Ichiro is back to robbing homers in Seattle.

This. Is. So. Cool. pic.twitter.com/LIdmiqVetW

— MLB (@MLB) March 31, 2018

WELL DONE, COLONEL DYER:

More than 1,500 others were wounded when Israeli forces fired live ammunition at protesters, used tear gas and rubber-coated steel bullets to push them back from the border area, according to the Palestinian health ministry. 

On Saturday, 49 more people were wounded in the ongoing demonstrations. 

Palestinian rights group Adalah said the Israeli army on Saturday "accidentally" took responsibility for the attacks on Palestinian protesters, before deleting a post from their official Twitter page.

"Yesterday we saw 30,000 people; we arrived prepared and with precise reinforcements. Nothing was carried out uncontrolled; everything was accurate and measured, and we know where every bullet landed," a screenshot of the post, shared by Adalah, read.

COMIC GOLD:

VLAD WHO?:

Mr. Nikulin had been held in the Czech Republic since the authorities there arrested him in 2016. His case quickly turned into a battle between Washington and Moscow over whether he should be tried in the United States.

He was arrested just two days before the Obama administration formally accused the Russian government of stealing and disclosing emails from the Democratic National Committee and other institutions and prominent individuals.

In fighting Mr. Nikulin's extradition to the United States, his lawyer had argued that the case against him was politically motivated. The Russian government argued separately that it had jurisdiction in the case after a Moscow court issued an arrest warrant for Mr. Nikulin in November 2016 in the 2009 theft of $3,450 via a website called WebMoney.

More broadly, the Kremlin claims that the United States has unfairly targeted Russians around the world for political purposes. The Russian ambassador in Prague has said the case against Mr. Nikulin was an effort to "extend the jurisprudence of American law to the territory of third countries."

This year, Spain extradited to the United States two Russians suspected of hacking. Another Russian, Aleksandr V. Vinnik, is being held in Greece pending extradition requests from Washington and Moscow.

Mr. Nikulin's extradition was ordered by the Czech Ministry of Justice on Thursday.

MR. LONG PLAY:

THE TRAGEDY OF GUNWALKER HYSTERIA:

WE ARE ALL DESIGNIST NOW:

On Monday, I'll attempt to be a better man. Not necessarily nicer. Just better. Western Civilization is at stake. It's time to pick a side. God wills it. I refer you, in my case, to John 1:5. Look it up. I've had enough of darkness. Let there be more light.

PLUM DUFF:

DONALD WHO?:

All three cable news channels bailed on Trump's rambling and unfocused speech. Even his allies at Fox News gave up, returning to previously scheduled programming while making excuses for his screw up.

DONALD/VLAD & CO.:

Most of the world aspires neither to Russia's politics nor its living standards. Alas, the west's chief ideological threat comes from within. Mr Putin's wealth extraction machine reveals the west's moral failings. His abettors could not do it without our connivance.

This is especially true of the US and Britain. In contrast to most western democracies, the US and UK permit anonymous ownership. Most democracies legally require the beneficial owner of an asset, such a company or property, to be made known. Not so in the largest English-speaking democracies. Roughly $300bn is laundered in the US every year, according to the US Treasury. Britain and its offshore financial centres take in about $125bn. Most of it goes undetected. The largest foreign share of it is Russian, according to Anders Aslund, a leading specialist on Russia's economy. Estimates of Mr Putin's personal wealth range from $50bn to $200bn. Even the lower figure would exceed the gross domestic product of most UN member states. Yet we have taken few steps to disrupt it.

HOW IS ANY OF THIS DIFFERENT FROM STANDARD TRUMPBOT FARE?:

On October 28, someone calling themselves Q began posting a series of cryptic messages in a /pol/ thread titled "Calm Before the Storm" (assumedly in reference to that creepy Trump quote from early October). Q claimed to be a high-level government insider with Q clearance (hence the name) tasked with posting intel drops -- which he, for some reason, called "crumbs" -- straight to 4chan in order to covertly inform the public about POTUS's master plan to stage a countercoup against members of the deep state. It was, in short, absolutely insane. However, thanks to some rather forced coincidences -- like Q kind of, sort of guessing that Trump would tweet the word "small" on Small Business Saturday, and this one time the internet decided that Q was "totally on Air Force One" because he posted a blurry picture of some islands while Trump was on his trip to Asia -- and a whole heck of a lot of wishful thinking, people believed he was the real deal.

So he kept talking.

According to Q, Trump was never really involved with Russia, and isn't actually under investigation by Mueller & Co. On the contrary, Q insists that it's actually Clinton and Obama who were corrupted by Putin (and are now actually under investigation by Mueller) because they're obviously just evil, money-hungry globalists who'll do anything for the highest bidder. (Oh, yeah, and they're also apparently into raping and killing children, though the crowd is split over whether this is because they're satanists or just part of some weird blackmail scheme involving the CIA.) Q also claims that Trump, the genius that he is, figured all of this out way back when he was just a measly presidential candidate, and has been pretending to love Putin and/or be involved with Russia ever since as a way to force a third party to investigate these horrors -- without drawing the attention of those evil Dems-who-must-not-be-named, of course -- because he's just that selfless of a leader.

In this fantasy world, all of the far right's wildest dreams come true: Q promises that Clinton, Obama, Podesta, Abedin, and even McCain are all either arrested and wearing secret police-issued ankle monitors, or just about to be indicted; that the Steele dossier is a total fabrication personally paid for by Clinton and Obama...

THOSE KIDS ARE REALLY BLOWING IT...:

FRANKLIN GRAHAM'S KIND OF PLACE!:

An obscure White House office responsible for recruiting and vetting thousands of political appointees has suffered from inexperience and a shortage of staff, hobbling the Trump administration's efforts to place qualified people in key posts across government, documents and interviews show.

At the same time, two office leaders have spotty records themselves: a college dropout with arrests for drunken driving and bad checks and a Marine Corps reservist with arrests for assault, disorderly conduct, fleeing an officer and underage drinking. [...]

PPO leaders hosted happy hours last year in their offices that included beer, wine and snacks for dozens of PPO employees and White House liaisons who work in federal agencies, White House officials confirmed. In January, they played a drinking game in the office called "Icing" to celebrate the deputy director's 30th birthday. Icing involves hiding a bottle of Smirnoff Ice, a flavored malt liquor, and demanding that the person who discovers it, in this case the deputy director, guzzle it.

MAN ON:

In 23 seasons, Staub reached base 4,050 times, the 41st highest total in baseball history. (The number grows to 4,165 if you include the 115 times he reached via error.) He was a six-time All-Star who finished his career with 292 home runs, 1,466 runs batted in and 45.8 wins above replacement.

Most of those career totals are, admittedly, below Hall of Fame standards. But for some context on how impressive the feat of reaching base 4,000 times is, consider how often those who have accomplished it have been enshrined in Cooperstown. Forty-six players have done it, 43 have become eligible for Hall of Fame induction, and 37 of those players were elected. The six who were not: Pete Rose, Barry Bonds, Rafael Palmeiro, Gary Sheffield, Staub and Manny Ramirez.

IT'S NATIONALISM, JAKE:

The prospect of an American president going after a private business out of personal pique is alarming, yet American conservatives, the normal defenders of big business, have been surprisingly silent. This is all the more striking since they were so vocal in criticizing Trump's predecessor for allegedly meddling in the economy by favoring some firms over others. In 2012, Mitt Romney complained that Barack Obama was "practicing crony capitalism. And if you want to get America going again, you've got to stop the spread of crony capitalism." Four years later, Romney's running mate, Paul Ryan, made a similar complaint: "Elites in Washington should NOT be picking winners & losers--that's a recipe for a closed economy--for cronyism."

MAYBE PUTIN'S NRA WILL BUY THE AD TIME:

Multiple companies say they're pulling their advertisements from conservative Fox News host Laura Ingraham's show after she sent a tweet mocking Parkland shooting survivor and gun-control activist David Hogg.

Nestle US, Hulu and Nutrish confirmed on Twitter that they are removing advertising from Ingraham's show. Media reports say TripAdvisor, Expedia, Wayfair and Johnson & Johnson are pulling their support as well.

NOT THAT THERE'S EVER A BAD TIME:

Each Easter, Dr Johnson took communion, the one time in the year he did so; remembered with affection and grief his wife, Tetty, who had died on 17 March 1752;  and examined his life over the past 12 months. He wrote prayers, made resolutions to rise early and work hard, and recorded his failure to keep those resolutions.

Dr Johnson is a man who could, if he wished, have had a high opinion of himself. His sonorous command of the English language, pious observances, moral seriousness, self-sacrificial charitable giving, high reputation as a man of letters and tremendous ability to rout opponents in conversation, could all have turned him into a conceited, self-satisfied worshipper at the temple of his own fame.

In his Prayers and Meditations, published soon after his death, the decision was taken to include the miscellaneous notes to himself which Johnson would certainly not have included. He had handed over the notebook under the impression that the prayers which it contained, composed at various times for his own use, would be published, and not the surrounding ephemera.

For he had promised Dr Adams, Master of Pembroke College, Oxford, to provide some prayers, and was now too ill to prepare these for publication himself.

Fortunately for us, everything was published. So we get the full, scorching blast of Johnson's humility, the very low view which he took of himself, as well as his profound faithfulness, expressed in the stately language of the Prayer Book, and in his religious observances. 

THUS hE DESPAIRED:

As Jesus looked down from the cross, so close to three o'clock on a Friday afternoon, he saw his "mother, with her sister, Mary wife of Clopas, and Mary of Magdala." Next to the three Marys stood "the disciple whom he loved," St. John. For nearly four decades, this scene has haunted me. As Catholics, we focus so much on Jesus's physical suffering on the cross, the pain his mother must have felt, and the forthcoming death and resurrection that we often readily and understandably skip a person who is vital--actually, fundamentally and profoundly critical--to the entire story: St. John. Tradition tells us that John was the youngest, that he was the last to write his Gospel, and that he was the only apostle not to have been brutally martyred. At the moment that Jesus looked down from the Cross, He gave His mother to John, asking him and his house to shelter her. "'There is your mother'; and from that moment the disciple took her into his home." While I have often wondered what St. John must have felt--the pain and the anguish--at seeing his savior crucified, I have wondered far more often what Jesus must have felt, especially given that He was fully man as well as fully God. No doubt, it meant a great deal to Him to have the four by his side in His greatest moment of agony. All to the good.

But, as a man, what must He have thought knowing that all eleven of His closest male friends had betrayed Him, deserted Him in His hour of greatest need? Judas the worst, to be sure, but even Peter had denied Him three times, and not a single one of them dared suffer with Him or even next to Him that Friday afternoon. Only John. Might this not have been a blow as great as any dealt to Him in his entire thirty-three years of Incarnate life on this world of sorrows? Though I have no idea, perhaps these betrayals were the greatest blow to Jesus. It's possible I'm projecting too much of myself on the situation, but given that Jesus already knew what God the Father's response would be, how the people would (pen)ultimately view him, and the fortitude of His mother He had come to cherish, the only real unknown in the entire Passion was the response of His closest friends.

eND OF hISTORY AND THE LIVIN' IS EASY:

[T]he CBO uses the personal-consumption expenditures (PCE) index to measure inflation, whereas the Census Bureau uses the consumer-price index (CPI). These differ in two main ways. The CPI includes only what consumers spend on themselves, whereas the PCE index also includes expenditures on their behalf, such as employee health insurance. And the CPI's basket of goods is updated every two years, whereas that for the PCE index is updated quarterly. This means it is quicker to pick up substitutions: as the price of one item (apples, say) rises, consumers seek cheaper alternatives (for example, pears).

In 2000 the Federal Reserve's rate-setting body switched from the CPI to the PCE index for its inflation target, citing this reason. Growth in the PCE index has generally been half a percentage point below the CPI. The gap, small in the short run, grows wider with each passing year.

The third difference is that the Census Bureau uses pre-tax incomes, whereas the CBO takes taxes and transfers, such as government-funded health insurance, into account. Between 1979 and 2014 the average federal tax rate for families in the middle fifth of the pre-tax income distribution fell from 19% to 14%. Transfers rose from 0.8% of pre-tax income to 4.7%.

Other data also suggest that the CBO's methods paint a fairer picture. Bruce Sacerdote of Dartmouth College has calculated that household expenditure, converted to 2015 dollars using the CPI, has risen by 32% since 1972. Spending on food and clothing has fallen from 27% of the total to 16% in 2016, and the share spent on health care and housing has stayed roughly constant. That means more left over for luxuries. Homes have got bigger, and the number of cars per household has risen from 1 to 1.6.

ALL THAT REMAINS IS THE SHOWER:

A bombshell report just confirmed the key underlying premise of the Trump-Russia dossier - https://t.co/vIt3p4bm9u

— brothersjudd (@brothersjudd) March 30, 2018

ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:

Thanks for noticing, @RedState, but you're wrong. I actually have two legs. They're made of titanium, and they don't buckle. pic.twitter.com/uj2aIO0Ahr

— Tammy Duckworth (@SenDuckworth) March 28, 2018

THE GOOD ORANGE:

THE WARP AND WEFT:

YOUR NEXT CAR WILL BE A VOLT:

There are lots of reasons to buy an electric vehicle these days, starting with their cost. A recent analysis found that running an EV is, on average, 2.3 times cheaper than operating a traditional gas vehicle. There's always been some concern that, despite the environmental cred not pumping gas gives, EV buyers weren't doing as much for the environment as they thought: if the electricity powering your car comes from coal, you're still polluting, just from a power plant, not your tailpipe.

But EVs continue to get more efficient and the electricity they use is becoming cleaner. Because the U.S. grid is switching away from coal-fired power to natural gas and renewables, the footprint of the electricity grid, and therefore your EV, is getting smaller all the time.

David Reichmuth, an engineer at the Union of Concerned Scientists, analyzed climate change emissions of EVs versus gasoline-powered cars using 2017 figures from the E.P.A. On average, though figures vary widely across the U.S., an EV now gets has the equivalent emissions of a gas car that gets 80 miles to the gallon (which is to say, basically no car on the market).

HOME COMING:

Every fan has his own list of unique baseball moments, but I can guarantee they are exactly like mine in how sharply they are etched into the mind. We possess them in a way we possess no other memories. They can't be touched by that deadly "fuzzy trace." They need no mental remaking. Baseball memories are different, because this impossible game touches on something fundamentally human: our innate longing for the eternal.

In the prologue to his epic novel Underworld, Don DeLillo describes, through the eyes of a fictional announcer, the aftermath of Bobby Thomson's pennant-winning, walk-off home run for the New York Giants at the Polo Grounds in 1951:

Russ thinks this is another kind of history. He thinks [the fans] will carry something out of here that joins them all in a rare way, that binds them to a memory with protective power. People are climbing lampposts on Amsterdam Avenue, tooting car horns in Little Italy. Isn't it possible that this midcentury moment enters the skin more lastingly than the vast shaping strategies of eminent leaders, generals steely in their sunglasses -- the mapped visions that piece our dreams? Russ wants to believe a thing like this keeps us safe in some undetermined way. This is the thing that will pulse in his brain come old age and double vision and dizzy spells -- the surge of sensation, the leap of people already standing, that bolt of noise and joy when the ball went in. This is the people's history and it has flesh and breath that quicken to the force of this old game of ours. And fans at the Polo Grounds today will be able to tell their grandchildren . . . that they were here when it happened.

The staying power of memories and moments like this one is largely due to nostalgia, of course -- but not in our watered-down conception of it. "Nostalgia" combines the Greek words nostos and algos to mean "a pain at returning home." And what is baseball about, if not returning home?

ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:

It's baseball season. The great George Carlin explains how baseball is different. https://t.co/ICQ34ZnSgh

— Buster Olney (@Buster_ESPN) March 29, 2018

FROM THE ARCHIVES: WITH APOLOGIES TO MRS. MURTAUGH:

1. Bands.

2. Half time with bands.

3. Cheerleaders at half time with bands.

4. Up With People singing "The Impossible Dream" during a Blue Angels flyover at half time with bands.

5. Baseball has fans in Wrigley Field singing "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" at the seventh-inning stretch.

6. Baseball has Blue Moon, Catfish, Spaceman and The Sugar Bear. Football has Lester the Molester, Too Mean and The Assassin. [...]

9. Baseball has a bullpen coach blowing bubble gum with his cap turned around backward while leaning on a fungo bat; football has a defensive coordinator in a satin jacket with a headset and a clipboard. [...]

12. Vince Lombardi was never ashamed that he said, "Winning isn't everything. It's the only thing."

MORE:
Baseball and Writing (Marianne Moore)

Fanaticism? No. Writing is exciting
and baseball is like writing.
You can never tell with either
how it will go
or what you will do;
generating excitement -
a fever in the victim -
pitcher, catcher, fielder, batter.
Victim in what category?
Owlman watching from the press box?
To whom does it apply?
Who is excited? Might it be I?

It's a pitcher's battle all the way - a duel -
a catcher's, as, with cruel
puma paw, Elston Howard lumbers lightly
back to plate. (His spring
de-winged a bat swing.)
They have that killer instinct;
yet Elston - whose catching
arm has hurt them all with the bat -
when questioned, says, unenviously,
"I'm very satisfied. We won."
Shorn of the batting crown, says, "We";
robbed by a technicality.

When three players on a side play three positions
and modify conditions,
the massive run need not be everything.
"Going, going . . . " Is
it? Roger Maris
has it, running fast. You will
never see a finer catch. Well . . .
"Mickey, leaping like the devil" - why
gild it, although deer sounds better -
snares what was speeding towards its treetop nest,
one-handing the souvenir-to-be
meant to be caught by you or me.

Assign Yogi Berra to Cape Canaveral;
he could handle any missile.
He is no feather. "Strike! . . . Strike two!"
Fouled back. A blur.
It's gone. You would infer
that the bat had eyes.
He put the wood to that one.
Praised, Skowron says, "Thanks, Mel.
I think I helped a little bit."
All business, each, and modesty.
Blanchard, Richardson, Kubek, Boyer.
In that galaxy of nine, say which
won the pennant? Each. It was he.

Those two magnificent saves from the knee-throws
by Boyer, finesses in twos -
like Whitey's three kinds of pitch and pre-
diagnosis
with pick-off psychosis.
Pitching is a large subject.
Your arm, too true at first, can learn to
catch your corners - even trouble
Mickey Mantle. ("Grazed a Yankee!
My baby pitcher, Montejo!"
With some pedagogy,
you'll be tough, premature prodigy.)

They crowd him and curve him and aim for the knees. Trying
indeed! The secret implying:
"I can stand here, bat held steady."
One may suit him;
none has hit him.
Imponderables smite him.
Muscle kinks, infections, spike wounds
require food, rest, respite from ruffians. (Drat it!
Celebrity costs privacy!)
Cow's milk, "tiger's milk," soy milk, carrot juice,
brewer's yeast (high-potency -
concentrates presage victory

sped by Luis Arroyo, Hector Lopez -
deadly in a pinch. And "Yes,
it's work; I want you to bear down,
but enjoy it
while you're doing it."
Mr. Houk and Mr. Sain,
if you have a rummage sale,
don't sell Roland Sheldon or Tom Tresh.
Studded with stars in belt and crown,
the Stadium is an adastrium.
O flashing Orion,
your stars are muscled like the lion.

FREEDOM FROM MORALITY:

It is clear that there is a kind of continuity with members of the Inklings: Pullman draws heavily on the tools of their trade to evoke other worlds where there can be a battle of ideas and of values, he also has supernatural, or supernaturally endowed beings, in these worlds who struggle to prevail, and he also seeks to re-enchant our prosaic world with his tales of strange worlds and stranger creatures. Like them, Pullman professes to be influenced by the Bible and by Christian hymns in particular. But here the resemblance ends. 

Pullman uses the paraphernalia of fantasy to send a message radically different from the Inklings. He sees religion as a force for coercion and oppression, and organised religion as a bondage from which the human race must be liberated. Thus the "Magisterium" and "the Church" play the role of the villain in his work and the Christian God is singled out for oblivion. It seems appropriate then to see him, as Cathy Young and Peter Hitchens have done, as a kind of anti-Lewis: using fantasy and even allegory to communicate a message very different from Lewis's. He is generally anti-Inklings, even if he depends on them in his use of fantasy as a method to discuss important issues. He is not only anti-religion but specifically anti-Christian and, we may even say, anti-Christ. [...]

It is simply not enough to oppose authority to freedom. The question today is not so much about freedom from organised religion or cultural mores, but what freedom is for, how it expresses our essential nature and the lawfulness which is embedded in it, even when we neglect or deny it. In any view of moral development which might be seen as adequate, heteronomy leads to autonomy which, in turn, should lead to interdependence, respect for persons and the willingness to sacrifice our individual interests for another person, the family or the Common Good.

All civilisation has been built on the delaying or even the denial of gratification. The Church's teaching, in this respect, is not to be a killjoy but to promote respect for persons rather than their use merely for our own sexual, economic or cultural gratification. In spite of numerous disasters, the "free love" movement seems not to have learnt the value of self-restraint. The removal of all inhibition will not lead to happy communes of the imagination but to hurt individuals, broken families and bewildered children. The delaying of the gratification of primary appetites, on the other hand, can contribute to greater literary, artistic or scientific achievement, even it it is not a sine qua non for these.

In a recent BBC interview Pullman declared that he couldn't believe in God because of the theory of evolution he had learnt at school. This kind of naive scientism ill becomes someone who has been voted the 11th most influential person in British culture. Is he aware, for example, of Fr Teilhard de Chardin, who not only made hugely significant contributions in palaeontology but set his understanding of development in the universe in an explicitly Christian setting? For him, the emergence of complexity and of consciousness alerts us to the special destiny of humans. In agreement with St Paul, he sees Christ as the origin, centre and goal of the cosmic process. 

Similarly, Simon Conway Morris, the palaeobiologist, has called our attention to the phenomenon of convergence in widely different creatures and to the implications of this for the inevitability of the emergence of intelligence. Intelligence itself is a signal of transcendence and reminds humans not to regard themselves as cosmic accidents, but as stewards who will have to account for their stewardship. Robert Asher, also a palaeontologist, declares roundly that the mechanics of biology do not address the "who" or the "why" behind it. We could mention Frank Collins, the former director of the Human Genome Project, or Denis Alexander of Cambridge, or Paul Davies, who is not a conventional Christian but believes that science provides a surer path to the existence of God than religion, and many others. The point is that atheists, like Pullman, have some obligation to understand what it is they are rejecting, just as believers have a responsibility to understand atheism before engaging in apologetics in response to it. 

While the Inklings invented imaginary worlds like Narnia or Middle Earth, Pullman uses the pseudo-scientific notion of parallel universes. This is a last desperate throw of the dice for those seeking to avoid the conclusion that the remarkable expansion, balance and laws of the universe, to say nothing of the right amount of materials for the emergence of life, the miracle of consciousness and of creatures able to study the universe from which they have emerged, calls for an explanation. Thus, if an infinite number of universes is posited, then the existence of this one is a necessity but an unremarkable one. That there is no evidence of such universes and, in any case, how could we know whether they existed since we are limited in our observation to this universe, seems not to deter the advocates of this view. A properly scientific view would take this universe seriously and attempt to explain its remarkable nature. If mythic worlds are to be created for the sake of the story, let us be clear that is what they are rather than confusing them with pseudo-science.  

A PEOPLE WHO THINK THEMSELVES A NATION ARE ONE:

Familiarity makes the statist mythology easy to explain: The dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire enabled self-determination for a number of states. Saudi Arabia and the Gulf sheikhdoms represent legitimate self-expressions of the people who have long lived within those territories. In the Levant, Syria, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon and Palestine defined multi-ethnic populations who sought similar self-determination. The British and French successfully ushered the first four to independence. Unfortunately, the region's Jews, bolstered by Jewish refugees from war-torn Europe, declared an ethnonational State of Israel, disenfranchising the Palestinians. The consequent lack of Palestinian self-determination remains the region's largest festering problem; its resolution would open the door to peace, prosperity, and development.

This conventional wisdom suffers from a fatal flaw: it is riddled with falsehoods. In reality, the region's state system was born when the European empires decided to decolonise. England and France drew lines on a map to create Middle Eastern states. Few of those lines represented anything other than European preferences. 

Like every previous attempt at global organisation, the now-dominant nation state system conferred both significant benefits and significant costs upon humanity. Many of the benefits are obvious. Day-to-day crises notwithstanding, the liberal international order of nation states, and the market-oriented global commercial system that it has enabled, have improved living standards around the world. By any material measure -- health, life expectancy, peace, prosperity -- the benefits of today's global order dwarf those of every earlier ordering. 

Many of the costs are subtler. They rest in the hybrid nature of a nation state. Nationhood is an ancient concept, featured prominently in the Bible and the Homeric epics. A nation is a group of people who share feelings of kinship and commonality. Members of a nation -- like members of a family or a tribe -- claim a defining identity that marks them as distinct from all others. National identities may derive from bloodlines, faiths, principles, or citizenship, but a sine qua non of nationhood is that the nation's members see themselves as forming a distinct, coherent entity. 

States are very different. Statehood is a purely political designation. A viable state possesses defined geographic boundaries and a government capable of imposing order within those borders. States exist because other states recognise them. A state's existence is independent of the feelings or identities of the people living within its borders. 

Because a nation state embodies both concepts, a new nation state may be born in one of two ways: either a pre-existing nation may gain control over territory in which to build a state; or the leadership of a recognised state may forge the people living within its borders into a nation. The former path thus begins with national self-determination and requires the hard work of state-building. The latter begins with statehood and requires the far harder work of nation-building. 

This distinction inevitably pits the interests of insiders against those of outsiders. From the perspective of outside powers, the latter route is much easier. Outsiders can draw lines on a map to serve their own interests without worrying about the people on the ground. Outsiders can find local allies capable of forwarding some plausible claim to leadership, and help them impose order within state lines. Outsiders can recognise their favoured locals as a legitimate government, and hand them the challenge of convincing the new state's residents that they constitute a well-defined nation. Even better for outsiders, lines drawn to create allegedly multi-ethnic states avoid the messy problem of "population exchanges" inherent in ethnonational states, such as those that sorted Turkish Muslims from Greek Christians, or Pakistani Muslims from Indian Hindus. That avoidance keeps the outside powers' hands clean. 

From the perspective of insiders -- even those selected for leadership and handed the reigns of power -- that avoidance is a disaster. It complicates, and often renders impossible, the challenge of nation building. An outsider's declaration that one of the local self-identified nations is now first among equals tends to shatter whatever modus vivendi the locals had worked out among themselves. The new government inherits the unenviable task of building a nation comprised of people whose histories cast them as distinct (often warring) ethnicities, amidst a disruptive realignment almost designed to inflame resentment and encourage discrimination.

The British and French took precisely that easy approach in the Levant. In Iraq, the British combined large Sunni Arab, Shia Arab, and Kurdish communities, along with smaller numbers of Christians, Jews, Yazidis, Zoroastrians, and others. They chose a Sunni Arab ally -- from the royal Hashemite family of Mecca -- to set upon the Iraqi throne in 1921. 

Sunni dominance of Iraq lasted until American forces toppled Saddam Hussein in 2003. Almost immediately, the country fragmented into Sunni, Shia and Kurdish zones. Iraq's citizens demonstrably identified with their ethnic kin -- pre-existing national identities forged over centuries -- rather than as Iraqis. Fifteen years later, it is evident that no one ever built an Iraqi nation. The Iraqi state can exist only as long as outside powers and local strongmen hold it together by force. Few  today can doubt that left to their own devices, Iraq's citizens would divide the territory into three ethnonational states born fighting border wars.

In Syria, the French created a state with a sizeable Sunni Arab majority, a large Alawite community dominating its Mediterranean coast, a compact Druze community in its southern mountains, and smaller numbers of Christians, Jews and others sprinkled throughout. The French rejected a British-allied Hashemite monarchy early on, and imposed direct control, initially from Paris, later from Vichy. At the end of the Second World War, France handed control to a weak, Sunni-dominated parliament. 20-plus years and several coups later, the Syrian Ba'ath party seized power and an Alawite faction seized control of the Ba'ath. By 1970, the Alawite Ba'athist Hafez Assad had consolidated the power handed to his son Bashar upon his death in 2000. Syria remained a brutal Alawite dictatorship until its current civil war broke out in 2011. Its population, like Iraq's, fractured immediately along ethnic lines. 

The French also carved the Lebanese state out of its Mandate for Syria. By design, Lebanon was a multi-ethnic confessional republic, with power shared unequally among its Christian, Sunni, Shia and Druze communities. As an uneasy marriage of Western-looking and Arab cultures, the Lebanese state was always weak. Changes to the demographic balance among its constituent communities, coupled with the arrival of PLO-led Sunni refugees from Jordan in 1970, pushed it beyond the breaking point. It dissolved into a bitter, sectarian civil war in 1975. Though that war nominally ended in 1991, the country has never recovered fully. Syrian and Iranian dominance have elevated Hezbollah, a Shia terrorist militia, into the de facto government. Lebanon's recognised government is little more than a fig-leaf allowing countries and international organisations to pretend that they're not dealing with Hezbollah. Like the citizens of Iraq and Syria, Lebanese citizens identify almost exclusively with their traditional, ethnically-defined nations rather than with the Lebanese state. 

Palestine was always destined to be the most interesting part of the Levant. By the end of the 19th century, the Zionist movement had committed to reasserting Jewish independence in the historical Jewish homeland. Jewish investment reshaped the economy of this long-neglected backwater; Jewish and Arab immigration swelled its population. In the Balfour Declaration of 1917, the British officially blessed the Zionist dream of a Jewish state in Palestine. The San Remo Conference of 1920 incorporated that blessing into international law; the League of Nations charged the British Mandatory with the development of a Jewish homeland.

In 1921, the British carved out the eastern three-quarters of Mandatory Palestine to form Transjordan (since 1949, Jordan). They brought a Hashemite ruler to sit on its throne -- Sunni royalty from Mecca to rule Levantine Sunnis. Eighty years of underinvestment in nation-building kept alive the tension between the two Sunni factions -- though even at its worst, it paled in comparison to the inter-ethnic fighting that devastated Jordan's neighbours. To the misplaced surprise of many, this sole post-Ottoman Levantine Arab state lacking ethnic minorities has proved to be the most durable of the bunch. Its Hashemite monarchy has already celebrated its centenary (per the shorter Islamic year). It current ruler appears intent upon avoiding the fate that has befallen his neighbours. In 2002, King Abdullah II became the first Arab leader to invest in explicit nation-building. His "Jordan First" initiative set out to inculcate a sense of "Jordanianness" among the Kingdom's citizens.

Israel alone travelled the opposite path. The Jewish nation predated the modern state by more than three millennia. Its investment in nation-building was made long ago; all that remained to create in the 20th century were the institutions of a modern state. While hardly trivial, that task is far, far easier than nation-building. In 1948, the Jewish state of Israel became the region's sole successful exercise in  minority ethnic self-determination. 

None of the Arab states recognised the Jews' right to self-determination in land they considered rightfully Arab. Five Arab armies invaded western Palestine the moment Israel declared its independence. By the time the dust settled along armistice lines in 1949, the geographic region that had been Palestine was split in four. In addition to the pre-existing Sunni Arab state of Jordan, the new Jewish state controlled the Galilee, a narrow central coastal plain, and the Negev desert. Egypt occupied the tiny but densely populated Gaza Strip. Jordan occupied -- and annexed -- the historic Jewish heartland of Judaea and Samaria. Hundreds of thousands of displaced people began a reconfiguration of the territory's demographics. 

That demographic shift continued into the early 1950s, as nearly every Arab state exiled its Jews in the first half of a classic post-colonial population exchange that has yet to reach its stabilising conclusion. Israel addressed that half by integrating all Jewish arrivals and extending citizenship to non-Jewish residents. The UN arrested the other half with a unique, creative, and ultimately disastrous approach seemingly designed to perpetuate instability: it defined a new nation of stateless "Palestine refugees" comprised of all displaced non-Jews who had lived in western Palestine during a narrow two-year window -- and their patrilineal descendants. It then established a permanent agency, UNRWA, whose sole responsibility was catering to the members of this newborn stateless nation, and ensuring that its charges remained perpetually stateless. 

