Oh Sarah
by digby
This is an amazing scoop that shows Trump spends 60% of his day in “executive time” (which translates to shooting the shit with his staff, watching TV and calling his buddies on the phone.) The infor comes from leaked official schedules. Huckasanders gave this hilarious comment:
“President Trump has a different leadership style than his predecessors and the results speak for themselves.”
Yes. Yes they do:
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Gone soft
by digby
I’m beginning to think my joke about Trump hearing voices might be true. Here he is this morning:
MARGARET BRENNAN: Would you let your son Barron play football?
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: It’s very, it’s very tough question. It’s a very good question. If he wanted to? Yes. Would I steer him that way? No, I wouldn’t.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Why?
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I wouldn’t. And he actually plays a lot of soccer. He’s liking soccer. And a lot of people, including me, thought soccer would probably never make it in this country, but it really is moving forward rapidly. I- I just don’t like the reports that I see coming out having to do with football—I mean, it’s a dangerous sport and I think it’s- I- it’s- really tough, I thought the equipment would get better, and it has. The helmets have gotten far better but it hasn’t solved the problem. So, you know I- I hate to say it because I love to watch football. I think the NFL is a great product, but I really think that as far as my son- well I’ve heard NFL players saying they wouldn’t let their sons play football. So. It’s not totally unique, but I- I would have a hard time with it.
Setting aside the fact that soccer has problems with a concussion too, the president has said very different things about this in the past:
Donald Trump knocked the National Football League’s rules about concussions, calling them “soft,” during a Wednesday campaign rally in Florida. While speaking at an airport in Lakeland, Fla., the Republican presidential nominee witnessed a woman in the audience faint. First wondering whether she was a protester, and then asking whether there was a “doctor in the house,” Trump said he was confident she would return to the rally.
When she came back, after being treated for passing out in the tarmac heat, Trump boasted that his supporters were tough — tougher, even, than the safety rules in place to protect professional football players.
“That woman was out cold, and now she’s coming back,” Trump said from the podium. “See, we don’t go by these new, and very much softer, NFL rules. Concussions — ‘Uh oh, got a little ding on the head? No, no, you can’t play for the rest of the season’ — our people are tough.”
[…]
But this is not the first time the GOP candidate has been unimpressed with what he sees as weakness in modern football. During a Reno rally in January, as The Post reported, he said, “football has become soft like our country has become soft.”
Regarding his nostalgia for the dangerous hits that college and pro football have been trying to take out of the game, Trump said: “Today if you hit too hard—15 yards! Throw him out of the game! They had that last week. I watched for a couple of minutes. Two guys, just really, beautiful tackle. Boom, 15 yards! The referee gets on television—his wife is sitting at home, she’s so proud of him. They’re ruining the game! They’re ruining the game. That’s what they want to do. They want to hit. They want to hit! It is hurting the game.
I guess he just wants other people’s kids to maim themselves for his entertainment.
Of course he does.
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Losin’ the wimminfolk
by digby
A little Republican handwringing over this is long overdue. It may be too late:
As I sat in my office on election night in November and watched the returns roll in, it quickly became clear it would not be a fun night for Republicans. Aside from losing our majority, some of our best members and candidates running in swing districts would lose their races. Making matters even worse, many of them were women like Barbara Comstock, Mimi Walters and Young Kim.
When night turned to morning, the number of women in our GOP conference shrank considerably. Today, we just have 13 Republican women in the House – the lowest number in over 25 years.
Though among those 13 we have incredible leaders like Liz Cheney, Martha Roby and Cathy McMorris-Rodgers, it’s time to get serious about adding to their ranks.
We have to do better. And we have to start now.
[…]
2018 was a wake-up call for the Republican Party. 60 percent of women across the country voted for Democrats. If you look exclusively at college-educated women, they broke for Democrats by 8 points more than they did in 2016.Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell raised the alarm recently as well. In an interview with The New York Times he said the current path our party is on with women – namely suburban women – is “not a sustainable position, politically, if you want to be a competitive party.”
Some have written recently that while, yes, we need more women in Congress, they need to tow a particular ideological line. That recruiting women from swing seats isn’t as helpful to the cause as recruiting women from conservative seats, like Marsha Blackburn or Kristi Noam.
What these people fail to understand is that it’s not an either/or scenario. We need both Elise Stefaniks and Marsha Blackburns in Congress if we hope to hold the majority again.
Yes, they do have to start someplace but simply recruiting women isn’t going to get the job done for them. They’re way too far gone for that.
What they need to do is stop electing pussy-grabbing racist imbeciles who try to make health care unavailable, separate kids from their parents and put babies in cages. That’s just for starters.
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Trump’s number one adviser
by digby
Earlier I wondered who it was that Trump turned to for intelligence and advice. We know the answer, of course. It’s obvous:
For more than a year, I’ve studied this Trump-Fox feedback loop, the president’s habit of live-tweeting his favorite shows on the right-wing cable news network. I’ve tracked several hundred of the president’s often-hyperaggressive tweets back to particular segments on Fox News and its sister network, Fox Business, that caught the president’s eye.
Fox helped build Trump’s political brand and fuel his electoral rise, and in recent years has remade itself as a propaganda outlet in support of his presidency. Trump, in turn, has long been obsessed with the network. His worldview and decision making are shaped by the former network personalities with whom he has stocked his administration, the “Fox cabinet” of current stars he reaches out to for advice, and the hours of Fox programming he reportedly watches each day.
