[News] Post a Political News Story

Ongoing discussion of the political news of the day. This thread is for 'smaller' stories that don't call for their own thread. If a story blows up, please start a new thread for it.

Gremlin wrote:

It's going to be a harder for the US to impose sanction because we no longer have an office to oversee that. It's been disbanded.

Foreign Policy: State Department Scraps Sanctions Office: The Trump administration was three weeks late on a Russia sanctions deadline. But it’s killed the office that coordinates them.

The NYT's had an article on Friday about how Tillerson's absolutely gutting the State Department (and scaring off younger people from even starting a career in the Foreign Service).

The article had one example of how Tillerson's getting experienced diplomatic professionals to leave: he's forcing them to work beside unpaid interns for months at a time wading through documents and emails to fulfill Freedom of Information Act requests (Trump made this a priority primarily to get more Hillary emails released).

And that's just State. All of Trump's picks were intended to destroy the agencies they lead.

Gremlin wrote:

It's going to be a harder for the US to impose sanction because we no longer have an office to oversee that. It's been disbanded.

Foreign Policy: State Department Scraps Sanctions Office: The Trump administration was three weeks late on a Russia sanctions deadline. But it’s killed the office that coordinates them.

The president is an agent of Russia. Of course he did that.

And Rex Tillerson was one of the most obviously Russia-tied appointees.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/12/w...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...

Facebook takes it upon themselves to gauge your mental health.

Facebook is using artificial intelligence to scan users’ posts for signs they’re having suicidal thoughts. When it finds someone that could be in danger, the company flags the post to human moderators who respond by sending the user resources on mental health, or, in more urgent cases, contacting first-responders who can try to find the individual.

That sounds so helpful and kind. And then I think about other things the can scan your posts for. Do I want them to contact me with information on cross dressing platypuses? "But the AI indicated you were into that"

Actually I am sure they are already doing that for ads. "User loves coffee - spam ads of coffee makers, spam ads of colombian coffees." so I guess this is at least a good use of their power to scan everything

Even focusing just on suicide, how long until the first incident of first responders (specifically police) killing someone that Facebook sent them to?
It's a massive invasion of privacy, and I wish to hell we had laws preventing social media companies from profiling users like the EU has (the only jurisdiction this won't be going live in).

Stengah wrote:

Even focusing just on suicide, how long until the first incident of first responders (specifically police) killing someone that Facebook sent them to?
It's a massive invasion of privacy, and I wish to hell we had laws preventing social media companies from profiling users like the EU has (the only jurisdiction this won't be going live in).

Yeah, "Mark Zuckerberg AI will SWAT you for good reasons!" is the dystopia I didn't expect to live in but now reside.

Meanwhile:

The Internet Was a Mistake

Mike Cronk was sitting half-naked on a street corner, hands covered in blood, when the TV news reporter approached. The 48-year-old, who had used his shirt to try to plug a bullet wound in his friend’s chest, recounted in a live interview how a young man he did not know had just died in his arms.

Cronk’s story of surviving the worst mass shooting in modern US history went viral, but many people online weren’t calling him a hero. On YouTube, dozens of videos, viewed by hundreds of thousands of people, claimed Cronk was an actor hired to play the part of a victim in the Las Vegas mass shooting on 1 October.

Conspiracy theorists harassed him on Facebook, sending messages like “How much did they pay you?” and “How does it feel to be part of a hoax?” The claims multiplied and soon YouTube’s algorithm began actively promoting the conspiracy theory.

Two months later, Cronk’s online reputation appears damaged beyond repair. Type “Mike Cronk” into Google and YouTube, and the sites automatically suggest searches for “actor” and “fake”, leading to popular videos claiming he and his wounded friend were performers and that the Mandalay Bay tragedy that killed 58 people never happened.

“It’s awful that we have to go through what we did and then you have a whole new level of attacks on you and who you are,” said Cronk, a retired teacher. “I don’t want negative stuff associated with my name, but how do we stop that?”

As record-breaking mass shootings have become a ritual of life in the US, survivors and victims’ families across the country have increasingly faced an onslaught of social media abuse and viral slander. Bullying from the ugliest corners of the internet overwhelms the grief-stricken as they struggle to cope with the greatest horror they’ve ever experienced.

The cycles of hoaxer harassment are now as predictable as mass shootings. And yet those with the most power to stop the spread of conspiracy theories have done little to address victims’ cries for help.

