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To be clear: I have no problem with Superdelegates. Clinton won more votes than Obama in 2008, but fewer delegates, and it was clear that the party was coalescing around Obama. Clinton won even more votes this time around, and though I supported Bernie in the primary, the jig is up. Nothing wrong, to my mind, with having some vestige of the party leadership having a say in it's nomination.
Random thoughts on the superdelegate system, in hopefully its final year of existence.
Some people look over at the GOP side and say, “that’s why we need superdelegates, to protect us from nominating someone like that!” And yeah, it would suck if we nominated someone like that. But if we are to be a party fueled by its grassroots, we have to trust the grassroots to make the right call. And if it doesn’t? Tough shit. The idea of having a crew of paternalistic “adults” ready to rectify our mistakes is utter bullshit.
Hillary Clinton asked the remaining undeclared superdelegates to hold off on commitments until today. Too many didn’t and it screwed her. So instead of having the voters push her over, which will happen today when she wins a majority of the pledged delegates, she had the supers do it. Shitty optics that stepped on her celebration. This is a small thing soon to be forgotten, but given the history that’s happening, would’ve been nice to do it right.
It’s not the AP’s fault they declared Clinton the presumptive nominee. They are reporting the facts, and if enough supers have committed, that’s that. They shouldn’t be withholding news because it steps on Clinton’s coronation or it might make some California, New Jersey, or New Mexico (or wherever) voters sad. It’s the fault of the Clinton supers who couldn’t wait an extra day to let their intentions be known.
CT: My grandparents used to play a parlor game. It went like this: Tell me who you are without telling me your name or what you do. We have seen your tough exterior, but who are you at your core and what is your basic philosophy and worldview?
DT: I am a person who grew up with two wonderful parents and a wonderful family and a person who has done well in life. I went to great schools. Wharton School, a lot of great places. Education is very important. I think I understand education. I think I can straighten out our mess in education. And I’m a person who has, to a certain extent, redefined where I should be. I started off in Brooklyn and Queens and I wasn’t supposed to come to Manhattan. My father didn’t want to go to Manhattan for me, and I came to Manhattan and I have done a great job in Manhattan. And then I wrote a best-seller and I wrote numerous best-sellers. I wrote ‘The Art of the Deal’ and numerous other books. Some were number one best-sellers. I guess ‘The Art of the Deal’ is the best-selling business book of all time. I had a TV show called ‘The Apprentice’ and it’s one of the most successful reality shows in the history of television. And now I’m doing something else.
He doesn’t even pretend that there’s anything to him other than worshiping himself. There’s no there there, just ego. I know this is not exactly news, but it still astonishes me that he can’t even fake it.
There’s idiocy, non sequiturs, and sloganeering throughout. But here is the most glorious part:
CT: Every president has called upon God at some point. Lincoln spoke of not being able to hold the office of the presidency without spending time on his knees. You have confessed that you are a Christian …
DT: And I have also won much evangelical support.
CT: Yes, I know that. You have said you never felt the need to ask for God’s forgiveness, and yet repentance for one’s sins is a precondition to salvation. I ask you the question Jesus asked of Peter: Who do you say He is?
DT: I will be asking for forgiveness, but hopefully I won’t have to be asking for much forgiveness. As you know, I am Presbyterian and Protestant. I’ve had great relationships and developed even greater relationships with ministers. We have tremendous support from the clergy. I think I will be doing very well during the election with evangelicals and with Christians. In the Middle East — and this is prior to the migration — you had almost no chance of coming into the United States. Christians from Syria, of which there were many, many of their heads … chopped off. If you were a Muslim from Syria, it was one of the easiest places to come in (to the U.S.). I thought that was deplorable. I’m going to treat my religion, which is Christian, with great respect and care.
CT: Who do you say Jesus is?
DT: Jesus to me is somebody I can think about for security and confidence. Somebody I can revere in terms of bravery and in terms of courage and, because I consider the Christian religion so important, somebody I can totally rely on in my own mind.
