In 2014, 16.9 percent of Ohio’s voters (1,307,351 of 7,715,103) voted in our primary election.

In 2018—according to preliminary numbers—the number increased to 20.9 percent.

That sucks.

No. Seriously. That bigly sucks.

That sucks for at least a couple of reasons. First, there were important state and local issues on the ballot like State Issue 1 (which passed, yea!) and my local Issue 13 (which failed, again yea!) but there were also dozens of tax levy issues across the state that 80 percent of Ohioans decided to say whatever when it came to how much of their paychecks get yanked in taxes. Second, while 20.9 is a 20 percent bump, Republicans are already celebrating because the Blue Wave didn’t happen here and Ohio is a bellwether state.

John Cassidy, analyzing the national results in A Warning Against Democratic Complacency from This Week’s Primaries and Opinion Polls for The New Yorker, writes:

For a party that is presumed to be heading for disaster in the midterms this November, the G.O.P. had a pretty good week. Its leadership in Congress, which is looking to head off a “blue wave,” received encouraging news on three different fronts: primary results, opinion polls, and fund-raising. On Friday, Charlie Cook, the editor and publisher of the Cook Political Report, which is widely read in Washington, posted an analysis under the headline “Glimmers of Hope for the GOP.”

Before examining some of these glimmers, it is important to note that the basic equation hasn’t changed. Several factors that always play key roles in midterm elections—the President’s unpopularity, grassroots mobilization, and the historical tendency for ruling parties to suffer losses—still favor the Democratic Party, particularly in the House, where twenty-three Republicans are defending seats in districts that Hillary Clinton won. To gain control, the Democrats need to flip twenty-four seats.

But there is no room for complacency among Trump’s foes, particularly regarding the prospects in the Senate, where the electoral map strongly favors the G.O.P. Ten Democrats are facing reëlection races in states that Trump carried. The Democrats’ chances of picking up Republican seats are probably limited to four states: Arizona, Nevada, Tennessee, and Texas.

That Ohio is not on the list—just take a look at this map—is no surprise, but two races: Richard Cordray vs. Mike Dewine and
Sherrod Brown vs. Jim Renacci are going to vital and both involve statewide voters.

In the governors race, Cordray got 423,264 of the 679,738 Democratic votes cast and Dewine got 494,766 of the 827,041 Republican votes. In the senate race, Brown, running unopposed, pulled 605,448 votes and Renacci, running in a field of six, got 360,475 of the 761,032 Republican votes. Ohio Democrats have nothing to be complacent about.

Cassidy continues:

On the polling front, a new survey from CNN indicated that the Democrats’ lead in the generic congressional vote is now just three percentage points. A second survey, from Reuters/Ipsos, put the Democrats’ lead at just one point.

To be sure, these findings should be interpreted skeptically. A third survey, from The Economist/YouGov, put the Democrats’ lead at nine points, which represented an increase of six points compared to the previous survey from that pollster. Poll averages, which aggregate the results from all the recent polls, are generally more reliable. The Real Clear Politics poll average puts the Democratic lead at 6.1 percentage points; 538’s version puts it at 6.2 percentage points. Still, these figures represent a significant change from the start of the year, when the Republicans were trailing by double digits in many polls.

President Donald John Trump’s numbers are getting better, but I expect that how the talks in Korea come out paired with high gas prices—fueled in no small part by Trump’s decision to embroil the United States in Israel’s fight with Iran—could both make a huge difference in either direction come the fall.

Much is at stake for Trump, as Cassidy notes:

Facing the possibility of being impeached if the Republicans lose control of Congress, Trump surely doesn’t need any persuading about the importance of the coming elections. On Thursday night, he revved up a large crowd in Indiana, where the Democratic senator Joe Donnelly is facing a tough reëlection battle. The event provided a preview of how the Republicans will use Trump to target states and districts that he carried in 2016. In a speech that the Washington Post described as “remarkably on message—for him,” the President warned the crowd that, if Donnelly won, he and the Democrats would “raise your taxes,” “destroy your jobs,” and “knock the hell out of your border.”

As the election approaches, Trump will do a lot more of these rallies. To the extent they remind voters of his existence, it will be bad news for many G.O.P. candidates. Particularly in suburban Republican districts in states such as California, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, Trump still represents electoral poison for Republicans. That’s why so many G.O.P. incumbents have announced their retirement from politics. And it’s why a Democratic takeover of the House remains the most likely outcome in November.

As Jordan Klepper reminds us four nights a week: the fight continues.

I remember 20 April 1999 well. I remember the reaction of our office secretary, a grandmother, instantly began investigating how to arrange for the home schooling of her grandchildren. I also remember the impossibility of talking about how school shootings had been in decline for years, and were continuing to decline even after that day’s events, but to no good result.

