Monthly Archives: November 2018

Arabesque:

1. Fine Arts . a sinuous, spiraling, undulating, or serpentine line or linear motif.
2. a pose in ballet in which the dancer stands on one leg with one arm extended in front and the other leg and arm extended behind.
3. a short, fanciful musical piece, typically for piano. [Dictionary.com]

Noted in “Whitaker is Unfit to be Attorney General, Acting or Otherwise,” Bruce Fein, The American Conservative:

Mr. Whitaker decries Marbury as one of the Court’s many “bad rulings.” At the same time, the Acting Attorney General berates the Court for neglecting to employ its power of judicial review (which he believes it should not enjoy) to nullify New Deal legislation expanding the power of the federal government, including Obamacare. His intellectual arabesque recalls F. Scott Fitzgerald’s memorable quote from The Crack-Up: “The test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”

Perhaps Mr. Fein is a trifle fanciful in his metaphors.

With regards to the Khashoggi tragedy, between an undoubtedly intransigent MBS (the Crown Prince) and the eternal amateur President Trump, I would not in the least be surprised if this scandal was still dragging on in two years, despite the outrage of the Turks and the best efforts of Secretary of State Pompeo, who, by many reports, is better than former Secretary Tillerson.

And how would that play into the 2020 elections?

If you heard something about a blogger trashing 29 year old Representative-elect Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) for her clothing, Greg Fallis has an explanation for you:

Remember, ‘it’ is the misleading bullshit conservatives throw in front of us to distract us. It’s NOT about her clothes. When we respond to bullshit by discussing the clothing options of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, we are falling for the misleading bullshit. It’s sabotage. It’s creating a narrative designed to undermine Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. It’s suggesting she is a fraud, that she’s not who she says she is, that she doesn’t belong in a position of power, that she can’t be trusted. That she’s phony. I’m going to say it again; it’s NOT about her clothes. We do her a disservice when we let folks like Eddie Scarry distract us by talking about her clothes.

Repeat his attack — and similar attacks — for a decade and some of that narrative will infiltrate the public consciousness. After a few years, people will begin to distrust AOC without quite knowing why; they’ll begin to dislike her without knowing quite why. This is exactly what conservatives did to Hillary Clinton. It’s what they’ve done to Nancy Pelosi. It’s what they’ve consistently done to all effective Democratic women leaders.

They’ve started on AOC even before she’s been sworn in. Why? Because she scares the absolute shit out of them. She’s young. She’s young AND she’s conventionally attractive. She’s a young, attractive woman AND she’s of Puerto Rican descent. She’s a young, attractive, working class Latinx AND with less than US$200,000 in campaign funds, she won a primary against a long-term Democrat with campaign funds of nearly $3.5 million and who was the Chair of the Democratic Caucus of the House of Representatives. She did it through hard work combined with intelligence and passion. And that scares them.

Right now, we can think of Ocasio-Cortez as a faux-pinpoint of light. Faux, because we really know little about her, but because she’s a fresh face that has had little time to indulge in subterfuge, we think we have some understanding of her.

We don’t. But this is not a condemnation, nor even a warning. This observation applies to most novice legislators.

The goal, if we take Fallis seriously, is to smear that pinpoint so that it’s seems harder and harder to get a read on Ocasio-Cortez. She may be full of ideas and ideals and energy, but, hey, her dress, and ya know she is just a girl.

This is the time, if a citizen hasn’t already done so, to formulate standards on which to judge legislators. Too often – which I can say because I often belong in this group – we simply vaguely watch and, at some point, our gut comes back with an answer, with little regard as to the integrity of the inputs, as to whether or not we like someone.

I think it’d be wise to come up with important categories, ranging from ideology to leadership qualities to ethics, and then be ready to pursue measurements for each category and each legislator we’re interested in. If, in the end, your gut doesn’t agree with your brain, then it’s time to sit down and figure out what you’ve missed in your rational approach, or which news source is feeding you bad information for your gut to process.

For those of us in a less than welcoming mood, this news from NewScientist (3 November 2018, paywall) has to be a trifle disturbing:

What’s in your suitcase? If you open the suitcase and show me what is inside, will it confirm that your answers were true?

These are just two of the questions that an automated lie-detection system will ask travellers during a six-month pilot starting this month at four border crossing points in Hungary, Latvia and Greece with countries outside the European Union. It will be coordinated by the Hungarian National Police.

The lie detector uses artificial intelligence and is part of a new tool called iBorderCtrl, developed by a Europe-wide consortium.

