Lawrence O'Donnell gets over his skis!

THURSDAY, AUGUST 29, 2019

For entertainment purposes only: Why does Donald Trump seem to love Vladimir Putin so much?

We can't answer your question. At this point, neither can Lawrence O'Donnell, though he did get way out over his skis pm Tuesday night's Last Word.

On Wednesday night, he had to retract what he'd said. Everybody makes mistakes, and this was the latest example.

The fact that Lawrence retracted his claims doesn't mean that his claims are false. It's still possible that Lawrence's claims are true. It's also possible that Lawrence stopped to rob a bank Tuesday night on his way home from work.

Last night, Lawrence got massacred by Boston's Howie Carr on Tucker Carlson Tonight. We were struck by how many segments Carlson did last night which had a substantial semblance of truth. It's a measure of how much ridiculous conduct continues to emerge from various players on our team, helping prop Donald Trump up.

If you're behind on the Lawrence affair, we'll direct you to Erik Wemple of the Washington Post. It's getting harder and harder to force ourselves to go through the motions with this constant bullshit from our own players Over Here within our own self-impressed tribe.

We were happy to see that Wemple mentioned John Heilemann. He was cheering Lawrence on as Lawrence ran with the thrilling report he later had to retract:

WEMPLE (8/29/19): John Heilemann, an MSNBC national affairs analyst, regurgitated the cautionary phrase of the moment and then proclaimed how big a story this could be: “Got to stress if true, but if true, the reporting that you have … it’s the skeleton key, right, that opens—picks the lock on so many fundamental mysteries of the Trump era.”

How big a story this could be, if the story was known to be true!

Our team would be much better off if we were better able to see how much foolishness emerges from our corporate hirelings and our tribal elites. For example, this column in Sunday's Outlook section was just depressingly underfed all the way down.

We've been trying to force ourselves to reread and discuss the column; we may discuss it this weekend. But the silly, unhelpful tribal pieties, how powerfully they burn!

For entertainment purposes only, here's part of Lawrence's most famous historical meltdown, from late in Campaign 04. At the time, the newly emerging on-line left thought his performance had been heroic.

In our view, his effort was lazy and self-defeating, but don't force us to explain that. For entertainment purposes only, that link provides just a tiny part of Lawrence's two-segment meltdown that night.

He got kicked off the air for the next several months. He'd been too lazy to compose and publish actual work about the topic at hand.

Everybody makes mistakes, and Lawrence gets to make his. As a tribe, we've been praying for a magical knockout of Trump for the past several years.

SEARCH FOR TOMORROW: Carranza's promise goes unmet!

THURSDAY, AUGUST 29, 2019

Everything else gets ignored: As we noted yesterday, Eliza Shapiro's profile of Richard Carranza's first year didn't seem real complimentary.

Carranza has finished his first year as chancellor of the New York City Public Schools. Like other school systems across the nation, Gotham's academic profile features massive "achievement gaps" between different racial and ethnic groups. And no, they aren't the result of "test prep," as the New York Times' Eliza Shapiro has inexcusably claimed, perhaps due to true belief.

The gaps are very large. Presumably, there is no magic wand Carranza could wave to address this punishing state of affairs. But in her lengthy front-page report in last Saturday's New York Times, Shapiro almost seemed to portray Carranza as a bit of a slacker when it comes to classroom instruction:

SHAPIRO: [S]ome educators say that Mr. Carranza also urgently needs to address the uneven performance of schools across the system.

[Mayor] de Blasio canceled a $773 million school improvement program, known as Renewal, after it was unable to turn around many long-struggling schools, and Mr. Carranza has not created an alternative initiative for the dozens of lowest-performing schools.

David Bloomfield, a professor of education at Brooklyn College, said Mr. Carranza’s “impact on the classroom at this point seems insignificant.”

Can we talk? There are 1800 schools in the New York City system. Based on national norms, more than "dozens" of these schools would qualify as strikingly "low-performing."

That said, Shapiro made it sound like Carranza hasn't done much in the way of addressing classroom instruction. Most amazingly, this topic wasn't raised until paragraph 32 of Shapiro's front-page report.