OG_slinger wrote:
Stengah wrote:

It's harder in that he's deliberately making them waste time and money on fact checking his bogus stories. He's adding to the pile of fake stories with the goal of bogging them down enough that something slips through, or that they get paranoid enough to scare off someone with an actual story.

Vetting and checking sources is just something that actual news organizations do. It's just how good journalism is produced.

When The Washington Post first broke the story about Moore they had something like 30 different sources. You can bet that every one of them was checked and cross-checked.

Even O'Keefe's largest success to date--ACORN--cost him a $100,000 in a lawsuit. And speaking of lawsuits, just last week it came out that Project Veritas is suing its own insurance company because it's balking at paying for multiple lawsuits that people from previous "stings" have brought against the group.

Unfortunately, they're getting used in court cases.

Federal prosecutors targeting anti-Trump protesters are relying on video evidence from Project Veritas, a far-right group under fire this week for allegedly trying to dupe the Washington Post with a false story of sexual misconduct.

The US attorney’s office submitted the footage in court on Tuesday as part of an ongoing trial against activists who protested Donald Trump’s inauguration and now face conspiracy and rioting charges that could lead to decades in prison.

Prosecutors played the video – which reportedly showed undercover footage from a meeting of activists – one day after the Washington Post reported that Project Veritas had sent a woman undercover pretending to be a victim of Roy Moore, the US Senate candidate accused of sexual misconduct.

The decision to use video from a discredited ultra-conservative group known for ethically questionable tactics has drawn criticisms from civil liberties groups, who have argued that the federal government under Trump is aggressively prosecuting activists who oppose the president.

“It’s absolutely shocking that the prosecutors went on record today saying they are relying on a Project Veritas video,” said Jude Ortiz, a member of the organizing crew of Defend J20 Resistance, a group supporting the nearly 200 people facing charges related to the Washington DC protests of Trump on 20 January.

“It’s a dubious piece of evidence at best, and it’s appalling that it’s coming from the far right,” said Ortiz, who attended the hearing.

Hundreds were arrested during inauguration day demonstrations – including journalists, legal observers and medics – drawing criticisms that law enforcement was issuing overly broad charges against people caught up in the chaos, without specific evidence tying them to alleged crimes. Though some charges were later dropped, many are still on trial for conspiracy, rioting and property destruction allegations, and some could face 60-year prison sentences.

The video comes from Project Veritas’ infiltration of a meeting where activists discussed plans to disrupt inauguration activities.

The use of Project Veritas footage is the latest example of prosecutors relying on evidence linked to controversial far-right sources. The US attorney’s office has also submitted video from the Oath Keepers, a rightwing militia group that has been present at “alt-right” rallies.

I'd be less concerned with this if it wasn't for that whole "packing the judiciary" story from a week or two ago.

Meanwhile, every word of this story makes me angry/sad.

These kids are being failed at every one of their stops in education.

Brian Butcher, a history teacher at Ballou High School, sat in the bleachers of the school's brand-new football field last June watching 164 seniors receive diplomas. It was a clear, warm night and he was surrounded by screaming family and friends snapping photos and cheering.

It was a triumphant moment for the students: For the first time, every graduate had applied and been accepted to college. The school is located in one of Washington, D.C.'s poorest neighborhoods and has struggled academically for years with a low graduation rate. For months, the school received national media attention, including from NPR, celebrating the achievement.

But all the excitement and accomplishment couldn't shake one question from Butcher's mind:

How did all these students graduate from high school?

"You saw kids walking across the stage, who, they're nice young people, but they don't deserve to be walking across the stage," Butcher says.

An investigation by WAMU and NPR has found that Ballou High School's administration graduated dozens of students despite high rates of unexcused absences. We reviewed hundreds of pages of Ballou's attendance records, class rosters and emails after a district employee shared the private documents. Half of the graduates missed more than three months of school last year, unexcused. One in five students was absent more than present — missing more than 90 days of school.

According to district policy, if a student misses a class 30 times, he should fail that course. Research shows that missing 10 percent of school, about two days per month, can negatively affect test scores, reduce academic growth and increase the chances a student will drop out.

Teachers say when many of these students did attend school, they struggled academically, often needing intense remediation.

"I've never seen kids in the 12th grade that couldn't read and write," says Butcher about his two decades teaching in low-performing schools from New York City to Florida. But he saw this at Ballou, and it wasn't just one or two students.