The pilot will involve actual travellers, who will be invited to use the system after they have passed through border control. It won’t affect their ability to travel. But the plan is that the system will eventually be able to grant people permission to cross a border by automatically assessing a range of information, including official documents, biometric data and social media activity – as well as the truthfulness of responses to security questions.

The cutesy name is just a false attempt to obscure the fact that a key part of theory of mind is under development in this project, and theory of mind is one of the key parts of being human (although it’s not unique to humans, and I have my doubts as to whether there’s any biological feature of humanity that can be considered unique, beyond the definitional genomic configuration).

This is, of course, a very small part of it, the recognition of tangible signs of deceit, and has a long ways to go. But it does trouble me. First, I’m not sure I want government authorities using a machine to guess whether or not I’m lying.

And if the machine achieves true sentience, it’ll certainly know that deceit is part of existence.

Paul Rosenzweig on Lawfare is in agony over the breakage of integrity in the national security apparatus:

And it really, really is a problem that they have succeeded. In normal times—by which I mean the entire course of the American Republic, and certainly the time from 1945 until just a couple of years ago—the CIA’s conclusions about bin Salman would have been some of the most highly classified secrets within the American government, subject to dissemenation to a small, select group of individuals. The reasons for this secrecy are, classically, two-fold: First, disclosure of what we know deprives the country’s leaders of freedom of action, to act with knowledge that U.S. adversaries don’t know we have and to select courses of action that maximize America’s benefit. Second, disclosure of what the government knows will often “burn” sources and methods so that the inquiry is of the “one and done” variety. When U.S. opponents know what America knows, they often learn how America knows it—and change their behavior accordingly.

And so it is beyond belief that some in the CIA (or elsewhere in the classified community) feel the necessity to disclose this Top Secret information publicly through the Post. I understand their motivation—the aberrance of Donald Trump is so great that they have no faith in his ability or willingness to process intelligence analysis faithfully. I share their concern—in spades.  But violating norms of behavior and the criminal law is not the way to ameliorate the problem.

One must wonder, though, if the leakers assessed the damage potential of making such a release and came to the conclusion that the Saudis would truly learn little, if anything, from it. Security professionals are not idiots, and are often intensely patriotic, outside of a few well-known exceptions. That patriotism may be the driving force in these leaks, once the incompetence and venality of Trump had become apparent.

But it’s a minefield in which they’re dancing, there’s no doubt about that.

Praxis:

1. practice, as distinguished from theory, of an art, science, etc.
2. established practice; custom
3. Rare
   a set of examples or exercises, as in grammar [Collins Dictionary]

Noted in “Games researcher retracts one paper, corrects three others, for plagiarism,” Retraction Watch:

A researcher, formerly of Bath Spa University in the UK, who studies how computer games are designed, has retracted a paper and corrected three others after she said she became aware that they all contained plagiarism.

The common author of the four papers, Dana Ruggiero,

focuses on praxis in design for persuasive technology, multimedia installations, and affective knowledge, including the application of games for social issues such as higher education, homelessness, juvenile offenders, children in care, and healthcare.

A conservative friend and I recently had an exchange which I think I’ll post, with his permission, concerning the current various political leaderships, and the proper way to integrate divinity into the question of governance. We pick up on this in the middle of our correspondence:

[My friend] I’d worry more about the idiots on the other [Democratic] side of the isle.

[Hue] I have to say I adore your typo!

They seem to not be in step with the common sense folks.

Problem is they’re not employed to ‘be in step’ with us. That’s how we ended up with gross incompetents like Speaker Ryan, Gohmert, not to mention corrupt folks like Pruitt, Price, Zinke, Ross, Hunter, Collins, etc etc etc. They’re employed to take care of us – safeguard the nation, and regulate it so low-life scum don’t take too much advantage of us.

Wasn’t it well known conservative and writer Robert Heinlein who said something like ‘common sense is neither’? Well, he was technically trained and thought analytically (and he was a former Navy officer, forced out by TB). Point is, common sense, at best, applies only to your area of expertise. ‘Common sense folks’ have no experience with politics, government, and international politics, and their diagnoses and plans often reflect their ignorance. The only fountain of wisdom is the knowledge that you’re ignorant, and that applies to farmers just as much as it applies to M.D.s or physics PhDs – two groups famous for their hubris.

To me they seem to be in the game for power, glory, and money.  The heck with the common folk.

Both sides are attracted to the power & glory, and Trump appears to get off on all three. If you wonder about money, search on the new FBI HQ building and how he’s interfering to keep it right near one of his own hotels.

