Month: May 2017

Saturday Night at the Movies



Original sin: The Student (**½), Buster’s Mal Heart (***), The Dinner (*½)

By Dennis Hartley

In my 2008 review of Larry Charles and Bill Maher’s documentary Religulous, I wrote:

“Logic” is the antithesis to any manner of fundamentalist belief. Setting off on a quest to deconstruct fundamental religious belief, armed solely with logic and convincing yourself that you are going to somehow make sense of it all, ironically seems like some kind of nutty fundamentalist belief in and of itself.

Funnily enough, this is the conundrum at the heart of Russian writer-director Kirill Serebrennikov’s somber drama The Student. In this particular narrative, you could say that “fundamentalist belief” is a high schooler named Venya (Pyoter Skvorstov), and “logic” is his biology teacher (Lidiya Tkacheva). In fact, nearly every character in this stagey piece walks around with “I am a metaphor!” tattooed on their forehead; I was not surprised when credits revealed it was adapted from a play (by Marius von Mayenburg).

Venya is a brooding fellow who skulks about the halls, avoiding eye contact with any of his fellow students. He appears taciturn as well; that is, until he refuses to participate in co-ed swimming for P.E., citing it goes against his religion. His mother (Yuliya Aug) is called in for a conference, and it’s clear that she has become exasperated with her son’s obstinate behavior as of late; fueled by a sudden literalist fanaticism for Christian dogma.

The school’s deeply religious principal is happy to accommodate Venya’s request for a deferral. This emboldens the young man to become ever more vocal and disruptive, to the particular chagrin of his free-spirited biology teacher, who finds herself more and more on the defensive as Venya repeatedly hijacks her normally democratic class discussions.

Venya’s non-stop preachiness and self-righteous scolding is off-putting to classmates, with the exception of shy and soft-spoken Grigoriy (Aleksandr Gorchilin). Grigoriy is an outsider himself; mostly due to feeling self-conscious about a pronounced limp, which makes him a frequent target for bullying. Venya makes an attempt to “heal” Grigoriy, which fails. Undeterred, Grigoriy offers to become his “first disciple”. Grigoriy’s devotion is not necessarily motivated by spirituality, leading to fateful misinterpretations.

I was reminded of John Huston’s 1979 comedy-drama Wise Blood and Peter Medak’s 1972 satire The Ruling Class; although it lacks the black humor of the former and irony of the latter. What it does have is intensity; perhaps a bit too much, as it threatens at times to collapse under the weighty mantle of its protagonist’s martyr complex. Still…its central message rings clear and true: a blind devotion to fundamentalism rarely ends well.

My favorite bit of dialog from the 1965 film A Thousand Clowns goes thusly:

Murray: Nick, in a moment you are going to see a horrible thing. 

Nick: What’s that? 

Murray: People going to work.

Yes, it is a horrible thing. Drudgery, that is. And unless you were born with a silver spoon in your mouth, work, sleep, eat, reproduce, die is pretty much the plan. Okay, that came off sounding a little grimmer than I intended. Let’s say it’s the human condition. Lives of quiet desperation, and all that entails. Oh, dear. That doesn’t help either, does it?

I’m sure most wage slaves, if asked, still dream of flouting convention (like Murray) and dropping out of the rat race altogether. But it’s usually academic; pragmatism dictates that it’s best to sigh wistfully and leave the daydreaming to Walter Mitty. Just accept your lot, enjoy your 2 or 3 weeks a year of vacation time and remain chained to that desk.

Besides, an idle mind is the devil’s playground, right?

You could say that writer-director Sarah Adina Smith’s enigmatic thriller Buster’s Mal Heart takes place in the devil’s playground of an idle mind. Or does it? We’re fairly sure we know “who” the protagonist is. Or do we? You see, my dilemma here is that this is one of those films that is very difficult to synopsize at any length without risking spoilers.