An internal email obtained by WAMU and NPR from April shows two months before graduation, only 57 students were on track to graduate, with dozens of students missing graduation or community service requirements or failing classes needed to graduate. In June, 164 students received diplomas.

"It was smoke and mirrors. That is what it was," says Butcher.

The Rise of the “Westernists”

When imagining what globalization looks like in practice, few envision a more Senegalese or Sri Lankan world. Globalization is of course a complicated process, but due to the immense economic and geopolitical power of the U.S. and Europe, it has resulted in the continual expansion of Western norms and values. For many, this was a welcome development. As globalization proceeded, their thinking went, a common human culture would emerge, leading to ever more progress and cooperation. We would never necessarily be the same, but our aims and hopes would converge.

Globalization’s ideal, however, has been turned upside down. From annual debates over whether Americans should celebrate Christopher Columbus, to new veil bans in Austria, lightning rod identity controversies have come to dominate the headlines for weeks or months at a time. After the technocratic moment of the 1990s and 2000s, politics is returning to its natural state: answering the fundamental question of who we are, not what sorts of policies we support.

The dividing lines have become predictable: on one side line up liberal individualists, who maintain almost as a matter of faith that any form of personal expression is to be protected and even celebrated. On the other end lies a new brand of conservative nationalists, who—perhaps channeling their inner Paul Revere—see it as their personal responsibility to warn the nation when certain symbols and identities begin to threaten the values that (in their eyes) any self-respecting Western society ought to hold dear.

Though not often coupled together, both Islamists and the West’s conservative nationalists (whom we might term “Westernists”) place great importance on the communal dimension of human society. Both aim to privilege a certain set of beliefs and symbols at the local level, starting with the family, and both are inclined to prioritize the communities, regions, and nations in which they live. In this sense, both are also “supremacist” (we say this descriptively, not necessarily pejoratively). In our research studying Islamism across the Muslim world, we’ve written about how elevating Islamic law and morals in the public sphere forms a central motivation for its supporters. Though they view their aims as diametrically opposed, Islamists and Westernists mirror each other in their preoccupation—and even obsession—with collective identity and cultural integrity.

Christ, remember when we thought 2016 was the craziest year ever?

Prederick wrote:

Christ, remember when we thought 2016 was the craziest year ever?

I seem to remember a lot of cartoons with 2017 saying, "hold my beer."

Prederick wrote:

Unfortunately, they're getting used in court cases.

I have a feeling that years from now it's going to come out that the Justice Department went after the inauguration protesters so hard because Trump's fragile little ego demanded it.

That being said I'm have faith that the protesters' lawyers--backed by the ACLU--could gut the video evidence by showing that the group it comes from has an established track record of deceptively editing videos--as proven by the ACORN settlement--and is run by a fellow who plead guilty for entering federal property under false pretenses for the purposes of committing a felony in a failed exposé on a Senator . Not exactly things that reassure jurors that they're seeing everything on the videos.

The curriculum was a product of Vision Forum, a now-defunct Texas-based evangelical organization headed by Doug Phillips, which taught “Biblical patriarchy”, a theology that prescribes strict, unequal gender roles for men and women. According a statement on the Vision Forum’s website, “Egalitarian feminism is a false ideology that has bred false doctrine in the church and seduced many believers.”

Again, they sound SO. MUCH. Like the Muslims they abhor.

His views about women are abhorrent, but it's worse that his worldview is literally that the Bible (his f*cked up interpretation, of course) trumps our Constitution and our laws.

OG_slinger wrote:

His views about women are abhorrent, but it's worse that his worldview is literally that the Bible (his f*cked up interpretation, of course) trumps our Constitution and our laws.

That's related to something that keeps bothering me about the sovereign citizen/county rights/sheriffs-run-everything crowd that showed up at Malheur.

See, our laws work because of consensus. We have enough of a shared reality that even when we disagree with the laws we still agree about what the laws are. We might quibble about interpretation, occasionally, but no one disputes that the text exists or what the general parameters are. And as long as that holds true, that lets us have a society.

But the county-rights movement (founded by a literal American Nazi) can only exist by coming up with their radical rewrite of the social contract. Ammon Bundy's first step was to preach their version of the Constitution as a means of establishing support for his armed takeover.

