NY Times Notes and Highlights

Counting interim leaders, there have been seven communications chiefs; four heads each of the Departments of Homeland Security, Veterans Affairs and Health and Human Services; four national security advisers; three secretaries of defense; and three press secretaries.

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The Brookings Institution puts the turnover in Mr. Trump’s “A Team” — defined as top decision makers within the executive office of the president (which does not include cabinet secretaries) — at 74 percent as of Monday. No other modern administration came even close to that.

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Trump seems to understand, at least on a limbic level, that the effect of this cavalcade of scandal isn’t cumulative. Instead, each one eclipses the last, creating a sense of weary cynicism that makes shock impossible to sustain.

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The unemployment rate was only 3.7 percent in June, near its lowest level since 1969, as tens of thousands of people gave up actively looking for another job. But in doing so, the dropouts meant the labor force participation rate was stuck at 62.9 percent, near its lowest level since 1977.

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Online dating has numerous benefits, but it also leads to option paralysis, decreased fluency in social cues and the tendency to consider people avatars instead of human beings.

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Today that Grand Old Party has devolved into a personality cult surrounding a racist demagogue who incites a mob to chant about a Somali-American member of Congress: “Send her back!”

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Dear Democrats: This is not complicated! Just nominate a decent, sane person, one committed to reunifying the country and creating more good jobs, a person who can gain the support of the independents, moderate Republicans and suburban women who abandoned Donald Trump in the midterms and thus swung the House of Representatives to the Democrats and could do the same for the presidency.

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The gravest thing Trump has done is to empty this idea of meaning. His has been an assault on honesty, decency, dignity, tolerance and civility. On this president’s wish list, every right is alienable. He leads a movement more than he does a nation, and so depends on fear to mobilize people.

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He reflects many of the values that America once proudly stood for: toughness without belligerence, charm without smarminess, loyalty without question.

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He is a faux tough guy who lets other people do the fighting for him, a needy brat who never accepts responsibility for his actions, an oaf with no trace of courage, class or chivalry.

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The United States is the only advanced industrial nation that doesn’t have national laws guaranteeing paid maternity leave. It is also the only advanced economy that doesn’t guarantee workers any vacation, paid or unpaid, and the only highly developed country (other than South Korea) that doesn’t guarantee paid sick days. In contrast, the European Union’s 28 nations guarantee workers at least four weeks’ paid vacation.

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“A politician has no actual principles. He is in favor of whatever seems to him to be popular at the moment.”

Consider, for example, the matter of religion. It is debated freely and furiously in almost every country in the world save the United States,” but here the critic is silenced. “The result is that all religions are equally safeguarded against criticism, and that all of them lose vitality. We protect the status quo, and so make steady war upon revision and improvement.”

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United States: Essays 1952-1992 (Vidal, Gore)

- Your Highlight on page 794 | Location 14575-14577 | Added on Friday, August 23, 2019 11:58:55 PM

This dazzling inequity is reflected in our tax system where the man on salary pays more tax than the man who lives on dividends, who in turn pays more tax than the wheeler-dealer who makes a capital-gains deal.

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- Your Highlight on Location 7272-7273 | Added on Sunday, August 25, 2019 8:27:02 AM

In the four decades between 1969 and 2008, economists played a leading role in slashing taxation of the wealthy and in curbing public investment.

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- Your Highlight on Location 7277-7278 | Added on Sunday, August 25, 2019 8:27:34 AM

Perhaps the starkest measure of the failure of our economic policies is that the average American’s life expectancy is in decline, as inequalities of wealth have become inequalities of health.

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The New York Times - Daily Edition for Kindle (The New York Times Company)

- Your Highlight on Location 8134-8137 | Added on Sunday, August 25, 2019 2:11:28 PM

Let’s say I want to read about the Iran nuclear deal, but I prefer coverage from The New York Times. Instead of just Googling US iran deal for the latest news, I can search site:nytimes.com iran deal to see coverage only from The Times. This also allows me to see everything The Times has done on the topic going back weeks or months, rather than my results getting cluttered with versions of today’s news from other publications.