On average, Gotham's roughly 770,000 black and Hispanic kids stand at the punishing end of gigantic achievement gaps. What was Shapiro doing for 31 paragraphs before she got around to briefly discussing this topic?

What else? Shapiro doesn't gargle or brush her teeth without discussing the "entrenched segregation" she and her editors are able to spot, and loudly decry, in Gotham's public schools. Hard-copy headline included, this is the way her front-page report began:

SHAPIRO (8/24/19): A Promise to Desegregate Schools in New York City Goes Unmet

Soon after he took the helm of the nation’s largest school district last year, Richard A. Carranza made his top priority clear: desegregation.

He sought to set himself apart from previous New York City schools chancellors and even his own boss, Mayor Bill de Blasio, by promising both frank talk about racial inequality and sweeping action.

At an event for student activists this spring, he slapped the side of a podium and shouted: “No, we will not wait to integrate our schools, we will not wait to dismantle the segregated systems we have!” He repeated the message in speeches, television appearances and national magazine profiles.

Interesting! According to Shapiro, the newly-hired Carranza had vowed to pursue "desegregation!" He said it was his top priority. He made this focus clear.

It was this rather fuzzy pledge which dominated Shapiro's profile this day. But uh-oh! As she continued, she made it sound like Carranza had staged a bit of a flip:

SHAPIRO (continuing directly): But now, as he enters his second year, he seems to be trying to reset expectations. In an interview, Mr. Carranza described himself as a “realist.”

“If I integrated the system, the next thing I’m going to do is I’m going to walk on water,” he said.

We don't know if Shapiro's presentation is fair. But her first 31 paragraphs were burned away on the claim that Carranza's promise has gone unmet—that he has failed to act on his (rather fuzzy) pledge to "desegregate" Gotham's schools.

Might we talk? In our view, Carranza's fiery promise hasn't simply "gone unmet." It also goes largely unexplained in Shapiro's lengthy report.

Given the ugly history of American public schools, "segregation" will always sound like a dragon to be slain. "Desegregation" will always sound like a noble goal to pursue.

That said, in what sense are New York City's public schools "segregated" at this point? What would Gotham's schools look like after they've been "desegregated?" And how would that help Gotham's kids?

Such matters are rarely clarified in Shapiro's endless jihads on this, the New York Times' favorite topic in the realm of public schooling. Saturday's lengthy report provided no exception to this annoying rule.

At several points, Shapiro acknowledged that "desegregation" of Gotham's schools would be a daunting task. In this passage, she does at least provide a sense of what this noble-sounding term might mean:

SHAPIRO: Even some of the most avid proponents of integration have acknowledged that the system’s demographics make school-by-school diversity daunting, and have focused on ways to desegregate schools in mixed-income, racially diverse neighborhoods.

Still, activists and academics have offered proposals that they say could begin to chip away at segregation: The city could change selective admissions policies that tend to exclude black and Hispanic students from the highest-performing schools; adopt a cross-borough school transportation plan; or require that specific neighborhoods create desegregation plans for their schools.

Speaking some unnamed version of English, Shapiro seems to say that accomplishing "school-by-school diversity" would be a "daunting" task.

She says the Gotham schools could "chip away at" its poorly-defined "segregation" if they'd just "focus on ways to desegregate schools" in certain types of neighborhoods. The system could "require that specific neighborhoods create desegregation plans for their schools."

Out of repeated circular definition, a likely picture emerges. It would be better if Gotham's individual schools more closely matched the racial/ethnic demographics of the system as a whole.

To the extent possible, Shapiro would like the "diversity" in each school to match that of the overall system. In the early passage shown below, Shapiro makes a familiar, punishing claim about the New York City schools, and she gives us the clearest picture of what she means when she says that Gotham's schools are heavily segregated:

SHAPIRO: The past year has given Mr. Carranza an education in the complexities and challenges presented by the nation’s largest school system, an often unwieldy collection of 1,800 schools that sprawls across five boroughs and enrolls 1.1 million students.