70 years and several Arab-Israeli wars later, Gaza, Judaea and Samaria remain disputed territories. Israel gained control over them in 1967, ceded partial control to a Palestinian Authority (PA) -- a relabelling designed to give the terrorist PLO a clean start -- created under the Oslo Accords of 1993, and withdrew entirely from Gaza in 2005. Meanwhile, UNRWA's count of Palestine refugees has grown from 750,000 to five million. Because a majority of them remain in the region, and Jordan remains the sole Arab state to have accorded any of them citizenship, these stateless Palestine refugees are a constant contributor to tension, instability and terrorism -- in the region and around the world.

All told, the familiar statist view of the Middle East that dominated the 20th century collapsed in the 21st.

RUTHLESS:

Armed with that knowledge, and one lyrical line poached from the box score, [New York Daily Mail columnist Franklin Pierce] Adams sat down and typed:

 These are the saddest of possible words:

"Tinker to Evers to Chance."

 Trio of bear cubs and fleeter than birds,

 Tinker and Evers and Chance.

 Ruthlessly pricking our gonfalon bubble,

 Making a Giant hit into a double -

 Words that are heavy with nothing but trouble:

 "Tinker to Evers to Chance."

And that was it. Eight lines of throwaway verse, reprinted in newspapers from coast to coast and eventually re-titled "Baseball's Sad Lexicon," that would leave generations of readers scratching their heads -- "gonfalon bubble?" -- or arguing that Adams had unwittingly elevated his subjects -- the Cubs' double-play combination of shortstop Joe Tinker, second baseman Johnny Evers, and first baseman Frank Chance -- to an iconic status unmerited by their play.

Or not.

A quick trip to the dictionary solves the first mystery. A gonfalon, Webster informs us, is a banner or flag hung from a crosspiece instead of an upright staff, usually ending in pointed streamers, and common to the medieval republics of Italy. Hence, a literate jab at New York baseball fans afflicted with mid-summer "pennant fever." David Rapp unfurls the rest in Tinker to Evers to Chance.

OBSTRUCTION ALL THE WAY DOWN:

A lawyer for President Trump broached the idea of Mr. Trump pardoning two of his former top advisers, Michael T. Flynn and Paul Manafort, with their lawyers last year, according to three people with knowledge of the discussions.

The discussions came as the special counsel was building cases against both men, and they raise questions about whether the lawyer, John Dowd, who resigned last week, was offering pardons to influence their decisions about whether to plead guilty and cooperate in the investigation.

The talks suggest that Mr. Trump's lawyers were concerned about what Mr. Flynn and Mr. Manafort might reveal were they to cut a deal with the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, in exchange for leniency.

WHEN HATING IMMIGRANTS IS INSUFFICIENT:

"I knew he was a shallow, lazy ignoramus, and I didn't care," Coulter admitted to an audience largely composed of College Republicans and a few hecklers at Columbia University on Tuesday night.

It was the sort of anti-Trump invective that Coulter would share privately with pals, including this reporter, over a wine-soaked dinner during the first year of the new administration, but in recent weeks she has increasingly voiced her displeasure in public forums.

This time, Coulter--wearing her trademark slinky black cocktail dress, accessorized by a sparkling, handcuff-sized bracelet--repeatedly trashed her former hero during a supposed debate in Columbia's Roone Arledge Cinema with her good friend, neoliberal blogger Mickey Kaus (modeling a plain blue suit and blue patterned tie).

The ostensible focus of the conversation--moderated by Kevin Can Wait showrunner Rob Long, a rare Hollywood conservative (suitless, unshaven)--was immigration policy. It's a topic on which Coulter and Kaus largely agree (namely, curb the flow of indigent, ill-educated, unskilled arrivals and get rid of the "illegals" who depress the wages of working-class Americans). Also on the agenda was Trump's apparent lack of interest in fulfilling his central campaign promise to erect a "big, beautiful wall" on the U.S. border with Mexico.

The debate also touched upon the opioid crisis--again, a catastrophe created by "Mexicans." 

DANG TRIBE:

Last week, on what ends up being one of the best days every spring, the newest version of Out of the Park Baseball was released. If you've never played, it is a text-based sim game in which you can take over a roster -- rosters can be current-day rosters, historical rosters or fictional rosters -- as a general manager, manager or both and build everything. It is the best baseball game by far in terms of attention to detail and really getting down to the nitty gritty with roster building. I like it a lot is what I'm saying. For the last couple of years here I've run a simulation of the upcoming season following the release of the newest OOTP, so it seemed like time to do it again. For what it's worth, last year the game had the Red Sox finishing with 88 wins and getting knocked out in the ALDS. Not bad! Let's see what it has in store this year.

The best sound in the world. 😍 pic.twitter.com/NDuMGkJLLE

— MLB (@MLB) March 28, 2018

THANKS, DONALD:

It only took a week for Pennsylvania Rep. Ryan Costello, a moderate Republican representing suburban Philadelphia, to recognize the headwinds that Donald Trump's presidency would create for him and members in similar districts.

"After the travel ban," Costello said in an interview Tuesday. It wasn't just the overwhelming protests at airports but all the protesters who gathered at his office, too. They were linking him, their Republican member of Congress, with the decisions of the new Republican president. He remembered "the expectation that, somehow, I needed to issue a statement within X number of minutes or somehow I was complicit, or whatever they were trying to accuse me of."

"And what that told me," he continued, "is that they were very engaged, and there was a lot of anger, and they were just waiting for Trump to do something so that they could express their outrage."

SHOPPING IN THE DISCOUNT BIN:

Sekulow said Ekonomou, who works under contract as an assistant district attorney in Brunswick, Georgia, was a "brilliant strategist" who has handled complex investigations for decades. Ekonomou assisted Sekulow in a famous case involving the religious group Jews for Jesus before the Supreme Court in the 1980s.

While Ekonomou has also worked on criminal matters, he has not handled cases as high-profile and complex as the Mueller probe.

In an interview, Ekonomou told Reuters that he "prosecutes a lot of murders for the D.A."

When asked about his biggest cases of late, Ekonomou said, "That's basically it. Nothing earthshaking." [...]

Trump has tried to tap top-tier lawyers to represent him but been repeatedly rebuffed, according to people familiar with the matter. For example, on Monday, Dan Webb, a former U.S. attorney in Illinois, said Trump had reached out to him and a Washington colleague, but business conflicts prevented them from representing the president.

Savannah Law School professor Andrew Wright, former associate counsel in the Obama White House, said it is unusual for a president to turn to lawyers like Ekonomou who are untested on the national scene and not part of the elite white-collar bar.

"He's well past the A-team grab space," Wright said.

THE TIGHTENING NOOSE:

The special counsel investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election revealed Tuesday night that prosecutors say they have connected former Trump deputy campaign chairman Rick Gates to a person with ties to a Russian intelligence service while Gates worked on the campaign.

That Gates and the unnamed person, who had lived in Kiev and Moscow and worked for one of Paul Manafort's companies, were in touch in September and October 2016 was "pertinent to the investigation," a court filing from prosecutors said Tuesday night.

The acknowledgment that Gates knew the person had Russian intelligence ties is alleged in a report prosecutors filed about the coming sentencing of a Dutch attorney. 

ONLY BASEBALL:

Guerrero walked off for Toronto at Montreal's Olympic Stadium in the Blue Jays' final exhibition game before the start of the regular season. The 19-year-old son of Vladimir Guerrero hammered Jack Flaherty's pitch over the wall in left-center to a huge roar from the 25,816 spectators on hand.

Fans wearing Montreal Expos paraphernalia jumped and yelled from the stands. Guerrero -- wearing his dad's No. 27 -- threw his helmet before leaping into a frenzied circle of teammates at home plate. One fan waved a Guerrero Expos jersey as he celebrated.

Using the hashtag "priceless," the elder Guerrero tweeted out a clip of his son's Tuesday evening heroics.

THE rIGHT IS THE lEFT:

[T]he notion of the primacy of one's own group over others is the backbone of contemporary right-wing groups. Adherents of Pegida, Alternative fuer Deutschland (AfD) and Front National generate popular support by summoning images of heroic white Europeans ready to save their cultural heritage from the imminent destruction caused by immigrants. Extreme political groups on both sites evidently deploy the same methodology--and once again, the mere fact that some of those on the left side harbor good intentions does not turn the methodology itself into something admirable.

We should ask ourselves if we want to create a balkanized environment that defines itself not by a feeling of mutual cohesiveness and a common bond, but rather through exclusive racial and social identities--a method used by both white supremacists/far-right wingers and leftist activists calling for segregated safe spaces.

ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:

We need a name for those moments when @maggieNYT story headlines become indistinguishable from @TheOnion headlines. https://t.co/6K2qnWvyql

— Daniel W. Drezner (@dandrezner) March 27, 2018

MAYBE HE SHOULD BE FBI DIRECTOR:

NATIONALISM BREEDS CRONYISM:

Generally speaking, economists and other freedom-lovers who oppose tariffs do so because of the costs imposed on all consumers taken together. Tariffs interfere with the enormous gains from trade that we all enjoy and blunt incentives to specialize and produce the things that we can produce best and most simply. In short, they make the average citizen poorer.

That's problematic enough. But when a tariff program is administered by politicians who can pick industrial winners--which also means picking losers by omission--the potential costs to the economy become even more crippling. We pay higher prices for consumer goods, and get less of them. And we get a politically entangled, less-vibrant economy and a sad case of economic hardening of the arteries.

But while all this seems bad enough, the program also allows Trump to decide which countries will be winners and losers, since he has the power to lower the tariffs for those that he favors. It is highly likely that the economic gains from regulatory and tax reform will be more than offset by losses from tariff and industrial policy.

OH, HAPPY DAY!:

Reports of the death of the print book have been greatly exaggerated, at least judging by the perennial popularity of the annual Five Colleges Book Sale. This year, donations to the sale, to be held on April 21 and 22 at the Lebanon High School gym, number approximately 50,000, according to organizers Cindy Heath, of Plainfield, and Sarah Biggs of Norwich. One of New England's largest used book events, the Five Colleges Book Sale also includes CDs, DVDs, audio books, maps, memorabilia, computer materials and more.

WORDS HAVE MEANINGS:

IF ONLY THEY LOOKED LIKE IVANKA:

President Donald Trump on Tuesday ordered an end to special legal status for certain immigrants from Liberia, including some who have lived in the United States for decades, effective next year, citing improved conditions in the West African nation.

Although some freed American slaves did settle there, Liberia was actually founded by the American Colonization Society, a group of white Americans--including some slaveholders--that had what certainly can be described as mixed motives. In 1817, in Washington, D.C., the ACS established the new colony (on a tract of land in West Africa purchased from local tribes) in hopes that slaves, once emancipated, would move there. The society preferred this option to the alternative: a growing number of free black Americans demanding rights, jobs, and resources at home.

Notable supporters of transporting freed blacks to Liberia included Henry Clay, Francis Scott Key, Bushrod Washington, and the architect of the U.S. Capitol, William Thornton--all slave owners. These "moderates" thought slavery was unsustainable and should eventually end but did not consider integrating slaves into society a viable option. So, the ACS encouraged slaveholders to offer freedom on the condition that those accepting it would move to Liberia at the society's expense. A number of slave owners did just that.

When the first settlers were relocated to Liberia in 1822, the plan drew immediate criticism on several fronts. Many leaders in the black community publicly attacked it, asking why free blacks should have to emigrate from the country where they, their parents, and even their grandparents were born.

THE TRIBALISTS ARE ANTI-AMERICAN:

Like many political thinkers, Madison reckoned that "factionalism" (his word for tribalism) was part and parcel of human nature. The solution was not a small polity -- because that could empower a single faction to run roughshod over everybody else. Instead, he recommended an extended republic that took in a variety of factions or tribes, each positioned in such a way as to check the self-interested designs of the others. Madison's idea was that having factions share power with one another would result in the type of laws that were good for the whole country. [...]

The Madisonian system is far from perfect. Madison himself acknowledged that it would only reduce the tendency toward factionalism, and history has demonstrated that there are gaps within its protective shield. For instance, distributive politics is a problem: This is where legislators create logrolls that join diverse pieces of legislation into a single bill. It allows disparate factions to join forces with one another to secure passage of a bundle of laws that otherwise could not succeed on their own. Also, a lot depends on who gets counted as a citizen -- minorities who cannot vote do not get to defend their interests. [...]

In the history of the United States, we have never really had tribalism devolve into majoritarian faction. We have had minorities, usually wealthy ones, acquire outsize political power. We have had logrolls in which factions bundled their interests to maximize their gains at the expense of the common good. And of course, we have struggled to expand the definition of citizenship so that it incorpoartes all segments of society, ensuring that racial and ethnic minorities receive the full protection of the state. But we have never really had a single tribe or faction take control of the entire process. That is a very good thing. And I prefer a government that sometimes impedes wise reforms as the cost for preventing the wicked designs of majoritarian tribes.

PLAUSIBLE IGNORANCE:

In deposition transcripts over the years, Trump comes across as uninterested in details, unfamiliar with legal documents and occasionally impatient. One theme that emerges is preparation. Baum, in the 2016 session, asked Trump what he did to prepare.

Baum: What did you do to prepare for the case today, for the deposition?

Trump: I would say virtually nothing. I -- I spoke with my counsel for a short period of time. I just arrived here, and we proceeded to the deposition.

Baum: Thank you. So you didn't look at any documents or

Trump: No, I didn't.

Baum: anything.

In a 2011 deposition for a case related to a failed Florida condo and hotel development, the plaintiff's lawyer Elizabeth Beck starts by asking Trump to look at a document.

Beck: Exhibit 323.9 (Whereupon, a document entitled 10 Re-Notice of Taking Deposition11 was marked Plaintiff's Exhibit 32312 for identification.) Mr. Trump, have you seen this document before?

Trump: I don't know. Hold on, let me just see. Not that I know.

Beck: Well, this is your deposition notice. Are you here pursuant to this re-notice of deposition?

Trump: Yes, I am.

Early on Beck asks Trump about how involved he is in decision-making at the Trump organization.

"If other people in your organization makes that decision, do they do it with your approval and/or sanction?" she asked. "Generally, yes," Trump said.

"When would that not be the case?" Beck asks. "I don't know of any case where that's not the case," Trump responds.

But, then, throughout the deposition he repeatedly claims a lack of knowledge, saying details were handled by his children and telling Beck she will have to check with his lawyers or accountant to get an answer.

NOT THE COMPROMISE WE WERE LOOKING FOR...:

When Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI, attention fell on his meetings with a mysterious Maltese professor named Joseph Mifsud, who, according to court documents, told Papadopoulos that the Russians had thousands of Hillary Clinton emails -- nearly two months before the Democrats themselves knew that their computers had been hacked.

But European security officials say another set of meetings Papadopoulos held in Europe in the months before and after the 2016 election should alarm US investigators. That's because the person with whom he met, Greek Defense Minister Panos Kammenos, is known to be close to Russian President Vladimir Putin -- a relationship that goes beyond Greece's traditional ties to Russia through the Eastern Orthodox Church and a growing relationship brought on by Greece's economic collapse.

"Like much of the Greek economic and security establishment, the Ministry of Defense is considered compromised by Russian intelligence," said one NATO military intelligence officer, who like the others in this story declined to be identified by name because of the sensitivity of his work. "Specifically, we have been officially warned against briefing Greek ministry representatives about sensitive intelligence operations involving the Russians" because of concerns about his apparent links to their intelligence services.

THE SHALLOW END:

At the very moment when Robert Mueller's Russia investigation is spinning into higher gear, Donald Trump's legal team is falling apart in extraordinary fashion. John Dowd, the president's lead personal lawyer, resigned last week. Ty Cobb, who is running point for the White House on everything Russia, is on the outs. Even Joseph diGenova, the shit-kicking conspiracy theorist who was expected to join the team, unexpectedly bowed out Sunday, alongside his wife, Fox News regular Victoria Toensing, citing undefined conflicts. (The New York Times reported that Trump did not believe he had "personal chemistry" with the couple.) "I don't think you have seen anything like this," said former Obama general counsel Bob Bauer, struggling to identify a historical antecedent. "Like so much else around Trump, [the shake-up] is marked by confusion, a lack of consistency, and an apparent reflection of the president's uncontrolled impulses."

Trump's personal legal team now consists of just one full-time attorney--Jay Sekulow--a remarkably shallow bench for a president facing potential obstruction of justice charges and the prospect of impeachment. "As far as I can tell, Ty Cobb is the only attorney left on the Trump team with experience handling federal criminal investigations," said Renato Mariotti, a former federal prosecutor who has been closely following the probe. "The team is thinner than you might expect for perhaps the most important investigation of our lifetime."

MISSING BROTHER MALCOLM:

It is true that, generally speaking, where Farrakhan has trod, grass has failed to grow. His successes are purely negative. He does not build up; he damages. He was Malcolm X's rival in the Black Muslim movement, and his invective appears to have led to Malcolm X's assassination. He was Jesse Jackson's most vigorous supporter during Jackson's historic campaign in 1984 for the Democratic party nomination for president, and his threats of violence against the Jews caused a devastating setback to Jackson's political career. He assembled the largest protest ever to occur in African-American history, the Million Man March in 1995, and, having gotten the entire universe to pay attention to him, he delivered a numerological oration about the mystical attributes of the number 19, which was broadcast to the nation, as if black America had nothing more urgent to say.

Just now he has cast a shadow over the Women's March by making the people who have emerged as its leaders appear to be animated by a bigotry of the extreme and racist right. And he has damaged the political prospects of Rep. Keith Ellison, the deputy chair of the Democratic National Committee, his one-time follower, who has explained that long ago he turned against Farrakhan, and was, in any case, his follower for only a brief period; but appears to have been his follower for a much longer period; and has said he has no relation with Farrakhan, and has not seen him recently; except that Farrakhan himself has proclaimed just now to a mass gathering of his followers that, on the contrary, Ellison conferred with him as recently as 2015. All of which means either that Ellison has damaged himself by being Farrakhan's follower, and by lying about it; or that Farrakhan has damaged Ellison by lying about a Farrakhan-Ellison connection that ended long ago.

THE IN-KINDEST CUT:

A federal law bans corporations from making "direct or indirect" contributions to federal candidates. That ban extends beyond cash contributions to "any services, or anything of value." In other words, corporations cannot provide federal candidates with free services of any kind. Under the Federal Election Commission's regulations, "anything of value" includes any "in-kind contribution."

For example, if a corporation decided to offer a presidential candidate free office space, that would violate federal law. Corporations can certainly offer their services, including office space, to federal campaigns. But the campaigns are required to pay the fair market value for such services or rental properties.

According to Carol Davidsen, the former media director for Obama for America, Facebook gave the 2012 Obama campaign direct access to the personal data of Facebook users in violation of its internal rules, making a special exception for the campaign. The Daily Mail, a British newspaper, reported that Davidsen said on Twitter March 18 that Facebook employees came to the campaign office and "were very candid that they allowed us to do things they wouldn't have allowed someone else to do because they were on our side."

The type of data that the Obama campaign was mining from Facebook is a more sophisticated version of the type of data that has long been provided by professional direct mail marketers - something pioneered by Richard Viguerie. Viguerie, for example, has detailed personal data on "12 million conservative donors and activists" to whom his company sends letters and emails on behalf of his clients. He provides information to campaigns looking for votes and money, and to nonprofit and advocacy organizations raising funds.

Political campaigns must pay for these services. Under a Federal Election Commission regulation, giving a mailing list or something similar to a campaign is considered an "in-kind contribution."

So if Facebook gave the Obama campaign free access to this type of data when it normally does not do so for other entities - or usually charges for such access - then Facebook would appear to have violated the federal ban on in-kind contributions by a corporation. And the Obama campaign may have violated the law by accepting such a corporate contribution.

NO ONE HATES JUST MEXICANS:

Worries over a looming trade war have already hit Iowa pork producers' pocketbook to the tune of $240 million from falling prices, and the damage will likely grow, industry leaders say.

On Friday, China said it would impose tariffs on $3 billion worth of American-produced fruit, pork, wine, seamless steel pipes and more than 100 other goods. [...]

Mexico, Hong Kong and China, Japan and Canada are the nation's top export markets for U.S. pork.

The Chinese market alone purchased about $1.1 billion in U.S. pork last year, according to the U.S. Meat Export Federation.

U.S. pork prices have already dropped about $6 per market-weight pig over the last couple of days as threats have grown.

NATIONALISM BREEDS CRONYISM BREEDS NATIONALISM:

The surviving ex-Mossad intelligence agency chiefs voiced their opinion of the fourth-term, right-wing leader in a joint interview excerpted on the front page of Yedioth Ahronoth, Israel's best-selling newspaper and a regular Netanyahu critic. [...]

Danny Yatom, who headed the Mossad during Netanyahu's first stint in office in the late 1990s, called for his ouster, accusing him and his aides of "putting their interests ahead of national interests" as corruption investigations deepen.

Police questioned Netanyahu on Monday over his alleged dealings with the country's largest telecommunication company, one of three cases weighing on his political future. Netanyahu has denied any wrongdoing and opinion polls show his popularity is still high.

Yatom also voiced concern about "the inertia in the diplomatic sphere, which is leading us toward a bi-national state (with the Palestinians), which would spell the end of (Israel as) a Jewish and democratic state".

SLEEPING WITH THE ENEMY:

A top fundraiser for President Donald Trump received millions of dollars from a political adviser to the United Arab Emirates last April, just weeks before he began handing out a series of large political donations to U.S. lawmakers considering legislation targeting Qatar, the UAE's chief rival in the Persian Gulf, an Associated Press investigation has found.

George Nader, an adviser to the UAE who is now a witness in the U.S. special counsel investigation into foreign meddling in American politics, wired $2.5 million to the Trump fundraiser, Elliott Broidy, through a company in Canada, according to two people who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter. They said Nader paid the money to Broidy to bankroll an effort to persuade the U.S. to take a hard line against Qatar, a long-time American ally but now a bitter adversary of the UAE.

A month after he received the money, Broidy sponsored a conference on Qatar's alleged ties to Islamic extremism. During the event, Republican Congressman Ed Royce of California, the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, announced he was introducing legislation that would brand Qatar as a terrorist-supporting state.

THANKS, JIMMY:

South Sudan, the world's youngest nation, appears to have stopped Guinea worm disease within its borders, the country's health minister announced Wednesday.

"Having known the suffering it inflicted, one is very happy today," the minister, Dr. Riek Gai Kok, said. "Future generations will just read of Guinea worm in the books as history."

Dr. Kok made the announcement in Atlanta at the Carter Center, a philanthropy founded by former President Jimmy Carter that leads the effort to eliminate the parasitic worm.

Only 30 worm infestations were detected last year, 15 in Chad and 15 in Ethiopia. When Mr. Carter began the eradication drive in 1986, there were an estimated 3.5 million cases in 21 Asian and African countries.

IT'S ALMOST AS IF CLIMATE WEREN'T STATIC:

Scientists examining an internationally important archaeological site from about 8000 years ago, which hosted an active human hunter-gatherer society for several hundred years, have found that the community experienced multiple, severe, abrupt climate changes that affected regional temperatures, the landscape and ecosystems, -- but that activity at the site persisted regardless of these environmental stresses.

NOW RUN FOR GOVERNOR:

Inevitably, champions of gun rights were appalled by Rubio's apparent surrender on raising the age limit to purchase a rifle, and his willingness to consider a ban on high-capacity magazines. Opponents of the NRA were equally incensed by Rubio's failure to condemn the organization, and for not moving further in their direction. Left unnoticed is that he was, in his fitful way, working towards a position that just might represent a workable compromise between warring camps.

This isn't the first time Rubio's efforts to reconcile the seemingly irreconcilable have gotten him into trouble. During the Obama administration, he was skewered for crafting an immigration bill that would have granted legal status to a large majority of unauthorized immigrants, something he pledged not to do as a Senate candidate in 2010, and that would have sharply increased immigration levels. Though much of the criticism of the Gang of Eight bill was richly deserved, and though I opposed it, it's not hard to offer a sympathetic interpretation of his failed effort: Rubio saw an opportunity for a lasting settlement of an issue that divides newcomers and the established, and he went for it. But the price he paid was high. One could argue that Rubio's central role in the Gang of Eight sealed his fate in the race for the 2016 GOP presidential nomination.

TAKE ONE FOR THE TEAM, KIDS!:

In an appearance on CNN's State of the Union, he criticised the marching children.

How about, kids, instead of looking to someone else to solve their problem, do something about [sic] maybe taking CPR classes or trying to deal with situations that when there is a violent shooter that you can actually respond to that.

ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:

trump's habit of telling women he wants to have sex with that they remind him of ivanka, in addition to being gross, is incredibly rude to tiffany

— Ashley Feinberg (@ashleyfeinberg) March 25, 2018

RICO ACTS:

As Daniels and her lawyer, Michael Avenatti, recount, Cohen was the point of contact in Trump's negotiations to keep Daniels quiet about their affair. Cohen paid her $130,000 to sign a non-disclosure agreement. This could well be an illegal campaign expenditure on Trump's behalf - Cohen was paying Daniels for the purpose of aiding Trump's campaign. Cohen claims he paid the money out of his own pocket, which would make Cohen the perpetrator of the campaign finance violation. But Avenatti has documents showing that the payment was sent to Cohen at his Trump Tower location, and communicated through his official Trump organization email. That strongly indicates, and perhaps even proves, Cohen was making the payment on Trump's behalf.

A second aspect of the story contains even more danger for Trump. Daniels describes being approached by a man in a parking lot who threatened her:

I was in a parking lot, going to a fitness class with my infant daughter. T- taking, you know, the seats facing backwards in the backseat, diaper bag, you know, gettin' all the stuff out. And a guy walked up on me and said to me, "Leave Trump alone. Forget the story." And then he leaned around and looked at my daughter and said, "That's a beautiful little girl. It'd be a shame if something happened to her mom." And then he was gone.

AND MR. SEKULOW IS THERE TO DEFEND A COUPLE POLITICAL ISSUES, NOT LITTLE FINGER:

CITIES WERE A MISTAKE:

The new 2017 US Census Bureau metropolitan area population estimates have been published. They show a significant increase in domestic migration away from the largest cities (the major metropolitan areas, with more than 1,000,000 population) toward the metropolitan areas with from 500,000 to 1,000,000 population. The data also shows an acceleration of suburban versus core county population growth within the major metropolitan areas themselves.

GREATEST WAR EVER:

HE'S NOT A DEMOCRAT:

HE WASN'T KIDDING HOWARD:

Wow https://t.co/FQBy0NC6zt

— Philip Rucker (@PhilipRucker) March 26, 2018

OF CONSCIENCE?:

U.S. President Donald Trump will not hire two lawyers to his legal team handling the special counsel's Russia probe despite announcing their addition last week, Trump's personal lawyer said on Sunday. [...]

DiGenova and Toensing had been expected to help fill a growing void on Trump's legal team handling Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia in the 2016 presidential election.

BUBBLE PRICKED:

Devin Nunes calls the @moscow_project "fake news" for its report on Trump's contacts w/ Russia. @moscow_project responds with a 70 tweet reply w/ all the known contacts b/w Trump camp and Russia - which, to be fair, are probably all news to Nunes. https://t.co/Zo6iAhGr71

— Max Bergmann (@maxbergmann) March 25, 2018

lEFTISTS!:

NEW: Fox News Poll show strong support for stronger gun control pic.twitter.com/u2yrbDMOXN

— FoxNewsSunday (@FoxNewsSunday) March 25, 2018

MAGATTES:

Nationwide protests swept America today, as a teenager-led protest against the epidemic of mass shootings.

But as with most protests, there were counter-protests. Gun-lovers in red Trump hats showed up at many of the rallies carrying AR-15s and sidearms, an effort they dubbed "March For Our Guns."

BULLETPROOF:

[I]f her name has seemed ubiquitous -- repeated on cable television and in the White House briefing room, and plastered on signs outside nightclubs, where her appearance fees have multiplied -- there is this to consider: Unlike most perceived presidential adversaries, about whom Mr. Trump is rarely shy, Ms. Clifford has not been the subject of a single tweet.

WINNING!:

New Marist poll: By 72% to 11% registered voters say Mueller should be allowed to finish the investigation, not be fired. Republicans oppose firing Mueller by 57% to 25%

— Geoff Garin (@geoffgarin) March 25, 2018

OBAMA LITE:

In the $1.3 trillion spending bill that President Trump reluctantly signed on Friday, lawmakers did more than reject the steep cuts in dollars and programs that Trump proposed for domestic agencies a year ago. Across much of the government, Republican leaders agreed to spending levels that matched or even exceeded what Obama asked Congress to appropriate in his final budget request in 2016--and many of which lawmakers ignored while he was in office.

The Department of Health and Human Services received $78 billion, nearly identical to the $77.9 billion Obama sought and almost 20 percent more than what the Trump budget called for. Ditto for the Department of Labor and the Department of Education, which got $1.5 billion more than Obama's final request and nearly $12 billion more than the reduced level Trump sought. Obama-era priorities like Head Start and Pell Grants drew increases, too.

Congress eliminated none of the 18 independent agencies Trump wanted to scrap, including the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. And several of the programs he wanted to zero out won huge increases instead. Take the TIGER grants, an infrastructure program created by Obama's 2009 economic stimulus package. Congress had allocated $500 million to it each of the last several years, despite annual Obama requests to boost it to $1.25 billion. Trump's budget called for axing it entirely, but lawmakers went even higher than Obama, giving $1.5 billion to TIGER. Or the Community Development Block Grant, a federal housing program that had been receiving $3 billion from Congress annually. Obama actually proposed cutting its funding by $200 million in 2016, while Trump called for chopping it altogether. In the end, it received $3.3 billion--a 10 percent boost.

ISN'T THE WHOLE POINT OF THE STORY THAT hE'S THE VICTIM OF EVERY VIOLENCE?:

[I]t seems especially appropriate to recall the stripping of Jesus - and to name it for what it was intended to be: a powerful display of humiliation and gender-based violence, which should be acknowledged as an act of sexual violence and abuse.

The idea that Jesus himself experienced sexual abuse may seem strange or shocking at first, but crucifixion was a "supreme punishment" and the stripping and exposure of victims was not an accidental or incidental element. It was a deliberate action that the Romans used to humiliate and degrade those they wished to punish. It meant that the crucifixion was more than just physical, it was also a devastating emotional and psychological punishment.

The convention in Christian art of covering Christ's nakedness on the cross with a loincloth is perhaps an understandable response to the intended indignity of Roman crucifixion. But this should not prevent us from recognising that the historical reality would have been very different.

This is not just a matter of correcting the historical record. If Jesus is named as a victim of sexual abuse it could make a huge difference to how the churches engage with movements like #MeToo, and how they promote change in wider society. This could contribute significantly to positive change in many countries, and especially in societies where the majority of people identify as Christian.

Some sceptics might respond that stripping a prisoner might be a form of violence or abuse, but it is misleading to call this "sexual violence" or "sexual abuse". Yet if the purpose was to humiliate the captive and expose him to mockery by others, and if the stripping is done against his will and as a way to shame him in public, then recognising it as a form of sexual violence or sexual abuse seems entirely justified. The way that the stripping of Vercingetorix, King of the Arverni, is depicted in the first episode of the first series of the HBO series Rome is an example of this.

The scene highlights the vulnerability of the naked prisoner who is stripped and exposed in front of the assembled ranks of hostile Roman soldiers. The power and control of Roman power is contrasted with the vulnerability and forced submission of the prisoner. The scene also hints at the possibility of even greater sexualised violence which might be in store.

WHAT ETHICAL LAWYER WOULD REPRESENT HIM?:

CNN is reporting Trump's new attorney for Mueller work is no longer convinced he is the right person for the job after a meeting yesterday. My god.

— Adam Parkhomenko (@AdamParkhomenko) March 23, 2018

WITCH HUNTS ARE A FUNCTION OF WITCHES:

In 1594, Gwen ferch Ellis was a three-times married woman making her living weaving cloth and providing cures for sick animals.

She was proud of her expertise as a healer. Taught by her sister, she used charms to help people.

The 42-year-old did not charge for her help but was paid in kind with food and wool.

But when a charm was found at Gloddaith, the home of upper class Thomas Mostyn, her life changed forever.

