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Timely Content Open Thread: The Impeachment of Andrew Johnson

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Michael Harriot is the Roots writer who had that much-discussed convo about racism with Pete Buttigieg. I knew the basics of Johnson’s impeachment, but I learned stuff from Harriot’s thread here. Click on the tweet below to read the whole thing with the extraneous headers stripped out:

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Tuesday Morning Open Thread: Good News from the Sports World

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Read the whole thing:

… She is just the fourth woman in the award’s 66-year history to win it unaccompanied, a feat that is both a remarkable athletic achievement and a reflection of entrenched gender biases. Rapinoe challenged perceptions of her, of female athletes, of all women. She led her teammates, three months before their tentpole tournament, to sue the U.S. Soccer Federation for equal pay; to declare in advance that they would not visit the White House when they won the Cup; to score 13 goals in a group-stage match against Thailand, without apology.

As for The Pose? “It was kind of like a ‘F— you,’ but with a big smile and a s— eating grin,” Rapinoe says. “You are not going to steal any of our joy.”

Yes, the U.S. women have been here before. But the ’19ers were more dominant than the team that won four years ago—they never trailed in France; they scored a record 26 goals—and they were even bolder than the ’99ers who collectively captured SI’s year-end award two decades ago. Julie Foudy, co-captain of that team, asked her old cohort Mia Hamm about the equal-pay lawsuit, “Do you think we would’ve done this?” And Foudy says they concluded, “We probably would have said, Let’s plant that flag after we’ve won. We had been socialized not to stir the pot. Which I love about Rapinoe, this freedom to speak her mind in a way we didn’t feel we had.”…

In the months since: Michelle Obama recruited Rapinoe to join in a voter-participation initiative. Gloria Steinem, the original feminist icon, thanked Rapinoe for carrying her torch. A high school girls’ soccer team in Burlington, Vt., staged its own campaign in support of equal pay, and an 11-year-old boy in Geneva, Ill., went viral for his pink-haired Halloween costume, each inspired by Rapinoe. She has been invited to Washington by New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez; talked politics on Meet the Press, Pod Save America and CNN; and turned into a coveted endorsement for the 2020 election. No, she’s not running for office anytime soon. “I don’t have plans for policies and how to implement them,” she says. “I’ll just be the jabber.” (The White House did reach out privately to the team about a visit, a U.S. Soccer rep confirms. Rapinoe says she heard about the outreach on the plane ride home from France, from USSF president Carlos Cordeiro. He suggested a visit to both the White House and Capitol Hill; Rapinoe and another player reiterated they didn’t want to meet with Trump. Rapinoe would like to visit Congress with her team, but she doesn’t think U.S. Soccer is willing to organize a trip that skips the White House, with the World Cup coming to the U.S. in 2026. The team rep says ’26 “has absolutely zero bearing” on the issue.)…

Bonus points: This will make the #MAGAts lose what little chill they might’ve had.


***********
Also good — if more ambiguous — news:

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Saturday Morning Open Thread

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If Fitzpatrick is your rep, you might want to send him a thank-you message.

===========

And a long read, because it’s Saturday morning and worth the effort:

… Harry Reid, who retired in 2017 after representing Nevada for 30 years in the U.S. Senate—a dozen of them as chair of the Democratic caucus, eight of them as Senate majority leader—was supposed to be dead already; his pancreatic cancer was forecasted to prove fatal within weeks. But he’s still here, which is how I came to be talking with him, not long before Thanksgiving, in a conference room at the Bellagio, asking him why he remains the person to whom many of the Democratic presidential candidates come for advice and anointment.

Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren have both stopped by for meetings and checked in via phone. Pete Buttigieg made a special pilgrimage to see him. Bernie Sanders welcomed Reid to his hospital room after his recent heart attack. Before Mike Bloomberg started filing the paperwork to enter the primaries, he didn’t alert many Democratic Party figures—but he did call Reid…

If defeating Donald Trump rests on the Democratic Party unifying early and strong around a nominee, then the current state of things looks ominous. Polling suggests a scenario in which four different candidates could each win each Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina—with a fifth candidate, Bloomberg, the one with the deepest pockets, only then entering the primaries. Not a recipe for rapid coalescence—and conceivably a situation in which the Democratic convention arrives next July with candidates still scrambling for delegates and no one in possession of a majority. In that case, who could play the role of party elder to mediate among the various factions?

