When I was in elementary school, I played a cornet. Not a clarinet, dammit. A cornet. Like a trumpet. Kinda. And every time I ate a box of Corn Flakes, I dug like crazy into the depths to find the stickers that were inside. Stickers with names like “Liberty Bell 7” and “Freedom 7” and “Friendship 7.” Every one of those stickers also had the name of just one man—a man who went into space, all alone. I put all those stickers on my cor… trumpet case. And when I was walking to school, or sitting waiting for band to start, I looked at them. At the names and the little emblems.
Godspeed, John Glenn. The others are way down the track, but you’re fast. You’ll catch up.
Have I mentioned how much I would rather be talking about anything else? How nice it would be to really devote some time to fantastic happenings in paleontology? How badly I want to get back to that discussion over Utopia and the difficulty of getting past the barriers that autonomy presents to our system? I have this half-written story about the real Rats of NIHM that I’ve been hanging onto for almost a year, and who knows when I’ll get to finish it.
And, of course, I really want to be bored out of my gourd, explaining how Hillary Clinton just made yet another completely reasonable, experienced, well-qualified choice for her cabinet.
Only … no. We’re dealing with this crap.
I’m sorry. I really am. Let’s go inside …
There’s a section in Masha Gessen’s Autocracy: Rules for Survival that says …
In the face of the impulse to normalize, it is essential to maintain one’s capacity for shock. This will lead people to call you unreasonable and hysterical, and to accuse you of overreacting. It is no fun to be the only hysterical person in the room. Prepare yourself.
“No fun” doesn’t begin to capture it. I look at myself and think “who is this overexcited bozo shouting about Russians and bouncing up and down over conflicts of interest?” How did he ever get in my mirror? And yet, it’s not the fake news scaring me silly, it’s the real stuff. So I keep shouting. Keep bouncing. Keep trying to make sure everyone understands just how Not Right this all is.
I also find that shouting and bouncing tends to make me more snipping when replying to comments. My apologies. That one I can change.
Oh, and a final note: this is definitely one of those Sunday’s when the news that’s generating the most attention broke after PunditWorld had done it’s work for the week and slipped back to the Hamptons, or that little place near Cape May, or wherever it is that people who get paid unreasonable amounts to dash off the occasional column go for the weekend (oh no, I’m not jealous). So consider it something of a vacation from Russia, if not from Trump.
But you know we’ll be going back to that topic soon.
Leonard Pitts is as disgusted about the Michael Slager as everyone else.
On Monday, a jury in South Carolina deadlocked in the trial of a former North Charleston police officer who shot a black man named Walter Scott in the back.
There was cell phone video, so jurors knew that when Michael Slager said he feared for his life, he was lying.
What threat is posed by the back of an unarmed man — even a black one — who is 18 feet away and running from you?
And yet, a panel of 11 white people and one African-American could not find it in themselves to hold Slager accountable for this summary execution, could not bring themselves to say that this black life mattered.
We’ve seen some genuine horrors over the last year, but the Slager case really raises the bar in “Really? You’ll let him get away with that? Really?”
I know that probably, eventually, my elders will beguile me back into faith, convince me there are reasons to keep hammering at America’s ideals, or stand for America’s song.
But in this moment of fresh betrayal? Sorry, elders.
I’m damned if I can think of one.
Completely understandable.
Kathleen Parker is watching another trial. One that has already showcased it’s own set of monstrous statements and chilling attitudes.
Roof, who posed in online pictures with the Confederate battle flag, allegedly told his victims he had to kill them because blacks were taking over and were “raping our women.” ...
From the evidence, it was easy to discern how the shooter went about his business. Shell casings and empty magazines were found around the perimeter of the room, indicating that the killer was moving around while shooting. One magazine was left on one of three round tables in the center of the room where the Bible study group was meeting and where most of the victims were found. This particular table was draped with a bright yellow-and-green-patterned cloth. Next to the dark, empty magazine was a large opened Bible and a piece of paper.
I’m not watching this one. I do not wish death on Roof—I try to mean it when I think “none harm.” But neither do I want to understand him.
Maggie Orth and the dangers of the Trump age.
