit balled like Donald the bitch ‘He’s gonna get rid of all immigrants’ ‘He’s gonna build that thing up taller than this’ Well, if he does build it, I hope it’s rock solid with bricks ‘Cause like him in politics, I’m using all of his tricks ‘Cause I’m throwing that piece of shit against the wall ’til it sticks And any fan of mine who’s a supporter of his I’m drawing, in the sand, a line You’re either for or against And if you can’t decide who you like more and you’re split On who you should stand beside I’ll do it for you with this: ‘Fuck you!’ The rest of America stand up We love our military, and we love our country But we fucking hate Trump”
10.11 Robert Kagan in the Washington Post: “Rarely has a political party more deserved the destruction the Republican Party may be about to suffer at the hands of President Trump’s former strategist, ideological guru and onetime puppeteer Steve Bannon. It was obvious during the earliest days of the campaign that Trump never intended to be either the leader or the protector of the Republican Party. He had contempt for the party. For one thing, it was a proven loser. For another, it crumpled like stick figures under his steamroller. Who could respect people who fell so easily, and so willingly? Party leaders were especially contemptible in Trump’s eyes. They couldn’t even see what he was doing to them, or if they did, they were too cowardly to stop him. He had contempt for them when they tried to distance themselves from his racist, sexist and all around antisocial behavior. But he had even more contempt for them when they nevertheless came crawling back to him, again and again, pledging their fealty. He knew they came back not because they approved of him but because they feared him and the political following he commanded. He had stolen the hearts of their constituents, and therefore he owned them. He would use them as needed, and dispose of them when he could, knowing they could do nothing about it. “I saw them at Munich,” Hitler said of his British and French counterparts, whom he dubbed “little worms.”
10.11 Behind stout pitching from Sabathia, Robertson and Chapman, two homers from Gregorius, and Gardner‘s two epic 12 pitch at bats, the Yanks defeat Cleveland 5-2 and win the series. Nxt stop: Houston. Tom Verducci of SI: “The modern game is a brutally simple one. Home runs and power arms have knocked out subtlety, lessened the impact of our hallowed “little things” that for generations we liked to believe made the difference between winning and losing. It’s smashmouth baseball now. And nobody plays it better than the New York Yankees.”
10.10 His net approval (approval minus disapproval) on health care (-24 points), the economy (-10 points), national unity (-13 points) and immigration (-17 points) have dropped precipitously since he was elected. T
10.10 Charlie Cook: Given their current disarray, Republicans will need to fight hard to gain any new [Senate] seats, and losing one or two of their own seats would put their majority in jeopardy. The stakes are even higher in the House where their majority status is in real danger. The party needs to sublimate its divisions, get mainstream Republicans to the polls, and persuade the Trump base to cast ballot for non-Trump Republicans. That’s a tall order.
10.10 Weinstein allegations now include rape
10.10 “I think it’s fake news,” Trump said, “but if [Tillerson] did that, I guess we’ll have to compare IQ tests. And I can tell you who is going to win.”
The Failing @nytimes set Liddle' Bob Corker up by recording his conversation. Was made to sound a fool, and that's what I am dealing with!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 10, 2017
10.9 New York Times: “The Russian campaign … appears to have been tailored to exploit the companies’ own strategies for keeping users engaged. Facebook, for example, pushed people to interact more in Groups like the ones set up by the Russians. The Russians appear to have insinuated themselves across American social media platforms and used the same promotional tools that people employ to share cat videos, airline complaints and personal rants. Boosted by Russian accounts, the material was quickly picked up by other American users of Facebook, spreading the posts to an even bigger audience. The Russian presence appeared to be layered throughout different platforms:
10.9 Steve Selenfriend: i can’t tell you how wonderful and engaging you biography of william b cushing is. i was just amazed by the depth of your research and your writing skill. you made it as if i was reading a novel or a movie script.