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- Your Highlight on Location 8156-8157 | Added on Sunday, August 25, 2019 2:12:57 PM

Drag an image into Image Search and Google will find other versions of that photo for you.

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The 2,548 Wittiest Things Anybody Ever Said (Byrne, Robert)

- Your Highlight on Location 307-309 | Added on Friday, September 20, 2019 8:30:55 PM

As I grow older and older and totter toward the tomb I find that I care less and less who goes to bed with whom. —Dorothy Sayers (1893–1957)

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- Your Highlight on Location 2262-2264 | Added on Sunday, September 22, 2019 8:29:07 AM

When we’re young, we want to stand out, to leave our mark on the world, to be exceptional. As the seasons pass, we come to find that it’s everything that’s not extraordinary in us — our ability to tend to a family, to keep ill health at bay, to hit a Ping-Pong ball — and even in the world around us, that may be most memorable.

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The president has previously handed over highly classified intelligence to Russia; sided with Russian President Vladimir Putin against U.S. intelligence; devised 

military strategy in public at Mar-a-Lago; insulted leaders of Britain, Germany and France; shoved the prime minister of Montenegro; fallen "in love" with North Korea's dictator; invited the Taliban to Camp David; asked if he could nuke hurricanes; taken children from their parents and put them in warehouses; altered a weather forecast with a Sharpie; said windmills cause cancer; and hired Rudy Giuliani.

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Perhaps for the first time since the United States was established, a majority of young adults here do not identify as Christian.

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- Your Highlight on Location 7894-7896 | Added on Sunday, October 27, 2019 5:06:56 PM

Only 49 percent of millennials consider themselves Christian, compared with 84 percent of Americans in their mid-70s or older, according to a new report from the Pew Research Center.

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- Your Highlight on Location 7910-7912 | Added on Sunday, October 27, 2019 5:08:02 PM

It would be difficult to imagine a president more at odds with Jesus’ message than Trump, a serial philanderer and liar who has persecuted refugees, divided families, exploited the poor and allegedly committed sexual assaults.

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- Your Highlight on Location 7564-7565 | Added on Sunday, October 27, 2019 5:12:00 PM

Trump is as inept at English as he is at governing. He’s oxymoronic: a nativist who can’t really speak his native tongue.

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- Your Highlight on Location 8998-8999 | Added on Sunday, November 3, 2019 9:15:21 AM

That Mr. Trump seems to have made up the scene of a whimpering terrorist may be shocking on one level yet not all that surprising from a president who over the years has made a habit of inventing people who do not exist and events that did not happen.

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- Your Highlight on Location 9031-9035 | Added on Sunday, November 3, 2019 9:17:29 AM

Mr. Trump has always had an active imagination, on matters large and small. While in business, he called reporters pretending to be a Trump spokesman named John Barron boasting about Mr. Trump in the third person. For years, he peddled the lie that Mr. Obama was born in Kenya instead of Hawaii and he claimed to see “thousands and thousands” of Muslims in New Jersey cheering the fall of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, a claim that was thoroughly debunked.

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- Your Highlight on Location 9080-9082 | Added on Sunday, November 3, 2019 9:20:28 AM

In essence, the more steps people accumulated over the course of the month, the higher their self-rated sleep quality was during that time. Ditto when the researchers looked at the number of minutes they had spent moving; the more time someone was in motion during the month, the better they rated their sleep over all.

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- Your Highlight on Location 9098-9099 | Added on Sunday, November 3, 2019 9:22:23 AM

If Robert Ballard, who discovered the wreck of the Titanic, were given the job of finding Trump’s moral bottom, he’d fail.

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- Your Highlight on Location 9408-9408 | Added on Sunday, November 3, 2019 9:34:59 AM

Diners who walk in the door eager to hand over literal piles of money aren’t greeted; they’re processed.

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- Your Highlight on Location 9411-9411 | Added on Sunday, November 3, 2019 9:35:16 AM

The Department of Motor Vehicles is a block party compared with the line at Peter Luger.

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- Your Highlight on Location 9437-9438 | Added on Sunday, November 3, 2019 9:39:02 AM

Other restaurants, and not just steakhouses, buy beef that is tender, richly marbled and deeply flavorful; at Luger, you get the first two but not the third.