But since you bring up common sense folks again, I gotta ask why. The way I was brought up, common sense meant you didn’t trust liars, and Trump is the undisputed King and Master of the Liars of Politics. Maybe Nixon was in the same ballpark, but even he was only at 1st base when Trump rounds 3rd and chugs for home. (Brief pause to consider the visual.) There may be a couple of other Republicans who think they are as absolutely unprincipled as Trump, such as Pruitt and this new boy, Whittaker, but they’re no where near them.

No doubt the Democrats do a little lying, but to tell the truth, as an independent, the Republicans appear to be equal parts liars and incompetents. Their campaigns seem to subsists on lies and voter suppression/gerrymandering. How is this something the ‘common folks’ with ‘common sense’ can possibly approve of? Maybe it’s just that I’ve started paying attention to politics, but it seems painfully obvious that Trump has snookered almost half the nation.

Trump has plenty of folks around to help keep him on the straight and narrow—that is if you have faith in your politicians and that’s a se7rious problem,

Trump appears to be attracted to people just like himself, and generals. Defense Secretary and former General Mattis seems like he’s both competent and honorable, although how can I be certain from this distance? The rest? Either hamstrung with ridiculous ideologies or so freakin’ avaricious they belong in cartoons. And as the expert Washington watchers have noted, he’s not nominating competent people who just [have] views that differ from liberals – he’s nominating folks with no relevant experience, often people who just happen to show up on Fox News (such as that Florida candidate for Governor, DeSantis, who was considered a long shot when he entered the race, but arranged to appear on Fox every chance he could until Trump endorsed him). That Acting Attorney General has managed to put himself in the running as Biggest Clown in the Trump Cabinet, and given names like Price, Zinke, and Pruitt, that is saying one helluva lot.

but God put these people in position,  but I have to say I don’t really agree with His choices, but He’s running the show—like it or not.  I have to keep reminding me of that too.

I cannot agree. The last time people said that, the Bush Debacle occurred. If it’s really God in charge, he fucking well hates us.

But the truth of the matter is that we’re self-governing, we’re no longer under the rule of a God-picked sovereign, eh? It’s no Queen Lizzie for us, and we’ve told ‘God’ to keep his nose out of our affairs. I know that ticks a lot of folks off, but given how poorly theocracies work out I thinkt the Founding Fathers agreed for good reason to keep him/it/her at arms length and take responsibility for our own future.

And a second point – putting this all on God, some sort of mysterious plan, let’s call it what it really is:

Abdication of Responsibility.

How much sense does it make to say that God wants Trump to sit in an Oval Office, give up national security secrets, damage the economy through the tariff wars, lie like it’s an Olympic Sport, and SIT ON OUR ASSES DOING NOTHING BUT VOTING FOR THOSE WHO SUPPORT HIM?

Doesn’t it make more sense to admit he’s an error and work to fix it?

It’s so much easier to blame it on a God with a mysterious plan than take up arms against a thousand foes, isnt it? Yet, I contend, the latter course is far more honorable than navel-gazing about the intentions of some divine creature for which there’s no evidence of even existing?

The Founding Fathers struck out on their own because the navel-gazing of King Henry was going nowhere good. Why deviate from their course?

Make of it what you will.

While reading Paul Waldman’s missive concerning President Trump’s doom – in his opinion – I began to wonder if President Trump will go on a foreign trip and simply never come back, thus evading the forces of justice. It’d certainly appeal to his sense of drama.

But I think his nebulous grasp on reality makes it impossible for him to understand just how deep this tarpit trap has become. I think he’ll stick it out until he finds himself in handcuffs, if that is how this all ends.

But it makes for some interesting possible fictional stories, doesn’t it?

Yes, it’s the Evil Texaco symbol!

One of the superior thrills for the movie viewer is going into a movie cold and discovering they’ve been transfixed for an hour without realizing it. I had that pleasure when I walked into a theater and watched the now-legendary The Usual Suspects (1995) without a clue as to what was happening. More recently, my Arts Editor and I had the same reaction to Magellan (2017), and even if I am not convinced it’ll ever be legendary, we enjoyed it and found it thought-provoking.

