Agree? Disagree? Discuss -- And Vanity Fair On Christopher Steele And Donald Trump March 31, 2017May 3, 2017 Don’t miss the two Vanity Fair articles below, but first: 1. Either you knew at the time you were the target of Russian tweets and social media posts designed to lower your opinion of Hillary Clinton — or they worked. Agree? Disagree? Discuss. 2. The thrice-stayed 90-day travel ban is now moot. It was designed to keep the bad hombres from flooding in while we did an emergency assessment of the current 18-to-24-month vetting system to see whether it was sufficiently extreme. (It had to be sprung on the world without notice, lest thousands of terrorists hop the next Air Syria flight, stream through JFK without visas, and wreak havoc. As in fact they did. The Bowling Green massacre? The terror in Sweden? I blame the so-called “judges” for those.) Given the urgency, Trump surely waited not a day to begin his 90-day review. So it must be complete by now, and the element of surprise is gone, so the legal wrangling should cease. Agree? Disagree? Discuss. 3. The best of several reasons to filibuster Neil Gorsuch: simple fairness. Mitch McConnell set the rules when he — controversially — overruled the Constitution and wouldn’t allow Merrick Garland a vote. We had to wait, he said, to see which party the PEOPLE favored in 2016. (Not the Electoral College, the people.) So now we know; and, as argued here, Gorsuch could be next, but only after Merrick Garland. Those were Mitch’s rules. No fair changing them just because he didn’t like the outcome. Agree? Disagree? Discuss. And now . . . By my high school chum Howard Blum in Vanity Fair: HOW EX-SPY CHRISTOPHER STEELE COMPILED HIS EXPLOSIVE TRUMP-RUSSIA DOSSIER.* And by T.A. Frank who doubtless went to high school somewhere also: THE TERRIFYING TRUTH BEHIND THE TRUMP-RUSSIA MESS (“Attempts to eject Trump prematurely could unleash demons far worse than any that we’re seeing now”) — a caution to liberals like me: While I’m going to use most of my words today to try to talk down Donald Trump’s enemies, we can’t overlook that we have a president who acts like a nut job: euphoric at midnight, paranoid a few hours later about phantom prowlers on the roof. Let’s leave aside the debate over how much of a point Trump may have had when he accused Barack Obama of being a “Bad (or sick) guy” who had overseen efforts to “tapp [sic] my phones during the very sacred election process.” (As they say on Twitter, huge if true.) Even if the accusation were perfectly accurate—which no one, including Trump, seems to believe—the manner in which he chose to reveal it was less that of a president than that of a dementia patient screaming that his clothes have been stolen by the nursing staff. There’s no way that a series of misspelled four A.M. tweets, sandwiched next to a lament about The Apprentice, is the work of someone playing 28-dimensional chess. It’s the work of someone who found a chess set and had to go to the hospital after swallowing two rooks and a knight. . . . Yet he thinks we shouldn’t be too quick to assume the worst — or attempt removal. Read the rest. Agree? Disagree? Discuss. Have a great weekend. *The criticism that Steele misspelled Alfa Bank (“Alpha Bank”) seems thin. Transliterated from the Russian, which is how Steele may have been reading most of his documents, it’s just as easily transliterated either way, and so — even though the bank is, assuredly, Alfa Bank — an easy mistake to make.