Whole thing here. I hope Jerry Falwell Jr. and Mike Huckabee are proud of themselves.
The prospect of four years of this stuff. Just think about it.
An embattled Donald Trump urgently rallied his most visible supporters to defend his attacks on a federal judge's Mexican ancestry during a conference call on Monday in which he ordered them to question the judge's credibility and impugn reporters as racists.
"We will overcome," Trump said, according to two supporters who were on the call and requested anonymity to share their notes with Bloomberg Politics. "And I’ve always won and I’m going to continue to win. And that’s the way it is.
1. “We will overcome.” Because no one has suffered more discrimination than Donnieboy. Tremendous discrimination. The greatest.
2. “Two supporters who were on the call” ratted out ol’ Don. Such great “supporters” he has there…
3. “I’ve always won and I’m going to continue to win. And that’s the way it is.” I live in perpetual fear that Trump will quit before the election and take his ball home with him. Then we’d be stuck running against Paul Ryan. Quotes like this put my mind to ease. And as a bonus, they heighten my anticipation for Trump’s November concession speech litany of lawsuit threats.
All that, plus the doubling down on the racism, is pretty amazing. But that’s not all!
When former Arizona Governor Jan Brewer interrupted the discussion to inform Trump that his own campaign had asked surrogates to stop talking about the lawsuit in an e-mail on Sunday, Trump repeatedly demanded to know who sent the memo, and immediately overruled his staff [...]
"Are there any other stupid letters that were sent to you folks?" Trump said. "That's one of the reasons I want to have this call, because you guys are getting sometimes stupid information from people that aren't so smart.“
JERSEY CITY, N.J. (AP) — Donald Trump says he made "a lot of money" in a deal years ago with Moammar Gadhafi, despite suggesting at the time he had no idea the former Libyan dictator was involved in renting his suburban New York estate.
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The email seems largely inoffensive (of course this is coming from a cis-gendered white male, so that is important), and what's strange to me is that it also explicitly suggests that conversation matters while agreeing with the idea that students shouldn't wear offensive Halloween costumes. I'm curious as to your thoughts, because this strikes me as a place where Freidersdorf is totally correct in his concerns.
Last fall, student protesters at Yale University demanded that Professor Nicholas Christakis, an academic star who has successfully mentored Ivy League undergraduates for years, step down from his position as faculty-in-residence at Silliman College, along with his wife, Erika Christakis, who shared in the job’s duties.
The protesters had taken offense at an email sent by Erika Christakis.
Dogged by the controversy for months, the couple finally resigned their posts Wednesday. Because the student protests against them were prompted by intellectual speech bearing directly on Erika Christakis’s area of academic expertise, the outcome will prompt other educators at Yale to reflect on their own positions and what they might do or say to trigger or avoid calls for their own resignations. If they feel less inclined toward intellectual engagement at Yale, I wouldn’t blame them.
The controversy that culminated in this week’s resignations began last October, when Erika Christakis was teaching a Yale class called “Concept of the Problem Child.”
An expert in early childhood education, she’s long been critical of ways that adults deprive children of learning experiences by over-policing their behavior. When Yale administrators sent an all-students email advising Yalies to avoid “culturally unaware or insensitive choices” when choosing their Halloween costumes, Erika Christakis responded with an email of her own, acknowledging “genuine concerns about cultural and personal representation,” lauding the “spirit of avoiding hurt and offense,” but questioning whether students were well-served by administrators asserting norms rather than giving them space to shape their own.
“Have we lost faith in young people’s capacity—in your capacity—to exercise self-censure, through social norming, and also in your capacity to ignore or reject things that trouble you?” she asked. “What does this debate about Halloween costumes say about our view of young adults, of their strength and judgment? Whose business is it to control the forms of costumes of young people? It’s not mine, I know that.”