Now, 19 years later, the shootings have continued their decline, but no one is interested. Two months ago I flagged Zaid Jilani’s piece—School Shootings Have Declined Dramatically Since the 1990s. Does It Really Make Sense to Militarize Schools? in The Intercept—to be blogged in the future. After writing IN 2018, IT’S [STILL] THE GUNS, STUPID… below, I realized I needed to get Jilani’s work out there. He writes:

Schools are increasingly becoming fortresses: packed with metal detectors, police officers, and other measures designed to counter the threat of a school shooter. Six states now even require mandatory active shooter drills.

In the wake of the tragedy of the mass shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida, many local, state, and federal officials are responding by promoting an expansion of these measures — some, including the president, are even calling for arming teachers. One Democratic member of Congress in Georgia even suggested posting the National Guard outside of schools.

But ideally, policy should be proportionate to the danger faced. And that leaves us with a question: Are schools actually increasingly dangerous?

New research released this week by Northeastern University researchers shows that they aren’t.

Criminology professor James Alan Fox and doctoral student Emma Fridel charted the path of mass shootings and school shootings over three decades, from 1992 to 2015. They used a variety of government and nonprofit data sources, including data collected by the FBI, USA Today, and Everytown for Gun Safety, an organization that advocates for gun reform. Their research is the basis of a chapter that will be published in an upcoming book on school violence, The Wiley Handbook on Violence in Education.

They found that schools are actually increasingly free of mass shootings, which they define as a shooting in which four or more individuals are killed by firearms. “There is not an epidemic of school shootings,” Fox said in a statement about the research, noting that there were four times as many children shot and killed in schools in the early 1990s as today.

More children are killed every year drowning in pools or in bicycle accidents than in school shootings, Fox added. Over the past 25 years, around 10 students per year were killed in gunfire at school. To put that into perspective, in the fall of 2017, around 56 million students attended public and private public elementary and secondary schools.

What Wiley doesn’t say, at least here, is that what changed in 1999 was that a mass school shooting happened to white students. Just as no one paid attention to the crack crisis or the meth crisis or the opioid crisis until they moved out of communities of color and started taking down white folk, so to was the number of students of color dying from gunshots ignored prior to Columbine.

What changed is that people, and their children, who look like us started dying.

And that (wrongly) makes all the difference.

The Craig’s list ad above appeared at the end of March. The ad has since expired, but given recent changes in our president’s legal team, I have to wonder if Rudolph William Louis Giuliani, Emmet Flood or any of the other new hires, read the ad?

While the team assembled by Special Counsel Robert Mueller has steadfastly progressed in the current investigation—remember, Kenneth Starr took 49 months to reach his conclusions—the president makes trades like an owner of a Cleveland sport’s franchise.

Betsy Woodruff and Asawin Suebsaeng, writing for The Daily Beast, explore the chaos in How Jay Sekulow Keeps Surviving Trump’s Legal Team Purges.

When it comes to tumult, President Donald Trump’s legal team has known its fair share.

Less than a year ago, New York attorney Marc Kasowitz was helming the team—and making headlines for telling a stranger who emailed him about Rachel Maddow’s show to “Watch your back, bitch.” He departed July 21, 2017.

In the months since then, lawyers have come and gone. John Dowd, a veteran white-collar defense attorney, came aboard as lead lawyer for the president on June 16, 2017, and departed on March 22 of this year. Ty Cobb, the White House lawyer tasked with overseeing document production and interviews for special counsel Robert Mueller, is set to leave later this month. And husband-and-wife pair Victoria Toensing and Joseph DiGenova were on the cusp of joining the president’s legal team until, well, they weren’t.

But through all that, one person has remained a consistent presence: Jay Sekulow, a lawyer best known for championing social-conservative causes at the Supreme Court.

And now he has to deal with Giuliani.

We can’t come up with decent textbooks or pay a living wage to teachers but we can talk about buying guns for teachers and paying those willing to pack a salary bonus in addition to the $2.7 billion to buy essentially worthless school security services and products? This is what happens when irrational fear grips a nation and Ollie North is the new president of the National Rifle Racist Association.

Why do I say that the school-security services and products are essentially worthless? Consider, the most protected, secure and surveilled places in our country are our prisons, yet we can’t keep drugs, cellphones and other contraband away from the inmates. If we can’t keep people safe in the oppressive environment of a prison, why would we even begin to think that we can make our schools secure and still make learning possible?

And what makes schools special—other than media attention—anyway. We don’t talk about keeping movie theaters, sporting events, plazas or churches secure in the same way.

But should we? How much money are we willing to divert from a space’s intended purpose for an illusion of safety?

Consider our public libraries, our real temples of learning. I spend most of my working day tutoring students in public libraries. During school hours parents and grandparents are there with their young charges and after school the tables are filled with teenagers working alone or in groups.

Talk about your target-rich environment.

John Castelluccio, writing in Librarians train to keep stacks safe, secure for the Gloucester (Massachusetts) News, explains:

Two months ago, Jeffrey Yao walked into the lobby of the Winchester Public Library and allegedly stabbed 22-year-old Deane Kenny Stryker to death with a hunting knife.

The incident has, understandably, left many people shaken and on edge—a violation of a public space that should be safe. There have similar violent and disturbing incidents at other libraries across the country.