Into that same category falls Armstrong (2017), an action movie that has, as its primary theme, a meditation on the contrast between certainty and uncertainty. Rookie EMT Lauren, an ex-junkie, is deeply uncertain of herself and her future as she climbs into Ambulance 32 to ride the midnight streets of Los Angeles with Eddie. Before long, a huge explosion rends the quiet and, on dispatch to the scene, they literally run into a man who leaves one big dent in their ambulance’s hood. As they tend to him, his gibberish confuses them – and then they become even more confused when they find one arm is encased in a previously unknown prosthetic.

On the edge of shoving their patient, Armstrong, out the door, the two EMTs encounter a man in futuristic military costume, evidently searching for their patient, and mouthing apocalyptic Aztec religious references to the Fifth Sun. In the midst of the religious rhetoric, their patient surprises this attacker and kills him with a shocking blast of power.

Soon, we are told – with good reason to wonder – that a Doomsday Cult is at work, the sort that thinks Doomsday must be actively brought about, rather than passively awaited, and their patient is a dissident from the movement, burdened with his own ghosts from his military past.

Throughout the movie, Lauren’s personal uncertainty, the choice before her of working for good, or blotting everything out of her consciousness, is contrasted to those who are certain – principally, the representatives of the Cult, who are certain with the obduracy of granite that they are those who are Chosen to survive, and thus they have the right to escort everyone else to the Gates of Hell, if I may wax faux-eloquently. For Lauren, this means she must repeatedly ask herself what is right and what is wrong, while for those who are in the cult, the question has been answered so with such finality that the very concept of reopening the question, to look too closely into the depths of irrationality, is beyond conception. To die with the words of murderous orthodoxy on one’s lips is to have abandoned entirely the question of good and evil.

It’s a well done movie, but it’s not perfect. Some of the special effects are suggestive of a low-budget effort, but if it is low-budget, the moviemakers were smart enough to put their principal investment into the story and actors. I found myself more than willing to use my imagination to fill in the missing elements of the visuals in order to get on with the story.

And, without revealing its content, I would have not included the final scene. Lauren has been faced with a question, but this movie needn’t provide an answer. It’s enough for every viewer to put him or herself in Lauren’s place and meditate on how they might answer the question put to her. Her answer is both unnecessary and trite.

I won’t quite recommend it, but I can say we were pleasantly surprised. The violence isn’t too graphic, information is strategically withheld, and the questions asked are good questions. Dig it up one night if you’re in the mood for a highly focused thriller.

Thrill-seekers? It’s like watching a 2 year old fall down the stairs.

Or like the kitten we had back when I was a teenager who was so determined to get into the forbidden basement that he launched himself full tilt through the door the moment it opened, cart-wheeled down the stairs, shook himself at the bottom, and trotted off to explore.

I think Kevin Drum has stumbled across the latest concerted meme and Republican behavior, discovered as Representative Mimi Walters (CA-R) finally loses her re-election bid to Democrat Katie Porter:

The sad part of this is that a couple of days ago, as it became clear which way the wind was blowing, Mimi Walters pulled a Trump and started claiming that the vote count was corrupt. “I’m currently up by 1 point, but the Democrats are already preparing for a recount to try and steal this Republican seat after the fact,” she wrote in a fundraising email. This is a shameless and reprehensible thing to say. She knows perfectly well that Neal Kelley is a very well regarded Registrar of Voters and that there’s no evidence at all of even the slightest fraud or incompetence in his office.

But I guess that’s how things go in the GOP of the Trump era. If you lose, you lash out. Yesterday I said I had nothing special against Walters other than the usual disagreement of a liberal toward a conservative. Now I do. What a terrible way to go out.

In the Trump Republican Party, you have to go down kicking, screaming, and pointing at imaginary foulness from the Democrats in order to retain the respect of the Leader, otherwise your political career is finished.

Or at least that’s the perception among the losers. The culture is such that there’s no such thing as a graceful loser, at least if it’s close.

But I suppose that’s how you safeguard the royal jewels Holy Tenets of the party from disgrace. It’s not that the voters have rejected faux tax reform, the deadly threat of invaders from the South, and the grace of Trump, it’s cheating by the Democrats.

That’s one way to soothe one’s ruffled feelings.

2020 should be interesting if the Republicans suffer more losses. Every public claim – and this one was in a letter to donors, so it’s private – should be met with polite requests for evidence from the reporters, and, if none is provided, keep noting (as CNN now does) that none was provided and the claim is probably false.

