The Social Progress Imperative is a U.S.-based nonprofit that produces an annual index of countries, ranked by their social and environmental standing. Well, according to this index, WaPo says, the U.S. is a second-tier nation.

With an overall score of 86.4/100, the United States ranks 18th out of the 180 countries measured, a slot that makes the United States a “second-tier” country, according to the index. “The U.S. has been pretty consistently underperforming given its GDP relative to other developed nations,” Michael Green, CEO of the Social Progress Imperative, told The Washington Post. “The U.S. has been underperforming for some time now, but what we see now is that the U.S. has basically flatlined on social progress since 2014. “The fact that the U.S. is in the second tier is not the product of one or two administrations, but decades of underinvestment and failure to address the problems people face,” he added.

Well, drat.

The index ranks nations on the basis of 50 major measures as varied as “freedom of expression” and “wastewater treatment.” While second-tier countries generally offer their citizens access to nutrition, sanitation and electricity, they lag behind in measurements for civic engagement, communal cohesion and safety nets.

We’re still exceptional at providing people with education and with basic sanitation needs, liked piped water, the report says. But, seems to me, given Betsy deVos and Flint, we must be heading for third-tier status fast.

The index measures the quality of life for 98 percent of the world’s population. The top of this year’s index — a section labeled “Very High Social Progress” — is dominated by northern European nations, such as Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Switzerland, all of which score at least 90. In the second tier, which begins with Belgium at 15, the United States is sandwiched between Japan at 17 and France at 19. Argentina rounds out the section — labeled “High Social Progress” — at 38.

I suppose we can take comfort that we still have it way better than the Argentinians do.  Note that Canada and Australia seem to be doing pretty well, too, according to this map.

The two areas in which the U.S. is under-performing most bigly are “health and wellness” and “tolerance and inclusion.” Here’s what the report says about “health and wellness”:

Italy (84.81) ranks second in the world on Health and Wellness with long life expectancy and a low level of premature deaths from non-communicable diseases and suicides. Japan (79.89, 20th) and France (79.06, 22nd) have the highest and second highest life expectancy (at 60), but Japan ranks 114th on suicide rate and France ranks 106th. The US performs far below countries at the same level of GDP per capita, registering relative weaknesses on all indicators in the component.

And, of course, we’re going to be even less great again if that monstrosity of a Republican health care bill gets passed.

The Social Progress Imperative index creating people were broadly disappointed with the whole world in the area of “tolerance and inclusion,” but said this:

The United States and Canada have both experienced declines in Tolerance and Inclusion due to decreasing religious tolerance and increasing discrimination against minorities. But whereas tolerance for immigrants has also declined in the United States, it has slightly improved in Canada. In the US, Tolerance and Inclusion scores declined significantly due to an increase in anti-Semitic activities and an increase in discrimination against minorities. The US ranks just 23 in the world across this component, placing it behind less prosperous countries including Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, and Costa Rica.

Ooops — Argentina pulls ahead in this category. Double drat.

Overall, the index considers the U.S. to be “under-performing.” Based on the GDP per capita, there should be a much better qualify of life here than there is.

Okay, try to look surprised. Just try.

Update: Timothy Egan, “Our Fake Democracy“

There continues to be confusion about what makes fake news fake. So I’d like to demonstrate with a new story from Palmer Report.

I’ve been using Palmer Report as an example of a fake news site, even though it isn’t the only one by a long shot. But Palmer has a loyal following on the left who refuse to see why his reports are not trustworthy. So let me explain.

Today’s example is a story headlined “Treasury Department’s financial crimes unit is giving up Donald Trump’s money laundering records.” Now, I personally have long believed Trump’s real estate business could very well be involved in money laundering. It’s also the case that the Treasury Department’s financial crimes unit has investigated Trump properties for money laundering. It’s also the case that this financial crimes unit has agreed to share some documents regarding Trump’s finances with the Senate Intelligence Committee. That much of Palmer’s report is true.

So what’s the problem? First — a careful reading of the CNN story Palmer himself uses as a source doesn’t say squat about those Treasury documents containing evidence of money laundering. We don’t know what’s in those documents. It’s not even clear that the crime unit, FinCEN, is sharing everything it has on Trump with the Senate. The story just says they’re handing over some documents with information relating to connections between the Trump campaign and Russian financiers.