Barack Obama would seem to be the natural choice; he’s not only the last Democratic president, and the only one since Franklin Roosevelt to be elected twice with majorities of the electorate, but he remains the most popular figure, by far, in the Democratic Party. Yet it would be hard for him to appear to remain neutral. He’s good friends with one top-tier candidate, Joe Biden, his vice president for eight years; he’s expressed public doubts and private annoyance about the socialism-inflected movement inspired by another, Bernie Sanders; he’s had an uneasy relationship with a third, Elizabeth Warren, since she briefly worked for him setting up the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau; and Buttigieg has explicitly tried to position himself as the next Obama. (Obama actually has deeper roots and a closer friendship with a fifth candidate, Deval Patrick, than with any of these four.) But beyond this, Obama doesn’t want to be the party mediator or convention broker. Part of why he’s retreated from the public is because he’s hoping the party will move past him, and he doesn’t think that his being seen to have handpicked Trump’s opponent would be good for Democrats’ odds in the general election. There’s also the more self-interested worry about his legacy: What would it say about him if he couldn’t get a deal done, or if his handpicked candidate loses to Trump?

So if not Obama, then who? Not Bill or Hillary Clinton—they’re too loathed by some of the very factions they’d be trying to soothe. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is the de facto leader of the party, and people close to her hope and expect that she might be asked to mediate, based on her skill at steering the party toward the center-left. But she doesn’t have much of a relationship with any of the candidates or their campaigns aside from Biden, so she wouldn’t be able to exert personal suasion effectively.

That leaves the man, hairless due to chemotherapy, sitting across from me. Reid knows all the candidates who are within range of contention for the nomination; his former aides populate their campaign staffs. Perhaps most important, given the intransigent nature of Bernie Sanders and his supporters—who were notoriously reluctant to yield to Hillary Clinton last time around—Reid may be the only politician in America other than Sanders himself who’s trusted by Jane O’Meara Sanders, the senator’s wife and possibly most fight-hungry defender…

Reid said he agrees with Obama’s warning two weeks ago that the electorate was not as into progressive revolution as some candidates and Democrats on Twitter want to believe—but he also assured me that the party isn’t on a self-destructive bender. “You can go back and look at presidential primaries for as long as you want to go back, and candidates are always criticized in the primary for being too far to the left. But as time moves on, you wind up being more center. It’s going to happen this time, just like it always has,” he said.

Moreover, opposition to Trump will unite Democrats, he predicted, and heal the rifts among them. “We know that to say four more years of Trump will not be good for the country is a gross, gross understatement.”…

If the selection of the Democratic nominee does come down to Reid brokering a compromise, whom might he back? He won’t say, of course, and has promised not to make any endorsement until at least after Nevada’s primary, at the end of February. But he’s been talking up Warren since the 2016 election ended, and she was the candidate he was decidedly the most effusive about, calling her “one of the finest people I’ve ever worked with.” And many former Reid staffers occupy prominent roles on the Warren and Sanders campaigns and on lefty Twitter.

Does all this mean that you’re a secret liberal, or you’re more progressive than people thought? I asked Reid.

“I’m glad you think it’s a secret,” he told me…

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Impeachment Inquiry Open Thread: “But No PIZZAZ!”

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Susan Hennessey, “Lawfare Executive Editor, Brookings Senior Fellow, CNN National Security and Legal Analyst, Former IC attorney”, yesterday:

As a general matter there is too much focus on optics and too little on substance. But to the extent the Democrats needed to make the case to the public in this hearing, today was an extremely strong showing. And the Republicans offer zero substantive defense of Trump.

“Jonathan Allen, the poor man’s Chris Cillizza“, for NBCNews:

Analysis: The first two witnesses called Wednesday testified to President Trump’s scheme, but lacked the pizzazz necessary to capture public attention.

The Volatile Mermaid:

I AM AN AMERICAN! I LIKE PIZZAZZ! IMPEACHMENT HEARINGS SHOULD HAVE SWORD FIGHTS, TALKING ANIMALS, NINJA STRIPPERS, AND A POST CREDITS SCENE THAT FORESHADOWS THE PLOT OF THE NEXT HEARING!