Having a superfan in the White House has given Fox outsized influence over both the news cycle and federal policy. The network’s efforts to infuriate its audience—over everything from NFL players kneeling in protest during the national anthem to a caravan of migrants slowly approaching the U.S. southern border—can trigger outraged presidential tweets, instantly turning the network’s particular fixations into national news.
And because Fox’s staff and guests are aware that Trump could be watching at any time, they often use the network’s platform to try to reach him directly, seeking to shape his decisions on political strategy, legal tactics, pardons, personnel, and more.
No story has demonstrated the power of this Trump-Fox feedback loop like the partial government shutdown.
Trump’s incessant craving for validation from the network’s conservative commentators triggered his initial refusal to sign any legislation funding the government that did not include money for a border wall, and then that need sustained his intransigence over the following weeks. His eventual cave shows the limitations of prioritizing the whims of right-wing infotainers during congressional negotiations. But there is no evidence Trump has learned anything from the crushing defeat, suggesting that he will continue trying to make policy with respect to the wall and other issues, on the basis of whether it pleases Fox hosts.
In September, I argued that Trump’s Fox affinity made a government shutdown inevitable. The same pattern kept playing out: House and Senate leaders would agree to a spending bill, Fox commentators would claim the bill betrayed the president’s base because it didn’t include wall funding, Trump would angrily tweet about the Fox segments and send Washington into chaos, and Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan would have to talk him into supporting the legislation. With Trump publicly declaring that a shutdown was a “great political issue” and explicitly citing Fox hosts as his inspiration for the tactic, the situation seemed untenable.
Three months later, it finally came to a head. As the December deadline to renew government spending loomed, Fox personalities again began urgingTrump to shut down the government rather than sign a spending bill that didn’t include money for the wall. Once again, Fox’s influence was matched against that of Republican congressional leaders, who warned the president that a shutdown would be a grave tactical mistake.
But this time, Fox News won.
He goes on to lay out the whole Fox News shutdown campaign and it’s painfully obvious how much they influenced the president’s actions. The tweets provide a perfect tick-tock. They weren’t happy with the ending but all is forgiven:
Trump’s decision to fold divided his Fox allies—even the hosts who had counseled the president on his shutdown strategy. Hannity offered a vigorous defense of his decision, arguing that “anyone out there” who is “thinking President Trump caved today, you don’t really know the Donald Trump I know.” For Dobbs, however, the news was “a victory for Nancy Pelosi… and to deny it is to try to escape from reality.”
But neither Dobbs nor the president appeared to hold a grudge—by Thursday morning, Trump was tweeting about the previous night’s episode of Dobbs’ show, using the Fox host’s talking points as evidence that a border wall is necessary. Based on that program, Trump argued that Republicans negotiating an immigration deal “are wasting their time” because Democrats will not provide money for the “DESPERATELY needed WALL.” “I’ve got you covered,” he ominously added.
That seemed to be a reference to Trump’s likely endgame: declaring a national emergency in order to divert previously appropriated federal funds to wall construction. Ever since Trump first suggested that he might take that step in early January, Fox hosts have been urging him to do it, claiming that, in Dobbs’ words, the “only way forward” is for Trump to “simply sweep aside the recalcitrant left in this country” and do so.
Republican congressional leaders keep warning Trump that declaring a national emergency is a terrible idea that won’t serve his ends, and up until now, he’s listened to him. But we’ve seen how this played out before. The president will continue to wallow in Fox’s programming, as night after night its hosts tell him that the declaration is his only way to win. And eventually, he will listen.
Fox hosts want him to declare the national emergency because they know its the only way he can save face with the base. The Republicans in the Senate aren’t going to go for another shutdown — they’ll override his veto if they have to and that would be a serious rebuke. So he’ll do this instead and strut around telling his followers that he’s taken the matter into his yuge hands and to hell with the congress which will thrill them beyond measure.
This is idiotic tea party politics in the White House. We might as well have Jim Jordan as president.
But think about how dangerous this is in terms of foreign policy. He won’t listen to the government’s intelligence analysis but he has former Fox News analyst (and certified lunatic) John Bolton as his NSA. And Fox commonly features nuts like Sebastian Gorka.
This is what he craves and it’s what they give him:
The man with his finger on the button speaks gibberish
by digby
It’s terrible to watch and hear. It’s even more awful to read it. The man’s mind is clearly disordered:
MARGARET BRENNAN: I want to ask you about your intelligence leaders who were testifying on Capitol Hill this week. Did you read the report that they presented?
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I did.
MARGARET BRENNAN: And did you – there was some conversation you had because you went on Twitter and you called them naive and told them to go back to school.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Well, I think–
MARGARET BRENNAN: What specifically was wrong about what they said?
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I think- let me just say it wasn’t so much a report. It was the questions and answers as the report was submitted and they were asked questions and answers. We’ve done an incredible job with Syria. When I took over Syria it was infested with ISIS. It was all over the place. And now you have very little ISIS and you have the caliphate almost knocked out. We will be announcing in the not too distant future 100 percent of the caliphate which is the area- the land- the area- 100. We’re at 99 percent right now, we’ll be at 100. When I took it over it was a disaster. I think we’ve done a great job with that. At the same time, at a certain point, we want to bring our people back home. If you look at Afghanistan we’re going in very soon we’ll be going into our 19th year spending 50 billion dollars a year. Now if you go back and look at any of my campaign speeches or rallies, I talked about it all the time.
