10.31 Gov. Cuomo, after Trump announces that he is changing his residence from New York to Florida: “Good riddance.”
10.30 In a gem of a game, The Washington Nationals beat the Houston Astros 6-2, winning their series 4 games to 3. Every game in the series was won by the home team. During the playoffs, the Nationals won five elimination games. In the last three elimination games, Nationals third baseman Anthony Rendon came to bat seven times in the seventh inning or later, producing a walk, three doubles and three home runs.
10.29 Eric Wemple in the Post: The Trump era has stretched the capacity of TV news anchors for euphemism. There’s so much cowardice, stupidity and mendacity flowing each day in the public discourse that, at some point, the broadcaster must toss all pretense of family-friendly newspeak. MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace reached that threshold on Tuesday afternoon. The afternoon host abridged the situation surrounding Lt. Col. Alexander S. Vindman, who had been testifying in the House about what he witnessed as the top Ukraine hand for the National Security Council. According to his opening statement, Vindman was concerned enough about President Trump’s pressuring Ukraine to investigate a potential political opponent — former vice president Joe Biden — that he sent his thoughts up the NSC’s org chart. Though Vindman is a lieutenant colonel in the Army who was wounded while on duty in Iraq, Trump and his backers have seen fit to undercut him. Wallace went off: “His biography and his life of service make the attacks against him remarkable. At a time when attacks on once-sacred institutions and their leaders have stopped being noteworthy or newsworthy, Trump went from not knowing him to calling him a Never Trumper in the course of an hour and a half this morning,” show. That’s “nothing,” argued Wallace, when compared to the “smear campaign happening on cable news.” Here, MSNBC ran tape of three segments — two on Fox News, including one by “Fox & Friends” co-host Brian Kilmeade and another by host Laura Ingraham and guest John Yoo; and one on CNN featuring CNN contributor and former congressman Sean P. Duffy. After showing Yoo saying “some people might call that espionage” in describing Vindman’s testimony, Wallace said, “Except those people aren’t chickenshit like the three of you, and they know that he passed a background check that the president’s daughter and son-in-law didn’t.”
10.28 Axios: 50% of millennials and 51% of Generation Z have a somewhat or very unfavorable view of capitalism, according to a new YouGov/Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation survey of more than 2,000 Americans 16 years and older. Nearly half of Gen Z and millennial respondents said they felt the U.S. economy worked against them — more than other generations. They’ve grown up in a capitalist country where economic inequality has continued to climb.
10.28 Peter Baker in the Times: In his first appearance at a Major League Baseball game since taking office, Mr. Trump was not invited to throw the first pitch when he showed up Sunday night at Game 5 between the Washington Nationals and the Houston Astros. Instead, when he was shown on the stadium’s large screen, the crowd booed robustly and began chanting, “Lock him up!” In the upper decks, fans held up a giant “Impeach Trump!” banner.
10.25 Rachel Maddow: “The allegations about the behavior of Harvey Weinstein and Matt Lauer are gut-wrenching. But accusations that people in positions of authority in this building may have been complicit in some way in shielding those guys from accountability — those accusations are very, very hard to stomach.”
10.27 White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham: “I worked with John Kelly, and he was totally unequipped to handle the genius of our great President.”
10.26 Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the head of ISIS, kills himself and three of his children with a suicide while pursued by US forces in Syria
10.26 Steve Schmidt in New York: “When you look at the structure of the argument that Admiral Bill McRaven advanced about Trump, where he talked about the American republic is under attack from within, that’s not a statement of paranoia, that’s a statement based on the facts of Trump’s degrading the institutions and systems that have been built up over 200-plus years — but he talked about the values and the importance of the systems and framed the danger that Trump presents in an argument that thus far we have not heard from the Democratic contenders, save occasionally from Biden.”
10.26 Steve Schmidt in New York: “People are left to affiliate with the side that they think will protect them from the side they worry will help them the most. Voting in America for a substantial part of the population is no longer about affirming a belief in the future, it’s an act of aggression. It’s an action taken to choose someone to punish their enemies. And that more than anything is how Trump has redefined American politics. Not even the pretense of unity.”
10.26 Steve Schmidt in New York: “Democrats are going to have to offset this with a truth-based, fact-based, reality-based approach which focuses on the oath, which focuses on this system. Members of Congress take an oath to defend the Constitution of the United States against enemies, foreign and domestic. So there’s this really important debate taking place right now between not just two parties, but between reality and alternate reality. We used to have strong partisan differences in the country, but not two realities. The force of Trump’s lying has ruptured the space-time continuum. We now exist in binary universes.”
10.26 Steve Schmidt in New York: “[Trump] has completely remade the American presidency through his debasements of its traditions. He has pitted the country against each other in a cold civil war and he is the first president purposefully who, with each and every utterance, he seeks to incite and divide as opposed to unifying around core principles. He is attacking and degrading our institutions and the concepts of the rule of law that are necessary for the maintenance of the constitutional republic from within. He is utterly infidelitous to his oath to preserve, protect, and strengthen the Constitution of the United States. That makes him, not a clown and a joke, but a dangerous and profoundly consequential figure. I caveat “consequential” by saying it’s not a celebratory statement — it’s one of alarm.”
10.26 Media Strategist Elizabeth Spiers in the Washington Post: “In my day job, we create messaging for political candidates and conduct polls. Over and over, messages about Trump’s corruption land with a thud. The reality is that voters have a hard time buying the idea that such misconduct affects them in any way at all. They might think it’s unfair, but they also overwhelmingly think everything that happens in Washington is corrupt, and that all elites in politics and business are corrupted on some level. They view Trump as a data point on a continuum of corruption, not as an outlier.”