Margaret Sullivan, at the Washington Post — “Media Beware: Impeachment Hearings Will Be the Trickiest Test of Covering Trump”:

The national media’s shortcomings have been all too obvious in recent years as Donald Trump has gleefully thrown the norms of traditional journalism into a tizzy…

But on Wednesday — as televised impeachment hearings begin in the House of Representatives — journalists need to be on their game. The stakes don’t get much higher when it comes to fulfilling their core mission: informing citizens of what they really need to know.

Here’s a refresher course in what needs to go right.

Stress substance, not speculation. Journalists and pundits love to ponder about how the public is reacting to news, though they aren’t much good at it.

Avoiding that would be a public service…

Don’t let stunts hijack the coverage. If we know anything about Trump’s reaction when things get tough, it’s that he and his allies will haul out some attention-grabbing performance art and its distractions…

Avoid Barr-Letter Syndrome. It was a little over six months ago that Attorney General William P. Barr took it upon himself to summarize the Mueller report in a misleading letter that the news media — pretty much en masse — represented as an accurate summation of the 448-page report about Russian interference in the 2016 election and its aftermath.

You might remember some headlines and news reports that said, essentially, “no collusion, no obstruction.”

Of course, that’s not what the report said, as Mueller himself later tried to set straight…

Beware mealy-mouthed and misleading language. Punditry will be running even more amok than usual once the hearings begin. And we’ll be hearing a lot about what a divided nation we have and how ugly politics has become. We’ll be hearing the term “quid pro quo” endlessly.

As for “polarization,” it’s a kind of false equivalence expressed in a single term, suggested Rosen: “We hear, ‘Oh things are so polarized now,’ when this is really about what’s happened to the Republican Party.”

In a potent Twitter thread last week, Ezra Klein of Vox pointed out that Trump’s abuses are so blatant that he “is the easiest possible test case for ‘Can our system hold a president accountable?’ And we are failing, because Republicans are failing.”

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Thursday Morning Open Thread: Another Day, Another Glitch in the Matrix

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So, just in time for the first post of the new morning, I seem to have lost the ability to properly embed tweets or images.   Hopefully, it’s the usual FYWP 3am/4am daily update, and the developers will be able to fix it later today…

 

ETA: I pulled out the extraneous code, for now.

 

From LA Mag, “Adam Schiff Is Ready to Rumble”:

… He is world-famous now. The chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence can now see himself caricatured on Saturday Night Live. In Trump’s Twitterverse, he’s the limp, Ivy League-educated elitist scheming to bring down the President of the Real America. To his supporters, he is Elliot Ness chasing Al Capone, Joseph Welch facing down Joseph McCarthy. Which of these images wins out may ultimately determine nothing less than the fate of the free world.

Or, as Schiff put it while sitting in his office, his expression indicating a half-hearted attempt at gallows humor: “Just another day.”…

I visited him the day after the Republican attempt to disrupt the hearings, which Schiff spoke of with a mixture of irritation and faint amusement. “We knew they were planning some kind of a stunt,” Schiff told me. “We didn’t know what kind, but we knew something was up because they had a [press conference] podium set up with a list of [speakers’] names.”

His reaction was pure Schiff: “I excused the witness so that she would not have to be part of it,” he said. “Then I left the room. Eventually, they got bored and left.

“They were disappointed,” he added. “They wanted a confrontation.” As it happens, they got one. According to a transcript of the proceedings released afterward, Schiff reserved special bile for Matt Gaetz, the fratty Florida Republican who has been one of the president’s most vocal Congressional cheerleaders. “Mr. Gaetz, please absent yourself!” Schiff said sternly when Gaetz crashed the hearing in violation of House rules. “You’re going to have someone remove from the hearing?” Gaetz replied with surprise. “No,” Schiff shot back. “You’re going to remove yourself.”…

Equanimity comes naturally to Schiff, but it’s also a part of a conscious strategy. “I do think that this is such a head-on-fire kind of a time that there’s a premium amount of people talking rationally. Along the way I’ve had people say, ‘You need to get angrier. You need to yell.’ I say, ‘Look, there are plenty of people getting angry right now. That’s just not who I am.’ And I think people in my line of work who have a problem, it’s often because they try to be something they’re not or someone they’re not. I’ve never tried to be anything other than what I am, and so I tell those who are looking for someone more incendiary there are lots of other choices.”