Gwen, a woman who had already lost two husbands and a sister, was to become the first person hanged in Wales for witchcraft.

In the 16th and 17th centuries, Gwen's belief system was what most people understood by the word witch in Wales.

WE ARE WHAT WE DO:

I wish Ruth Marcus had come to the birthday party Wednesday night.

Not that I know her that well, but I've always found her pleasant, decent, and smart. We've exchanged green room pleasantries and apparently last week during a joint appearance, I introduced her to the term "pornstache" (in a discussion of John Bolton's facial hair).

A few weeks ago, Marcus created a stir with her column headlined: "I would've aborted a fetus with Down syndrome. Women need that right." A mother of two, Marcus wrote that she was old enough to be tested for Down syndrome after the 15th week of her pregnancy. "I can say without hesitation," she wrote, "that, tragic as I would have felt, and ghastly as a second-trimester abortion would have been, I would have terminated those pregnancies had the testing come back positive. I would have grieved the loss and moved on."

I would have liked to have taken Ms. Marcus to Gracie Jagler's 21st birthday party.

Gracie had her hair done for the event and a limousine brought her to the local Elks Club lodge for the gathering of families and friends. Coincidentally, her birthday fell on World Down Syndrome Day, which was appropriate since Gracie was born with an extra chromosome.

I wish I could have introduced Marcus to this lovely young woman and told her Gracie's story. Last year, Gracie was awarded the first-ever Blake Pyron Entrepreneurship Scholarship. The award, given by the National Down Syndrome Society, recognized Gracie's success in creating her own company--a natural dog treat business based out of her home in Watertown, Wisconsin, called Gracie's Doggie Delights.

INDISPUTABLY (profanity alert):

THE rIGHT IS NOT CONSERVATIVE:

As he persuasively demonstrates, America has always had conservatives who opposed capitalism, particularly the simon-pure free market version. Moreover, these enemies of the unregulated market economy have not been mere flashes in the pan. Some of the most important figures in American history, including John C. Calhoun and Theodore Roosevelt, have been right-wing adversaries of the moneyed classes. This tradition may even be enjoying a resurgence, as Kolozi persuasively contends, due to the rising instability and socioeconomic inequality that have bedeviled American capitalism since the near collapse of the system in 2008. Even if most establishment conservatives no longer undertake a systematic critique of capitalism, the populist insurgency of Donald Trump arguably builds on a tradition that has never been comfortable with laissez-faire.

Kolozi does an impressive job of discussing different traditions in American history that count as hostile to capitalism. Unsurprisingly, he devotes considerable attention to the South, the one region of America that has a discernibly feudal past. Kolozi credits both the antebellum defenders of slavery (including Calhoun but also James Henry Hammond and George Fitzhugh) and the twentieth-century Southern Agrarians (including John Crowe Ransom, Donald Davidson, and Robert Penn Warren) with producing some of the most penetrating critiques of laissez-faire capitalism, even if their motives stemmed from the self-interested desire to preserve racial hierarchy and privilege.

SHOELESS KEN:

DONALD WHO?:

COFFEE, TEA OR COLLUSION:

"You should do it," deputy communications director Bryan Lanza urged Papadopoulos in a September 2016 email, emphasizing the benefits of a U.S. "partnership with Russia." [...]

Since Papadopoulos pleaded guilty last year to lying to the FBI about his Russia contacts during the campaign and agreed to cooperate with special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, Trump officials have sought to paint the 30-year-old energy consultant as a low-level volunteer whose outreach to Russia was not authorized by the campaign -- and in some cases was actively discouraged.

Emails described to The Washington Post, which are among thousands of documents turned over to investigators examining Russia's interference in the 2016 campaign, show Papadopoulos had more-extensive contact with key Trump campaign and presidential transition officials than has been publicly acknowledged.

Among those who communicated with Papadopoulos were senior campaign figures such as strategist Stephen K. Bannon and adviser Michael Flynn, who corresponded with him about his efforts to broker ties between Trump and top foreign officials, the emails show.

THERE IS NO LEFTWING PARTY:

While Trump is an irritant to Warren, she has bigger problems. The most serious is what appears to be an openness by her party to lean a bit toward the center. This is not unusual before a midterm election. But Warren is bound to view it as a weakening of both her influence on Capitol Hill and her prospects of winning the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020.

That Democrats have the upper hand in 2018 is undisputed (except by Trump), and they want to maximize their gains. They've held on tightly to liberal positions on immigration and social issues, but other policies adopted in the Obama years are no longer sacrosanct.

Politico headlined a recent story "Warren at war with fellow Dems." Indeed she is, and what's noteworthy is she's losing the most serious of the battles.

It involves a bipartisan measure to ease the sweeping banking regulations--the Dodd-Frank Act--passed after the 2008 financial crisis. Sixteen Democrats joined Republicans to push the new bill ahead. Warren, along with her left-wing allies, was furious.

THE ACCUSATION THEY'D WORK FOR HIM IS A SMEAR:

The race to become the next White House Communications Director has degenerated into a round of backstabbing and factionalism that has taken aback even the most jaded of White House aides and allies.

One White House official described the contest to replace departing Trump adviser Hope Hicks as being well into its "smear campaign stage." Another senior administration official dubbed it as a "battle royale." And a Republican official close to the White House bemoaned yet another heavy shot of "palace intrigue and backstabbing" in an administration uniquely notorious for both.

SOMEONE HAS TO GIVE THE BOTS THEIR MARCHING ORDERS:

It's not hard to see why Peters is ashamed. Fox has turned itself into the American version of RT, Vladimir Putin's propaganda TV. Not only does Fox usually go to great lengths to avoid criticizing President Trump; it also regularly peddles insidious conspiracy theories on his behalf. To try to undermine the "incontrovertible" evidence that the Russians hacked into the Democratic National Committee, for example, Fox hosts pinned the blame on a DNC staffer named Seth Rich, even going so far as to claim that his murder -- ascribed by District police to a botched robbery -- was the work of the Democrats. Rich's parents are now suing Fox for the "pain and anguish" inflicted on them. (Fox has retracted the story.)

The Seth Rich hoax is only the tip of the conspiratorial iceberg at Fox, which has also pushed claims that Obama wasn't born in America, that Obamacare would create "death panels," that Hillary Clinton sold America's uranium to Russia and that a "deep state" is plotting against Trump. (Little wonder that, according to a new poll, 74 percent of Americans believe in the existence of a deep state -- a concept Trump borrowed from Egypt and Turkey.)

Fox has taken the lead in smearing special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, a war hero and prosecutor of unimpeachable integrity. The network has called for his investigation of Trump to be terminated. Fox host Jeanine Pirro has even suggested that the FBI and Justice Department should be "cleansed of individuals who should not just be fired but who need to be taken out in handcuffs."

I got a small taste of Fox's psychosis in July 2017 when I appeared on Tucker Carlson's show. Carlson was spitting mad because the previous night Peters had accused him of sounding like "Charles Lindbergh in 1938" for advocating an alliance with Russia. Carlson had ostensibly invited me on to discuss Syria, but he spent most of the interview insulting me. He suggested that "nobody" takes me "seriously" (so why did he invite me on?) and that I should "choose another profession -- selling insurance, house painting, something you're good at." As I later noted, this was emblematic of Carlson's lowbrow shtick -- "sarcasm, condescension, and mock-incredulous double-takes" -- all in service of his Maximum Leader.

What makes Fox's ravings so scary is that they are not just influencing the public -- they are also influencing the president. 

MEANWHILE, OUTSIDE THE BUBBLE...:

Just your periodic and helpful reminder that just because the White House denies a story doesn't mean it's not true. The White House flipped out when we wrote McMaster was out last week -- and, now he's gone. https://t.co/djeIhaF3yR

— Ashley Parker (@AshleyRParker) March 23, 2018

THE TIGHTENING NOOSE:

Guccifer 2.0, the "lone hacker" who took credit for providing WikiLeaks with stolen emails from the Democratic National Committee, was in fact an officer of Russia's military intelligence directorate (GRU), The Daily Beast has learned. It's an attribution that resulted from a fleeting but critical slip-up in GRU tradecraft.

That forensic determination has substantial implications for the criminal probe into potential collusion between President Donald Trump and Russia. The Daily Beast has learned that the special counsel in that investigation, Robert Mueller, has taken over the probe into Guccifer and brought the FBI agents who worked to track the persona onto his team.

PURE CLASS:

THE HIGH COST OF RACISM:

Donald Trump tanked the stock market Thursday. Our president announced he would slam down about $60 billion worth of tariffs on China in retaliation for trade practices the White House says amount to stealing U.S. intellectual property. By the end of the day, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was down more than 700 points. The S&P 500 was down about 2.5 percent, the most since its last freakout in February.

ALWAYS BET ON THE dEEP sTATE:

The lesson sunk in, helping Trump to develop a willingness to go where others with some sense of propriety or ethics wouldn't dare. He could take on huge debts and then leave others holding the bag, he could skirt rules and laws whenever it suited him, he could take a wife (or two or three), cheat on her and then discard her for a younger one when he got bored, and through it all maintain his celebrity and his lifestyle. When you're a star, as he later said about his ability to sexually assault women with impunity, they let you do it.

Whenever anyone Trump had wronged tried to fight back -- a small business owner he stiffed, a woman he abused -- he had the lawyers handle it. Sometimes a threatening letter was enough to make the problem go away, or he might sue them (before running for president Trump had sued someone or been sued a mind-boggling 3,500 times). At worst he'd make a payoff, for a sum that was meaningful to his antagonist but miniscule to him, like the $130,000 paid to the porn star Stormy Daniels to allegedly cover up their affair. The routine was familiar, handled almost entirely by his underlings, and left him free to continue acting the way he always had.

Trump's ability to escape accountability reached its apotheosis with his presidential run, in which again and again he did and said things that everyone told him would destroy his campaign, but never did. Every appalling statement, every fight he picked, every person he offended -- and how he emerged unscathed every time -- reinforced the old lesson: I can get away with anything.

But then he walked into the Oval Office and found that the presidency is surrounded by layers of accountability and constraint. The courts can overrule his policy choices. Congress has to be convinced to put his preferences into law. When he does something stupid, there's a good chance that one of his own aides is going to whisper it to a reporter. In just the latest example, on Tuesday Trump was handed briefing materials by his national security staff in preparation for a phone call with Vladimir Putin, on which the words "DO NOT CONGRATULATE" were written in all caps, lest Trump seem to validate Putin's corrupt election win. Naturally, Trump proceeded to congratulate Putin, and by the next day the story was in The Washington Post, making him look like a fool, a Putin lackey, and someone who gets treated like a child by his own staff.

Meanwhile, he's getting sued by multiple women over sexual misconduct, and worst of all is that diabolical Robert Mueller. Someone who doesn't care when Trump insults him, who can't be threatened or intimidated or sued or bought off, and who has the temerity to demand that Trump answer questions and turn over documents. Just who the hell does this guy think he is?

One gets the impression that what galls Trump the most isn't that Mueller is running a "witch hunt" trying to uncover evidence of wrongdoing when Trump's behavior was obviously above reproach. It's that Mueller just keeps going, turning former Trump associates, handing down indictments, and getting answers to his questions. 

REGIME CHANGE IS WHO WE ARE:

In a Senate floor speech Wednesday, Sasse said Sanders was wrong to sidestep a question about the integrity of Russia's elections, a question to which he said the world already knows the answer.

"Yesterday, when the White House refused to speak directly and clearly about this matter, we were weakened as a nation and a tyrant was strengthened," he said. "The dodge on Putin broke with the basic American moral tradition. It broke faith with our core values. It broke trust with freedom seekers across the globe."

He continued: "To those who struggle, we have always said, 'we see you, and we stand with you.' These simple truths matter. The moral responsibilities of the office of the presidency matter, and when we don't affirm these basic truths, it is a failure to who we are. It is a failure to do what we do, and it is a betrayal, not just to the millions of people who are denied free and fair elections in Russia this week, but it is a failure to people all across the globe who are struggling in darkness against tyrants."

PASS:

KNOWING YOUR ALLIES:

Former U.N. ambassador John Bolton recorded a video used by the Russian gun rights group The Right to Bear Arms in 2013 to encourage the Russian government to loosen gun laws.

The episode, which has not been previously reported, illustrates the common cause that Russian and American gun rights groups were forming in the years leading up to the 2016 election through former National Rifle Association president David Keene.

ALLIED AGAINST DEMOCRACY:

BASE AND DEBAUCHED:

Over the course of his 14 months in office, the president has pointedly refused to use the term "white supremacist terrorist". He has turned a blind eye to a wave of shootings, stabbings and bombings carried out not by radicalised Muslims but by radicalised white men. He has ignored the fact - documented in a range of studies - that Americans are much more likely to be the victims of a "white supremacist terrorist" than a "radical Islamic terrorist". (According to the Investigative Fund, an independent journalism organisation, "far-right plots and attacks outnumber Islamist incidents by almost two to one.")

And the reason for Trump's PC position? It's straightforward - if scary. "Radical Islamic terrorists" aren't part of his base. "White supremacist terrorists" are.

THE POINT BEING HE WANTED TO HIDE IT:

FRIENDLY FIRE:

The stunning note reverberated through the Fox News community. Employees passed it along to other employees, people familiar with the matter said, with many agreeing with the thrust of the note: That Fox News opinion personalities were out of control in their devotion to Trump. One employee even told CNN that they were "jealous" about the way Peters made a splash on his way out and that the person "fantasized" about doing the same.

And it wasn't only the rank-and-file employees who were talking about it. Fox News executives were "rattled" by the leak, afraid that the story has the potential to grow legs, as Peters is a fierce conservative with a lot of credibility within the conservative community, a person familiar with the matter told CNN.

Indeed, it's possible Peters could speak out on rival networks after he is freed from the constraints of his contract, which he said is set to expire next week. And he's not someone who can be characterized as sympathetic to liberal views. [...]

Peters' note, however, underscored the divide at Fox News between the network's opinion programming and hard news. Peters cited the Fox News opinion hosts' relentless attacks on the FBI, Justice Department, intelligence agencies, and other branches of government and said he believed Fox News was knowingly causing harm to the country in exchange for profit. His comments helped expand a rift that has grown incredibly deep as of late, the longtime Fox News employee told CNN.

In fact, it's started to boil over into public view. In October, "Fox News Sunday" anchor Chris Wallace told the Associated Press he was bothered by how some of his colleagues on the opinion side of the network used their platforms to attack the media. And Shepard Smith, the chief news anchor at Fox News, was critical of the Fox News opinion bloc in a story published last week.

GREATEST WAR EVER:

In the 1990s and 2000s, as al-Qaeda was asserting itself on the global stage as the premier Salafi-jihadi terrorist group, its ideology and action inspired tremendous bloodletting, especially among Muslims. By the 2010s, Zawahiri recognised the limited value of that approach and reoriented the organisation away from mass casualty-terrorism, especially against Muslims.

To highlight how attuned Zawahiri is to shifting perceptions, he clearly noted that by the late 2000s, pollsters were pointing out that public opinion, especially in Muslim-majority countries, had shifted against suicide bombing. In Lebanon, for example, 74% of the population thought that such attacks could be justified in 2002; by 2007, that support had fallen to only 34%. At that time, WorldPublicOpinion.org noted that large majorities in Egypt (88%), Indonesia (65%) and Morocco (66%) opposed attacks on civilians.

Zawahiri's al-Qaeda even chastised Islamic State, accusing it of 'deviation and misguidance' and saying that the group 'exceeded the limits of extremism'. That has meant that the prospect of another al-Qaeda-inspired 9/11 has decreased, as Zawahiri appreciates that such an attack is likely to harm his cause more than to help it. [...]

Interestingly Zawahiri appears to have adapted the ideas of his arch-enemy, Abdullah Yusuf Azzam, who argued that after the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan, it was time for the Arab Afghans (Arabs who had made the hijrah (migration) to Afghanistan) to shift their attention to the near enemy--'apostate' Muslim regimes and Israel. Zawahiri had argued that the mujahedeen should focus on the far enemy (the US and the West in general), as it was Washington that was keeping the Arab leaders in power.

Zawahiri's current strategy seems to indicate that al-Qaeda is moving away from its initial focus, the far enemy, and focussing instead on the near enemy, specifically Arab countries with fragile governments. There are many such governments across the Muslim and Arab World, especially in sub-Saharan Africa and the Maghreb.

'So where are you,' Zawahiri asks his followers in his latest message. 'Where is your Islamic zeal? Where is your eagerness? Where is your settlement of your duties for the inheritance of your fathers?'

JUST ANOTHER POLITICAL PARTY:

The leader of Lebanon's powerful Hezbollah group, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, said on Wednesday that the deeply indebted country faced disaster if it continued on the same financial path.

Iran-backed, Shi'ite Hezbollah is part of Lebanon's coalition government and wields extensive influence in Lebanese politics. Nasrallah was speaking on television about the group's platform for parliamentary elections in May.

"The danger reaches to the level of an existential threat to the state and to the country, and to the security and stability of society if the financial situation and spending continue like this," he said.

He urged measures to rationalise spending, reduce public debt and combat corruption and wastefulness, but without giving specifics.

ALLIES AGAINST DEMOCRACY:

In late October, Jared Kushner made an unannounced trip to Riyadh, catching some intelligence officials off guard. "The two princes are said to have stayed up until nearly 4 a.m. several nights, swapping stories and planning strategy," the Washington Post's David Ignatius reported at the time.

What exactly Kushner and the Saudi royal talked about in Riyadh may be known only to them, but after the meeting, Crown Prince Mohammed told confidants that Kushner had discussed the names of Saudis disloyal to the crown prince, according to three sources who have been in contact with members of the Saudi and Emirati royal families since the crackdown. [...]

One of the people MBS told about the discussion with Kushner was UAE Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed, according to a source who talks frequently to confidants of the Saudi and Emirati rulers. MBS bragged to the Emirati crown prince and others that Kushner was "in his pocket," the source told The Intercept.

OH, BEAUREGARD...:

According to the sources, McCabe authorized the criminal inquiry after a top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vermont, and then-Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., wrote a letter in March 2017 to the FBI urging agents to investigate "all contacts" Sessions may have had with Russians, and "whether any laws were broken in the course of those contacts or in any subsequent discussion of whether they occurred."

It's unclear how actively federal authorities pursued the matter in the months before Sessions' interview with Mueller's investigators. It's also unclear whether the special counsel may still be pursuing other matters related to Sessions and statements he has made to Congress - or others - since his confirmation.

During his confirmation in January 2017, Sessions told the Senate committee that he had not been in contact with anyone connected to the Russian government about the 2016 election. He also said he was "not aware" of anyone else affiliated with the Trump campaign communicating with the Russian government ahead of the election.

Two months later, after a Washington Post report disputed what Sessions told Congress, the attorney general acknowledged he had met the Russian ambassador twice during the presidential campaign, but insisted none of those interactions were "to discuss issues of the campaign."

Sessions "made no attempt to correct his misleading testimony until The Washington Post revealed that, in fact, he had at least two meetings with the Russian ambassador," Leahy and Franken said in a statement at the time. "We know he would not tolerate dishonesty if he were in our shoes."

Sessions called any suggestions that he misled lawmakers "false."

Nevertheless, charges subsequently brought by Mueller raised more questions over Sessions' testimony to Congress.

In November, former Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos admitted to federal authorities that during the campaign he was in frequent contact with Russian operatives about setting up a meeting between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, and Papadopoulos pitched the idea to Sessions and Trump at a meeting of the then-candidate's foreign policy team in March 2016.

KNOWING YOUR ALLIES:

A former deputy defense minister on Wednesday claimed Israel ended its attacks on Syrian air defenses last month because Russian President Vladmir Putin called Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and told him, "That's enough."

Nothing costs more than it used to. https://t.co/IPW1aiwSuY

— Doctor Catface (@doctor_catface) March 21, 2018

JUST BUY HIM A PACIFIER:

To calm Mr. Trump, Donald F. McGahn II, the White House counsel, drew up a broad document barring White House officials from publicly disclosing what they heard and saw at work. But he privately told senior aides that it was mainly meant to placate an agitated president, who was convinced that the people around him had to be pressured into keeping his secrets. Mr. McGahn made it clear the agreement could not ultimately be enforced, according to several people who signed.

ROLL FROM BOTTOM:

Investigations have a certain rhythm: You begin with solid leads, use subpoenas to compel testimony or documents from reticent witnesses, interview lower-level witnesses first and then move on to higher-level targets. Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee did none of these things before shutting down their Russia investigation last week. [...]

If the committee Republicans intended to conduct a serious investigation, the path was obvious. They would have interviewed key witnesses like George Papadopoulos, Michael Flynn, KT McFarland and scores of others, and compelled answers from those we did interview but who refused to answer our questions. 

Instead, they uniformly refused Democratic requests to subpoena travel, bank, calendar, phone and Twitter Direct Message records. Witness interviews were rushed and scheduled haphazardly with no apparent order. Often the most important witnesses were brought in first (like Jared Kushner), and frequently before witnesses provided documents we needed to inform our questions.

During interviews, Republican lawmakers followed a familiar pattern. They would ask each witness the "three C's" as they became known: "Did you collude, conspire, or coordinate with Russia?" If a witness answered "no," all too often that was the end of the matter for Republicans. It's like asking the getaway driver if he robbed the bank and accepting "no" for an answer, rather than asking why he owned the car used in the heist, why his alibi didn't check out, or why marked bills were found in his house.

The fundamental un-seriousness of the Republican majority was most glaring when witnesses simply refused to answer, asserting non-existent, overly broad or farcical claims of privilege, or giving no basis at all. In permitting witnesses to choose their questions, the majority made a serious investigation impossible, and hobbled future congressional oversight by setting a terrible precedent. 

ALWAYS BET ON THE dEEP sTATE:

One of the most startling leaks -- and stunning revelations -- of this whole administration has left President Trump and his senior staff furious and rattled. The Washington Post reports in its lead story: "Trump did not follow specific warnings from his national security advisers [yesterday] when he congratulated ... Putin on his reelection -- including a section in his briefing materials in all-capital letters stating 'DO NOT CONGRATULATE.'"

Why it matters: The speed and sensitivity of the leak prompted immediate finger-pointing within the administration, as aides reeled from a leak that could only have come from a small group of people, each of whom is trusted with sensitive national secrets.

THE OPPOSITE OF THE rIGHT:

Almost as soon as Kirk entered Michigan State College as an undergraduate in 1936, Professor John Abbott Clark took him under his care and introduced him not just to the profoundly important but already neglected works of Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More, but to Socratic and Ciceronian humanism as a fundamental part of the Western tradition. During his college years, Kirk combined his love of romantic literature, the humanist ideals of Babbitt and More, and the stoic wisdom of his grandfather into what would be recognized by 1953 as modern conservatism. While earning an M.A. in history at Duke in 1940 and 1941, Kirk also discovered an intense love of Edmund Burke, whom he'd encountered through Babbitt and More in college but only indirectly. It was while writing his M.A. thesis on the rabid Southern republican John Randolph of Roanoke that Kirk first felt the influence of the greatest of the 18th-century Anglo-Irish statesmen. Though many scholars--from Daniel Boorstin to Leo Strauss to Peter Stanlis--were also re-discovering Burke (along with Alexis de Tocqueville) in the 1940s, it was Kirk's 1953 work, The Conservative Mind, that would once again make Burke a household name in America and, to a lesser extent, in Great Britain.

By the time America entered World War II, a very young Kirk--rather enthusiastically Nockian and anarchistic--already despised Franklin Roosevelt for his mistreatment of ethnic and religious minorities at home and abroad and his militarization of the American economy. As much as Kirk hated Hitler, he did not see FDR as a viable alternative. Succumbing to the draft in the late summer of 1942, Russell Amos Kirk, B.A., M.A., endured in the military the only way he knew how: by spending all of his free time reading. Before shipping off to training at Camp Custer in Michigan (he would spend much of the war as a company clerk in the desert wastes of Utah), Kirk purchased every work of Plato and the Stoics that he could find. From his childhood to his death, he kept a copy of Aurelius's Meditations close to him. As in the rest of his life, it would serve as his greatest comfort during the war. As he wrote in a personal letter, "everything in Christianity is Stoic":

HE HIRED THE MONEY:

Sen. McCain on Pres. Trump congratulating Putin on election win: "An American president does not lead the Free World by congratulating dictators on winning sham elections." https://t.co/Rp18kaLJX4 pic.twitter.com/svq13QPWZI

— This Week (@ThisWeekABC) March 20, 2018

IT'LL NEVER FLY ORVILLE:

#OTD in 1804, the first self-propelling #steam locomotive, designed by #Trevithick was used to haul a 20 ton load from the #Penydarren Ironworks to the #Glamorgan Canal at #Abercynon. It reached the dizzying speed of 5mph. Find out more: https://t.co/fBW9DTBrig pic.twitter.com/Wc8rgRBfPW

— The History Press (@TheHistoryPress) March 21, 2018

RALPH AGAINST THE MACHINE:

A retired United States Army lieutenant colonel and Fox News contributor quit Tuesday and denounced the network and President Donald Trump in an email to colleagues.

"Fox has degenerated from providing a legitimate and much-needed outlet for conservative voices to a mere propaganda machine for a destructive and ethically ruinous administration," wrote Ralph Peters, a Fox News "strategic analyst."

"Over my decade with Fox, I long was proud of the association. Now I am ashamed," he wrote.

ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:

WHILE WE'RE STUCK IN DONALD'S S-HOLE...:

African heads of state have gathered in Kigali, Rwanda, to sign a free trade agreement that would result in the largest free trade area in terms of participating countries since the formation of the World Trade Organization.

Leaders are poised to approve the African Continental Free Trade Area, a deal that will unite the 55 member countries of the African Union in tariff-free trade.

The agreement is touted by the African Union as encompassing a market of 1.2 billion people, and a gross domestic product of $2.5 trillion. It is hoped that it will encourage Africa's trade to diversify away from its traditional commodity exports outside of the continent, the volatile prices of which have hurt the economies of many countries.

"Less than 20 percent of Africa's trade is internal," Rwandan President Paul Kagame, also currently chairperson of the African Union, said in a speech Tuesday. "Increasing intra-African trade, however, does not mean doing less business with the rest of the world."

GLOBALIZATION IS ANGLOFICATION:

Baguette lovers may be horrified to learn that in 2017, for the first time ever, hamburger sales were higher in France than the classic jambon-beurre sandwich.

American-style burgers were on the menu at 85 percent of restaurants in France last year, with a whopping 1.5 billion units sold, according to Paris-based restaurant consultants Gira Conseil.

RAININ' ALL THE TIME:

Cohen said in February that he made a $130,000 payment to Daniels in October 2016, just weeks before the election that would catapult Trump to the White House. Cohen later said the money came from a home equity line of credit. Daniels, whose legal name is Stephanie Clifford, has said the money was in exchange for her signing a non-disclosure deal facilitated by Cohen through a company he set up shortly beforehand.

Daniels gave details of the alleged affair to In Touch magazine in a 2011 interview that wasn't published until earlier this year. Although the relationship between Trump and Daniels allegedly occurred between 2006 and 2007 -- shortly after Trump's wife, Melania, gave birth to Trump's youngest son, Barron -- the hush-money deal wasn't signed until a few weeks before the 2016 presidential election.

 Trump's lawyer used Trump Organization email to arrange payment to Stormy Daniels Trump's lawyer used Trump Organization email to arrange payment to Stormy Daniels  

5:07 PM ET Fri, 9 March 2018 | 00:57

The timing of the payment has raised the question of whether Cohen and the Trump campaign violated campaign finance laws in an effort to prevent Daniels going public with her story just before voters started casting ballots.

The amount of money that Cohen gave Daniels was well in excess of the contribution maximum that an individual could make to a campaign. And the expenditure was not disclosed by the Trump campaign.

"I think that is something to care about," New York City criminal defense lawyer Gerald Lefcourt said when CNBC asked why Mueller could be eyeing the Daniels deal.

"It's a close associate of the president involved in the campaign," Lefcourt said. "If the president knows about it, he's involved in the [potential] campaign violation as well."

He added: "Why would [Mueller] not want to know about it? It might not be a major violation, but he'd certainly want to know it."

TAX WHAT YOU DON'T WANT:

Could Paris take the revolutionary step of making public transport completely free for all residents of the capital? The mayor is looking into the idea. [...]

In the meantime Hidalgo is looking to at least make public transport free in Paris for certain sections of the population. The Paris city council will decide whether the monthly Navigo transport pass will be free for over 65s who earn less than €2,200 per month or €3,400 if they are in a couple.

Paris would not be the first place in France to make public transport free for residents.

In all there are some 24 towns (see link below) that have already committed to adopting the revolutionary measure including Dunkirk on the English Channel coast.

ONE STEP CLOSER TO UNDERSTANDING:

AROUND THE HORN:

The last obstacle that got in the way of Martin Perez's pitching career was an obstinate, ornery and rambunctious bull.

Perez had the bull killed. And then he ate him.

"It tasted good, too," Perez said rather gleefully Sunday after five sharp innings against the Los Angeles Angels in his first spring training game of the year. "Good meat." [...]

Perez required surgery to repair a broken bone at the tip of his right (non-pitching) elbow after the bull jumped at him and knocked him off a fence on his ranch in Venezuela. And then the bull met its end.

DONALD HAS MADE MAGGIE HABERMAN A PEER OF ANDREW FERGUSON:

Mr. diGenova has endorsed the notion that a secretive group of F.B.I. agents concocted the Russia investigation as a way to keep Mr. Trump from becoming president. "There was a brazen plot to illegally exonerate Hillary Clinton and, if she didn't win the election, to then frame Donald Trump with a falsely created crime," he said on Fox News in January. He added, "Make no mistake about it: A group of F.B.I. and D.O.J. people were trying to frame Donald Trump of a falsely created crime."

Little evidence has emerged to support that theory.

YOU TRY CARRYING WATER FOR DONALD AND SEE HOW MUCH SENSE YOU MAKE!:

McCarthy's accusation is pretty simple. Mueller didn't do that with Gates, and therefore he broke the rule. Straightforward, right?

The problem is that there's an exception to the rule that McCarthy ignores. It appears in the next paragraph:

The requirement that a defendant plead to a charge, that is consistent with the nature and extent of his/her criminal conduct is not inflexible. Although cooperation is usually acknowledged through a Sentencing Guideline § 5K1.1 filing, there may be situations involving cooperating defendants in which considerations such as those discussed in USAM 9-27.600, take precedence. 

What's USAM 9-27.600, you wonder? That's the section on entering into non-prosecution agreements in exchange for cooperation. The idea is that in some cases, the only way to get a defendant to cooperate quickly may be to make a deal: Cooperation in exchange for no prosecution at all. The Manual says that is an option if "the person's timely cooperation appears to be necessary to the public interest and other means of obtaining the desired cooperation are unavailable or would not be effective." But the Manual then explains that such an extreme approach should be undertaken only after considering and rejecting less extreme alternatives:

[N]on-prosecution agreements are only one of several methods by which the prosecutor can obtain the cooperation of a person whose criminal involvement makes him/her a potential subject of prosecution. Other methods - such as seeking cooperation after trial and conviction, bargaining for cooperation as part of a plea agreement, and compelling cooperation under a "use immunity" order - involve prosecuting the person or at least leaving open the possibility of prosecuting him/her on the basis of independently obtained evidence. Since these outcomes are clearly preferable to permitting an offender to avoid any liability for his/her conduct, the possible use of an alternative to a non-prosecution agreement should be given serious consideration in the first instance. 

Let's put the pieces together. 

In the ordinary case--the only kind of case McCarthy focuses on--a defendant must "plead to a charge that is consistent with the nature and extent of his/her criminal conduct."  But that ordinary approach is "not inflexible," and the need to get cooperation from a defendant may "take precedence" over the rule. In particular, prosecutors can "bargain[] for cooperation as part of a plea agreement," and the need for cooperation can "take precedence" over the usual requirement when "timely cooperation appears to be necessary to the public interest."   