The grim reality, said Rockport Public Library Director Cindy Grove, is that, as a public space, the library cannot guarantee patrons’ or staff members’ safety, but there are measures it can take.

“We really want the public to be aware that it’s something we’re aware of,” Grove said. “There’s no guarantee of safety, but we’re doing what we can.”

To that end, the library is hosting a workshop by library security manager and author Warren Graham—widely considered an expert in the field—on Tuesday for a day-long training event for North Shore librarians.

No amount of vigilance or security can make us safer—we’re never safe, that’s just life—but the sensible implementation of restrictions on gun ownership (including the ban of all semi-automatic weapons) will move us in the right direction.

I would like to think that someone was making a lame attempt at irony when they suggested disgraced Marine officer and member of President Ronald Reagan’s National Security Council advisor Oliver North to head The National Rifle Association and that when head’s around the table started nodding in agreement, he simply couldn’t figure out how to claw back the joke. But I know that that isn’t what happened.

Jon Schwarz, reporting in Oliver North Worked With Cocaine Traffickers to Arm Terrorists. Now He’ll Be President of the NRA for The Intercept, lays out why this is a really, really bad idea.

The National Rifle Association has always been clear about drugs: They’re terrifying.

Last year, NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre darkly warned that members of drug gangs “are infiltrating law enforcement and even the military.” In 2013, LaPierre proclaimed that “Latin American drug gangs have invaded every city of significant size in the United States,” and are a key part of the “hellish world” that awaits us in the future. When Charlton Heston was president of the NRA in the 1990s, he declared that regular Americans would soon be besieged by 10,000 drug dealers freed from prison by the Clinton administration.

It seems odd, then, that the next president of the NRA will soon be Oliver North, who spent years in the 1980s working together with large-scale cocaine traffickers and protecting a notorious narco-terrorist from the rest of the U.S. government.

Odd? Yes. But in our current fake-news reality, not enough to even cause a single eyebrow to rise.

This reality about North has been largely covered up, first by North himself and then by Fox News and the passage of time. Thirty years later, it’s been almost totally forgotten. But the facts remain genuinely appalling.

North was an active-duty Marine when he joined the Reagan administration’s National Security Council in 1981. One of Reagan’s top priorities was organizing and funding the Contras, a guerrilla military force, to overthrow the revolutionary socialist Sandinista government of Nicaragua. But the Contras engaged in extensive, gruesome terrorism against Nicaraguan civilians. Congress gradually reduced and then eliminated appropriations supporting them, leading the Reagan administration to secretly search for money elsewhere.

According to the report from a later congressional investigation, North was put in charge of this operation, which participants dubbed “The Enterprise.”

I expect that NRA members, like the evangelicals who have turned a blind eye to the sinful behavior of their president, will ignore any and all mentions of past bad behavior because, well, they like to shoot the fuck out of shit and somebody has to be armed to protect white women from the zombies niggers.

Buster smelled a troll—aka racoon—and he was very determined to have his way!

This should be a slideshow, but after installing and deleting three different plugins, I gave up.

My pleasure reading of late has been the oeuvre of Walter Mosley. I just finished the second book in his Easy Rawlins’ collection—The Red Death and on page 244 I found this passage where Easy, speaking with Jackson Blue, asks:

“You ever hear of a group called the African Migration, Blue?”

“Sure, ain’t you ever seen it? Down on Avalon, near White Horse Bar and Grill.”

I had seen the place. It used to be a hardware store, but the owner died and the heirs sold it to a real estate broker who rented it out to storefront churches.

“I thought that was just another church.”

“Naw, Easy. These is Marcus Garvey people. Back to Africa. You know, like W.E.B. Du Bois.”

“Who?”

“Du Bois. He’s a famous Negro, Easy. Almost a hundred years old. He always writin’ ’bout gettin’ back t’Africa. You prob’ly ain’t never heard’a him ’cause he’s a com’unist. They don’t teach ya ’bout com’unists.”

“So how do you know, if they don’t teach it?”

“Lib’ary got its do’ open, man. Ain’t nobody tellin’ you not to go.”

There aren’t too many moments in your life when you really learn something. Jackson taught me something that night in John’s, something I’d never forget.

But I didn’t have time to discuss the political nature of information right then. I had to find out what was happening, and it was the African Migration that was my next stop.

Now, before someone—like my students do—jumps on the whole “See? We told you the Internet makes us smart!” rationalization, the Internet is like a library where someone dug a big ol’ hole and backed trucks loaded with books, CDs, tapes, photocopies and handwritten notes up to the hole and just started shoveling. Libraries aren’t perfect, but they are curated and, to a lesser extent, juried. Sure, there’s a certain amount of woo-woo even in a library, but the ratio of fact-to-woo must be much much higher in a library.

Jackson’s words of wisdom should be blazoned in every classroom. Carved on the arches of every institution of learning. School children should chant Blue’s words each morning instead of wasting their time on prayer or the pledge of allegiance.

That man keeps it a hundred.