The other advantage, Schiff said, is that when he does show anger people pay far closer attention. “If you’re not angry all the time,” he said, “then people do notice when you are. And it tends to have more of an impact.”…

 

Schiff’s work ethic—and slight dorkiness —was on full display in June during one of several days that I followed him. His day began early with a morning “hit” on NBC, an interview carried out in a small hallway just off of the Rotunda…

The rest of the day included House votes, a meeting with a delegation of Armenian interns, a radio interview on the Mueller investigation, recording several spots for the Democratic Caucus, and, finally, an interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer.

As Schiff drove me to the studio, he looked almost cool in his reflective shades. (It’s a fleeting moment. He drives an Audi whose license plate frame bears a line from The Big Lebowski: “I don’t roll on Shabbos.”) Once inside the studio, just before he was miked up, Schiff tapped a small toy wolf on a shelf. “It’s a tradition,” he said, “for good luck.” At Blitzer’s desk—a small, red, glass-topped island in a sea of Pacific-blue tile—Schiff waited patiently as Blitzer recounted the day’s news, including Trump’s callous reaction to a photo of two immigrants, a father and daughter, found dead on a riverbank near the Mexico-U.S. border. “Does it ever stop?” Blitzer asked. The congressman responded with a withering takedown of Trump that left the room silent for a moment.

On the way back to his car, Schiff still seemed incensed, showing the rare flash of anger he had spoken about earlier. But there was no time to dwell—fresh outrages were piling up almost hourly. As fate would have it, he was one of the few people in America who could do something about it.

 

 

 

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Veterans Day Read: “The Endless Recovery From the Endless War”

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He was, for a time, the most well-known veteran in America.

On the evening of January 28, 2014, Cory Remsburg, an elite Army Ranger grievously wounded in Afghanistan, sat next to First Lady Michelle Obama in the balcony of the House chamber as President Obama delivered his annual State of the Union address. As one of the president’s speechwriters, I watched from the floor below, crowded among congressional and White House staff.

Nearing the end of his speech, Obama described how, on Cory’s tenth deployment, a bomb blast had thrown him into a canal, where his fellow soldiers found him facedown, underwater, unconscious, with a punctured skull. Across the country, television screens cut to Cory, with a lean build, close-cropped brown hair, piercing blue eyes, and striking in his dress blue uniform — a bow tie and a chestful of colorful ribbons and commendations…

This October 1 marked a decade since the explosion. Cory has now spent more years working to recover from his injuries than he did serving on active duty in the war zones — one of the approximately 5,000 veterans from Afghanistan and Iraq with penetrating head wounds who have returned home to live with their catastrophic injuries for decades to come. In advance of this milestone, I asked Cory and his parents for permission to follow him for the year.

I wanted to see the unvarnished reality of his life after the applause…

Over the past year, I spoke with Cory and his parents about two dozen times, in person and by telephone, often for an hour or more. I visited him at military and veterans’ hospitals and at his home in Arizona, where he granted me and photographer Pete Souza unprecedented access to his daily life. I spoke with more than 30 of Cory’s family, friends, fellow Rangers, doctors, and therapists.

I soon learned, as his brother had warned me, how dark the journey could get…

Remsburg was a 26-year-old at the height of his powers; now he’s a 35-year old whose parents are his full-time caregivers. Someone learning, over and over every day, how much he’ll never again do for himself… from driving to putting on deodorant.

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Sunday Morning Open Thread: Salmagundi

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Welcome to the chill season:

Note who wrote this tweet:

Halloween dateline, on a real horror story:

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Excellent Read: “My Education in the Patriarchy”

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Wrong time of day to run this, but there’s too damned much breaking news around. A reminder that Gary Wills remains an excellent political commentor as well as an astute writer… and that the New York Review of Books deserves to be more widely read:

In 1962, I began teaching ancient Greek in the graduate school of the Johns Hopkins University. I was twenty-seven and looked younger, and some of my graduate students were almost as old and looked older, so I tried to adopt the manner of a Hopkins “Herr Doktor Professor,” hoping that would give me some authority in the classroom. In my first course, which was on Homer’s Iliad, an argumentative student kept up a disagreement on one Homeric point. When I could not convince her of my position, I huffily quoted Dr. Johnson to her: “I have found you an argument; but I am not obliged to find you an understanding.”