New York is home to one of the most segregated school systems in the country. Black and Hispanic students make up 70 percent of the system, and white and Asian students represent about 15 percent each. About three-quarters of students are low income, and roughly half the city’s schools are more than 90 percent black or Hispanic.

New York City is operating "one of the most segregated school systems in the country," Shapiro says, failing to explain the basis on which she makes this eye-catching claim. "Roughly half the city’s schools are more than 90 percent black or Hispanic."

Shapiro seems to feel it would be better if fewer schools, or no schools at all, fit that demographic profile—and in that judgment, she and her obsessive editors certainly may be right.

What's wrong with a public school which is more than 90 percent black or Hispanic? There are many answers to that question, some more compelling than others.

Long ago and far away, the New York Times' N. R. Kleinfield penned an insightful report which explored one important answer. He held a group discussion with ten middle-school kids at Explore Charter School in Brooklyn, a school where almost all the students were black.

Kleinfield posed a basic question to these good, decent kids: "What did they think of the absence of racial diversity?"

In an outstanding report, he recorded what those kids said:

KLEINFIELD (5/11/12): What did they think of the absence of racial diversity?

“It doesn’t really prepare us for the real world,” said Tori Williams, an eighth grader. “You see one race, and you’re going to be accustomed to one race.”

Jahmir Duran-Abreu, another eight grader, said: “It seems it’s black kids and white teachers. Like one time we were talking and I said I like listening to Eminem and my teacher said this was ghetto. She was white. I was pretty upset. I was wondering why she would say something like that. She apologized, but it sticks with me.”

Jahmir, one of Explore’s few Hispanic students, is its first student to get into Stuyvesant High School, one of the city’s premier schools. He was also admitted to Dalton, an elite private school, where he intends to go. He wants someday to become an actor.

Shakeare Cobham, in sixth grade, offered a different view: “It’s more comfortable to be with people of your own race than to be with a lot of different races.”

Tori came back: “I disagree. It doesn’t prepare us.”

Yata Pierre, in eighth grade, said, “It doesn’t really matter as long as your teachers are good teachers.”

Trevon Roberts-Walker, a sixth grader, responded, “When we are in high school and college, it’s not going to be all one race.”

Jahmir: “Yeah, in my high school there will be predominantly white kids, and I think this school will be so much better if it were more diverse.”

Kenny Wright, in eighth grade, piped in, “You could have more discussion instead of all the same thoughts.”

Ashira Mayers, in seventh grade, said: “We’d like to hear from other races. How do they feel? What’s happening with them?”

Though not all alike, those are beautiful thoughts. Those good, decent kids were discussing the problem of "racial isolation."

Most of those kids seemed to feel that they were missing out on something because they weren't attending school with kids of other "races." There's a lot to be said for that view—and kids of other "races" may well be missing out on something by not going to school with those Explore Charter kids.

That said, a public school doesn't run on "diversity" alone. The giant achievement gaps which obtain in Gotham''s schools wouldn't magically disappear if someone waved a magic wand and made every school magically conform to the perfect pattern in which an unwavering 15 percent of the students were "white."

Nor would that magic degree of diversity likely extend into the classrooms of those schools. Gotham's giant range of achievement levels would suggest the need to organize instruction in ways which could be called "tracking" or "grouping."

Unless we're prepared to pretend, as Shapiro has explicitly done, that the racial component of those gaps is simply an illusory artifact of "test prep," that school-by-school diversity would tend to fade away on a classroom-by-classroom basis. This unavoidable reality can create new "segregation" problems, perceptions and concerns on a within-the-school basis.

Few such matters ever survive the deeply propagandistic way the New York Times discusses this important topic. In last Saturday's lengthy report, Carranza's attention to classroom instruction didn't get mentioned until we'd burned away 31 paragraphs on the poorly explained claim that Gotham's schools 1) are severely "segregated" at present and 2) are subject to some substantial form of "desegregation."