Warp Speed, WheelTug, and Oysters [corrected] March 30, 2017 Sorry, Cap’n Kirk: not gonna happen. We’ll get to Mars; but beyond our solar system? The BBC explains why we’ll never reach, let alone exceed, the speed of light. But we’ve gotten pretty good at 600 miles an hour, if not 186,282 miles per second. Glenn: “The 737 is the #1 selling passenger plane in the world. Did you ever wonder how Boeing produces over forty 737 airplanes a month? The train arrives with the main body in the morning. This 3½ minute video is fascinating. Enjoy!” ☞ And one day, they’ll all be equipped with WheelTug and we’ll save 20 minutes on every flight not having to wait for a tug to back up, boarding and deplaning from both front AND rear doors. (Click here if you might be in Singapore May 23-24 for IATA’s second e-taxi conference. I wrote about the first one, here.) “Keep away from oysters / whatever you do and / just for the hell of it / you can be a celibate, too.” So ran the line from a song in HPT 121, Harvard’s 1969 Hasty Pudding Theatrical, “Bottoms Up,” wherefrom I came to learn that oysters are thought to be an aphrodisiac. Thanks to Upworthy for this encouraging tale. While some of tomorrow’s unemployed truck drivers may be installing solar roofs, others may be farming oysters. Which, it turns out, is good for wild oysters, as well. Check it out. How can you not be excited by all this? Artie: “Needless to say, I was intrigued by the article you linked to Tuesday (about the Russian mob), but I’m very reluctant to share information from sources that I don’t know to be reliable. Your introduction, “If this report is to be believed,” is not exactly a ringing endorsement, so I have to ask, Are you familiar with them? and Do you have reason to believe them?” ☞ Yes and yes. I shouldn’t have struck such a skeptical tone. Jonathan Z. Larsen is indeed a respected journalist who goes back a long way, having headed TIME’s Saigon bureau, edited New Times Magazine, and more. I’ve met Russ Baker and contributed a dollar or two to his work. That doesn’t make them infallible. But they are serious investigative journalists whose alarming report should be taken seriously.
Warp Speed, WheelTug, and Oysters March 30, 2017March 30, 2017 Sorry, Cap’n Kirk: not gonna happen. We’ll get to Mars; but beyond our solar system? The BBC explains why we’ll never reach, let alone exceed, the speed of light. But we’ve gotten pretty good at 600 miles an hour, if not 186,282 miles per second. Glenn: “The 737 is the #1 selling passenger plane in the world. Did you ever wonder how Boeing produces over forty 737 airplanes a month? The train arrives with the main body in the morning. This 3½ minute video is fascinating. Enjoy!” ☞ And one day, they’ll all be equipped with WheelTug and we’ll save 20 minutes on every flight not having to wait for a tug to back up, boarding and deplaning from both front AND rear doors. (Click here if you might be in Singapore May 23-24 for IATA’s second e-taxi conference. I wrote about the first one, here.) “Keep away from oysters / whatever you do and / just for the hell of it / you can be a celibate, too.” So ran the line from a song in HPT 121, Harvard’s 1969 Hasty Pudding Theatrical, “Bottoms Up,” wherefrom I came to learn that oysters are thought to be an aphrodisiac. Thanks to Upworthy for this encouraging tale. While some of tomorrow’s unemployed truck drivers may be installing solar roofs, others may be farming oysters. Which, it turns out, is good for wild oysters, as well. Check it out. How can you not be excited by all this? Artie: “Needless to say, I was intrigued by the article you linked to Tuesday (about the Russian mob), but I’m very reluctant to share information from sources that I don’t know to be reliable. Your introduction, “If this report is to be believed,” is not exactly a ringing endorsement, so I have to ask, Are you familiar with them? and Do you have reason to believe them?” ☞ Yes and yes. I shouldn’t have struck such a skeptical tone. Jonathan Z. Larsen is indeed a respected journalist who goes back a long way, having headed TIME’s Saigon bureau, edited New Times Magazine, and more. I’ve met Russ Baker and contributed a dollar or two to his work. That doesn’t make them infallible. But they are serious investigative journalists whose alarming report should be taken seriously.
Even If You DIDN’T Inherit The Happy Gene March 29, 2017March 28, 2017 No surprise: happy people live longer. But according to this article, which you must read (because the happier you are, the longer you will live and the longer I will get to enjoy your readership, which will make me happier, and thus healthier, and — let’s be frank — it’s all about me) . . . there are eight steps you can take to, in effect, develop the happy gene. And they cost not a cent. And they will tend to make those around you happier as well. Thank you, indispensable New York Times. (There’s a thought: every time we say Trump, we should say, “the failing Donald Trump,” and every time we say the New York Times, let’s make it “the indispensable New York Times.”) Combine this with a few hours of BrainHQ each year, and you’ll not only stay happy and healthy — you’ll be compos mentis. At 80, you might even be like this guy.