I can tell you this much: Rami Malek (star of USA’s Mr. Robot) plays the eponymous character. Buster is one of those wage slaves I was talking about, holding down the midnight shift as a hotel concierge. He appears sleep-deprived, but it’s a living. Besides, he has his loving wife (Kate Lyn Sheil) and toddler daughter to take care of. He seems “happy” enough with his life…in the same way a monkey in a cage seems “happy”, as long as he has a tire to play with and a supply of bananas. But Buster has his dreams, too.

Or does he? Because that’s only one “version” of Buster. I could tell you more, but…

Suffice it to say that what ensues is sort of a hybrid of The Shining and Lost Highway, with a dash of Fight Club and a smidge of Dark City (i.e., file under ‘mind fuck’). This is the sophomore effort from Smith; and while her film is (obviously) not 100% original in conception, it is impressively stylish and atmospheric in execution. Malek and Sheil give good performances, with a quirky supporting turn by DJ Qualls as ‘The Last Free Man’ (don’t ask, don’t tell). If you’re in a mood to expect the unexpected, give this one a peek.

In my 2012 review of the French dramedy Little White Lies, I wrote:

In 1976, a Swiss ensemble piece called Jonah, Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000 unwittingly kick-started a Boomer-centric “midlife crisis” movie subgenre that I call The Group Therapy Weekend (similar to, but not to be conflated with, the venerable Dinner Party Gone Awry). The story usually centers on a coterie of long-time friends (some married with kids, others perennially single) who converge for a (reunion, wedding, funeral) at someone’s (beach house, villa, country spread) to catch up, reminisce, wine and dine, revel…and of course, re-open old wounds (always the most entertaining part).

Oven Moverman’s new drama The Dinner edges closest to the “dinner party gone awry” meme, with a generous dollop of “you only hurt the ones you love” tossed in for giggles.

Actually, there are very few (intentional) giggles in this histrionic disappointment from a director who has done better work and a tragically wasted cast (so much for burying my lede). Set in an upscale restaurant and using a framing device that divides the narratives into chapters (of a sort), delineated by the many courses of the meal, Moverman’s story (adapted from the novel by Herman Koch) centers on a (wait for it) dysfunctional family.

In this corner, we have Richard Gere (in full, insufferably over-confident alpha mode) as a Congressman in the midst of a run for governor, and his lovely wife (Rebecca Hall). And in this corner, we have the Congressman’s agoraphobic, insufferably neurotic academic brother (Steve Coogan) and his lovely wife (Laura Linney). The brothers have not been on speaking terms for most of their adult lives, but an odious crime committed by their teenaged sons (and posted on YouTube by a third party) has necessitated a truce. The boys’ identities are concealed by the fuzzy video, but the couples are struggling with how to best handle it all. As the evening progresses, the familial bloodletting commences.

It’s an intriguing setup, but something went terribly wrong with this film, which I found deadly dull and thoroughly unpleasant to sit through. The fault certainly doesn’t lie in the casting; these are all wonderful actors. That said, Steve Coogan in particular makes some truly awful choices in his performance. It pains me to say this, as he is one of my favorite comedic actors; and perhaps that’s the problem…he is trying too hard. He has successfully tackled dramatic roles in the past, but it may take time to live this one down.

It’s a major letdown from Moverman, who has directed and/or written some exemplary films in the past. In fact, his film The Messenger (my review) made my top 10 of 2009, his film Rampart (my review) made my top 10 films of 2011, and a film he scripted, Bill Pohlad’s Love & Mercy (my review) made my top 10 of 2013. Oh well. I guess even some of the best 4-star restaurants serve up the odd plate of overcooked ham. C’est la vie.

More reviews at Den of Cinema
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–Dennis Hartley

Trump’s main contributions so far

by digby

Seth Masket at the Pacific Standard adroitly points out that Trump has actually done something useful. He exploded three persistent myths about the presidency. The first is that politics is easy and any guy off the street could do it. The second is that outsiders without any experience make the best leaders.