10.8 At Trump’s behest, Pence leave Colts-49ers game when players kneel during national anthem. Cost to tapayers tops a million
10.8 Senator Bob Corker: “It’s a shame the White House has become an adult day care center.”
10.8 The Weinstein Company board fired Harvey Weinstein
10.8 Harvey Weinstein: “My board is thinking of firing me. All I’m asking, is let me take a leave of absence and get into heavy therapy and counseling. Whether it be in a facility or somewhere else, allow me to resurrect myself with a second chance. A lot of the allegations are false as you know but given therapy and counseling as other people have done, I think I’d be able to get there.”
10.7 Alexander Ovechkin of the Washington Capitals recorded his second-consecutive hat trick and a total of 7 goals, becoming the first player to score hat tricks in the first two games of the season.
10.6 Princeton professor J. Richard Gott projects that the human race will go extinct: between 5,100 and 7.8 million years from now.
10.6 Trump: “You guys know what this represents? Maybe it’s the calm before the storm.”.
10.5 Amid allegations stretching over three decades, Harvey Weinstein has settled sexual harassment claims with at least eight women.
10.4 NBC: Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was on the verge of resigning this past summer amid mounting policy disputes and clashes with the White House, according to senior administration officials who were aware of the situation at the time. The tensions came to a head around the time President Donald Trump delivered a politicized speech in late July to the Boy Scouts of America, an organization Tillerson once led, the officials said. Just days earlier, Tillerson had openly disparaged the president, referring to him as a “moron,” after a July 20 meeting
10.8 Ginny and I had a lovely if humid weekend in south central Pennsylvania. In more-lively-than-we-remembered Gettysburg, we stayed at the grandish hotel right on Lincoln Square. In Hanover, we saw the home of the best potato chips on earth, and the product of a great Mad Men episode.
10.7 Tanaka twirls a gem, Bird homers, Yanks win 1-0.
10.6 An excruciating Yankee loss. After going up 8-3 against Cleveland’s ace Kluber, New York loses 9-8 in extra innings. Key moment: a hit-batter that loads the bases is revealed on replay to be a foul tip that would have ended the inning. But Girardi doesn’t call for a review. Lindor then hits a grand slam, turning the whole game around.
10.6 Times publishes expose revealing Harvey Weinstein as a serial harrasser who has engaged in at least eight settlements. Weinstein apologizes, claims to be making amends, announces that he will sue the Times anyway. “It’s gross, yeah,” says a lawyer.
10.5 “Do you know what this represents?” President Donald Trump asks photographers taking a group portait. “Could be the calm before the storm.” When asked to elaborate, he said: “You’ll find out.”
10.5 English author Kazuo Ishiguro wins the 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature.
10.5 Vanity Fair: Haberman’s signature is her preternatural ability to get lots of people telling her lots of things they probably shouldn’t be telling her. She’s regarded as the best-sourced reporter in Washington, the irony being that she only spends part of her time there, working largely out of her home turf in New York. She’s able not only to get inside the room with Trump, but to seemingly get inside his brain—to translate for the masses what he and the people around him at any given moment are thinking about the crisis or controversy du jour. That skill has made her incredibly valuable at a time when juicy, granular, inside-the-room dish has gained massive journalistic currency—Trump watching cable news in his bathrobe, Trump in a foul mood for this reason or that, and so on. “The larger story,” one of Haberman’s colleagues told me, “is the increasingly tabloid-y evolution of the mainstream political press. These stories are fun to read, they’re very of-the-moment, they’re made for Twitter. So I think Maggie’s success is very much part of that tabloid, Twitter-fied sensibility bleeding into the Times, entering the Times’s metabolism.”
10.5 EJ Dionne: “The United States is now a non-majoritarian democracy. If that sounds like a contradiction in terms, that’s because it is. Claims that our republic is democratic are undermined by a system that vastly overrepresents the interests of rural areas and small states. This leaves the large share of Americans in metropolitan areas with limited influence over national policy. Nowhere is the imbalance more dramatic or destructive than on the issue of gun control.”