There was a time that Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) commanded a certain amount of respect in the Senate, but I think that’s coming to an end. It’s not just the political threats he’s making against those who appear ready to apply proper oversight over the President, but the logic that he’s applying in the process. Someone has nicely supplied a Tweet summarizing an interview Graham had with Sean Hannity of Fox Propaganda News:

Here’s Lindsay Graham on Sean Hannity last night, threatening House Democrats that if he’s in charge of Senate Judiciary and they investigate Trump-Russia, he’ll investigate whether “political bias” in FBI Hillary Clinton email server and Trump-Russia probes. pic.twitter.com/SSjTVFDGoD

— Matthew Gertz (@MattGertz) November 15, 2018

So what’s the problem here?

Graham is arguably committing a crime if he doesn’t investigate the Democrats!

Look, if he suspects one or more crimes have been committed, and he doesn’t either investigate himself, or present his credible evidence to the FBI, then he is effectively a co-conspirator, and thus equally guilty as the Democrats of any crime they may have committed.

All of which makes me think this is empty-headed bluster by a guy who’s been given his orders by Party Leader Trump, and he’s busy trying to carry them out. Right now, he’s offered a bribe to the Democrats – you don’t investigate us, we won’t investigate you. That just might be an illegal offer worthy of scrutiny by the FBI, and even if it isn’t, it looks like an exceedingly bad offer for a sitting Senator to make.

But the Democrats won’t care, I suspect. Clinton may still be a force in the Party, but honestly Democrats have seen her lose twice now in Presidential bids, and understand her limits (along with her age). More entertainingly, they are undoubtedly willing to let her have another go with a Congressional investigatory committee – after all, it’s another chance for her take a bite out of the ass of a bunch of incompetent Republicans who are chasing a Sasquatch across the landscape. Hell, Clinton herself may relish a chance to bounce Graham up and down a few more times.

And the Democrats should be willing to let all of Graham’s threats be promulgated, because it’s their professional duty to implement this oversight and investigation. Graham should know all about this, he’s an adult.

Which all makes me wonder if it’s Senator Graham or Thumb-Puppet Graham. It’s just so stupid. Unless Graham has decided that in order to keep the respect of Trump, he has to “hit back twice as hard.” But does it really makes sense to desire the respect of a liar? Hell, what does that even mean?

And, yes, Senator Grassley has given up his chairmanship of the Judiciary Committee, clearing the way for Graham to be appointed to the post.

Bezoar:

A bezoar is a mass found trapped in the gastrointestinal system, though it can occur in other locations. A pseudobezoar is an indigestible object introduced intentionally into the digestive system.

There are several varieties of bezoar, some of which have inorganic constituents and others organic. The term has both a modern (medical, scientific) and a traditional usage. [Wikipedia]

Noted at the new Bell Museum yesterday. They just described it as a cow hairball.

In this dormant thread I mentioned that Trump-clone Chris McDaniels was threatening to run in the primary against up for re-election Senator Wicker (R-MI). However, the other Senator from Mississippi, Senator Cochrane, retired for health reasons, and a special election of the ‘jungle’ type took place. Chris McDaniel decided to join the fun. Here’s the results:

It was good to see the Trump clone rejected, and while I think I’d prefer former Ag Secretary Espy over Hyde-Smith, she did manage to beat McDaniel comfortably, so what the hell, right?

Wrong.

A video of Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, R-Miss., who faces a runoff this month against an African-American Democrat, joking about attending “a public hanging” went viral Sunday as she insisted there was nothing negative about her remark.

“If he invited me to a public hanging, I’d be on the front row,” Hyde-Smith said during a campaign stop in Tupelo, Mississippi. The man she was referring to was identified as a local rancher. [NBC News]

When backlash hit, she took the “what are you talking about?” route out of the controversy:

It’s ok to still have a sense of humor in America isn’t it? These students enjoyed a laugh with Cindy despite out of state social media posts trying to mislead Mississippians. @espyforsenatehttps://t.co/dcObRfHpMi pic.twitter.com/nfOi3ifekq

— Cindy Hyde-Smith (@cindyhydesmith) November 16, 2018

Symptomatic of another sycophantic power-seeker.

Which all makes me think we may have an election on our hands here, rather than the usual Republicans win in Mississippi, now over to the news from the local bar. While Nelson may eventually lose to Republican Rick Scott in Florida, there may be a surprise pickup in Mississippi for the Democrats. I suppose it depends on how many people are outraged at what Hyde-Smith thinks is funny.

Especially if President Trump goes and campaigns for Hyde-Smith, as he’s rumored to readying to do so. He’s so awful at it….