MARGARET BRENNAN: You did. You’ve been talking about- and that–
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: –I want to bring people home.
MARGARET BRENNAN: But that’s one of the questions here. Is because you have these strongly held convictions and people ask, “Well, why don’t the facts influence those opinions, if those facts change?” And- and your director of national intelligence said ISIS still has strongholds in Iraq and Syria–
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: By the way–
MARGARET BRENNAN: –and will launch attacks from there.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: You’re going to always have pockets of something. What– you’re going to have people, like the one armed man who blew up a restaurant. You’re going to have pockets. But you’re not going to keep armies there because you have a few people. Or you even have fairly reasonable numbers of people. We’ve been there for many, many years. We were supposed to be in Syria for four months. We’ve been there for years. We have been in Afghanistan for 19 years. And by the way, I’ve been hitting very hard in Afghanistan and now we’re negotiating with the Taliban. We’ll see what happens, who knows–
MARGARET BRENNAN: Can you trust the Taliban? Can you actually broker a deal?
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Look, whether we should have been there in the first place, that’s first question. Second question–
MARGARET BRENNAN: That’s where 9/11 was launched from.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: –we’ve been there for 19 years, almost, we are fighting very well. We’re fighting harder than ever before. And I think that they will- I think they’re tired and, I think everybody’s tired. We got to get out of these endless wars and bring our folks back home. Now, that doesn’t mean we’re not going to be watching with intelligence. We’re going to be watching, and watching closely. North Korea–
MARGARET BRENNAN: Isn’t that harder when you don’t have troops on the ground?
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Well, everything’s harder. But, you know you pay a big price for troops on the ground. We’re spending hundreds of billions of dollars on military. We’re the policemen of the world and we don’t–
MARGARET BRENNAN: Because the concern in here by your intelligence chiefs, though, is that you could in that vacuum see a resurgence of ISIS.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Sure.
MARGARET BRENNAN: See a resurgence of terror groups like Al-Qaeda–
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: And you know what we’ll do? We’ll come back if we have to. We have very fast airplanes, we have very good cargo planes. We can come back very quickly, and I’m not leaving. We have a base in Iraq and the base is a fantastic edifice. I mean I was there recently, and I couldn’t believe the money that was spent on these massive runways. And these- I’ve rarely seen anything like it. And it’s there. And we’ll be there. And frankly, we’re hitting the caliphate from Iraq and as we slowly withdraw from Syria. Now the other thing–
MARGARET BRENNAN: How many troops are still in Syria? When are they coming home?
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: 2,000 troops.
MARGARET BRENNAN: When are they coming home?
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: They’re starting to, as we gain the remainder, the final remainder of the caliphate of the area, they’ll be going to our base in Iraq, and ultimately some will be coming home. But we’re going to be there and we’re going to be staying–
MARGARET BRENNAN: So that’s a matter of months?
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: We have to protect Israel. We have to protect other things that we have. But we’re- yeah, they’ll be coming back in a matter of time. Look, we’re protecting the world. We’re spending more money than anybody’s ever spent in history, by a lot. We spent, over the last five years, close to 50 billion dollars a year in Afghanistan. That’s more than most countries spend for everything including education, medical, and everything else, other than a few countries.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Is there a scenario where you would keep troops in Afghanistan? A smaller number?
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Yes. And I’ll leave intelligence there. Real intelligence, by the way. I’ll leave intelligence there and if I see nests forming, I’ll do something about it. But for us to be spending 51 billion dollars, like last year, or if you average the cost it’s- I mean you’re talking about numbers that nobody’s ever heard of before.
MARGARET BRENNAN: The Senate Republicans voted, the vast majority of them said that they don’t support what you’re doing. That what you’re doing risks national intelligence by a precipitous withdrawal from Syria and Afghanistan. Doesn’t that concern you?
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I ran against 17 Republicans. This was a big part of what I was saying, and I won very easily. I think the people out in the world- I think people in our country agree. We’ve been fighting for 19 years. Somebody said you were precipitously bringing to- precipitously? We’ve been there for 19 years. I want to fight. I want to win, and we want to bring our great troops back home. I’ve seen the people. I go to Walter Reed Hospital. I see what happens to people. I see with no legs and no arm- arms. And I’ve seen also what happens to them up here because they’re in this situation, and they come back and they are totally different people– where the wives and the fathers and the mothers say, “What has happened to my son? What has happened in some cases to my daughter?” It’s a terrible thing. We’ve been there close to 19 years. And it’s time. And we’ll see what happens with the Taliban. They want peace. They’re tired. Everybody’s tired. We’d like to have- I don’t like endless wars. This war. What we’re doing is got to stop at some point.
MARGARET BRENNAN: But you- but you also campaigned saying that, you know, President Obama made a big mistake by telegraphing his military moves. You’re telegraphing your retreat.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I’m not telegraphing anything. No, no, no. There’s a difference. When President Obama pulled out of Iraq in theory we had Iraq. In other words, we had Iraq. We never had Syria because President Obama never wanted to violate the red line in the sand. So we never had Syria. I was the one that actually violated the red line when I hit Syria with 59 Tomahawk missiles, if you remember. But President Obama chose not to do that. When he chose not to do that, he showed tremendous weakness. But we didn’t have Syria whereas we had Iraq. So when he did what he did in Iraq, which was a mistake. Being in Iraq was a mistake. Okay. Being in Iraq- it was a big mistake to go- one of the greatest mistakes going into the Middle East that our country has ever made. One of the greatest mistakes that we’ve ever made–
MARGARET BRENNAN: But you want to keep troops there now?