Take that Eu Lei, you troll…

At the end of chapter eight of Black Reconstruction In America, Transubstantiation Of A Poor White, W.E.B. Du Bois placed the second stanza of (an anti-epigraph of sorts) from The Falconer of God:

My wild soul waited on as falcons hover.
I beat the reedy fens as I trampled past.
      I heard the mournful loon
      In the marsh beneath the moon
And then, with feathery thunder, the bird of my desire
      Broke from the cover
      Flashing silver fire.
High up among the stars I saw his pinions spire.
      The pale clouds gazed aghast
As my falcon dropped upon him, and gript and held him fast.

—William Rose Benét, 1886-1950

Benét wrote The Falconer Of God on the eve of what would become The Great War. The son and grandson of military men, Benét himself never served, but his son, James Walker Benét, would grow up to serve in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.

As I read the poem I’m uncertain why Du Bois selected this stanza for this chapter. Did he see substantiation in Benét’s work? Perhaps.

[Update on 10 May: In reading Walter Mosley’s The Red Death this week I came across this reference to Du Bois:

“Naw, Easy. These is Marcus Garvey people. Back to Africa. You know, like W.E.B. Du Bois.”

“Who?”

“Du Bois. He’s a famous Negro, Easy. Almost a hundred years old. He always writin’ ’bout gettin’ back t’Africa. You prob’ly ain’t never heard’a him ’cause he’s a com’unist. They don’t teach ya ’bout com’unists.”

Yep, in America, the only people worse than the socialists are the communists.]

[Updated 9 May]

So, just the headlines—for now—because life is rushing past…

[Updated 11 May] Yeah, Michael Cohen may be just a cheap very expensive New York thug lawyer with really good marketing skills—and a not-so-good education—when it comes to whoring his access to President Donald John Trump.

I’m thinking that Trump is wishing he’d hired a better class of attorney after news of millions in cash surfaced. Paul Blest, writing in Michael Cohen Is Just a Web of Corruption for Splinter, reported:

Stormy Daniels’ attorney Michael Avenatti dropped a bombshell today: Trump fixer Michael Cohen allegedly took $500,000 from a Russian oligarch over the course of eight payments made between January and August 2017.

It’s not clear how Avenatti obtained the information. The top of the report includes this disclaimer: “Note: This information is true and correct as of the date of this Preliminary Report of Findings (May 8, 2018) to the best of our knowledge. Additional information is being obtained on a near daily basis. The below information and findings, therefore, are subject to change.”

The Daily Beast confirmed the Vekselberg payments in its own story. “How the fuck did Avenatti find out?” a source reportedly asked the Daily Beast. And according to CNN, the office of special counsel Robert Mueller has interviewed Vekselberg in connection with the payments.

According to Avenatti, the payments were made through the private equity firm Columbus Nova, whose CEO is Vekselberg’s American cousin Andrew Intrater, to an LLC that Cohen set up, Essential Consultants. Essential Consultants was also the LLC through which he paid Daniels $130,000 prior to the 2016 election, as a hush money payment about her alleged affair with Donald Trump. (Columbus Nova was also previously a minority investor in Gawker Media Group, which owned several Gizmodo Media Group properties before its bankruptcy in 2016.)

Yeah, $500,000 is much worse than $130,000, But not nearly half as bad as $1,200,000.

[Updated 9 May] Blest followed up the story on Wednesday with Novartis Says It Paid Michael Cohen $1.2 Million For Basically Nothing.

Then, the company reportedly signed Cohen to a one-year, $1.2 million contract in February of 2017. STAT’s source, identified only as a Novartis employee “familiar with the matter,” described the deal as the company hoping Cohen could help it through issues such as the ACA, tax reform, and “navigating reimbursement challenges for medicines.”

“We were trying to find an inroad into the administration. Cohen promised access to not just Trump, but also the circle around him,” the employee told STAT. “It was almost as if we were hiring him as a lobbyist.” You don’t say!

Apparently, the meeting did not go well.

In March 2017, a group of Novartis employees, mostly from the government affairs and lobbying teams, met with Cohen in New York to discuss specific issues and strategies. But the meeting was a disappointment, the insider explained, and the Novartis squad left with the impression that Cohen and Essential Consultants—the firm controlled by Cohen that Novartis was making payments to—may not be able to deliver.

“At first, it all sounded impressive, but toward the end of the meeting, everyone realized this was a probably a slippery slope to engage him. So they decided not to really engage Cohen for any activities after that,” the employee continued. Rather than attempt to cancel the contract, the company allowed it to lapse early in 2018 and not run the risk of ticking off the president. “It might have caused anger,” this person said.

You read that right: Novartis says they paid Cohen $100,000 a month for nothing because they were scared of pissing off the president.