Many students were outraged by the email, particularly a portion that Erika Christakis attributed to her husband: “Nicholas says, if you don’t like a costume someone is wearing, look away, or tell them you are offended. Talk to each other. Free speech and the ability to tolerate offense are the hallmarks of a free and open society.”
Student critics responded, in part, by circulating a petition that accumulated scores of signatures from Yale students and alumni. “You ask students to ‘look away’ if costumes are offensive, as if the degradation of our cultures and people, and the violence that grows out of it is something that we can ignore,” the petition stated, adding that “we were told to meet the offensive parties head on, without suggesting any modes or means to facilitate these discussions to promote understanding.”
The petition assumes that offensive Halloween costumes beget violence; proceeds as if Nicholas Christakis simply advised students to ignore all offensive costumes; acknowledges in the next clause that, in fact, he also declared, “or tell them you are offended;” and most bizarrely, concludes as if Ivy League students advised to “talk to each other,” the most straightforward of human behaviors, somehow need further counsel on “modes or means to facilitate these discussions,” as if they are Martians unfamiliar with talking to classmates—even as they put forth a persuasive petition aimed at those same classmates.
Soon after his wife sent her email, Nicholas Christakis found himself standing on a campus quad surrounded by protesters. He attempted to respond in person to their concerns. After watching videos of the scene, I noted the core disagreement between the professor and the undergraduates. Christakis believed that he had an obligation to listen to the views of the students, to reflect upon them, and to respond that he was persuaded or articulate why he maintained a different view. In short, he believed that one respects students by engaging them in earnest dialogue.
Many students believed that his responsibility was to hear their demands for an apology and to issue it. They saw anything short of a declaration of wrongdoing as unacceptable. In their view, one respected students by validating their hurt feelings.
Their perspective was informed by the idea that their residential college is akin to a home. At Yale, residential colleges have what was then called a “master”—a professor who lives on site and is responsible for its academic, intellectual, and social life. “Masters work with students to shape each residential college community,” Yale stated, “bringing their own distinct social, cultural, and intellectual influences to the colleges.” The approach is far costlier than what’s on offer at commuter schools, but aims to create a richer intellectual environment where undergrads can learn from faculty and one another even outside the classroom.
“In your position as master,” one student said, “it is your job to create a place of comfort and home for the students who live in Silliman. You have not done that. By sending out that email, that goes against your position as master. Do you understand that?!”
“No,” Christakis said, “I don’t agree with that.”
As he saw it, there was no contradiction between creating a safe residence for Silliman students and challenging them intellectually, a view Yale itself officially shares (though what its representatives convey to prospective students is opaque to outsiders).
Professor Alan Jacobs of Baylor University published one of the more insightful posts on this aspect of the controversy, observing that any Yale student seeking an environment akin to a home is bound to be disappointed, because their residential colleges are, by design, places where “people from all over the world, from a wide range of social backgrounds, and with a wide range of interests and abilities, come to live together temporarily, for about 30 weeks a year, before moving on to their careers. It is an essentially public space,” he added, “though with controls on ingress and egress to prevent chaos and foster friendship and fellowship.”
Homes are typically places where parents instill their own values in kids whose formative experiences they shape, or where domestic partners who bonded over shared values cohabitate. Insofar as Yale includes students from diverse homes, it will be unlike an actual home, and should acknowledge that reality to all of its students. Learning to live away from home by tolerating difference is part of campus life.
In that October confrontation, the student demanding a comfortable home exploded when Christakis articulated an educator’s understanding of his role. “Then why the fuck did you accept the position?!” she screamed. “Who the fuck hired you?! You should step down! If that is what you think about being a master you should step down! It is not about creating an intellectual space! It is not! Do you understand that? It’s about creating a home here. You are not doing that!”
The student concluded with a hateful statement: “You should not sleep at night! You are disgusting!” It was, by all accounts, an out-of-character outburst from an intelligent, normally thoughtful person in a moment of high emotion, but when video of her tirade was posted online, she was mercilessly harassed by trolls, some of whom used racial epithets and threatened to kill her. The Christakises, who defended that student, were subject to anonymous abuse and online threats, as well.