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- Your Highlight on Location 9448-9450 | Added on Sunday, November 3, 2019 9:39:55 AM

They will say that nobody goes to Luger for the sole, nobody goes to Luger for the wine, nobody goes to Luger for the salad, nobody goes to Luger for the service. The list goes on, and gets harder to swallow, until you start to wonder who really needs to go to Peter Luger, and start to think the answer is nobody.

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- Your Highlight on Location 7917-7919 | Added on Sunday, November 3, 2019 3:31:44 PM

One of the first I learned was “nunchi”— literally translated, “eye-measure.” Nunchi is the art of sensing what people are thinking and feeling, and responding appropriately. It’s speed-reading a room with the emphasis on the collective,

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- Your Highlight on Location 7931-7933 | Added on Sunday, November 3, 2019 3:32:15 PM

Maybe you have nunchi already: Do you sense when a host secretly wants you to leave? Do you accurately sense when dangers are real before your friends do? Then you probably have quick nunchi.

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- Your Highlight on Location 8333-8335 | Added on Sunday, November 3, 2019 4:49:46 PM

Highly ideological parties and candidates can win elections in the right circumstances, and a race against an unpopular, unfit and impeachable incumbent might be one of them. But it would still be a folly, a case study in ideology’s exacting costs, for the Democrats to take the chance.

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- Your Highlight on Location 9118-9120 | Added on Sunday, November 3, 2019 4:51:08 PM

No wonder the president chose to lambaste Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman as a “Never Trumper.” The combat veteran had the simple decency of being scandalized by what he heard from the president on the Ukraine phone call, and by what he knew of the discrepancies between what he heard on the call and the account of

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Smartest Things I Read Today

Think tanks in DC call themselves non-partisan. But of course, that’s not true, because they’ve already made up their minds. They’re not thinking at all. Merely arguing.

Seth Godin

If the Catholic Church wasn't a religious institution, would we be handling the situation differently?

"They would have been arrested under the RICO federal laws already and they would have been considered organized crime," 

Pennsylvania State Rep. Mark Rozzi, a Democrat, told Salon. Rozzi is more than just a proponent of passing new legislation to help victims of childhood sex abuse, whether from employees of the Catholic Church or other organizations; he is also a victim himself, one who was raped by a priest in a rectory shower in Pennsylvania when he was 13 years old.

Economically, the country has changed surprisingly little since 2008. The big banks have returned to risky practices, and Republicans are trying to undo the Dodd-Frank reform law, which was enacted to prevent another collapse. The distribution of income and wealth in America is as lopsided as ever. Despite almost ten years of economic growth, real wages are stuck at their pre-crisis level, while corporate profits are soaring and stock prices have reached record highs. All the misshapen economic trends of the previous decade are still with us.

The lasting effect of the crisis is in our politics. The Presidency of Donald Trump is an overdetermined fluke, an accident with a thousand causes. Among them is the catastrophic event that gutted millions of lives and ended in no fair resolution, only cynicism. The economic indicators are strong right now, but before long there will be another financial crisis. They come every seven or ten years, each bearing the features of its time. If the previous one was the result of overconfidence in free markets, the next might be triggered—as in Turkey today—by the behavior of an authoritarian leader. When it comes, we’ll be less prepared to address it than we were in 2008. This President has made an enemy of facts, Congress no longer passes rational laws, and American democracy is ten years unhealthier.

George Packer

Trump Troll

That leaves Trump free to grab his phone at all hours to shove and to smear and to spew falsehoods. As Michiko Kakutani writes in her new book, “The Death of Truth”: “Trump, of course, is a troll — both by temperament and by habit. His tweets and offhand taunts are the very essence of trolling — the lies, the scorn, the invective, the trash talk, and the rabid non sequiturs of an angry, aggrieved, isolated, and deeply self-absorbed adolescent who lives in a self-constructed bubble and gets the attention he craves from bashing his enemies and trailing clouds of outrage and dismay in his path.”

Maureen Dowd

Trump Was Outfoxed in Singapore (Nicholas Kristof-NYT)

It sure looks as if President Trump was hoodwinked in Singapore.