Second, while it’s true that FinCEN has investigated Trump properties for money laundering activities, they haven’t publicly accused anyone in the Trump organization of actually doing any money laundering. Palmer, of course, says otherwise. Palmer claims:

As Palmer Report was the first to report back on April 15th (link), the Treasury FinCEN division busted the Trump Taj Mahal casino for money laundering back in the spring of 2015.

Here’s a more reliable source, NPR:

The Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City, which opened in 1990 and closed in 2016, was repeatedly cited for having inadequate money-laundering controls, not an unusual charge in the gaming business.

FinCEN fined the casino $10 million in 2015, although Trump had long before declared bankruptcy and had little real involvement in the property.

If NPR is right, Palmer lies when he said the Trump Taj Mahal was “busted for money laundering.” It was cited for having inadequate money laundering controls. That’s quite a bit different. And as NPR said, by 2015 Trump was no longer involved in the Taj Mahal, and even if actual money laundering had been found there, it wouldn’t necessarily have been tied to him.

Back to Palmer:

This was announced in a press release on the FinCEN website (link), but it only became a part of the Senate’s Trump-Russia investigation after our research team dug it up and publicized it.

If you follow the link to the FinCEN website, and actually read the press release, you find that NPR is right and Palmer is wrong. FinCEN fined the Trump Taj Mahal for inadequate money-laundering controls, not for actual money laundering.

Trump Taj Mahal, a casino in Atlantic City, New Jersey, admitted to several willful BSA violations, including violations of AML program requirements, reporting obligations, and recordkeeping requirements. Trump Taj Mahal has a long history of prior, repeated BSA violations cited by examiners dating back to 2003. Additionally, in 1998, FinCEN assessed a $477,700 civil money penalty against Trump Taj Mahal for currency transaction reporting violations.

FinCEN may have suspected actual money laundering was going on, but apparently they couldn’t prove it. But, again, in 2015 Trump was mostly out of the casino business already. In fact, according to this in-depth report in the New York Times, Trump walked away from his own casino business in 2009, dumping the debt-ridden mess on the shareholders. After that he was no longer even on the board of the company, even though his name was on the buildings.

So what FinCEN found going on in the Trump Taj Mahal in 2015 probably is irrelevant to Donald Trump, no matter how breathlessly Bill Palmer tries to pump it up into a big exclusive scoop. If other news outlets weren’t making a big deal out of the 2015 press release — and Palmer isn’t the only one who found it — it’s probably because the professionals realized it wasn’t that significant.

I’m not bringing this up to make excuses for Trump. I’m bringing this up because I think facts are important. We do not need alternate facts; the standard facts ought to suffice.  Palmer is not reporting facts. He’s reporting speculation, and in some case he’s reporting lies.

If you have done real news reporting for an actual newspaper or other professional news medium — and I have — you learn to be very careful that your facts are, well, factual. People who are sloppy with the factual details get caught, eventually, and that’s the end of their careers. So it doesn’t matter how fervently you believe X to be true; if you cannot corroborate X with a reasonable source, you can’t put it in the story. But owners of clickbait sites answer to no professional standards, and as long as they don’t write anything slanderous or libelous, they can bamboozle away.

More from the Palmer Report:

The Senate Intel Committee is now looking to get to the bottom of the money laundering bust, which came at a time when Donald Trump was still part owner of the Taj Mahal. The punishment came in the form of a $10 million civil fine, and the press release did not state the nationality of the individuals who were laundering money through the casino. There is widespread suspicion, but not yet publicly available proof, that the Russians were the culprits, and that Trump knew about it. In sufficiently large dollar amounts, it would be impossible for a casino not to be aware of money laundering taking place on its floor.

So let’s unpack this. Was Trump still a part owner of the Taj Mahal in 2015? Sort of. According to the Associated Press, Trump “cut most of his ties with Atlantic City in 2009, though he retained a small stake in its parent company, Trump Entertainment Resorts, in return for the right to use his name.” As the New York Times story already cited said, he walked away from his casinos in 2009, giving up his position on the board of directors. It’s well known that after 2009 he no longer had anything to do with the casinos, operationally. But he did retain some shares in the parent company, so technically he was a “part owner.”

But the rest of Palmer’s paragraph is just fiction. FinCEN didn’t claim to have found anyone laundering money through the casinos, so they couldn’t very well state the nationality of the individuals they didn’t catch.