The ire that student activists directed at the couple is inseparable from the larger protest movement that roiled American campuses last fall. Many black students at Yale felt that the institution has failed to create an inclusive environment on campus, citing grievances as varied as the presence of residential college named for John C. Calhoun, who advocated for slavery in Congress, and the allegation that Yale security guards disproportionately forced students of color to show their IDs on campus.
The vast majority of grievances had nothing to do with Nicholas or Erika Christakis. Many were far more persuasive than any critiques aimed at the couple. Nor does their resignation do anything to address those grievances. Some activists nevertheless cast the couple as symbols of what was wrong with Yale, an injustice noted by a group of faculty members who came to their defense. “In the case of the Christakises, their work has been more directly oriented toward the social justice than the work of many other members of the Yale faculty,” they wrote. “For example, Nicholas Christakis worked for many years as a hospice doctor, making house visits to underserved populations in Chicago. Progressive values and social justice are not advanced by scapegoating those who share those values.”
With regard to Erika Christakis’s email, the faculty members declared themselves “deeply troubled that this modest attempt to ask people to consider the issue of self-monitoring vs. bureaucratic supervision has been misinterpreted, and in some cases recklessly distorted, as support for racist speech; and hence as justification for demanding the resignation of our colleagues from their posts at Silliman.”
But relatively few humanities professors signed that letter of support.
And when drafting the letter, the physics professor Douglas Stone found himself warned by faculty colleagues that he was putting himself at risk of being protested.
At Yale, I encountered students and faculty members who supported the Christakises but refused to say so on the record, and others who criticized them, but only anonymously. On both sides, people with perfectly mainstream opinions shared them with a journalist but declined to put their name behind them due to a campus climate where anyone could conceivably be the next object of ire and public shaming. Insufficient tolerance for disagreement is undermining campus discourse.
Off campus, many pundits published misrepresentations of Christakis’s email in the press. Without extraordinary support from colleagues or a change of heart among activists, some of whom vilified the couple out of solidarity rather than conviction, staying in residential life—which they could have chosen to do—would have assured ongoing conflict, further efforts to force their resignation, and more distractions from their scholarship. “At Silliman College’s graduation ceremony,” the Yale Daily Newsreported, “some students refused to accept their diplomas from Nicholas Christakis.” Why put yourself through treatment like that?
On the other hand, their resignations all but assure that others at Yale will regard surviving a speech controversy as less viable and curtail their intellectual engagement.
The statement put out by the couple characteristically declined to criticize anyone at the institution. “Erika and I have devoted our professional lives to advocating for all young people. We have great respect for every member of our community, friend and critic alike,” Nicholas Christakis wrote. “We remain hopeful that students at Yale can express themselves and engage complex ideas within an intellectually plural community. But we feel it is time to return full-time to our respective fields.”
They declined to comment further.
When Yale’s history is written, they should be regarded as collateral damage harmed by people who abstracted away their humanity. Yale activists felt failed by their institution and took out their frustration on two undeserving scapegoats who had only recently arrived there. Students who profess a belief in the importance of feeling safe at home marched on their house, scrawled angry messages in chalk beneath their bedroom window, hurled shouted insults and epithets, called for their jobs, and refused to shake their hands even months later, all over one email. And the couple’s ultimate resignation does nothing to improve campus climate.
I want to tell you about an article that you simply must read. It's about Trump University. But it's a part of the story I at least was not at all familiar with - how what we now know as the Trump University real estate seminar scam grew out of a licensing deal Trump struck with one of the most notorious late night informercial get-rich-quick scammers of the early aughts. The article was published at the end of April in Ars Technica. Even though Ars is widely read and extremely well respected, it's in the tech and science rather than the news and politics space. So that may account for what seems like relatively little discussion of this aspect of the story.