Russian Crime: Worse Than You Thought March 28, 2017March 28, 2017 If this report is to be believed– “WHY FBI CAN’T TELL ALL ON TRUMP, RUSSIA” — we really do need an independent investigation. Read the tiniest sliver to see if you want more. The authors, Jonathan Z. Larsen (who once headed TIME’s Saigon bureau) and Russ Baker (to whose work I once contributed a dollar or two) are serious investigative journalists. . . . The Russian mob has a breathtaking and underappreciated reach. It is so powerful that FBI Agent Peter Kowenhoven told CNN in 2009 that Semion Mogilevich, its “boss of bosses,” is a strategic threat, and a man who “can, with a telephone call or order, affect the global economy.” US authorities came to see Mogilevich, who is described as close with Putin, as not only a danger to the financial system but a potential threat to world peace. He had access to stockpiles of military weapons and even fissionable material, snapped up as the Soviet Union fell apart. . . . The Russian mob should also not be confused with a mere crime syndicate. It is an organization comprised of state actors, oligarchs, and specific groups of individuals working collectively with the authority of the Russian government — a “mafia state.” At times, it is difficult to tell where the mob ends and the government begins. . . . Right from the earliest days of Trump Tower, in 1983, some of the choicest condominiums, including those in the 10 floors immediately below the future president’s own triplex apartment, went to a rogues gallery of criminals and their associates. . . . . . . by the early 1990s, both the arrival of Russian organized crime in the US and the strange attraction of Trump properties for Russian mobsters were on the Bureau’s radar. . . . When you get to the line, “Today, Trump claims to have trouble remembering Sater,” you may be puzzled. Sater could simply walk up a flight of stairs to Trump’s office and stop in for an impromptu chat. Indeed, Sater and the Trump clan grew so close that in February 2006, at the personal request of Donald Trump, the mobster joined his children Ivanka, Donald Jr., and his son’s wife Vanessa in Moscow to show them around, according to his deposition testimony. . . . a few years later, he could still be found in Trump Tower. But now he was apparently working directly for Trump himself, with an office, business cards, phone number and email address all provided by the Trump Organization. The cards identified him as a “Senior Advisor to Donald Trump.” Today, Trump claims to have trouble remembering Sater. And so it goes. It’s not the Mexicans we should be worried about, methinks — it’s the Russians.* *Friday, I quoted Sinclair Lewis’ It Can’t Happen Here, the 1935 novel about a man improbably elected President in 1936. “The [candidate] was vulgar, almost illiterate, a public liar easily detected, and in his ‘ideas’ almost idiotic. . . . [He would] jab his crowds with figures and facts — figures and facts that were inescapable even when, as often happened, they were entirely incorrect.” One of his tools of governance was fear of the Mexican people, who, by 1939, were routinely crossing the border and reportedly slaughtering Americans left and right . . . though verification of those slaughters was hard to come by . . . and whose plans, it had been discovered, were “to fly over and bomb Laredo, San Antonio, Bisbee, and probably Tacoma, and Bangor, Maine.” Faced with Mexico’s “appalling army of 67,000 men, with thirty-nine military aëroplanes . . . [w]omen in Cedar Rapids hid under the bed; elderly gentlemen in Cattaraugus County, New York, concealed their money in elm-tree boles; and the wife of a chicken-raiser seven miles N.E. of Estelline, South Dakota, a woman widely known as a good cook and a trained observer, distinctly saw a file of ninety-two Mexican soldiers pass her cabin, starting at 3:17am on July 27, 1939.”