The third, and most important I think, is this:

Myth 3: The Country Should Be Run Like a Business

Related to the above two myths is the idea that the best person for the presidency is not only a political outsider, but one with experience running a business. Again, this is pretty bizarre. Businesses and governments do very different things to create jobs, providing mandated services is very different from serving voluntary customers for profit, and the federal government can print money and run debts over a very long time period while that might prove fatal to a business. But this, too, was one of Trump’s rationales for running for office; he made money in the private sector (at least in some years), so he’d be good for the government’s bottom line.

If anything, Trump seems, instead, to be importing some of the private sector’s worst features, including secrecy, nepotism, self-dealing, and unaccountability. The thrift and efficiency one theoretically needs to survive in the business world are nowhere to be seen. He’s spending on personal travel at a rate more than eight times that of his predecessor, who had no business experience.

It’s too early to know whether Trump’s business experience will make him a good job creator as president. The early evidence isn’t great, but presidents don’t actually have a whole lot of direct control in this area anyway.
In some ways, Trump isn’t a very fair test for these myths. It’s certainly possible a different politically inexperienced corporate leader with a temperament more suited to politics might be running the executive branch considerably better at this point in a presidency. But he’s doing some real damage to these persistent myths, and we may just end up better off for the experience.

American worship of the business leader runs deep. But if anyone can make some people finally question whether running the government like a business makes a lot of sense, Trump can. Of course, he isn’t actually much of a business success. He inherited his money, lost vast sums running casinos (who loses money on gambling???) and scratched around for years selling cheap consumer items with his name on them and conning people out of their hard earned dollars. Still, he’s fulfilling his promise to run the country like he ran The Trump Organization. It’s a dumpster fire so far.

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If you don’t understand what you’re negotiating for how do you know if you’ve won?

by digby

This piece by Jamelle Bouie on why Trump’s civil war comments are so scary is an important read. He lays out the historical detail around Andrew Jackson and the nullification crisis and the bigger picture about the culture and economy of slavery. He admits that the slave owing Andrew Jackson might have been able to “strike a deal” to avert the civil war temporarily had he been president thirty years later. But it would have had to perpetuate slavery.

Bouie describes something I’ve been thinking about a lot since Trump’s election. He believes he is a “dealmaker” extraordinaire (which we’ve seen is nonsense) who can solve all the world’s intractable problems (including the Israeli-Palestinian conflict) at the negotiating table. But how do you know what “winning” is — even “win-win” — if you don’t understand or care about the outcome? How does this work in politics when you have no morals or principles?

That gets to the rub of it all. Trump isn’t wrong to think there was a deal that could have prevented the Civil War. There was. But the price of that deal was the maintenance of slavery; in fact, the strengthening of a monstrous system of violence and exploitation.

That this wasn’t obvious to President Trump—that, judging from his continued tweets on the issue, it still isn’t—is as revealing as it is troubling. It suggests a worldview in which everything can be resolved by deals, where there are no moral stakes or irreconcilable differences, where there aren’t battles that have to be fought for the sake of the nation and its soul. Slavery had to be eradicated, and war was the only option. Any deal that was achievable would have been an immoral maintenance of an abominable status quo.

Likewise, Trump seems to see presidential leadership as a game of dealmaking, where the best and most effective presidents are those that make the most “deals.” But this just isn’t true. Dealmaking and negotiation are part of the job of the presidency, but they have to happen with a purpose in mind; with an idea of the good within reach. Simply striking a deal for the sake of a deal is a recipe for terrible missteps or outright capture by antagonistic interests. Trump’s amoral and opportunistic approach may pay dividends in the world of real estate, but it can bring disaster in government, obscuring real challenges, alienating potential allies, and bringing bad outcomes.

Trump’s entire campaign argument was based upon his alleged talent at dealmaking. I have always wondered just what that means when the person making the deal has no understanding of his ostensible goals or how the deal might affect them if he did. He can be manipulated with flattery by people much smarter than he, who will simply tell him he won when he didn’t. How can he know the difference? He just wants to “win” so a win can literally be anything.