In San Jose on Thursday, a volatile crowd outside a Donald Trump rally assaulted numerous attendees. They punched a man in the face, knocking him to the ground; bloodied another man by bludgeoning the side of his head with a duffel bag; trapped a woman against a glass door, pelting her with an egg and other objects; snatched a cap off a man’s head, lighting it afire on the street soon afterward; and perpetrated other hateful acts against total strangers, with many fellow protesters cheering them on and a brave few fervently pleading for nonviolence.
The bad actors in San Jose should be arrested, prosecuted, jailed, and broadly condemned. In addition to attacking fellow human beings, they did violence to the shared right to assemble. They assaulted the American inheritance of a politics that is decided peaceably at the ballot box by the people, not in the streets through force or intimidation.
By using the preferred approach of the Donald Trump supporter who infamously sucker punched a peaceful protester, another execrable actor who ought to serve jail time for his inexcusable thuggery, San Jose’s violent anti-Trump protesters offered a reminder that beyond left and right, conservative and liberal, pro-Trump and anti-Trump, there is a broad majority of Americans who intuitively understand the peril of abiding violence in politics—who understand that it would ultimately empower the most thuggish, ruthless, impulsive sociopaths—and that it is vital to stand together on that point, now and forever after, if on nothing else.
All that would be true regardless of the horse-race implications of Thursday’s violence. It is nevertheless worth noting the likely effects of the violence. The San Jose anti-Trump protesters, like the violent anti-Trump protesters in Costa Mesa before them, more likely helped than hurt the odds of Trump being elected president.
Phone videos of Mexican flags waving as Trump supporters are attacked will fuel nativist anxieties about immigration as well as hate-group fundraising.
White supremacists were undoubtedly smiling as they read the news.
In a week with headlines about Trump University’s shockingly unethical behavior, old footage of Trump telling a TV interviewer that he got furious at his former wife when she didn’t have dinner on the table when he got home, and the revelation that Trump failed to make good on a pledge to a veteran’s charity until the press called him on it, San Jose’s protesters managed to do the one thing that would give Trump supporters, if not the candidate himself, moral high ground in anything.
At anti-Trump protests, eschew violence and any other behavior that helps his cause.
The activist left is very antagonistic to “respectability politics,” which Wikipedia defines as “attempts by marginalized groups to police their own members and show their social values as compatible with mainstream values rather than challenging the mainstream for its failure to accept difference.”
Since nonviolence is a value held dear by large majorities on the activist left, not a mainstream value it rejects, efforts to keep anti-Trump protests as peaceful as possible are not at all inconsistent with rejecting respectability politics.
They’re a no-brainer.
Results-oriented activists should go a step farther. If organizers at anti-Trump rallies did their utmost to keep Mexican flags out of the hands of activists and to have as many American flags waving as possible that may or may not constitute respectability politics. Labels aside, that tactic would significantly increase the chance that a given rally will help the anti-Trump cause and significantly decrease the chance that a given rally will harm the anti-Trump cause. All who regard preventing the empowerment of a demagogue who pits his supporters against Mexicans and Muslims as a hugely important goal should prioritize its achievement.
All that said, any reader of mine who is tempted to react to violence by a tiny subset of Trump opponents by supporting the candidate himself should understand that not only have Trump supporters engaged in violence on multiple occasions—two beat and urinated on a homeless man while saying “Trump was right”—the candidate himself has, on other occasions, explicitly encouraged violence, unlike Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders or Gary Johnson or Jill Stein or any other credible candidate for the presidency in my lifetime. “Maybe he should have been roughed up,” Trump said of one verbal dissenter who was beaten at one of his rallies. On another occasion, he declared that he missed the old days when people saying nasty things at political rallies would “be carried out on a stretcher.”
And that Trump supporter who sucker-punched a protester at a rally? Trump later told a journalist that his people were looking into the possibility of paying the man’s legal fees. If you looked upon the scene in San Jose with disgust at the outbreak of political violence in America, as we all should, it is vital to grasp that while there are violent people who support and oppose every candidate, the only candidate irresponsible enough to advocate for political violence has been Donald Trump.
