I tease my mother by calling her Emily after Emily Gilmore both because overall my family reminds me very much of the Gilmores and because she’s never met a brand name she didn’t like whereas I’m perfectly content to buy generic.
I thank her among many things for a thorough grounding in the domestic and other arts.
Mom teaches first grade and is actually famous in a quiet sort of way. The kind parents brag about and angle their kids for though she’s won national awards too. Of course I owe everything I know about educating to her and among my own peers I’m considered an asskicking trainer.
She also insisted we learn to perform routine self maintenance, little things like laundry and ironing, machine and hand mending. basic cooking. Of course she always indulged us with trips to museums and zoos, made sure we got library cards, did the usual bus driver thing to swim practice, had this huge second career as a Brownie/Girl Scout Leader for my sister.
At one point when I was old enough for it to make an impression she took her Masters of Fine Arts in Art of all things, so I know a little Art History with Far Eastern. I understand how to bang out a copper pot and make silver rings because she took me to class once or twice. She liked stained glass so much that she and dad made several pieces (you use a soldering iron and can cut yourself pretty bad so it’s a macho thing too). They also did silk screening which taught me a lot about layout and graphic arts.
But she always liked fabric arts and in addition to a framed three dimensional piece in the living room, there are Afghans and rugs and scarves and pot holders and wash cloths and hats and quilts and dolls.
And the training kits and manuals for her mentorship programs, and the adaptations and costumes for the annual first and fifth grade play. Did I mention she plays 3 instruments, though mostly piano?
She touch types too.
So to Emily, a woman of accomplishment and refinement, Happy Mother’s Day.
Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungoverwe’ve been bailed outwe’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:30am (ET) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.
Pope John Paul II shot; English colonists arrive at what becomes Jamestown; Winston Churchill gives his first speech as British prime minister; The U.S. declares war on Mexico; Singer Stevie Wonder born.
Rakem Balogun thought he was dreaming when armed agents in tactical gear stormed his apartment. Startled awake by a large crash and officers screaming commands, he soon realized his nightmare was real, and he and his 15-year-old son were forced outside of their Dallas home, wearing only underwear.
Handcuffed and shaking in the cold wind, Balogun thought a misunderstanding must have led the FBI to his door on 12 December 2017. The father of three said he was shocked to later learn that agents investigating “domestic terrorism” had been monitoring him for years and were arresting him that day in part because of his Facebook posts criticizing police.
“It’s tyranny at its finest,” said Balogun, 34. “I have not been doing anything illegal for them to have surveillance on me. I have not hurt anyone or threatened anyone.”
The U.S. unemployment rate dropped to 3.9 percent in April, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today, a point not seen since the bubbly, waning days of Bill Clinton’s presidency. Yet, while the labor market seems to be getting tighter by the month, wage growth is still tepid and doesn’t seem to be accelerating.
…The fact that the unemployment rate is way down, while wage growth isn’t moving much, is a sign that the official number has stopped telling us much about how much slack is left.
Thankfully, there is a much better measure of slack, which analysts like Nick Bunker of the Center for Equitable Growth and Adam Ozimek of Moody’s Analytics have been advocating for years: The prime age employment to population ratio—which, as I said above, is what I’ve dubbed the working-age employment rate, because it just tells you the percentage of Americans between the ages of 25 to 54 who have a job. In other words, it tells you what share of Americans you’d expect to be working are actually gainfully employed.
Take one quick glance at the the working-age employment rate, and I’m sure you’ll notice the obvious: The labor market is still only about four-fifths recovered from the recession. The employment rate is steadily improving. But there are still a lot of Americans who could use a job right now.
…TRANSCRIPT
…AMY GOODMAN: …For more, we’re joined by Jeremy Scahill, co-founder of The Intercept, host of the weekly podcast Intercepted, author of the books Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army and Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield, and the Oscar-nominated film Dirty Wars.
Jeremy, welcome back to Democracy Now! Talk about what happened yesterday, and talk about Gina Haspel’s record.
JEREMY SCAHILL: Well, first of all, I think that if we look at the fact that we’re 17 years removed from 9/11, and we look at how this country has not come to terms with all of the acts of torture, kidnapping, extrajudicial killing, that was done with the veneer of legalism, put over it by very creative, albeit creative in a sort of evil way, lawyers in the Bush administration, what has resulted in not holding those torturers accountable is that one of them is now ascending to the highest post in the CIA.