So now that the Senate has managed to twist the Treasury Department’s arm into turning over the money laundering records in question, it should allow the Senate Intel Committee to follow the money and determine the identities and motives of those who were laundering the money at Trump’s casino, as well as Donald Trump’s connection to those individuals.

And that’s it. That’s the whole money laundering scoop. This is not a serious news story.

Again, I’m not saying money laundering wasn’t going on in those casinos, I’m saying that the Treasury Department never cited those casinos for money laundering, just for bad record keeping and reporting compliance. FinCEN may have more evidence it hasn’t made public, but apparently not enough to seek an indictment.

I do think there’s a large possibility that the Trump real estate business has been used for money laundering purposes. I’m not the only one who thinks so; you can find lots of people connecting those dots. For example, Jeremy Venook wrote in the Atlantic,

According to The New York Times, Trump attempted to rekindle his Russian connections during one of his brushes with bankruptcy in 1996, saying he had never been “as impressed with the potential of a city as I have been with Moscow.” Once again, the proposed development, this time an underground shopping mall near the Kremlin, fell through. In the process, though,Trump developed a partnership with a development company called the Bayrock Group, which was founded by a former Soviet official and a Russian-American businessman who has since been implicated in a stock-manipulation and money-laundering scheme involving members of the Russian mob.

See also “Trump and Money Laundering: The Key Questions to Ask” by Cerelia Athanassiou at Newsweek and “Do Trump’s Murky Financial Ties to Russia Connect to Money Laundering?” by Bill Buzenberg at Mother Jones. Lots of dots that might connect; lots of circumstantial evidence. Some of Trump’s business associates appear to be in it up to their necks. I think it’s very likely that Trump was in on it, too.

But we don’t know for sure yet. My believing this is true doesn’t make it true. We don’t know what FinCEN knows. We don’t know what are in the documents that FinCEN will share with the Senate. Bill Palmer doesn’t know, either. And that’s why this story is fake news.

Even if we find out some day that Trump really was directly involved in laundering money through his casinos for Russian mobsters, which is entirely possible, this story will still have been fake news, because it was making assertions without having the facts to back them up at the time.

The problem is that when large parts of the Left begin to buy alternate facts, it hurts our credibility and diminishes our ability to make rational decisions about What to Do About Trump. Now we’ll have a bunch of lefties believing that Trump already has been caught at money laundering, when he hasn’t, and maybe he never will be. When we fall into believing alternate facts, we’re no no different from the wackjob Right believing that Barack Obama faked his birth certificate.

So please, people, let’s try to keep it real.

Word is that Republicans are going to push for a vote on the Senate version of Trumpcare by Thursday, June 29. This is the mystery bill they’ve been writing in the shadows; there is no substantive debate because the details are being kept under wraps. Will the Republicans succeed? It depends on whom you ask. Here are some links. If you read through these, you will know as much as I know, anyway.

Tim Dickinson, Rolling Stone, WTF Is Going on With the Secret Senate Version of Trumpcare?

Ezra Klein, Vox, The real reason Republicans can’t answer simple questions about their health care bill

Dylan Scott, Vox,  3 ways Senate Republicans can pass Obamacare repeal (And four ways they could fail)

Greg Sargent, Washington Post, Sorry, folks. The GOP’s devious strategy for ramming Trumpcare through is working

Tierney Sneed, Talking Points Memo, Dems Gear Up For Make-Or-Break Moment On Obamacare Repeal

Josh Marshall, Talking Points Memo, The McConnell Corrupt Bargain And The Fallacy of Policy Literalism

Josh Marshall, Talking Points Memo, The Moderates’ Tale (or the Play-Acting Before the Cave)

I hope everyone enjoyed Father’s Day. I was kind of out of it yesterday and didn’t pull myself together to post anything. But now I’m back.

“Fake news” is a vast topic, but I want to zero in on something I see going on among leftie websites and social media. An Atlantic article from February discussed the increasing tendency of online lefties to share “fake news,” defined as “online stories that look like real journalism but are full of fables and falsehoods.” Some days social media is one link to a fake news story after another.

As the Atlantic article says, fake news on the Left and Right are not equivalent. Leftie fake news usually is not deliberate propaganda. Usually it exploits wishful thinking. It’s a headline blurting out something we may want to be true, so people can’t resist clicking on it. The story itself may not deliver what the headline promises, however.

