10.31 Trump: “Paul Ryan should be focusing on holding the Majority rather than giving his opinions on Birthright Citizenship, something he knows nothing about! Our new Republican Majority will work on this, Closing the Immigration Loopholes and Securing our Border!”
10.30 Paul Ryan: “You cannot end birthright citizenship with an executive order.”
10.30 Whitey Bulger, 89, is murdered in a federal prison in West Virginia
10.30 Kanye West: “My eyes are now wide open and now realize I’ve been used to spread messages I don’t believe in. ”
10.30 Richard Cohen in the Post: “In the United States, the cliche of rootless amoral Jews has been replaced by a media with the same odious characteristics. Jews have long been associated with journalism — in 19th century Vienna, the word “journalist” was analogous with Jew — and in 1941, Charles Lindbergh, a steadfast isolationist, made matters clear in a speech in Des Moines . What he called “war agitators” consisted of three groups: “the British, the Jewish and the Roosevelt administration.” These “agitators,” he added, are “only a small minority of our people; but they control a tremendous influence. Against the determination of the American people to stay out of war, they have marshaled the power of their propaganda, their money, their patronage.” Only crackpots talk that way today. But the fundamentals remain. In Trump talk, the media remains the enemy of the American people. It lies. It lies because it is evil. It lies because it is un-American. Trump relies on the predicate for this belief, which was established years ago when the three television networks and some major newspapers were controlled by Jews — and if Trump does not know this, anti-Semites sure do. Jews no longer control, but stereotypical “Jewishness” endures.”
10.30 Philip Bump in the Washington Post: “With the attack in Pittsburgh, there have been more people killed in the United States during Trump’s presidency in violent acts perpetrated by people embracing anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic or far-right political ideologies than by terrorists acting on behalf of groups like the Islamic State.”
10.29 Shepherd Smith on Fox News: “Tomorrow the migrants, according to Fox News reporting, are more than two months away, if any of them actually come here. But tomorrow is one week before the midterm election, which is what all of this is about, There is no invasion. No one’s coming to get you. There’s nothing at all to worry about.”
10.29 Trump to Laura Ingraham: I’m proud of this country and I call that “nationalism”; I call it being a nationalist’’
There is great anger in our Country caused in part by inaccurate, and even fraudulent, reporting of the news. The Fake News Media, the true Enemy of the People, must stop the open & obvious hostility & report the news accurately & fairly. That will do much to put out the flame…
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 29, 2018
….of Anger and Outrage and we will then be able to bring all sides together in Peace and Harmony. Fake News Must End!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 29, 2018
10.29 Venice, Italy, was hit with a high tide on Monday, leaving some 70 percent of the city covered in five feet of water,
10.28 The Red Sox defeat the Dodgers, 4 games to 1, to win their fourth World Series this century. With a home run and 3 RBIs in each of the last two games, journeyman first baseman Steve Pearce wins the MVP. Only two other players in World Series history have homered and driven in three runs in the final two games of a series: Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig.
10.27 Behind 4-0 in the seventh, the Red Sox rally to win.
10.27 An anti-Semitic gunman, saying “All Jews must die,” murders 11 worshipers at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh.
10.26 The New York Times: “The people who are closest to a thing are often the most wary of it. Technologists know how phones really work, and many have decided they don’t want their own children anywhere near them. . . .A wariness that has been slowly brewing is turning into a regionwide consensus: The benefits of screens as a learning tool are overblown, and the risks for addiction and stunting development seem high. . . .The debate in Silicon Valley now is about how much exposure to phones is O.K.”
10.26 The Dodgers win game 3 in 18 innings. The game lasted 7 hours, 20 minutes, ending at 12:36 a.m. PT.
10.26 Trump: “I think I’ve been toned down, if you want to know the truth. I could really tone it up.”
10.26 Rush Limbaugh: “Two weeks out, a bunch of bombs start showing up in places that the media can then say that they are being received by ‘Trump targets?’ I’m sorry. I didn’t fall off the turnip truck ever, and certainly not yesterday, and the world of October Surprises coupled with all the other realities I just exposed, and I think it only makes sense to be suspicious and demanding of proof for whatever we’re gonna be told.”
10.26 Authorities arrested a pizza delivery man named Cesar Sayoc, alleging in a criminal complaint that he was responsible for sending at least 13 potential explosive devices to prominent Democratic and media figures across the country in recent days — including Obama, Clinton, Soros, former attorney general Eric H. Holder Jr. and Rep. Maxine Waters
10.25 Newt Gingrich:“If Democrats subpoena Trump’s tax returns during the next Congress, Trump will be trapped into appealing to the Supreme Court. And we’ll see whether or not the Kavanaugh fight was worth it.”
