As usual for Sunday morning, the chart comes from the folks at Compound Interest. Visit their site for a full-size version.
And now, movie time!
Michael: I don't know anyone who could get through the day without two or three juicy rationalizations. They're more important than sex.
Sam Weber: Ah, come on. Nothing's more important than sex.
Michael: Oh yeah? Ever gone a week without a rationalization?
The Big Chill (1983)
Increasingly the GOP finds that rationalization juice is the only lubricant which can keep the machine squeaking along. Once upon a time—as in a couple of weeks ago before they all tied their carts to the fool’s gold crazy train—Republican leadership could at least acknowledge that maybe, possibly, some of the things Donnie Trump says are beyond the ken of (pick one or more: good taste, law, possibility, sanity, reality). But now there is nothing that Trump can say, which Republicans will not warp space time in an effort to defend. Witness.
John Heilemann: Let's just say this first of all, when Trump does what he did in that Tapper interview, and he did it over and over again, he kept calling Curiel a Mexican, right? It is not even dog whistle politics. It is just pure racial politics.
Mark Halperin: No, it’s not racial.
Heilemann: It’s racial politics. It is.
Halperin: Mexico isn’t a race.
Wait! Don’t cringe yet. there's much more.
Donald Trump suggested this week that U.S. District Court Judge Gonzalo Curiel can’t give him a fair hearing. Curiel, who is presiding over a class-action suit against Trump over his former for-profit educational company, Trump University, is a U.S. citizen, born in Indiana to Mexican immigrants. “I’m building a wall” on the U.S.-Mexico border if elected, the presumptive Republican nominee for president told the Wall Street Journal on Thursday. “It’s an inherent conflict of interest.” Earlier in the week, he told a crowd at a rally in San Diego that Curiel was “a hater of Donald Trump, a hater.” …
It is crucial to understand the real issue in this matter. I am not judging whether Curiel is actually biased against Trump. Only he knows the answer to that question. I am not saying that I would be concerned about him presiding over a case in which I was a litigant. And if I were a litigant who was concerned about the judge’s impartiality, I certainly would not deal with it in a public manner as Trump has, because it demeans the integrity of the judicial office and thus potentially undermines the independence of the judiciary, especially coming from a man who could be president by this time next year. But none of these issues is the test. The test is whether there is an “appearance of impropriety” under the facts as they reasonably appear to a litigant in Trump’s position.
That, ladies and gentlemen, was the former Attorney General of these here United States arguing that a judge’s race constitute an appearance of impropriety. And doing so in defense of Trump spitting out “Mexican” as an execration.
Spineless jellyfish. It’s a bit redundant, since all jellyfish are spineless. However, when you want to make it clear that someone has no principles, no moral direction, no commitment to truth or even simple consistency, then sticking these two words together makes for a serviceable, if a little shop-worn, handle. No more. From now on, when you need to describe someone as having all the solidity of ice cream left out overnight, you only need one word: Republican.
Come on in. Let’s see if there were any vertebrates on the editorial page this week.
Ruth Marcus on Trump v. Law.
The latest, scariest manifestation of Trump’s attitude involves his now doubled-down attack on the federal judge — Indiana-born, but Mexican for Trump’s repellent purposes — hearing the Trump University cases. …
In Trump’s universe — governed by the rule of self-interest, not the rule of law — Curiel’s actions can be explained only by his ethnicity: “Mexican, which is great,” but also, Trump told the Wall Street Journal on Thursday, “an absolute conflict” of interest because “I’m building a wall.”
The racism infecting Trump’s assessment — in a Trump presidency, under this cynical assessment, no Hispanic judge could rule on any executive initiative — demands notice and rejection. But Trump’s comments also highlight his disturbing attitude toward the role of the courts.
White people can only be judged correctly by other white people. And non-white people can only be judged correctly by white people. Because… lord, I can not believe this is a real thing.
Jennifer Steinhauer nets another squirmy thing.