Blighty:

1. An informal term for Britain or England, used by soldiers of the First and Second World Wars.
   1. military slang A wound suffered by a soldier in the First World War which was sufficiently serious to merit being shipped home to Britain.
      ‘he had copped a Blighty and was on his way home’ [Oxford English Dictionaries]

Just popped into my head this morning.

“It’s like Country & Western as done by the Muppets!”

– My Arts Editor, commenting on an act which will remain nameless.

A friend and reader sends an article on just how deep the Sun can reach into the Earth and we hardly even notice, courtesy Scientific American:

“Between 2 and 4 August 1972 [a sunspot] produced a series of brilliant flares, energetic particle enhancements and Earth-directed ejecta,” [researchers] wrote. …

And somehow, amid all that drama, space weather researchers had largely ignored another consequence of the storm: “the sudden detonation of a ‘large number’ of US Navy… sea mines [that had been] dropped into the coastal waters of North Vietnam only three months earlier.”

We all know the telegraph stories from the 1859, where unpowered telegraphs suddenly sprang into activity, powered by an immense solar flare that hasn’t been matched since. But sometimes these flares can do odd, odd things to unstable mechanisms, of which I would classify sea mines.

I wonder if other munitions, such as those on wrecks, might also be vulnerable? There are a few wrecks that are under surveillance because of the dangers they pose if their cargoes were to detonate. Could the metallic hulls somehow destabilize these precarious munitions?

From WaPo:

Scientists behind a major study that claimed the Earth’s oceans are warming faster than previously thought now say their work contained inadvertent errors that made their conclusions seem more certain than they actually are.

Two weeks after the high-profile study was published in the journal Nature, its authors have submitted corrections to the publication. The Scripps Institution of Oceanography, home to several of the researchers involved, also noted the problems in the scientists’ work and corrected a news release on its website, which previously had asserted that the study detailed how the Earth’s oceans “have absorbed 60 percent more heat than previously thought.”

“Unfortunately, we made mistakes here,” said Ralph Keeling, a climate scientist at Scripps, who was a co-author of the study. “I think the main lesson is that you work as fast as you can to fix mistakes when you find them.”

Religious zealots don’t make mistakes, of course. But scientists? They have to deal with contingency in everything they do – their instruments, their calculations, their skills, all have some error associated with it, much like public pollsters do. Sometimes they get it wrong, and they have to retract it, because reality will rise up and smack them between the ears if they don’t. And don’t take too much reassurance from this report:

The central conclusion of the study — that oceans are retaining ever more energy as more heat is being trapped within Earth’s climate system each year — is in line with other studies that have drawn similar conclusions. And it hasn’t changed much despite the errors. But Keeling said the authors’ miscalculations mean there is a much larger margin of error in the findings, which means researchers can weigh in with less certainty than they thought.

Good to hear them working on getting it right.

I do like graphs, because they can tell stories that are not so easy to tell in English. In that, I’m like many geeks. But sometimes those stories are significant, and sometimes they’re ephemeral. I think this one, the graph of Gallup’s Presidential Approval/Disapproval Poll over time, is ephemeral:

No doubt President Trump’s behavior since the mid-term elections, such as his calls for halting ballot counts when “his” candidates are ahead, are fueling this disapproval, along with the fact that the GOP suffered big losses in the mid-terms. His approval ratings have plunged from 44% just a few weeks ago, to 38% this past as of this Monday.

But it doesn’t mean much, really. Everyone, even his supporters in their little enclaves of “Trump Country,” are well aware the President does not poll well; interpretations differ. But so long as the GOP is unwilling to interpret these results as country-wide condemnation of his incompetence, no impeachment will successfully convict him.

Although it’d humiliate him. And it’d be symbolic of this country’s refusal to go into the dark night of fascism under the flag of false charisma which Trump has forever over his head.

But, in the end, approval and disapproval aren’t very meaningful.

The AP finds out more about the hapless qualities of Acting Attorney General Whitaker:

While in private business, acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker walked away from a taxpayer-subsidized apartment-rehabilitation project in Iowa after years of cost overruns, delays and other problems, public records show.

The city of Des Moines ultimately yanked an affordable housing loan that Whitaker’s company had been awarded, and another lender began foreclosure proceedings after Whitaker defaulted on a separate loan for nearly $700,000. Several contractors complained they were not paid, and a process server for one could not even find Whitaker or his company to serve him with a lawsuit.

Steve Benen contributes to the fun:

Vox published a piece  yesterday summarizing Whitaker’s many controversies, and I was struck, not just by the seriousness of the allegations, but by the length of the piece itself. Ordinarily, before anyone could put together a lengthy list of controversies surrounding a Trump cabinet official, he or she would have to be in office for at least a couple of months.