[Updated 9 May] The same day, Adam Davidson, reporting in, The Michael Cohen Revelations Are a Crash Course in Shady Corporate Entities for The New Yorker, wrote:

After the news came out, on Tuesday, that Columbus Nova, an American company linked to the Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg, gave Michael Cohen, President Trump’s lawyer, a half million dollars last year, a lawyer for the company issued a statement that said, “Columbus Nova is a management company solely owned and controlled by Americans. . . . Neither Viktor Vekselberg nor anyone else other than Columbus Nova’s owners, were involved in the decision to hire Cohen or provided funding for his engagement.” So who are these owners? I happened to have a phone number for Reinhard Freimuth, a managing director at Columbus Nova’s financial-management arm, so I called him up to ask. Who owns Columbus Nova? “I haven’t got a clue,” Freimuth said. He pointed me to the lawyer’s statement.

The fact is that Columbus Nova’s lawyer is using the phrase “owned and controlled” to mean something more narrow and technical than what we normally think of as ownership and control. “Think about us as his property manager,” Freimuth said. “Like a family office.” Viktor Vekselberg, the founder of a company called the Renova Group, is one of Russia’s richest men, with a multibillion-dollar fortune made in the oil and metal industries. It has become common for very rich people to have something called a family office, essentially a company tasked with managing and investing their money. Columbus Nova, which is based in New York City, functions in a similar way for Vekselberg. It is a company technically owned by others but which looks after money owned and controlled in large part—if not entirely—by Vekselberg and his family. (Columbus Nova’s president, Andrew Intrater, is Vekselberg’s cousin.) It’s the kind of clever corporate structure that allows a lawyer, at a crisis moment such as this, to say truthfully that the company is not owned and controlled by the man who owns and controls everything of value within the firm. (Columbus Nova’s lawyers did not respond to a request for comment.)

Great lawyers are masters of weasel words. Just ask President William Jefferson Clinton.

[Updated 9 May] The same day, Amy Davidson Sorkin, also writing for The New Yorker dives deeper still in Is Michael Cohen’s Essential Consultants L.L.C. a Slush Fund for Donald Trump? and asks the simplest of questions: Who is paying whom?

Sometimes the most convoluted question, when it comes to the financial dealings that swirl around President Donald Trump, is the most basic: Who is paying whom? The follow-up, which can be even more troubling, is: And for what? These questions arose, again, on Tuesday night, in a series of revelations that began with a tweet from Michael Avenatti, the lawyer representing Stephanie Clifford, the adult-film actress and director known as Stormy Daniels, in her fight to void a hush agreement about her relationship with Trump. The revelations involved Essential Consultants, a Delaware limited liability company that Michael Cohen, Trump’s personal attorney, had set up as a vehicle to pay Clifford a hundred and thirty thousand dollars. As it turns out, companies such as A.T. & T., Novartis, Korea Aerospace Industries, and Columbus Nova—whose largest client is a company controlled by the Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg, who is under U.S. sanctions—had made payments to Essential Consultants adding up to more than four million dollars. There does not appear to be any legitimate business rationale for these payments (the emphasis there being on the word “legitimate”). In short, the account that was depleted to pay for Clifford’s silence was filled up again to pay—whom?

Put another way, did the Russians and A.T. & T. inadvertently help to pay for Clifford’s silence? Tuesday’s revelations felt a bit like the moment, in November, 1986, when it was revealed that the money from the Reagan Administration’s secret sale of weapons to Iran (in the interest of freeing American hostages) had been diverted to, of all people, the Nicaraguan Contras.

The companies have offered varying explanations for their payments, none of them persuasive. A.T. & T. said that it wanted “insights” into the Trump Administration; that is not something you pay the President’s personal attorney to give you, under any circumstances. (Did the company expect the lowdown on Trump’s next moves? That would possibly be a violation of attorney-client privilege.) It is particularly not something you pay for when, as was the case with A.T. & T., you are trying to get Cohen’s client’s other subordinates to approve a merger. That might be topped by Korea Aerospace’s statement saying that it had turned to Essential Consultants for advice on meeting “accounting standards on production costs.” Korea Aerospace, alongside Lockheed Martin, is currently competing for a defense contract.

I’ve not heard this yet mentioned, but I have to wonder at what point the emollients clause will again raise its ugly head.

[Updated 10 May] As the drip, drip, drip becomes a steady stream, Michael Harriot, writing in Did Michael Cohen Get $600,000 From AT&T so Trump Would Kill Net Neutrality and OK a Merger? for The Root, connects more dots:

Don’t you find it funny that AT&T paid Michael Cohen’s shell company, Essential Consultants, $50,000 per month for all of 2017? Even though the $600,000 is 3.5 percent of all the money the huge corporation spends on lobbying, AT&T said Essential Consultants “did no legal or lobbying work for us, and the contract ended in December 2017,” according to the Washington Post.

Now, we know that Cohen is not a lobbyist, and he only had three clients, one of whom was Donald Trump. We also know that AT&T, as the No. 1 internet provider in the U.S., had a vested interest in dismantling net neutrality because the company stood to make a fortune if the regulations were nixed.

Now, I’m not accusing AT&T of bribing anyone, but I find it funny that the telecom behemoth began paying the money to Trump’s fixer, Cohen, the not-lobbyist, two months after AT&T announced that it would try to merge with Time Warner, the second-largest internet provider in America.