10.25 A white man with a history of violence shot and killed two African-Americans at a Kentucky Kroger store following a failed attempt to barge into a black church. As he surrendered, he asked not be harmed by the arresting officer, saying “Whites don’t kill whites.”
10.25 Joe Biden in Kentucky: “The example we’re showing the rest of the world is sad. Our values are being shredded. Our democracy’s under assault. A president has put his own interest before our ideals. The question is not who Donald Trump is. America knows who he is. The question is, ‘Who are we?’ ”
10.24 Stress test
10.19 Afar: Just a few months after Vilnius, Lithuania, unveiled its cheeky new tourism slogan—“Vilnius: The G-Spot of Europe”—Nebraska has followed up with an even funnier tagline. .. . Its new slogan is “Honestly, It’s Not For Everyone”
10.18 The Atlantic: Lee Atwater‘s deathbed confession holds that he engineered the Gary Hart scandal. “What he wanted to say, according to Strother, was that the episode that had triggered Hart’s withdrawal from the race, which became known as the Monkey Business affair, had been not bad luck but a trap. The sequence of events was confusing at the time and is widely misremembered now. But in brief: In late March 1987, Hart spent a weekend on a Miami-based yacht called Monkey Business. Two young women joined the boat when it sailed to Bimini. While the boat was docked there, one of the women took a picture of Hart sitting on the pier, with the other, Donna Rice, in his lap. A month after this trip, in early May, the man who had originally invited Hart onto the boat brought the same two women to Washington. The Miami Herald had received a tip about the upcoming visit and was staking out the front of Hart’s house. (A famous profile of Hart by E. J. Dionne in The New York Times Magazine, in which Hart invited the press to “follow me around,” came out after this stakeout—not before, contrary to common belief.) A Herald reporter saw Rice and Hart going into the house through the front door and, not realizing that there was a back door, assumed — when he didn’t see her again — that she had spent the night. Amid the resulting flap about Hart’s “character” and honesty, he quickly suspended his campaign (within a week), which effectively ended it. Several weeks later came the part of the episode now best remembered: the photo of Hart and Rice together in Bimini, on the cover of the National Enquirer.
10.18 Vance Serchuk, adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security: “What we are seeing is a sort of Putinization of world order.”
10.18 John Mulholland in The Guardian: “To celebrate an attack on a journalist who was simply doing his job is an attack on the First Amendment by someone who has taken an oath to defend it. In the aftermath of the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, it runs the risk of inviting other assaults on journalists both here and across the world where they often face far greater threats. We hope decent people will denounce these comments and that the president will see fit to apologize for them.”
10.18 Trump in Montana, praising Congressman Greg Gianforte, who last years physically attacked a journalist. “Any guy who can do a body-slam, he’s my guy.”
10.18 Trump in Montana: “This will be an election of Kavanaugh, the caravan, law and order, and common sense.”
10.17 Max Boot in the Post: If the Saudis carried out this grisly crime with high-level authorization, as the evidence would indicate, they did so at least in part because they anticipated that the American president wouldn’t care about the disappearance of another “enemy of the people.” Other dictatorships are equally emboldened by America’s abdication of authority. This is a good time to be a dictator — and a dangerous time to be a dissident. Trump has given every despot on the planet a license to kill without worrying about the U.S. reaction. Because, in all likelihood, there will be none.
10.17 The Original Big Bird, Caroll Spinney, leaves ‘Sesame Street’ After Nearly 50 Years. He was also Oscar the Grouch
10.17 Nancy Pelosi: “None of us is indispensable. You can’t let the opposite party choose the leader of your party. And I say this especially to women, because they think women are going to run away from the fight. But you can’t do that. You believe in what you have to offer.”
We take Putin’s word he didn’t interfere in 2016 election, Kim’s he will denuclearize, and MBS that he had no role in Khashoggi murder. If Reagan was trust but verify, @realDonaldTrump is trust and look away. Sad to be sure, but also dangerous.
— Richard N. Haass (@RichardHaass) October 17, 2018
10.17 Trump: “I think we have to find out what happened first. Here we go again with, you know, you’re guilty until proven innocent. I don’t like that. We just went through that with Justice Kavanaugh. And he was innocent all the way.”
10.16 Washington Post: Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on Tuesday called the ballooning budget deficit “very disturbing” but said large federal spending programs were to blame, dismissing criticism that last year’s GOP tax cuts are saddling the country with more debt.