When I told my wife, Natalie, about that day’s class, she was shocked. I had used my position to humiliate a student who was just trying to get to the truth. When I told her the student was a woman (the sole woman student I had amid that hostile university atmosphere of 1962—undergraduate “co-eds” would not be admitted to Hopkins for another eight years), Natalie was distressed. I was not only humiliating a student but bullying her. She asked how I would feel if that happened to our then one-year-old daughter, Lydia, when she went to college. After being put in my place by Natalie, I tried to stay there (it is very helpful to marry someone smarter than yourself).

Even after that correction, I was ill-equipped to cope with the presence of women in a university. There were none in my classes when I was a graduate student at Yale, where they would not be admitted as undergraduates until six years after I got my doctorate. The fact that there was a woman in my graduate class at Hopkins was an oddity, as it would have been at many of the major universities in America…

But our day at Hopkins was not much better than Gildersleeve’s. Though I kept the respect instilled by my wife for the one woman in my class, I did not appreciate the effort that student had had to make just to get there. I learned a little about that at my first faculty meeting to allot fellowship money to applicants for the department. When the résumé came up of a woman who clearly merited admission, our archaeologist, John Young, said that no fellowship money should be given to her. “That is just throwing away money that should be saved for those who will advance the profession. Why give money to a woman who, as soon as she becomes pregnant, will drop the profession and start taking care of her babies?” Young was no shining star of the classics world himself, and I would find over the years that some of the people most intent on showing that women could not meet high standards had barely met those standards themselves, if at all. Yet I did not argue with Young. Since I knew that the head of our small department was with him on this, I went along with the policy. No woman received any money over the six years I was in the department.

I knew that opposing the admission of women to protect the standards of the classics profession was a phony argument. I had come to Hopkins from the inaugural year of Harvard’s Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, where I was part of the first class of six junior fellows (young scholars of promise given time off from teaching to develop their research). There were three fellows from America and three from abroad—one from Germany, one from England, one from Italy. The Italian, and our lone woman, was Anna Morpurgo. She was the youngest and clearly the brightest of us. She knew more languages than we did and knew them better…

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Cold Grey Pre-Dawn Open Thread: Roger Stone Goes on Trial

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Both Sommer and Tillman are good leads for this trial, if you’re curious. Yes, I am allowed to ‘obsess about minor characters’ like Stone, because I’ve actively loathed that dude since he was one of Nixon’s sleaziest defenders back in the 1970s…

… Stone’s lawyer, in turn, argued that his client never meant to lie to lawmakers about his efforts to gain insights about Democrats’ hacked emails ahead of the presidential election. In an unusual gambit, Stone’s lawyer Bruce S. Rogow argued that Stone’s public claims about connections to the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks were false, and therefore he did not make false statements later to Congress.

Stone’s trial is the last case filed by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III in his investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 campaign, and prosecutors wasted little time drawing a straight line from Stone’s alleged crimes to Trump’s political interests…

The prosecutor urged jurors to focus on Stone’s conduct, not the broader controversies still swirling around the 2016 campaign.

“This case is not about who hacked the Democratic National Committee servers. This case is not about whether Roger Stone had any communications with Russians. And this case is not about politics,” said Zelinsky. “This case is about Roger Stone’s false testimony to the House Intelligence Committee in an attempt to obstruct the investigation and to tamper with evidence.”

Stone, 67, a longtime Trump adviser and political consultant, has pleaded not guilty to a seven-count indictment that charges him with false statements and witness tampering…

Timeline of all the incriminating communications here:

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Foreign Affairs Open Thread: Why Trump Hates Ukraine

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Three of President Trump’s top advisers met with him in the Oval Office in May, determined to convince him that the new Ukrainian leader was an ally deserving of U.S. support.

They had barely begun their pitch when Trump unloaded on them, according to current and former U.S. officials familiar with the meeting. In Trump’s mind, the officials said, Ukraine’s entire leadership had colluded with the Democrats to undermine his 2016 presidential campaign.