For example, a story being spread around today is headlined “Donald Trump wants to resign.” If you read the actual article, you find a lot of filler copy that finally gets to a quote pulled out of Politico —

“But Trump, too, is cognizant of the comparison to Nixon, according to one adviser. The president, who friends said does not enjoy living in Washington and is strained by the demanding hours of the job, is motivated to carry on because he ‘doesn’t want to go down in history as a guy who tried and failed,’ said the adviser. ‘He doesn’t want to be the second president in history to resign.’”

That’s it. That’s the entire “scoop,” and it’s neither original nor does it actually say that Donald Trump wants to resign. It says he’s miserable at the job, yes, but that he doesn’t want to resign. This example is mostly innocuous, but going by social media comments the headline caused a lot of people to believe Trump is about to resign.

This is right up there with last year’s number one fake news story on the Left, that Hillary Clinton was about to be indicted. Any day now. Just you wait and see. Any day now …

Sometimes there’s a headline with no story — see “Donald Trump Is Going to Prison.” There’s no story; just the author’s prediction. This kind of story comes closer to being a hoax than propaganda, but the point of it is to get people to click on the link and thereby earn the site owners advertising revenue.

The people who write these sites (such as Bill Palmer of Palmer Report, who also happens to be a jerk, IMO) are not “journalists” even in a broad sense of the word. They do no legwork, make no phone calls, cultivate no sources. They pull out pieces of news stories published in legitimate news sources, wrap them in a lot of extra verbiage to plump them and make them look more substantial, slap an incendiary headline on them, and hit publish. Then they wait for the clicks to come in.

Sometimes these fantasies are unintentionally hilarious. Louise Mensch and Claude Taylor of Patribotics came up with this one last month:

Multiple sources close to the intelligence, justice and law enforcement communities say that the House Judiciary Committee is considering Articles of Impeachment against the President of the United States.

Sources further say that the Supreme Court notified Mr. Trump that the formal process of a case of impeachment against him was begun, before he departed the country on Air Force One. The notification was given, as part of the formal process of the matter, in order that Mr. Trump knew he was not able to use his powers of pardon against other suspects in Trump-Russia cases. Sources have confirmed that the Marshal of the Supreme Court spoke to Mr. Trump.

It was reported this week that Mr. Trump had texted Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn the message ‘Stay strong’. This might be interpreted as an attempt to intimidate a witness, sources say.

Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein met with the House Judiciary Committee this week in closed session.

The authors have previously reported exclusively on Patribotics that a sealed indictment exists against Donald Trump.

And, of course, that’s now how this works. That’s not how any of this works. Give David Frum credit for a sense of humor:

Exclusive photo of the Marshall of the Supreme Court and his honor guard arriving at the White House. MUST CREDIT. pic.twitter.com/gX4v1hlGoY

— David Frum (@davidfrum) May 20, 2017

Also, too:

ah, another hot scoop rooted in finely granular knowledge of how the U.S. government does not operate pic.twitter.com/1hO3bAARSc

— Simon Maloy (@SimonMaloy) May 20, 2017

Probably not remarkably, this episode appears to have done nothing to hurt Louise Mensch’s credibility with her fans, who insist she is always right.

I guarantee you can bleeping make up something absolutely ridiculous out of whole cloth, write about eight paragraphs of mostly filler text that doesn’t actually say anything, and with the right headline it will go viral in hours. Here are some headlines you can use — “Trump Spends Three Hours a Day Diddling Himself, Sources Say.” How about “Secret Court Declares Hillary Clinton Election Winner.” (or) “Hillary Clinton Sues DNC to Force Her Name on 2020 Ballot.” Take your pick on that. “Bernie Sanders Working With Trump to Undermine Democrats.” I believe I’ve seen that one, actually.

One area where there is genuine propaganda going on is in the Russian hacking story. As I wrote a few days ago,  I keep running into lefties who sincerely believe this whole Trump-Russia thing is just something like a false flag operation being run by Clinton supporters in media and government. And you can find all kinds of “news” stories providing, um, alternative facts supporting that position.

Basically, wherever there’s a strongly held opinion, someone somewhere will set up a fake news site to cater to it. These days a professional-looking news site can be set up for practically nothing. It’s a fairly simple, and completely legal, way to make some money. I wish I were unethical enough to do it myself.