10.4 Washington Post: Former ambassador Eric S. Edelman concurs. “The press appearance was the most humiliating, degrading performance by a secretary of state that I have seen in my lifetime. He was clearly ordered by the White House to go out and lavish slavish praise on the president.” He points out that “Trump’s comment that Tillerson has refuted the story and NBC owes an apology is evidence” that Tillerson was ordered by the White House to go out there. Edelman adds, “His statement was actually the quintessence of the non-denial denial.”
10.4 NBC: Tillerson reportedly called Trump a “moron” after a July 20 meeting at the Pentagon with members of Trump’s national security team and Cabinet officials, according to three officials familiar with the incident.
10.4 Washington Post: New York gets 56 cents back for every dollar and California gets 64 cents. But states such as North Dakota, South Carolina, Alabama, Kentucky, West Virginia and Indiana get more than two dollars back in federal spending for every dollar in taxes. (There are some outliers: New Mexico, which votes for Democrats, gets nearly $2.50 back for every dollar, while Nebraska and Ohio, both Republican, get back only about a half-dollar.)
10.4 Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal: “There is a sense that society is collapsing — the culture is collapsing. We’re collapsing in crime. The world is collapsing. Crazy people with bad haircuts have nukes. Everything is going bad — terrorism, etc. They want to be fully armed on their hill, at home. … They’re Americans, and they want to go down fighting.”
10.4 Joe Scarborough: “A lot of things brought us Trump. Maybe this is the net result of people … over the past 15 to 17 years … seeing one failure after the other: 1999, impeachment; 2000, the recount, where we can’t even elect a president the right way; 2001, 9/11; … 2002, WMDs; 2003, Iraq; 2005, Katrina; 2006, the meltdown in Iraq; 2008, the meltdown of the stock market. . . .Where confidence in this government has been shattered, … perhaps that’s what leads to the paranoia that you’re talking about. ‘They’re not going to protect me. … They’re not going to defend me. I’ve got to defend myself and my family.'”
10.3 Sen. John Thune on the prevalence of gun violence: “I think people are going to have to take steps in their own lives to take precautions to protect themselves. And in situations like that, you know, try to stay safe. As somebody said — get small.”
10.3 Yankees bet Twins 8-4 in the American League wild card game, New York’s first post-season win in five years. Sports Illustrated: “Before the game the Twins spoke in hypotheticals—“hopefully,” they said over and over. They talked about enjoying the experience and how proud they were to have come this far. “We’ll see what happens,” second baseman Brian Dozier said 30 hours before first pitch. The Yankees were considerably less impressed. “I do plan on winning the game,” Gardner said. And in the end, that was the difference. The Twins wanted to win on Tuesday. The Yankees expected to.”
10.3 Trump in Puerto Rico yesterday: “Every death is a horror, but if you look at a real catastrophe, like Katrina, and you look at the tremendous, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people that died, and you look at what happened here with really a storm that was just totally overpowering, nobody’s sever seen anything like this. … You can be very proud.” The death toll in Puerto Rico is 36; Florida 26; Houston 50; Katrina, 1833
10.2 Spoke at the Robert E. Lee Civil War Round Table in Woodbridge NJ. An alert, book-buying crowd!
10.2 Jimmy Kimmel: “The Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, the Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, a number of other lawmakers who won’t do anything about this because the NRA has their balls in a money clip also sent their thoughts and their prayers today which is good,” Kimmel said. “They should be praying. They should be praying for God to forgive them for letting the gun lobby run this country because it is — it is so crazy.”
10.2 Tom Petty dies at 66. Bob Dylan: “It’s shocking, crushing news. I thought the world of Tom. He was great performer, full of the light, a friend, and I’ll never forget him.”
10.1 59 killed, more than 500 injured in mass shooting in Las Vegas
10.1 Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook: “Tonight concludes Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year for Jews when we reflect on the past year and ask forgiveness for our mistakes. For those I hurt this year, I ask forgiveness and I will try to be better. For the ways my work was used to divide people rather than bring us together, I ask forgiveness and I will work to do better. May we all be better in the year ahead, and may you all be inscribed in the book of life.”