And the trick with the law is that if enough people buy into an interpretation of it, that can become the de facto consensus. The Malheur terrorists (mostly) skated because they were able to get enough mud in the water to get a jury to let them off the hook. If their preaching had been more successful, they could have pushed their anti-federalist agenda further.

And we're seeing similar stuff with the administration--blatant violations of the law going unaddressed because no one is willing to prosecute. Not to mention all of the mere norms that have fallen apart. It's creating a sense that the law doesn't matter any more. Which is a dangerous time to be in--on the one hand, you have the people who are willing to reshape the country around their shared delusion, no matter what the rest of the country thinks. (For example, if Trump believes hard enough, he can make it so he won the popular vote in 2016. He just has to silence everyone who points out pesky things like objective facts.)

On the other hand, you get a growing sense of disenfranchisement as people who trusted the system (to a greater or lesser extent) decide that the system is broken beyond repair. Which can lead to them giving up, or to their own form of revolution. We're not there yet and I hope we never get there. But I can hear this horrific sound of scraping metal as the hull of the ship of state grinds against an iceberg.

Prederick wrote:
The curriculum was a product of Vision Forum, a now-defunct Texas-based evangelical organization headed by Doug Phillips, which taught “Biblical patriarchy”, a theology that prescribes strict, unequal gender roles for men and women. According a statement on the Vision Forum’s website, “Egalitarian feminism is a false ideology that has bred false doctrine in the church and seduced many believers.”

Again, they sound SO. MUCH. Like the Muslims they abhor.

Wait, it's from Doug Phillips? That would be the same Doug Phillips who spent years grooming his children's underage nanny, until finally forcing himself on her. (He claimed it wasn't so bad because his sexual assaults didn't involve penetration, just masturbating on her every night despite her begging him to stop. And it was in the same house with his wife and kids.) His Vision Forum thing closed down after the details of that came out.

Yeah, Roy Moore makes more sense now. He's friends with a group of vultures and serial sexual assaulters who have been preying on homeschoolers for the past decade or two. They've been covering for pedophiles for ages.

Gizmodo: People Are Getting Robocalls About Their "Derogatory" Trump Posts (Updated)

The reports, though, are all consistent. When the call goes to voicemail, as it did for Vanderbrook, the beginning of the recording gets cut off, but people describing the calls on Twitter, Facebook, and the telemarketer-reporting site ShouldIAnswer.com have said that the recording claims to come from “Citizens for Trump.”
Several readers recognized the voice in the recording from Ownage Pranks, a service that places automated prank calls. “Citizens for Trump” is a prank offered by the service, which records the call and lets the person who ordered it post it publicly if they choose. In the full recording, the caller is identified as “Russell from the Citizens for Trump Foundation.”
-
Citizens for Trump describes itself as a “grassroots organization” that advocates for President Trump. According to a legal filing by its co-founder Timothy Selaty, the group was formed in 2015 by Patriotic Warriors LLC. Patriotic Warriors had now-expired business licenses in West Virginia and Arizona. The Citizens for Trump website encourages people to submit “Trump-related memes” for publication. In 2016, with the help of the ACLU, Citizens for Trump sued the city of Cleveland for the right to hold a parade there during the Republican National Convention.
For now, the mechanics of the calls remain a mystery. Robocalls are difficult to trace, and the proliferation of internet-based phone systems makes it cheap and easy to place them en masse. I was able to link five of the numbers attached to the incoming calls to two different VoIP services, Peerless Network and Inteliquent. A spokesperson for Peerless said that the company would only reveal who owned a particular number if there was a court order to do so, and noted that the numbers appearing on the incoming calls could have been spoofed. Inteliquent has not yet responded to questions.

D&D Seems like the best place for this.

Killing It
Is there something wrong with millennials?

The whole article is well worth a read, but the last line stands out to me.

“Someone once said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism,” the critic and theorist Fredric Jameson wrote, fourteen years ago. These days, the kids find it easy enough to imagine both. 

Something I've always gotten talking to people of my generation is this sense that we're F**ked unless Radical Changes happen. Not just from the left either, both sides seem have the same sense. For almost the same reason with mirror image causes.

Looks like Tillerson may be on the way out, to be replaced by Pompeo.