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: –but when it was chosen– well, we spent a fortune on building this incredible base. We might as well keep it. And one of the reasons I want to keep it is because I want to be looking a little bit at Iran because Iran is a real problem.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Whoa, that’s news. You’re keeping troops in Iraq because you want to be able to strike in Iran?
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: No, because I want to be able to watch Iran. All I want to do is be able to watch. We have an unbelievable and expensive military base built in Iraq. It’s perfectly situated for looking at all over different parts of the troubled Middle East rather than pulling up. And this is what a lot of people don’t understand. We’re going to keep watching and we’re going to keep seeing and if there’s trouble, if somebody is looking to do nuclear weapons or other things, we’re going to know it before they do.
MARGARET BRENNAN: So you’re going to trust the intelligence that you receive?
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I am going to trust the intelligence that I’m putting there, but I will say this: my intelligence people, if they said in fact that Iran is a wonderful kindergarten, I disagree with them 100 percent. It is a vicious country that kills many people. When you talk about torture and so many other things. And- maybe they’ll come back. The country is getting absolutely- when I ended the horrible Iran nuclear deal- it was a horrible deal done by President Obama and John Kerry that didn’t know what the hell he was doing. When I ended that deal, Margaret, all of a sudden Iran became a different country. They became- very rapidly- right now they’re a country that’s in big financial trouble. Let’s see what happens.
MARGARET BRENNAN: I want to move on here but I should say your intel chiefs do say Iran’s abiding by that nuclear deal. I know you think it’s a bad deal, but–
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I disagree with them. I’m- I’m- by the way–
MARGARET BRENNAN: You disagree with that assessment?
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: –I have intel people, but that doesn’t mean I have to agree. President Bush had intel people that said Saddam Hussein–
MARGARET BRENNAN: Sure.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: –in Iraq had nuclear weapons- had all sorts of weapons of mass destruction. Guess what? Those intel people didn’t know what the hell they were doing, and they got us tied up in a war that we should have never been in. And we’ve spent seven trillion dollars in the Middle East and we have lost lives–
MARGARET BRENNAN: Do you trust your national security adviser John Bolton because he worked in the Bush administration?
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I do, and I respect John and John is not one of the people that happened to be testifying or on.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Got it.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: And you know what I tell people- you can testify any way you want. I’m not going to stop them from testifying. They said they were mischaracterized– maybe they were maybe they weren’t, I don’t really know– but I can tell you this, I want them to have their own opinion and I want them to give me their opinion. But, when I look at Iran, I look at Iran as a nation that has caused tremendous problems.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Yeah.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: When I came in as president of the United States, my first year, I went to the Pentagon two weeks after I came in, a short time after, and I was given a- because I wanted to know what’s going on with Iran.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Right.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: We were in many many locations in the Middle East in huge difficulty. Every single one of them was caused by the number one terrorist nation in the world which is Iran. So when my intelligence people tell me how wonderful Iran is- if you don’t mind, I’m going to just go by my own counsel.
I wish Margaret Brennan had asked him where he gets his information if he doesn’t believe the Intelligence Community.
I would guess that Bolton has half his ear. The voices in his head have the other. Either way, bad things could very easily happen.
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A robot apocalypse? Part 2
by Tom Sullivan
Interactive graphic at Axios
[Part 1 here.]
How long can we keep pretending to train people for the jobs of the future when the future will have fewer jobs?
It’s not enough that the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals just ruled “the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA) only protects current employees” and not job applicants. Companies rushing to automate may soon discriminate against flesh-and-blood people of any age, sex, race, ethnicity, or employment status by no longer employing humans.
We could be heading into to a new age of jobs disruption. Another wave of automation, robotics, and artificial intelligence means we will be taking more jobs from humans and creating fewer jobs for humans while still creating more humans. There will, of course, be no shortage of humans to yell “Get a job!” at them.
A report from the Brookings Institution, “Automation and Artificial Intelligence: How machines are affecting people and places” compares the job disruptions of the IT revolution of the 1980s to predict what effects widespread commercial introduction of “artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, and other digital technologies” will have on American workers.
Axios summarizes some of the findings:
By the numbers:
• A quarter of all jobs across the U.S. have high chance of being wiped out by automation.
• The five states with the highest share of at-risk jobs are Indiana (29%), Kentucky (29%), South Dakota (28%), Arkansas (28%), and Iowa (28%) — all of which went for President Trump in 2016.
• Compare that to the bottom five: New York (20%), Maryland (20%), Massachusetts (21%), Connecticut (22%) and New Mexico (22%), all of which went for Hillary Clinton.
But the extent of the hit to middle America is even clearer when zooming in to the county level.
• For example, in Jerauld County, South Dakota, 53% of jobs are hanging in the balance.
• 48% of jobs are vulnerable in Scott County, Miss.; 48% in Dakota County, Neb.; and 46% in Colfax County, Neb.
Brooking finds that across occupations automation effects will vary, but lower-wage jobs assigned to lower-education workers engaged in rote work will feel the change the most. This is no surprise.