In plain English, if a sweet plea deal is needed to get an important witness to flip and cooperate quickly, a sweet plea deal can be reached. Prosecutors should do so cautiously for a range of reasons. But accepting the plea to only a small part of the charge in exchange for cooperation, as happened in the Gates case, isn't "bizarre." It doesn't "shred" policy. And it doesn't "flout" the rules. The practice is expressly provided for in the rules. It's just in a paragraph that McCarthy for some reason ignores.

REPUBLICAN LIBERTY:

Fred Humphries woke up Saturday morning and for the first time ever raised a blue and white Federal Bureau of Investigation flag on the pole in his front yard. [...]

Humphries retired, a short while after serving a 60-day unpaid suspension for previously speaking to the Times without permission.

McCabe, fired after the Justice Department rejected an appeal that would have let him retire this weekend, is accused in a yet-to-be-released internal report of failing to be forthcoming about a conversation he authorized between FBI officials and a journalist.

Humphries said McCabe's firing was good for the organization because it is important for top officials to be held accountable for the same transgressions agents like him are. The McCabe firing is fitting, Humphries says, for a man accused of lack of candor about media contacts whose office launched an investigation into him talking to a newspaper.

"Every employee of the FBI voluntarily swears to observe the bureau's strict standards of conduct, especially in terms of candor and ethics," said Humphries. "When we fall short of that, we can expect appropriate sanctions. Yesterday's firing of the former deputy director demonstrates that those sanctions are meted out uniformly, regardless of rank or position."

IN ALL FAIRNESS...:

Public employees can't be gagged by private agreements. These so-called NDAs are unconstitutional and unenforceable. https://t.co/IyYqScsESu

— ACLU (@ACLU) March 19, 2018

W WAS THE ONLY PERSON EVER TO TAKE THE UN SERIOUSLY:

Flouting UN sanctions and international law

Saddam diverted upwards of $500 million from illegal oil sales, obtained through the Oil-For-Food (OFF) programme (designed to alleviate the negative effects of the sanctions on the Iraqi people), to bribe mostly French, Russian and Chinese officials into gaining their approval for lifting sanctions, and also to support his and his government's extravagant expenditure.

The Iraq Survey Group report sums up the effect of the regime's systematic efforts to undermine the sanctions regime:[5]

"Over time sanctions have steadily weakened to the point where Iraq in 2000-2001 was confidently designing missiles around components that could only be obtained outside sanctions. Moreover illicit revenues grew to quite substantial levels during the same period ... the regime quickly came to see the OFF could be corrupted to acquire foreign exchange both to undermine the sanctions and to provide the means to enhance dual-use infrastructure and potential WMD-related development. By 2000-20001 Saddam had managed to mitigate many of the effects of the sanctions and undermine their international support. Iraq was within striking distance of a de facto end to the sanctions regime both in terms of oil exports and the trade embargo by the end of 1999."

Meanwhile Saddam reduced the UN Security Council's sanctions to meaningless, toothless and ineffectual words, although these sanctions had been passed after many complex and delicate negotiations between diplomats. He simply ignored and undermined them.

These were the UN Security Council Resolutions, in chronological order:

•      Resolution 660, August 2, 1990 -- Demanded that Iraq withdraw from Kuwait.

•      Resolution 661, August 6, 1990 -- Established the first sanctions regime.

•      Resolutions 678 and 679, November 29, 1990 -- Last chance to leave Kuwait before war.

•      Resolution 686, March 2, 1991 -- Cease provocative actions.

•      Resolution 687, April 3, 1991 -- Destroy all biological and chemical weapons, and make restitution.

•      Resolution 688, April 5, 1991 -- Established the No-Fly Zones.

•      Resolution 707, August 15, 1991 -- Demanded full disclosure of WMD.

•      Resolution 715, October 11, 1991 -- Established weapons-monitoring programme (UNSCOM).

•      Resolution 986, April 14, 1995 -- Established Oil-for-Food.

•      Resolution 1284, December 17, 1999 -- Re-established weapons inspections (UNMOVIC).

•      Resolution 1373, September 13, 2001 -- Tightened international laws concerning terrorism.

•      Resolution 1441, November 8, 2002 -- "False statements or omissions in the declarations submitted by Iraq pursuant to this resolution and failure by Iraq at any time to comply with, and cooperate fully in the implementation of, this resolution shall constitute a further material breach of Iraq's obligations " (This resolution was passed unanimously by the relevant nations, 15-0, an even bigger level of support than the UN manifested for the First Gulf War.)

Every single one of these resolutions was breached by the Iraqi regime.

Twelve years ago, Iraq invaded Kuwait without provocation. And the regime's forces were poised to continue their march to seize other countries and their resources.

Had Saddam Hussein been appeased instead of stopped, he would have endangered the peace and stability of the world. Yet this aggression was stopped by the might of coalition forces and the will of the United Nations.

To suspend hostilities, to spare himself, Iraq's dictator accepted a series of commitments. The terms were clear to him and to all, and he agreed to prove he is complying with every one of those obligations.

He has proven instead only his contempt for the United Nations and for all his pledges. By breaking every pledge, by his deceptions and by his cruelties, Saddam Hussein has made the case against himself.

In 1991, security council resolution 688 demanded that the Iraqi regime cease at once the repression of its own people, including the systematic repression of minorities, which the council said threatened international peace and security in the region. This demand goes ignored.

Last year, the UN commission on human rights found that Iraq continues to commit extremely grave violations of human rights and that the regime's repression is all-pervasive.

Tens of thousands of political opponents and ordinary citizens have been subjected to arbitrary arrest and imprisonment, summary execution and torture by beating and burning, electric shock, starvation, mutilation and rape.

Wives are tortured in front of their husbands; children in the presence of their parents; and all of these horrors concealed from the world by the apparatus of a totalitarian state.

In 1991, the UN security council, through resolutions 686 and 687, demanded that Iraq return all prisoners from Kuwait and other lands. Iraq's regime agreed. It broke this promise.

Last year, the secretary-general's high-level coordinator for this issue reported that Kuwaiti, Saudi, Indian, Syrian, Lebanese, Iranian, Egyptian, Bahraini and Omani nationals remain unaccounted for; more than 600 people. One American pilot is among them.

In 1991, the UN security council through resolution 687 demanded that Iraq renounce all involvement with terrorism and permit no terrorist organisations to operate in Iraq.

Iraq's regime agreed. It broke its promise. In violation of security council resolution 1373, Iraq continues to shelter and support terrorist organisations that direct violence against Iran, Israel and western governments. Iraqi dissidents abroad are targeted for murder.

In 1993, Iraq attempted to assassinate the Emir of Kuwait and a former American president. Iraq's government openly praised the attacks of September 11. And al-Qaida terrorists escaped from Afghanistan and are known to be in Iraq.

In 1991, the Iraqi regime agreed to destroy and stop developing all weapons of mass destruction and long range missiles and to prove to the world it has done so by complying with rigorous inspections.

Iraq has broken every aspect of this fundamental pledge. From 1991 to 1995, the Iraqi regime said it had no biological weapons.

After a senior official in its weapons program defected and exposed this lie, the regime admitted to producing tens of thousands of litres of anthrax and other deadly biological agents for use with Scud warheads, aerial bombs and aircraft spray tanks.

UN inspectors believe Iraq has produced two to four times the amount of biological agents it declared and has failed to account for more than three metric tonnes of material that could be used to produce biological weapons.

Right now, Iraq is expanding and improving facilities that were used for the production of biological weapons.

United Nations inspections also revealed that Iraq likely maintains stockpiles of VX, mustard and other chemical agents, and that the regime is rebuilding and expanding facilities capable of producing chemical weapons.

And in 1995, after four years of deception, Iraq finally admitted it had a crash nuclear weapons program prior to the Gulf war.

We know now, were it not for that war, the regime in Iraq would likely have possessed a nuclear weapon no later than 1993.

Today, Iraq continues to withhold important information about its nuclear program, weapons design, procurement logs, experiment data, and accounting of nuclear materials and documentation of foreign assistance.

Iraq employs capable nuclear scientists and technicians. It retains physical infrastructure needed to build a nuclear weapon.

Iraq has made several attempts to buy high-strength aluminium tubes used to enrich uranium for a nuclear weapon. Should Iraq acquire fissile material, it would be able to build a nuclear weapon within a year.

And Iraq's state-controlled media has reported numerous meetings between Saddam Hussein and his nuclear scientists, leaving little doubt about his continued appetite for these weapons.

Iraq also possesses a force of Scud-type missiles with ranges beyond the 94 miles permitted by the UN Work at testing and production facilities shows that Iraq is building more long range missiles that can inflict mass death throughout the region.

In 1990, after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, the world imposed economic sanctions on Iraq. Those sanctions were maintained after the war to compel the regime's compliance with security council resolutions.

In time, Iraq was allowed to use oil revenues to buy food. Saddam Hussein has subverted this program, working around the sanctions to buy missile technology and military materials.

He blames the suffering of Iraq's people on the United Nations, even as he uses his oil wealth to build lavish palaces for himself and to buy arms for his country.

By refusing to comply with his own agreements, he bears full guilt for the hunger and misery of innocent Iraqi citizens. In 1991, Iraq promised UN inspectors immediate and unrestricted access to verify Iraq's commitment to rid itself of weapons of mass destruction and long range missiles.

Iraq broke this promise, spending seven years deceiving, evading and harassing UN inspectors before ceasing cooperation entirely.

Just months after the 1991 cease-fire, the security council twice renewed its demand that the Iraqi regime cooperate fully with inspectors, condemning Iraq's serious violations of its obligations.

The security council again renewed that demand in 1994, and twice more in 1996, deploring Iraq's clear violations of its obligations.

The security council renewed its demand three more times in 1997, citing flagrant violations, and three more times in 1998, calling Iraq's behaviour totally unacceptable. And in 1999, the demand was renewed yet again.

As we meet today, it's been almost four years since the last UN inspector set foot in Iraq - four years for the Iraqi regime to plan and to build and to test behind the cloak of secrecy.

We know that Saddam Hussein pursued weapons of mass murder even when inspectors were in his country. Are we to assume that he stopped when they left?

The history, the logic and the facts lead to one conclusion: Saddam Hussein's regime is a grave and gathering danger.

Will the United Nations serve the purpose of its founding or will it be irrelevant?

The United States helped found the United Nations. We want the United Nations to be effective and respectful and successful.

We want the resolutions of the world's most important multilateral body to be enforced. And right now those resolutions are being unilaterally subverted by the Iraqi regime.

Our partnership of nations can meet the test before us by making clear what we now expect of the Iraqi regime.

If the Iraqi regime wishes peace, it will immediately and unconditionally forswear, disclose and remove or destroy all weapons of mass destruction, long-range missiles and all related material.

If the Iraqi regime wishes peace, it will immediately end all support for terrorism and act to suppress it - as all states are required to do by UN security council resolutions.

If the Iraqi regime wishes peace, it will cease persecution of its civilian population, including Shi'a, Sunnis, Kurds, Turkmens and others - again, as required by Security council resolutions.

If the Iraqi regime wishes peace, it will release or account for all Gulf war personnel whose fate is still unknown. It will return the remains of any who are deceased, return stolen property, accept liability for losses resulting from the invasion of Kuwait and fully cooperate with international efforts to resolve these issues as required by security council resolutions.

If the Iraqi regime wishes peace, it will immediately end all illicit trade outside the oil-for-food program. It will accept UN administration of funds from that program to ensure that the money is used fairly and promptly for the benefit of the Iraqi people.

If all these steps are taken, it will signal a new openness and accountability in Iraq and it could open the prospect of the United Nations helping to build a government that represents all Iraqis, a government based on respect for human rights, economic liberty and internationally supervised elections.

The United States has no quarrel with the Iraqi people. They've suffered too long in silent captivity. Liberty for the Iraqi people is a great moral cause and a great strategic goal.

YOU CAN'T HAVE LOW ENOUGH REGARD FOR BEAUREGARD:

U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions' testimony that he opposed a proposal for President Donald Trump's 2016 campaign team to meet with Russians has been contradicted by three people who told Reuters they have spoken about the matter to investigators with Special Counsel Robert Mueller or congressional committees.

IT'S A RICO INDICTMENT THEY SHOULD BE WORRIED ABOUT:

When the Kushner Cos. bought three apartment buildings in a gentrifying neighborhood of Queens in 2015, most of the tenants were protected by special rules that prevent developers from pushing them out, raising rents and turning a tidy profit.

But that's exactly what the company then run by Jared Kushner did, and with remarkable speed. Two years later, it sold all three buildings for $60 million, nearly 50 percent more than it paid.

Now a clue has emerged as to how President Donald Trump's son-in-law's firm was able to move so fast: The Kushner Cos. routinely filed false paperwork with the city declaring it had zero rent-regulated tenants in dozens of buildings it owned across the city when, in fact, it had hundreds.

THANKS, DONALD!:

Democrats appear well positioned ahead of the midterm elections, both in terms of voter preference and enthusiasm. A new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll shows 50 percent of registered voters prefer a Congress controlled by Democrats while 40 percent say they would rather have one controlled by Republicans. That marks a widening of the Democratic lead from the January poll that showed Democrats with a six-point edge. Significantly, Independent voters also seem to be leaning toward the Democrats by a 12-point margin.

Democrats are also much more excited about the prospect of heading to the polls with 60 percent saying they have a high degree of interest in the upcoming elections while 54 percent of Republicans feel the same way.

PURITAN NATION:

Health experts recommend that you focus on reducing added sweeteners -- like granulated sugar, high fructose corn syrup, honey, maple syrup, stevia and molasses. You don't need to worry so much about the sugars that are a natural part of fruit, vegetables and dairy products. Most people don't overeat naturally occurring sugars, as Marion Nestle of New York University says. The fiber, vitamins and minerals that surround them fill you up.

A typical adult should not eat more than 50 grams (or about 12 teaspoons) of added sugars per day, and closer to 25 is healthier. The average American would need to reduce added-sweetener consumption by about 40 percent to get down to even the 50-gram threshold. Here's how you can do it -- without spending more money on food than you already do. 

HOW MUCH GREENER IS MY VALLEY:

THEY CAN'T CHRISTIANIZE FAST ENOUGH:

#China will grow old before it gets rich https://t.co/EDKfc4U8dE pic.twitter.com/KVdMqYV0M4

— World Economic Forum (@wef) March 18, 2018

THERE IS NO SYRIA:

WE ARE ALL dESIGNIST NOW:

MORE SPORT THAN FARMING:

NO ONE WILL MISS LABOR:

LABOR HAS NO VALUE:

In today's world, we value most products (or services) by their scarcity and the human labor that goes into them. For instance, diamonds are scarce and that's why they're so expensive. But in most cases, we're paying for the human labor that goes into creating goods and services. For example, when you buy grocery, you're not paying for the scarcity of food. You pay for it because a lot of human labor goes into producing it, packaging it, transporting it and selling it to you in the store.

By human labor, I do not necessarily mean physical toil. It can also be cognitive functions. When you acquire a software or an online service, you pay for it because a lot of human labor goes into programming it and maintaining it. Those services in turn must pay for other services that support them and are running on human labor.

Each of us has a specific set of skills, which we sell to afford other people's skills. For instance, I develop software and write articles to earn money and buy food and pay the rent. These activities account for a considerable part of our everyday lives. We're still in a better situation than our ancestors, who had to spend the entire day hunting for food.

With artificial intelligence and machine learning earning a more prominent role in every industry and domain, the need for human labor, both physical and cognitive, is dwindling. Self-driving trucks will eventually replace truck drivers, and smart vending machines fast food workers. Robots can flip burgers just as well as cooks and harvest crops better than field workers. Amazon's automated retail store will obviate the need for cashiers, and smart drone deliveries might even make stores excessive. Even doctors, lawyers and news reporters can someday surrender their professions (or a large part of it) to artificial intelligence. We're already seeing the glimmers of AI algorithms that create their own AI. Maybe one day, even AI researchers will go extinct.

In every case, we can expect robots to perform faster, better and cheaper than humans. They can work for longer periods (sometimes incessantly), improve their skills over time, and pass on their experience to their peers in real time.

As automation removes humans from the loop, the costs for human labor will gradually fade. A transportation company doesn't need to pay its self-driving trucks as it used to do its truck drivers. However, it must pay for their maintenance (which still costs less) because the task still involves human labor. That too will cost next to nothing once the development and maintenance of the trucks and their AI software become automated as well. The same goes for everything else.

SUBLIME:

THE TIGHTENING NOOSE:

The Federal Election Commission has launched a preliminary investigation into whether Russian entities gave illegal contributions to the National Rifle Association that were intended to benefit the Trump campaign during the 2016 presidential election, according to people who were notified of the probe. [...]

Under FEC procedures, the preliminary investigation is likely to require the NRA to turn over closely guarded internal documents and campaign finance records. Depending on what FEC investigators and lawyers find, the agency could launch a full-blown investigation, impose fines or even make criminal referrals to the Justice Department and Special Counsel Robert Mueller, people familiar with the probe said.

The preliminary investigation focuses on issues similar to those raised recently by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore), the ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, as part of his investigation into possible collusion between the NRA, the Trump campaign and Russia.

Wyden is particularly interested in whether Russian-backed entities helped the Trump campaign by funneling contributions to the gun-rights group that "inappropriately and illegally influenced our election," according to a Feb. 2 letter Wyden sent to the NRA.

WAIT'LL HE DEPOSES DONALD AND BEAUREGARD:

Andrew McCabe -- the former FBI deputy director just fired by the attorney general -- kept personal memos regarding President Donald Trump.

The person with knowledge of McCabe's situation says McCabe's memos include details of interactions with the president, among other topics.

EITHER YOU CAN TELL THE FEDS THE TRUTH...:

THEY'LL NONE OF THEM BE MISSED:

The president is also considering removing a number of his Cabinet officials, several of whom he's grown concerned about over news reports that they have misused taxpayer dollars for travel or personal luxuries. Trump's list of most imminent departures includes Ryan Zinke at Interior, Ben Carson at Housing and Urban Development, and David Shulkin at Veterans Affairs. All three have faced scrutiny in recent weeks for outlandish spending, including Carson's purchase of a $31,000 dining room set at the HUD building, Zinke's $139,000 in door repairs, and Shulkin's misleading ethics investigators over expensed travel for he and his wife. The coverage has apparently embarrassed Trump for undercutting his campaign pledge to "drain the swamp."

Also earning the president's ire is EPA director Scott Pruitt for the former Oklahoma attorney general's apparent preference for first-class airline travel, though it's not evident Pruitt is in the same precarious positions as the others. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, too, is always potentially on the chopping block.

OUR WORK HERE IS NEARLY DONE:

Nothing that has happened since the election has changed my pre-election assessment. Donald Trump is unfit to be the president of the world's greatest nation.

— David French (@DavidAFrench) March 17, 2018

BEING INDECENT IS HIS JOB REQUIREMENT:

Kelly has a lot of strengths. But telling this story, even off the record, was shamefully dumb. Tillerson's already been needlessly humiliated. This is what the guy will now be mocked and remembered for. And it's terribly unfair, even cruel. https://t.co/89fcS9i0Hc

— Jonah Goldberg (@JonahNRO) March 17, 2018

WHY THE ANGLOSPHERE WON THE lONG wAR:

In the eyes of travelers, tourists, and locals alike, Saint-Germain-des-Près serves as the archetype of the quintessential Parisian neighborhood. Bursting with character, charm, and a fascinating wealth of history, the neighborhood in the 6th arrondissement sits on the left bank not far from the Seine and the Île de la Cité. The quarter has been home to countless writers, artists, and philosophers, and a multitude of publishing houses, museums, cafés, art galleries, jazz clubs, and universities, among other celebrated institutions. But for all the culture that the neighborhood has birthed, none of it would be here were it not for the église of Saint-Germain-des-Près, the church around which the village was established.

The Church of Saint-Germain-des-Près is the city's oldest church and the very heart of the vibrant neighborhood. It was first built by King Clovis in A.D. 543, and while the original structure was obliterated some 500 years after it was built, the current structure standing in its place has remained for over 1,000 years. While it has stood vigilantly for centuries--surviving fires, a brief stint as a jail, and countless restorations-- it has long been in a tragic state of neglect and in desperate need of repair. To counteract the ravages of time, some passionate Americans have banded together to procure the funding needed to save the church for years to come by starting a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, appropriately named the American Friends for the Preservation of Saint-Germain-des-Près.

PITY THE POOR MALTHUSIANS:

In the 1970s Stanford Professor Paul Ehrlich warned of mass starvation of humans due to overpopulation. Today we have a population of over 7 billion & doing well. So what happened? So this guy happened. #Borlaug https://t.co/TnyaDyqf8F v pic.twitter.com/euIME3ctf8

— C. S. Prakash (@AgBioWorld) March 12, 2018

WINNING THE WAR ON LABOR:

WHEN THE BURGER-FLIPPING ROBOT FLIPPY debuted last year, the Miso Robotics contraption seemed to be mostly a futuristic curiosity. But today, Flippy fulfilled the purpose it had been built for. After a year-long testing period, a model of the robot is now hard at work flipping burgers at a Caliburger restaurant in Pasadena, California.

Looking like a large arm swathed in a chef jacket and mounted on a cart, it comes with a spatula at one end. Using thermal imaging and cameras, Flippy can tell when a burger needs to be flipped and taken off the heat. Flippy can also switch out dirty spatulas for clean ones, and can even scrape the grill. According to local news outlet KTLA, artificial intelligence is a part of its programming, meaning that Flippy has the potential to get better at its job over time.

Caliburger, which helped fund Flippy and Miso Robotics, plans on rolling its technology out to restaurants across the world. 

YOU HAVE TO DEGRADE YOURSELF WITH ENTHUSIASM TO BE A TRUMPBOT:

McMaster, a combat hero in both Iraq wars, had made his reputation 20 years earlier, as an Army major, with his dissertation-turned-book, Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam, which criticized the top generals of the 1960s for betraying their constitutional duties by failing to give the president their honest military advice.

In his assignments since then, McMaster only solidified his standing as an officer who spoke truth to power, sometimes impetuously, with a distinct lack of talent for dissembling. Some of his superiors admired him for his impolitic indifference; most despised him for it.

He came to the White House with no background in broad national security policy and no experience in Washington politics--and those shortcomings helped seal his doom. When the president called on him to tell the sorts of lies for which he'd lambasted an earlier generation of generals, he didn't know how to evade the pressure, and he succumbed to it just as they did.

The turning point came in May, barely three months into the job. The Washington Post reported that at a meeting in the Oval Office, Trump had divulged to Russia's two top diplomats highly classified secrets about Israel's involvement in an intelligence operation. In the wake of this appalling security breach, which would have sent anyone else to prison, McMaster was ordered to cover Trump's tracks at a press conference.

Reading from a carefully worded script, McMaster strung together a series of mendacities and half-truths that appalled his friends and admirers. One of them pronounced himself "heartbroken." Eliot Cohen wrote in the Atlantic, in a pointed reference to McMaster, that, for the high officials dragged into Trump's swamp of deceit, the worst moment may come when they "can no longer recognize their own characters for what they once were."

THANKS, GLIDER:

THANKS, W:

Last year, Finland was the only EU country not currently in the middle of a massive homelessness crisis.

In fact, the EU homelessness organisation FEANTSA, which published the report, found Finland's number of homeless has been decreasing year-on-year.

Finland employed a bold initiative to get people off the streets: it's called Housing First.

These radicals from Finland had the crazy idea that giving people a permanent home gives them... well, gives them a place to live and get off the streets.

It's a far-cry away from some of the tactics that have been deployed in the UK, which has included disturbing anti-homeless architecture like metal spikes.

Finland even goes as far as assigning individual support to sort out the issues that have led to the person becoming homeless.

This is a complete reversal of what other countries do and although it might sound simple, it's also incredibly effective. When someone has a literal place to call home, it makes it a whole lot easier to solve any potential problems which lead to an individual becoming homeless in the first place.

ALONG THE ANGLOSPHERE:

New Zealand now ranks third in The Heritage Foundation's Index of Economic Freedom and is one of the champions of economic freedom around the world. But it wasn't always so.

In the mid-1980s, New Zealand was facing an economic crisis, with its domestic market and international trade both heavily regulated. Unemployment had reached 11 percent, and inflation was a sky-high 15 percent.

In response, the government of New Zealand began implementing revolutionary economic reforms, most significantly related to trade policy. It announced in 1987 a program that would reduce the tax on imports to under 20 percent by the year 1992.

By 1996, that tax was reduced further to under 10 percent, and by the end of 1999, about 95 percent of New Zealand's tariffs were set at zero. Successive New Zealand governments, whether conservative or liberal, have maintained the strong commitment to free trade.

WHO'S BEING NAIVE, KAY?:

Vanessa Trump has hired a criminal defense attorney to represent her in her divorce from Donald Trump Jr. just as special counsel Robert Mueller subpoenaed the president's family business.

White Plains, NY-based lawyer David Feureisen is representing Vanessa, according to paperwork filed in Manhattan Supreme Court.

Vanessa and Don Jr. had claimed in a joint statement that their split after 12 years of marriage was not acrimonious. "It's a curious choice if it's an amicable separation," Manhattan family law expert Bonnie Rabin said of Vanessa's attorney. "If it's an amicable situation, you wouldn't be highlighting the criminal aspect," noted Rabin, who is not involved in the case.

ALL INACCESSIBLE TO rEASON:

Throughout Weaver's work is found a profound appreciation for Plato and his contribution to the Western heritage. Indeed, Weaver's best-known and probably most influential work, Ideas Have Consequences, is a hook long lament that Western modernism has departed from the Platonic tradition. Plato, Weaver wrote, "possessed the deepest divining rod among the ancients."[9] In Plato, Weaver found the personification of that philosophical bent which pursued an understanding of "the structure of reality:"

From the time of the Greeks there have existed in most periods 'wise men,' phi­losophers, or scholars who make it their work to seek out the structure of reality, and to proclaim it by one means and an­other to the less initiated. The first Greeks began looking for the structure of reality in the constitution of matter: What was the prime element out of which all other things were made?[10]

Weaver reasoned that a mature conserva­tism would follow in that tradition:

It is my contention that a conservative is a realist, who believes that there is a structure of reality independent of his own will and desire. He believes that there is a creation which was here be­fore him, which exists now not by just his sufferance, and which will he here after he's gone.... Though this reality is independent of the individual, it is not hostile to him. It is in fact amenable by him in many ways, but it cannot be changed radically and arbitrarily. This is the cardinal point. The conservative holds that man in this world cannot make his will his law without any regard to limits and to the fixed nature of things.[11]

In keeping with the Platonic view, Weaver argued this "structure of reality" was composed of things which have "essential natures" and that these natures were "knowable." Moreover, we have an "intui­tive feeling that existence is not meaning­less."[12] It is then the function of the philoso­pher to discern the realities--the essential nature of things--and hopefully to per­ceive, even though dimly and imperfectly, the meaning and purpose of existence. As it was with Plato, so it was with Weaver, that philosophy was the highest of callings whereby through "right reasoning" knowl­edge, understanding, wisdom, and ultimate­ly Truth were to be pursued.

Consistent with the Platonic view, Wea­ver contended that basic and inherent in the "nature of things" was a dualism:

The first positive step must be a driv­ing afresh of the wedge between the ma­terial and the transcendental. This is fundamental: without a dualism we should never find purchase for the pull upward, and all idealistic designs might as well be scuttled.... To bring dualism back into the world and to rebuke the moral impotence fathered by empiricism is then the broad character of our objec­tive.[13]

The material side of this dualism related to specifics and concretes, to the imperma­nent and transitory. The transcendental facet pertained to first principles, essences, universals, forms, and finally to unchang­ing ideals: truth, beauty, justice, and good­ness. In Weaver's words: "Plato reminded us that at any stage of an inquiry it is important to realize whether we are moving toward, or away from, first principles."[14] Similarly, Weaver wrote, "Belief in universals and principles is inseparable from the life of reason," and he noted, "[W]e in­variably find in the man of true culture a deep respect for forms."[15] In this regard, probably Weaver's best-known observation was: "The true conservative is one who sees the universe as a paradigm of essences, of which the phenomenology of the world is a sort of continuing approxima­tion. Or, to put this in another way, he sees it as a set of definitions which are struggling to get themselves defined in the real world."[16]

Weaver's embracing of the Platonic con­cept of the transcendent led to his observa­tion that "the conservative image of history arises out of primal affection and a desire to follow transcendental ideals of justice. And it is this that gives content to the phi­losophy of conservatism."[17] In the final analysis, the pursuit of ideals is the Pla­tonic quest for standards and values:

Standard means, first of all, something of general application and validity. A standard is something that is set up as a measure for all. It is not contingent upon this man's preference, or whim, or that man's location in space and time.... A standard is, therefore, something of uniform and universal determination. This is one of the aspects of the meaning. But in addition to this, the term standard in its more general usage has the imperative sense of an ideal.[18]

We must, Weaver argued, have ideals, stan­dards, and values in order that we can dis­tinguish and evaluate: "Before we can have the idea of relative evaluation at all, we must have a tertium quid, a third essence, an ideal ideal, as it were. This is why a humanism which is merely historical-minded can be learned, but cannot in the true sense be critical."

THE GREATER THE TURMOIL THE LESS HE CAN DO:

US President Donald Trump has decided to fire national security adviser H.R. McMaster, in what would be the latest in a string of high-profile White House departures, The Washington Post reported Thursday.

HAWK ON THE WING:

THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS QUALITY:

West Coast startup Diamond Foundry is ushering in a new precious-mineral rush in California--this time for clear, undetectably lab-grown diamonds made by plasma reactor technology that mimics the outer core of the sun.

HE'S A WHAT? HE'S A WHAT?:

One of a bare handful of hit Broadway musicals to have been written in its entirety by a single person, The Music Man opened to rave reviews in 1957, beat out West Side Story at the Tony Awards, and ran for 1,375 performances. Then it was turned into one of the most popular Hollywood musicals ever filmed. The story of a smooth-talking con man who breezes into a hick town to swindle its residents and ends up losing his heart to the local librarian was successfully revived on Broadway in 2000, filmed a second time for TV in 2003, and continues to be performed regularly by regional and amateur theater companies throughout America.

Why, then, is Meredith Willson--the author of its libretto and music and lyrics--so completely forgotten? Because nothing he did before or after The Music Man was of lasting interest. Willson (surely one of the last males in America to carry the first name of Meredith) was 55 years old when The Music Man premiered, and the two musicals that followed it, The Unsinkable Molly Brown (1960) and Here's Love (1962), were successful in their day but have since failed to hold the stage. (The peculiarly unmusical movie version of The Unsinkable Molly Brown, with Debbie Reynolds as a brassy survivor of the Titanic, was a big hit, but it dispensed with most of the score, featuring only six of Willson's songs.) Willson also wrote the music for one film of note, William Wyler's 1941 adaptation of Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes, but his score was undistinguished. Only one of his non-theatrical songs, "It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas," continues to be sung, and except for the ubiquitous "Seventy-Six Trombones," none of the numbers from The Music Man quite established itself as a standard (although "Till There Was You" came close).

Willson was, in other words, a one-hit wonder, and the immense and enduring popularity of his hit, coupled with the fact that he was by all accounts exceedingly likable and seems to have led a blameless private life, has had the unexpected effect of blotting out any lasting memories of the man who wrote it.

WE ARE ALL DESIGNIST NOW:

Most people go to Hawaii for the golden beaches, the turquoise seas, or the stunning weather. Rosemary Gillespie went for the spiders.

Situated around 2,400 miles from the nearest continent, the Hawaiian Islands are about as remote as it's possible for islands to be. In the last 5 million years, they've been repeatedly colonized by far-traveling animals, which then diversified into dozens of new species. Honeycreeper birds, fruit flies, carnivorous caterpillars ... all of these creatures reached Hawaii, and evolved into wondrous arrays of unique forms.

So did the spiders. There are happy-face spiders whose abdomens look like emojis, and which Gillespie started studying in 1987. There are appropriately named long-jawed spiders, which caught her attention years later. Spiders have so repeatedly radiated on Hawaii that scientists often discover entirely new groups of species at once, allowing them to have some taxonomic fun. One genus was named Orsonwelles and each species is named after one of the director's films; another group is named after all the characters from the film Predator. "The diversity is extraordinary," says Gillespie, an evolutionary biologist at UC Berkeley.

