The Norwegians cover their eyes, embarrassed to be singled out

Our president is a racist and a shameful laughingstock, part MCXVIX.

President Trump grew frustrated with lawmakers Thursday in the Oval Office when they floated restoring protections for immigrants from Haiti, El Salvador and African countries as part of a bipartisan immigration deal, according to two people briefed on the meeting.

Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here? Trump said, according to these people, referring to African countries and Haiti. He then suggested that the United States should instead bring more people from countries like Norway, whose prime minister he met yesterday.

Meanwhile, the more polite and diplomatic members of the rest of the world are all thinking about what a shithole the United States is becoming.

The right take

I’ve been reading Wolff’s Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House off and on. It’s tough. It’s terribly written, this kind of gossipy gibbering, and the only thing keeping me going at all is the occasional deliciously vicious insider story that pops up at you. I think, though, that Jeff Sharlet has the right perspective on it.

A number of my fellow journalists are saying privately and publicly that Michael Wolff’s book is no big deal — “nothing we didn’t know already.” This makes me think of people who see some piece of modern art, a Jackson Pollack or an Ellsworth Kelly, and say, “I could do that.” Yeah, but did you?

Exactly. I know it’s a bad book, but why didn’t any of the excellent journalists who are sneering at it now write a better book first? Wolff is a hack and a bit sleazy, but if he’s saying what everyone already knew, at least he had the guts to actually go against the cozy insider culture that infects government and the media right now.

Which would you prefer: An asshole who relishes his access to power as an ornament with which to improve his status with other elites, or an asshole who betrays it? Wolff, who by many accounts will betray just about anybody, was the writer for the job of bringing us inside the administration that wants to screw everybody.

When you put it that way…I want the asshole that’s willing to write about the bad crap going down at the cost of getting kicked out of the White House press room. I want a newspaper publisher who is willing to go to press with the story that will cost them easy access to the spin the administration wants to give to everyone, and instead has to work to get the story.

Why would a school in Washington state be named after Robert E. Lee, anyway?

There is a Robert E. Lee Elementary School in East Wenatchee, Washington, and some community members are irate because the school board has proposed changing the name to just Lee Elementary. Some because it doesn’t go far enough.

“Lee needs to be gone, period,” JJ Jackson told the board before the vote. “My kids attend schools in this district and they come home daily complaining about racism, about teachers,
about clothing that a white kid can wear, but they can’t,” said Jackson, who is black. “Please
explain how the world’s biggest gang, the KKK and neo-Nazis, why it’s OK to support them.
Going forward, Lee is a no. It needs to be gone.”

I’m with him. Others, it’s because, well, change is bad, I guess.

“You should reject this group’s agenda because it will not stop with this name. This is but a microcosm of what is happening in our country. There are more important issues like assuring
our kids are getting a quality education,” he said. “Leave it the way it is. Set the standard right
here and now and stand up to this.”

I would like to know what “quality education” this fellow wants to see in his schools that’s more important than the complaints that Mr Jackson brought up. I rather suspect that they’re more of the conservative agenda than anything to do with actually improving and funding public education.

Maybe somebody should point out to them that, while Washington was not a state at the time of the Civil War, the territory did side with the North and actually recruited the Washington Territory Volunteer Infantry to support the defense of the region during that war.

Bonus amusement: there is a Ulysses S. Grant Elementary in Wenatchee.

Eggers also suggested addressing Grant Elementary at the same time, though that suggestion did not move forward.

As long as someone is explaining what side Washington was on in the Civil War, they might also mention that Grant was a Northern general and American president, and was not a slave-holding traitor to the country.

I know we’re not supposed to have heroes, but some teachers deserve the title

The money is always supposed to move upwards, and it’s a crime to question it. Take, for example, this Louisiana teacher who dared to ask why administrators were getting raises when teacher salaries had been frozen for years:

Local news station KATC reports that Deyshia Hargrave, a teacher at Rene Rost Middle Schools in Kaplan, Louisiana, attended a Vermilion Parish School Board meeting on Monday to ask questions about how the board could vote to increase the superintendent’s pay despite the fact that many school employees have worked for years without a pay increase.

Hargrave was informed that she was not supposed to ask questions at the meeting, as this was only intended to be a forum for public feedback. Nonetheless, board members tried to answer her questions.

It seems to me that asking a question is a perfectly reasonable form of feedback, especially since asking administrators why they have given themselves a raise is much more polite than simply stating that you protest the inequities constructed by the ratfuckers in charge, which would not be a “question”, and therefore would be allowed.