Image found at https://modernliberals.com/the-palmer-report-is-not-news-and-its-an-insult-to-the-left/clickbait-kitten-palmer-report/

But beside misinforming people, fake news sites also are parasites. They rip off work done by actual reporters and leech revenue that should go to organizations paying the salaries of actual reporters.

And yes, as a blogger I rip off a lot of work done by others, too, but I don’t pretend The Mahablog is a news site. If I ever stumble across an actual scoop I’ll let you know, though.

Josh Marshall wrote this week,

Early this week, Time Inc. laid off 300 employees across its properties. On Wednesday, Huffpost laid off 39 employees. Then later that day Vocativ, another digital media site, laid off its entire editorial staff. Huffpost’s layoffs were part of a much larger retrenchment (2,100 layoffs) at Oath, the new company which combines what used to be Yahoo and AOL.

That’s just this week. If the quality of journalism is suffering, part of the reason is that the news business model is in a state of flux these days. Newspapers, once the backbone of journalism, are going the way of the horse and buggy. Over the past several years all manner of news bureaus have had to cut staff. Television news appears to be holding steady, but much of television news is less news reporting and more opinion programming, which is a lot cheaper to produce. Years ago cable news filled up with programs featuring party hacks yelling at each other. Actual in-depth journalism is a rare thing.

So I’d like to ask people to be more careful about who you link to. If you find a story with a promising headline, pay attention to the website it’s hosted in. Have I heard of this site? How can I tell if it’s legitimate?

If it seems to be a newspaper, is it a real newspaper? Fake newspapers abound on the web.  One way to check is to find out what city it’s published in; a real newspaper will be mostly local news, so the location should be immediately obvious.  If the location isn’t obvious, assume it’s fake.

Is it The Onion (not fake, but satire)? Is it Jared Kushner’s Observer (Kushner uses it to troll lefties)?

If you aren’t sure about the source, can you corroborate the basic story by finding it in other sources? If it’s real news, multiple sites will pick it up the same story pretty quickly. If the story appears no where else, assume it’s fake.

If the story is just quoting another news source, do the world a favor and link to the original news source. Let the news medium that actually did the legwork get the clicks. Don’t let the parasites win.

Does the writing seem to take a while to get to the point? That’s usually fake news; real journalists put the meat of the story in the first sentence or two.

That said, an online news source isn’t necessarily “fake” if it publishes perspectives different from yours. If you refuse to use news media that do not perfectly reflect your views, that’s another kind of problem, and a serious one. But it’s your problem.

Based on news reports, it doesn’t seem Donald Trump is handling himself like a martial arts master, cooly in control. He’s more like an old punch-drunk fighter swinging at every shadow. This morning he attacked Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein:

I am being investigated for firing the FBI Director by the man who told me to fire the FBI Director! Witch Hunt

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 16, 2017

The Daily Beast also reports that Trump is furious with Rosenstein and would have no qualms throwing him under the bus.

The word for today, boy’s and girls, is “lawyered.” As in “lawyered up.” Mike Pence has lawyered up. Trump personal attorney Michael Cohen has lawyered up.  Bob Mueller also is lawyering up and hiring 13 more lawyers to pursue the investigations.

The investigation has expanded to take in obstruction of justice on Trump’s part as well as little Jared’s business dealings. The list of people being investigated has expanded to included associates of associates.

The circle of people under scrutiny in the various investigations into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election apparently has widened to include Rick Gates (pictured at left), former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort’s closest ally on the trail.

According to a memo sent out to former campaign officials and obtained by various news outlets, a lawyer for President Donald Trump’s transition team requested the preservation of all documents related to Russia and Ukraine, as well as travel records and all documents connected to a small handful of former campaign officials. Gates’ name was on that list, sandwiched between other Trump allies known to be under federal investigation like Manafort and Michael Flynn, the ousted national security adviser.

Earlier today there was speculation that Rosenstein would have to recuse himself from the investigation. The Justice Department is now saying otherwise. Or, at least, it’s not recusal time yet.

“As the deputy attorney general has said numerous times, if there comes a point when he needs to recuse, he will. However, nothing has changed,” DOJ spokesman Ian Prior said in a statement, according to the Washington Post.