The most spectacular of these spider dynasties, Gillespie says, are the stick spiders. They're so-named because some of them have long, distended abdomens that make them look like twigs. "You only see them at night, walking around the understory very slowly," Gillespie says. "They're kind of like sloths." Murderous sloths, though: Their sluggish movements allow them to sneak up on other spiders and kill them.

During the day, stick spiders hide, relying on their camouflage to protect them from the beaks of honeycreepers. Each of Hawaii's islands has species of stick spider that come in three distinctive colors--shiny gold, dark brown, and matte white. Go to Oahu and you'll find all three kinds. Head to East Maui and you'll see the same trio.

AND HE WAS, OF COURSE, ANTI-COMMUNIST WHEN THE LITERATI WERE PRO-:

COMIC GOLD:

"Now look at who Mueller has prosecuted at this point, and who is left to prosecute for collusion?" he wondered. "I mean, there's no one left. [Former Trump campaign manager Paul] Manafort would be the obvious guy to think of that was colluding, right? If you could have gotten him on collusion, he would have been the obvious choice. Flynn, I mean, I knew Flynn very very well, and he is not a secret communist supporting Putin. So, they can't get him on that. So who else do they have?"

THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS SPECIES:

THE TIGHTENING NOOSE:

U.S. Special Counsel Robert Mueller has subpoenaed the Trump Organization for documents, including some related to Russia, the New York Times reported on Thursday, citing two people briefed on the matter.

The statement by Democrats on the House intelligence committee, who have had access to internal Trump Organization documents and interviewed key witnesses, raises new questions about the Trump Organization's financial ties to Russia and its possible willingness to deal with a bank that had been placed under US sanctions.

BRACKETS FOR BOOKS?:

STRIPPING AWAY HIS LIES:

Virtually everyone who has worked for Trump since the late 1980s has been required to sign a nondisclosure agreement, or NDA, as a condition of working for him. Even some low-level campaign volunteers had to sign NDAs, which included lifetime promises to never speak critically of Trump, his family or the Trump Organization.

Clifford has asked a Los Angeles County superior court judge to lift any restrictions on telling about what she says was an affair with Trump that began in 2006 and continued well into 2007, when Trump's third wife, the former soft-core porn model Melania Knaus, was caring for their infant son.

The lawsuit states Clifford has documentary evidence of the affair, which she plans to make public if the court rules in her favor.

Trump, aided by personal lawyer Michael D. Cohen, "aggressively sought to silence" Clifford, the lawsuit asserts.

Clifford and her lawyer say Trump never signed the agreement, making it null and void. They also say public statements by Cohen negate the deal.

The Trump White House has denied any affair. At the same time, both Trump, Cohen and White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders have backhandedly confirmed there was an affair and, significantly, that hush money was paid.

Our interest is not in the illicit sex. Rich and powerful men dallying is hardly news. Rather our interest is in the denials, the cover-up and what those actions tell us and how they jeopardized national security.

People with dark secrets, the kind that make them vulnerable to blackmail, are routinely denied national security clearances. By virtue of his office, Trump has access to every secret--including ones he delivered to Russian emissaries last year, as we learned from the Kremlin.

We know that Clifford is not the only woman who could come forward. Earlier the parent company of one of Trump's favorite newspapers, the supermarket tabloid The National Enquirer, paid $150,000 to the 1999 Playmate of the Year to never speak of her 2006 fling with Trump.

How many others with dark secrets of all sorts are out there, hidden from the American people because of nondisclosure agreements or hush money? What of the mobsters and the major international drug trafficker with whom Trump has done business and lucrative favors--the ones we know about from court records, a letter he wrote and New Jersey casino regulatory files?

Now, BuzzFeed is using Cohen's libel suit as a vehicle to demand that Daniels preserve all records relating to her relationship with Trump, as well as her dealings with Cohen and the payment he has acknowledged arranging in 2016.

On Tuesday, BuzzFeed's lawyer wrote to Daniels' attorney asking that the adult film actress, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, preserve various categories of documents. Such preservation letters are often a prelude to a subpoena. If Daniels' testimony is formally demanded in a deposition, the nondisclosure agreement would likely be no obstacle, legal experts said.

The letter from BuzzFeed's attorney, obtained by POLITICO, argues that Cohen's role in paying Daniels is similar to allegations in the dossier about Cohen. The dossier alleges that Cohen met Russian legal officials and legislators in Prague in August 2016 in a bid to "sweep ... under the carpet" details of the relationship between Russia and Trump campaign officials like Paul Manafort and Rick Gates. Cohen has flatly denied the claim.

"Mr. Cohen's role in President Trump's 2016 campaign, including but not limited to any payments he made or facilitated to third parties during or in connection with the campaign, is therefore directly relevant to" Cohen's suit, BuzzFeed lawyer Katherine Bolger wrote.

THE TELL? HIS LIPS WERE MOVING:

THE DARK KNIGHT:

THUS BEGAN THE lONG wAR:

Despite these failings, though, Burke noted with much satisfaction that when the French Revolution began in 1789, the monarch as well as the majority of aristocrats apologized for their selfish errors and had been the first to admit that their own orders needed reform for the good and benefit of the whole of society.

Read their instructions to their representatives. They breathe the spirit of liberty as warmly, and they recommend reformation as strongly, as any other order. Their privileges relative to contribution were voluntarily surrendered; as the king, from the beginning, surrendered all pretence to a right of taxation. Upon a free constitution there was but one opinion in France. The absolute monarchy was at an end. It breathed its last, without a groan, without struggle, without convulsion.

Such an apology and a reform (or series of reforms) the real revolutionaries mightily feared. Never had they actually sought reform of French society, whatever their claims and protestations. Instead, from the moment they began the revolution in 1789, they wanted to destroy and overturn all that opposed them and to do so utterly and completely, leaving no remnant and no possible opposition.

UNTO DEATH:

As C.S. Lewis reminded us, "to love at all is to be vulnerable." Loving another person means giving oneself as a hostage both to fortune and to an alien will. The traditional Christian marriage vows are explicit on this point: one is promising to remain married for worse, for poorer, and in sickness, if that is what comes. Prudence can mitigate some of the risks, but marriage nonetheless remains an acceptance of lifelong vulnerability if one takes these vows seriously. To quote Chesterton's Manalive once again, "Imprudent marriages! . . .  where in earth or heaven are there any prudent marriages? Might as well talk about prudent suicides." A commitment unto death is not prudent, if one is only looking out for oneself.

And marriage is a death of the autonomous self, because it establishes a lifelong "We" over the solitary "I" of the individual. The physical union of marriage that the Bible describes as becoming one flesh is only part of the merger that is marriage, in which the self is not abolished, but is irrevocably committed to another person. It may be terrifying to give up sole control of one's life in this way, and many will refuse. Think, for example, of the prominent philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who for all his life struggled to find a way to have love without vulnerability. That is simply not possible in this life.

One can have pleasure while maintaining control and safety, but one cannot have love. And pleasure without love will grow stale. Thus, Lewis concluded his comments on the vulnerability of love by warning: "The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell." Those who will not risk their hearts will in the end make themselves heartless. This is why the traditional wedding vows recognize that they promise eventual heartbreak, for if hearts are not hardened over the years then one at least will be broken when death does its part.

Yet those in love continue to get married, not only out of social custom or for the benefits romantic and family stability provide to society, but because their love compels them to do so. There is something about being in love that induces us to make promises of everlasting fidelity, as if we know that such fidelity offers a better way of life, whatever the risks may be. It is commitment that allows a relationship to move from potentiality to actuality. The self that sacrifices its autonomy upon the marriage altar will find itself more fully realized in that marriage. It is only by foreclosing the other options of what we might become that we can really set about the business of becoming something; only by forsaking all others can we fully realize our relationship with one.

IF THEY'D ONLY OPPOSED IMMIGRATION, THE rIGHT WOULD JOIN tHE nATION:

More than 30 years have passed since the former FBI agent Robert Lamphere detail-ed his key role in uncovering major Soviet espionage networks in The FBI-KGB War. That book provided the first detailed (but truncated) account of the Venona Project, the most successful American counterintelligence operation of the Cold War. Hidden from historians and the public for decades, Venona provided the key leads that resulted in the convictions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and Judith Coplon in the United States and Klaus Fuchs in Great Britain by making it possible for FBI agents to read thousands of high-level Soviet communications. Venona also exposed hundreds of other Soviet spies, most of whom could not be prosecuted since independent evidence was lacking and it was thought inexpedient to reveal Venona in court.

Nearly a decade would pass until the FBI and NSA began to release the actual Venona transcripts in 1995. In the years since, a number of books (including several co-authored by me) have analyzed the Venona revelations, while others have mined Communist International files and the KGB archives. Virtually all the major mysteries about Soviet espionage in the United States have been resolved by these once-secret documents. In addition to confirming the guilt of the Rosenbergs, Alger Hiss, Harry Dexter White, and virtually every other person accused of spying in the 1940s by the ex-spies Whittaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley, these books have exposed several important and previously unknown agents such as Theodore Hall, Russell McNutt, and I.F. Stone. Indeed, the only accused spy who turns out to have been innocent (although he was a secret Communist almost up until the day he took charge of developing an atomic bomb) was J. Robert Oppenheimer.

A handful of espionage deniers, centered around the Nation magazine, continue to argue, against all evidence and logic, that Alger Hiss is still innocent. The Rosenberg children continue to distort their mother's role in espionage. And some hard-core McCarthyites still demonize Oppenheimer. But in truth, the bloody battle over who spied is over.

THE ESSENCE OF BOYHOOD:

In 1965, The New York Times wrote that Joshua Lionel Cowen had made the Lionel name "the third wing of Christmas, along with the evergreen tree and Santa Claus." Even now, for many of us, a Christmas tree, however laden with colored lights, however lavishly tinseled, seems incomplete without an 027 model train running beneath it on a circle of steel track.

Once, American railroads dominated popular culture because they were the only means of fast land transportation. Now there are other ways to get there from here. They seem less important, and toy trains share the marginalization of their prototypes. Yet millions of us played with toy trains half a century ago, particularly those manufactured by the Lionel Corporation. For perhaps a decade after World War II, the technical, managerial, and promotional genius of Joshua Lionel Cowen, founder of Lionel, made his toy trains a solid part of American middle-class boyhood.

In 1952 alone, Lionel produced 622,209 engines and 2,460,764 freight and passenger cars. Ron Hollander's delightful, lavishly-illustrated biography of Cowen and his company, All Aboard (published in 1981 and reissued in 2000), states that Lionel's 1952 production eclipsed "the nation's railroads, which had a mere 43,000 locomotives and 1.8 million cars in service."

Joshua Lionel Cowen was born on Henry St. in Manhattan's Lower East Side on Aug. 25, 1877. He preferred playing ball, bicycling, hiking and tinkering with mechanical toys to formal education, and soon became fascinated with electricity, its transmission, and its storage in batteries. In the labs at Peter Cooper Institute, he built what may have been (or what he claimed was--Cowen had no false modesty) the first electric doorbell. In 1899, he patented a device for igniting photographers' flash powder by using dry cell batteries to heat a wire fuse. Cowen than parlayed this into a defense contract to equip 24,000 Navy mines with detonators. His ignorance of armament manufacture didn't stop him. He used mercuric fulminate, a sensitive and powerful explosive. His supplier's deliveryman told him, "The company said you should always keep a good deal around. It's better to be dead than maimed." He delivered the fuses to the Brooklyn Navy Yard on time by horse-drawn wagon at the gallop.

In 1900, with $12,000 in profits, he began manufacturing "electrical novelties" at 24 Murray St. in Lower Manhattan as the Lionel Manufacturing Co. He was 23. 

PI DAY:

Good morning and Happy #PiDay!

🥧3⃣1⃣4⃣🥧

In honor of 3/14, and our refusal to let Rankings Week end, we offer you the DEFINITIVE rankings of Major League Baseball's all-time #PiDay All-Stars: pic.twitter.com/oRT83QHpcE

— MLB Network Radio on SiriusXM (@MLBNetworkRadio) March 14, 2018

PI DAY:

#DidYouKnow that two-time All-Star and 1974 NL Cy Young Award winner Mike Marshall had a career 3.141 earned run average, giving him the closest career ERA to the number pi of any pitcher in baseball history? #PiDay pic.twitter.com/dhZiAwK5OX

— MLBPAA (@MLBPAA) March 14, 2018

PI DAY:

Pie Traynor, Star Third Baseman of the Pittsburgh #Pirates (Baseball Magazine - July 1926) #MLB #PiDay pic.twitter.com/mDNwIRV2yD

— Baseball by BSmile (@BSmile) March 14, 2018

PI DAY:

Happy #PiDay. pic.twitter.com/xQLErUQioT

— Super 70s Sports (@Super70sSports) March 14, 2018

PI DAY:

Happy #PiDay everyone!

📸: @Rockies pic.twitter.com/G3ac5BGfYp

— SB Nation (@SBNation) March 14, 2018

THUS, PEPE IS A FROG

POLICING THEIR OWN:

The former FBI deputy director scheduled to retire on Sunday, Andrew McCabe, may be fired over allegations that he misled investigators about sharing sensitive information with the media, which would make him ineligible for full retirement benefits, according to the Washington Post and New York Times on Wednesday.

DONALD WHO?:

 Ambassador Nikki Haley on Wednesday accused Russia of flagrantly and aggressively using a nerve agent to poison a former Russian spy in the U.K., and called on Moscow to "come clean" about its chemical weapons program.

"Russia must fully cooperate with the U.K.'s investigation and come clean about its own chemical weapons program," Haley said at the U.N. in New York. 

Haley's comments were the strongest to date from a Trump administration official regarding the poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, with a nerve agent. U.K. officials have blamed Russia for the attack.

ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:

Daughter: Stephen Hawking died

Youngest: Was he famous? Was he a skateboarder?

Daughter: No, that's Tony Hawk

— brothersjudd (@brothersjudd) March 14, 2018

GREATEST WAR EVER:

BREAKING: Ten pro-regime fighters killed in Turkish airstrike near Afrin, Syria.

— The Spectator Index (@spectatorindex) March 14, 2018

EVERY OTHER CANDIDATE BESIDES CRUZ) WOULD BE GROWING THE MAJORITY:

No Spin Zone: Donald Trump is presiding over a growing economy, a period of general peace in the world, and very few unselfimposed crises. Yet his repellant personal character and inept leadership is costing the GOP a safe seat.

— Tim Miller (@Timodc) March 14, 2018

AFTER ALL, SHE'S NOT MEXICAN OR BLACK:

Only about half of the people who voted for President Donald Trump say it would be immoral if he had an affair with pornographic film actress Stormy Daniels. The other half say it is not immoral, or they are not sure, according to a new HuffPost/YouGov survey published Tuesday.

THE RIGHT DOESN'T TRUST TEACHERS TO HANDLE TEXTBOOKS NEAR CHILDREN...:

THE TRUMPBOTS HAVE THE FOOTBALL SNATCHED AWAY AGAIN:

Rep. Trey Gowdy of South Carolina said that the evidence gathered by the committee clearly showed Russia's disdain for Trump's rival, Hillary Clinton, and was "motivated in whole or in part by a desire to harm her candidacy or undermine her Presidency had she prevailed."

A source familiar with Gowdy's thinking said the congressman believes there's no difference between opposing Clinton and backing Trump in what had become, effectively, a two-person race. The source added that Gowdy "disagrees with the conclusion" that the intelligence agencies got it wrong.

WE ARE ALL dESIGNIST NOW:

In July 2002, Hawking said in a lecture that although his quest was to explain everything, a theory of determinism that would predict the universe in the past and forever in the future probably could not be achieved.

He caused some controversy among biologists when he said he saw computer viruses as a life form, and thus the human race's first act of creation.

YOU'D BE ANXIOUS TOO IF YOUR PARENTS WANTED TO DRUG YOU INTO SUBMISSION:

A surprising number of the nation's youngest children are being prescribed psychiatric drugs, some younger than preschool, according to health-care industry data on physician prescriptions in the United States.

Widely reported data collected in 2014 from IMS Health show that more than eight million children are prescribed drugs for anxiety, depression, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and bipolar and behavioral disorders. More than one million of them are younger than five.

But rigorous studies of these drugs in young children is "incredibly poor," says Mary Margaret Gleason, a pediatric psychiatrist at Tulane University. "We don't know much, especially with preschoolers," she says. "The older kids get, their brains have already developed, and we have more information."

The National Institutes of Health confirm that the use of antidepressants has "risen dramatically" since the 1990s. Anxiety is the most common type of mental-health disorder in children, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics. About 10 percent of all young children deal with generalized anxiety, panic, separation anxiety, and phobias.

THE IRRESPONSIBILITY SOCIETY:

Robert Wuthnow, a sociologist at Princeton University, spent eight years interviewing Americans in small towns across the country. He had one goal: to understand why rural America is so angry with Washington.

Wuthnow's work resulted in a new book, The Left Behind: Decline and Rage in Rural America.  [...]

Sean Illing

In the book, you argue that the anger we're seeing in rural America is less about economic concerns and more about the perception that Washington is threatening the way of life in small towns. How, specifically, is Washington doing this?

Robert Wuthnow

I'm not sure that Washington is doing anything to harm these communities. To be honest, a lot of it is just scapegoating. And that's why you see more xenophobia and racism in these communities. There's a sense that things are going badly, and the impulse is to blame "others."

They believe that Washington really does have power over their lives. They recognize that the federal government controls vast resources, and they feel threatened if they perceive Washington's interest being directed more toward urban areas than rural areas, or toward immigrants more than non-immigrants, or toward minority populations instead of the traditional white Anglo population.

THE CULTURE WARS ARE A ROUT:

American adults, on average, are having sex about nine fewer times per year in the 2010s compared to adults in the late 1990s, according to a team of scholars led by the psychologist Jean Twenge. That's a 14 percent decline in sexual frequency. Likewise, the share of adults who reported having sex "not at all" in the past year rose from 18 percent in the late 1990s to 22 percent from 2014 to 2016, according to our analysis of the General Social Survey. (The GSS, which is fielded every two years and is directed by the University of Chicago, is a large, nationally representative and federally funded survey of American adults covering a range of attitudes and behaviors.)

Similar trends are apparent among younger men and women. In the early 2000s, about 73 percent of adults between the ages of 18 and 30 had sex at least twice a month. That fell to 66 percent in the period from 2014 to 2016, according to our analysis of the GSS.

Other 18- to 30-year-olds aren't doing it at all. From 2002 to 2004, 12 percent of them reported having no sex in the preceding year. A decade later, during the two years from 2014 to 2016, that number rose to 18 percent.

Sex is also down among teenagers. Earlier this year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported a decline in the share of high school students who said they ever had sex: from 47 percent in 2005 to 41 percent in 2015. Sexual activity among teenagers fell the most between 2013 and 2015, about the same time that sex took a real dip among 18- to 30-year-old adults.  [...]

There are upsides to the sexual counter-revolution that appears to be unfolding, one of which is that it seems likely--especially in the wake of the #MeToo movement--to encourage women and men to be more considerate, committed and consensual about all matters sexual. This counter-revolution may be cutting down on sex, and sex-related talk and behavior, that is unwanted, awkward and abusive--and probably casual sex in general. "Now could be the time to reintroduce virtues such as prudence, temperance, respect and even love," Christine Emba of The Washington Post wrote. "We might pursue the theory that sex possibly has a deeper significance than just recreation and that 'consent'--that thin and gameable boundary--might not be the only moral sensibility we need respect."

This would be good, in part, because women are, on average, more likely to derive satisfaction from sex in committed relationships, compared with casual ones. One recent study of college women by the sociologists Jessie Ford and Paula England found that women reported more orgasms in committed relationships than in hookups, and that the gender gap in orgasms between college men and women was smaller in committed relationships than in hookups. The sexual counter-revolution, then, may mean that women, especially, get to enjoy more committed, mutually gratifying sex and endure less joyless casual sex for the sake of male gratification--in other words, less Aziz Ansari-style sex (at least as reported by the website Babe.net).

Another apparent upside is that the share of babies born to teenage and unmarried mothers is falling. The birthrate for 15- to 19-year-olds is down by 51 percent since 2007. And the percent of babies born outside of marriage reached a record high of 40.6 percent in 2008 but has since fallen (to 39.8 percent in 2016) and will likely fall even more in the coming years as young adults continue to postpone sex and have fewer partners. This downturn is the first of its kind since the 1960s. It's good news in part because children born to married parents are more likely to avoid poverty, enjoy stable families, and thrive, educationally and economically.

ODDLY ENOUGH, THEY FOUND NO COLLUSION WITH OUR ENEMIES:

The Barack Obama presidential campaign hired Fusion GPS in 2012 to dig up dirt on Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, according to a book released on Tuesday.

cONSERVATISM CAN MAKE NO ACCOMMODATION WITH RACISM:

Classical liberals don't just have an aversion to populism; they think it's dangerous. But here's the thing: The populists are outnumbered. Global free trade and liberal democracy do not benefit everyone equally, but they create vastly more winners than losers. Domestic producers benefit from economies of scale. Countries that engage in trade enjoy rising standards of living. Comparative advantages increase productivity. Recent agitation to the contrary notwithstanding, an unfettered global-trade regime has dramatically decreased global poverty and reduced the gap between wealthy and impoverished.

These are incremental benefits, and they're far easier to overlook than are the conditions endured by those who are left behind in the global economy. The global liberal trade regime's losers are sympathetic figures, and they command far more political power than their numbers should suggest. They serve as a living indictment of the very system by which the majority benefits. Their very existence buttresses populist attacks on the legitimacy of a system that creates so much disaffection. This is a matter of perception, not numerical inferiority.

Populist attacks on the Western-led international order don't begin and end with free trade; they are aimed at the fundamental assumptions upon which the classically liberal democratic ideal is based. As Mounk concluded, it is, thus, necessary to contain this ideological impulse's most dangerous excesses. He recommended subversion and assimilation, but there is another approach that is based on a rational hard-power calculation. Classical liberalism's winners vastly outnumber its losers, and it is the populist nationalist alternative that cannot be accommodated. But it can, and therefore should, be defeated.

Humility and passivity do not well serve those who truly believe the liberal capitalist order hammered out after the Second World War is of the greatest benefit to the greatest number. Concessions to illiberal populists or chauvinistic nationalists should not be the product of charity or self-doubt. They should be hard-won, and only after a bitterly contested ordeal. These kinds of martial metaphors will yield bouts of feigned indignation from populist nationalists who freely and recklessly resort to such language themselves, but this, too, amounts to mere theatrics. If capitalist democrats believe their model is the means by which the greatest number will benefit, and contend that their opponents are dangerously wrong, they need to start acting like it.

It has been more than a generation since the West confronted a peer competitor that championed an alternative model to the kind of liberalized global economic integration that emerged after the collapse of the Berlin Wall. As such, our skill at championing a model of social organization unapologetically, without fear or favor, has atrophied. That's an aptitude that we will have to re-learn, and soon. If populist nationalism is to be contained, it cannot be subsumed into greater liberalism and its malcontents mollified by social-welfare programs. The very idea of populist nationalism will have to be overwhelmed. As soon as advocates of unfettered freedom and commerce come to that conclusion, that necessary work can begin.

OF COURSE ETHNO-NATIONALSTS DON'T WANT COLOREDS VOTING:

 Co-written by Lee Drutman, Larry Diamond and Joe Goldman, it is one of a continuing series of reports produced by the Voter Study Group. (Disclosure: I am the research director of the Voter Study Group.) In this report, based on a July survey with 5,000 Americans, four key findings stand out:

1) Support for democracy is actually higher in this survey than several earlier surveys.

Compared with surveys in the 1990s and 2000s, the percentage of Americans who say that "a strong leader who does not have to bother with Congress and elections" is a "fairly" or "very good" way of governing the country has declined. The percentage who say that "having the army rule" is good was similar to 2011. The percentage who say that a "democratic" political system is fairly or very bad has also declined slightly. [...]

3) Shaky support for democracy is more visible among conservatives.

In the report, a willingness to consider a "strong leader" system or put less priority on democracy is more visible among self-identified conservatives -- and particularly among those who express conservative views on social and racial issues. Indeed, support for anti-democratic political systems is especially strong among those who think that being white and European is important to American identity.

TYRANT IS SORE, REX:

Rex Tillerson says he received a call from President Trump around noon today, more than three hours after his firing was announced on Twitter https://t.co/fvnLbrw16o

— CNN Politics (@CNNPolitics) March 13, 2018

EVERYONE KNOWS THE DONALDS ARE CORRUPT:

NO ONE BELIEVES IN SPECIES:

LAUGHINGSTOCK:

Mexican residents of a poor Tijuana slum in the shadow of eight prototypes of U.S. President Donald Trump's planned border wall called the project a waste of money and laughed at the idea the monolithic slabs will stop desperate immigrants.

THE TIGHTENING NOOSE:

In the spring of 2016, longtime political operative Roger Stone had a phone conversation that would later seem prophetic, according to the person on the other end of the line.

Stone, an informal adviser to then-candidate Donald Trump, said he had learned from WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange that his organization had obtained emails that would torment senior Democrats such as John Podesta, then campaign chairman for Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

The conversation occurred before it was publicly known that hackers had obtained the emails of Podesta and of the Democratic National Committee, documents that WikiLeaks released in late July and October. The U.S. intelligence community later concluded the hackers were working for Russia.

WHEN VLAD SAYS JUMP:

COUNTING COUP:

AND HE STILL MANAGED TO TRAIL HILLARY BY THREE MILLION VOTES:

On Sunday, the New York Times published research from a group of political scientists and data analysts that breaks out how voters who supported President Barack Obama in 2012 behaved in 2016. Most of them, unsurprisingly, voted for Hillary Clinton. Nine percent voted for Trump. Seven percent didn't vote.

Those percentages aren't distributed evenly by race. According to the analysis, 12 percent of white voters who had backed Obama in 2012 voted for Trump four years later. Eleven percent of black Obama 2012 voters stayed home.

 

Those are small percentages of the total pool of voters, but it means that the Obama-to-Trump voter pool was overwhelmingly white -- and the Obama-to-nonvoting pool disproportionately black.

We see this effect in other ways, too. The U.S. Elections Project tracks Census Bureau data on turnout. In 2016, black turnout was down eight points from 2012, helping contribute to that lower percentage that black voters made up of the overall electorate.

ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:

It's been pointed out that this weekend a Republican president who paid hush money to hide an affair with a porn star campaigned in a district where the Republican resigned because he asked a woman with whom he had an affair to get an abortion. The party of family values.

— Peter Wehner (@Peter_Wehner) March 13, 2018

IT'S A DEFLATIONARY EPOCH:

With so many central banks failing to hit their inflation targets, some are considering changes to the tool kits they use to steer their economies.

Norway's decision to lower its price target is just the latest example, and follows more or less official adjustments in Sweden, Argentina and the euro area. Even in New Zealand, the birthplace of inflation targeting, the central bank is shifting to a broader goal that includes a focus on employment.

CRYSTAL BALL SAYS...COLLUSION!:

One of the Arab world's top spies and a shadowy conduit to Vladimir Putin's Kremlin were present at a meeting in the Seychelles being probed by Robert Mueller's Russia investigation, DailyMail.com can disclose.

The meeting between Erik Prince, the Trump donor and billionaire Blackwater founder whose sister is education secretary Betsy DeVos, and Kirill Dmitriev, a Russian banker close to the Kremlin, was convened by the crown prince of Abu Dhabi, Mohamed bin Zayed, who is the de factor joint ruler of the United Arab Emirates.

But DailyMail.com can disclose that also present were bin Zayed's spy chief and a Palestinian seen as the crown prince's personal conduit to Putin's Kremlin.

The two men - Hamad al Mazroie, the de facto head of the UAE intelligence service, and Mohammed Dahlan, a bin Zayed adviser who is fluent in Russian - were never named by Prince when he testified to the House intelligence committee about the meeting.

It emerged last month that George Nader, a Lebanese-American businessman and Middle East expert with ties to the Trump administration was present.

Nader is now co-operating with Mueller after being stopped as he entered the U.S. in January and being served with a subpoena.

THANKS, UR!:

Oil prices dip on relentless rise in U.S. crude output (Henning Gloystein, 3/13/18, Reuters) 

NOT tHE oNION:

Clarke has suffered other problems on the home front. Two months before Clarke spoke at the RNC, an inmate died in one of his jails in Milwaukee after allegedly being deprived of water for a week. After the autopsy results were released, Clarke was further accused of calling the city medical examiner and threatening him, an accusation Clarke declined to comment on. The jail death has resulted in an ongoing criminal trial of three jail staff. Two have plead not guilty. Inmates said the man cried out for water before he died.

But Cockburn can reveal that there may be another reason for his political demise. It seems that he has for some time been conducting extra-marital affairs.

Clarke filed for divorce from his wife two weeks ago, on the day before this year's Conservative Political Action Conference. Since last year, he has been seen regularly with Hedieh Mirahmadi, a Muslim woman who has a job conducting sensitivity training with law enforcement agencies. According to her LinkedIn page, Mirahmadi was a consultant to the FBI from 2015 until June 2017.

Mirahmadi characterises her relationship as standard for a business manager to someone of Clarke's stature. But when asked to confirm or deny whether they were having an affair, Mirahmadi told Cockburn, 'well, he's filing for a divorce, so I don't think it's technically an affair. I don't really want to comment on the nature of our relationship.'

WHAT CREDIBILITY?:

The U.S. intelligence community disagrees with that assessment, and said so again Monday, CNN's Erin Burnett reminded House Intelligence Committee member Tom Rooney (R-Fla.) Monday night. "They believed that the Russian intent was to hurt Hillary Clinton, but as it became clear that Donald Trump was a viable candidate, they then took it further," Burnett said. "They wanted to explicitly help Donald Trump. So you're saying you do agree?" "I believe there's evidence of everything that you just said," Rooney agreed. "But I also believe there's evidence to where they were trying to wreak havoc on both sides."

Rooney said his assertion is "not completely the opposite" of what Conaway said. "I think there were efforts to try to hurt Hillary and help Trump, but I think there was also the opposite, too," he said. Burnett asked why Republicans are wrapping up the House investigation with questions outstanding, and Rooney was frank. "We have gone completely off the rails, and now we're basically a political forum for people to leak information to drive the day's news," he said. "As you allude to, we have lost all credibility."

When secret agent man Devin Nunes raced to the White House to break a phony story of illegal and inappropriate surveillance from a mysterious "whistleblower," it turned out the super-secret intel he set his ass on fire to reveal came from... wait for it... the White House itself.  Ezra Cohen-Watnick and Michael Ellis, both employees of the White House, provided Nunes with top secret material outside the approved channels to push one of many of the White House's endless variations on the "no collusion--no puppet, you're the puppet" defense.

Nunes released a memo last month that tried and failed to bring the grown-ups' investigations to a halt, and to change the facts of why Carter Page and Trump campaign officials came under the baleful glare of the FISA Court. Spoiler: it wasn't the intelligence community helping Hillary Clinton. It was Trump's allies and family ass-deep in contacts, connections, communications, and coordination with Vladimir Putin's information warfare operation.  

To imagine for even one moment that every intelligence agency in this nation is wrong and that Devin Nunes, super-staffer Derek Harvey and the other partisans are right about Putin and Trump is beyond ludicrous. Harvey, a refugee from the Trump national security council purge executed by H.R. McMaster and John Kelly, is now the lead agent in the coverup by Republican members of the House. Nunes, while claiming to have recused himself, has remained deeply involved at all time in the coverup.

POLL DANCE:

Now, in a bold move that places more pressure on the White House, Daniels is offering to give back the $130,000.

The New York Times reports that Daniels' lawyer sent a letter to Trump's personal attorney early Monday indicating that Daniels would "wire the money into an account of Mr. Trump's choosing by Friday." According to the report, Trump's lawyer has until noon tomorrow to respond.

Daniels and her attorney want to return the hush money to make the agreement to stay quiet null and void. They argue that Daniels would then be free to speak openly about her relationship with Trump and well as to share any text messages, phone and/or videos relating to Trump.

For the White House, the story continues to descend into chaos.