NYT

Prederick wrote:
The curriculum was a product of Vision Forum, a now-defunct Texas-based evangelical organization headed by Doug Phillips, which taught “Biblical patriarchy”, a theology that prescribes strict, unequal gender roles for men and women. According a statement on the Vision Forum’s website, “Egalitarian feminism is a false ideology that has bred false doctrine in the church and seduced many believers.”

Again, they sound SO. MUCH. Like the Muslims they abhor.

Religious fundamentalism always seem to look the same regardless of what religion it's built on.

Demosthenes wrote:

Looks like Tillerson may be on the way out, to be replaced by Pompeo.

NYT

On the one hand, I've hated Tillerson since before he started.

On the other hand... Pompeo.

It's just chaos over there.

oilypenguin wrote:
Demosthenes wrote:

Looks like Tillerson may be on the way out, to be replaced by Pompeo.

NYT

On the one hand, I've hated Tillerson since before he started.

On the other hand... Pompeo.

It's just chaos over there.

Yeah, while I have grave concerns about Tillerson... then there's Pompeo.

Demosthenes wrote:
oilypenguin wrote:
Demosthenes wrote:

Looks like Tillerson may be on the way out, to be replaced by Pompeo.

NYT

On the one hand, I've hated Tillerson since before he started.

On the other hand... Pompeo.

It's just chaos over there.

Yeah, while I have grave concerns about Tillerson... then there's Pompeo.

Been a big ol' article dump on Pompeo and Tom Cotton today.

Rex Tillerson’s Slow-Motion Exit

The president of the United States and the man he made secretary of state have been at odds almost since the beginning. Donald Trump and Rex Tillerson clashed over the Iran nuclear deal, nato, the Qatar crisis, and North Korea. Then there were reports that Tillerson called Trump a “moron,” prompting the president to challenge him to an IQ test. Taken individually, each disagreement could be dismissed. Taken together, they made Tillerson’s position untenable.

The New York Times reported Thursday, citing senior administration officials, that the White House had developed a plan to force out Tillerson by the end of the year and replace him with Mike Pompeo, the CIA director. If the report, which said Trump hadn’t yet signed off on the plan, is accurate, Tillerson would join the list of the secretaries of state with the shortest tenure (Elihu B. Washburne, President Ulysses Grant’s top diplomat, resigned after 11 days; he was then named ambassador to France). Even if it’s not accurate, it further undermines Tillerson’s position as secretary of state, and further saps his credibility: What could be worse for America’s top diplomat than a leaked plan to replace him at some indefinite point in the future?

Reports about Tillerson's departure, which have circulated for months, emerged most recently last month when NBC News reported that he had called Trump a “moron” during a meeting that did not involve the president, following his controversial remarks to the Boy Scouts of America. Tensions between the two men were reportedly high during this period and Tillerson had seriously considered quitting, NBC reported, but was persuaded to stay by James Mattis, the defense secretary, and John Kelly, the White House chief of staff. Vice President Mike Pence reportedly talked to Tillerson about not airing his policy disagreements publicly, NBC added. The Times report Thursday said Kelly had formulated the plan to replace Tillerson with Pompeo.

Reports of Tillerson’s impending exit also circulated in August when he declined to defend Trump after his controversial remarks about a white-nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. When asked about the president’s values, Tillerson told Chris Wallace, the Fox News host, “The president speaks for himself, Chris.”

If Tillerson’s time at Foggy Bottom is indeed coming to an end, his tenure will be remembered both for its brevity and its turbulence. The former Exxon CEO's lack of government experience became a major sticking point among critics of his nomination. His close ties to Russia, where Exxon has vast business interests, were cited as a possible conflict of interest as the Trump administration became embroiled by controversy over alleged contacts between his inner circle and Russian officials. Tillerson's reorganization of the State Department also left much of its staff despondent over the future of U.S. diplomacy. He pushed back vigorously against criticisms that he was hollowing out American diplomacy this week in remarks at a forum in Washington. But on matters of policy, Tillerson stuck to longstanding U.S. approaches even if he sometimes chose different words to advocate it—and even if at times he seemed to contradict Trump.

Tillerson said the Obama-era policy of of “strategic patience” with North Korea was over—even if Trump’s policy is virtually indistinguishable from his predecessor's—despite North Korea’s latest ICBM test this week. Tillerson cited concerns with the nuclear deal with Iran, but pressed for its repeated re-certification by Trump, who was angered by the pressure. Trump called the agreement the “worst” deal in history, and ultimately, despite Tillerson’s advice, sent the multi-nation deal to Congress. Tillerson also endorsed the idea of collective defense at nato, which the president dismissed as obsolete. And the secretary defended Qatar in its diplomatic dispute with its Arab neighbors. (Trump called the nation the biggest supporter of terrorism in the Middle East.)