Even Shapiro was prepared to admit that it didn't make sense to believe that Carranza could produce more than a certain amount of increased "diversity." But in the deeply uncaring New York Times, that limited advance in school-by-school diversity seems to be the only things that actually counts.

The New York Times cares about who gets into Stuyvesant High. Beyond that, it wants to juggle diversity numbers along the margins. It doesn't seem to care (or even know) about those massive achievement gaps, or about the hundreds of thousands of good, decent kids who struggle beneath their yoke.

"Segregation" is a painful, powerful word—a powerful word from the past. You could almost say that this powerful word leads back to 1619.

For reasons only it can explain, the New York Times seems to be in love with the powerful word, full and complete total stop. It seems to care about no other aspect of its city's public schools.

Rather than a bow to the past, we'd advise a search for tomorrow. What explains those giant gaps? Starting on this very day, what can someone like Richard Carranza possibly do to address those gaps?

Good, decent kids are losing out. Aside from the few who might end up at Yale, does anyone care about them?

Tomorrow: "New York is home to one of the most segregated school systems in the country."

Where does that favorite claim come from? Also, dividing the tribes.

An August when the sharks wouldn't bite!

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 28, 2019

Bedbugs, bad polls fill the void: What does the modern journalist do when it's late in August and the sharks aren't attacking swimmers often enough?

As you may have noticed, the modern journalist fills the void with various bedbug tales.

Here at this site, we're discussing the way the New York Times covers public schools. Over at Slate, Ashley Feinberg is offering a different type of press critique:

She's filing reports about the number of bedbugs (very few) found in the Times' Gotham headquarters.

Also at Slate, Ben Mathis-Lilley has filed a detailed report about who called whom a bedbug on-line and how each person reacted. Also, pretty much all around—bedbugs alleged at Doral!

Also this:

Check out the highlighted offerings at Slate from 5:55 AM right on through noon today. Try not to miss this highly typical show-stopper:

STOYA * AUG. 28, 2019 * 5:55 am
My Girlfriend Won't Stop Talking About Other Men—During Sex With Me

To all appearances, these are the things the modern "news org" must do to get us liberal/progressive giants to click. Have you been to The Daily Beast lately?

When all else fails, the last resort—you talk and you talk and you talk about polls, no matter how transparently worthless the poll in question may be:

A few days ago, Monmouth was pimping exciting results of a poll which seemed to show that Candidate Biden had lost a whole lot of ground. Cable stars jumped on the thrilling news, even though the poll was based on 298 respondents.

We have no idea who's going to win the Democratic nomination. (We are willing to say that it seems like a very weak field.)

That said, we also have no idea why a polling organization even bothers reporting a survey with such a small N. Saddest of all is the fact that our desperately bored cable hordes were more than willing to thrash it.

Question:

Is it possible that we're describing a major anthropological problem? Compare, contrast and discuss! Then pray that the sharks bite again.

One last humanitarian plea: It isn't clear that any poll is worth discussing, except in the most cursory way, at this stage in the alleged Democratic race.

Having said that, we make our plea:

MSNBC bosses, please! Stop making Kornacki roll up his sleeves when he gets sent to "the big board!"

SEARCH FOR TOMORROW: Carranza's attempts to improve instruction...

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 28, 2019

...are mentioned in graf 32: The New York Times' self-ballyhooed, new "major initiative" is deeply involved with the past.

If we might coin an original phrase, it seems that the past isn't simply un-dead. It isn't even past!

The traffic jam you sat in today may have been the result of American slavery! According to leading top-rated experts, such approaches to history are sometimes called "uber-reductive."

That doesn't mean that the work the Times will publish as part of The 1619 Project may not be informative and constructive. Presumably, some of the work will be superb. Some of it probably won't be.

That said, who but the self-impressed New York Times would undertake such a project? Within our modern political history, the Times is best known for such journalistic achievements as these:

Through a set of bungled front-page reports, the Times invented the Whitewater pseudo-scandal, which lent its name to a crackpot political era.

Katherine Boo warned the world about the dangers of "Creeping Dowdism" when Maureen Dowd was still just a front-page reporter. In 1995, the Times made Dowd a columnist anyway.