And, you know, Amy, the CIA is generally prohibited from engaging in operations inside of the United States, and also prohibited from engaging in propaganda aimed at the American people. And yet, to me, this whole Gina Haspel nomination really seems like a CIA operation itself. You know, the CIA, throughout history, from its origins — and this was the case with its predecessor, the OSS — has had a mastery of coups and interventions and interfering in affairs of other nations and waging propaganda battles. Gina Haspel, when she was nominated for the CIA, was the recipient of an enormous amount of support from the CIA’s social media accounts, Twitter and others. And it was a propaganda campaign that was aimed at all of us, at the American people. It was aimed at lawmakers, it was aimed at journalists, where they sort of tweeted a — and they did it over and over and over, and they even did it once Haspel was technically in charge of the CIA, where they’re giving her biography, making her sound like some combination of like Lara Croft, Tomb Raider, with Jack Bauer. I mean, it was really kind of incredible.
And then they selectively — the CIA — declassified documents, including one from a Hillary Clinton supporter, Mike Morell, the former acting director of the CIA, that sought to exonerate Gina Haspel of any wrongdoing in the destruction of the CIAtapes, pinning all of the blame on her boss, Jose Rodriguez. The reason I’m bringing all of this up is because Gina Haspel is — has been embraced by Republican and Democratic nominees, everyone from John Brennan, who was sort of Obama’s killer priest — you know, they always said, “Oh, John Brennan, it’s like he’s like priest-like. He has this great conscience.” This man ran a global assassination program. Michael Hayden, Bush’s former CIA director, I actually respect his intellectual honesty, because, unlike Brennan and Clapper and others, Hayden says, “I support torture, and torture works, and that’s part of why I support Gina Haspel.” What we saw yesterday was a CIA propaganda operation. Gina Haspel’s answers were very carefully prepared, the way she refused to answer Kamala Harris’s questions about the immorality of torture.
And, you know, one of the things I found was astounding was she said the CIA has historically not been in the business of interrogations. What on Earth is she talking about? And why wasn’t she pressed on that? I believe that what she was doing was relying on a technicality, which is that the CIA traditionally outsources those interrogations, or they will have people like those mental health professionals, Mitchell and Jessen, who were essentially the ones that came in and said, “Here’s how we can reverse-engineer the tactics that we use to train our own personnel to resist torture or to face torture. Let’s reverse-engineer that and actually apply it in an offensive manner against prisoners.”
So, the fact that — this hearing was a farce, where, unfortunately, some of the Democrats and all of the Republicans engaged in a collective endorsement of what is, in my view, quite clearly, a CIA propaganda operation. It’s a coup of sorts to have someone like Gina Haspel, who has been involved with destroying evidence, torture, kidnapping, and refuses — refuses — to denounce any of it. I mean, it’s incredible that 17 years after 9/11 and — and, I’m sorry, Obama plays a huge role in how this happened. The moment Obama said, “We need to look forward, not backward,” was the moment that Gina Haspel was able to become a viable candidate for CIA. And, I mean, this is a very, very serious development and the result of a probably extralegal propaganda campaign and an operation aimed at the domestic American public.
The FT today published a fascinating interview with Thomas Middelhoff, the former CEO of Bertelsmann, the German media giant. Middelhoff became a star during the dot-com boom—his $50 million investment in AOL became a $7 billion exit five years later—and then his star fell. Middelhoff ended up sentenced to three years in prison after being found guilty of 27 counts of embezzlement and three counts of tax evasion in 2014.
Middelhoff’s crimes were not the kind of thing that would land an American executive in jail: Mostly, they centered on his predilection for taking a helicopter to work to avoid nasty traffic jams. He billed those expenses to the company, but they had never been authorized, and he should have paid for them himself.
Meanwhile, in London, Barclays CEO Jes Staley has been fined $870,000 for attempting to identify a whistleblower who complained about the way that the bank hired one of Staley’s friends; the bank’s board has also clawed back some $680,000 from Staley’s annual bonus.