And frankly, the fact the public was so willing to buy the idea that a TV celebrity who says he knows how to make good deals is qualified for the presidency actually says more about us than him. We clearly don’t know what the job is either.

Hacks aplenty

by digby

Here’s a good piece by Robert Mackey at the Intercept about the French hacking:

There Are No “Macron Leaks” in France. Politically Motivated Hacking Is Not Whistleblowing.

HERE’S SOME NEWS for the alt-right activists in the United States behind a disinformation campaign aimed at getting Marine Le Pen elected president of France by spreading rumors about her opponent, Emmanuel Macron: The French do not much like having their intelligence insulted by Americans.

That theme was repeated again and again in France on Saturday, in response to reports that a trove of hacked documents — nine gigabytes of memos and emails stolen from Macron aides and posted online Friday night, just before a legally imposed blackout on statements from candidates took effect — was first publicized on social networks by pro-Trump propagandists.

According to Nicolas Vanderbiest, a Belgian academic who studies social networks, the hacked documents only began to attract attention after they were linked to on Twitter by Jack Posobiec, a Trump supporter who added the misleading hashtag, #MacronLeaks.

That tag, which falsely suggested that the hacked documents had been leaked by a public-spirited whistleblower, rather than stolen by Macron’s political opponents, and contained evidence of wrongdoing, instead of what appears to be mainly a collection of mundane campaign memos, was soon used by a more influential account, WikiLeaks.

[…]

Instead of important revelations, an initial review of the documents circulating under the MacronLeaks tag by Julien Cadot, a journalist for the site Numerama, suggested that they “seem to be utterly banal.”

“There are briefing notes, bills, loans for amounts that are not excessive,” Cadot explained, along with “strictly personal and private exchanges — personal notes on rain and good weather, a confirmation email on the publication of a novel, the reservation of a table between friends.”

The point of the dump, then, appears to be less about providing real evidence to back up the rumors and innuendo Marine Le Pen’s supporters have been spreading about Macron for months, and more a way to reinforce the fact-free speculation the candidate herself engaged in during a televised debate this week — that her rival, a former investment banker, might be hiding something that would discredit him, like an offshore account.

That was certainly the message Le Pen’s influential deputy, Florian Philippot, attempted to drive home on Twitter, where he asked rhetorically, “Will #Macronleaks teach us something that investigative journalism has deliberately killed?”

Sounds like typical bullshit to me.

Click over and read the whole piece. There’s a lot of detail there that’s very interesting.

Let’s just say that this tracks very closely to what happened here in the US. The American media went crazy, of course, looking for something juicy about Clinton, spreading gossip and creating innuendo as if it was earth shattering news that gave special insight into her despicably repellent character. They had a lot of fun with it — as did Donald Trump.

It worked out well. Especially for Mexican immigrants, Muslims, pregnant women and young black men. And about 24 million people who have to buy health care on the individual market. Judging by the shitty, sophomoric reaction of the media to Clinton’s comments last week, they’re still wallowing in it.

In a lot of ways, the media chose Trump for you. Aren’t you happy?

Update: This piece by Zeynap Tufekci asking the French media not to fall into those same traps is really good. Her description of how the US media reacted to the DNC and Podesta hacks is especially on point.

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Mid-east peace is easy peasy

by digby

It’s hard to believe he said this, but he did:

The LA Times editorial board said it all:

Donald Trump won the presidency thanks to a series of cocky, what-me-worry promises to solve seemingly intractable problems using his supposedly superior art-of-the-deal negotiating skills.

This week, he made another such promise. After meeting with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas at the White House, he vowed flippantly to bring the century-old conflict between Israelis and Palestinians to an end, adding that the problem is “something that, I think, is frankly maybe not as difficult as people have thought over the years.”