Thirteen years later, a Times public editor finally savaged Dowd for the relentless misogyny she'd brought to her treatment of Candidate Hillary Clinton. She'd slimed many others before that, not excluding the balding Al Gore, and including the stunning insults she'd directed at Howard Dean's hopelessly under-styled wife.

Most recently, the brilliant newspaper decided to stage an anguished staff meeting because editors had managed to bungle a single front-page headline. Now, this puzzling collection of Hamptons four-day weekend types have announced that they plan to "reframe th[is] country’s history," skillfully reconfiguring "the story we tell ourselves."

That traffic jam is Atlanta today is part of that reframed history. And who knows? The Times may even get around to re-explaining the crazy decision the newspaper made to retell the ridiculous, hopelessly bungled story of Uranium One during the Trump-Clinton campaign!

They told that hopelessly bungled story at a length of 4400 words, teaming with a right-wing crackpot to do so. Today, they plan to retell the whole of American story, starting with the tragic events of the year 1619.

Almost surely, some of that work will be instructive and useful. On balance, though, this project's work may not be helpful at all. For an example of the newspaper's frequently cockeyed, quasi-ideological focus, consider last Saturday's front-page report on Richard Carranza's first year as head of New York City's schools.

Carranza was named chancellor of the New York City Public Schools in April 2018. He was serving as superintendent of the Houston Independent School District at that time. We assume he's a good, decent person.

Last Saturday, the Times' kid reporter, Eliza Shapiro, wrote a lengthy assessment of Carranza's first year in New York. Her lengthy report appeared on the Times' front page.

All in all, Shapiro's profile of Carranza's first year may not have seemed all that flattering. Needless to say, Carranza had accepted a deeply challenging job when he came to New York. In the baldest formulation, he'd accepted the task of directing a giant school system with such achievement gaps as these:

Average scores, Grade 8 math
New York City Public Schools, Naep 2017
White kids: 290.71
Black kids: 259.60
Hispanic kids: 263.56
Asian-American kids: 306.03

U.S. public schools, all students: 281.96
U.S. public schools, white kids only: 292.16

For all Naep data, start here. But the gaps are extremely large in Gotham, as they are across the nation.

Based on a very rough rule of thumb, the average white kid in New York City's public schools is three years ahead of his black counterpart in math by the end of eighth grade.

The average white kid nationwide scored a bit better than that. Asian kids in New York City left everyone else in the dust.

No one could expect Carranza, or anyone else, to transform this state of affairs in his first year on the job, presumably by improving the performance of the black and Hispanic kids. Still and all, Shapiro made it sound like Carranza had possibly earned an F for effort in his inaugural year:

SHAPIRO (8/24/19): [S]ome educators say that Mr. Carranza also urgently needs to address the uneven performance of schools across the system.

[Mayor] de Blasio canceled a $773 million school improvement program, known as Renewal, after it was unable to turn around many long-struggling schools, and Mr. Carranza has not created an alternative initiative for the dozens of lowest-performing schools.

David Bloomfield, a professor of education at Brooklyn College, said Mr. Carranza’s “impact on the classroom at this point seems insignificant.”

We'll discuss one key word in that passage—"also"—in tomorrow's report. That said, this account makes Carranza's first year sound a bit underwhelming.

As she continued, Shapiro let the chancellor defend himself. Here's what Shapiro reported:

SHAPIRO (continuing directly): Looking back on his first year, the chancellor said in an interview that he had made significant strides in improving education for students learning English, and in reorganizing the Department of Education’s vast bureaucracy. He said he had put in a new discipline code that was intended to limit in-school arrests for students of color, who he said were disproportionate targets of policing in schools.

This week, the city announced that student test scores rose modestly during the chancellor’s first year on the job.

“There’s a lot of work that’s happening that I’m very proud of,” Mr. Carranza said.

Did Carranza somehow "ma[k]e significant strides in improving education for students learning English?" We have no way of knowing, and the New York Times will never examine such a boring and tedious topic.