Middelhoff, now out of jail and claiming to have lost all of his wealth, is at peace with his prison sentence, and has come to hate his former self, the arrogant and narcissistic CEO who craved affirmation and who failed to hold himself to the same standards he demanded of everybody else. He told the FT that he’s rediscovered his Catholic faith, and talked about learning humility.
Staley hasn’t quite had the same kind of come-to-Jesus moment, but did put out an apologetic statement saying that his behavior was inappropriate.
Can we take either of these two stories of punishment and contrition entirely at face value? Almost certainly not. I find it very hard to believe that Middelhoff is as broke as he says he is. But the fact remains that in both cases a high-profile CEO has been handed down a very public punishment by his government, and in both cases he has accepted that punishment as being entirely legitimate.
FORT DODGE, Iowa (AP) — With best friends like these, who needs enemies?
An Iowa man says his dog inadvertently shot him while they were roughhousing Wednesday.
Fifty-one-year-old Richard Remme, of Fort Dodge, told police he was playing with his dog, Balew, on the couch and tossed the dog off his lap. He says when the pit bull-Labrador mix bounded back up, he must have disabled the safety on the gun in his belly band and stepped on the trigger.
I am absolutely unqualified to talk about things medical other than the lying on a gurney side which I’ve done quite enough of, thank you. Indeed when my physician says, as they did recently, “You have the constitution of a 90 year old,” I deem it a compliment since I’m 120+.
Sometimes, when I’m at the club, I’ll awake to find myself being lifted out of my chair by a team of very helpful and concerned young people in uniform while an apologetic staff member mumbles something like- “Sir, we thought you were dead.”
Welcome to the Stars Hollow Gazette‘s Health and Fitness News weekly diary. It will publish on Saturday afternoon and be open for discussion about health related issues including diet, exercise, health and health care issues, as well as, tips on what you can do when there is a medical emergency. Also an opportunity to share and exchange your favorite healthy recipes.
Questions are encouraged and I will answer to the best of my ability. If I can’t, I will try to steer you in the right direction. Naturally, I cannot give individual medical advice for personal health issues. I can give you information about medical conditions and the current treatments available.
You can now find past Health and Fitness News diaries here.
This classic French dish is summer dining at its finest: no utensils required, and it pairs very well with chilled rosé. Of course, you can serve your aioli with any vegetables or seafood you like—consider this a good starting point.
How to make steakhouse-quality steak at home. Step 1: Buy a great steak from a great butcher. Step 2: Salt it liberally. Step 3: Gradually build up a crusty sear. Step 4: Butter. Butter?! Yep—butter. Browned, nutty butter will deliver toasty flavor to every bite. It’s the secret to pretty much all the great steakhouse dinners you’ve ever had.
Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungoverwe’ve been bailed outwe’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:00am (ET) (or whenever we get around to it) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.
This Day in History
The Soviet Union announces an end to its blockade of Berlin; Body of missing Lindbergh baby is found in a wooded area; Burt Bacharach, Katherine Hepburn and George Carlin are born.
Breakfast Tunes
Something to Think about over Coffee Prozac
Just cause you got the monkey off your back doesn’t mean the circus has left town.
Michael Cohen got what are essentially huge bribes from corporations including AT&T and Novartis, as well as a firm tied closely to a Russian billionaire named Viktor Vekselberg, it was revealed this week. The expectation clearly was that if Cohen got his cut, then he would help these powerhouses obtain political favors from the Trump administration. AT&T and Novartis have both offered public apologies of sorts, and said they had basically been conned. Meanwhile, Cohen personally collected something like $1.8 million out of a shell company — which, it turns out, was the same one he used to pay hush money to Stormy Daniels.
Looks bad! But not to worry, the savvy Washington media is on the case.
In Politico’s Playbook newsletter, Jake Sherman, Anna Palmer, and Daniel Lippman sneer at everyone who was gobsmacked at Cohen taking straight-up bribes (“Newsflash: $1.2 million is not even a rounding error for massive corporations”), or Paul Ryan flying to collect $30 million in campaign cash from billionaire Sheldon Adelson. (“That’s how campaign finance works … Happens routinely in both parties.”)
There is a basic problem with centrist nonpartisan political journalism: According to the internal ideology of the profession, reporters aren’t supposed to make ideological statements, because that would not be “objective.” On about 30 seconds’ philosophical consideration, one discovers that it is virtually impossible to say anything about politics without making some kind of normative statement. Objectivity in reporting is a priori impossible.