That there will be regional variation is not a surprise either, “but it will be most disruptive in Heartland states—the same region hit hardest by IT era changes (pg. 37):
Less than one-quarter of adults in Kentucky, Arkansas, Alabama, and Mississippi have a bachelor’s degree or more, ensuring that all four states face automation exposures of current tasks in excess of 47 percent. In keeping with that, roughly 40 percent of the employment in these states resides in the industry groups most at risk from automation—accommodation and food services, manufacturing, transportation, agriculture, retail, and mining. Less than one-fifth of the workforce in these states labors in the sorts of jobs we have identified as using digital technologies most intensively.
Brookings finds smaller, less-educated (rural?) communities “will struggle relatively more with automation, while larger cities will experience less disruption, and that “men, young workers, and underrepresented groups” are at greatest risk from the next wave of automation and widespread implementation of technologies based on artificial intelligence.
A 2017 report indicates hundreds of thousands of jobs in low-wage metropolitan areas such as Las Vegas alone are at risk from automation:
By the numbers: Per a report from the University of Redlands’ Institute of Spatial Economic Analysis, 65% of Vegas jobs have a high chance of being automated away. Compare that to 25% of all jobs in the U.S.
And then, of course, there are the effects of climate change — not considered in either study.
It will be increasingly difficult to sustain rhetoric about working hard and playing by the rules to get ahead in an era in which the old jobs are increasingly scarce and the old rules no longer apply. In fact, we have by now a couple of generations of Americans for which the old rules have not really applied (image below). We just keep speaking as if they do.
From “The Productivity–Pay Gap” by EPI, August 2018.
David Atkins wrote plenty here about the coming jobless future and how we adapt to it. Elsewhere economists speculate about the prospects for a “Star Trek economy” (however that’s supposed to work). “Work hard and play by the rules,” however well-intended, now sounds not like a Star Trek economy but like “your parents’ economy,” a lost past to be resurrected, not a better future to be imagined and built. “Work hard and play by the rules” is already beyond its use-by date. It does not address conditions in rural areas already left behind by the economy as it exists today. Nor will it energize new voters across the country looking to the future, and for leaders visionary enough and bold enough and with the emotional intelligence to get them there.
Seen any lately?
Put me in, coach: A top 10 mixtape
By Dennis Hartley
Did you know “snack stadiums” were a thing? I just learned that. I’m sure they’ve been a thing since asparagus and fig “snack coliseums” were all the rage in Rome, but I wouldn’t know, as I don’t follow football. Or basketball. Or baseball, soccer, hockey, boxing, bowling, racing, tennis, polo, curling, or shuffleboard. I have nothing against anyone who does-I’m just not a sports guy. However, I do look forward to Super Bowl Sundays for one reason: a “private screening” at the mid-afternoon matinee of my choice.
That said…while I don’t know much about sports, I can still hum a few bars. So I’ve curated my “top 10” favorite songs about my least-favorite pastime. In alphabetical order:
“Basketball Jones” (Cheech & Chong) – While this 1973 Top 40 hit by the premiere stoner comedy duo has taken on a life of its own, some of us are old enough (ahem) to remember the original “smooth groove” song that it parodies… “Love Jones” by Brighter Side of Darkness (which makes it even funnier). “Cheech” Marin took on the persona of one “Tyrone Shoelaces” for lead vocals. An all-star backing track lineup includes George Harrison (!), Carole King, Tom Scott, Billy Preston, Nicky Hopkins, and Ronnie Spector.
“Centerfield” (John Fogerty) – After kicking off with a riff suspiciously close to Richie Havens’ “La Bamba”, the former Creedence Clearwater Revival front man is “a-roundin’ third, and headed for home” with this popular 1985 song (actually released as a “B” side).
“Eye of the Tiger” (Survivor) – This rousing theme song for Rocky III was co-written by band members Frankie Sullivan and Jim Peterik (former lead vocalist for The Ides of March). A #1 hit that has become everyone and your grandma’s favorite workout anthem.
“Gonna Fly Now” (Bill Conti) – That distinctive opening brass salvo from the theme originally composed for Rocky in 1976 has become the trademark for a movie franchise now 43 years in the running (2018’s Creed II was the 8th installment, if you’re counting).
“Hit Somebody! (The Hockey Song)” (Warren Zevon) – The late singer-songwriter’s droll paean to the joys of high sticking. “What else can a farm boy from Canada do?”
“Take the Skinheads Bowling” (Camper Van Beethoven) – Some people say that bowling alleys got big lanes. Now you! (“Got big lanes. Got big lanes.”). Two and a half minutes of pure genius. Lead singer David Lowery later formed Cracker (“Teen Angst”).
“Tell the Coach” (The Bus Boys) – I always felt this unique and talented L.A. band should have been a bigger deal, but the music business is nothing if not fickle. Here’s a great tongue-in-cheek song from their 1980 debut album, Minimum Wage Rock and Roll.
“Tour de France” (Kraftwerk) – The German electro-pop pioneers leave you breathless.
“We Are the Champions” (Queen) – You may have heard this at one or two sporting events. Originally on their 1977 News of the World album, it’s Queen’s ultimate anthem.