Trump made a huge concession — the suspension of military exercises with South Korea. That’s on top of the broader concession of the summit meeting itself, security guarantees he gave North Korea and the legitimacy that the summit provides his counterpart, Kim Jong-un.

Within North Korea, the “very special bond” that Trump claimed to have formed with Kim will be portrayed this way: Kim forced the American president, through his nuclear and missile tests, to accept North Korea as a nuclear equal, to provide security guarantees to North Korea, and to cancel war games with South Korea that the North has protested for decades.

In exchange for these concessions, Trump seems to have won astonishingly little. In a joint statement, Kim merely “reaffirmed” the same commitment to denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula that North Korea has repeatedly made since 1992.

“They were willing to de-nuke,” Trump crowed at his news conference after his meetings with Kim. Trump seemed to believe he had achieved some remarkable agreement, but the concessions were all his own.

The most remarkable aspect of the joint statement was what it didn’t contain. There was nothing about North Korea freezing plutonium and uranium programs, nothing about destroying intercontinental ballistic missiles, nothing about allowing inspectors to return to nuclear sites, nothing about North Korea making a full declaration of its nuclear program, nothing about a timetable, nothing about verification, not even any clear pledge to permanently halt testing of nuclear weapons or long-range missiles.

Kim seems to have completely out-negotiated Trump, and it’s scary that Trump doesn’t seem to realize this. For now Trump has much less to show than past negotiators who hammered out deals with North Korea like the 1994 Agreed Framework, which completely froze the country’s plutonium program with a rigorous monitoring system.

Smartest Things I Read About Rosenanne Firing Today

1. What makes this moment unique is Roseanne’s occupation, fame, and employer. Authoring racist and/or otherwise offensive material, personally attacking political opponents, and believing in a collection of wildly false narratives puts her in lockstep with what seems to be America’s fastest growing and most vocal political party. With all due respect to baseball, Roseanne was participating in America’s favorite pastime. If you see her as an outlier, you’re missing the point.
2. While the bough-breaking Tweet stands alone, the bigger issue here is that Roseanne’s whole twitter feed is a cesspool of conspiracy theories and lies that are believed by tens of millions of ill-informed Americans. The racism and ignorance are widespread — and there is an entire media industry that has been fueling this fire for years. Roseanne isn’t the big problem here. It’s the millions of others who see her, and those like her (including the Troll in Chief), as truth-tellers.
3. The Roseanne firing is a reminder of America’s modern truism. Everyone pays but Trump. He’s said much worse things than Roseanne … today.
4. David Pell Medium

Analysis of Cancellation of North Korea Summit

“Kim baited Trump into pulling out of the summit, and Trump took the bait,” said Vipin Narang, a professor of international relations at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“They clearly don’t have the personnel in place and the mindset to accomplish much in these delicate sorts of exchanges,” said Joshua Pollack, a senior research associate with the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey. “We can’t even reach and stick to trade agreements with close partners.”

I felt that as things drew closer and Trump realized like he wasn’t going to get the grand submission with Kim on his knees, that things were not going to go well.Stephen Schwartz, nuclear policy consultant

“Kim also wanted to drive a wedge between the U.S. and South Korea, the U.S. and Japan, the U.S. and China, and he’s done that,” Schwartz said. “Donald Trump fell right into it, and he has no one to blame but himself.”

Opinion No wonder there’s an exodus from religion By E.J. Dionne Jr. (5-7-2018 Washington Post)

Do you wonder why the proportion of Americans declaring themselves unaffiliated with organized religion has skyrocketed in recent decades?

This trend is especially pronounced among adults under 30, roughly 40  percent of whom claim no connection to a religious congregation or tradition and have joined the ranks of those the pollsters call the “nones.”

To understand how so many now prefer nothing to something when it comes to religion, ponder the news over the past few days.

The same newspapers and broadcasts that were reporting on how President Trump finally admitted that he had indirectly paid a porn star to keep quiet about an alleged affair also offered accounts of what we’ll call Jesuitgate, the controversy over who should be the chaplain of the House of Representatives.

