Contrary to conventional commentary, Nick Ayers’ refusal of Trump’s request to serve as General Kelly’s replacement as White House Chief of Staff is not rule breaking. Steve Mnuchin and Nick Mulvaney’s rumored reluctance/refusal are, as the unwritten but unequivocal rule makes clear. […]
Hail to the Chief. Not the pretender at 1600 Pennsylvania, but the real one who presides over SCOTUS at 1 First Street NE. When an honest and comprehensive history of the nasty and brutish Trump administration is chronicled, years from now, Wednesday November 21, 2018 will be marked as the turning point, after which Trump’s fall proceeded steadily and the ultimate crash became certain. […]
There are many reasons why people like Elizabeth Warren, who is whiter than Ivory Soap, and Donald Trump of German ancestry, but who claimed to be a Swede, make false claims about their ethnic, national, racial or socio-economic identities. We all have met these people and some of us have been them. H.L. once interviewed (for a government position) an applicant who had been the head of her law school’s Puerto Rican student association. She was as Puerto Rican as Trump is a Rutabaga. And for a few seconds, H.L., while an exchange student at Howard convinced himself he was black – until quickly disabused of that by his frat brothers. What do we think when the deceivers go public and how should we evaluate whether the lie signals a serious flaw in character? […]
H.L. does not post about things where we don’t possess real knowledge, experience or unique perspective. For example, nothing about the long-term prospects of the latest royal marriage. And despite having been around the SCOTUS pool a few times – via oral argument, testimony at confirmation hearings and many briefs and cert. denials, some causing despair and others corks to pop – H.L. determined to be really unique and not comment on The Kavanaugh. But the second and public swearing in was a spectacle up with which we will not put (Sir Winston). […]
Nine years after Michael Jackson’s death, his testimony overwhelms the memory of his creative and performative genius. More than his Moonwalk or Thriller video I hear him describing the refiner’s fire that forged perfection on stage, video and in recordings. No birthdays off, no Christmases, no New Years, no time off at all from drilling – under a father/sergeant major who recognized his child’s hundred-year latent talent, that could be realized by disregarding the price to be paid. […]
This hopeless liberal’s examination of professions that best prepare people to serve as legislators and in other elected offices began when John Dunne (from Long Island not “no man is an island” Donne) once Republican majority whip in the New York Senate assigned the decline in legislative civility and productivity to not too many, but too few lawyers. He said in more productive and decorous times a majority of legislators had been attorneys, whose education and profession rewarded skill in negotiation, compromise, conciliation, conflict resolution and knowledge of the law – how to make them, change them and what the fuck they actually mean. Dunne did not utter the expletive but went on to chronicle the growing number of doctors, farmers, dentists and astronauts in legislative chambers and the contemporaneous plummet in productivity. […]
After reading about, then hearing, finally watching Trump’s “why would they” and accompanying remarks from the post-coital 7/16/18 Helsinki news conference, H.L. experienced a series of reactions that corresponded to 80% of the Kübler-Ross stages of grief. Acceptance being the one missing. […]
As H.L. Post 55 made clear, this hopeless liberal bids good riddance to Justice Anthony Kennedy. Among liberals that point of view is not widely shared and the laments keep coming, stoked by press on the left. Among the foremost and most knowledgeable in that camp is NPR’s Nina Totenberg, who upon Kennedy’s announcement commented “it’s the end of the world as we know it.” Immediately and repeatedly followed by her false history of the context of Kennedy’s nomination, the falsity of which is known better by Totenberg than anyone. She recites that in 1987 Kennedy was nominated by President Reagan, in the wake of the Senate’s rejection of Reagan’s nomination of Judge Robert Bork. Half true enough. Reagan in fact nominated Kennedy in the wake of another intervening nomination, of D.C. Circuit Judge Douglas Ginsburg. A nomination that Totenberg single handedly torpedoed. […]
In the two weeks before Justice Anthony Kennedy announced that he would retire, the high court issued five very bad decisions that will grievously harm many Americans and America for decades, at the very least. They are, one, National Institute of Family and Life Advocates v. Becerra, Attorney General of California involving “pro-life” unlicensed crisis pregnancy centers; two, Janus v. American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees, involving agency fees paid by non-union members to unions for negotiating better compensation and benefits for them; three, Ohio v. American Express, involving an antitrust challenge to a credit card practice that raises merchant and consumer prices by $ billions annually; four, Trump v. Hawaii, involving our openly bigoted President’s third attempt to ban most Muslim aliens from entering the United States; and five, Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, involving a bakers refusal, on religious grounds, to bake a wedding cake for a same sex couple. […]
Though America’s white population must continually be reminded that racism – overt, covert and systemic, still pervade American life, Jews need little reminder of pervasive anti-Semitism, mostly below the surface in America but openly expressed virtually everywhere else. H.L. encounters it as he travels and often because his funny Welsh/Greek-Russian Romanian name allows him to “pass for white” (as Jews used to say) and initially cloaks his ethnicity and religion. […]