This month in the District, a gunman shot up Comet Ping Pong pizzeria, threatening customers and workers and terrorizing an entire neighborhood. …
This attack on liberal politics and an opposition party was not organized by some authoritarian state, the Republican Party or President-elect Donald Trump. No action was taken by any Orwellian Big Brother. Nor did a government generate the doublespeak that created the Comet Ping Pong lies. Instead, this political violence emerged from a self-organized pack of irate, fear-mongering, right-wing conspiracy theorists reacting to whispers about Clinton in fake news and on social media and the Web.
This is Little Brother — millions of irrational people spreading lies, sowing doubt and fomenting violence.
While much of this new propaganda industry seems to be focused on racking up ad revenue, there’s no doubt the fake news writers are being used to generate specific types of fear, and specific potentials for violence.
Little Brother screams so loud, no one can think. When human beings experience anger and fear — the dominant emotions of Little Brother and his Internet clickbait — their IQs drop. People cannot use their rational minds when thousands of angry children are shouting at them online. That’s Little Brother.
It’s hard to think that anyone who bought into pizzagate was exactly a brain surgeon in the first place … but then, I haven’t asked Ben Carson about it.
The New York Times is also concerned about fake news.
Donald Trump understood at least one thing better than almost everybody watching the 2016 election: The breakdown of a shared public reality built upon widely accepted facts represented not a hazard, but an opportunity.
Let me hit the pause button long enough to say, when the New York Times refuses to run an interview granted them with the minority leader of the Senate because it contradicts what they were told by an FBI director with clear political motivations, it’s kind of hard to hum along with your umbrage. But, sure. Go ahead.
But it also turns out that when everyone can customize his or her own information bubble, it’s easier for demagogues to deploy made-up facts to suit the story they want to tell.
That’s what Mr. Trump has done. For him, facts aren’t the point; trust is. Like any autocrat, he wins his followers’ trust — let’s call it a blind trust — by lying so often and so brazenly that millions of people give up on trying to distinguish truth from falsehood. Whether the lie is about millions of noncitizens voting illegally, or the crime rate, or President Obama’s citizenship, it doesn’t matter: In a confusing world of competing, shouted “truths,” the simplest solution is to trust in your leader. As Mr. Trump is fond of saying, “I alone can fix it.”
The New York Times? You alone can’t fix it. But it would help if you stopped reliably and breathlessly chasing after every ridiculous scrap tossed out by Donald Trump and instead spent more time triaging issues for importance and digging deeper into things that matter. What did Trump tweet this morning? No, don’t tell me! I don’t want to know. You shouldn’t either.
Abraham Nussbaum wants to explain what Medicaid has meant for his patients.
When I started working at Denver Health, an academic safety-net system in downtown Denver, most of the patients I met were uninsured, so routine care was not readily available outside of safety-net institutions.
Safety-net systems have long cared for the uninsured, the underinsured and the publicly insured, so they think of themselves as our nation’s essential hospitals. Denver Health is a western cousin of safety-net systems such as Atlanta’s Grady Health, where Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga.), Donald Trump’s choice to be secretary of health and human services, practiced orthopedic surgery. Safety-net systems such as Grady Health and Denver Health provide the care you rarely see advertised on a billboard or announced on a newspaper’s front page — services such as paramedic response, public health, trauma care and care for people with serious mental illnesses.
It’s the kind of care that Republicans, including Price, seem to believe is hovering out there somewhere for everyone, though the truth is that such institutions are widely space, overworked, and able to cover only a fraction of the health care that’s needed. Even for the safety-net hospitals, treating patients with coverage means a huge change.
In Colorado, the Medicaid expansion halved the number of uninsured. In Denver, 94 percent of residents are now insured. At Denver Health, half our patients now receive Medicaid, which has enabled us to add physicians, integrate behavioral health into primary care, provide care in cost-effective outpatient settings and add quality jobs. Even though many private practitioners and hospitals refuse to accept Medicaid because of low reimbursement rates, safety-net systems stretched these modest payments into a network of essential services.
Michael Kinsley has a familiar name for Donald Trump.