The civic responsibility to reject political violence is therefore both a strong reason for everyone to reject Trump and occasion for the activist left to take stock of its coalition and prepare for the future anti-Trump protests that are and ought to be ahead. Addressing the parts of the activist left who acted as apologists for San Jose on social media, the libertarian journalist Jesse Walker offered this critique on Twitter:
The great tacticians of Twitter think random attacks on rally-goers are a reenactment of the Battle of Cable Street. Looks more like the Days of Rage to me, with all the ridiculous posturing that implies. (Look up David Dellinger's critique of the Days of Rage sometime. D-E-L-L-I-N-G-E-R. Not a hippie-puncher.)
I'll skip past the moral critique of such tactics. They'll just call it bourgeois sentimentality and we'll get nowhere. I'll also ignore the more hard-nosed question of whether the "optics" will "help Trump." (I mean, they obviously do help Trump. That's how polarization politics works. But set it aside.) And for the sake of argument, we'll stipulate that Trump's a fascist. Maybe he is. He certainly veers toward it & could get there.
You know who isn't a fascist? Most of the people who go hear him speak.
I've covered several of these rallies. Saw some ugliness. But the offline crowds aren't the same as the online Trump troll mob. Which is to say: I encountered some genuine Nazis, but mostly I met the sort of people who dug Perot 24 years ago… and have now convinced themselves Trump is a worthy vessel for their grievances. Could any of them become brownshirts?
Sure.
People like them have before.
Right now they haven't. Aiming at them is just acting out. You're making the closest, weakest scapegoats your target. (And feeding their fears.) And with what endgame? You want, what, people to be too physically scared to go to a Trump rally? OK, they'll just go to the polls then.
Thursday’s violence erupted in a left-leaning part of the country that likes to think of itself as unusually tolerant. And yet, would its residents feel safe wearing a Trump 2016 t-shirt around San Francisco or Oakland or San Jose? People in the Bay Area regularly—and often rightly—urge other parts of the country that are intolerant toward different people in different ways to engage in introspection and improve their community.
How many will do anything to respond to the fact that yesterday, at a political rally in their community, some of their neighbors got beat up merely for attending?
Comparing the current presidential election to Idiocracy has become cliche at this point—as well as depressing, because, well, it’s not wrong. But Etan Cohen still has a free pass to do just that, because he co-wrote the script for the 2006 satire with director Mike Judge. And Cohen and Judge seem determined to undo whatever weird witchcraft they unleashed by making the film, and are now working together on a series of anti-Trump campaign ads in a valiant attempt to put off their dystopian vision a little longer.
Talking to BuzzFeed, Cohen says he and Judge “thought it would take much, much longer to get to this point,” and that they considered the film a satire of celebrity culture, and its political elements “a crazy joke.” He says that, at first, the parallels between this election cycle and the film were “just a general lizard brain kind of ...
Muhammed Ali played many roles over the course of a life that sadly ended yesterday. High on the list are that he was an iconic boxing champion and probably the first American Muslim to be really widely known. Last December, President Obama made a glancing reference to Ali and other famous Muslim athletes like Kareen Abdul-Jabar and Shaquille O'Neal in a speech about ISIS and national security.
That prompted one of the all-time weirdest Donald Trump tweets, in which he suggested that there were no such Muslim sports heroes.
Obama said in his speech that Muslims are our sports heroes. What sport is he talking about, and who? Is Obama profiling?
In the speech, Obama directly took on Trump's notion that we should introduce formal religious discrimination into our immigration policy:
But just as it is the responsibility of Muslims around the world to root out misguided ideas that lead to radicalization, it is the responsibility of all Americans — of every faith — to reject discrimination. It is our responsibility to reject religious tests on who we admit into this country. It’s our responsibility to reject proposals that Muslim Americans should somehow be treated differently. Because when we travel down that road, we lose. That kind of divisiveness, that betrayal of our values plays into the hands of groups like ISIL. Muslim Americans are our friends and our neighbors, our co-workers, our sports heroes — and, yes, they are our men and women in uniform who are willing to die in defense of our country. We have to remember that.