ALSO KNOWN AS NOLAN RYAN'S CHANGE-UP...:

IT'S NOT JUST TRUMPBOTS WHO HATE STEELE:

Boris Karpichkov says he and Skripal were on a hit-list of EIGHT defectors Vladimir Putin wants dead - and names the others . [...]

"Vladimir Putin was there and was briefed that the hit had been a success." And he reveals other names on a hit list he has been given by his contact.

OLEG GORDIEVSKY, 79: Britain's top Cold War double agent spirited out of Russia in 1985 in the boot of a Ford saloon.

BILL BROWDER, 53: ­US-born Brit financier banned from Russia for fraud, but he claims it was for exposing corruption.

IGOR SUTYAGIN, 53: Russian nuclear weapons specialist accused of spying for UK. Spy-swapped in 2010 along with Skirpal.

YURI SHVETS, 65: Ex-KGB major who defected to America in 1994. A key witness in the poisoning of Litvinenko.

CHRISTOPHER STEELE, 53: Former MI6 officer who claimed Russian spies had a video of Donald Trump cavorting with prostitutes.

VLADIMIR REZUN, 70 : Soviet military intelligence captain who defected to Britain in 1978.

DONALD HAS A DREAM:

Vladimir Putin has plenty of reason to worry about the future of Russia https://t.co/iqbIsBvw2N pic.twitter.com/K5tAeJdrMK

— Bloomberg Economics (@economics) March 12, 2018

DONALD WHO?:

Over the winter holidays, the U.S. Mission to the United Nations got around to hanging the official portrait of Ambassador Nikki Haley alongside the images of President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence in its lobby in New York.

But there was something, or someone, missing. In the spot where the portraits of America's previous top diplomats, Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, once hung was an unused picture hanger. The U.S. secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, had been essentially airbrushed out of this American diplomatic tableau.

The elimination of America's top diplomat from the mission's lobby gallery highlighted the contentious nature of relations at the top of the president's diplomatic team, as well as the unique nature of Haley's tenure as U.S. ambassador.

The first Republican Cabinet-level U.N. ambassador since the end of the Cold War, Haley has rejected the traditional chain of command that grants the secretary of state the primary policymaking role, and she has made it clear she will accept nothing less than to be Tillerson's equal. Her voracious pursuit of the spotlight, meanwhile, has elevated her national profile and strengthened her prospects for higher political office should she decide, as many suspect she will, to pursue the American presidency.

"Overall, the consensus in Republican national security circles is that she has done herself a huge favor by taking this position and going to New York," says Daniel Vajdich, a Republican foreign-policy expert who advised the presidential campaigns of Mitt Romney and Ted Cruz. "She can be a very popular candidate in 2020 or 2024."

GORE EVERY OX:

Jake Tapper has found himself--or put himself--in the middle of the gun-control debate in America. After last month's mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, the CNN anchor moderated a town hall in which parents and survivors vented anger at politicians, police, and the National Rifle Association.

"We're here tonight to facilitate your desire to speak directly to your leaders," he said as the broadcast began. He made a few points--for instance, that Democrats didn't prioritize gun control when they last held Congress and the White House--but mostly hung back, even when the dialogue grew tense. "Normally at a debate or a town hall, I would be quick to say to someone, 'That was rude' or 'We're going to try to keep it civil here,' or 'Let's not have personal attacks,'" he later told Variety. "But in this situation, who am I to tell someone that just lost a daughter or a friend, 'Don't talk that way'?"

Media observers said the town hall was a "stunning" event, unlike any in the history of American TV. Liberals cheered it, too. But conservatives hated it. Ben Shapiro, editor-in-chief of The Daily Wire, called it a "show trial on behalf of full gun bans," and nationally syndicated radio host Joe Walsh described it to me as "a one-sided pep rally against guns."

Days later, Tapper grilled Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel. "Just so people watching at home understand," Tapper said, "even after the shooter left the school, there was a period of time where nobody was going into the school--no law enforcement officers. People were bleeding out." He later asked Israel, "Are you really not taking any responsibility for the multiple red flags that were brought to the attention of the Broward sheriff's office about this shooter before the incident?"

Some liberals criticized the interview. But conservatives loved it. Shapiro said it was "deeply necessary and perfectly done"; NRA spokeswoman Dana Loesch agreed. The Blaze founder Glenn Beck called Tapper "the number one journalist in the nation." The right praised Tapper again this week after he called out Democrats for not condemning Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, who recently gave an anti-Semitic and anti-LGBT speech.

With the asymmetric polarization of American politics, many on the right condemn mainstream news organizations as liberal organs or "Fake News," and they cocoon themselves in a right-wing media ecosystem of Fox News, the Drudge Report, Breitbart, and the like. This includes President Donald Trump, whose favorite show is Fox & Friends and number-one target is CNN. In this era, consensus journalists--those who are respected across America's partisan divide--are not supposed to exist. And yet, Tapper has become perhaps the most widely praised journalist working in TV today.

JOBS WHITE PEOPLE WON'T DO:

EVERYTHING BUT THE SHOWER IS PROVEN:

The rest of the book has other significant disclosures. Here's an incomplete list.

- George Papadopoulos claimed Trump encouraged him to connect with the Russian government. As a member of Trump's team of foreign policy advisers, Papadopoulos, a young energy consultant with little national security experience, spent months in the spring and summer of 2016 trying to set up a back channel between the campaign and the Kremlin, in part to arrange a Trump-Putin meeting before Election Day. His efforts were known to senior campaign aides, including campaign co-chairman Sam Clovis and top campaign aide Paul Manafort. According to a later court filing, Papadopoulos, who in October 2017 pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI, aimed to set up an "off the record" meeting between campaign representatives and Putin's office. Trump has famously denied there was any relationship between his campaign and Moscow. But Russian Roulette reveals that Papadopoulos has told investigators that at a March 31, 2016, meeting Trump held with his foreign policy team, when Papadopoulos informed Trump he had contacts in the United Kingdom who could set up a meeting between Trump and Putin, Trump said this was an "interesting" idea. Trump, according to Papadopoulos' account, looked at then-Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), a top Trump adviser at the time, as if he expected him to follow up. Afterward, Papadopoulos, working with Russian cutouts, kept pursuing such a meeting.

- A secret source. According to the book, a US official in Russia in 2014 developed a high-level source in the Russian government who regularly shared inside information about Kremlin doings. After Viktor Yanukovych, the president of Ukraine and a Putin ally, fled Kiev in February, this source told his American contact that Putin was planning to move into Crimea. He also informed the US official that Putin was increasingly under the influence of an ultranationalist Orthodox Russian monk named Father Tikhon Shevkunov and that Putin and his inner circle had total contempt for Obama, denigrating the president as weak but also accusing him of meddling in Russia's affair. Putin's aides often used racist terms when referring to Obama, calling him a "monkey" and using the N-word. But most alarming, this secret source told the US official that the Kremlin was planning a wide-ranging clandestine campaign to undermine Western democracies that would include cyberattacks, information warfare, propaganda, and social media efforts. The US official sent in reports based on the source's information. Yet these warnings garnered little attention within the US government. "Anybody who had any doubt about Putin's intentions," the US official later said, "just wasn't reading what we reported."

- Steele isn't sure the pee party happened. Steele's dossier became most notorious because it included the allegation that Trump had prostitutes put on a "golden showers" performance in his hotel room when he was in Moscow in 2013. Steele's larger point was that the Russian government, according to his sources, had obtained compromising information about Trump's personal conduct that could be used to blackmail Trump. There still is no confirmation anything sordid happened in Trump's suite that particular night. (At least one Trump associate has said Trump engaged in sexual antics on previous trips to Russia.) Steele, according to Russian Roulette, has told people that he believes that 70 to 90 percent of the broad assertions of his reporting--that Russia mounted a campaign to cultivate Trump and in some manner colluded with the Trump campaign--was accurate. But he is less certain about the most sordid allegation. Regarding whether prostitutes in Moscow had urinated in Trump's presence, Steele has told colleagues, "It's fifty-fifty."

LANGUAGE OF THE ROADS

The language of the roads is standardised but the handwriting varies hugely. It's not Transport, the round sans serif typeface designed for highway signs in the late 1950s by Margaret Calvert and Jock Kinneir. The official script is Pavement, an elongated form of Transport, but it's only a guide: nearly all the shapes and lettering on road surfaces are hand-painted. Reading the roads every day, you begin to notice the different hands. Some do short, fat-bottomed arrows, with an even triangle for the head; others draw long stems topped with a flashy inverted 'V'. A few are jaunty, most are austere. Some hands are rather shaky and in need of practice: you can tell where a painter was learning or lazy (Dalston has some terrible - terribly good? - examples). But there's much artistry too, starting with the straightness of lines and the even dashes of parking spaces. Where there is variety, it's hard to tell if fashions or individuals have changed. The bicycle symbols that were painted in Islington four or five years ago (that's as long as road paint lasts) showed rather elegant, long, square-wheeled machines with tapered racer handlebars curving back like ibex horns. They only remain as ghosts now, and have been replaced with a new shape, rounder and with the fussy addition of pedals. Road symbols, like all municipal communication, seem to grow cuter but also vaguely patronising. Perhaps out of respect, the latest shapes are painted a few yards along from the older, fading figures. [...]

There weren't any markings on the roads themselves till 1918, when Britain became the first country to paint a white line down the middle to keep cars from colliding. Pedestrian markings appeared later, during World War Two, when the edges of roads were whitened so that people could see them in the blackout. As late as the 1950s many of the markings remained optional - recommendations not rules - and presumably some sort of Brownian motion ensued. Now there are so many markings the roads need constant maintenance and one type of sign has barely faded before a new rule or style supersedes it. Figures are replicated to the point of incoherence: at some places along the cycle routes a bike is painted every three yards. A narrow cut-through I take, not wide enough for a car, has the words 'Look Right' on one side of the pedestrian crossing and 'Look Left' on the other, so close they're almost touching. In other places lettering is bunched up, unreadable; arrows point in two directions; a cycle lane runs into a wall.

SO MANY CHOICES:

Ryan Goodman recently highlighted an important revelation contained in the memo written by Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee: Not only had the Russians told the Trump campaign that they had dirt on Hillary Clinton in the form of thousands of emails, but they had also previewed for George Papadopoulos, a foreign policy adviser on the campaign, that they could help with disseminating them.

 [...]

Goodman and the experts he spoke with identified four types of actions that could create criminal liability for the Trump team stemming from this new information: if the campaign consulted with the Russians on their plans to disseminate the emails, if the Trump campaign gave tacit assent or approval or support, if Trump officials intentionally encouraged the Russians, or if they sought to conceal the facts of a crime. Just looking at the publicly available information shows the outlines of a potential legal case against members of the Trump team along these very lines.

As campaign finance law expert Paul S. Ryan points out, campaigns cannot coordinate with foreign nationals on any expenditure that seeks to influence a U.S. election. Coordination includes cooperation, consultation, or acting in concert with, or at the request or suggestion of the candidate or his team. A key word is or--each of those actions could independently suffice to establish a violation.

The emails to set up the now infamous June 9, 2016, Trump Tower meeting contain a particularly incriminating piece of evidence on this score. While significant focus has been given to Donald Trump Jr.'s enthusiastic response to the offer of damaging information on Clinton as "part of Russia and its government's support for Mr. Trump," equal attention should be paid to the rest of his response, in which he says that such information would be helpful "especially later in the summer." In this statement, Trump Jr. was not only communicating a willingness to collude with Russia; he was also telling them when the campaign thought the release of such information would be most politically useful. What's more, as Bob Bauer has noted, when Trump Jr. told the Russian lawyer the information that she presented on Clinton-related donors was not valuable, he "aided the Russians by providing access to its judgments about attacks that would be ineffective." That too was a form of consultation and assistance.

SWEET CLARITY:

After many voters were drawn to Trump's calling Mexican immigrants rapists and murderers, their critics claimed that the populism eventually articulated by former White House chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon was grounded in ethnocentrism.

This past weekend, Bannon, who has increasingly been connecting with nationalist leaders around the world who share his politics, encouraged those who share his worldview to embrace accusations of racism.

While speaking Saturday at a gathering of the far-right French National Front party, Bannon told the gathering they should be proud of being accused of racism.

"Let them call you racists," Bannon said. "Let them call you xenophobes. Let them call you nativists. Wear it as a badge of honor."

RESTORE GOD'S TIME:

MIS-SPELLING:

You spelled "CNN broke the news of Farrakhan's anti Semitic, misogynist, and anti-LGBTQ speech, wrote about it on https://t.co/Ee7scGTCpp & covered it on TV" wrong. Unless that's what you meant by "blackout." https://t.co/HuVE7kn4a1

— Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) March 11, 2018

WE CAN'T KILL CAIN FAST ENOUGH:

Consider the life of a truck driver forty years ago versus today. In 1976 long-haul truck drivers had a powerful, if flawed, union in the Teamsters and enjoyed middle-class wages and excellent benefits. They also had a remarkable degree of autonomy, giving the job a cowboy or outlaw image. Drivers had to track their hours carefully, of course, and submit to weigh stations and other inspections of their trucks. But dispatchers could not reach them while they were on the road, since CB radios have limited range. Truckers would call in from pay phones, if they wanted. 

No longer. Trucking companies today monitor drivers closely through "telematics" devices that gather and analyze data on their location, driving speed, and delivery efficiency. Some even note when a driver turns the truck on before fastening his seat belt, thereby wasting gas. As sociologist Karen Levy has shown, some long-haul trucking companies use telematics to push drivers to drive for all the hours permitted per day under federal law, at times waking them up or even overriding drivers' own judgments about whether it is safe to drive. UPS has used the technologies to reduce its stock of drivers, and many have noted the stress that "metrics-based harassment" puts on workers.

While the specter of self-driving vehicles is out there, this is the current reality for many drivers and will be for the foreseeable future. We have seen stunning advances in autonomous vehicles in recent years, but there is a vast difference between driving on a highway or broad suburban streets in good weather conditions and navigating narrow and pothole-filled city streets, not to mention making the actual delivery to houses, apartments, and businesses. As labor economist David Autor and others have argued, we are nowhere close to fully automated production or distribution of goods, since so many jobs involve nonrepetitive tasks. In other words, the reports of the death of work have been greatly exaggerated.

Technological development is nevertheless altering the political economy of labor markets in profound ways. As we can see in the truck driver example, many firms are deploying information technologies to erode workers' conditions and bargaining power without displacing them.

And of course truck drivers are not alone. Many other firms today use advanced information technologies to push for more efficiency, in the process reducing workers' discretion, ultimately requiring them to work harder, faster, and for less. For example, where once taxi drivers' folk knowledge of the optimal path from A to B in a crowded city was a valuable skill, now Uber and Lyft can calculate the best route through GPS technology and machine learning processes based on data gleaned from hundreds of thousands of trips.

Other technological innovations make it easier--which is to say more efficient--to purchase labor without entering formal employment relationships and accepting the attendant legal duties. In the past firms tended to employ workers rather than contractors, or to pay employees above-market wages, in scenarios where it was difficult to train or monitor them. Workers who felt valued in this way would work diligently and remain loyal toward firms, ultimately reducing overall labor costs.

Again Uber's model helps illustrate. The company's app reduces consumers' and drivers' search costs significantly. Rapid scalability reduces Uber's costs of identifying and contracting with new drivers and riders; its GPS-based monitoring of its drivers enables it to know whether they are speeding or otherwise driving carelessly and whether they are accepting a sufficient number of fares; and its customer rating system enables it to manage an enormous workforce without managerial supervision. The net result is an economic organization of global scope based largely on contract where the firm disclaims any employment relationship toward its workers and therefore any employment duties toward them.

To be clear, there are powerful arguments that Uber drivers meet the legal test for employment, given the company's pervasive control of their work and its economic power over them. But given the ambiguities of current law, Uber has few economic incentives to bring drivers inside the firm, making them employees, or to extend them generous wage and benefit packages. Similarly Amazon's analytics help it to keep wages low: with barcode scanners tracking pickers' and packers' efficiency, the company does not have to pay workers as well to keep them motivated.

Finally, extensive data about market structures and consumer demand can enable firms to exert power over their suppliers or contractual partners, driving down costs--and therefore wages and conditions--through their supply chains. Walmart has long leveraged its unparalleled market data to estimate the lowest possible price suppliers will accept for goods, putting downward pressure on their profits and their workers' wages. Amazon does the same today, and franchisors such as McDonald's set prices and detailed product specifications for their franchisees.

Many firms today have substituted algorithmic scheduling for middle-managers' local knowledge, using data on past sales, local events, and even weather forecasts to schedule work shifts. A Starbucks employee, for example, has little schedule predictability since she is at the mercy of the algorithm, and a McDonald's worker can be sent home early if computers say sales are slow. This push to limit labor costs through finely tuned scheduling practices also alters workplace norms, since workers cannot appeal to a computer's emotions in asking for more or less time, a raise, or a slower pace of work. The net effect of all of this is that power in our labor and product markets is increasingly concentrated in a few hands.

Crucially such management techniques and new production strategies are often more efficient than the status quo. Amazon has undeniably lowered prices for goods through its use of automation. Similarly a recent MIT study calculated that just three thousand multi-passenger cabs using a version of Uber's algorithm could serve Manhattan's need for taxis. The potential benefits here are staggering, especially if coupled with a modern mass transit system: shorter commutes, less car ownership, less pollution, and more urban space.

But the line between innovation and exploitation is far from clear. While some workers will thrive as their unique skills and talents are rewarded by new technologies, many others will have less autonomy, less generous wages, less time for social connection, and unpredictable schedules.

WAIT, McENROE CALLED SOMEONE ELSE A BRAT?:

Most professional athletes are obsessed with winning, or at least with not losing. This fixation almost always predates them becoming a professional, and sometimes even comes before playing serious sport. It is pronounced in tennis players, and especially pronounced in Nick Kyrgios. He approaches everything from the men's tour to the video game Call of Duty with the same obsessional thirst for competition, and has done ever since he was an overweight, asthmatic kid playing juniors in Canberra.

This trait is unexceptional for a tennis player, possibly even a requirement, but in Kyrgios it is extreme, and sits uncomfortably with the rest of his personality, which is surprisingly collegiate, fair, funny and empathetic. (You might miss these features on a tennis court.) He has been open about this contradiction, and unusually good at describing it. "There is a constant tug-of-war between the competitor within me wanting to win, win, win," he wrote for PlayersVoice in 2017, "and the human in me wanting to live a normal life with my family away from the public glare."

This drive helped him become the youngest player to hold a position in the men's top hundred ATP rankings. On his first encounters with Rafael Nadal, Roger Federer and Novak Djokovic, he beat them all. He will be 23 in April, but sometimes talks as though he is a veteran and a little envious of younger players for their freedom and untested confidence. He retains his own freedom by playing tennis with a degree of flair, spontaneity and expressiveness that often borders on the unwise: "tweeners" - shots hit between the legs - are a signature, and representative of a repertoire that extends to round-the-netpost shots and speculative drop shots from behind the baseline. His frank cross-court forehand slap works around 2 per cent of the time, but is one of the most spectacular shots in tennis when it does.

He is the best Australian player in a generation, and somehow this is considered an underachievement. His former coach Josh Eagle revealed Kyrgios could maintain a position just outside the top 20 while doing less than 15 minutes' practice a day. Instead he played basketball and video games, and let his quick hands and reflexes pick up the slack.

He injured his hip, shoulder, knee, ankle, back and elbow, sometimes while playing basketball. He earned almost $6 million in prize money, and paid almost $100,000 in fines. Forbes magazine rated him the most fun tennis player in the world to watch, but not the easiest to watch. Many of those fines accrued in strings of code violations, and some were for moments his half-hearted effort dropped to a no-hearted effort. He admitted to deliberately "tanking" in perhaps eight professional tournaments.

He became famous for meltdowns. When the pressure of talent and competition and winning became too acute, he forfeited or gave up. In his second-round match at the Australian Open in 2017, where he led Andreas Seppi two sets to love, he announced "I didn't sign up for this bullshit" during the third set, received a code violation, and left the court two and a half sets later to the sound of home-crowd booing. He also beat opponents without pleasure, and shook his head after hitting winners.

He was called a brat, a sulking brat, a peanut, a disgrace, a shame, a galoot, and the most talented tennis player of the past decade. (John McEnroe made both the "sulking brat" and the "most talented" comments.) Chinese commentators used a phrase that means "to sink into oblivion".

There was a time when a Nick Kyrgios press conference could feel like an intervention, or a parole board hearing. Press conferences are on his long list of dislikes, which includes noise, late line calls, umpires, late challenges, fans arriving late, phone calls, birds, ball boys not handing him a towel quickly enough, and, periodically, tennis. He mixes disdain for media calls with a painful degree of disclosure. There were times he didn't so much wear his heart on his sleeve as display it clinically, as though on an autopsy table. He questioned his commitment. "I don't really like the sport of tennis that much," he told the UK's Independent newspaper.

No one does.

INSIDE BASEBALL:

Independent investigations by FiveThirtyEight, publications like The Ringer, and Nathan himself have shown differences in the characteristics of the ball and the way it performs. Research has shown that balls used in games after the 2015 All-Star Game were bouncier and less air resistant compared with baseballs from the 2014 season, when players hit a relatively modest 4,186 homers, the fewest since 1995. (Nathan noted that MLB does not regularly measure air resistance.) Taken together, these changes would result in a ball that would come off the bat at a higher speed and carry farther. While investigations have been able to show that the baseball behaves differently in recent years, no one had looked inside the ball to see if there was evidence of changes to the way the baseball is constructed.

EVEN POLISH PLUMBERS WON'T PICK FRUIT:

NORMAL AGING RESUMES:

After three weeks and two days, a training camp for baseball's unsigned free agents will close its doors Friday. According to the Associated Press, 41 players attended the camp in Bradenton, Fla. Only seven found employment. Other veterans such as Mike Moustakas, Jake Arrieta, Alex Cobb, Lance Lynn and Andre Ethier have been training on their own while exhibition games began without them.

The offseason was a time for reflection. The supply of unsigned players was exceeded only by the supply of opinions as to how the market had changed and why. Once the games began, however, this was no longer a story about supply and demand. It was a story of aesthetics.

The average age of the major league hitter decreased from 29.3 in 2004 to 28.3 in 2017. The average age of pitchers fell too - not as pronounced, but following the same broad trend - from 29.2 in 2005 to 28.5 a year ago. Now, the average age is roughly in line with the 1980s and early 1990s, before the size of the league and the size of the players grew.

The majority of unsigned major league free agents are in their 30s. [...]

Craig Counsell caught himself mid-thought.

"The PED era fooled us a little bit," he said, and a smile quickly crept over his face. 

THE lEFT IS THE rIGHT:

ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:

AMERICA'S GAME:

Ted Williams began his autobiography by saying that when he was a kid, his only ambition was to have people say, as we walked down the street, "There goes the greatest hitter who ever lived." My own autobiography could start the same way. It would end differently, though.

In this I can confidently speak for millions of American males. Every little boy has his dreams of baseball glory from the first time he feels the delicious shock in the wrists of bat smashing ball and sees the ball rocket away into the outfield, faster and farther than he knew he could propel it. That's enough to keep him going through the long summers when he's picked last in the sandlot games, assigned to bat last, and ordered to play right field, where he gets yelled at by his teammates when he lets an easy grounder roll past him.

Not to play means missing out on the common experience of the male sex. And once you get into it, it's easy to get absorbed. In Ypsilanti, Michigan, I spent long winters studying baseball statistics to while away the endless cold grey days until the snow melted. Then, around mid March, we started our new season in the park, or any empty field. At that time of year it didn't feel good to connect. In the chill, hitting the ball stung your hands, and catching it hurt worse, so that you'd suck your breath through your chattering teeth. You tried to snag the ball in the webbing of your glove, even if you were a good fielder, because having it smack your palm was almost unbearable.

Our neighborhood games were played with no more than seven boys on a team: slow pitch, no catchers, no umpires. We'd lob pitches in so that everyone could hit and put the ball in play. Anyway, we were all afraid of fast pitching, though this fear was one of those things you didn't confess, like wetting the bed or getting beaten up by your sister.

But we had to face fast pitching in Little League, which turned out to be the fatal hurdle on my way to Cooperstown. [...]

Baseball is a deeply orderly game. The distinctiveness of its component actions -- pitching, hitting, fielding, and base-running -- makes them available to separate attention, measurement, analysis, and judgment. Every player's contribution to every play is recorded and given value. The statistics are rarely misleading. If you want to know who the American League's best second baseman of the Thirties was, well, as Casey Stengel used to say, "You could look it up." Try that with defensive linemen.

Other sports thrill; baseball also absorbs. It's the most discussable game, and it's the national pastime largely because we can talk about it so volubly long after we can play it. No other sport binds the generations the way baseball does.

Because it's so thoroughly recorded, baseball has a genuine history. It also has a continuity that the other major sports don't have. "The NFL keeps changing the most basic rules," Thomas Boswell observes. "Most blocking now would have been illegal use of the hands in Jim Parker's time. How do we compare eras when the sport never stays the same?" In fact, none of the other three sports is the same game it was as recently as the Fifties, for all sorts of reasons. Wilt Chamberlain's season scoring records will never be broken, simply because nobody will ever play against as many white players as Chamberlain did. (If you want a sure-fire laugh, ask a basketball fan whether Michael Jordan is as great as George Mikan.)

The statistical discreteness of individual performance, set against the game's stable history, gives achievement in baseball a permanence and stature other sports can seldom confer. And even racial integration hasn't devalued the records; in fact, most fans -- including experts -- doubt Henry Aaron was a greater slugger than the man whose supreme record he broke. Lawrence Ritter reckons that with as many times at bat as Aaron, Ruth would have hit 1,064 home runs. Be that as it may, heroism in baseball is more perduring than in other American sports, and does much to account for the splendid literature baseball has produced. Nearly every fan has read John Updike's description of Williams' last game.

KNOW BO:

When Bo's hip gave out on that carry down the sideline against the Bengals, Danny Duffy was 2. Still in diapers. And he's one of the older guys in here. How could he know?

Did he even know who Bo was? I asked.

"Bro," he said. "We all know."

Really?

"My uncle Josh was like 6 years older than me, and he would just wear me out with Bo Jackson stuff," Duffy said. "We'd play Tecmo Super Bowl, and Josh would always be Bo Jackson. I couldn't tackle him. He'd run back and forth all over the field, just zigzagging, and I couldn't do anything about it."

Uncle Josh sounds like a great man, and this is about when I start to feel like the age gap isn't as much. Or, maybe, YouTube and ESPN's You Don't Know Bo have just closed the gap.

"I've definitely searched 'Bo Jackson' a few times," said Nicky Lopez, a middle-infield prospect born in 1995. "Throwing out that runner from the warning track, the one he caught and then ran along the wall, just crazy plays you don't see normal people make. There was a story, I don't know if it's true, but of him hitting the scoreboard in Kansas City with a home run."

That story is absolutely true, by the way. I've heard it so many times. It was the day of his introductory news conference at Royals Stadium, and he hadn't picked up a bat in months. Nobody thought he'd swing. The Royals probably didn't want him to swing, but once he announced into the microphones he wanted to hit, there was no stopping him.

Avron Fogelman, at the time a part owner in the team and an avid memorabilia collector, watched from a suite as Bo hit the base of the scoreboard. Fogleman pointed at a staff worker.

"Go get me that ball!"

Then, Bo hit one even higher off the scoreboard. Fogleman found a second staff worker.

"Go get me that ball!"

C'MON GUYS, AT LEAST PRETEND TO BE HONEST:

The White House held private meetings with four Cabinet-level officials last month to scold them for embarrassing stories about questionable ethical behavior at their respective agencies, sources familiar with the sessions tell CNN.

Internal watchdogs have launched at least nine audits, reviews or investigations across several Cabinet agencies, and stories about first-class travel, expensive office furniture, and internal strife have become commonplace.

Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson, Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin and Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt all met with officials from the White House counsel's office and the Cabinet liaison.

The meetings, held at chief of staff John Kelly's request, were intended to provide "a clear message that optics matter," the sources said.

OR, AS THE GREAT ANGLO-AMERICAN PHILOSOPHER PUT IT...:

One thing which made religion a key to virtue was the humility which Christianity promoted. Most of our political and social problems, Burke believed, stemmed ultimately from vanity, the chief of the vices. We must recognize that we are a part of an order greater than ourselves if our lives are to have meaning and virtue and if our society is to be a humane and stable one. One of the things which most appalled Burke about the French Revolution was its attack on the church. He recognized that this would doom the project, since "all other nations have begun the fabric of a new government, or the reformation of an old, by establishing originally or by enforcing with greater exactness some rites or other of religion."

Despite Burke's defense of church establishment, he was also a supporter of religious liberty. And, he bitterly attacked the anti-Catholicism laws imposed on Ireland. Such laws were eroding Irish society, destroying social and cultural bonds and transforming the population into an atomized mob ripe for rebellion. Government attacks on new and minority churches were bad enough, but attacking the major, ancestral church of a society was deadly. He warned against the promotion of a generic "Protestantism" understood as anti-Catholicism, pointing out that an atheist, with his rejection of all Catholic doctrine rather than just portions of it, is "the most perfect Protestant." In attacking Catholicism, government was attacking religion, piety, and, ultimately, society itself.

Notably, Burke displayed great respect for, and interest in, major non-Christian religions such as Hinduism and Islam. Indeed, in opposing the openly tyrannical governance of India by the fortune-seeking men of the East India Company, he noted that, in contrast, rule in traditional Islamic states (such as those they were supplanting) was--at least in theory--never arbitrary. This was because the prince's actions were constrained by Islamic law, and clerics had the moral authority to help check his excesses. 

FOLLOW THE YELLOW ROAD:

Steele worked out of the British Embassy for M.I.6, under diplomatic cover. His years in Moscow, 1990 to 1993, were among the most dramatic in Russian history, a period that included the collapse of the Communist Party; nationalist uprisings in Ukraine, the Caucasus, and the Baltic states; and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Boris Yeltsin gained ultimate power in Russia, and a moment of democratic promise faded as the K.G.B.--now called the F.S.B.--reasserted its influence, oligarchs snapped up state assets, and nationalist political forces began to emerge. Vladimir Putin, a K.G.B. operative returning from East Germany, reinvented himself in the shadowy world of St. Petersburg politics. By the time Steele left the country, optimism was souring, and a politics of resentment--against the oligarchs, against an increasing gap between rich and poor, and against the West--was taking hold.

After leaving Moscow, Steele was assigned an undercover posting with the British Embassy in Paris, but he and a hundred and sixteen other British spies had their cover blown by an anonymously published list. Steele came in from the cold and returned to London, and in 2006 he began running its Russia desk, growing increasingly pessimistic about the direction of the Russian Federation.

Steele's already dim view of the Kremlin darkened in November, 2006, when Alexander Litvinenko, a former Russian K.G.B. officer and a Putin critic who had been recruited by M.I.6, suffered an agonizing death in a London hospital, after drinking a cup of tea poisoned with radioactive polonium-210. Moscow had evidently sanctioned a brazen murder in his own country. Steele was put in charge of M.I.6's investigation. Authorities initially planned to indict one suspect in the murder, but Steele's investigative work persuaded them to indict a second suspect as well. Nine years later, the U.K.'s official inquiry report was finally released, and it confirmed Steele's view: the murder was an operation by the F.S.B., and it was "probably approved" by Vladimir Putin.

Steele has never commented on the case, or on any other aspect of his intelligence work, but Richard Dearlove, who led M.I.6 from 1999 to 2004, has described his reputation as "superb." A former senior officer recalls him as "a Russia-area expert whose knowledge I and others respected--he was very careful, and very savvy." Another former M.I.6 officer described him as having a "Marmite" personality--a reference to the salty British spread, which people either love or hate. He suggested that Steele didn't appear to be "going places in the service," noting that, after the Cold War, Russia had become a backwater at M.I.6. But he acknowledged that Steele "knew Russia well," and that running the Russia desk was "a proper job that you don't give to an idiot."