“I Made A Huge Mistake” March 26, 2017March 25, 2017 Bill Maher’s New Rule Friday night: “America needs more Republicans like this guy.” Six minutes not to be missed. It seems to me two things are likely to happen on parallel tracks: More and more Trump voters will become disenchanted (see above). Trump associates and possibly Trump himself, will face charges of treason for cooperating with Russia in its cyber attack on our country (see below). Sean Spicer downplays Paul Manafort’s Trump connection, but he was Trump’s campaign manager. And you wonder: of all the people in the world to run your campaign, why choose a guy who’d been paid $10 million a year to influence U.S. politics and news coverage to favor Putin? And why name as your Commerce Secretary the co-chair of a bank best known for laundering Russian oligarch money, very possibly including Putin’s own? Putin, who murders political opponents and journalists? (“What,” says Trump, in Putin’s defense: “you think our country’s so innocent?”) Watch the shootings, poisonings, and a guy fly out his fourth-floor window the day before he was set to testify. There are other Russia ties as well, as you know (Trump’s pick for Secretary of State, around whose neck Putin draped the Order of Friendship award) . . . like National Security Advisor Michael Flynn. USA Today has prepared this devastating timeline. I don’t see how this goes on for four years. I think at some point, those two parallel tracks converge.
A 1935 Novel About You Know Who March 24, 2017March 23, 2017 Ron: “Not to distract from Trump coverage (and have you mentioned the April 15 Tax March requesting release of Trump’s tax returns or the April 22 Earth Day March for Science?) . . . . . . but here’s a financial comment/question: It’s been a few years since your guru commented on NKTR, which jumped this week to about double from where you suggested it in 2013. Its non-addictive opioid alternative passed phase 3 trials well. Now what?” ☞ Guru suggests hanging on. “They will likely sign a big partnership. The product is a version of oxycodone that has been altered so it can’t get into the brain quickly. You can take a huge dose iv or snort it, but it won’t get into the brain any faster than if you take the recommended dose. In the human abuse liability test, this drug registered close to the level of a placebo and dramatically below oxycodone. Thus, it could become a new gold standard for lower back pain. $10 billion is spent each year in the US on these drugs. The sales potential is quite large.” Sinclair Lewis wrote It Can’t Happen Here in 1935, a dozen years before Trump was even born — but it’s about him and the millions who, yearning to believe, voted for him. “The [candidate] was vulgar, almost illiterate, a public liar easily detected, and in his ‘ideas’ almost idiotic. . . . [He would] jab his crowds with figures and facts — figures and facts that were inescapable even when, as often happened, they were entirely incorrect.” He won, and it did not go well. Four score and two years later, we have a president who has us winning so much we’ve already begun to tire of winning; who’s protecting us from the kind of terror Swedes faced last month; who’s giving us all better health care at lower cost even as he transfers hundreds of billions back to the uber-rich Obama forced to help pay for it; whose victory by the widest margin of anyone since Ronald Reagan was witnessed in person on the Mall by the largest crowd in history. Tom Friedman here calls upon a few good men — Secretary of Defense James Mattis, National Security Adviser H. R. McMaster, Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly, C.I.A. Director Mike Pompeo, and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson — to stand up to him. Have a great weekend.
The Resistbot And Some Reader Feedback March 22, 2017 As you probably know — watch the story here — Russia aimed tens of millions of demoralizing, defamatory tweets, seemingly from American humans but actually from Russian “bots,” at potential Hillary voters. One more reason Trump came within 3 million votes of her total and now feels he has a mandate to shift hundreds of billions of dollars from people who are struggling to billionaires like himself and his Cabinet. (How might the election results have been different if the FBI, in breaking its practice of not commenting on an ongoing investigation, had broken it more even-handedly? “We are investigating Hillary’s emails. Separately, we are investigating ties between Trump, his associates, and a relentless, sprawling Russian cyberattack on our democracy.”) In that context, the resistbot is pretty tame stuff. But check it out. “This New Anti-Trump Tech Is The Most Genius Thing Of 2017.” Dick W.: “You said it: Gorsuch’s brilliance and experience qualify him for the Court, and ‘policy differences come with the territory.’ So let’s not be petty. Let’s not sink to their level. Let’s pick our fights. Let’s save our energy for the big stuff. Let’s show some restraint. Let’s show some leadership.” ☞ Thanks, but I don’t think this is petty. I think we should either have played by the rules set in the Constitution – not a petty thing — in which case Obama would have gotten to name Scalia’s successor . . . or, since Senate Republicans failed to honor the Constitution, choosing to set their own rules instead, we should hold them to those rules. There is a huge difference between Garland, a mainstream judge, and Gorsuch, who some have said is to the right of Scalia. It matters which we get. Theft of the Court is not a petty thing. Any more than theft (by Putin) of an election. These are really consequential things. No?” Which is why, when I get a note like this one . . . Tristan A.: “I’ve been a non-paying subscriber for almost 20 years. (And an owner of BOREF for almost the same. I was prepared for it go to zero; I was not prepared to wait this long.) However, I’m drifting on your post. It’s like reading Rachel Maddow–snark, angry, telling us things we already know, apocalyptic. Could be, but in the past you’ve told us the world won’t end and to bet against it.” . . . my feeling is that I should acknowledge the feedback with thanks — which I do — but have to keep annoying you anyway. Because (a) the world probably won’t end, but stands a much better chance if we all recognize the danger we now find it in; and (b) I’m always surprised to see how many of my well-educated, well-informed don’t know all these things . . . e.g., that our President for years kept a book of Hitler’s speeches by his bedside. I would have thought something so colorful would have become common knowledge, but it hasn’t. So . . . even though I guess most of us already know the President of the United States is a pathological liar — an enormous problem for mankind, if you ask me — I feel compelled to share columns like this one, by David Leonhardt, writing in the New York Times (subscribe!): The ninth week of Donald Trump’s presidency began with the F.B.I. director calling him a liar. The director, the very complicated James Comey, didn’t use the L-word in his congressional testimony Monday. Comey serves at the pleasure of the president, after all. But his meaning was clear as could be. Trump has repeatedly accused Barack Obama of wiretapping his phones, and Comey explained there is “no information that supports” the claim. I’ve previously argued that not every untruth deserves to be branded with the L-word, because it implies intent and somebody can state an untruth without doing so knowingly. George W. Bush didn’t lie when he said Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and Obama didn’t lie when he said people who liked their current health insurance could keep it. They made careless statements that proved false (and they deserved much of the criticism they got). But the current president of the United States lies. He lies in ways that no American politician ever has before. He has lied about — among many other things — Obama’s birthplace, John F. Kennedy’s assassination, Sept. 11, the Iraq War, ISIS, NATO, military veterans, Mexican immigrants, Muslim immigrants, anti-Semitic attacks, the unemployment rate, the murder rate, the Electoral College, voter fraud and his groping of women. He tells so many untruths that it’s time to leave behind the textual parsing over which are unwitting and which are deliberate — as well as the condescending notion that most of Trump’s supporters enjoy his lies Trump sets out to deceive people. As he has put it, “I play to people’s fantasies.” Caveat emptor: When Donald Trump says something happened, it should not change anyone’s estimation of whether the event actually happened. Maybe it did, maybe it didn’t. His claim doesn’t change the odds. Which brings us to Russia. Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential campaign was an attack on the United States. It’s the kind of national-security matter that a president and members of Congress swear to treat with utmost seriousness when they take the oath of office. Yet now it has become the subject of an escalating series of lies by the president and the people who work for him. As Comey was acknowledging on Monday that the F.B.I. was investigating possible collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign, Trump was lying about it. From both his personal Twitter account and the White House account, he told untruths. A few hours later, his press secretary, Sean Spicer, went before the cameras and lied about the closeness between Trump and various aides who have documented Russian ties. Do you remember Paul Manafort, the chairman of Trump’s campaign, who ran the crucial delegate-counting operation? Spicer said Manafort had a “very limited role” in said campaign. The big question now is not what Trump and the White House are saying about the Russia story. They will evidently say anything. The questions are what really happened and who can uncover the truth. The House of Representatives, unfortunately, will not be doing so. I was most saddened during Comey’s testimony not by the White House’s response, which I’ve come to expect, but by the Republican House members questioning him. They are members of a branch of government that the Constitution holds as equal to the presidency, but they acted like Trump staff members, decrying leaks about Russia’s attack rather than the attack itself. The Watergate equivalent is claiming that Deep Throat was worse than Haldeman, Ehrlichman and Nixon. It fell to Adam Schiff, a Democratic representative from Southern California, to lay out the suspicious ties between Trump and Russia (while also hinting he couldn’t describe some classified details). Schiff did so in a calm, nine-minute monologue that’s worth watching. He walked through pro-Putin payments to Michael Flynn and through another Trump’s aide’s advance notice of John Podesta’s hacked email and through the mysterious struggle over the Republican Party platform on Ukraine. “Is it possible that all of these events and reports are completely unrelated, and nothing more than an entirely unhappy coincidence? Yes, it is possible,” Schiff said. “But it is also possible, maybe more than possible, that they are not coincidental, not disconnected and not unrelated, and that the Russians used the same techniques to corrupt U.S. persons that they have employed in Europe and elsewhere. We simply don’t know, not yet, and we owe it to the country to find out.” Comey, as much as liberals may loathe him for his 2016 bungling, seems to be one of the few public officials with the ability and willingness to pursue the truth. I dearly hope that Republican members of the Senate are patriotic enough to do so as well. Our president is a liar, and we need to find out how serious his latest lies are. Have a nice day!
We Need To Play By Mitch McConnell’s Rules March 21, 2017March 22, 2017 Let’s stipulate that Judge Gorsuch is a fine, upstanding guy. Let’s stipulate, too, that his brilliance and experience qualify him for the Court. There are loads of places I’d surely hate his decisions, if he were confirmed. (He’s written a whole book on why I shouldn’t be allowed to get help, if I ever encounter such agony or despair that I want to end my life. That decision, he believes, should be left up to him, not me.) But policy differences come with the territory. That’s not the line along which Democrats should unanimously reject his nomination. This is: We should play by Mitch McConnell’s rules. We hate them, but he set them — hours after Scalia’s death — and his Republican Senate colleagues aggressively adopted them, so we should hold them to their word. Those rules were: We must wait to see what the PEOPLE think. It wasn’t enough that the people expressed their preference for President Obama in 2008 and 2012. The Republicans insisted, Constitution be damned, Obama should not be allowed to select the next Justice. We should wait for the next election to see which way the American PEOPLE were leaning. (Not how the Electoral College was leaning – the people.) And now we know. The PEOPLE again confirmed in 2016 – by 3 million votes — that they leaned the Democrat. (It would have been by yet more millions if it had not been for Vladimir Putin. Still more millions if the media hadn’t assured everyone Trump had no path to 270. Safe to stay home, Hillary would win. Safe to vote third-party. Safe, even — knowing there was no real risk of his actually becoming president — to “send a message” and vote for Trump.) Democrats should insist we play by Mitch McConnell’s rules: Wait to see the will of the people. And it is: MERRICK GARLAND. That’s the only Justice we should vote to confirm. Next time there’s a vacancy, if Gorsuch is nominated, there’s a good possibility he would be confirmed. But for now? We’re with Mitch. Jim Burt: “One of the late Jimmy Breslin’s most quotable characterizations was of Rudy Giuliani as ‘A small man in search of a balcony.’ Rudy has company. One wonders if the root of the expression ‘Il Duce ha sempre ragione‘ (‘the Leader is always right’) might not have been that he, like our current orange malediction, never admitted error and never apologized. For anything.”