Senator John McCain does not say much these days about Donald J. Trump’s attack on his five-plus years as a prisoner of war. Instead, he clenches his teeth and says he will support the Republican Party’s presumptive nominee, who once said derisively about the senator’s time in captivity, “I like people that weren’t captured.” …
“I’m fair game. I’m in the arena,” said Mr. McCain, 79, whose thinning face reflects the decades he has spent traveling around his massive and increasingly diverse state.
Still, the episode sits with traces of bitterness, like old coffee grounds at the bottom of his cup, even if he says otherwise.
McCain is apparently willing to drink a lot of bitter coffee. Bitter, bitter coffee.
And Mr. McCain has a credible Democratic challenger, Representative Ann Kirkpatrick, who grew up on an Indian reservation and has strong support from the state’s sizable Native American population. “I just came from a Latino round table, and they are really concerned about McCain’s support for Trump,” she said Tuesday. “It’s very personal here.”
Hopefully, Mr. McCain will soon get to drink all that coffee at home. Where he can put his feet up by the fire, lean back in a chair, and reminisce about how when he was confronted by someone who insulted him to the core, he licked that guy’s boots. Licked ‘em good and clean.
Frank Bruni visits the land of already-done-that-guy.
During the circus-like years of Silvio Berlusconi, Italians grew flinchingly accustomed to being the butts of the world’s jokes.
Will they have the last laugh?
They look toward America and wonder. Me, too. In Donald Trump, we have a version of their buffoonish former prime minister — a clown all our own. He baffles and appalls much of Europe.
Here in Italy he prompts an additional reaction: relief, even satisfaction, that another country is proving vulnerable to an emphatically tanned, flamboyantly randy and frequently ridiculous billionaire who makes promises that he can’t possibly keep. …
“We do feel, partly, ha-ha-ha,” said Maria Valentini, a professor at a university just outside Rome. “It’s your turn.”
Please note: four out of five Americans surveyed believe helping Italian self-esteem is not a legitimate reason for voting for Donald Trump. The fifth American was busy snacking on bitter coffee gelato.
The Washington Post mourns Paul Ryan’s spine-ectomy.
As Donald Trump was building a campaign on lies, bigotry, insults, fearmongering and unreason, a few Republican leaders of apparent principle offered some resistance. Foremost among them was House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.). In March, Mr. Ryan insisted that “all of us as leaders can hold ourselves to the highest standards of integrity and decency” and that “we shouldn’t accept ugliness as the norm.”
On Thursday Mr. Ryan capitulated to ugliness. It was a sad day for the speaker, for his party and for all Americans who hoped that some Republican leaders would have the fortitude to put principle over partisanship, job security or the forlorn fantasy that Mr. Trump will advance a traditional GOP agenda.
Nope. Please be careful in moving past Speaker Ryan. He’s been known to flop around. And he’s already been stepped on a few times by the Freeedddddooom! caucus. But don’t worry, there are no stingers in all that slime.
Kathleen Parker probes the translucent remains for any sign of life.
With the surrender of House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (Wis.) to the Trump crusade, it is fair to wonder what the Republican Party stands for.
Ryan’s endorsement of Trump, which appeared in an op-ed the speaker wrote for his hometown paper — rather than before a gaggle of reporters and newscasters with his arm draped around Trump’s shoulders — was a white flag from the establishment opposition. …
To Trump’s supporters, a billionaire with no governing experience, questionable business practices and secret tax returns would be vastly better than Clinton on no substantive basis whatsoever. Most compelling of all is the belief that Trump would nominate conservative justices. …
At least now, Ronald Reagan can finally get some rest. The Republican Party has left him.
Don’t worry, Kathleen. I’m sure the Republican Party will rediscover its spine. You know, during the fight over who was to blame for this massive screw up. Around about November 9.
The New York Times follows the money.
Like practiced horseplayers at a racetrack, wealthy campaign donors are adjusting their bets as the primary season ends and the political field narrows. This is particularly true of Republican megadonors who cannot abide Donald Trump and are thus doubling down on keeping G.O.P. control of the Senate as a firewall against a possible Democratic president, while investing heavily in keeping statehouses in Republican hands.