The British Secret Intelligence Service is highly regarded by the United States, particularly for its ability to harvest information from face-to-face sources, rather than from signals intelligence, such as electronic surveillance, as the U.S. often does. British and American intelligence services work closely together, and, while Steele was at M.I.6, British intelligence was often included in the U.S. President's daily-briefing reports. In 2008, Michael Hayden, the C.I.A. director, visited the U.K., and Steele briefed him on Russian developments. The following year, President Obama visited the U.K., and was briefed on a report that Steele had written about Russia. Steve Hall, a former chief of the C.I.A.'s Central Eurasia Division, which includes Russia, the former Soviet states, and the Balkans, told me, "M.I.6 is second only perhaps to the U.S. in its ability to collect intelligence from Russia." He added, "We've always coördinated closely with them because they did such a great job. We're playing in the Yankee Stadium of espionage here. This isn't Guatemala."

In 2008, Steele informed M.I.6 that he planned to leave the service and open a commercial intelligence firm with Burrows. He left in good standing, but his exit was hastened, because M.I.6 regarded his plans as a potential conflict of interest. Launching the business was a risky move: London was filled with companies run by former intelligence officers selling their contacts and inside knowledge. To differentiate itself, Orbis, which opened its office in Mayfair, attempted to exploit Steele's Russian expertise. The strategy appears to have paid off. According to people with knowledge of the company, Orbis grossed approximately twenty million dollars in its first nine years. Steele now drives a Land Rover Discovery Sport, and belongs to a golf club. He also runs a bit, but the feats that kept him in shape while he was a spy--he ran six marathons and twenty-five half-marathons, and competed in a dozen Olympic-length triathlon events--have been replaced by the carrying of a briefcase. His free time is devoted largely to his family, which includes three cats, one of whom not long ago replicated the most infamous allegation in the Steele dossier by peeing on a family member's bed.

Orbis's clients are mostly businesses or law firms representing corporations. Burrows said that although the company has fewer than ten full-time employees, "we're a bit like the bridge on the Starship Enterprise--we're a small group but we manage an enormous ship." To serve its clients, Orbis employs dozens of confidential "collectors" around the world, whom it pays as contract associates. Some of the collectors are private investigators at smaller firms; others are investigative reporters or highly placed experts in strategically useful jobs. Depending on the task and the length of engagement, the fee for collectors can be as much as two thousand dollars a day. The collectors harvest intelligence from a much larger network of unpaid sources, some of whom don't even realize they are being treated as informants. These sources occasionally receive favors--such as help in getting their children into Western schools--but money doesn't change hands, because it could risk violating laws against, say, bribing government officials or insider trading. Paying sources might also encourage them to embellish.

Steele has not been to Russia, or visited any former Soviet states, since 2009. Unlike some of his former M.I.6 colleagues, he has not been declared persona non grata by Putin's regime, but, in 2012, an Orbis informant quoted an F.S.B. agent describing him as "an enemy of Mother Russia." Steele concluded that it would be difficult for him to work in the country unnoticed. The firm guards the identities of its sources, but it's clear that many Russian contacts can be interviewed elsewhere, and London is the center of the post-Soviet Russian diaspora.

Orbis often performs anti-corruption investigations for clients attempting internal reviews, and helps hedge funds and other financial companies perform due diligence or obtain strategic information. One Orbis client who agreed to talk to me, a Western businessman with interests in Russia and Ukraine, described Steele to me as "very efficient, very professional, and very credible." He said that his company had successfully cross-checked Steele's research with other people, adding, "I don't know anyone who's been critical of his work. His reports are very good. It's an absolute no-brainer that he's just a political target. They're trying to shoot the messenger."

Orbis promises confidentiality, and releases no information on its clientele. Some of its purported clients, such as a major Western oil company, are conventional corporations. Others are controversial, including a London law firm representing the interests of Oleg Deripaska, the billionaire victor of Russia's aluminum wars, a notoriously violent battle. He has been described as Putin's favorite oligarch. Steele's possible financial ties to Deripaska recently prompted Senator Grassley to demand more information from the London law firm. If a financial trail between Deripaska and Orbis can be established, it is likely to raise even more questions about Steele, because Deripaska has already figured in the Russia investigation, in an unsavory light. Paul Manafort, Trump's former campaign manager, has been accused of defrauding Deripaska's company while working for it in Ukraine. (Manafort has been indicted by Special Counsel Robert Mueller on charges of money laundering and other financial crimes. He has pleaded not guilty.) Even if Steele's rumored work for Deripaska is aboveboard, it illustrates the transition that he has made from the world of government service to the ethically gray world of commerce. Oligarchs battling other oligarchs provide some of the most lucrative work for investigators with expertise in Russia. Orbis maintains that, as long as its activities are limited to providing litigation support for Western law firms acting in Western courts, it is helping to settle disputes in a more civilized way than they would be in Russia. But Steele stepped into a murkier realm when he left M.I.6.

Republican claims to the contrary, Steele's interest in Trump did not spring from his work for the Clinton campaign. He ran across Trump's name almost as soon as he went into private business, many years before the 2016 election. Two of his earliest cases at Orbis involved investigating international crime rings whose leaders, coincidentally, were based in New York's Trump Tower.

Steele's first client after leaving M.I.6 was England's Football Association, which hoped to host the World Cup in 2018, but suspected dirty dealings by the governing body, fifa. England lost out in its bid to Russia, and Steele determined that the Kremlin had rigged the process with bribes. According to Ken Bensinger's "Red Card," an upcoming book about the scandal, "one of Steele's best sources" informed him that the Deputy Prime Minister, Igor Sechin--now the C.E.O. of the Russian state-controlled oil giant Rosneft--is suspected of having travelled to Qatar "to swap World Cup votes."

Steele appears to have spoken anonymously to the Sunday Times of London about the case. An "ex-M.I.6 source" who investigated the bidding process told the paper, "The key thing with Russia was six months before the bid, it got to the point where the country feared the humiliation of being beaten and had to do something. . . . Putin dragged in all sorts of capabilities." He added, "Don't expect me or anyone else to produce a document with Putin's signature saying 'Please, X, bribe Y with this amount in this way.' He's not going to do that."

Steele might have been expected to move on once his investigation of the bidding was concluded. But he had discovered that the corruption at fifa was global, and he felt that it should be addressed. The only organization that could handle an investigation of such scope, he felt, was the F.B.I. In 2011, Steele contacted an American agent he'd met who headed the Bureau's division for serious crimes in Eurasia. Steele introduced him to his sources, who proved essential to the ensuing investigation. In 2015, the Justice Department indicted fourteen people in connection with a hundred and fifty million dollars in bribes and kickbacks. One of them was Chuck Blazer, a top fifa official who had embezzled a fortune from the organization and became an informant for the F.B.I. Blazer had an eighteen-thousand-dollar-per-month apartment in Trump Tower, a few floors down from Trump's residence.

Nobody had alleged that Trump knew of any fifa crimes, but Steele soon came across Trump Tower again. Several years ago, the F.B.I. hired Steele to help crack an international gambling and money-laundering ring purportedly run by a suspected Russian organized-crime figure named Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov. The syndicate was based in an apartment in Trump Tower. Eventually, federal officials indicted more than thirty co-conspirators for financial crimes. Tokhtakhounov, though, eluded arrest, becoming a fugitive. Interpol issued a "red notice" calling for his arrest. But, in the fall of 2013, he showed up at the Miss Universe contest in Moscow--and sat near the pageant's owner, Donald Trump.

"It was as if all criminal roads led to Trump Tower," Steele told friends.

FALSE RELIGION TO TRUE:

THERE'S NO SWEETER RIDE THAN THE BULLPEN CART:

Vega, 43, is the owner of The Auto Firm, an extremely popular customization shop located a relatively short drive away from South Beach in Miami. It's a location that's well known to prominent athletes ranging from Alex Ovechkin to Greg Norman, but is especially popular with pro baseball players and Vega's custom creations are annual attendees at spring training.

Starting in 2004 when he customized a Hummer for Alfonso Soriano after the ballplayer saw a model he had modified for Rick Ross and wanted a similar job, Vega has had a steady stream of work coming his way in advance of spring training each year.

Players want to show up with a ride that will impress their teammates and get people talking - look no further than the flame-throwing Lamborghini Yoenis Cespedes once brought to spring training - and those who don't have a car that's been given the Vega touch, want one.

PITY THE POOR FLATLANDERS:

Frost 👏 was 👏 saying 👏 the 👏 notion 👏 of 👏 the 👏 road 👏 not 👏 taken 👏 was 👏 fanciful 👏 revisionist 👏 nostalgia 👏 and 👏 not 👏 based 👏 in 👏 reality 👏

— Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) March 7, 2018

THOSE DANG GLOBALISTS::

 In an interview with NBC, Putin said the 13 Russian nationals who were indicted by special counsel Robert Mueller may not even be ethnically Russians, which would apparently mean they're not real Russians at all. "Maybe they're not even Russians," Putin told NBC's Megyn Kelly. "Maybe they're Ukrainians, Tatars, Jews, just with Russian citizenship. Even that needs to be checked. Maybe they have dual citizenship. 

VLAD'S MAN FROM JUMP ST:

Just a month after Trump announced his campaign for the White House, he spoke directly to Maria Butina, the protégé of the powerful Russian banking official and Putin ally Alexander Torshin. During a public question and answer session at FreedomFest, a libertarian convention in Las Vegas in July 2015, Butina asked Trump what he would do as president about "damaging" US sanctions. Trump suggested he would get rid of them. [....]

[T]rump responded: "I know Putin, and I'll tell you what, we get along with Putin... I believe I would get along very nicely with Putin, OK? And I mean, where we have the strength. I don't think you'd need the sanctions. I think we would get along very, very well."

THE MEETING IS THE VICTORY FOR THE NORKs:

OPEN SOURCE IT ALL:

President Trump issued the second pardon of his presidency Friday to former Navy sailor Kristian Saucier, who learned the news while driving a garbage truck, the only job he could find with a felony conviction.

STRIPPING AWAY THE LAYERS:

Here's a step-by-step guide of how the Daniels affair could potentially creep into the Mueller probe:

STEP 1: MUELLER INVESTIGATES COHEN'S TIES TO RUSSIA

First things first, an investigation of Cohen could open the door to examining the payments.

The New York Times reported that Cohen is under FBI scrutiny in the Russia investigation. The Washington Post reported that Mueller has requested documents and interviewed witnesses about Cohen, specifically regarding pursuit of a Russian business deal during the campaign and his involvement in an effort to craft a "peace plan" for Ukraine.

CNN has previously reported that Mueller's team asked witnesses about the failed efforts to build a Trump-branded tower in Moscow. Cohen played a leading role in those negotiations.

Cohen is also mentioned in the controversial dossier, written by former British spy Christopher Steele, that alleges widespread collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. Cohen vehemently denies all the allegations in the dossier. CNN has reported that members of Mueller's team met last summer with Steele, presumably to learn about the dossier claims.

STEP 2: MUELLER BROADENS HIS COHEN INQUIRY

If investigators are already looking into Cohen's activities during the campaign, it is possible they could broaden their inquiry to include his financial arrangement with Daniels.

Mueller was authorized by the Justice Department to investigate Russian interference in the 2016 election, any potential ties between Trump associates and the Russians, potential obstruction of justice and "any matters that arose or may arise directly from the investigation."

That last phrase is how Mueller could investigate the payment to Daniels.

THE NOBLE DON WAS THE ONLY SANE ONE IN THE STORY:

"Two types of humanity were the wonder of medieval Europe: the great saint and the great knight." So declared Russell Kirk in his magnificent The Roots of American Order. In an illuminating chapter appropriately called "The Light of the Middle Ages," Kirk argued that the saint and the knight gave rise to the scholar and the gentleman in later generations. This "neglected inheritance"--true in a broader sense--was not lost on the American Founders. They drew on its riches to give our constitutional order its distinctiveness.

The great saint and the great knight come together most prominently in the founding of an earlier order. Christopher Dawson, in his brilliant Medieval Essays, observed that medieval chivalry was "a sacred institution consecrated by religious rites and dedicated to the service of God and the defence of Holy Church. This religious conception of chivalry is already implicit in the crusading movement; it finds explicit expression in the new military orders, whose ideals were set forth by St. Bernard himself in his work In Praise of the New Knighthood." The most perfect expression of this, as Dan Jones demonstrates, was the Knights Templar.

THE GIRL IN THE "BEEHIVE-MULLET":

When I was growing up in the 1960s, our little tract house in northern Knoxville, Tennessee, was nearly always filled with the twin aromas of cigarette smoke and home cooking--a bouquet of bacon, fried eggs, coffee, and fried toast, which my stay-at-home mother cooked daily for my manual-laborer father--and the reverberations of country music. Some mornings I could hear my parents talking in the kitchen when they thought I was still asleep. (I learned a lot of family secrets by eavesdropping from bed.) But mostly I listened for the kitchen radio, tuned to WIVK, from which the splendid twang of country music poured forth. My father loved Merle Haggard. My mother loved George Jones. I loved Dolly Parton, Skeeter Davis, Jean Shepard, Tammy Wynette, and Connie Smith. I adored Loretta Lynn, though it was not easy for a Tennessee girl like me to choose a Kentucky singer as her favorite. After all, Dolly had come down from the mountains in neighboring Sevier County and sung shows around our town; she had appeared on local television for years. One was expected to be loyal, to take sides, to support the home-grown hero that Dolly was becoming. But I watched Loretta on TV, too. With her big hair, big guitar, and big voice, she materialized before me in flickering living color every Saturday afternoon when I tuned in to watch The Wilburn Brothers Show, a country music variety program hosted by Doyle and Teddy Wilburn, a singing brother act from Arkansas. 

My father told me that Loretta was from Eastern Kentucky--a "child bride" was what he called her with some pity--and that she wrote most of her own songs. He admired the way she kept up with herself by thrumming out a steady rhythm on her guitar, backed by the Wilburn Brothers' house band, an old-school country knock and grind grounded in that familiar crying-shame country music accompaniment: pedal steel, bass, and electric guitar. She sang her heart out in a voice that awakened my budding musical sensibilities. I could sing along. I could pick out her songs on my grandmother's farmhouse piano. But Loretta's voice kindled the fire for that honky-tonk sound that still burns in me today. And I liked the way she looked. 

I didn't have a name for Loretta Lynn's coiffure in 1963, but now I'd call it a sort of beehive-mullet. 

NOT tHE oNION:

HE BETTER GET TO LEAD THIS MILITARY PARADE HE SOLD OUT FOR:

[T]he agreement to talks is, in itself, a reward. North Korea is close to achieving what it has long craved: a meeting with the US on equal terms. Far from being crazed, the Stalinist state's nuclear programme has long rested on rational foundations. The fearsome project grants the isolated country diplomatic leverage. For Kim, the lesson of the fall of Saddam and Gaddafi is that tyrants pay a price for relinquishing their arms. The threats from the US have strengthened the regime by reinforcing a siege mentality.

North Korea will not now turn swords into ploughshares without a security guarantee and the softening or abolition of sanctions. Indeed, it may have no intention of doing so at all. By forcing the US to address it as an equal, on the eve of its 70th anniversary, North Korea has already achieved a remarkable victory.

ANY SOFT TARGET WILL DO:

NEWLY RELEASED EVIDENCE today calls into serious doubt many of the most widespread beliefs about the 2016 shooting by Omar Mateen at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, which killed 49 people, along with Mateen himself. Because the attack occurred on the club's "Latin night," the overwhelming majority of the victims were Latinos, primarily Puerto Ricans.

In particular, Mateen went to Pulse only after having scouted other venues that night that were wholly unrelated to the LGBT community, only to find that they were too defended by armed guards and police, and ultimately chose Pulse only after a generic Google search for "Orlando nightclubs" -- not "gay clubs" -- produced Pulse as the first search result.

Several journalists closely covering the Mateen investigation have, for some time now, noted the complete absence of any evidence suggesting that Mateen knew that Pulse was a gay club or that targeting the LGBT community was part of his motive. These doubts have been strongly fortified by the new facts, previously under seal, that were revealed by today's court filing.

WHO THOUGHT IT WAS A GOOD IDEA...:

COMIC GOLD:

Brazil, which after Canada is the biggest steel supplier to the U.S. market, said it wanted to join the list. "We will work to exclude Brazil from this measure," Acting Trade Minister Marcos Jorge told Reuters after meeting U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross. Argentina made a similar case.

Japan, the United States' top economic and military ally in Asia, was next in line. Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga told a news conference that Japan's steel and aluminum shipments posed no threat to U.S. national security.

HE'S AN ETHNONATIONALIST, NOT A REPUBLICAN:

More than 100 Republican members of the House have signed off on a letter condemning Trump's looming tariffs. That's a rare occurrence for a GOP whose obsequiousness to Trump has become a hallmark.

Rushing in to try to stop Trump as he blindly readies his plan to impose stiff tariffs on steel and aluminum imports, angry Republican politicians, especially red state representatives, are getting an up-close look at what it's like dealing with an erratic, illogical president.

In Wisconsin, which went for Trump by the narrowest of margins, Republican Gov. Scott Walker has warned that tariffs could hurt the state's canning and beer industries. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) has also condemned the looming trade war. And Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) lamented how the White House doesn't understand today's global economy.

Red state leaders are freaking out, and not only because most of them oppose Trump's protectionist agenda: Many realize the real damage could come when U.S. trading partners strike back -- and the states that are going to pay the highest price are the GOP states that voted for Trump.

THE CRUSADE STARTED IN 1776:

A fever dream of a war "This is a new kind of evil." So said the president that September 16th, standing on the South Lawn of the White House. "And the American people are beginning to understand. This crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take a while." In that way, only five days after the 9/11 attacks, George W. Bush elevated a band of petty nihilists to the status of world-historic warriors. "And the American people must be patient," he continued. "I'm going to be patient."

He, of course, is long gone, but what he initiated that day is still unspooling. It could have been so different. September 11th was a tragic moment, but the initial reactions of most Americans to those collapsed towers and a damaged Pentagon were ones of empathy and patriotism. The selflessness of first responders that day had its echo in a broad and surprising manifestation of national altruism. The usual left-right divides of politics disappeared and the flag, for once, became a true symbol of national unity. The global reaction was similar. From across the world, including from erstwhile adversaries like Russia and China, came authentic expressions of support and sympathy, of grief-struck affection.

But in every phrase the president would speak in those weeks -- "this is war... with us or against us... dead or alive" -- he chose to take this country on quite a different path into the future.

Two days before invoking the Crusades, for instance, he presided over a religious service, which, though officially defined as "ecumenical," took place in the neo-Gothic National Cathedral. "Just three days removed from these events," he said from that church's pulpit, "Americans do not yet have the distance of history. But our responsibility to history is already clear: to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil... This conflict was begun on the timing and terms of others. It will end in a way and at an hour of our choosing."

In a specifically Christian setting, that is, George W. Bush answered the criminal attacks of 9/11 not by calling on international law enforcement to bring the perpetrators to justice, but by a declaration of cosmic war aimed at nothing less than the elimination of Islamist evil. 

LITTLE FINGERS WILL DO ANYTHING FOR A MILITARY PARADE:

#Breaking: @realDonaldTrump has agreed to meet North Korean leader Kim Jong Un by May. https://t.co/uGFrxJRUAo

— Financial Review (@FinancialReview) March 9, 2018

KNOWING YOUR ALLIES:

According to the decree, members of the Shi'ite militias, an assortment of militia groups known collectively as the Popular Mobilisation Forces (PMF), which are mostly backed and trained by Iran, will be granted many of the same rights as members the military.

Paramilitary members will be given equivalent salaries to those members of the military under the Ministry of Defense's control, the decree said. They will also be subject to the laws of military service and will gain access to military institutes and colleges.

The decree had been expected for some time and comes two months ahead of a high-stakes general election. The PMF commands popular support among Iraq's majority Shi'ite population and is expected to sway voters.

Tens of thousands of Iraqis heeded a call to arms in 2014 after Islamic State seized a third of the country's territory, forming the PMF. The paramilitaries supported Iraq's military in ejecting Islamic State from areas the militants overran in 2014, when Iraqi military and police divisions deserted en masse.

HOW OVERSIGHT IS MEANT TO WORK:

Acting FBI Deputy Director David Bowdich met with lawmakers on the House Oversight and Government Reform and Judiciary committees Tuesday to discuss the missteps, which were revealed in the days after the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla.

Bowdich acknowledged that the FBI failed to follow its own protocol after it received a tip in January about the accused shooter, Nikolas Cruz, 19, and vowed to take corrective actions, according to a press release issued by Reps. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) and Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), the chairmen of the Oversight and Judiciary committees, respectively.

The FBI admitted just two days after the Feb. 14 shooting that it received a tip from a person close to Cruz the previous month warning about the teen's gun ownership, desire to kill and erratic behavior.

That tip "should have been assessed as a potential threat to life," the FBI said at the time, but the warnings were never investigated further.

CRYSTAL BALLS SAYS...CORRUPT!:

NOT THAT ANYONE EVER TOOK HIM SERIOUSLY:

The Uranium One sale was unanimously approved by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), which comprises representatives of nine U.S. government agencies. When the issue was voted on, the State Department was represented not by Clinton, but by a lower-level official.

Five committees in the U.S. House and Senate previously looked into the issue and found no evidence that Clinton was behind CFIUS' approval of the deal, according to congressional records.

THE lEFT IS THE rIGHT:

Schatz was responding to a tweet from Farrakhan posted on Wednesday.

"The FBI has been the worst enemy of Black advancement," it said. "The Jews have control over those agencies of government."

President Trump used a well-known anti-Semitic dog whistle on Thursday while wishing his best to outgoing National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn. "This is Gary Cohn's last Cabinet meeting," Trump said. "He may be a globalist, but I still like him. He is seriously a globalist, no question." [...]

Trump added that "in his own way, [Cohn is] also a nationalist because he loves our country." 

THE LAST NICKEL DROPS (salacity alert):

A group of about 20, including Trump's personal attorney Michael Cohen, dined in a private room, and Trump flattered his new friends and boasted that "nobody in the world" was better at self-promotion than he was, and referred to himself in third person.

Also at the dinner was Ike Kaveladze, the vice president of Agalarov's Crocus International, who had been identified in 2000 by U.S. authorities as a conduit for money laundering $.14 billion out of Russia and Eastern Europe.

Part of the group -- including Trump, Emin, Goldstone, reigning Miss Universe Olivia Culpo and outgoing Miss USA Nana Meriwether -- went after dinner to an after-party at a raunchy nightclub called the Act, where they arrived shortly after midnight.

The Act was later ordered a few months to stop its "lewd" and "offensive" performances -- which involved activity that resembles salacious details of the Trump-Russia dossier compiled by a former British spy.

"Among the club's regular acts cited by the judge was one called 'Hot for Teacher,' in which naked college girls simulate urinating on a professor," Isikoff and Corn reported. "In another act, two women disrobe and then 'one female stands over the other female and simulates urinating while the other female catches the urine in two wine glasses.'"

The club had been under undercover surveillance since March 2013 by the Nevada Gaming Con­trol Board and private investigators hired by its landlord, the Palazzo -- which was owned by Republican megadonor Sheldon Adelson.

The Act shut down after the judge's ruling, which also cited simulated bestiality and sadomasochist acts...

COMIC GOLD:

Earlier this week, President Trump raised eyebrows when he told reporters of a phone call he had held with North Korea, in which he warned the dangerous rogue state it must de-nuclearize. (His administration later admitted quietly Trump had actually spoken with South Korea, not North Korea.) This week, Trump ventured another strange foreign policy pronouncement. He had asked China to produce a plan to reduce its trade deficit by One Billion Dollars. He even capitalized it to underscore the significance of the towering sum he proposed to extract: [...]

This demand was incredibly puzzling to trade economists, and regular economists, and anybody who had ever read a couple paragraphs in a random business story. China runs a trade surplus of $375 billion with the United States. Trump was demanding a reduction of 0.3 percent, or less than a single day's worth of imports.

The Wall Street Journal's Lingling Wei reports that the demand was actually supposed to be $100 billion. 

ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:

A+ headline. pic.twitter.com/nQ6ZxvtuJZ

— Jim Roberts (@nycjim) March 8, 2018

THANKS, W/UR!:

SUPPOSE FOR A MOMENT THAT YOU ARE THE MOST SUBMISSIVE OF TRUMPBOTS...:

Blackwater founder Erik Prince will host a fundraiser this month for Russia-friendly Republican Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, as Prince faces new questions over a 2017 meeting currently being investigated by special counsel Robert Mueller. [...]

Rohrabacher, a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, has been the target of attacks by Democrats and some Republicans for his unusually robust support for Russia. In the past, he has dismissed claims of Russia's human right violations as "baloney," publicly defended WikiLeaks and argued that the DNC was not hacked by Russia.

NOW MAKE THEM UNIVERSAL:

BUT, VLAD, YOU NEED TO GIVE ME SOME COVER....:

The Washington Post said the U.A.E. agreed to broker the meeting in part to explore whether Russia could be persuaded to curtail its close relationship with Iran -- a key objective of both the Trump administration and several Gulf Arab countries.

The Washington Post, citing U.S. officials, said such a concession by Moscow would have been required to justify any easing of U.S. sanctions on Russia by the Trump administration.

The Washington Post said that while Mueller is probing the circumstances of the Seychelles meeting, he is also more broadly examining apparent efforts by the Trump transition team to create a back channel for secret talks with the Kremlin.

After the Seychelles meeting, Nader visited the White House several times and met at least once there with former presidential adviser Stephen Bannon and Jared Kushner, Trump's son-in-law, The Washington Post said.

EVEN COBB AND COHEN COULD CONVICT THIS CLOWN:

The special counsel in the Russia investigation has learned of two conversations in recent months in which President Trump asked key witnesses about matters they discussed with investigators, according to three people familiar with the encounters.

In one episode, the president told an aide that the White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, should issue a statement denying a New York Times article in January. The article said Mr. McGahn told investigators that the president once asked him to fire the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III. Mr. McGahn never released a statement and later had to remind the president that he had indeed asked Mr. McGahn to see that Mr. Mueller was dismissed, the people said.

In the other episode, Mr. Trump asked his former chief of staff, Reince Priebus, how his interview had gone with the special counsel's investigators and whether they had been "nice," according to two people familiar with the discussion.

The episodes demonstrate that even as the special counsel investigation appears to be intensifying, the president has ignored his lawyers' advice to avoid doing anything publicly or privately that could create the appearance of interfering with it.

THANKS, UR!:

The newspaper Vedomosti has noticed a curious trend in voter polling released by the state-run sociological institute VTsIOM: Vladimir Putin's presidential candidate ratings slipped 12 percentage points in Moscow and St. Petersburg between mid-January and mid-February, falling from almost 70 percent to just above 57 percent.

WINNING THE WAR ON JOBS:

AND NOT EVEN PSYCHOLOGY, BUT EMOTION:

The intellectual effort to craft or divine a coherent Trumpist ideology didn't fare much better. Just over a year ago, Julius Krein launched a new journal called American Affairs to "give the Trump movement some intellectual heft," as Politico put it. As I wrote at the time, American Affairs' dilemma was that by associating itself with Trump, it would be forced to either defend the incoherence of his behavior or break with him to defend its own consistency.

Six months later, after the debacle of Trump's response to the neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Va., Krein recanted his support for the president.

On the left, there's an enormous investment in the idea that Trump isn't a break with conservatism but the apotheosis of it. This is a defensible, or at least understandable, claim if you believe conservatism has always been an intellectually vacuous bundle of racial and cultural resentments. But if that were the case, Commentary magazine's Noah Rothman recently noted, you would not see so many mainstream and consistent conservatives objecting to Trump's behavior.

Intellectuals and ideologically committed journalists on the left and right have a natural tendency to see events through the prism of ideas. Trump presents an insurmountable challenge to such approaches because, by his own admission, he doesn't consult any serious and coherent body of ideas for his decisions. He trusts his instincts.

Trump has said countless times that he thinks his gut is a better guide than the brains of his advisers. He routinely argues that the presidents and policymakers who came before him were all fools and weaklings. That's narcissism, not ideology, talking.

THE SELF-CORRECTING INSTITUTION:

Remember the story CNN ran in June 2017 & later retracted that got three reporters fired? Stack it up next to tonight's NYT story. pic.twitter.com/96AIEUE1KD

— Kilgore Trout (@KT_So_It_Goes) March 7, 2018

ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:

Gary Cohn Resigns In Protest Of Trump's Bigoted Comments Towards Aluminum https://t.co/cm2smdHb0B pic.twitter.com/JoHjOCo1X2

— The Onion (@TheOnion) March 6, 2018

HAIL TO CHIEF DENNISON:

Trump's alias, according to the Stormy Daniel's lawsuit -- David Dennison pic.twitter.com/rFaXKwSqUt

— MJ Lee (@mj_lee) March 7, 2018

LAUGHINGSTOCKS:

At a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on Tuesday, Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) asked National Intelligence Director Dan Coats if he knew that at least four foreign countries discussed their ability to manipulate Kushner.

"I've seen that leak," Coats replied.

"Can you assure us that you are taking effective action to protect our national security against that manipulation?" Blumenthal asked.

"We are doing everything we can to protect the United States' citizens from harm from abroad, including what you have just described," Coats replied.

A MAN HAS TO BE ABLE TO LOOK IN THE MIRROR:

President Donald Trump demanded economic adviser Gary Cohn's cooperation on tariffs in a meeting in the Oval Office Tuesday -- asking Cohn directly if he would support his decision to move forward with the plan.

Cohn would not offer his support, according to two people familiar with the episode -- and just hours later, the White House announced Cohn's resignation.

THEIR rEPUBLICAN GOVERNOR:

Buoyed by tax increases passed under his administration and a strong economy, Mr. Brown said Wednesday that the state is projecting a $6.1 billion surplus for the next fiscal year, which begins July 1.

The governor proposed socking most of the money away in a rainy-day fund whose creation he pushed for in 2014. Nearly 70% of the state's projected revenue of about $135 billion next fiscal year is derived from personal income taxes, according to the governor's office. [...]

As is his custom, the governor warned of an inevitable economic slowdown.

"California has faced 10 recessions since World War II, and we must prepare for the 11th," he said. "Let's not blow it now."

Mr. Brown has been preaching frugality for years--he kicked off one past budget talk with Aesop's fable about the thrifty ant and the lazy grasshopper.

Mr. Brown took office in 2011 with a $27 billion deficit and drastically slashed spending. In 2012, he staked his governorship on a tax increase that voters approved that year and reauthorized in 2016.

ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:

We are going to build a big, beautiful wall to keep affordable products from American consumers.

— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) March 6, 2018

DONALD WHO?:

Mick Mulvaney, Office of Management and Budget Director Statement on #GaryCohn resignation: pic.twitter.com/4EVjri5VVu

— Pat Ward (@WardDPatrick) March 7, 2018

AXIS OF EVIL:

An adviser to the United Arab Emirates with ties to current and former aides to President Trump is cooperating with the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, and gave testimony last week to a grand jury, according to two people familiar with the matter.

Mr. Mueller appears to be examining the influence of foreign money on Mr. Trump's political activities and has asked witnesses about the possibility that the adviser, George Nader, funneled money from the Emirates to the president's political efforts. It is illegal for foreign entities to contribute to campaigns or for Americans to knowingly accept foreign money for political races.

Mr. Nader, a Lebanese-American businessman who advises Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed Al-Nahyan, the effective ruler of the Emirates, also attended a January 2017 meeting in the Seychelles that Mr. Mueller's investigators have examined. The meeting, convened by the crown prince, brought together a Russian investor close to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia with Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater and an informal adviser to Mr. Trump's team during the presidential transition, according to three people familiar with the meeting.

YOU HAVE TO HAVE SOME PRIDE:

Mr. Trump's announcement last week that he would levy tariffs on aluminum and steel imports was the most immediate catalyst for Mr. Cohn's departure, according to people familiar with his thinking. Mr. Cohn, a longtime proponent of free trade, believed the decision could jeopardize economic growth.

SUBLIME:

U.S. President Donald Trump has not had a phone call with the North Korean regime, a White House official said Monday, commenting on his remarks that suggested such a possibility.

Trump said Saturday while talking about North Korea that "they, by the way, called up a couple of days ago." [...]

The official on the National Security Council told Yonhap Trump was referring to his March 1 phone call with South Korean President Moon Jae-in. 