The monumental arrogance and flat-out ignorance displayed by such an obtuse statement is truly stunning. Virtually all Americans, Israelis and Palestinians, as well as the citizens of every other country on the planet, are in favor of a just, safe, sustainable, mutually beneficial resolution to this conflict, which dates back to the earliest years of the 20th century. 

Perhaps his Chauncey Gardiner-type naïvete will give him some bizarre advantages that are not available to more sophisticated students of the conflict.

But no one anywhere believes it will be easy. Just like repealing and replacing Obamacare, which Trump initially said would be “so easy” but finally conceded: “Nobody knew healthcare could be so complicated.”

By all means, Trump should try his hand at Middle East peacemaking. Perhaps his Chauncey Gardiner-type naïvete — and the fact that he is apparently unburdened by any historical or political knowledge of the subject — will give him some bizarre advantages that are not available to more sophisticated students of the conflict.

But for the record, since no one else appears to have told him, here are some of the factors that make this particular conflict knottier and more troublesome than the president seems to realize. 

Any agreement between Palestinians and Israelis must overcome more than 100 years of hatred and mistrust, built on a long history of killings and terror and dispossession and imprisonment and broken promises. 

Israel’s most generous offer ever, made in the final days of the Clinton administration, simply didn’t meet the Palestinian demand for an independent state along the lines that existed before the 1967 war, with East Jerusalem as a capital and a resolution to the ongoing refugee problem. If one side’s best offer doesn’t meet the other side’s minimum requirements, there’s a problem.

Palestinian and Israeli leaders must wrestle not only with each other, but with hard-liners on their own side who have already proven their willingness to scuttle any agreement that relies (as any agreement must) on compromise.
Abbas is disliked and mistrusted by his own people, two-thirds of whom said last year that he should resign.

And there are more: How to divide resources, including water. What to do about the millions of Palestinian refugees. How to handle the 1.6 million Palestinians under Hamas rule in the Gaza Strip.

Peace is not impossible. But like virtually all the issues that reach the Oval Office, it is not easy either. It involves sorting out equally valid but irreconcilable claims; making least-bad, zero-sum game choices; relying on judgment calls and subjective political calculations. It will require a president to be tough, even-handed, imaginative and realistic at the same time.

Is Donald Trump up for it? His glib, uninformed pronouncements are not encouraging.

I can tell that everyone’s adjusting to this imbecile being president. The sheer volume of inane commentary is numbing us to it. It’s human to need to find some way to deal with stress and having an ignorant cretin for president is stressful.

But every once in a while you have to step back and think about how you would have felt a year ago if you’d seen a US president say such a foolishly naive thing. Today it passes without much notice — “oh there goes Trump again.” But it shouldn’t.

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A message from the grave

by digby

Via Raw Story:

A new website will send your cremated remains to Republicans in Congress if the American Healthcare Act (AHCA) — also known as “Trumpcare” — kills you by discontinuing your coverage or denying you access to medications, surgery or other treatments.

Mediaite.com’s Linsey Ellefson said on Friday that MailMeToTheGOP.com will mail your ashes to a Republican in Congress if you die as a result of Trumpcare.

“Millions of Americans rely on protections and coverage from the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare. The Republicans new bill will gut these protections and many will die,” says MailMe’s website. “They deserve to know it. Fill out our form and we’ll help you get papers in order to send your ashes to a GOP member of Congress if you pass.”

Users of the website have the option of writing a custom message about how and why they died as a result of Trumpcare, but there are also pre-written messages like, “My combat tour in Iraq resulted in enough disability to make me uninsurable, but not enough to get all my healthcare through the VA. You killed me, you prick” and “Because you took away my f*cking insurance.”

This is gallows humor for a lot of people who really will be in trouble. Sadly, there are many Trump voters who are digging their own graves too. But I guess they will take pleasure in taking down a bunch of people they hate with them, so there’s that.