10.25 Paul Waldman in the Post: The central question is whether they want someone offering a reassuring incrementalism they hope will be less threatening to Republicans but might not inspire adoration among their own base, or someone offering a more ambitious agenda of change that will excite their voters but might not appeal as much to those who don’t already like them.10.23 Dan Balz in the Post: “It is no longer a question of whether this happened. It is now a question of how the president explains it and how lawmakers — especially Republicans — choose to respond to it. Taylor’s prepared testimony documents with precision and clarity what he heard, saw, wrote and was asked to respond to over a period of weeks. In his telling, the squeeze on Ukraine, and Trump’s role in it, goes well beyond a single phone call July 25 between the U.S. president and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Trump’s long-standing characterization that there was no quid pro quo runs smack into evidence to the contrary.”
10.24 John Boehner: “There is no Republican Party. There’s a Trump party. The Republican Party is kind of taking a nap somewhere.”
10.24 Joe Walsh on CNN: “Good god. Look how Trump corrodes. That kind of silliness…is what you do when you cannot defend a president who’s betrayed this country. You pull stunts like this. It’s going to get worse. …Trump’s going to get worse. He called me and Republicans who oppose him ‘human scum’…Not only is Trump a child and a coward and a traitor. He’s a monster. He doesn’t care about anything but Trump.i wish my fellow Republicans got this. …once they realize, this president will tear down and destroy the Republican party. Tear down and destroy congress, the executive branch and democracy because he only cares about himself. . so when Republican voters keep moving away from the President, i think you’ll see more Mitt Romneys.They can’t defend what the president did. The president betrayed this country, colluded with another foreign government to interfere in our elections. Brooke, they don’t want to go near there or touch that so they go after the process. Think about this. In another couple weeks these hearings will be open. So now they’re condemning the closed-door hearings. Are they going to condemn the open-door hearings in another couple weeks? They have nothing to stand on right now.He’s a horrible human being. And we’ve talked about Nixon and Clinton and some of the other presidents who at least when they were caught doing something wrong or bad they exhibited some human shame. We’ve got a guy in the White Housewho is incapable of shame, and that’s why, again, a warning to my fellow Republicans, this is going to get uglier and worse.It’s human scum today. Republicans, he’s going to turn on you. He’ll turn on you, he’ll turn on anybody to save his skin. I hope Republicans wake up to that.”
10.23 Dana Milbank in the Post: In an instant, the impeachment inquiry no longer rested on the credibility or motives of a whistleblower, nor arguments about the meaning of quid pro quo. Here, spelling out Trump’s wrongdoing in extensive detail, was the diplomat Trump’s team brought out of retirement to be the ambassador to Ukraine — replacing the woman Trump ousted from that position at the request of Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani. Taylor, an Army veteran and a respected diplomat who obviously kept detailed notes, will not be easy to discredit. Trump, more than anybody, must have known how damaging Taylor’s testimony would be. Ninety minutes before Taylor was slated to arrive, Trump created a diversion. He tweeted to his 66 million followers: “All Republicans must remember what they are witnessing here — a lynching.”
10.22 Ambassador William Taylor, to Congress: “In August and September of this year, I became increasingly concerned that our relationship with Ukraine was being fundamentally undermined by an irregular informal channel of U.S. policy-making and by the withholding of vital security assistance for domestic political reasons.”
10.22 Bradford William Davis in the Daily News: last offseason, the Yankees chose not to match Patrick Corbin’s offer from Washington. GM Brian Cashman would later say in the hours after a trade deadline where the Yankees again failed to add a frontline rotation arm, told reporters if the team concentrated money at Corbin, they would not have Ottavino as well as DJ LeMahieu. The press conference ended before any natural follow-ups about whether the richest team in baseball submitted themselves to their own false choice, driven more by luxury tax concerns than winning. The Yankees continue to choose surplus value over being the last team standing. Their payroll is efficient; the team insufficient. Their failure to supplement their core of exceptional position players — impressive, talented, young, but older with every wasted postseason — cost them another opportunity to cross the finish line. There was a time when winning was the most important thing, right after breathing. If they’re serious about returning to their glory days, they should remember what got them there.
10.21 Facebook took down a network of Russian-backed accounts that were posing as American voters in swing states. The social media company said the operation appeared well-resourced, reflected a sophisticated understanding of the culture wars that divide Americans, and bore all the hallmarks of the Internet Research Agency, the Kremlin-backed troll farm that interfered in the 2016 presidential election. Fifty fake accounts were removed from Instagram, the photo-sharing app owned by Facebook. Only one of the accounts that was taken down was a traditional Facebook page. This reflects how America’s adversaries continue to be aggressive and entrepreneurial, evolving to maximize their impact.
10.20 Nick Tosches dies at 69
10.19 Astros eliminate Yanks, 4 games to 2
10.17 General James Mattis at the Al Smith Dinner: “I earned my spurs on the battlefield. Donald Trump earned his spurs in a letter from a doctor. . . . I’m not just an overrated general. I am the greatest, the world’s most overrated. I’m honored to be considered that by Donald Trump because he also called Meryl Streep an overrated actress. So I guess I’m the Meryl Streep of generals. And, frankly, that sounds pretty good to me.”
10.17 Admiral William McRaven in the Times: “We are not the most powerful nation in the world because of our aircraft carriers, our economy, or our seat at the United Nations Security Council. We are the most powerful nation in the world because we try to be the good guys. … But, if we don’t care about our values, if we don’t care about duty and honor, if we don’t help the weak and stand up against oppression and injustice — what will happen to the Kurds, the Iraqis, the Afghans, the Syrians, the Rohingyas, the South Sudanese and the millions of people under the boot of tyranny or left abandoned by their failing states?”