Obama raised the athletes because they are prominent, well-known, and easy-to-understand examples of how the talents of diverse individuals have made America stronger over the years. Trump couldn't refute the basic point so he just decided there were no Muslim sports heroes.
Today, however, Trump is singing a different tune:
Muhammad Ali is dead at 74! A truly great champion and a wonderful guy. He will be missed by all!
Bloomberg journalist Mark Halperin said Friday that Donald Trump’s attacks on the Mexican heritage of a federal judge overseeing a case against him were “not racial” because “Mexico isn’t a race.”
What would happen to our planet if humans just disappeared completely? (Given the impending Trump presidency, it seems like a good question to ask.)The answer is fascinating. While there would be initial chaos in the short-term (some of which I'm sure you can predict), the real interesting consequences take place hundreds and thousands of years down the line.This video attempts to go through that timeline. It gets more compelling the longer you watch:
The Senate passed a not-great, but decent bill to address the threat of the Zika virus. The House version is garbage and uses the public health crisis mostly as a means to relax regulations on pesticides. By the time the House and Senate bills are reconciled, it will be too late to do anything meaningful, since mosquito season is already in full swing.
"Well, I don't have thin skin," Trump protested. "I have very strong and thick skin. If you do a report and it's not necessarily positive but, you're right, I never complain. I do complain when it's a lie or when it's wrong."
Trump then went on to explain how his thick skin and "good temperament" made him have "one of the best-selling books of all-time" and a successful television show.
"What does that have to do with temperament?" Tapper asked.
In an attempt to respond to Hillary Clinton's "thin skin" jab at him during her foreign policy speech earlier in the week, Donald Trump is now defending his ability to take criticism.
Google pulled a browser plugin from its app store Thursday night after Mic News reported the web tool was being used to systematically mark and harass Jewish internet users and members of the media.
Steven Moffat may be leaving his Doctor Who showrunning duties behind, but before he goes, he wants to see a more diverse cast. At least, that’s what he tells the BBC News in a recent interview, in which he also claims that a “black actor” was offered the role of the Doctor himself. Moffat won’t disclose who that person was, he just says that the casting didn’t work out for “for various reasons.” But that setback hasn’t kept him from wanting to add more actors of color to the main cast of Doctor Who(which is the name of the show, not the character, BBC News. Ahem). Moffat says that the show needs to “do better” and include greater representation of people of color.
Moffat notes that Doctor Who’stime-traveling premise, which often takes the Time Lord and his companion(s) to the past, might ...
I haven’t had a lot of pho, the Vietnamese noodle-and-meat soup, but what I’ve had I’ve liked. The name is a notorious problem (for English-speakers): it looks like it should be pronounced like the word “foe,” and lots of people say it that way, but the Vietnamese word phở actually has a mid-vowel that sounds like the vowel of “fun” (you can hear it said at that Wikipedia article by clicking the “listen” symbol), and those English-speakers who know that can sound a little silly trying to reproduce it in English (and, worse, can sound supercilious if they feel impelled to “correct” those who say it like “foe”). But never mind that; where is the word from, what is its etymology? The OED (entry created 2006) says “< Vietnamese phở, perhaps < French feu (in pot au feu),” and AHD says the same, but it seems odd that such a basic Vietnamese dish should have a name of foreign origin. Not absurd, mind you, or even unlikely (cf. “hamburger”), but odd. So I was interested to see an entirely different origin proposed in Andrea Nguyen’s The History of Pho; it’s well worth reading if you have any interest in the soup itself, but here I’m focusing on etymology. She says it began (around the turn of the 20th century) as a beef noodle soup called nguu nhuc phan:
So how did nguu nhuc phan become pho? It is likely that as the dish caught on, the street hawkers became more competitive and abbreviated their distinctive calls as a means to attract customers. “Nguu nhuc phan day” (“beef and rice noodles here”) was shortened to “nguu phan a,” then “phan a,” or “phon o,” and finally settled into one word, pho. In a Vietnamese dictionary published around 1930, the entry for pho defined it as a dish of thinly sliced noodles and beef, its name having been derived from phan, the Cantonese word for flat rice noodle. It’s been suggested that pho arose because when phan is mispronounced or misheard, it can mean “excrement.”