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Tentacles of Rage revisited
by Tom Sullivan

How many times, Dear Reader, have you been in conversations about the lack of progressive infrastructure for pushing back against the conservative octopus? All we have is poor George Soros. As conservative propaganda mills tell it, he does it all himself. After the Tax Day protests by people Soros supposedly paid, I offered via Twitter $100 for a cancelled Soros check. I’m still waiting.

Movement conservatives and their progeny have no such funding issues. Frank Rich listed 25 (and counting) million-dollar-plus conservative PAC donors during the 2012 campaign. In September 2004, Lewis Lapham spelled out in Harper‘s the networks of think tanks (“Tentacles of Rage“) supporting conservative activism. These are just the larger ones:

The Bradley Foundation was right there at the top then. Today their assets are somewhat larger, explains Mary Bottari of the Center for Media and Democracy in Madison, “With $835 million in assets as of June 2016, the Bradley Foundation is as large as the three Koch family foundations combined…”

The length of Milwaukee-based Bradley’s tentacles has just been revealed thanks to 56,000 internal documents released by international hackers (Anonymous Poland, purportedly). The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reports that Bradley is “working to duplicate its success in Wisconsin under Republican Gov. Scott Walker, focusing on such swing states as North Carolina and Colorado.” The paper’s review concludes:

The records make clear the Bradley Foundation no longer simply favors groups promoting its signature issues: taxpayer-funded school choice and increased work requirements for welfare recipients. It now regularly funds nonprofits that are, among other things, hostile to labor unions, skeptical of climate change or critical of the loosening of sexual mores in American culture.

More important, the foundation has found success by changing its fundamental approach to putting policies into reality.

Washington is now passe. Bradley is focusing on building infrastructure and influence in the states.

The report continues:

• Starting in 2016, the foundation put $575,000 into five groups in Colorado, a key swing state. One group uses the money to recruit and train conservative activists and candidates while two others have the stated goal “to defund teachers unions.”
• Bradley Foundation officials are giving $1.5 million over three years to two organizations in North Carolina, another swing state, to “create a comprehensive communications infrastructure around four primary elements: radio, online content aggregation, mobile applications and an AP-style news service for local newspapers.” One group has acquired a Drudge Report-style website called Carolina Plott Hound.
• In the states of Washington and Oregon, a group called the Freedom Foundation was awarded $1.5 million over three years to “educate union workers themselves about their rights — which, if and when exercised, would defund Big Labor.”

Mary Bottari elaborates in her report, “Weaponized Philanthropy“:

Bradley describes its goal as advancing “conservatism,” but the files link “receptivity to conservative policy reform” to “unified control” of governorships, legislatures, and state Supreme Courts by the Republican Party (The Barder Fund, August 18, 2015). A Bradley video geared toward enticing other funders to join the cause puts it more bluntly: “Together we can help keep our Great Lakes blue and our states red.”

The Bradley Foundation, organized as a tax-exempt “charitable” foundation under 501(c)(3) of the tax code, appears to be pursuing a highly partisan game plan: funding an “infrastructure” on the right that benefits the Republican Party, while at the same time attempting to crush supporters of the Democratic Party. “The trial attorneys and Big Labor” are the “two principal funding pillars of the left,” the Bradley documents claim on multiple occasions (Center for America, Grant Proposal Record, 8/19/214) (NRWLDF, Grant Proposal Record, 11/12/2013).

CMD made Bradley’s “enemies list.”

So don’t expect Bradley’s tax status to receive review under any Republican administration.

What makes such groups successful at moving forward their agendas is not simply money or smarts. It is tenacity, as I wrote here:

I used to describe George W. Bush as a Jack Russell terrier playing tug of war with a knotted rope. Once he sank his teeth into something, he simply would not let go. You could lift him bodily off the ground and watch his butt cut circles in the air as he wrestled with his end of it. But in the end you would tire of the game first, let go, and he’d retire triumphantly to his doggy bed with his prize. I was never sure myself whether I meant that as a cut or a compliment.