GREATEST WAR EVER:

IT'S NOT ECONOMICS, JUST RACE:

NO MATTER HOW WIDE YOU CAST THE NET...:

On Dec. 19, 2017, a former staffer for Sen. John McCain named David Kramer testified before the House intelligence committee behind closed doors. He'd played a role in bringing the salacious and unverified Steele dossier to the FBI's attention, and members peppered him with questions about it.

Then something unusual happened. Word of Kramer's testimony got out--to the lawyer of another witness.

The following, based on conversations with multiple sources familiar with the matter, illuminates the extraordinary breakdown of trust between committee investigators and the witnesses they call. It also suggests that some people working on the committee investigation may be trying to covertly assist one of the president's closest allies--when the president's inner circle is ostensibly a focus of their probe.

A few days after Kramer's testimony, his lawyer, Larry Robbins, got a strange call. The call was from Stephen Ryan, a lawyer who represents Trump's longtime personal attorney Michael Cohen. Cohen is facing scrutiny from Special Counsel Robert Mueller and congressional investigators regarding potential coordination between Trump's team and the Kremlin. He featured prominently in the Steele dossier--the document that Kramer handled--and is currently suing Buzzfeed for publishing it.

Ryan told Robbins he reached out because someone from the House told him that Robbins' client, Kramer, had information about the Steele dossier that could help Cohen.

OUR dEMOCRAT PRESIDENT:

GREATEST WAR EVER:

PITY THE POOR MALTHUSIANS:

THE HANDS THAT DON'T ROCK THE CRADLE:

As President Trump appears to lurch from crisis to crisis on the world stage, Defense Secretary James N. Mattis and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson have quietly maneuvered to constrain an impulsive commander in chief, the latest sign of a national security team that is increasingly challenging the president.

Officials say the two senior Cabinet officers have slow-rolled requests for options on a wide range of policy goals, including exiting the Iran nuclear disarmament deal, reacting to missile strikes into Saudi Arabia by Iran-backed rebels in Yemen, pressuring longtime ally Pakistan by cutting U.S. military aid, and possible limited airstrikes on North Korea's nuclear infrastructure. [...]

"They are going to hide the ball from the president to keep him from doing stupid [stuff], there's no doubt about it," said another former official, a national security expert who served in the Trump administration transition and asked not to be identified discussing internal deliberations.

WE ARE ALL THE RESISTANCE:

Share markets in Asia and Europe regained ground on Tuesday after U.S. President Donald Trump faced growing pressure from political allies to pull back from proposed steel and aluminum tariffs and a potential global trade war.

TAX COLLECTOR FOR THE ETHNOSTATE:

It would seem that for the Republican Party, an incompetent, erratic kleptocracy might just be the best form of government.

Or at least it was until March 1, 2018, the day Trump signaled his intention to impose across-the-board import tariffs of 25% on steel and 10% on aluminum. That decision, notes Pat Roberts, a Republican senator from Kansas, "is not going to go down well in farm country."

As Roberts points out, Trump's move toward protectionism this year is at odds with his earlier policy achievements. "We have a tax reform package that's bringing a lot of benefits to the business community," Roberts told the Kansas City Star, "and this is a policy move that is contrary to that." His worry now is that Trump will pursue "a trade policy that will basically result in all the benefits of the tax reform being taken away by higher manufacturing costs being passed on to consumers."

He's right. In the end, American consumers will pay for Trump's tariffs. Such broad protectionist measures will affect every sector of US manufacturing in one way or another, and manufacturers certainly will not eat the full costs of higher-priced steel and aluminum inputs. At the same time, other countries will introduce tariffs of their own against US exports. The European Union, for example, is now planning to slap tariffs on such American staples as Harley-Davidson motorcycles, bourbon whiskey, and Levi's jeans.

So, Trump has essentially proposed a new tax on US consumers and export industries, the costs of which will be borne largely by his own supporters in the American heartland and Rust Belt. Moreover, Trump seems to have arrived at his decision almost out of the blue. Stock markets were caught off guard, and immediately fell by around 1.5%. And according to the Kansas City Star report, "[Roberts] and other Republican senators received no formal heads-up from the White House."

IT IS THE NATURE OF DONALDWORLD...:

"If he had some deal -- we already know that [Trump attorney] Michael Cohen was trying to do Trump Tower Moscow," Nunberg said, referring to a deal then in the works for a Trump-branded property in Moscow.

That deal ultimately fell through just two weeks before the Iowa caucuses. Yet even though the project never came to fruition, it caught the attention of Mueller. And his investigators are reportedly scrutinizing the Trump Organization's efforts to secure the deal, among other business dealings before the election.

Minutes earlier, he told MSNBC's Katy Tur that he thinks Trump "may have done something during the election." And he claimed that Mueller's team may already have evidence of it.

He reiterated those statements in yet another interview on CNN Monday afternoon. "They know something on [Trump] ... I don't know what it is, and perhaps I'm wrong, but he did something," he told Jake Tapper.

The interview essentially became a complete meltdown on live TV. Nunberg told Tapper that former Trump aide Carter Page had "colluded with the Russians" during the campaign. He also said Mueller believes Trump ally Roger Stone colluded with Russia.

GUNS DON'T KILL PEOPLE, PEOPLE WITH GUNS DO:

Eleven of the top 15 states for firearm ownership are also in the top 15 states for gun deaths, according to data from a 2015 study on gun ownership rates in the states and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's mortality rates for gun-related deaths.

NATIONALISM/CRONYISM*:

WELL, THAT WON'T CALM LITTLE FINGER DOWN:

"I'm not going to go to jail," Nunberg said when asked by Tur if he thought he would be held in contempt for publicly snubbing the investigation into Russia's interference in the 2016 presidential election.

"What you're doing is surprising to say the least, but you sat there in that room being questioned by Mueller's investigators," Tur said. "I want to hear directly from you. Do you think that they have something on the president?"

"I think they may," Nunberg said.

THANKS, UR!:

[H]aving put his finger in the dyke, Mr. Putin can't remove it or Mr. Assad will drown. So Russia is stuck in the middle of multiple conflicts it cannot control -- between the Assad regime and the rebels; between Turkey and the Kurds; between American-led coalition forces and the Islamic State; between Israel, Syria and Iran; between Sunni and Shiite. This Rubik's cube of conflicting interests makes partners on one front adversaries on another.

Far from abating, Syria's civil war is raging -- slowly but surely becoming more lethal to Russia's forces, more damaging to its reputation, and more of a drain on its resources. Moscow is fully complicit in Mr. Assad's murderous campaign against the primarily Sunni opposition, which has now reached new levels of depravity with the indiscriminate bombing of civilians in Ghouta, a suburban area outside Damascus. Moscow's alliance with Mr. Assad and Iran in slaughtering Sunnis risks alienating Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States and Turkey. It also will inflame Russia's own Sunni Muslim population and their brethren in Central Asia and the Caucasus, lighting the fuse for more terrorism directed at Moscow. [...]

Worse, his intervention in Eastern Ukraine has precipitated many of the very developments Mr. Putin sought to prevent.

NATO is more energized than it has been in years -- not because of President Trump's browbeating, but in response to Mr. Putin's aggression. The alliance now has forces on regular rotational air, land and sea deployments along Russia's border, and its budget is increasing, in part with a sustained infusion of funds from the United States. The European Union has revived the idea of strengthening its own defense capacity, spurred on by Mr. Putin's threats and Mr. Trump's rhetorical retreat from America's commitment to Europe's defense. Europeans are getting more serious about energy security. They are multiplying new routes, connections and sources for fuel and renewable power. That's making it harder for Mr. Putin to use oil and gas as strategic levers. American-led sanctions, despite Mr. Trump's reluctance to impose them, have done real, sustained damage to Russia's economy.

As for keeping Russia's fist on Ukraine's future, Mr. Putin has managed to alienate the vast majority of its citizens for generations. Systemic corruption is now a bigger bar to Ukraine's European trajectory than is Moscow.

Mr. Putin embarks on foreign adventures in part to distract his people from Russia's putrefaction at home. Reform is stagnant. The single-cylinder economy can't break its addiction to energy. Corruption and kleptocracy are all-corrosive. The population is aging and declining. The opposition is repressed but resilient.

WHEN IT RAINS, IT'S SHOWERS:

HIS DREAM JOB, WHOREMONGERING FOR A WELCHER:

The Wall Street Journal reports:

Mr. Cohen said he missed two deadlines [in October 2016] to make the $130,000 payment to Ms. Clifford because he couldn't reach Mr. Trump in the hectic final days of the presidential campaign, the person said. ... After Mr. Trump's victory, Mr. Cohen complained to friends that he had yet to be reimbursed for the payment to Ms. Clifford, the people said.

THANKS, DONALD!:

Chris Krueger, managing director of Cowen & Co.'s Washington Research Group, said he sees four "glaring red flags for the House GOP majority":

The correlation between the president's approval number and first-term midterm losses by the president's party: In the six times that the president's job approval was under 50%, the average loss was more than 43 seats. The Democrats need 24 to flip the House.

CA + PA = half-way there: California is the citadel of the resistance, which has 14 House Republicans. Between retirements, losing state-and-local tax deductions in the tax bill, and Trump's California disapproval, the Golden State could lose half its GOP delegation. The new Pennsylvania redistricting map -- and similar anti-Trump trend lines -- could cost Rs as many as six seats.  These two states get you halfway to a Democratic House.

Suburban danger zones: 2018 could make the suburbs great again for the House Democrats. The Democratic victories in last year's Virginia and New Jersey governor's races could well be the canaries in the coal mine. Remember that there are 23 House Republican seats in districts Clinton won -- and most are suburban.

VLAD HAS TAPES:

As Russia's virtual war against the United States continues unabated with the midterm elections approaching, the State Department has yet to spend any of the $120 million it has been allocated since late 2016 to counter foreign efforts to meddle in elections or sow distrust in democracy.

As a result, not one of the 23 analysts working in the department's Global Engagement Center -- which has been tasked with countering Moscow's disinformation campaign -- speaks Russian, and a department hiring freeze has hindered efforts to recruit the computer experts needed to track the Russian efforts.

THE ENRICHMENT WAS THE POINT OF THE CAMPAIGN:

There has been disarray in the White House before but this time, observers said, the checks and balances that have provided a modicum of restraint appear to be crumbling, leaving Trump isolated, angry and ready to lash out. It is, they fear, not inconceivable that the world's most powerful country is now being guided by instinct, by impulse, by whim and by mood swing.

"This feels like it's turned a corner and not for the better for the White House," said Rich Galen, a Republican strategist, once press secretary to Vice-President Dan Quayle.

"As layers of this onion - the people who have seniority, who he listens to and who hopefully can talk him down - unpeel, there are fewer and fewer people to do that, which means he can operate on his gut, and he doesn't have the experience to do that."

Since Trump's inauguration in January last year, there has been an ever-decreasing inner circle of trusted advisers. Back then, it seemed that three competing centres of power in the West Wing might provide a balance of sorts. [...]

In addition, it was reported by the Washington Post that officials from four foreign countries discussed ways to manipulate Kushner via his business arrangements. The New York Times said two companies made loans worth more than half a billion dollars to Kushner's family property company after executives met him at the White House. The disclosures could leave him exposed in special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into alleged collusion with Russia.

Rick Tyler, a political analyst, said: "It's appalling that anyone would leverage their time in government to enrich themselves or do personal business and Jared Kushner appears to have been doing that consistently. He ought to leave immediately. They are nothing but grifters."

& WE ALL KNOW HOW THAT ENDED:

"Robert Mueller's pace in this investigation really is very similar to some of the best special prosecutors in modern history," said Ken Gormley, the president of Duquesne University and the author of two books on special prosecutors.

These investigations carry special burdens: to move forward quietly, with no leaks, and quickly, to prove guilt or innocence.

"The whole point of appointing an independent counsel in these kind of instances is to deal with the fact that there's a cloud over the highest levels of the executive branch and to restore public confidence, one way or the other," Gormley said.

For many people, the model prosecutor was Archibald Cox, who investigated Watergate for a little more than a year before he was fired.

"I'm not looking for a confrontation," Cox told reporters in 1973. "I've worried a good deal through my life about the problems of imposing too much strain upon our constitutional institutions and I'm certainly not out to get the president of the United States."

During his tenure, Cox developed evidence about obstruction of justice by President Richard Nixon. The prosecutor who replaced Cox built on that work, ultimately leading to Nixon's resignation.

Gormley said the current special prosecutor, Robert Mueller, is operating in that same mold.

ONE STEP AHEAD OF THE JAILER:

DANGEROUS NAIVETE:

In a combative letter to the leadership of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee sent in the midst of its policy conference in Washington, a top settler leader blasted Monday the positions of the US' most powerful Israel lobby as having "no basis in fact."

Samaria Regional Council chairman Yossi Dagan took particular issue with AIPAC's support for the two-state solution, asserting that the group was inaccurately claiming it to be the end-game to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and that it had support from both Washington and Jerusalem.

EASIER TO JUST MAKE IT A RICO CASE:

Axios has reviewed a Grand Jury subpoena that Robert Mueller's team sent to a witness last month.  [...]

Mueller is subpoenaing all communications -- meaning emails, texts, handwritten notes, etc. -- that this witness sent and received regarding the following people:

Carter Page

Corey Lewandowski

Donald J. Trump

Hope Hicks

Keith Schiller

Michael Cohen

Paul Manafort

Rick Gates

Roger Stone

Steve Bannon

WHEN TRACK STILL MATTERED:

THE EXISTENTIAL THREAT IS INTERNAL:

Two effigies of Israeli soldiers with a rope around their necks were hung in predominantly Haredi areas of Jerusalem, in what Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman said was a "shocking" criminal act.

Police officers on Friday removed the effigies, one of which was soaked in flammable fluid, from a rooftop in Jerusalem's Me'a She'arim neighborhood and from a rope dangling from a column on Chaim Ozer Street, the Israel Broadcasting Corporation reported.

The effigies had black kippahs on their heads, leading to speculations in the Israeli media that it was meant to intimidate Haredi soldiers who serve in the Israel Defense Forces.

WHEEL MAN:

WHERE INNOVATION COMES FROM:

This report shows that NIH funding contributed to published research associated with every one of the 210 new drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration from 2010-2016. Collectively, this research involved >200,000 years of grant funding totaling more than $100 billion. The analysis shows that >90% of this funding represents basic research related to the biological targets for drug action rather than the drugs themselves. The role of NIH funding thus complements industry research and development, which focuses predominantly on applied research. This work underscores the breath and significance of public investment in the development of new therapeutics and the risk that reduced research funding would slow the pipeline for treating morbid disease.

THE WISDOM OF THE MARKET:

IT'S A DEFLATIONARY EPOCH:

So-called procyclical inflation -- a measure containing the prices of goods and services that typically rise faster when employment is increasing -- decelerated last month to the lowest level on an annual basis since April 2014, according to data compiled by Bloomberg News from Commerce Department figures published Thursday. [...]

The so-called core inflation rate they watch closely, which strips out volatile food and energy prices, was just 1.5 percent in January, and the cell-phone pricing change that hit the index in March 2017 is only holding it down by about a tenth of a percentage point.

The slowdown in procyclical inflation in January stemmed from several components, including food services and accommodations, recreation services, prescription drugs and nonprofit spending.

Rental inflation, one of the biggest drivers of core and procyclical inflation, was little changed.

HE DOES LOVE THOSE 76 TROMBONE PARADES...:

Trump has been in these dire straits before in his life, make no mistake-and his reaction at every step was to run from the damage, welsh on his obligations, let fixers handle the mess and never look back. Donald Trump has declared bankruptcy no less than six times, leaving creditors holding the bag each and every time. His building deals frequently go up in smoke. His fraudulent "university" went belly up and ended in settlements. He routinely stiffs his subcontractors. Most banks refuse to deal with him, and because he refuses to release his or his organization's tax returns, we have no idea if he has the sort of money he claims to have, or is instead deeply in hock to foreign mafia cartels. Without his father's money he would be just another two-bit white collar criminal from Queens, either in jail on tax evasion or running a ponzi scheme.

Trump is a classic grifter. And the modus operandi of the grifter is to play the con as long as he can, then pack up and run when the water gets hot and the bill comes due.

It is remarkable that we as a nation allowed such a person to become president. But nations do make mistakes. The question is what the Grifter-in-Chief will do now.

The standard play would be to simply step away. Even the most narcissistic con artist is rarely fool enough to choose dire consequences over an easy escape route just out of ego alone. As the walls begin to close in on him, his friends and family, it is difficult to see how he lasts another year in the job, much less three.

NOT WHAT BOB MUELLER MEANT BY A LIFE TERM:

US President Donald Trump said Saturday he thinks it's great that China's president now holds that office for life and mused that maybe the US will do the same someday.

CRYSTAL BALL SAYS...:

DONALD THINKS THAT HUGE LOSER, JESUS, SHOULD COME TO HIM:

THE FBI SHOULD HAVE PAID STEELE FOR DOING THEIR JOBS:

WE ARE ALL HEROES IN OUR OWN MINDS:

How many of us have stared sudden, violent death in the face and reacted like a hero?

I was no braveheart when I found myself in the wrong place at the wrong time during the middle of an armed insurgency many years ago in my old hometown of Darjeeling.

To cut a long story short, a paramilitary soldier jammed the barrel of his assault rifle under my chin and threatened to blow my head off. I was a terrified school kid and it was enough to send me into catatonic shock.

The second time I stared death in the face was after I had just finished school and was earning some pocket money by taking a group of Canadian tourists on a trek high up in the Western Himalayas.

We were traversing a steep slope when we found ourselves caught in a sudden rockslide. There was no place to run or take shelter, so we just stood there, fully exposed to danger, as rocks the size of water melons came crashing down upon us.

By some miracle, we escaped with our lives, but I remember how petrified and helpless we were, staring up at what seemed like certain death from above. I watched the man next to me tilt his head to one side to dodge a jagged rock that would have decapitated him, had he not made that slight movement. We were all numb with shock.

That's what I'm thinking of as I listen to the shrill chorus of condemnation against the armed security officer who lost his job for remaining outside a Florida high school while an expelled student went on a shooting rampage inside, slaughtering 17 people last month.

PRO-NAZI IS ONE THING, BUT ANTI-TRADE!:

ARE WE ALL GOING TO PRETEND HE WAS ONCE RAVELLED AND GLUED?:

Not since Richard Nixon started talking to the portraits on the walls of the West Wing has a president seemed so alone against the world.

One source -- who is a presidential ally -- is worried, really worried. The source says this past week is "different," that advisers are scared the President is spiraling, lashing out, just out of control. For example: Demanding to hold a public session where he made promises on trade tariffs before his staff was ready, not to mention willing. "This has real economic impact," says the source, as the Dow dropped 420 points after the President's news Thursday. "Something is very wrong."

Even by Trumpian standards, the chaos and the unraveling at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue are a stunning -- and recurring -- problem.

But there's an up-against-the-wall quality to the past couple of weeks that is striking, and the crescendo is loud, clear, unhealthy, even dangerous. [...]

Multiple sources report an increasingly isolated Trump: cordoned off from old friends by Kelly, getting the cold shoulder from wife Melania (after Stormy Daniels and friends), increasing friction with his daughter and son-in-law over clearance, and home alone without longtime bodyguard/friend Keith Schiller and Hicks. His economic team is split over tariffs; his national security adviser, according to reports, will be replaced soon. No doubt the exodus will continue.

And the President -- who has bullied Jeff Sessions regularly since the summer -- is now furious that the attorney general has dared defend his department against a President who called it "disgraceful." A man who prides himself on his instinct to counterpunch finds it shocking when someone punches back. 

KIDS-R-US:

[I]n the wake of the Parkland high school shooting, Republican leaders have joined Democrats in calling for action on guns, mental health and school security -- issues they have flat-out rejected for years.

Florida's governor is even taking on the NRA, calling for new gun restrictions and opposing ideas like arming teachers.

Things like that simply don't happen in Florida.

So what's different this time? At least three things:

1) The gunman committed his massacre smack dab in the middle of the legislative session.

2) Rick Scott is running for higher office.

3) The Parkland kids actually look and sound like the kids of the legislators ... so their cries have resonated more.

Those explanations may seem cynical and even distasteful. So is politics all too often.

Rep. Carlos Guillermo Smith, an Orlando Democrat, said there's no denying that Tallahassee politicians are reacting differently this time.

With Parkland memorial ribbons on legislative lapels everywhere (compared to Pulse rainbow ribbons, which Smith said were few and far between), legislators are vowing fast action.

"That's a big change," he said. "Usually after a mass shooting, it's: Offer thoughts and prayers. Divert attention. Delay. And then do nothing."

This time, though, they couldn't divert or delay, because the slaughter took place five weeks into a nine-week legislative session.

That's normally a time when Republicans are advancing the NRA's bills -- often ludicrous ones like the 2011 one that tried to ban patients and doctors from freely discussing firearms or the 2014 one that guaranteed schoolchildren the right to carry pistol-shaped Pop Tarts -- so they can earn good grades on the NRA's annual report cards.

FUN LISTENING TO THE TRUMPBOTS CLAIM THIS ISN'T WHAT THEY SIGNED UP FOR:

[T]oday I'm going to talk about how to make America wealthy again. We have to do it. With 30-miles from Steel City, Pittsburgh played a central role in building our nation. The legacy of Pennsylvania steelworkers lives in the bridges, railways and skyscrapers that make up our a great American landscape.

But our workers' loyalty was repaid, you know it better than anybody, with total betrayal. Our politicians have aggressively pursued a policy of globalization, moving our jobs, our wealth and our factories to Mexico and overseas. [...]

And I have been talking about China for many years. And you know what? Nobody listened. But they are listening now. That, I can tell you.

The city of Pittsburgh and the state of Pennsylvania have lost 1/3 of their manufacturing jobs since the Clinton's put China into the WTO. 50,000 factories across America have shut their doors in that time. And this factory, because of your great owners, Gabe and Gloria, it's hanging in. Hanging in. But they just told me, it is not easy.

Almost half of our entire manufacturing trade deficit in goods with the world is the result and it's the result of trade with China. It was also Hillary Clinton, the secretary of state, who shoved us into a job-killing deal with South Korea, as reported by the Economic Policy Institute in May . This deal doubled our trade deficit with South Korea and destroyed nearly 100,000 American jobs.

As Bernie Sanders said, Hillary Clinton voted for virtually every trade agreement that has cost the workers of this country millions, millions of jobs. [...]

The Trans-Pacific Partnership is the greatest danger yet. The TPP, as it is known, would be the death blow for American manufacturing. It would give up all of our economic leverage to an international commission that would put the interests of foreign countries above our own. It would further open our markets to aggressive currency cheaters -- cheaters, that's what they are, cheaters.

They are not playing by the rules. They are cheating. It would make it easier for our trading competitors to ship cheap subsidized goods into United States markets, while allowing foreign countries to continue putting up barriers in front of our exports -- which is what they do. It is very hard to export to their countries. They make it very difficult.

We, on the other hand -- come on in, everybody. Come on in. Bad leadership.

The TPP would lower tariffs would lower tariffs on foreign cars, while leaving in place the foreign practices that keep American cars from being sold overseas.  [...]

I am going to direct the secretary of commerce to identify every violation of trade agreements a foreign country is currently using to harm you, the American worker.

I will then direct all appropriate agencies to use every tool under American and international law to end these abuses. And abuse is the right word. [...]

Number six, I'm going to instruct the U.S. trade representative to bring trade cases against China, both in this country and at the WTO.

China's unfair subsidy behavior is prohibited by the terms of its entrance to the WTO and I intend to enforce those rules and regulations. And basically, I intend to enforce the agreements from all countries, including China.

Seven, if China does not stop its illegal activities, including its theft of American trade secrets, I will use every lawful -- this is very easy. This is so easy. I love saying this. I will use every lawful presidential power to remedy trade disputes, including the application of tariffs consistent with Section 201 and 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, and Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962. [...]

Hillary Clinton and her campaign of fear will try to spread the lie that these actions will start a trade war. You already have a trade war, and we're losing badly. Badly.

She has it completely backwards. Hillary Clinton unleashed a trade war against the American worker when she supported one terrible deal after another, from NAFTA, to China to South Korea. It doesn't matter. No matter where she went, the American worker was hurt and you'll be hurt worse than ever before if she becomes president of the United States. That, I can tell you.

A Trump administration will end that war by getting a fair deal for the American people and the American worker. The era of economic surrender will finally be over. It will be over. You're not going to see it anymore. Well, I can't guarantee it, because after me, they'll probably start doing it again. But we will have four and maybe eight great, great productive years and we'll never go back and we'll make sure we never go back.

Thank you. Thank you, very much. Thank you. Thank you very much, everyone. I appreciate it.

A new era of prosperity will finally begin. America will be independent once more. Independent once more. Doesn't that sound great?

Under a Trump presidency, the American worker will finally have a president who will protect them and fight for them.

We will stand up to trade cheating. Cheating. Cheaters, that's what they are. Cheaters. We will stand up to trade cheating anywhere and everywhere it threatens the American job.

THAT AGREEMENT DOES NOT APPLY TO ROBERT MUELLER:

PRESIDENT PUNCHLINE:

THE rIGHT IS DEPENDENT ON IGNORING FACTS:

The FBI analyzed 160 cases of active shooters over the period from 2000-2013, and not one was stopped by a concealed carry permit holder who was not active duty military, a security guard, or a police officer. 21 were stopped by unarmed civilians.

OUR FIRST FEMALE PRESIDENT:

On Wednesday evening, the president became "unglued," in the words of one official familiar with the president's state of mind.

A trifecta of events had set him off in a way that two officials said they had not seen before: Hope Hicks' testimony to lawmakers investigating Russia's interference in the 2016 election, conduct by his embattled attorney general and the treatment of his son-in-law by his chief of staff.

Trump, the two officials said, was angry and gunning for a fight, and he chose a trade war, spurred on by Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and Peter Navarro, the White House director for trade -- and against longstanding advice from his economic chair Gary Cohn and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin.

Ross had already invited steel and aluminum executives to the White House for an 11 a.m. meeting on Thursday. But Ross, according to a person with direct knowledge, hadn't told the White House who the executives were. As a result, White House officials were unable to conduct a background check on the executives to make sure they were appropriate for the president to meet with and they were not able to be cleared for entry by secret service. According to a person with direct knowledge, even White House chief of staff John Kelly was unaware of their names.

By midnight Wednesday, less than 12 hours before the executives were expected to arrive, no one on the president's team had prepared any position paper for an announcement on tariff policy, the official said. In fact, according to the official, the White House counsel's office had advised that they were as much as two weeks away from being able to complete a legal review on steel tariffs.

MEET tHE cOMEDIAN

[N]unes's claim that the FBI misled the court was itself misleading. There are other ways in which the memo was misleading--discussed in the back and forth between Nunes and his critics on the House Intelligence Committee, and in Charlie Savage's characteristically excellent summary in the New York Times--but the FBI's alleged effort to deceive the court about Steele has always been the heart of the matter, and I am trying in this post to stick to the core.

The FISA applications did not mention the "DNC" or the "Clinton campaign" by name, but they did recount how Steele was approached and then hired by "an identified U.S. Person," Glen Simpson, who explained to Steele that he in turn had been hired by a "U.S.-based law firm," Perkins Coie, "to conduct research regarding Candidate #1," Donald Trump, and Trump's "ties to Russia." (The use of generic identifiers in the FISA applications is consistent with standard practice, as Nunes is well aware; the minority memo provides the names for each identifier.) The FISA applications also advised the court: "The FBI speculates that [Simpson] was likely looking for information that could be used to discredit [Trump's] campaign." [...]

2. It's even more disturbing that a purported oversight memo would withhold key facts from the American people in accusing the government of withholding key facts from the court. Had the FBI done in its FISA applications what Nunes did in his memo, heads would have rolled on Pennsylvania Avenue. The court itself, as well as both intelligence committees, several inspectors general, and the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility all could have brought their shillelaghs to bear. The court, in particular, has done so once before, when it was dissatisfied with the candor of an FBI agent.

 Congressional oversight is a critically important function, but who watches the watchers?

TOAST OF THE TOWN:

They were the ascendant young couples of the Trump White House: Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, and Rob Porter and Hope Hicks. They enjoyed rarefied access to the president and special privileges in the West Wing. Glamorous and well-connected, they had an air of power and invincibility. They even double-dated once.

But an unlikely cascade of events -- set in motion by paparazzi photos of Porter and Hicks published Feb. 1 in a British tabloid -- crashed down on Kushner this week. The shortest month of the year delivered 28 days of tumult that many inside and outside the White House say could mark the fall of the House of Kushner.

Once the prince of Trump's Washington, Kushner is now stripped of his access to the nation's deepest secrets, isolated and badly weakened inside the administration, under scrutiny for his mixing of business and government work and facing the possibility of grave legal peril in the Russia probe.

SURE, HE DIDN'T RUN AS A UNIFIER...:

WITH DONALD/VLAD, THE WEIRDER THE MORE LIKELY:

Navalny initially dismissed speculation that Deripaska had served as a back channel between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. "Among all the conspiracy theories of American mass media, this part was the most unconvincing," he said in the video. "Many oligarchs are close to Putin," and there was no evidence that Deripaska was transmitting secret intelligence to him.

But then Navalny and his team looked closely at the Instagram account of Deripaska's nubile consort. Vashukevich had posted video from an August 2016 trip to Norway on Deripaska's yacht with several other escorts. And on that yacht was a Russian deputy prime minister, Sergei Prikhodko. In the video, you can even hear Deripaska and Prikhodko talking about Russia's bad relations with the United States, for which Deripaska blamed Victoria Nuland, Barack Obama's assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs. Seeing it, said Navalny, "the pieces of this puzzle fell into place."

Within 24 hours of Navalny posting his investigation, a Russian court issued a ruling trying to block access to it. Deripaska filed a claim against Vashukevich and Aleksandr Kirillov, a self-styled "sex guru" she's close to, for invasion of privacy. And at some point Vashukevich and Kirillov took off for Thailand.

NATIONALISM BREEDS CRONYISM*:

SHARING HIS BIGOTRY IS INSUFFICIENT...:

The President of the United States has resumed his preferred pastime: screaming into the Internet. The target of Donald Trump's ire this time was his supposedly "embattled" attorney general, Jeff Sessions. For deferring to the Justice Department's inspector general's office regarding alleged FISA abuse, Trump called his appointee's conduct "disgraceful." With the theatrical zeal of any absolutist movement, Trump's keenest supporters were quick to condemn this new Bukharin in their ranks.

The competition was over before it began. "I couldn't agree more," read the winning entry, submitted by Liberty University President Jerry Falwell Jr. Sessions, he insisted, "must be part of the Bush/Romney/McCain Republican Establishment. He probably supported @realDonaldTrump early in [the] campaign to hide who he really is. Or he could just be a coward."  Jeff Sessions spent his career in the Senate opposing his party's orthodoxy on immigration. That career culminated in his decision to buck his party orthodoxy on Trump--legitimizing the future president's outsider campaign by becoming the first sitting senator to endorse him. Sessions is many things, but he's no coward. Falwell's denunciation is valuable only insofar as it demonstrates the malleability of the epithet "establishment" and the cultish pusillanimity around this president.

SOW THE WINDBAG...:

Sen. Ben Sasse, who's been a frequent critic Trump, slammed the tariffs decision as something Americans would expect from a "leftist administration," not a Republican commander in chief.

"Let's be clear: The President is proposing a massive tax increase on American families. Protectionism is weak, not strong," he said in a statement. "You'd expect a policy this bad from a leftist administration, not a supposedly Republican one."

Sen. Pat Roberts, who is the chair of the Senate agriculture committee, also blasted the decision for the tariffs and warned of retaliation.

"They've already done this on washing machines and solar panels and the sorghum producer, one of the rare crops where we were making a profit, got targeted by China," he said. "Every time you do this, you get a retaliation. And agriculture is the number one target. I think this is terribly counterproductive for the (agriculture) economy and I'm not very happy."

When asked why Trump made the decision Roberts and other senators made the case to him, Roberts responded: "Good question."

Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah said the tariffs would be a "huge job-killing tax hike."

"While I am sympathetic to the issues facing domestic steel manufacturers, there must be a better way to address the steel industries concerns, and I hope Congress and the executive branch can identify an alternative solution before these tariffs are finalized next week," he said in a statement.