Matt Whitaker is currently in his seventh day – and two of those days were a weekend.

What struck me is how this factual narrative is congruent with the generic story of a con-man, leaving wreckage in his wake as he climbs the ladder of ambition.

And then I recalled Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, who appears to have conned many, many people into thinking he’s some uber-billionaire, yet appears to have acquired much of his wealth – whatever there may be – through less than ethical means.

And then there’s former White House advisor Steve Bannon, who conned many a person into thinking he was some right-wing oracle, forecasting the fall of the left and the dominance of the right wing extremists.

And, skipping over some other possible con-critters, there’s the Conman-in-Chief, President Trump, who has visibly and painfully conned quite a few people with his claims of business success, intelligence, experience, oh so many things.

Someday, someone’s going to make a game out of this Administration, and one of the areas should be Tawdry Themes Of The Trump Administration. The Big Con could be the question, with many, many answers.

Robert Mueller has been the elephant in the room for quite a while. On Lawfare, Bob Bauer thinks his example, as a counter to Trump’s rubbish, has been sterling and should be admired. When it comes to Trump’s possible involvement in crime, he has two pieces of advice for him:

First, should Mueller conclude that the president has committed a crime, it is fully consistent with his role and responsibilities to name Trump as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Russia matter. The Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) opinions mistakenly contending that the president is immune from prosecution while in office do not preclude this option. The 2000 opinion, of course, was written well after Watergate; the authors were aware of the precedent of Nixon’s having been listed as an unindicted co-conspirator and did not challenge it. Since then, the Department of Justice has published guidance cautioning against this step but with ample allowance for it to be taken in a case like this.

Second, Mueller should also consider himself to have the authority to indict the president under seal, if the evidence so warrants, with prosecution deferred until Trump leaves office. OLC’s 2000 opinion takes objection to this course in a footnote, in which it asserts without elaboration that “[p]ermitting a prosecutor and grand jury to issue even a sealed indictment would allow them to take an unacceptable gamble with constitutional values.” This is not an argument: What does it mean to dismiss this prosecutorial option as a “gamble with constitutional values”?  In what way is it “unacceptable,” and to whom? This is gibberish, and it is not entitled to any weight.

Should the evidence take Mueller in these directions, the new Justice Department leadership could stand in his way: It could attempt to stop him or fire him. But this could not be accomplished in secret. The story would rapidly emerge, most likely with other resignations in protest from department officials—as with the Saturday Night Massacre. Mueller would have the chance to tell his story to the House, and the House, in turn, can and would obtain access to his evidence. The lines will have been clearly drawn, with Mueller situated on the right side—where his prosecutorial authority is found and has been responsibly exercised.

The OLC opinions do appear to be gibberish if that is, indeed, what they say. No man is above the law, and we have a VP for situations in which the President has become impotent. That’s the purpose of the VP. The OLC opinion sounds like it’s desperately trying to defend the occupant of the Oval Office, not the system of government we use.

Perhaps I should try reading the opinions myself. They’re photostats of a paper written in 1973, apparently.

While musing on the upcoming majority in the House, and how they might pressure President Trump to shape his ship and fly a reasonably straight course, it occurred to me that the GOP, especially the GOP Senate incumbents who are ambitious to continue to serve, could begin to develop a sweat.

1. The mid-term elections demonstrated that the independents are increasingly disenchanted with the GOP brand. The GOP base apparently remained true and enthusiastic, which Andrew Sullivan thinks was due to the xenophobia to which Trump applied the quirt in the form of the Honduras caravan^[1]. But the independents are in charge of the fate of elections, and the economy, the corporate tax cuts, the monkeying with the ACA, none of the GOP signature issues seemed to attract the independent voter. Their disgust with Trump and his close adherents was apparent in the losses suffered by many of those close adherents.
2. The consequent takeover of the House of Representatives by the Democrats makes competent oversight and resultant pressure on President Trump likely. A no-brainer? Sure – but important to keep that in mind.
3. Another reminder that the GOP has a holy tenet that states it’s a sin to cooperate with the Democrats on major legislation. This can be taken two ways, the first being that there will be no legislation on which the GOP can legitimately hang its hat during the next two years; or, the GOP will have little opportunity to shoot itself in the foot with regards to major legislation. This will become a talking point during the run-up to the 2020 Senatorial races. As the party facing decline, it’s important that it have achievements that it can point to as evidence of its essential health.
4. President Trump no longer has any legislative punch. The House will no longer bend to his will, and the Democrats have learned that he is untrustworthy when it comes to deal making.
5. This leaves President Trump with two primary levers of power.
6. The first is his mouth, amplified as it is by Twitter, which he can use to stir up his base at will. He’s managed to use this effectively for three years, and while I continue to expect the GOP to leak people who have FINALLY come to their senses regarding the gross incompetence and corruption endemic to Trump, not to mention those who pass away, I don’t expect those to be large numbers in the absence of irrefutable evidence of Presidential perfidy. Even in his last days, Nixon had his supporters. According to Gallup, he was at roughly 24% approval when he left office. Trump will always have his supporters.
7. The second is his power to make judicial selections. Trump does try to keep promises he considers important, and a conservative judiciary has, from the evidence, been one of them. He will continue to send deeply conservative people to the Senate Judiciary Committee for confirmation, and, given his Administration’s horrible record on vetting candidates for all positions, it won’t matter if they’re wonderfully qualified or pathetically incompetent and inept. He’ll send them.