“They tried to take me down,” Trump railed…

So far, a dozen witnesses have testified before House lawmakers since the closed-door impeachment inquiry began a month ago. One theme that runs through almost all of their accounts is Trump’s unyielding loathing of Ukraine, which dates to his earliest days in the White House.

“We could never quite understand it,” a former senior White House official said of Trump’s view of the former Soviet republic, also saying that much of it stemmed from the president’s embrace of conspiracy theories. “There were accusations that they had somehow worked with the Clinton campaign. There were accusations they’d hurt him. He just hated Ukraine.”…

Julia Ioffe is a great reporter, and an immigrant from Russia. “Here’s Why Ukraine Pops Up in So Many U.S. Scandals”:

… One main reason for Ukraine’s outsize presence in our news cycles is money: There’s a lot of it sloshing around, and, as the ladies selling at the designer store know, it tends to find its way into all kinds of crevices.

Ukraine would like America and Europe to think of it as a promising young democracy, the good little country struggling to fend off the gravitational pull of evil Russia. There is a lot of truth in that. But it is also an oligarchy where a very small number of people control the country’s natural resources, a legacy of its Soviet past. Around each of these people is a clan vying for influence, resources, and political power. They sponsor media outlets and politicians. Ukraine’s new president, Volodymyr Zelensky, for example, has promised to fight corruption but is also closely linked with one of the country’s most powerful oligarchs.

“It’s a pay-to-play democracy, or has been in the past,” says Rep. Tom Malinowski (D-NJ), who was Obama’s last assistant secretary of state for human rights, democracy, and labor. “At its most corrupt, you can get very rich, but you need permission to get very rich, so politicians and oligarchs are linked in all kinds of ways. In some ways, it’s very similar to Russia. But Ukraine is a country where you’re more likely to get rich without getting killed if you’re a Western businessman or political consultant.”

Indeed, plenty of American political operatives find there’s a lucrative market for their services in the country. Ukrainians see Americans as being really good at what in that part of the world is known as “political technology”: using data, polling, consulting to win elections. One candidate in Ukraine’s 2010 presidential election, for example, made the American political consultants working on his campaign a major selling point. It didn’t work, but Ukrainians still pay top dollar for any associations with the American political elite. “It was a part of the world where there was a lot of money to be made,” says Andrew Weiss, who oversees Russia and Eurasia research at the Carnegie Endowment. “These are people getting paid in a way that is totally out of proportion to how you would be paid elsewhere.” Consider, for instance, the $12.7 million that Manafort made in just five years. Bernie Sanders’s chief 2016 strategist, Tad Devine, was handsomely compensated for work he did for Yanukovych, too. When Devine was contemplating working on the 2014 Ukrainian election, he stipulated that his rate would be $10,000 per day—not including travel…

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Trump & the Trumplodytes Open Thread: Resentful Losers Run Amuck

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The story is members-only, but the teaser tweet did remind me of a certain notorious American personality who’s spent the last quarter-century complaining that nobody appreciates him like he DESERVES…

… Mr. Trump, whose own tweets have warned of deep-state plots against him, accused the House speaker of treason and labeled Republican critics “human scum,” has helped spread a culture of suspicion and distrust of facts into the political mainstream.

The president is also awash in an often toxic torrent that sluices into his Twitter account — roughly 1,000 tweets per minute, many intended for his eyes. Tweets that tag his handle, @realDonaldTrump, can be found with hashtags like #HitlerDidNothingWrong, #IslamIsSatanism and #WhiteGenocide. While filters can block offensive material, the president clearly sees some of it, because he dips into the frothing currents and serves up noxious bits to the rest of the world.

By retweeting suspect accounts, seemingly without regard for their identity or motives, he has lent credibility to white nationalists, anti-Muslim bigots and obscure QAnon adherents like VB Nationalist, an anonymous account that has promoted a hoax about top Democrats worshiping the Devil and engaging in child sex trafficking…

To assess this unprecedented moment, The New York Times examined Mr. Trump’s interactions with Twitter since he took office, reviewing each of his more than 11,000 tweets and the hundreds of accounts he has retweeted, tracking the ways he is exposed to information and replicating what he is likely to see on the platform. The result, including new data analysis and previously unreported details, offers the most comprehensive view yet of a virtual world in which the president spends significant time mingling with extremists, impostors and spies.