Donald Trump is a fascist.
Wait, wait a sec. Let me go dig up something I wrote last year. Okay, let’s go.
I mean “fascist” in the more clinical sense. …
The game has several names: “Corporate statism” is one. In Europe, they call it “dirigisme.” Those two other words for it — “Nazism” and “fascism” — are now beyond all respectability. It means, roughly, combining the power of the state with the power of corporations. At its mildest, it is intrusive regulations on business about parental leave and such. At its most toxic, it is concentration camps. In the 1930s, a few Americans (including a few liberals) bought into it. Pearl Harbor ended that argument. Even for Trump, “fascism” itself now is a dirty word, not just a policy choice. Even Trump would not use it — least of all about himself.
Can’t disagree. In fact, I already agreed. In fact, I did it several times. Gee, maybe I was bouncing at least a little even before I read the rules. What was I saying a year ago?
Now we’ve come to an election year in which the promise of surveillance of those who follow the wrong religion, internment camps, torture and racism, racism, racism is not just a strategy, but a winning strategy.
What an awful time to be right for once.
Frank Bruni on the end of Trump’s search for a Secretary of State.
Luminary upon luminary genuflected before him. Oracle upon oracle plumbed the mists of his utterances. (“Just met with General Petraeus,” he tweeted. “Very impressed!”) He was the star yet again of a top-rated reality show, this one with the heightened stakes of war and peace — “The Apprentice: Armageddon.” I assume that Mark Burnett helped to vet the candidates.
I don’t really think we can say that show is over. And Trump’s playing the nation for fools is barely getting started.
Does Trump laugh at his misdirection and his head fakes, as when he played footsie with Al Gore on Monday of last week and then, on Wednesday, kicked him hard by naming a climate-change denier to lead the Environmental Protection Agency?
Of course he does. He laughs at all of us.
David Quammen has been one of my favorite writers since he was doing Natural Acts in Outside. Let’s check in.
The Statue of Liberty stands on a piece of federal land, but “federal” doesn’t mean it belongs to Washington. This piece of real estate, 15 precious acres known as Liberty Island, lies in Upper New York Bay just west of the state line between New York and New Jersey, but it doesn’t belong to New Jersey. … It belongs to a schoolteacher in Vermont, a coal miner in West Virginia, a waitress in Las Vegas, a tattooist in San Francisco, and to you, and to me, and to every other American citizen.
But like Benjamin Franklin said about a republic, we only get national parks if we can keep them from the people who want to dice them up and fill them with oil derricks.
Sell off the federal lands, some critics urge, or give them away to the states! Unload, transfer to local control, privatize! The 2016 Republican platform instructs Congress to divest “certain federally controlled public lands” to the states, without specifying which lands, and to amend the Antiquities Act, giving Congress and the states veto power over designation of national monuments.
Republicans aren’t stopping there. They’re not just going to press for more resource exploitation of federal lands, they’re going to work to actively roll back some national monument designations. When they vote on it, you won’t have any trouble seeing who is getting funded by energy companies.
Homer Hickam is not just the author of Rocket Boys, but a genuine steely-eyed missile man.
We’ve lost the last of the Mercury Seven astronauts, the prodigious test pilots chosen to be the first Americans to fly into space. In the 1960s, nearly every American youth could list them: Shepard, Grissom, Glenn, Carpenter, Schirra, Cooper and Slayton. …
Ironically, John Glenn, the Mercury astronaut most Americans can still name, was the quiet one. He was strong and steady and never in any manner outlandish. He touched us in a different way. There was something about that balding, red-headed Marine with his lopsided smile that just made people love him. …
Once, in 2004, while I was on a book tour in Ohio, a mutual friend in Columbus organized a dinner for me and the Glenns. ... I had chanced upon and spoken to Kennedy when he was running in the 1960 West Virginia presidential primary, but when I told Glenn about the encounter, he winced. He fumbled a response, but I could tell he really didn’t want to talk about President Kennedy, and so I changed the subject. Decades later, it seemed, the assassination of the young, charismatic president who was also his friend still caused him some discomfort and pain.
Aww, shucks. Just go read it all.