I just write what I want. I write what amuses me. It’s totally for myself. I never in my wildest dreams expected this popularity.– J.K. Rowling

This is why there are fewer opportunists in sensitive areas like security and infrastructure.

This is why there are fewer opportunists in sensitive areas like security and infrastructure.

The Trump team (and much of the GOP) is working backwards, desperately trying to find something, anything to support the president’s aggrieved feelings, rather than objectively considering the evidence and reacting as warranted.

If this is populism, it’s an aggressive strain. Left-leaning historian Rick Perlstein calls Trump’s general appeal “herrenvolk democracy.” It’s not conservatism at all. It’s big government, and big government programs, but only for the deserving.

What happens when the next would-be autocrat tries this strategy — and what if they are smoother, more strategic, more capable, than this one? This is not a story happening elsewhere. It is a story happening here, now.

“Democracy works only when losers recognize that they have lost,” writes political scientist Henry Farrell. That will not happen here.

President Donald Trump and challenger Joe Biden will compete for TV audiences in dueling town halls on Thursday night instead of meeting face-to-face for their second debate as originally planned.

mmentary. It also includes many annotated newspaper and magazine articles.An articMaha Bali2 weeks agowould be nice to include a screenshot. Also, I feel like I need to read up on Cambodian history to understand the significance of this particular royal - you don’t explicitly talk about how he is using power here. Was he trying to influence public opinion, was he just annotating for his own knowledge and learning, what kind of power is at play here?(I also wonder if the whole leaders having “right to express freely their view” does not work to anyone’s favor in the case of Donald Trump, so I would contest this strongly. That freedom of expression for political leaders maybe should be weighted differently than for the general population, no? As it has broader consequences for the entire country or even the world…

And would a hip hop fan question, much less downvote, a “verified” Genius annotation authored by Kendrick Lamar that explains the meaning behind his music?

and annotation can tell us why that alternative view matters..d-undefined, .lh-undefined { background-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.2) !important; }.d-undefined, .lh-undefined { background-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.5) !important; }1Troy Hicks With this potential social function, we are reminded that annotation is not neutral as it helps those who add notes to texts produce new discourses and knowledge.

It has become banal to point out that almost any of these would have constituted a monumental scandal under any other president, but it remains true and important.

The most important takeaway Tuesday is that the president’s own former personal attorney pleaded guilty to breaking campaign-finance laws at his alleged direction.

Both books belong to one of today’s most important genres: the Not-About-Trump-But-Also-Sort-Of-About-Trump, or N.A.T.B.A.S.O.A.T., book.

The President's efforts to influence the investigation were mostly unsuccessful, but that is largely because the persons who surrounded the President declined to carry out orders or accede to his requests.

if we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state. Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, we are unable to reach that judgment. Accordingly, while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.

Under OLC's analysis, Congress can permissibly criminalize ce1tain obstructive conduct by the President, such as suborning perjury, intimidating witnesses, or fabricating evidence, because those prohibitions raise no separation-of-powers questions. See Application of 28 U.S.C. § 458 to Presidential Appointments of Federal Judges, 19 Op. O.L.C. at 357 n.11. The Constitution does not authorize the President to engage in such conduct, and those actions would transgress the President's duty to "take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed." U.S. CONST. ART IT, §§ 3. In view of those clearly permissible applications of the obstruction statutes to the President, Franklin's holding that the President is entirely excluded from a statute absent a clear statement would not apply in this context.

Trump’s online and email fundraising generated a record $239 million in small-dollar donations, far more than Hillary Clinton’s and more than two-thirds of his donation total, according to the nonpartisan Campaign Finance Institute. This made Trump competitive in a race where he was outspent nearly 2 to 1.

One previously unreported example: Since Trump’s election in 2016, critical “voter scores” — sophisticated polling-based analytics that the RNC provides to party committees and candidates — have conspicuously omitted an essential detail for any down-ballot race: how voters in specific states and congressional districts feel about Trump. Republican insiders believe these analytics are being withheld to try and prevent GOP candidates from publicly distancing themselves from the president or leaking unfavorable results that embarrass Trump.

More conspicuously, since Trump’s election, the RNC — at his campaign’s direction — has excluded critical “voter scores” on the president from the analytics it routinely provides to GOP candidates and committees nationwide, with the aim of electing down-ballot Republicans. Republican consultants say the Trump information is being withheld for two reasons: to discourage candidates from distancing themselves from the president, and to avoid embarrassing him with poor results that might leak. But they say its concealment harms other Republicans, forcing them to campaign without it or pay to get the information elsewhere.

He lost to New York billionaire Donald Trump,

He negotiated the North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico, a measure that was ratified by the Senate in President Bill Clinton’s first term.

what a great job you are doing

Perhaps this very prospect of centuries of boredom at the end of history will serve to get history started once again.

anomie

A lot of Democrats believe in what is called Enlightenment reasoning, and that if you just tell people the facts, they’ll reach the right conclusion. That just isn’t true.

I take your point, but I wonder if Trump is just kryptonite for a liberal democratic system built on a free press.