Again, I’m not trying to start anything, but Cohen, Trump’s fixer, who, AT&T said, did nothing for the company, began receiving these payments in January 2017, the month Trump took office. Now, it’s probably a hilarious coincidence that January 2017 was also the same month that Trump nominated Ajit Pai to head the Federal Communications Commission.

[Updated 11 May] Finally, for now—remember, Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr’s investigation ran 49 months (August 1994 to September 1998) and Special Counsel Robert Mueller only began work in May of 2017—Susan B. Glasser, writing for The New Yorker explores The Price of Getting Inside Trump’s Head. She writes:

On Easter Sunday, Chris Christie, the former New Jersey governor, was holding forth in the green room at ABC News in New York before going on the air. A friend of Donald Trump from well before the 2016 campaign, Christie had run against Trump in the Republican primaries, then dropped out and travelled around the country on behalf of his onetime rival. Eventually, he went on to become the chief of Trump’s transition team, although, when Trump surprised everyone by winning the election, Christie was pushed out in favor of Vice-President-elect Mike Pence. These days, Christie is once again a regular on Trump’s call list, one of the outside advisers with whom the President frequently consults in lieu of a more conventional White House staff. Trump has even been known to call and kibbitz with Christie over Sunday-show appearances like the one he was about to make.

In other words, Christie knows Trump a lot better than the rest of us do. As I and a couple of other guests peppered Christie that morning at ABC with questions about how to understand Trump (the latest tumult included his firing, by tweet, of the Secretary of State, ousting the Veterans Affairs Secretary, and deciding to name the unvetted White House physician to the post instead), he interrupted in frustration. Christie argued that pesky journalists and amateur Trump watchers were always getting the President wrong, making it out as if there were some “Machiavellian” grand plan by Trump that could explain many otherwise seemingly unexplainable moves. “There is no strategy,” he exclaimed.

Christie may not be the White House chief of staff, or Attorney General, or any of the other jobs he once aspired to in a Trump Administration (and his prospects remain dim, so long as his rival Jared Kushner, the President’s son-in-law, stays in the White House; Christie, as a federal prosecutor, helped send Kushner’s father, Charles, to jail). But, as far as I’m concerned, he belongs on the short list of reliable Trump decoders, at least when he avoids partisan spin and transparently self-serving plugs. Others have their own favored Trump whisperers helping to make sense of this President. Administrations have always needed their interpreters to the outside world, but never more than this one, where Trump explodes orderly decision-making processes, routinely countermands or bypasses his staff, and just generally operates as if his is a government of one. “I’m the only one that matters,” he proclaimed in response to a question, last fall, about the many vacancies in the State Department.

Meanwhile, we all have 12 June to look forward to.

Damon Young, writing in Making Donald Glover the ‘Anti-Kanye’ Is Gross and Wrong and Will Backfire, so Please Don’t for The Root, has this to say:

With his last performance Saturday night, [Donald Glover] debuted “This Is America.” We were each impressed with the song, and none of us knew that he’d also just dropped a video for that song. I didn’t know until the next morning, when conversations about it dominated each social media platform to which I belong.

The video, which I finally got around to watching in full Sunday evening, is … something. It’s one of those pieces of art whose primary purpose of existing is to theorize about it and its creator(s). I’ve seen, over the last 24 hours, a strange and somewhat tone-deaf call for people not to provide written commentary on it yet, as if it’s an artifact that can only be considered and assessed with the most delicate of hands and the most learned of sensibilities. (And as if there aren’t people whose incomes are at least partially dependent on developing and publishing quick thoughts and arguments about the things people are thinking and arguing about.)

“This Is America,” however, was created specifically for the take economy. You do not build and release a thing like that if you do not want people to be engaged with it. And of the myriad takes I’ve seen so far, about Glover and about that song and that video, the only truly terrible one is that he is now some sort of anti-Kanye West. Or, perhaps, the gift for making it through the Yeezy muck. The pot of gold at the end of Kanye’s shit-stained rainbow.

And therein, for Young and others, lies the problem. Young continues:

I understand, I guess, the compulsion for this sort of juxtaposition. Between Atlanta and his music, Glover’s work could have an antiseptic quality, cleansing us of Kanye’s descent into anti-blackness and celebratory idiocy. But at the very least, this comparison fails because it reduces Glover’s work to that of a palate cleanser. And also implied is that only one of these types of men can exist concurrently.

Mostly, though, this belief is dangerous because of how it idealizes Donald Glover, making him this paragon of nuanced depictions of and love for blackness, while Kanye exists as our fallen angel.

This type of exaltation invites a scrutiny into his work and his person—a search for an unimpeachable blackness that he cannot live up to. Those familiar with Glover’s entire career know that while he has undoubtedly evolved into whatever it is that he is now, who he was before this was (justifiably) accused of loitering in the same anti-blackness that Kanye sits in now.