One constant is the vast amount of money sluicing through the political system in what is certain to be the most expensive election in the nation’s history. Experts estimate that campaign spending, which has risen inexorably in recent years, will easily surpass the $6.28 billion record set in the 2012 federal elections and could conceivably reach $9 billion, much of it for political advertising.
We’re going to see just as much money from the 0.01% ripping through American politics. It’s just going to do it at a level where it’s harder to see and police. We’ve already seen the Koch brothers investing in keeping poor kids from getting a library (yes, really). So while it’s good to chuckle over Trump’s deadbeat campaign, remember that all the funds he’s not getting are coming to a community near you.
Timothy Egan gets ready for Bernie and Tuesday night.
Rumbling and roaring his way across California, Senator Bernie Sanders brought his political revolution to the neighborhood of Goofy and Mickey.
“Anybody here work for Disney?” he asked the crowd at the Anaheim Convention Center. Dozens of hands went up.
“Anybody here making a living wage working for Disney?” No hands went up. After a shower of boos, Sanders continued, showing little joy in his role as socialist scourge. While Disney paid its C.E.O., Robert A. Iger, more than $40 million in total compensation last year, he noted, adults in mouse costumes were living out of motels, making $11 an hour.
It’s a damned important point. A point that can’t be made too often. It’s not just a symptom of the growing income gap, it’s a sign that our economic system is utterly failing.
A day later, Donald J. Trump showed up at the same place. His supporters, mostly older whites, clashed outside with protesters, mostly younger Latinos. All the Trump rally appeared to do was unleash a spasm of airborne hatred.
And … of course it did.
Tom Clynes on just how far you can push the world if you have the cash.
The battle between Gawker and the tech titan Peter Thiel has made him look like a spiteful manipulator with a bully wallet. But this characterization is incomplete. The stakes and ambitions of Mr. Thiel’s back-room lawsuit-jiggering are fairly trivial compared with many of his endeavors — some stealthy, some gleefully public — to rewire the world to his liking.
For Mr. Thiel, business is never just business. His original vision for PayPal, which he helped found in 1998, was to create “a new world currency, free from all government control and dilution — the end of monetary sovereignty.” He considered his prescient investment in Facebook, in 2004, as “a means to create the space for new modes of dissent and new ways to form communities not bounded by historical nation-states.”
How seriously should we take this billionaire libertarian who recently signed on to be one of Donald J. Trump’s delegates?
Seriously. Not just as an individual, but as an example of how putting this much fiscal power into the hands of any one person places that person in a position where they can do damage that far exceeds even the reach of their massive bank accounts. From paying bright students $100,000 to drop out of school, to a plan to create real Randian paradises on artificial islands… take it all seriously.
Christine Emba has another take on Thiel.
A mean-spirited news and gossip website publishes the extramarital sex tape of a C-list, former professional wrestler. The wrestler sues, claiming invasion of privacy, and wins an unexpectedly large $140 million award. It later comes out that the litigation was secretly financed by a Silicon Valley billionaire who has held a decade-long grudge against the website for outing him as gay and bullying his friends.
The billionaire claims that his involvement is not about revenge, and instead declares insufferably that helping to shut down the website could be one of the “greater philanthropic things” he has done. The website’s editors, in turn, defend the newsworthiness of the sex tape and self-righteously claim that “journalism is as journalism does,” despite the ugliness of much of their output.
A phrase involving “pox” and “houses” comes to mind.
Justin Smith on history as a weapon.
We are supposed to find some solace these days in the assurance that Donald Trump is “not Hitler.” One reasonable response is this: Of course he isn’t. Only Hitler is Hitler, and he died in a bunker in 1945. There is no such thing as reincarnation, and history is nothing more than a long, linear series of individual people and events that come and go. It is, as the saying goes, “just one damn thing after another.” ...
The degeneration of which Mr. Trump is a symptom is by no means limited to American political life. If Trump is not a reincarnation of Hitler, he is most certainly one head of the same global Hydra that has already given us Vladimir V. Putin, Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Narendra Modi. For all of them, the past is not something to study and to attend to, but something to sculpt.