However, long ago political reporters discovered a clever way around this problem: what journalism professor Jay Rosen calls the “savvy style” of reporting. This type of journalist doesn’t make explicit ideological statements or normative judgments about politics; rather, he just comments about political effectiveness. Instead of saying whether it’s good or bad to annex the Sudetenland or whatever, he pronounces how that move is playing politically, whether or not it is “working.”
Of course, the savvy style has its own hidden ideology, as it must. As Rosen writes, by framing discussion within the boundaries of perceived status quo politics, it helplessly legitimizes that status quo, and tends to inculcate a corrosive cynicism: “In politics, they believe, it’s better to be savvy than it is to be honest or correct on the facts. It’s better to be savvy than it is to be just, good, fair, decent, strictly lawful, civilized, sincere, or humane.”
Despite adding a brief disclaimer that “we’re not defending the status quo,” that is absolutely what Sherman et al are doing — and in this case, a status quo of naked bribery and corruption, in which huge cash payments are literally traded for promises of political favors. In one incredible passage, they frankly admit that many Playbook readers — and by extension, Playbook itself, which commands high ad rates due to its elite readership — are reliant on Cohen-style bribery schemes, and literally include a tip for how to disguise payoff money:
YES, guys like Michael Cohen routinely get paid amounts like $1.2 million to offer insights about their boss or former boss. Yeah, it’s crazy. But many readers of this newsletter would not have their McMansion in McLean, their BMW, their membership at Army Navy, second homes in Delaware, cigar lockers and endless glasses of Pinot Noir at BLT Steak and Tosca if that kind of stuff didn’t happen. Newsflash: $1.2 million is not even a rounding error for massive corporations. (The smart companies route these deals through law firms.) [Politico]
Focused as they are on performative savviness instead of legal analysis, they also drastically underrate the possibility that such payments may run afoul of the remaining shreds of anti-corruption law. While the conservative Supreme Court majority has deliberately made it almost impossible to prosecute public corruption cases (to protect a major method of doing conservative politics), it remains highly illegal to take political bribes.
It’s also worth mentioning that the formal business model of Playbook itself has historically borne quite a close resemblance to Cohen’s method here. Back when founder Mike Allen was running it (he has since moved on to Axios), he would run very pricey ads from corporate clients, and then later mysteriously publish “adoring” coverage of those clients in his own voice. Needless to say, that is not how ordinary journalism is conducted.
Corruption, status quo bias, and incoherent ideology aside, it’s important to also emphasize that this style of reporting doesn’t even work on its own terms. Condescending cynicism is not a particularly reliable way of understanding horse race politics, and routinely fails spectacularly. Savvy journalists spent the whole last election cycle confidently predicting Trump could not win, doing things like laughing in Keith Ellison’s face when he suggested in mid-2015 that Trump might win the Republican nomination. If anything, they’re even more out of touch than the typical journalist is.
There are plenty of good reporters in Washington, D.C. But this style of journalism — the signature method in the nation’s capital — is worse than worthless. It is morally rotten.
The Villagers are not only arrogant, they’re bad at what they do too.
Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungoverwe’ve been bailed outwe’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:00am (ET) (or whenever we get around to it) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.
This Day in History
Breakfast Tunes
Something to Think about over Coffee Prozac
For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.
President Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, abruptly resigned from his law firm, Greenberg Traurig, the firm announced on Thursday, then promptly undercut his recent statements defending the president.
Mr. Giuliani had taken a leave of absence last month from the firm, one of the nation’s largest, to represent Mr. Trump. But the firm said in a statement that he no longer worked there.
Firm partners had chafed over Mr. Giuliani’s public comments about payments that another of Mr. Trump’s lawyers, Michael D. Cohen, made to secure the silence of a pornographic film actress who said she had an affair with Mr. Trump. The president has denied her allegations.
Mr. Giuliani suggested that such payments were common at his firm, even without the knowledge of the clients. “That was money that was paid by his lawyer, the way I would do, out of his law firm funds,” he said on Fox News. He added, “Michael would take care of things like this like I take care of this with my clients.”
The New York Times asked Greenberg Traurig about those remarks early this week. Shortly after Mr. Giuliani’s resignation was announced, the firm responded.