Liberals think in election cycles. Conservatives build infrastructure because they play the long game with patience and discipline. The impact of their positions on the general welfare, as the founders phrased it, has little to do with their success. They just don’t quit. Lapham wrote over a decade ago:

As long ago as 1964 even William F. Buckley understood that the thunder on the conservative right amounted to little else except the sound and fury of middle-aged infants banging silver spoons, demanding to know why they didn’t have more—more toys, more time, more soup; when Buckley was asked that year what the country could expect if it so happened that Goldwater was elected president, he said, “That might be a serious problem.” So it has proved, if not under the baton of the senator from Arizona then under the direction of his ideologically correct heirs and assigns. An opinion poll taken in 1964 showed 62 percent of the respondents trusting the government to do the right thing; by 1994 the number had dwindled to 19 percent. The measure can be taken as a tribute to the success of the Republican propaganda mill that for the last forty years has been grinding out the news that all government is bad, and that the word “public,” in all its uses and declensions (public service, citizenship, public health, community, public park, commonwealth, public school, etc.), connotes inefficiency and waste.

The Journal-Sentinel account echoes that assessment:

“The word I would use is grit,” said Mike Tate, a former state Democratic Party chairman who works with liberal nonprofits and candidates. “They have a 15- or 20-year vision, and they are executing it. They have their eyes on the horizon the whole time. That is not something seen in a substantial way in the progressive movement.”

Republicans know that. It is why they will try to wear out the #Resistance . Because they know they can.

Friday Night Soother

by digby

Via The Dodo, one tiny miracle:

He could have just kept on going — but instead he stopped to help.

And this kitten is alive today because of it.

Last week, Kwok Kin Wai was riding his motorcycle along a busy highway in Hong Kong when he spotted the tiny cat stranded alone in the middle of a lane. All around her were the crushing tires of countless passing cars, so she stood little chance of escaping the situation on her own.

Gripped by the fact that the kitten would likely soon be hit, Wai pulled over and put his own life at risk to save her.

Wai’s act of heroism was a selfless one, but it didn’t go unnoticed. A motorist’s dashboard camera happened to catch it all on video — a video which has since gone viral in China.

As word of Wai’s actions spread, however, he was working to help the kitten in yet another way. On Facebook, he posted photos of the cat in an effort to find her a safe and loving home.

And it worked.

As Chinese news site Shanghaiist reports, within an hour of publishing that post, someone stepped forward to adopt the kitten.

Risky business

by digby

TPM reports:

Cook Political Report on Friday morning changed its ratings for 20 House seats, predicting that Democrats’ odds of winning those districts has increased now that House Republicans passed a bill to repeal Obamacare.

“Although it’s the first of potentially many explosive votes, House Republicans’ willingness to spend political capital on a proposal that garnered the support of just 17 percent of the public in a March Quinnipiac poll is consistent with past scenarios that have generated a midterm wave,” Cook Political Report’s David Wasserman wrote in a post explaining the ratings changes. “Not only did dozens of Republicans in marginal districts just hitch their names to an unpopular piece of legislation, Democrats just received another valuable candidate recruitment tool.”

He wrote that for some Republicans, backing the American Health Care Act is an “unequivocal political risk.”

Cook Political Report moved three districts from leaning Republican to toss-ups, 11 districts from likely Republican to leaning Republican and six districts from solid Republican to leaning Republican.

That’s just day one.

I would never under-estimate the ability of the Democrats to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory but this is certainly a good sign. And let’s face facts, 2018 will be a referendum on the Orange Julius Caesar in the White House and so far he’s about as popular as chlamydia. The Democrats need to get their people out. If they do that,they can have a wave election. If they don’t Trump’s dubious victory will be validated and he will be strengthened.

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Gobbledygook

by digby

Kevin McCarthy explaining the health care plan yesterday. Basically, if you don’t like what we’re doing blame Obama.