“When an Old Cricketer Leaves the Crease” (Roy Harper) – Despite his huge catalog, folk-rock troubadour Roy Harper remains one of England’s best-guarded musical secrets, even after 50+ years in the business. The talented singer-songwriter has had an acknowledged influence on a number of higher-profile artists, including Kate Bush, Pete Townshend, Ian Anderson, Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin (Page and Plant even name-checked him in their homage song “Hats Off to Roy Harper”). This wistful and enigmatic tune from his 1974 album HQ is one of my faves. All I can tell you is-cricket is involved.
Previous posts with related themes:
Top 10 Sports Movies
Top 10 Off-the-Wall Sports Movies
Win Win
Rush
A Matter of Size
Big Fan
The Wrestler
More reviews at Den of Cinema
On Facebook
On Twitter
–Dennis Hartley
Trump is loyal to no one. So why this guy?
by digby
Trump has a real problem with switching physicians for some reason:
President Trump has tapped a senior Navy officer that he considered last year to be his Veterans Affairs secretary for promotion to two-star admiral and to be his chief medical adviser, even though there is still an open Pentagon investigation against him into allegations that derailed his VA secretary nomination.
The White House sent Rear Adm. Ronny L. Jackson’s name for promotion consideration to the Senate on Jan. 15. He was serving as the president’s doctor last April when Trump nominated him for the VA post, and withdrew from consideration after accusations of mismanagement and misconduct as White House physician emerged.
A spokesman for the Defense Department Inspector General’s Office, Bruce Anderson, said his office’s investigation into Jackson is still ongoing. The office, considered the Pentagon’s top watchdog, said in June that it had opened a case against Jackson, though it would not comment on the scope of it.
A Navy spokesman, Lt. Christina Sears, said Jackson is still assigned to the White House. The Navy originally submitted Jackson’s name for promotion last year before Trump nominated him to be VA secretary, and the White House resubmitted it, she said. Task & Purpose first reported the re-submission of Jackson’s nomination on Friday evening.
A White House official, speaking on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the issue, said that Jackson is no longer the president’s chief physician and the promotion nomination was simply re-upping one from last year. Trump still likes Jackson and believes he was treated unfairly, the official said.
The White House released a list of new appointments on Saturday that shows Jackson serving as an assistant to the president and as his chief medical adviser.
It isn’t clear whether the Armed Services Committee will act on Jackson’s new promotion nomination while the investigation is still ongoing.
“We don’t comment on pending nominations, ongoing investigations, or in this case both,” said Chip Unruh, a spokesman for Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), the ranking Democrat on the committee.
The nomination thrusts a controversy that had started to fade from view for the Trump administration back into the spotlight.
After Trump nominated Jackson for the VA secretary post last April, Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.), the ranking member of the Veterans‘ Affairs Committee, released a two-page summary of accusations against him that included freely dispensing medication, drinking on the job and creating a hostile workplace. Some former colleagues said he was nicknamed the “Candyman” because of how he dispensed medications.
Dr Ronny came through for him before with that absurd press conference proclaiming him to be in almost perfect health due to his superior genes. But I have a feeling he won’t be appearing publicly again. So maybe Trump is demanding “the candyman” for some other reason?
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Intelligence vs the gut
by digby
In the wake of President Donald Trump’s renewed attacks on the U.S. intelligence community this week, senior intelligence briefers are breaking two years of silence to warn that the President is endangering American security with what they say is a stubborn disregard for their assessments.
Citing multiple in-person episodes, these intelligence officials say Trump displays what one called “willful ignorance” when presented with analyses generated by America’s $81 billion-a-year intelligence services. The officials, who include analysts who prepare Trump’s briefs and the briefers themselves, describe futile attempts to keep his attention by using visual aids, confining some briefing points to two or three sentences, and repeating his name and title as frequently as possible.
What is most troubling, say these officials and others in government and on Capitol Hill who have been briefed on the episodes, are Trump’s angry reactions when he is given information that contradicts positions he has taken or beliefs he holds. Two intelligence officers even reported that they have been warned to avoid giving the President intelligence assessments that contradict stances he has taken in public.That reaction was on display this week. At a Congressional hearing on national security threats, the leaders of all the major intelligence agencies, including the Directors of National Intelligence, the CIA and the FBI contradicted Trump on issues relating to North Korea, Russia, the Islamic State, and Iran. In response, Trump said the intelligence chiefs were “passive and naïve” and suggested they “should go back to school.”
The intelligence officials criticizing Trump requested anonymity because the briefings they described, including the President’s Daily Brief, or PDB, are classified. The PDB is one of the most highly restricted products produced by U.S. intelligence analysts. A select group of intelligence officials is involved in preparing these briefings. A small number of senior officials, often including the Director of Central Intelligence, Director of National Intelligence or the heads of other agencies depending on the topic, usually deliver it.
The reporting for this story is based on interviews with multiple officials who have first hand knowledge of the episodes they describe, and multiple others who have been briefed on them. Asked in detail about the officials’ concerns, senior White House and National Security Council officials declined to comment.
The problem has existed since the beginning of Trump’s presidency, the intelligence officials say, and for a time they tried to respond to the President’s behavior in briefings with dark humor. After a briefing in preparation for a meeting with British Prime Minister Theresa May, for example, the subject turned to the British Indian Ocean Territory of Diego Garcia. The island is home to an important airbase and a U.S. Naval Support Facility that are central to America’s ability to project power in the region, including in the war in Afghanistan.