Unfortunately, in America in 2018 there can only be one response to questioning authority.

Now they’re saying she wasn’t arrested, she was just thrown to the ground and handcuffed. Just.

Oprah gives a phenomenal speech

At the Golden Globes award last night, she gave a wonderfully passionate speech and said a lot of the things we need to hear right now.

That was excellent and beautifully presented — she is a professional actor, and a good one, but I am confident that this was more than a well-polished oration, and that she really feels what she said from the heart.

That said, though, I was dismayed to see the tag #Oprah2020 pop up everywhere, and people talking about having her run for president. Are we so shallow that we now see a TV personality — a rich, eminently successful TV and movie star — as sufficient qualification for the job of president? Have we learned nothing from Trump? Oprah has an inspiring message and can actually speak in complete sentences, which puts her light years ahead of our current senile clown, but it is a job that really does require experience and skills and knowledge that Oprah does not have.

If she wants to serve in government, let her run for a state office, and then as a national representative, and then I’ll perk up when she announces a run for the head of the executive branch. No shortcuts. Bring back the cursus honorum!

Liam Neeson will play him in the movie

Andrew Therrien was getting dunned for payment on a loan he never took out, so he went on a one-man vendetta against loan sharks. He had special skills: not guns, but persistence and persuasion, and he eventually tracked down the company and the man who had made millions by inventing fake debt and selling it to collection agencies.

Therrien soon obtained two crucial sets of documents to that end. In March 2016 he flew to California to meet a debt broker, who handed over some contracts Tucker had signed. Separately, Therrien received an email from the manager of a collection agency, to whose conscience he’d spent weeks appealing. The email, whose subject line read “Have faith in the good in heart,” included actual phantom-debt files, with names and Social Security numbers. The metadata yielded a new name: Rob Harsh, Tucker’s IT guy. (The author of the email died of a drug overdose a few months later.)

In May 2016, Therrien emailed his discoveries to the FTC. A lawyer replied right away: “Andrew, we need to talk about this.” Therrien also gave his intel to some private lawyers who were going after Tucker in Texas. They contacted Harsh, and in August 2016 he submitted an affidavit to the court. Harsh, who declined to comment for this story, testified that Tucker had asked him to manipulate a database of almost 8 million payday-loan applications, writing in a made-up lender and adding an amount owed of $300 for each person.

Therrien had been right all along.

What’s discouraging, though, is that there were all these cracks in government regulation in the first place, and that the agencies that should have been hunting down and crushing these cockroaches weren’t getting anywhere.

Finally!

I’ve about had it with these incessant articles from an incredulous press, where some reporter runs off to some exotic (to them) rural locale where the locals mostly voted for Donald Trump,
and they goggle a bit and report back that, amazingly, the people here belong to the genus Homo
and have two legs and two arms and two eyes, and gosh no, they ain’t racist, no, not a bit — they’re just economically distressed. It’s a genre of lazy reporting that also includes all those interviews prior to an election with “the undecided voter”, as if finding the least informed, most chicken-shit citizens in the country will reveal some great insight.

Finally, though, one reporter turns that all on its head and journeys to the heart of anti-Trump country to report on the savage opinions of the well-educated. He goes to Mount Airy/Germantown in Philadelphia. I knew those places well, although I was apparently not well educated enough, liberal enough, or wealthy enough to actually be able to afford to live there.

In Philadelphia’s 22nd Ward, which covers Germantown and parts of Mount Airy, Clinton got 12,050 votes in 2016, and Trump received a mere 342 — and I did not run across any of those lonely 342 during my reporting. One of the more ethnically diverse neighborhoods in the city, Mount Airy and Germantown are also well-educated spots, described once as “a Ph.D ghetto.” More than the numbers, though, I wanted to see a place where, in the words of one Nobel laureate, there was “There was music in the cafés at night/And revolution in the air.”

As you might expect, all is not well among the aboriginals.

“Everybody here hates Trump — that’s why I like to live here,” said Raab — a sentiment I heard from more than one person. “I have a neighbor who couldn’t eat for four days” after the election. Like many folks, Raab has turned to activism — joining the January 21 Women’s March in Center City and giving away what she called “tons of money” to groups like the ACLU and Planned Parenthood. Despite all that, Raab said she feels pessimism about where America is at after one year of Trump, hours after the president used Twitter to threaten war with North Korea. “I don’t have hope,” she said, “as everyday there’s something worse and worse.”

I’m not giving up all hope just yet, although it is only hanging on by a sliver. I’m still hoping the next election will be a massive uprising to overthrow the known-nothings and bigots.