Despite these frequent differences of opinion, Tillerson insisted his relationship with the president was good. “He calls me late at night on the weekends when something comes into his head and he wants to talk. He may call me at any moment at any time, but it is a very open relationship, and it’s one in which I feel quite comfortable telling him my views,” Tillerson said at a news conference at the State Department on August 1. “And he and I have differences of views on things like [the Iran nuclear deal] and how we should use it. … [If] we’re not having those differences, I’m not sure I’m serving him,” he added.

Interrogators Blast Trump’s ‘Clueless’ CIA Pick Tom Cotton

The Central Intelligence Agency is set to receive an advocate of waterboarding, sweeping surveillance powers, jailing journalists, and conflict with Iran as its next director.

A combat veteran and first-term Arkansas GOP senator, Tom Cotton has wasted little time building his twin reputations as one of the Senate’s hardest hardliners and friendliest Donald Trump allies. In one of his earliest Senate soundbites, he rebuked a Pentagon official in 2015 for the failed plan to close Guantanamo Bay, saying its detainees should “rot in hell.”

More recently, he has mocked the idea that Trump colluded with Russia.

Now, following months of whispered reporting, White House chief of staff John Kelly has developed a plan to transition Cotton over to the Central Intelligence Agency directorship—the better to oust flailing Secretary of State Rex Tillerson with CIA director and fellow Trump loyalist Mike Pompeo, according to the New York Times.

Cotton’s prospective arrival at the CIA is the latest dalliance with a restoration of torture to the spy agency’s agenda. Trump as a presidential candidate advocated “worse” torture techniques than waterboarding, only to proclaim himself swayed away from torture by the opposition of Jim Mattis, now the defense secretary.

While Pompeo had to signal the same opposition during his confirmation hearing, Cotton has been more explicit in favor of an act whose illegality was reconfirmed formally in 2015. An amendment from Senators John McCain and Dianne Feinstein banned the CIA from torturing detainees. Cotton voted against it.

“Waterboarding isn’t torture,” Cotton told CNN last November, offering the misleading defense that waterboarding done to train elite U.S. forces to resist torture—and, therefore, is not so bad.

"If experienced, intelligence professionals come to the president of the United States and say, 'we think this terrorist has critical information and we need to obtain it, and this is the only way we can obtain it,' that's a tough call but the presidency is a tough job and if you're not willing to make those tough calls, then you shouldn't seek the office. Donald Trump is a pretty tough guy and he's ready to make those tough calls."

But U.S. forces volunteer for such training, and the waterboarding gruesomely administered by the CIA during the Bush administration was far more severe, according to the Senate intelligence committee’s landmark 2014 report—“a series of near drownings" was how internal CIA cables described the waterboarding of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed—and former torture-resistance instructors.

Glenn Carle, a retired CIA operations officer with interrogation experience, called Cotton “wholly unfit to be CIA director.”

“Those of us with some knowledge and objectivity have pointed out endlessly that torture does not work, is illegal, is unnecessary and harms the perpetrators of it,” Carle told The Daily Beast.

“Tom Cotton at present remains clueless about torture. He seems to base his beliefs on the efficacy of torture on B-movies and dog-eared Tom Clancy novels,” added former Navy interrogation-resistance instructor Malcolm Nance, who has been waterboarded and calls it torture.

Is Tom Cotton the Future of Trumpism?

If you believed the national media, the week of the annual Republican Party fund-raising dinner, in Fort Smith, Arkansas, in late August, was one of the worst of Donald Trump’s Presidency. The President had just responded to the unrest in Charlottesville with statements that appeared sympathetic to neo-Nazi demonstrators, and even some members of his own party were denouncing him. The White House staff was in turmoil, following the departure of Reince Priebus as chief of staff, and the Senate had failed to pass a replacement for the Affordable Care Act. The featured speaker for the evening was the state’s junior senator, Tom Cotton, who seized the chance to address the disquiet in the nation’s capital.