On Thursday, Speaker Paul D. Ryan backed down from his effective dismissal of the Rev. Patrick Conroy, a Jesuit priest, as chaplain. Ryan had said he asked the cleric to quit because he had provided inadequate “pastoral services,” but denied that Conroy was ousted because of a mild prayer for justice he delivered during the debate over the GOP tax cut.

Speaker Ryan says House chaplain can stay in job

House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) reversed course on May 3, and agreed to keep the Rev. Patrick J. Conroy on as House chaplain. (Reuters)

That phrase “pastoral services” must inspire a chuckle from your typical millennial agnostic. It makes the work of holy men and women sound like the this-worldly tasks of the accountant, the mechanic or the dentist. (As the grateful son of a dentist, I speak with respect for these extremely useful professions.)

Conroy had initially agreed to Ryan’s request to step aside but withdrew his resignation in a quietly stinging letter. The priest noted that he had never been informed of the shortcomings of his “pastoral services.” If he had, he would “have attempted to correct such ‘faults.’ ”

Conroy also quoted Ryan’s chief of staff, Jonathan Burks, as telling him “something like ‘maybe it’s time we had a chaplain that wasn’t a Catholic.’ ” Ryan’s office vehemently denied this (the Catholic vote is substantial), but the speaker announced he didn’t want to have a “protracted fight” and that Conroy could stay.

Many of us could have told the speaker that it’s a mistake to mess with a Jesuit. But think about it: The House Republican leadership was more inclined to push out a chaplain than to impose accountability on a president who is a proven liar and trashes the rule of law for his own selfish purposes day after day.

This degree of partisan irresponsibility only aggravates the already powerful skepticism among the young about what it means to be religious. In their landmark 2010 book, “American Grace,” the scholars Robert Putnam and David Campbell found that the rise of the nones was driven by the increasing association of organized religion with conservative politics and a lean toward the right in the culture wars.

Revealingly, Putnam and Campbell found that millennials with tolerant and open views on homosexuality were more than twice as likely to be religious nones as their statistically similar peers with conservative or traditionalist views on homosexuality. Many young people came to regard religion, in Putnam and Campbell’s words, as “judgmental, homophobic, hypocritical and too political.”

If you want a particularly exquisite hypocritical moment, consider that on Thursday, the very day when Trump had to admit his lies on the Stormy Daniels payoff, the president held a White House commemoration of the National Day of Prayer. “Prayer is the key that opens [to] us the treasures of God’s mercies and blessings,” he proclaimed, quoting Billy Graham. He tweeted this out as part of a pious 42-second video set to a sentimental soundtrack of peaceful strings. I guess Trump can use some peace and a lot of mercy right now.

What’s maddening about all of this is that religion has a strong case to make for itself — to the young and to everyone else — given its historical role as a prod to personal and social change and the ways in which movements for justice have been inspired through the centuries by the words of Exodus, Micah, Isaiah, Amos and Jesus.

Conroy was getting at this in the most uncontroversial way possible when he spoke in his now-contested prayer of how “our great nation” has created “opportunities that have allowed some to achieve great success, while others continue to struggle.” If a chaplain could be rebuked for voicing that simple and undeniable truth, what’s the point of the “religious liberty” that Trump and his GOP allies celebrate?

And when will those who advertise themselves as religion’s friends realize they can do far more damage to faith than all the atheists and agnostics put together?

Smartest Things I Read from Today's NY Times

Electing Mr. (Doug) Jones, who is admired nationally for prosecuting racial crimes, would be a cultural watershed for Alabama voters and a sign that the Trump base will fracture with unexpected ease. Deep in their bones, Alabamians know that it Roy Moore goes to Washington, the wardrobe department at "Saturday Night Live" will surely accommodate them by finding a cowboy vest, a tiny pistol and a Girl Scout dress, and they're prepared to feel very put upon.

Howell Raines

 I consider Mr. Trump's Republican Party to be a threat to conservatism, and I've concluded that the term evangelical – despite its rich history of proclaiming the "good news" of Christ to a broken world – has been so distorted that it is now undermining the Christian witness.

 Assume that you are a person of the left and an atheist, and you decided to create a couple of people in a laboratory to discredit the Republican Party and white evangelical Christianity. You could hardly choose two more perfect man then Donald Trump and Roy Moore.