Beyond that, Carranza was quoted saying that he'd reorganized the system's bureaucracy and had tried "to limit in-school arrests for students of color."

One paragraph later, he said his attempts at improvement "will not stick if the city does not address a more basic set of problems." Some of those problems were named:

SHAPIRO: The city’s school bus system, for example, suffered a major crisis last year when drivers could not complete new routes, leaving thousands of students stranded. This week, Mr. Carranza announced GPS tracking on city buses. And the city’s strained special education system appears to be reaching a breaking point; tens of thousands of students with disabilities are not receiving the services they need.

Something went wrong with the city's bus system. Also, the city's special education system was described as an ongoing mess, an ongoing mess which Carranza himself apparently hasn't addressed.

As this discussion unfolded, nothing was said about those giant, punishing achievement gaps, or about the types of classroom instruction which might imaginably start to address them.

The bus system failed, and special ed stinks. But what about standard classroom instruction? What can be brought to bear upon those large, punishing gaps?

As quoted, Carranza didn't address such points, not did Shapiro seem to have raised them. In truth, no one within our major news orgs seems to care about such matters, or about the kids on the short end of those punishing gaps. Again and again, these facts are made abundantly clear by Rachel Maddow's topic selection, but also by the New York Times' "education reporting."

Shapiro's account of Carranza's first year didn't sound all that inspiring. The chancellor's "impact on the classroom at this point seems insignificant,” or so said the one education expert she quoted on this subject.

Shapiro's account seemed unflattering. But there's something about the profile we've quoted which is even more striking than the apparent lack of big ideas brought to the city's classrooms:

The account we've posted didn't begin until paragraph 32 of Shapiro's lengthy front-page report!

Carranza took control of a giant school system with giant achievement gaps. One year later, his "impact on the classroom" was said to be insignificant.

You'd almost think that this might be the focus of Shapiro's report. But Shapiro's focus on the public schools also ties her to the past, in a way which is reminiscent of the possible reductive overreach of The 1619 Project.

At this site, we'll recommend that decent people conduct a search for tomorrow concerning our public schools. You could call it The 2024 Project. It would be a search for ways to improve the lives of the children who will be born today, the children who will enter Gotham's kindergartens in that onrushing year.

We'd recommend a search for tomorrow and a focus on those gurgling, squirming children. That said, Shapiro's reporting on public schools caries an unmistakable 1619 air. And no, her obsessive focus on past offenses is neither well-reported nor helpful.

What was Shapiro doing for 31 paragraphs before she offered the analysis we've quoted? She was musing about the brutal past, while once again helping us see the New York Times' moral grandeur.

This paper has bungled again and again as our political culture had slid toward the sea. Tomorrow, we'll suggest that a vast indifference, and an unhelpful self-regard, informed the puzzling 31 paragraphs which started last weekend's report.

Tomorrow: Just repeat the magic word and you'll win a hundred dollars!

What might Donald Trump do next year?

TUESDAY, AUGUST 27, 2019

Joe Walsh meets Wallace and friends: What might Donald Trump do next year, assuming there is a next year, if he's behind in the polls?

Might he start a serious war? Might be try to declare martial law and cancel the upcoming election?

We're not asking if he could succeed at such an approach. Regarding the attempt to cancel the vote, we're asking if he might try such an approach, with all the concomitant damage such an effort would cause.

Also, how about this:

Might he actually get involved in trying to hack voter tallies? Might he engineer a situation in which it's obvious that vote totals did get hacked somewhere, then use that circumstance to declare the election he lost null and void?

Might he even do something like this with Vladimir Putin's help? Might he start a war post-election, then declare that a nation at war can't change horses in midstream?

We're not asking if he could succeed at such approaches. We're asking if he is disordered enough to engage in such conduct.

For the record, we can't swear to you that he isn't. Did we mention the possibility of that war, whether pre- or post-election?

We thought such thoughts as we watched Joe Walsh speak with Nicolle Wallace and some of her favorite reporters and friends on yesterday's Deadline: White House.