And this is where those Senate incumbents of yore start to sweat. In order to win re-election, it’s not enough for them to win the base, but you have to have them (for those who remember formal mathematics or logic, the base is necessary but not sufficient). They have to have a good chunk of the independents as well.

But the independents are going to pay attention, and that’s where the Democrats come in. If & when Trump sends a bad candidate for the judiciary, regardless of the seat, the Democrats need to bring this up in the news. Pound on it. Trump is trying to screw America again with a bad judicial candidate.

The new neighbors, looking around the corner.

And the right will react as they always do. They’ll get behind whichever bumbler it might be and try to shove him (or her, although Trump seems allergic to the female judicial candidate) through. The GOP has the votes to put through any judicial nominee, but if a bad nominee is advertised by the Democrats, and then their individual votes pinned on the Republican Senators, they’ll find themselves between Scylla and Charybdis. Bad judicial nominees will be disastrous for both Trump and his Senators.

The 2020 election will all be about Trump. The Democrats have the early momentum, plus the GOP has many more Senate seats to defend than do the Democrats, so that’s another advantage. They don’t have an understanding of why Trump appeals to so much of the electorate, so that’s a disadvantage. But they have time to study the problem and come up with a strategy. Trump should be an easy target because, at his heart, he’s the antithesis of what the parents of most of his base were brought up to believe. Most of them are in denial.

That’ll be one of the keys.

¹ And we’ve not heard of the caravan again, have we? Even the military dropped its high-flying name for the operation in which they were to assist ICE and the border patrol. It might almost make one think the caravan was arranged by President Trump. Not true, I’m sure – I hope – but possible.

Venal:

1. willing to sell one’s influence, especially in return for a bribe; open to bribery; mercenary:
   a venal judge.
2. able to be purchased, as by a bribe:
   venal acquittals.
3. associated with or characterized by bribery:
   a venal administration; venal agreements. [Dictionary.com]

Noted in “Appoint Martha McSally to John McCain’s seat? No freakin’ way,” E. J. Montini, AZ Central:

We are accustomed to Trump’s venal behavior. We don’t expect anything else.

But McSally chose to mimic the president rather than mention McCain, who gave so much of his life to the country. For that she got the vote of Trump supporters – who often and loudly expressed their contempt for McCain – but that does not mean she should inherit McCain’s seat.

She could make a run at that seat in two years, when it comes up for election, but it should not be given to her.

National Geographic describes Nature’s adaptation to humanity’s lust for ivory:

THE OLDEST ELEPHANTS wandering Mozambique’s Gorongosa National Park bear the indelible markings of the civil war that gripped the country for 15 years: Many are tuskless. They’re the lone survivors of a conflict that killed about 90 percent of these beleaguered animals, slaughtered for ivory to finance weapons and for meat to feed the fighters.

Hunting gave elephants that didn’t grow tusks a biological advantage in Gorongosa. Recent figures suggest that about a third of younger females—the generation born after the war ended in 1992—never developed tusks. Normally, tusklessness would occur only in about 2 to 4 percent of female African elephants.

I hope elephants taste bad, too. Or are even poisonous. Massacring these big animals for their tusks may be perfectly acceptable to local morality, but I am a child of Western Civ – and find that activity to be consumeristic and repellent.

My best wishes to the elephants of Africa. Perhaps your legends will speak of the time when you bore the great tusks – and paid the ultimate price for the privilege.