“unpresidented” for “unprecedented,”

The problem in Washington is not a Deep State; the problem is a shallow man

there must be other factors that got us Trump

in a tiny number of hands.

Responding to Axios' reporting, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders emailed this statement: "President Trump has a different leadership style than his predecessors and the results speak for themselves."

When people do inexplicable things, it’s always tempting to project qualities onto them that would offer a more innocuous explanation of their behavior than bad judgment, fecklessness, or stupidity. And this particular bias has infected contemporary political analysis with a virulence that rivals Ebola. Even when the subject’s motives are as transparent as Donald Trump’s, there will always be a class of pundit who insists that Trump is playing 3-D chess, when, as one anonymous staffer put it, “more often than not he’s just eating the pieces.” 

Rather than a complete totalitarianism based on fear and blocking of information the newer methods include demonizing online mediums, and mobilizing armies of supporters or paid employees who muddy the online waters with misinformation, information glut, doubt, confusion, harrasment, and dis-traction, making it hard for ordinary people to navigate the networked pub-lic sphere, and sort facts from fiction, truth from hoaxes.

That they are defending a person who is fundamentally malicious, even if he makes judicial appointments of which they approve, is too painful for them to admit.

Finally it is worth noting that trust, through the theory of social capital, has been connected with long-term economic growth—even though these results are based on regressions using extremely sparse datasets.

People claiming that Trump said nothing racist may not be exactly the sharpest knives in the drawer on questions of sociology, and Trump himself is, on that score, a plastic spoon.

We can’t get into Trump’s head here. He may be feigning numbness to the nuances of racist as a power ploy. Or he may genuinely not perceive the racism in his current rhetoric. I suspect he may not, for the simple reason that to imagine how he would feel about a straight-talking Finn in Congress would require a thought experiment, and nothing the man has ever said or done suggests the remotest inclination or ability to process layers, hypotheticals, or subtlety. A man clueless enough to accidentally give away to a national television reporter that he fired James Comey to detract from the investigation of his ties to Russia doesn’t do intersectionality.

It’s difficult to say that the prosperity gospel itself led to Donald Trump’s inauguration. Again, only 17 percent of American Christians identify with it explicitly. It’s far more true, however, to say that the same cultural forces that led to the prosperity gospel’s proliferation in America — individualism, an affinity for ostentatious and charismatic leaders, the Protestant work ethic, and a cultural obsession with the power of “positive thinking” — shape how we, as a nation, approach politics.

Firms should not be owned and managed by people who survive because of their connections to government or their privileged birth: Capitalism is dynamic when owners or managers succeed because they are good at delivering high-quality goods and services at a competitive price. This is more likely to be a failure when the other two factors above are not working well.

In February, a friend pointed out to me that years ago Donald Trump lied about the size of Trump Towers, claiming he lived on the 66th to 68th floors. Here’s the thing: Trump Tower has only 58 floors, according to New York City documents. So Trump lied about even this, as he lies about virtually everything else. (In fact, Trump has lied about the height of several of his buildings, including Trump World Tower, which he claimed has 90 floors. In fact, it has 70.)If Biden were to use this story at the beginning of a debate, perhaps even before Trump’s first lie, the former vice president, when hearing a lie, could simply say, “Donald, we’re at the 66th floor again.” This response would certainly be more effective than repeatedly calling Trump a liar and serving as a fact-checker for the entire debate. Biden has to find a way to quickly name what’s happening and move on.

!

Critics, including Sarah Posner and Joe Conason, maintain that prosperity teachers cultivate authoritarian organizations. They argue that leaders attempt to control the lives of adherents by claiming divinely-bestowed authority.[63] Jenkins contends that prosperity theology is used as a tool to justify the high salaries of pastors.

When it comes to the response to the largest public health crisis of our time, our current political leaders have demonstrated that they are dangerously incompetent. We should not abet them and enable the deaths of thousands more Americans by allowing them to keep their jobs.

Gradually, we begin to conflate visibility with value. If something is being talked about and seen, we assume that it must be important in some way. – An Illustrated Guide to Guy Debord’s ‘The Society of the Spectacle’

Abandoning democracy and social solidarity, the Californian Ideology dreams of a digital nirvana inhabited solely by liberal psychopaths.

Dow swings 600 points after Trump rejects stimulus plan

Whom exactly were we trusting with our care? Why did we decide to trust them in the first place? Who says that only certain kinds of people are allowed to give us the answers?

And you can play around with it yourself on this demo page I set up. Some observations:

still took years before it paid off handsomely.

Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out. [ Urbigenous Library ]

hardgainer

fat-to-muscle

Periodization

Online

scienceWhen the actor Michael J. Fox was in the initial stages of creating his foundation forresearch on Parkinson’s Disease, he came to recognize the negative impact thatcompetition among scientific groups has on the overall progress of research on thedisease. The director of one group actually said to him, ‘‘Well, if you don’t help us,then, at least, don’t help them’’ [1, p. 236]. Such was his introduction to thecompetitive world of U.S. science.

If voting fraud is the third oldest profession, and if it is somehow rampant in all these states that have Republican leaders at their helm, then there should be reasonable ways to combat it