“We cannot speak for Mr. Giuliani with respect to what was intended by his remarks,” said a spokeswoman, Jill Perry. “Speaking for ourselves, we would not condone payments of the nature alleged to have been made or otherwise without the knowledge and direction of a client.”
Mr. Trump has publicly denied knowing about the payments as they were made. Mr. Giuliani said the president reimbursed Mr. Cohen for them, an arrangement he said was routine. Mr. Giuliani had to walk back many of his comments.
Mr. Giuliani laughed when read the statement from the firm. “First of all, I don’t think they really understand what I said,” he said. He said he was referring to a non-disclosure agreement that Mr. Cohen had negotiated. “That’s a very common part of a settlement,” he said. “In fact, any lawyer would negotiated that for a client.”
“You’ve gotta realize the firm is 2,000 lawyers,” he added, “some of them big supporters of the president, some of them enemies of the president.”
In the statement, Greenberg Traurig said that Mr. Giuliani had resigned effective Wednesday. “After recognizing that this work is all consuming and is lasting longer than initially anticipated, Rudy has determined it is best for him to resign,” said the firm’s chairman, Richard A. Rosenbaum.
Mr. Giuliani said in the statement that it “is in everyone’s best interest that I make it a permanent resignation” so he can focus on the special counsel’s investigation.
“Michael would take care of things like this, like I take care of things like this for my clients,” Giuliani told Sean Hannity last Wednesday, referring to the $130,000 hush payment Cohen made to Stormy Daniels just before the 2016 election on Trump’s behalf. “I don’t burden them with every single thing that comes along. These are busy people.”
Despite what Giuliani would have you believe, lawyers do not in fact regularly make hush payments on behalf of their clients without their knowledge. And in a statement released Thursday, Giuliani’s law firm sought to make that clear.
…
Greenberg Traurig’s public rebuke of Giuliani came shortly after the firm abruptly announced his permanent resignation. The firm claims Giuliani decided to resign because his work for Trump “is all consuming and is lasting longer than initially anticipated.” But Giuliani’s hiring as Trump’s lawyer was announced on April 19 — a mere three weeks ago — and Perry’s statement suggests Greenberg Traurig higher-ups aren’t happy with how Giuliani’s comments reflect on how they practice law.
Giuliani’s Hannity interview also created problems for Trump. Though the president said in April that he knew nothing about the Daniels payment, Giuliani claimed Trump actually reimbursed Cohen for it in increments throughout 2017. Asked to clarify the discrepancy last Friday morning, Trump instead threw Giuliani under the bus, pointing out that he “started yesterday” and “will get his facts straight.”
“Virtually everything that’s been said has been said incorrectly,” the president added.
Fast forward a week, and team Trump still hasn’t clarified the timeline about what Trump knew and when. The president says his lawyer’s story about the Daniels payment was incorrect, but he hasn’t bothered to offer an alternative explanation.
The Moos and The Head-Butts A Tail told by, like, a really smart person with a very good brain, a stable genius.
The cool mist settled in the hollows of the night as the idiot stood by the fence contemplating (as well as his child-like mind could) the bovine somnolence that stood before him, serenely dreaming lactative 4 stomach dreams of endless fields of daisies, yes daisies for that was her name- Daisy, bright as the summer sun, long slow munching of grass and partially digested grass, methane producing, global warming Daisy. She smelled of the earth and as he approached her side, careful not to disturb her gentle ‘earth gifts’, he could feel the heat of her fermentive power, the transformation of cool clay, the wetness of spring floods, and the greenness, the awesome greenness of the whole valley.
Gently he pushed her and she collapsed, even now unconscious, the pastures of her youth playing in her mind as the idiot re-crossed the boundary between what was her and her kind’s alone, back to the mundane reality that waited for him, back to his own kind and their cruel taunts.
As the sun rose the mist fled. Daisy, startled, rose to her feet and resumed her life as if nothing had happened. The idiot, wracked by guilt, finished his undergraduate degree in English Literature, not only never forgetting his youthful indiscretions but in fact REVELING in them as he said to me-
I tease my mother by calling her Emily after Emily Gilmore both because overall my family reminds me very much of the Gilmores and because she’s never met a brand name she didn’t like whereas I’m perfectly content to buy generic.
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