Fake accounts tied to intelligence services in China, Iran and Russia had directed thousands of tweets at Mr. Trump, according to a Times analysis of propaganda accounts suspended by Twitter. Iranian operatives tweeted anti-Semitic tropes, saying that Mr. Trump was “being controlled” by global Zionists, and that pulling out of the Iran nuclear treaty would benefit North Korea. Russian accounts tagged the president more than 30,000 times, including in supportive tweets about the Mexican border wall and his hectoring of black football players. Mr. Trump even retweeted a phony Russian account that said, “We love you, Mr. President!”…

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Friday Night Impeachment Watch: Nancy Pelosi Talks to Steven Colbert

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Good for Madam Speaker, now and forever…

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Election 2020 Open Thread: Joe Biden in Winter

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Olivia Nuzzi is a professional journalist-assassin, but some of the details here will break your heart. For NYMag, “The Zombie Campaign”:

… The pitch goes like this: Joe Biden ought to be the nominee because he’s electable, a meaningless concept if recent history is any guide, and presidential, that wonderful word — the thing Donald Trump could never be even though he literally is president — despite the fact that Biden, who appears by almost any measure to be a good man, a man whose lone sin in life is ego (and does that even count anymore?), has spent a half-century grasping for this position and watching it slip through his fingers.

To anyone paying attention — the army of political professionals more wired to observe shortcomings than are those likely to actually vote for him or for anyone else — it looks, unmistakably, like it’s happening again. His vulnerabilities are close to the surface. There’s the basic fact of his oldness and the concerns, explicit or implicit, about his ability to stay agile and alive for four more years…

But it’s not just his age itself. It’s his tendency to misspeak, his inartful debating style, and — most of all — his status as a creature from another time in the Democratic Party, when the politics of race and crime and gender were unrecognizably different. It’s not just that the Joe Biden of yesteryear sometimes peeks out from behind the No. 1 Obama Stan costume. It’s that the Joe Biden of today is expected to hold his former self accountable to the new standards set by a culture that’s prepared to reject him. And though he’s the party Establishment’s obvious exemplar, he can’t seem to raise any money — spending more in the last quarter than he brought in and moving into the homestretch with less than $9 million in the bank (roughly a third of what Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders has on hand). For political reporters, marveling every day at just how well this isn’t going, watching Biden can feel like being at the rodeo. You’re there because on some level you know you might see someone get killed.

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Election 2020 Open Thread: Joe Biden in WinterPost + Comments (112)

Repub Venality Open Thread: Oh, Joy, Another 80s Reboot We Didn’t Need

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Turns out those ‘Opportunity Zones’ aren’t just a financial lifeline for Jared Kushner’s family of grifters — it’s a smorgasbord for allll the financial predators among Donny Dollhands’ associates…

In the 1980s, Michael Milken embodied Wall Street greed. A swashbuckling financier, he was charged with playing a central role in a vast insider-trading scheme and was sent to prison for violating federal securities and tax laws. He was an inspiration for the Gordon Gekko character in the film “Wall Street.”

Mr. Milken has spent the intervening decades trying to rehabilitate his reputation through an influential nonprofit think tank, the Milken Institute, devoted to initiatives “that advance prosperity.”

These days, the Milken Institute is a leading proponent of a new federal tax break that was intended to coax wealthy investors to plow money into distressed communities known as “opportunity zones.” The institute’s leaders have helped push senior officials in the Trump administration to make the tax incentive more generous, even though it is under fire for being slanted toward the wealthy.

Mr. Milken, it turns out, is in a position to personally gain from some of the changes that his institute has urged the Trump administration to enact. In one case, the Treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, directly intervened in a way that benefited Mr. Milken, his longtime friend.

It is a vivid illustration of the power that Mr. Milken, who was barred from the securities industry and fined $600 million as part of his 1990 felony conviction, has amassed in President Trump’s Washington. In addition to the favorable tax-policy changes, some of Mr. Trump’s closest advisers — including Mr. Mnuchin, Jared Kushner and Rudolph W. Giuliani — have lobbied the president to pardon Mr. Milken for his crimes, or supported that effort, according to people familiar with the effort…

The former “junk bond king” has investments in at least two major real estate projects inside federally designated opportunity zones in Nevada, near Mr. Milken’s Lake Tahoe vacation home, according to public records reviewed by The New York Times.