BASH: But, I mean, you’re making a pretty big statement. You’re saying it’s solving the problem, which means that you, your colleagues, your Republican president, you own this. So if at the end of the day this process doesn’t bring the insurers back to Iowa and to other areas that don’t have it and to decrease premiums, decrease costs, it’s on you.

MCCARTHY: Well, the one thing we do know, Obamacare has failed. So what do we say to the people in Iowa? What do we say to the people in Tennessee? What do we say to the people in Virginia? We know Obamacare has failed. So as statesmen, do we just sit back and say, I told you so, or do we find a solution to the problem? I think as statesmen on both sides of the aisle, people should come forward with their ideas to solve the problem. If the Democrats are arguing nothing should happen, I want them to look in the eyes of those people and those counties, or what about the 23 co-ops that were given more than $2 billion? What about the collapse of 19 of those? Where are they defending that? Where are they helping those people with health care? Some —

BASH: Well they argue — I mean because they’re not here to defend themselves — they argue Obamacare is not perfect, but the answer is not to completely repeal it, it’s to try to fix it and to work together to do that.

MCCARTHY: It’s far from perfect. We found you have less options, you have no health care. How are you going to pay for Medicaid? We just passed an omni (ph) yesterday. It was roughly a trillion dollars.

BASH: A budget bill.

MCCARTHY: A budget bill, to pay for all discretionary funding of government. A trillion dollars. Well, you know what, in less than ten years, just Medicaid will cost us $1 trillion. So where’s the solution for that? Where’s the solution for funding of our government and (INAUDIBLE). We are taking a forward look. We’re repealing it, the posing of all those taxes. We’re replacing it, giving people an option to actually go into the market to choose and have the free market actually push prices down, which we show premiums will come down, and provide health care for all those counties that have now lost it because of Obamacare.

BASH: Let me ask you another piece of substance of this. Under this plan —

MCCARTHY: Yes.

BASH: Is there a chance that people who get health coverage through their employers could lose protections that limit out of pocket costs in a case of catastrophic illness?

MCCARTHY: No, because this deals nothing — this is at the individual market. If you’re getting your health care, if you have Medicare, you’re getting your health care from your business or others, this doesn’t deal with it. You know what else it does do?

BASH: Are — I just want to ask you just — are you sure because there’s a report “The Wall Street Journal” is reporting that there’s a loophole in the fine print that would allow just that.

MCCARTHY: (INAUDIBLE) —

BASH: Are you telling me you are confident that is not true?

MCCARTHY: We are confident when we went through the amendments. The one thing I will tell you as well, when you look at what Obamacare has done, even to the business climate, that so many people now, because of the 30 hour workweek, or just the 50 employees, so many small businesses that people are now having to work two part-time jobs because they can’t add people to the work, they can’t continue to expand. This is going to change from business to health care and help move the economy.

If somebody has a better idea, this is the legislative process. We’re moving it through the House. The Senate is a legislative body. They will be able to do what they want with the bill and then we can go to conference. So if there’s any other ideas that people have, bring it forward because the one thing we do know, day after day, more insurers are pulling out of the market so fewer people are having health care because Obamacare continues to survive.

BASH: Now, a lot of Democrats are — think that they’re kind of whistling past the graveyard here saying uh-oh, this is the same kind of vote that cost so many of my colleagues their seats on the gun issue, on the budget issue back in the ’90s. Are you confident you’re not making your members take a vote that will make them lose their seats and maybe even you lose the majority leader status?

MCCARTHY: Well, every vote that you just said the Democrats took, took more power — gave more power to government and took more freedom away from people. We are giving people actual freedom.

And remember this, more people took the option and paid the penalty than signed up for Obamacare. So you have people pulling out of health care that don’t have any health care now in county. More people taking the option and penalty than signed up for it. And the Democrats continue to take more freedom away. This bill provides more freedom to the individual, more choice and more opportunity.

This is one of the most powerful leaders in the Republican Party.

On the other hand, their leader is Donald Trump so …
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