ABC News reported Friday that sources within the Department of Justice said Rosenstein had acknowleged that he could have to recuse himself in a meeting with colleagues. Rosenstein is overseeing the investigation into Russian meddling, though it is being spearheaded by a special prosecutor, Robert Mueller.

But before the Justice Department statement, Paul Waldman speculated what a Trump version of the Saturday Night Massacre might look like.

If Rosenstein is considering recusal, it’s because of his role in the Comey firing — which, let’s not forget, Trump admitted both on national television and in a conversation with Russian officials in the Oval Office that he did out of unhappiness with the Russia investigation. Rosenstein could become a witness in the obstruction investigation, which would make it problematic for him to be overseeing Mueller. The authority would then fall to Brand. Is Trump going to go after her next? What happens if he orders her to fire Mueller? Would she resign in protest like Richardson and Ruckelshaus, or follow orders like Bork?

“Brand” is Associate Attorney General Rachel Brand, now #3 at the Justice Department. Waldman continues,

While Trump is erratic and impulsive much of the time, he seems particularly so with regard to this investigation. In some limited way it’s understandable — no president likes being investigated — but it seems to be pushing Trump to particular heights of irrationality. If you were trying to limit the investigation and its political fallout and not antagonize the prosecutors, it would be utterly insane to send out these kinds of tweets. Trump’s staff and lawyers are surely begging him to stop. But they can’t control him. There may be people who are willing to stand up to him and tell him that he’s making a mistake, but he’s obviously not willing to listen.

So, even though it would be the height of folly on Trump’s part to try to fire Mueller, he still might try to fire Mueller. But, legally, he cannot do so and would have to find a toady, a Robert Bork, in the Justice Department to do the job for him. But if it gets to that, we’ll know that Trump has totally, utterly lost it.

There have been 154 mass shootings, 6,880 gun-related deaths, and 13,504 firearm injuries in the U.S. in 2017, so far, according to Fortune. But some are shocked, shocked I tell you, that a powerful white male pro-gun Congressperson would be a victim of gun violence. And it must be liberals’ fault.

I don’t want to talk about fault just yet. This one guy decided to shoot at congressmen. As far as I know, he didn’t consult with anybody first. Nobody took a vote to ask him to shoot people. He did this by himself.

I do want to talk about rhetoric. Violent rhetoric does, I think, encourage people to become violent. Whether Kathy Griffin’s stupid stunt of a few days ago played any part in the shooter’s motivation to shoot we cannot know, but it certainly didn’t help.

But there’s another expression of political violence being blamed for the shooting, and this one is entirely unjust, and I want to say something about it.

Even before this week’s shooting in Virginia, righties were throwing fits over the new production of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar going on in the Delacorte Theater in Central Park, Manhattan. The director, Oskar Eustis, dresses his characters to look like current-day politicians, and Caesar himself unmistakably resembles Donald Trump. And, as you might remember, Caesar is assassinated in this play. So the wingnuts interpreted this as expressing a desire to kill Donald Trump. In an act of massive cultural cowardice, Bank of America and Delta Air Lines had both withdrawn sponsorship money from the theater even before the shooting because of the play.

The terrible irony here is that Shakespeare’s sympathies in this play are with Caesar, not the assassins. As director Eustis said,

“Julius Caesar can be read as a warning parable to those who try to fight for democracy by undemocratic means. To fight the tyrant does not mean imitating him.” 

This play does not glorify assassination; just the opposite. All the bedwetting about the assassination scene just reveals how culturally illiterate Americans are. This play is one of the jewels of English literature. Anyone who has graduated high school, never mind college, ought to be familiar with it even if you’re not a Shakespeare fan.

The play is really about Brutus, a man absorbed with notions of honor and morality, who allows himself to be talked into joining the assassins to kill his friend Caesar. The first part of the play is about Brutus coming to that decision, the assassination scene is roughly in the middle, and the second part is about Brutus being haunted by Caesar’s ghost while being driven into disgrace and exile, and eventual suicide. And rather than restore the Republic, the fallout of Caesar’s assassination helped reinforce the Empire. J.C. was followed by Augustus, then Tiberius, then Caligula, etc. pretty much going from bad to worse.

So, basically, the moral of the play is, don’t assassinate people. Even if it looks like a good idea at the time. It may not turn out well.

The genetically defective Donald Trump, Jr., naturally shared an opinion that the play was about “NY elites glorifying the assassination of our President.” We can’t expect anything more from the Trump offspring. But people with normal chromosomes should have no such excuse.