You’re Making It Up Again, Arnold March 19, 2017March 19, 2017 From New York Magazine: Trump Health Secretary Says States Should Only Require Vaccines If They Feel Like It. . . . If the government of Pennsylvania decides that it isn’t going to require its residents to vaccinate their school children against measles, that poses a threat for people living just across the border in Maryland. President Trump’s Health secretary does not seem to recognize this problem. . . . Trump’s team also seems not to recognize climate change is a problem. At the end of the day, what do “scientists” know? Or generals! “I know more about ISIS than the generals do” — he had a secret plan to defeat ISIS “very, very quickly.” Except that he didn’t, anymore than he released the tax returns he “absolutely” would — the man lies constantly, about everything, from having investigators in Hawaii finding incredible stuff about Obama’s phony birth certificate to having had the largest Electoral College victory since Reagan — there are so many lists of Trump lies someone is doubtless compiling a list of those. Politifact scores him at 16% true-or-mostly-true for the items they’ve checked, 34% half-true-or-mostly-false, 50% false-or-pants-on-fire. Frighteningly, the Breitbart / Fox / Limbaugh crowd largely believe him. And cheer when he calls journalists “the most dishonest human beings on earth.” Trump’s buffoonery would be laugh-out-loud, “you’re-making-it-up,-again,-Arnold” entertaining — delightful, indeed — who doesn’t love that song? — only, it’s not “The Book of Mormon,” it’s a fiendishly complex world with urgent problems in which a single man could literally cause nuclear winter that ends human life on the planet. Or launch a trade war that leads to global depression. Or merely transfer hundreds of billions of dollars from struggling Americans to those, like Trump himself and his Cabinet, in the top tenth of 1%, leading to a depression that way. (The last time we saw such inequality was 1929.) And it’s not just the lying. “You’re-making-it-up-again-Arnold” didn’t have a vindictive bone in his body. Trump, like a spoiled 6-year-old, lashes out at anyone who keeps him from getting his way. We have a delusional, pathological, grossly undignified, erratic, incompetent president who for years kept a book of Hitler’s speeches by his bedside . . . who claimed the despicable Roy Cohn as his mentor . . . and who — with big help from the successor agency to the KGB — came within 3 million votes of his opponent*. Most of the country and the world see this clearly. They saw before he was elected — and see now even more clearly — that Trump is everything Republicans said he was: a national disgrace, a pathological liar, an unstable narcissist, a dangerous con man, “undercutting everything that we stand for.” The sooner he can be impeached (if, say, it turns out he colluded with Russia) or “Section Four-ed” (see: the 25th Amendment), the more easily most of us would breathe. But back to ISIS for a second. Trump is for torture (“Trump calls for ‘hell of a lot worse than waterboarding’“) — a wonderful ISIS recruiting tool, as Abu Ghraib was for Al-Qaeda. And now we have the travel ban — the “blessed” travel ban, ISIS calls it — another great gift to those trying to radicalize young people born here and around the world. But leaving aside how stupid it is to give them this gift, when we already have extreme vetting, I’d like to note that it was billed as an urgent 90-day ban, imposed to give the Trump team time to evaluate, and perhaps tighten, the vetting procedures for travel from those seven, now six, countries. Well, guess what? The 90 days are almost up. And surely, given the threat, Trump’s team haven’t been waiting for the ban to take effect to START that assessment. They must have started immediately. What’s more, they might not have needed the full 90 days to do the job. A good deal maker asks for more than he needs. So could it have been completed in 60 if they asked for 90? In short: why waste even another dime on the legal wrangling? Whatever would have been done during those 90 days must already have been done, or will be within days. You can dispute the urgency of the reevaluation. (“There have been zero fatal terror attacks on U.S. soil since 1975 by immigrants from the seven Muslim-majority countries President Donald Trump targeted.”) But even assuming Trump was right abut its urgency, that reevaluation must now be complete, or nearly complete. Good for him for keeping us safe. Can we move on? Perhaps to the beautiful — and deeply stupid — wall that Mexico will not pay for? *Partly because everyone was assured it was safe to vote for him — or not to vote for her — or simply not to vote — because he couldn’t win. He had “no path to 270.” Had the pollsters and news media not gotten that wrong, and 5% of those who voted for Trump as a harmless way of saying, “hell yeah I’m pissed, listen to us!” voted for her instead (or not voted) . . . and millions who threw their votes away voting for Stein and Johnson chosen what they would have described as “the lesser of two evils” . . . and millions more who stayed home because they knew Hillary didn’t need their help . . . the popular vote would have been more like 80 million to 60 million. Still appallingly high for Trump/Putin/Pence/FBI, etc., but wide enough to swear in the best-prepared, rather than the least-prepared president in our history.