By bringing this up, I’m not suggesting that the 2018 Donald Glover should still be regarded as the 2010 Donald Glover. Instead, I’m just asking us to let him be him instead of St. Donald, here to deliver us from Calabasas. However tempting it is, don’t perform this racial canonization that he—and anyone else who’s similarly idealized—will undoubtedly fall short of.

I know this is America, but let’s try not to do what America encourages us to do.

Donald Glover as Childish Gambino on Saturday Night Live …

Lyricalhub offered one interpretation…

Lyrics and more commentary…

The Assault on Intelligence: American National Security in an Age of Lies…

Self-medicating is seldom a good idea and deciding, because your medical condition appears to have gone away, to stop taking your medication can have disastrous results. Government regulations are like that as has been documented for more than a century. Corporations, because they only value profit, are really, really bad at self-regulating. Just take a look at the meat processing, pharmaceutical and automotive industries.

When faced with a threat to humanity, a corporation will always balance potential losses when deciding risk.

Nicholas Lemann, writing in The Dangers of Undoing Dodd-Frank for The New Yorker, explains:

In the early days of the New Deal, the federal government set up an elaborate array of controls over the financial system. For half a century before that, the system crashed regularly; for half a century afterward, it didn’t crash at all. Effective precautions created the illusion that they were not necessary, and, little by little, the government drastically scaled back what Democrats as well as Republicans had come to view as an outmoded set of constraints on banks’ size, scope, and assumption of risk. Conventional wisdom is a powerful force. Even on the verge of the 2008 crisis, almost no one believed that a collapse of the entire system was possible. Dodd-Frank, by placing unregulated new markets under government supervision and by requiring big banks to behave less riskily, reversed the swing of the pendulum.

Wall Street and Bankers gamble with other people’s money. Imagine how you might act in a casino is you got a packet of hundreds when you walked through the door and were told that you got to keep the winnings?

Yeah, that’s how they think.

Be sure to visit: Hillaryclintonillness; Giuliani-Security and Giuliani2024.

There is good news today about Cyntoia Brown.

Christine Hauser, reporting in Cyntoia Brown, Trafficking Victim Serving Life Sentence for Murder, Will Get Clemency Hearing for the New York Times, writes:

Cyntoia Brown, a Nashville woman who is serving a life sentence for killing a man who picked her up for sex while she was being trafficked as a teenager, will receive a hearing that could lead to her release, officials said on Thursday.

The clemency hearing, set for May 23, will be the first for Ms. Brown, 30, since she was sentenced nearly 13 years ago, said Melissa McDonald, a spokeswoman for the state Board of Probation and Parole.

The board, appointed by the governor, will hear Ms. Brown’s petition and decide whether to recommend that she be released from the Tennessee Prison for Women, where she is serving a life sentence for fatally shooting Johnny Allen, 43, in 2004. “It is up to the governor to decide the process after we make our recommendation,” Ms. McDonald said. “The governor may act on it or choose not to act.”

Brown’s case took a turn toward the light when Kim Kardashian became involved. Angela Helm, reporting in With Cases of 2 Jailed Black Women: Cyntoia Brown and Alice Johnson for The Root, explains:

Look at Kim Kardashian jumping in with tangible help for black women in trouble.

According to reports, the famous-for-being-famous celeb has hired high-powered Los Angeles criminal attorney Shawn Holley (who was on the same O.J. Simpson “dream team” as Kardashian’s late father, Robert Kardashian) to help in the cases of two black women who have been railroaded by the system and whose cases have been highlighted by social media.

Holley said that Kardashian enlisted her services for support in the cases of Alice Johnson, a 62-year-old grandmother who has served 21 years for a nonviolent drug conviction, and also of 29-year-old Cyntoia Brown, who has spent more than 10 years in prison for killing a man who kept her as a sex slave starting when she was 16 years old.

What Kardashian’s involvement, and the turn in Brown’s case, most clearly illustrate is the American justice system works for those who can afford the best attorneys. Without the infusion of cash Brown, like thousands of others currently in prison, would have no hope.

*Or, as Donald Trump Jr. tweeted about his daughter:

I’m going to take half of Chloe’s candy tonight & give it to some kid who sat at home. It’s never to early to teach her about socialism.

So, I sometimes find stories in the weirdest places. Like really weird. Like News Of The Weird, weird. This morning I read The Continuing Crisis from February 11th:

Birds nesting near natural gas compressors have been found to suffer symptoms similar to PTSD in humans, according to researchers at the Florida Museum of Natural History, and noise pollution has been named the culprit. The Washington Post reported the team studied birds in the Rattlesnake Canyon Habitat Management Area in New Mexico, which is uninhabited by humans but does contain natural gas wells and compression stations that constantly emit a low-frequency hum. The steady noise was linked to abnormal levels of stress hormones, and the usually hardy western bluebirds in the area were found to be smaller and displayed bedraggled feathers. “The body is just starting to break down,” explained stress physiologist Christopher Lowry.

The story caught my eye because of a recent rude awakening for residents near Wooster, Ohio:

Residents in two Northeast Ohio counties were startled out of sleep early Sunday morning by a scary, loud noise that lasted about an hour.