At forty years old, Cotton is the youngest member of the Senate, and he retains the erect posture and solemn bearing that he displayed as a member of the Army’s Old Guard, which presides at military ceremonies, including funerals, in Washington. He’s let his hair grow, a little, since his Army days. When he first ran for office, in 2012—he served a single term in the House of Representatives before winning his Senate seat, in 2014—Cotton was often described as robotic on the stump, but he’s improved somewhat as a speaker, even if he still projects more intelligence than warmth. In this manner, he gave an assignment to the two hundred or so guests in the hotel ballroom.

“Go home tonight and turn on one of the nighttime comedy shows. Tomorrow morning, turn on one of the cable morning-news shows. This Saturday, watch ‘Saturday Night Live,’ ” he said. “All the high wardens of popular culture in this country, they love to make fun of Donald Trump, to mock him, to ridicule him. They make fun of his hair, they make fun of the color of his skin, they make fun of the way he talks—he’s from Queens, not from Manhattan. They make fun of that long tie he wears, they make fun of his taste for McDonald’s.” He went on, “What I don’t think they realize is that out here in Arkansas and the heartland and the places that made a difference in that election, like Michigan and Wisconsin, when we hear that kind of ridicule, we hear them making fun of the way we look, and the way we talk, and the way we think.”

It was, on one level, a breathtaking leap—to equate mockery of a louche New York billionaire with attacks on the citizens of this small, conservative city, which lies across the Arkansas River from Oklahoma. But Cotton’s appeal to his audience for solidarity with Trump, which was greeted with strong applause, represented just one part of his enthusiastic embrace of the President. Stephen Bannon, Trump’s former top strategist and the chairman of the right-wing Web site Breitbart News, told me, “Next to Trump, he’s the elected official who gets it the most—the economic nationalism. Cotton was the one most supportive of us, up front and behind the scenes, from the beginning. He understands that the Washington élite—this permanent political class of both parties, between the K Street consultants and politicians—needs to be shattered.” At the same time, Cotton has maintained strong ties with the establishment wing of the G.O.P. Karl Rove, President George W. Bush’s chief political adviser, told me, “Cotton is not like a Steve Bannon, who wants to blow up the existing structure, uproot the ideology of the Republican Party and replace it with something new. He’s a rising star. He’s capable of building bridges within the Party. He wants to get things done.”

In recent weeks, several Republican Senators have denounced Trump for his intemperance and his dishonesty. Jeff Flake, of Arizona, and Bob Corker, of Tennessee, condemned Trump and announced that they would not seek reëlection in 2018. Ben Sasse, of Nebraska, whose term is not up until 2020, said that, by threatening journalists, Trump was violating his oath to defend the Constitution. Cotton has made a different bet, offering only the gentlest of criticisms of the President. When, in the course of several weeks of conversations, I asked Cotton about one or another of Trump’s controversial statements or tweets, he always responded in the same manner. “The President puts things sometimes in a way that I would not,” he said in early October. “But he was still nominated by our voters and elected by the American people to be our President, and if we want him to accomplish our agenda we need to set him up for success.”

Even Trump’s latest political traumas have not shaken Cotton’s faith in him. Following the indictment of Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort and former campaign adviser Rick Gates, last week, Cotton urged a prompt resolution of the investigation into the Trump campaign, but he did not call for the removal of Robert Mueller, the special counsel. “What’s in the best interest of everyone is for these inquiries to move forward, and to follow them to their proper conclusion as quickly as possible,” Cotton said.

Every time this administration appoints someone, I become more convinced that they are trolling the world by choosing the polar opposite of the right person for the job.

Well, see, they know that government doesn't work, but not everyone in the country believes that. So they're going to stack the government with unqualified people who just want to destroy their agencies and bureaus. That way, government actually won't work, and then everyone will be with them.

Demosthenes wrote:
oilypenguin wrote:
Demosthenes wrote:

Looks like Tillerson may be on the way out, to be replaced by Pompeo.

NYT

On the one hand, I've hated Tillerson since before he started.

On the other hand... Pompeo.

It's just chaos over there.

Yeah, while I have grave concerns about Tillerson... then there's Pompeo.

What? No one's going to say anything about Tom Cotton becoming the new head of the CIA? The 40-year-old with no intelligence experience who's been quietly pushing Trump into open hostilities with Iran (and supporting Trump's sabre rattling with North Korea) and who once said "...the only problem with Guantánamo Bay is there are too many empty beds and cells there right now"?

EDIT: Prederickhaused with sauces.