The term pho is not French in origin, despite claims that the pronunciation bears resemblance to feu (fire in French, as in pot au feu).
Intriguing, but Nguyen is a food writer, not an etymologist, and I don’t know enough about Vietnamese to have an informed opinion. As always, I welcome all thoughts from the Varied Reader.
Donald Trump on Thursday ramped up criticism of the judge presiding over fraud cases against Trump University, declaring that U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel has "an absolute conflict" in the case because of his "Mexican heritage."
"I’m building a wall. It’s an inherent conflict of interest," Trump told the Wall Street Journal, noting his policy proposals on immigration and Curiel's background.
It's traditional for American presidents to put their financial assets in a blind trust when they become president, meaning that they still own what they own, but for the duration of their time in office they have no control over the assets. This isn't a legal requirement, but it's a customary way for chief executives to set people's minds at risk over the obvious conflicts of interest inherent in actively managing a stock portfolio while also serving as leader of the free world.
Donald Trump has indicated in the past that he wouldn't follow this practice, and the particular nature of his assets — many of which literally have his name on them — would make blindness difficult to achieve. Be that as it may, in a Thursday midday tweet he for the first time said clearly that if he wins the election he intends to seek to personally profit off his office.
After the litigation is disposed of and the case won, I have instructed my execs to open Trump U(?), so much interest in it! I will be pres.
Kick snacktime up a notch by sinking your teeth into one of these Reese's Pieces stuffed peanut butter cups. It combines the taste and texture of the already delicious peanut butter cups with the classic Reese's Pieces candy.
I confess Trump's 'Trump University' turned out to be a bit more sleazy and craven than I'd realized. Does anyone remember Tom Vu, the comical, endlessly parodied late night real estate seminar infomercial king from the 80s and 90s? Trump U seems to have been a rip off on that scale. Just look at this single passage from the Times first look at the documents released yesterday ...
Covering Donald Trump is great for ratings, and Trump is unusually willing to appear on cable television at basically all times, which is convenient for the cable networks. But cable news has often struggled with how to cover Trump accurately given his habit of constantly saying things that aren't true or don't make sense.
Today, CNN took a big step forward with this chyron:
This goes back to March, when Donald Trump was talking about the security situation in Northeast Asia.
He'd suggested earlier that the United States was spending too much money on stationing soldiers in South Korea and Japan, which are both high-income developed countries that can afford to defend themselves against North Korea.
This led to the suggestion that Korea and Japan should develop their own nuclear arsenals — obviously a big change from current American foreign policy, which tries to discourage the spread of nuclear weapons. It's also a politically sensitive issue in Japan, which is the only country that's actually been hit with nuclear weapons. Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida said flatly, "It is impossible that Japan will arm itself with nuclear weapons."
Today at a rally in Sacramento, Trump said, falsely, that Hillary Clinton was lying when she said he had proposed this.
"She made a speech, she’s making another one tomorrow, and they sent me a copy of the speech" Trump said. "And it was such lies about my foreign policy, that they said I want Japan to get nuclear weapons. Give me a break."
In fact, Trump very explicitly said this. Here he is in an April interview with Chris Wallace:
TRUMP: It’s not like, gee whiz, nobody has them. So, North Korea has nukes. Japan has a problem with that. I mean, they have a big problem with that. Maybe they would in fact be better off if they defend themselves from North Korea.
WALLACE: With nukes?
TRUMP: Including with nukes, yes, including with nukes.
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Liz Del Carmen