I do think conflating Caesar with Trump is a terrible slander of Julius Caesar.  Sophie Gilbert wrote for The Atlantic,

So why is a Trumpian Caesar so controversial?

The easy answer is that right-wing media outlets have generated outrage, amplified both by Donald Trump Jr. and by Griffin’s earlier stunt. But it’s also possible that the issue with the Public’s current production is that the point it’s making doesn’t fully compute, no matter your affiliation. “Shakespeare’s Caesar is a war hero and, as smartly played by Gregg Henry, a deeply charismatic one,” wrote The New York Times’s Jesse Green. “When offered the chance, three times, to become emperor, he chooses three times to remain a senator. This is more like George Washington than Mr. Trump.”

Many commentators have argued that, rather than advocate for the assassination of a controversial political figure, Julius Caesar does the opposite, warning of the chaos that comes from such action. But the subtlety of such a point is considerably easier to miss than the symbolism of a blond-coiffed businessman in a red tie being graphically executed onstage. “We are asked to consider how far citizens may go in removing a destructive leader, and we are warned about unforeseen consequences,” Green writes. “Dressing Caesar as Trump gives that agenda its juice but leaves the production a bit desiccated and incoherent thereafter.”

So maybe the production doesn’t quite work; I haven’t seen it and cannot comment. (I did see a Julius Caesar at the Delacorte many years ago, with David McCallum as Caesar. The production had traditional staging but suffered from Brutus being played by a guy from the Kevin Costner School of Under-Acting. Instead of a man tormented by a gut-wrenching decision he came to regret, this Brutus was more like a nice mook who fell in with the wrong crowd. Oh, well)

The great turning point of the play is, of course, the funeral scene, when Mark Antony turned the crowd against the assassins. I regret this isn’t the whole scene, but IMO nobody did it better than Brando.

Philip Bump comments on what might be the most suspicious thing Sessions said yesterday:

In his testimony, Sessions told Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) that he “did not recall” any meeting during which Trump expressed concern or curiosity about what Russia had been doing during the 2016 election. Sessions also testified that he himself, as the country’s and Trump’s lead law enforcement official, was never briefed on Russian interference.

Even if nothing else Sessions said on Tuesday had comported with what former FBI director James B. Comey said before the same committee last week, this did. Manchin asked Comey whether Trump had ever expressed curiosity about Russia’s attempts to swing the election; Comey said that he “[didn’t] remember any conversations with the president about the Russia election interference.”

Both before and after his election and inauguration, Trump’s attitude toward the Russia investigation has almost exclusively been that it’s a hassle, not an important step toward assuring the sanctity of American elections. (A sanctity, mind you, that has been his purported focus in establishing a commission to look at alleged voter fraud.) Instead, he has consistently disputed whether Russia was even behind the hacking — a line that Sessions mirrored in his testimony on Tuesday by stating that Russia’s role was the conclusion of U.S. intelligence agencies without embracing it as his own.

Here’s Trump’s most recent comment:

Russian officials must be laughing at the U.S. & how a lame excuse for why the Dems lost the election has taken over the Fake News.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 30, 2017

Of course, Trump is downplaying anything that might question the legitimacy of his election. This suggests that somewhere in his addled brain he knows Russians were trying to help him win the election.

And, of course, this tells us he is less concerned about the security of the United States than he is in protecting his own sorry ass.

So I’m back, the malware cleanup is done, and the site is safe to visit. I’ll be back tomorrow with some actual posts.

I didn’t get to watch it, but I take it Jeff Sessions’s testimony today was a lot of chest thumping and bluster without substance.

Josh Marshall:

The big and overriding takeaway from this hearing is that Sessions declined to answer almost all the pertinent questions – in most cases because they involved his discussions with President Trump and in at least one case (or this was what I understood him to be saying) discussions with other leaders at the Department of Justice. There’s an important back and forth about what basis he had for this refusal. That is important in itself. But the gist, as Sessions eventually seemed to concede, was that he was refusing to answer because he did not want to preclude or render moot the President’s ability to assert executive privilege.

But as the President hasn’t asserted executive privilege yet, I’m not sure how that’s supposed to fly.