10.17 The Original Big Bird, Caroll Spinney, leaves ‘Sesame Street’ After Nearly 50 Years. He was also Oscar the Grouch
10.17 Nancy Pelosi: “None of us is indispensable. You can’t let the opposite party choose the leader of your party. And I say this especially to women, because they think women are going to run away from the fight. But you can’t do that. You believe in what you have to offer.”
10.17 Trump: “I think we have to find out what happened first. Here we go again with, you know, you’re guilty until proven innocent. I don’t like that. We just went through that with Justice Kavanaugh. And he was innocent all the way.”
10.16 Washington Post: Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on Tuesday called the ballooning budget deficit “very disturbing” but said large federal spending programs were to blame, dismissing criticism that last year’s GOP tax cuts are saddling the country with more debt.
10.16 Trump called Stormy Daniels “Horseface.”
10.16 David Brooks in the Times: “(More in Common’s report)“Hidden Tribes,” breaks Americans into seven groups, from left to right, with names like Traditional Liberals, Moderates, Politically Disengaged and so on. It won’t surprise you to learn that the most active groups are on the extremes — Progressive Activists on the left (8 percent of Americans) and Devoted Conservatives on the right (6 percent). These two groups are the richest of all the groups. They are the whitest of the groups. Their members have among the highest education levels, and they report high levels of personal security. We sometimes think of this as a populist moment. But that’s not true. My first big takeaway from “Hidden Tribes” is that our political conflict is primarily a rich, white civil war. It’s between privileged progressives and privileged conservatives. You could say that tribalism is the fruit of privilege. People with more stresses in their lives necessarily pay less attention to politics. People with college degrees are more likely to describe their ideology as central to their identity. They are much more likely to derive moral meaning from their label, more likely to affiliate with a herd based on their label and more likely to vote on the party line. My second big takeaway from the report is that ideas really do drive history. Progressive Activists and Devoted Conservatives organize around coherent philosophical narratives. These narratives aren’t visions of a just society. They are narratives of menace — about who needs to be exorcised from society. Devoted Conservatives subscribe to a Hobbesian narrative. It’s a dangerous world. Life is nasty, brutish and short. We need strict values and strong authority to keep us safe. Trump Administration Discussed Coup Plans With Rebel Venezuelan Officers
Ninety percent of Devoted Conservatives think immigration is bad, while 99 percent of Progressive Activists think it is good. Seventy-six percent of Devoted Conservatives think Islam is more violent than other religions; only 3 percent of Progressive Activists agree. Eighty-six percent of Devoted Conservatives think it’s more important for children to be well behaved than creative. Only 13 percent of Progressive Activists agree. Progressive Activists, on the other hand, subscribe to a darkened Rousseauian worldview. People may be inherently good, but the hierarchical structures of society are awful. The structures of inequality and oppression have to be dismantled.
10.15 Sears files for bankruptcy
10.15 A DNA analysis reveals that Elizabeth Warren‘s great-great-great-grandmother was Native American, that puts her between 1/32nd and 1/512th American Indian.
10.15 New York Times: “Homelessness in New York Public Schools Is at a Record High: 114,659 Students” out of 1.1. million. “Tonight, about one out of every 10 students in New York City will sleep in a homeless shelter or in the homes of relatives.”
10.15 Trump, on the investigation into the disappearance of Jamal Khashoggi: “I just spoke with the King of Saudi Arabia, and he denies any knowledge of what took place with regards to, as he said, to Saudi Arabia’s citizen. He firmly denies that. We are going to leave nothing uncovered. With that being said, the king firmly denies any knowledge of it. He didn’t really know, maybe, I don’t want to get into his mind, but it sounded to me like maybe it could have been rogue killers, who knows? We’re going to try get to the bottom of it very soon, but his was a flat denial.”
10.15 Sen. Durbin, on Trump‘s comment on “60 Minutes” in which he said that he believes Russian President Vladimir Putin has “probably” been involved in assassinations and poisonings but that those incidents were “not in our country.” “That can’t be the standard. For goodness’ sake, when the Russians are killing off former spies in England, when we have this apparent complicity of the Saudis in the killing of one of their critics, we’ve got to take this seriously wherever it happens. If these are countries that say they are allied with us in values, we have to make it clear they are not.”
10.16 Trump called Stormy Daniels “Horseface.”
10.15 New York Times: “Homelessness in New York Public Schools Is at a Record High: 114,659 Students” out of 1.1. million. “Tonight, about one out of every 10 students in New York City will sleep in a homeless shelter or in the homes of relatives.”
10.15 Sears files for bankruptcy
10.15 A DNA analysis reveals that Elizabeth Warren‘s great-great-great-grandmother was Native American, that puts her between 1/32nd and 1/512th American Indian.
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.