The President, officials familiar with the briefing said, asked two questions: Are the people nice, and are the beaches good? “Some of us wondered if he was thinking about our alliance with the Brits and the security issues in an important area where the Chinese have been increasingly active, or whether he was thinking like a real estate developer,” one of the officials said wryly.
In another briefing on South Asia, Trump’s advisors brought a map of the region from Afghanistan to Bangladesh, according to intelligence officers with knowledge of the meeting and congressional officials who were briefed on it. Trump, they said, pointed at the map and said he knew that Nepal was part of India, only to be told that it is an independent nation. When said he was familiar with Bhutan and knew it, too, was part of India, his briefers told him that Bhutan was an independent kingdom. Last August, Politico reported on president’s mispronunciation of the names of the two countries during the same briefing.
But rhe disconnect between Trump and his intelligence briefers is no joke, the officials say. Several pointed to concerns regarding Trump’s assessment of the threat posed by North Korea’s nuclear capabilities. After Trump’s summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un last summer, the North claimed to have destroyed its major underground nuclear testing facility at Punggye-ri, and Trump has gone out of his way to credit the claim.
The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGIA), which oversees the spy satellites that map and photograph key areas, had tried to impress upon Trump the size and complexity of the North Korean site. In preparing one briefing for the President on the issue early in his administration, the NGIA built a model of the facility with a removable roof, according to two officials. To help Trump grasp the size of the facility, the NGIA briefers built a miniature version New York’s Statue of Liberty to scale and put it inside the model.
Intelligence officials from multiple agencies later warned Trump that entrances at the facility that had been closed after the summit could still be reopened. But the president has ignored the agencies’ warnings and has exaggerated the steps North Korea has taken to shutter the facility, those officials and two others say. That is a particular concern now, ahead of a possible second summit with the Kim Jong-Un later this month…
Obviously US Intelligence is not omnipotent. They have made plenty of wrong calls and at times been complicit with political leaders who wanted to gin up a threat.It’s important to maintain proper skepticism of these powerful institutions.
But given the choice between the US Intelligence Community and Trump’s “gut” I don’t think there’s much choice about who has more credibility.
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His button is very big and powerful
by digby
North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un just stated that the “Nuclear Button is on his desk at all times.” Will someone from his depleted and food starved regime please inform him that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 3, 2018
The administration’s decision to withdraw from the INF treaty isn’t surprising since John Bolton is the National Security Adviser. He doesn’t believe in arms control of any kind. He apparently thinks that nuclear war is winnable. But it’s also the case that Russia has long wanted the US to withdraw so they could continue to develop these medium range nuclear weapons without having to pretend that they aren’t:
Just so we’re clear, Putin has wanted to withdraw from the INF Treaty for a long time. Withdrawing from INF therefore isn’t the best way to punish Russia for its non-compliance. Rather, sticking with it is still the best way to keep a lid on Russian threat https://t.co/bl3wTt0RkU— Ivo Daalder (@IvoHDaalder) February 1, 2019
The article linked is from 2007. This isn’t a recent goal. The Washington Post shows here what Putin has been saying about this as recently as 2016:
In a [2016] exchange captured by a Kremlin transcript, Putin called the leaders of the Soviet Union who forged the treaty with the United States in the late 1980s “naive” for its terms (emphasis added):
Q: Does Russia see any value in this treaty, and if yes, then what exactly? Is it even worthwhile to be part of this treaty?
PUTIN: It would be of great value to us, if other countries followed Russia and the United States. Here’s what we have: the naive former Russian leadership went ahead and eliminated intermediate-range land-based missiles. The Americans eliminated their Pershing missiles, while we scrapped the SS-20 missiles. There was a tragic event associated with this when the chief designer of these systems committed suicide believing that it was a betrayal of national interests and unilateral disarmament.
Why unilateral? Because under that treaty we eliminated our ground complex, but the treaty did not include medium-range sea- and air-based missiles. Air- and sea-based missiles were not affected by it. The Soviet Union simply did not have them, while the United States kept them in service.
What we ultimately got was a clear imbalance: the United States has kept its medium-range missiles. It does not matter whether they are based at sea, in the air, or on land; however, the Soviet Union was simply left without this type of weapons. Almost all of our neighbours make such weapons, including the countries to the east of our borders, and Middle Eastern countries as well, whereas none of the countries sharing borders with the United States, neither Canada nor Mexico, manufacture such weapons. So, for us it is a special test, but nevertheless we believe it is necessary to honour this treaty. All the more so since, as you may be aware, we now also have medium-range sea- and air-based missiles.
That doesn’t sound like someone who will be particularly unhappy without the treaty — which he argued was stacked against his country to begin with.
So, for all the fatuous nonsense we’ve heard over the past day about Trump standing up to the Russians, let’s just say that this happens to be a situation where Bolton and Putin see eye to eye and the president is able to please both the Russia hawks and his handler at the saem time. Win-win.
Charlie Pierce gets into the history on this:
I’m not sure how giving Vladimir Putin everything he wants is supposed to hurt him, but I am not the Secretary of State. This is an odds-on decision to start another nuclear arms race in Europe, which can only hype up the ambitious Russian ganglord’s dreams of a gangster-capitalist new USSR. The INF Treaty was one of the Reagan Administration’s shining accomplishments, and one of the first indications that Mikhail Gorbachev was a real reformer.