What did jump out at me across the whole testimony is that Sessions claims he recused himself from the Russia probe simply and only because it involved a presidential campaign of which he could reasonably be viewed as a top advisor. This is almost certainly not true. Sessions recused himself the day after The Washington Post reported two meetings with Ambassador Kislyak which Sessions had failed to disclose at his confirmation hearing. Sessions now claims that that he had made what amounts to an in pectore recusal the day after he was sworn in (little shout out to you canon lawyers out there). So in Sessions’ mind, what we thought was a recusal was just the formal version of what he had done in his head weeks earlier. Again, this seems almost certainly false. Inevitably this elaborate ruse undermines his credibility about all the rest. Comey seemed to have in mind something more than simply a technical reason requiring Sessions to recuse himself.

Big picture: Sessions refused to answer the biggest questions; he was almost certainly not telling the truth about what triggered his refusal. Most of the rest was atmospherics.

Jennifer Rubin:

The contrast with Comey was striking. Sessions, grayer and older, looked nervous and shrunken in his seat, growing defensive at times. He weakly complained to Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) about her questioning. He sharply objected: “I’m not able to be rushed this fast, it makes me nervous.” Indeed, while Comey was relaxed, confident and expansive, Sessions was evasive and skittish. He repeatedly refused to answer questions, not invoking executive privilege but saying it was Justice Department “policy” not to talk about conversations with the president. Democrats repeatedly challenged him, accusing him of “stonewalling.” Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) slammed him: “You are impeding this investigation.” Heinrich told Sessions there’s no “appropriateness” standard that alleviates him from the need to testify under oath fully and completely. Heinrich flat out accused Sessions of “obstructing” the investigation.

Sarah Posner:

Sessions’s recusal — his justification for it, and the scope of how he defines it — is central to the integrity of the FBI’s investigation into Russian interference in our election, and possible Trump campaign collusion with it. That’s because Sessions was at the center of advising the Trump campaign on national security issues during the campaign and has failed to be forthcoming about how that role might have blended with his communications with Russian officials throughout. This raises questions as to how impartially he can exercise his role as the nation’s chief law enforcement officer and whether he may still be in a position to influence the Russia probe.

Sessions’s testimony, though, failed to put to rest any doubts Senate investigators, or the public, have about many of the matters relating to his recusal, and whether he is adhering to it. In fact, Sessions only raised new and potentially damaging questions about his actions and cast doubt on his own truthfulness about what the recusal entails.

Charles Pierce:

The people who best treed JeffBo on his most preposterous bullshit—Heinrich, Kamala Harris of California, and The Mustache of Righteousness, Angus King of Maine—could only push him so far. Everybody on that committee knew that what JeffBo was selling was batter-fried nonsense. (Call me an elitist snob if you like, but whenever I hear a Southerner talking about “mah honah,” I reach for William Tecumseh Sherman’s phone number.)

Everybody on that committee knew that, when JeffBo declined to answer questions about whether James Comey was fired because of the Russia probe, he was hiding the plain truth behind a privilege that he’d made up on the spot. Everybody on that committee knew that JeffBo’s memory lapses were at best highly convenient. (He couldn’t remember meeting the Russian ambassador, but he could quote an op-ed by William Barr from almost a year ago? That dog don’t even want to hunt.) Everybody on that committee knew that you can’t refuse to answer a question because the president* might want to invoke executive privilege at some vague point in the future. But if the majority is content to look like an entire bag of tools and pretend otherwise, there’s not much the Senate can do about being obstructed in such a shameless fashion.

Actually, there is one historical precedent for what Sessions asserted that went unmentioned, and that precedent is not promising. Although even it wasn’t as barefaced as it was on Tuesday, the assertion of an illegitimate, unasserted “executive privilege” was, for a long time, central to the defense of John Mitchell, Richard Nixon’s corrupt AG who went to jail behind his crimes relating to Watergate and what Mitchell himself called, “the White House horrors.” It is an argument you make when you know that there is an unacceptable political price to be paid if the president* actually does assert executive privilege in advance—which is what the Obama administration did on several occasions, despite Tom Cotton’s having been deliberately and dishonestly obtuse on the comparison during Tuesday’s hearings.

There’s only a certain amount of sham that our institutions can tolerate. We’re getting very close to it.

The site seems to be having malware issues. Note that I am paying some people to take care of it. Please see my Facebook page for updates:

https://www.facebook.com/mahabarbara