Hey let’s bring in a little quote from another source.
“He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.”
― George Orwell, 1984
Tom Hamburger, Rosalind Helderman, and Dalton Bennett on the real lessons of Trump University.
Trump University would be a noble endeavor, he said, with an emphasis on education over profits. It was a way for him to give back, to share his expertise with the masses, to build a “legacy as an educator.”
He wouldn’t even keep all the money — if he happened to make a profit, he would turn the funds over to charity. ...
Trump University was not a university. It was not even a school. Rather, it was a series of seminars held in hotel ballrooms across the country that promised attendees they could get rich quick but were mostly devoted to enriching the people who ran them. …
All told, Trump University received about $40 million in revenue from more than 5,000 participants before it halted operations in 2010 amid lawsuits in New York and California alleging widespread fraud. The New York attorney general estimated Trump netted more than $5 million during the five years it was active. He has since acknowledged that he gave none of the profits to charity
Sounds like the people who went to these seminars learned all about being cheated out of their money and lied to. So yeah, they did get Trump’s secret sauce after all. Seriously, if you want to understand the details of this story, read this article. It’s the best view of Trump’s “university” I’ve seen.
Stephen Kass has a solution to one problem.
The Supreme Court’s decision in February to stay President Obama’s Clean Power Plan may lead to a protracted legal battle over aging, unprofitable and environmentally unsound coal plants. But instead of litigating our way out of the problem, there is a simpler solution: The federal government could buy the plants and close them. …
There is another alternative — which I’ll call Plan A — that would avoid the considerable litigation risks of the Clean Power Plan and achieve more quickly and with greater certainty a reduction in emissions at least equal to those of the Clean Power initiative. Under Plan A, the federal government would buy or, if necessary, seize under eminent domain all existing U.S. coal plants and close them over 10 years. Such a use of federal authority is well-established and would not be subject to serious legal challenge.
While we’re at it, let’s just pay off the miners and be done with it. There are fewer than 70,000 coal mine workers left in the whole nation. Ohio, where there’s been so much fighting over who supports miners the most, has fewer than 3,000. Just pay them. Pick a number. Make it big. Write them a check. Then we can get on with making sensible policy without being hit by sentiment-dripping distractions.
Leonard Pitts is at the bottom of the column this morning, but what he has to say is at the top of my heart.
He told us he was the greatest.
He rhymed it in poetry, he sang it in song, he declaimed it into microphones, eyes wide and bright with mischief and just this side of crazy. “I am the greatest!” he told us. “I am the greatest of all time!”
Leave it to the aficionados and experts of his brutal sport to determine whether Muhammad Ali, who died Friday night in Scottsdale, Arizona, was the best boxer who ever lived. Leave it to them to measure Ali’s speed and footwork against Joe Louis’ punching power, Mike Tyson’s ferocity or Rocky Marciano’s iron jaw.
But “best” is not a synonym for “greatest.” To be called — or, as in Ali’s case, to call yourself — the greatest at a thing implies not just the skill and excellence with which you do that thing, but also the impact you have upon your craft and the world beyond. When the legendary comic book artist Jack “King” Kirby died in 1994, writer and artist Frank Miller put it like this: “You mark a great in any field by the fact that everything before them seems outdated when they show up and everything after them reflects their influence.”
I was fortunate enough to, just by total chance, run into Muhammad Ali twice in my life. The first time I was just a kid, still in high school. Afterwards, I was standing in a hotel lobby telling someone how “He’s big! I mean, you know he’s big, but he seems so much bigger in person. Like… really big.”
”Oh, you think so?” said a voice at my back.
I turned, and there was Muhammad Ali. He was dressed in a trench coat and had a fedora tipped down over his forehead. He was clearly trying to leave that afternoon without attracting a lot of attention. But he’d overheard my conversation and couldn’t resist the opportunity to josh with this one awe-struck fan. For just a moment there, The Greatest was grinning at me. Just me.
Go read Pitt’s complete column. You owe it to the champ.