“It was a huge, tremendous sound, as in a jet plane in my front yard or 100 Huey helicopters,” said Debbie Bliss who lives on Bell Road in rural Ashland County. “I didn’t know if I should pack and leave or stay and see what happened, but you obviously can’t pack up farm animals and be gone in ten minutes.”

The sound started after 4 a.m. and continued until after 5 a.m.

It could be heard by people a few miles away from the Wayne/Ashland County line and many of then dialed 911.

“It’s humongous,” said one caller. “You can hear it all the way, it’s coming down somewhere by Old (route) 30, which is a couple of miles from me.”

The noise came from a compressor station run by Texas company Energy Transfer.

The company is leading the Rover Pipeline, a $4.2 billion project that will transport natural gas through dual 42″ pipelines in Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia.

The story began with Sarah Kaplan, reporting in Some birds are so stressed by noise pollution it looks like they have PTSD for the Washington Post, who wrote:

The bluebird didn’t realize what she was getting herself into when she chose her new home, about 75 yards from a natural gas compressor. It was only as the days and weeks wore on that the low whine of machinery started to take a toll. It was harder to hear the sounds of approaching predators, or even the normal noises of the surrounding world, so she had to maintain constant vigilance. Her stress hormone levels became skewed; her health deteriorated. She couldn’t resettle elsewhere, because she had a nest full of hatchlings to tend. Yet her chicks suffered too, growing up small and scantily feathered — if they survived at all.

Scientists couldn’t ask the bluebird what she was feeling. But when they sampled the bird’s blood, as part of a study of 240 nesting sites surrounding natural gas treatment facilities in northern New Mexico, they found she showed the same physiological symptoms as a human suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.

“Noise is causing birds to be in a situation where they’re chronically stressed… and that has really huge health consequences for birds and their offspring,” said Rob Guralnick, associate curator of biodiversity informatics at the Florida Museum of Natural History.

That bluebird is, of course, a avian early warning system, a metaphorical canary in the mine. While the Ohio residents had their rude awakening, I’m not aware of any human studies similar to Guralnick’s paper. At what point do we discover that a human generation has been damaged on the altar of fossil fues?

*And that CompuServe email address…

Back in 1979 I was 30 seconds away from firing what might have been the first shot in an American-Iranian war. There were layers of command above me—the Captain Theodore Almstedt, the CIC and weapons officers and whomever the captain reported to that day—but I was the after-battery engagement controller with my finger on the trigger in the Gulf of Oman. The birds, thankfully, never left the rails.

President James Earl Carter was in the oval office that day. Maybe he knew what was happening, maybe he was briefed later. I don’t know, but successive presidents—Reagan to Trump—have had to think about the future radical regime we created when President Dwight David Eisenhower set a plan in motion to remove the democratically elected prime minister of Iran and strengthen the monarchical rule of the Shah: Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.

President Donald John Trump and his minions—nearly 40 years later—want to pull the trigger.

Nader, writing in Wake Up to Trump, Distraction and War with Iran, explains:

In mid-May, super-war hawks Donald J. Trump (worried about the Mueller investigation), John Bolton, Trump’s new unconfirmed national security advisor, and new Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, are likely to pull out of the Iran nuclear accord. This would open the way for Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his Congressional allies to push for armed conflict with Iran.

“Don’t do it,” declare our allies, Britain, France, and Germany—signatories to the Iran accord along with China and Russia. “Don’t do it,” say former secretaries of state and secretaries of defense from both Republican and Democratic administrations. “Don’t do it,” says Trump’s own Secretary of Defense, Jim Mattis, and Trump’s chief of staff, General John Kelly.

“Don’t do it,” say outspoken former top Israeli national security Continue Reading »

Andy Cush, reporting in Man Picks Fight With Protest Sign and Loses for Spin, explains:

Yesterday was May Day, which meant that groups of left-leaning demonstrators took to the streets across the world in support of workers’ rights. In Seattle, according to local media, the May Day march attracted hundreds of people, including a faction of “Proud Boys,” the far-right men’s group that Gavin McInnes founded after he was triggered by a song from a children’s movie. Despite the conflicting interests and a heavy riot police presence, the demonstrations were reportedly peaceful, and only one person was arrested, for throwing a rock at an Amazon building.

The most brutal occurrence of the day, then, was probably the merciless heckling directed at one counter-protester in a “Patriot Prayer” t-shirt and fingerless gloves who tried to tear up a rainbow-colored sign that read “In the name of humanity, we refuse to accept a fascist America.”

The sign was evidently stronger than it looked, and the guy had a hell of a time trying to break it. (It’s like it was a bundle of sticks, or something.) Watching his repeated failure in a video captured at the scene is somewhat cathartic, but the real joy comes from a woman who stands off camera and shouts mock encouragement at him: “Do it for the boys! They’re not proud of you right now!”

Best Comment on the video: Incel proud boy vs. Chad paper?…

And, of course, Chad wins. :)

*Or follow Gibb’s Rule No. 9…