It was the first arms-control agreement that required a reduction in nuclear weapons rather than simply freezing the number of them in place. It brought Europe out from under a dark shadow. (These were the days in which nuclear war was again thought to be feasible, if not imminent.) It allowed people in Europe to breathe a little easier. For all his faults, Reagan made the INF Treaty a landmark in nuclear diplomacy, and it led directly to President George H.W. Bush’s START treaty which cut in half the nuclear arsenals of both countries. Whereupon, of course, a short time later, there was no Soviet Union any more. You want my blogger’s guess? The START agreement is due to expire in 2021. That will be the next target for this administration*’s reckless vandalism, if this president* were to be re-elected.
If your partner in a treaty cheats, you use the mechanisms of the treaty to hold the partner to account. You don’t simply abandon the treaty—unless, of course, you want to start arming up in Europe all over again and (maybe) don’t mind much if Russia does the same thing. Were I an ordinary Czech, say, I might wonder if two oligarchs weren’t actually working together to dominate the European landscape. Several months ago, arms-control expert Joseph Cirincione made this very point when the idea of abandoning the INF agreement was first floated.
Maybe that is why no one wants them. No government in Europe or Asia is calling for these weapons or offering to host them. In the 1980s, deployments of nuclear weapons into Europe brought millions of Europeans into the streets in sustained protests. This time, the decision to pull down yet another security pillar in the trans-Atlantic alliance will deepen an already growing divide. “Of course, it will widen the rift between Europe and America,” former British diplomat and director of the European Leadership Network Adam Thomson told me this week, “European governments will look even more intensely at how they can provide for their own security.” It will not be as insulting to European leaders as Trump’s violation of the Iran anti-nuclear deal, he said. Europeans saw that agreement as the crowning achievement of European Union security diplomacy. But it will burn.
Cirincione further argued that the real vandal here wasn’t Pompeo, but, rather, National Security Adviser John Bolton, a truly bloodthirsty crackpot who’d tear down the entire global political order if it made him feel like Julius Caesar. Cirincione wrote:
Perhaps that is why the decision to jettison the INF Treaty did not come from the State Department (which normally has jurisdiction over treaties), but out of Bolton’s National Security Council. Bolton has an obsession with tearing down the treaties, legal arrangements, and global governance councils created by Republicans and Democrats over the past 70 years. He views treaties as tools of the global Lilliputians to tie down the American Gulliver. Bolton insists that maintaining U.S. global dominance requires that the U.S. have a massive spectrum of conventional and nuclear options. “Violations give America the opportunity to discard obsolete, Cold War-era limits on its own arsenal, and upgrade its military capabilities to match its global responsibilities,“ Bolton wrote with former Deputy Assistant U.S. Attorney General John Yoo.
As for Putin, there’s a good chance he pulled Trump’s strings in Helsinki:
Trump and Putin, who control the world’s two biggest nuclear arsenals, are due to meet on Monday in Helsinki, a venue which evokes memories of Cold War show-downs between the Soviet Union and the United States.
“The proliferation is a tremendous, I mean to me, it’s the biggest problem in the world, nuclear weapons, biggest problem in the world,” Trump said alongside British Prime Minister Theresa May at her Chequers country residence.
“If we can do something to substantially reduce them, I mean, ideally get rid of them, maybe that’s a dream, but certainly it’s a subject that I’ll be bringing up with him,” Trump said of his upcoming meeting with Putin.
Trump added the nuclear arsenals were “also a very expensive thing but that’s the least important.”
We know Trump doesn’t read his briefing papers so we can’t expect that he has learned anything about this issue since becoming president. Before that his knowledge of it consisted of bragging that his uncle was a Professor at MIT:
“I had an uncle went to MIT who is a top professor. Dr. John Trump. A genius. It’s in my blood. I’m smart. Great marks. Like really smart…My uncle used to tell me about nuclear before nuclear was nuclear,” said Trump (an impossible feat, since he was born one year after the first nuclear bomb was dropped on Hiroshima in 1945). “He would tell me, ‘There are things that are happening that could be potentially so bad for the world in terms of weaponry.’ He understood, literally, nuclear before it was nuclear.”
This article by David Corn about Trump’s musings about nuclear arms will chill you to the bone. This uneducated, delusional narcissist has been blathering incoherently on the subject for decades.
Remember, the reason Rex Tillerson called Trump a moron was over this issue:
President Donald Trump said he wanted what amounted to a nearly tenfold increase in the U.S. nuclear arsenal during a gathering this past summer of the nation’s highest-ranking national security leaders, according to three officials who were in the room.
Trump’s comments, the officials said, came in response to a briefing slide he was shown that charted the steady reduction of U.S. nuclear weapons since the late 1960s. Trump indicated he wanted a bigger stockpile, not the bottom position on that downward-sloping curve.
President Putin sees that he’s dealing with a president who has the mind of a child. So does Bolton. But as Charlie Pierce pointed out, these two motives are going to come into direct at some point:
If Putin lards up his western frontier with new generations of intermediate missiles, what will this administration*’s response? Bolton will want to arm up in equal measure. The president*’s truckling to the Russian president will collide with that. What does Bolton think the “global responsibilities” of the United States actually are? Can’t anyone here play this game? Which way to the basement?
I think both Putin and Bolton think they control Trump. This issue counts as a win for both. But I’d be prepared to bet that only the first one really has Trump’s number.
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