The strange reporting style on the chaotic Trump White House

The Trump white House is keeping the publishing industry busy with one gossipy book after another. The latest is from Bob Woodward, whose style is to write books based on conversations on ‘deep background’ with high officials, where he can quote people but cannot say who told him what. The presumption seems to be that since they are given anonymity, they will speak freely and frankly without fearing repercussions, even though he says that he actually recorded all the conversations and thus cannot be contradicted too forcefully. The picture he paints is hardly surprising or new. Trump comes across as an ignorant, narcissistic, and vindictive person. Is there anyone who does not know this by now?
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Trump’s approval rating among African-Americans is a yuge 3%

That is according to the Washington Post-ABC News poll released today, with 93% disapproval.

Just 3 percent of black Americans polled said they approved of Trump’s performance, compared to the president’s 36 percent approval overall. An overwhelming 93 percent of black Americans, meanwhile, said they disapprove. Those numbers have plummeted, data over time shows; just months ago his approval among black Americans was nearly 20 percent.
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Some interesting races to watch in November

There have been some surprising and encouraging results in various elections around the country. Primary elections held in Florida on Tuesday resulted in a surprise win for Andrew Gillum as the Democratic nominee for governor. Shaun King writes that the nominations of three black candidates for governorships (Ben Jealous in Maryland, Stacey Abrams in Georgia, and Gillum in Florida) marks a watershed in US politics.
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I don’t understand some people

You have no doubt heard of the phenomenon of the people who ‘dine and dash’. These are people who eat in a restaurant and then leave without paying. The usual perpetrators are small groups of young men. Why they do it is unclear, since usually it is not because they are hungry and lack money for food. Maybe they treat it as a lark. This is a despicable practice, especially since some restaurants dock the server for the amount of the unpaid bill. Given that servers get paid less than the minimum wage, this seems particularly outrageous.
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The scandal of Catholic orphanages

In the US, the focus of outrage against the Catholic church has been on the abuses by priests and the cover ups by higher officials. In other countries, there has also been widespread reporting on the appalling abuses that took place in orphanages run by the Catholic church. Two excellent films The Magdalene Sisters (2002) and Philomena (2013) were both based on true stories and the sheer cruelty of the nuns and priests involved is astounding.
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The ACLU under fire

I am a long-standing member of the ACLU. After the election of Donald Trump, the membership in this group more than tripled. I ran into the then-director of the Ohio ACLU and she wryly told me that while this surge in membership was welcome, there would come a time when the ACLU would take a stand on some issue that would make many of these new members realize that the ACLU was not an arm of the Democratic party and they would react angrily.
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Finally, a police officer found guilty of murder

A jury in Texas has found a police officer Roy Oliver guilty for the murder of Jordan Edwards, a 15-year old unarmed black youth, while he was a passenger in car driving by. The story was a familiar one in which the officer argued that the boy and his friends had been acting aggressively towards his partner and that he had been forced to fire at them in defense. But the body cam videos showed a very different story, that the car had been moving away.
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