Happy Ash Wednesday

Courtesy of T.S. Eliot.

"109 Inconvenienced Passengers" is the Big Muslim-Ban Lie

As I type this there's another Republican spokesperson (Rep. Ted Yoho of Florida) on the PBS Newshour defending Donald Trump's Muslim Ban in the same terms used by all the Administration voices repeating the same strange justifications of a ill-conceived policy that many of them describe as "working out very nicely" despite obvious evidence to the contrary. The most annoying statement to me has been Sean Spicer repeating the strangely specific number of only 109 people inconvenienced at U.S. airports because they were in the air when the policy changed.

There are obviously tens of thousands of others stuck in foreign airports, refugee camps, intermediate waystations, or various stages of the multi-year vetting process who are now in limbo. Those are the people I heard described in the episode of This American Life I listened to in the car on the way home tonight. This hour of audio is so much more informative than any of the quick "insights" and factoids you'll hear in any of the televised back and forth from the usual suspects we're used to seeing on TV.

 (If the embedded This American Life player isn't showing up or working on your browser below, Click Here to go directly to Episode 609: "It's Working Out Very Nicely")

The Short-Fingered Vulgarian's Revenge

Earlier this morning, the entity tweeting as @realDonaldTrump took its stubby little digits to its smartphone to attack Graydon Carter, so it seems like a good time to revisit Kurt Andersen and Graydon Carter's conversation with David Folkenflik about Spy Magazine and Donald Trump's most famous nickname that appeared on NPR back on March 7:

Trump Tweet Translator:
"They say I can't hold a grudge?! I'll never forget Graydon Carter's 30-year-old 'short-fingered vulgarian' smear!" https://t.co/I8NcHSMLK9

— True Blue Liberal (@TrueBlueLiberal) December 15, 2016

UPDATE AT NOON:
It seems clear that the actual reason Trump went after Vanity Fair's editor this morning was not because of a long-remembered slight, but because the magazine published Tina Nguyen's brilliant restaurant review of Trump Grill that should be read by all of America:

TRUMP GRILL COULD BE THE WORST RESTAURANT IN AMERICA
And it reveals everything you need to know about our next president.

Will he still be tweeting to protect the honor (and bottom line) of his private businesses after he has taken public office on January 20th? Or will he expect America to ignore his manifold conflicts of interest as completely as we ignored the fact that he never released his tax returns?

Chickens Coming Home to Roost (2016 Edition)

The phrase about the chickens is most familiar to modern Americans from the fact Barack Obama's Chicago pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, pointed out to his congregation on September 16, 2001, that "America's chickens are coming home to roost." Just as with most figures of speech that contain a lot of truth, that phrase is much older than the current century. Robert Southey used "Curses are like young chicken, they always come home to roost" on the title page of The Curse of Kehama in 1811. Earlier than that, Geoffrey Chaucer wrote "And ofte tyme swich cursynge wrongfully retorneth agayn to hym that curseth, as a bryd that retorneth agayn to his owene nest" in The Parson's Tale in the late 14th century.

In the six centuries since Chaucer, there may never have been a better illustration of the homing instincts of Gallus gallus domesticus than we saw this week when the CIA announced with "high confidence" that Russia had interfered with the US election to help Donald Trump win the presidency. The CIA. They should know. Since their founding in 1947, they have influenced elections on every continent but Antarctica (and maybe Australia?), beginning with the Italian election of 1948. Here's a short audio recap from Tim Weiner, author of Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, that was heard on WNYC yesterday:

Dear @realDonaldTrump,
What is the penalty going to be during your Administration for burning the Russian flag? pic.twitter.com/6l8zTRQpRc

— True Blue Liberal (@TrueBlueLiberal) December 10, 2016

"Liberal" Cool? Of Course It Is (and always has been)!

In concert with this morning's post about an article in Salon about "The L Word," I also stumbled upon this story from Public Radio International's The Takeaway: "Is the Word 'Liberal' Becoming Cool Again in America?"



As with the article in the last post, both reassessments of the word were prompted by the Democratic Presidential Debate on CNN on Tuesday night -- a debate which was not (except for Jim Webb) running away from liberal ideals and chasing the Republicans toward the Right.

It's Keef, innit?

There is still something to be said for the excitement of picking up a physical recording on the day of its release, hoping to get to the record store (if you are lucky enough to still have a record store) before they sell out of their first shipment.

So far I've only heard the song Trouble that was released online, but I'm expecting the hour in the car after work today to be more fun than usual. Because? Well, because it's Keef, innit? Author of one of my favorite books of the last five years, and not a bad guitarist either.

On the way to work, I was lucky enough to hear this interview with Keith Richards on NPR's Morning Edition. Following the Rules of Keith, even the stringent indoor smoking regulations of NPR and New York City were temporarily suspended for this humorous, informative, and touching conversation.

Kurt Andersen talking to Paul Thomas Anderson about Thomas Pynchon and Inherent Vice

If you have a spare 40 minutes, or if you want to listen to something interesting while watching football with no sound, you can do worse than listening to this extended interview that was condensed to 13 minutes on Studio 360:

This might actually be good.

I hate to get my hopes up, but is it possible that Paul Thomas Anderson may actually succeed in bringing a Thomas Pynchon novel to the screen?
Here's the trailer released today:



And here's an interesting discussion on WNYC's Soundcheck in which John Schaefer and Rolling Stone's Rob Sheffield talk about the music in the novel:

The Quote of the Day: "Visit the Caliphate Before the Caliphate Visits You"

It's not just NPR, but NPR is what I listen to when I'm not listening to music, so I have to blame them for giving over much too much of their Iraq coverage to the experts who were part of the fuck-up of the last decade. Having a uniform and brass on one's shoulder should not automatically qualify a person for opinions about war and peace, but NPR has been interviewing a lot of officers lately.

Here's the one I heard on the ride home this evening. At the 3'45" mark of this interview, Marine Colonel Gary Anderson (ret.) disqualifies himself by using the forbidden jargon "Boots on the Ground," but ten seconds later when Audie Cornish asks him if those "Boots" should be worn by Americans, he gives us our quote of the day:

"Well, I know it's not a popular thing. The American people think that they're uh tired of war, but uh they're gonna be a lot less tired when some of his [Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi's] American passport holders come back and start shooting up shopping malls and things like that. I think the watchword that I would use is 'Visit the Caliphate Before the Caliphate Visits You.'" 

This "watchword" (another suspect bit of jargon) would fit perfectly coming from a mouth of a Bush Administration cabinet member and could have been written as one the publicity tropes coming out of the White House Iraq Group (WHIG) in 2002-2003.