One of those developments, inside an industrial park, is a nearly 700-acre site in which Mr. Milken is a major investor. Last year, after pressure from Mr. Milken’s business partner and other landowners, the Treasury Department ignored its own guidelines on how to select opportunity zones and made the area eligible for the tax break, according to people involved in the discussions and records reviewed by The Times.

The unusual decision was made at the personal instruction of Mr. Mnuchin, according to internal Treasury Department emails. It came shortly after he had spent time with Mr. Milken at an event his institute hosted…

Mr. Milken — operating from an X-shaped trading desk in Beverly Hills, Calif. — was a Wall Street legend. He pioneered the junk bond, which enabled financially risky companies to borrow billions of dollars and ignited a wave of often-hostile corporate takeovers that came to define a go-go era. His firm, Drexel Burnham Lambert, hosted an annual event, which came to be known as the Predators’ Ball, where the era’s greatest financiers mingled. Mr. Milken became a billionaire.

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Repub Venality Open Thread: Oh, Joy, Another 80s Reboot We Didn’t NeedPost + Comments (74)

Sunday Morning Open Thread: Companion Animals

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Seems like a lot of people are taking the holiday-for-some weekend as a vacation from politics, not that I blame them. We’re debating whether to spend some time at the Topsfield Fair, or to start planting out the big box of spring bulbs that just arrived.

But speaking of companion animals, here’s a fun story from the Washington Post, which you should definitely click just for the absolutely perfect stock photo illustrating it. “What makes dogs so special and successful? Love”

… Clive Wynne, a psychologist and founder of the Canine Science Collaboratory at Arizona State University, has a new book that walks readers through the growing body of dog science. In it, he argues that what makes dogs remarkable is not their smarts, but their capacity to form affectionate relationships with other species — in short, to love.

Wynne spoke recently with The Washington Post about his book, “Dog Is Love: Why and How Your Dog Loves You.” This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The Washington Post: Many dog owners will think, “Of course my dog loves me.” Why study this?

Wynne: It’s at least worth thinking about that what on the surface appears to be something in our dogs that people are happy to call love might — might — not have deserved that name. It could have been that our dogs were in some sense just faking it to get better treats. Ultimately, this is, to me, about trying to understand the secret of dogs’ success and what makes dogs unique.

Scientists in the first decade of the 21st century were mainly concerned with the idea that dogs have special forms of intelligence and social cognition that were unique in the animal kingdom. From the point of view of those of us that are in the science of studying dogs, the idea that it’s affection and not intelligence that’s the secret ingredient that makes dogs successful is quite a radical idea.

You and I have had conversations in the past where I got the impression you would be on the more skeptical end of the dogs-love-us spectrum.

I’m a reluctant convert. I was somebody who was resistant to the idea that what appeared to be affection radiating from our dogs could really be that. But ultimately, a combination of getting this dog into my life — who’s lying down next to me now, Xephos — and the overwhelming evidence of the studies that my students and I did, and the studies that so many other people have done, it really all adds up to an irresistible picture. I know that sometimes Xephos just wants dinner. But I’m pretty convinced that that’s not the whole picture. She really does feel a bond, a connection toward me that’s as real as any other connection that any other individual in my life might feel toward me…

You also write about how biological research backs up the idea that dogs can love.

If it’s there, it’s got to be in their biology. Their biology has to underwrite their behavior.

A Japanese research group analyzed dogs’ and people’s urine for levels of this hormone oxytocin, which gets called the love hormone because it spikes when two people are in loving contact with each other. They had people and dogs come into the lab and look at each other lovingly. Sure enough, the oxytocin levels went up on both sides of the relationship…

The more biological side that I’ve been involved in is digging right down to the genetic code. In part of the genome of the dog that shows evidence of recent changes, the equivalent part of the human genome is responsible for this syndrome called Williams-Beuren. The most peculiar symptom is what they call exaggerated gregariousness. People who have this syndrome have no notion of stranger, they treat everybody as a friend, they’re extremely outgoing. When I read this, I thought: They’re much like our dogs!

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Sunday Morning Open Thread: Companion AnimalsPost + Comments (72)