Peter Wehner, senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center

 So Franken, who is good on women's rights, resigns for wet kisses and random squeezes while Pres. Trump, who is awful on women's rights, skips right past his braggadocio on groping. Meanwhile the accused pervert and pedophile Roy Moore, who is  a Neanderthal on women's rights, leads once more in the Senate race in Alabama, led by the president – who believes in nothing but winning – and the souless RNC.

Maureen Dowd

Insane Clown President: Dispatches from the 2016 Circus by Matt Taibbi

Insane Clown President: Dispatches from the 2016 Circus by Matt Taibbi
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

 For me, this book was a modern day horror story. As someone who has lived through 16 presidential election cycles, I could never imagine the events and results that took place, many if not most, with the complicity of the American voter. Taibbi does not present a pretty picture of Donald Trump or many of his supporters. If you are a Trump supporter, this book will not interest you in the least…

From the Taibbi book..

"The country, in other words, was losing it. Our national politics was doomed because voters were no longer debating one another using a commonly accepted set of facts. There was no common narrative, except in the imagination of a daft political and media elite that had long ago lost touch with the general public.

What we had instead was a nation of reality shoppers, all shutting the blinds on the loathsome old common landscape to tinker with their own self tailored and in some cases highly paranoid recipes for salvation and/or revolution.

They voted in large numbers, but they were voting out of loathing, against enemies and against the system in general, not really for anybody. The elections had basically become a forum for organizing the hatreds of the population. "


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Trump Revealed: An American Journey of Ambition, Ego, Money, and Power by Michael Kranish

Trump Revealed: An American Journey of Ambition, Ego, Money, and Power by Michael Kranish
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I have read many biographies of our past Presidents. Trump's biography does not fit into it any of them – – maybe Warren Harding's. This book provided additional details and insights into Trump than the earlier biography I've read from David Cay Johnston (The Making of Donald K. Trump). Unfortunately this reader wondered how someone like Trump could be elected president. Read the chapters on the Atlantic City casinos, his bankruptcies and the USFL, and you're at a loss to explain why just these failures were not disqualifiers to be President.

Well written book. I just wish that the last chapter showed that he failed to be President.


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The Making of Donald Trump by David Cay Johnston

The Making of Donald Trump by David Cay Johnston
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I choose to avoid books about political candidates published in an election year. Most books tend to be written by hacks and are not worth the time to read them. However "The Making of Donald Trump" is written by a respected investigative journalist who has credibility for his integrity. If you are a supporter of Donald Trump who has no interest in hearing bad news about him, you will not like this book. If you do not like Donald Trump, this book will provide additional ammunition for you to dislike him further and work against his opportunity to be President.

I can't say that there were many surprises for me in the book, though I did not know the backgrounds of his father and grandfather or their motivations in life. To coin a phrase, looks like the apple didn't fall far from the tree. Basically Donald Trump is portrayed as a very selfish and vain man focused on making money at any cost. He has very few friends and his poor treatment of people is detailed in the book.

The book is well researched and documented. It is very depressing that this man has gotten this far in business, media and in politics. I think this says more about the deterioration of our culture and judgment then Trump himself.


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Yuge: 30 Years of Doonesbury on Trump by G.B. Trudeau

Yuge!: 30 Years of Doonesbury on Trump by G. B. Trudeau
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I have been a fan of Doonesbury and G.B. Trudeau since the 1970s when the cartoon was first published. If you want to understand the history, politics, and culture of the past 45 years and you don't want to suffer through college courses or books in history, then skim through Doonesbury's cartoon strips. Yuge is a collection of Doonesbury's strips about Donald Trump from the past 30 years. As a caveat, please note that Trump is no fan of Trudeau's work. Trudeau skewers Trump as a businessman, self-professed icon, playboy, reality star, and now pseudo-politician. I enjoyed the book as it was very entertaining and funny.

Trudeau introduced his book with a defense and a warning..."You can't make this stuff up, so why try? Some people feel that Trump is beyond satire, but we professionals know he is satire, pure and uncut, free for all to use and enjoy, and for that we are not ungrateful. For our country, though we can only weep."

Agreed!


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