We'll recommend that you watch the videotapes. Our takeaways:

For starters, we never knew that John Heilemann was so amazingly morally pure. Beyond that, we think Wallace is holding back in her war against Trump in a fairly obvious way, a type of accusation she directed at Walsh a few times.

Don't get us wrong! Wallace was mainly quite sensible during her eighteen minutes with Walsh. It was Heilemann who amazed us with his remarkable moral purity, with the morally pure David Jolly not too far behind.

These favorite reporters and friends amazed us with their moral grandeur. That said, Wallace engaged in this exchange early in the interview:

WALLACE (8/26/19): This idea of [Trump's] fitness—

WALSH: He's nuts. Nuts!

WALLACE: And I think the truth is that, whether people say it disparagingly or affectionately, anyone that comes in contact with him comes away saying he's crazy. But this is a hard story to cover and it's a hard attack to make. What are sort of your proof points?

WALSH: He's a psychopath. He lies every time he opens his mouth. He's the biggest narcissist we've ever had in that office, and that's saying a lot, John.

"It's a hard story to cover," Wallace said, referring to Trump's apparent lack of mental or psychological "fitness." As you can see, Walsh was a bit more direct.

But is Trump's possible lack of "fitness" actually "hard to cover?" At the end of the interview, Wallace returned to this general topic, copping out once again:

WALLACE: I hope we can keep having this conversation. There's a lot to talk about, and I'm telling you, I think that, if you sort of marshal all the evidence—

David Brooks wrote in 2017 about a group of Republican senators leaving a meeting with Trump thinking he displayed the early signs of Alzheimer's.

If you look at the reporting just from this trip [to the G-7 conference].

If you look at the reporting on the speech last week, the rally, where he forgot what he said.

I'm not a doctor, but if you really want to make that case and you do the work of putting together all that evidence, it's a really compelling case to Republicans who, I'm old enough to remember, used to care a whole lot about the person who served as our country's commander in chief.

WALSH: And the rule of law.

"The person who serves as our country's commander in chief?" The person who could imaginably start a self-serving, crazy war?

"I'm not a doctor," Wallace said, after suggesting that Trump may be suffering from cognitive impairment.

"I'm not a doctor," she said. But then again, neither is Walsh.

Luckily, Bandy X. Lee actually is a doctor. It's time that Wallace bit the bullet and interviewed Lee, and other professionals, on her TV program.

We're sorry, but this actually isn't "a hard story to cover." As with other topics, you just have to interview sensible specialists who know what they're talking about.

For the record, Wallace should stage a solo interview with Lee, not a revival of Crossfire. In our view, we'd be well served if she left the remarkably pious Heilemann and Jolly home that particular day.

Wallace complained that, in certain ways, Walsh isn't going all in on his crusade against Trump. That said, neither is Wallace, if she suspects what she obviously does, but won't interview respectable, competent specialists.

Some final words of praise:

A. B. Stoddard threw Heilemann and Jolly overboard and under the bus in a highly sensible followup segment. Heilemann and Jolly are the kind of Dimmesdales who don't want anyone rejecting Trump unless they're directly responding to direct orders from People Exactly Like Us.

Stoddard left these Dimmesdales for dead. We'd like to link you to what she said, but it's the one segment the Deadline staff chose not to post at their site.

Stoddard said Walsh might be exactly the type of guy who can erode Trump's support over there on the right. We think she got it right.

We leave you with a question we ourselves can't answer:

What might this disordered president imaginably do next year? Start a war? Hack the vote? Do you feel sure where he'd stop?

SEARCH FOR TOMORROW: Experts release integration plan!

TUESDAY, AUGUST 27, 2019

It's time for The Bluebirds to go: In this morning's Washington Post, Michael Gerson drops the latest bomb on Donald J. Trump and Trumpism.

In hard-copy, the column appears beneath an aggressive headline. The headline, and the column itself, are easy for our tribe to swallow:

GERSON (8/27/19): The servile defense of Trump's crazy ideas

It is grotesquely fascinating to see President Trump’s apologists try to explain his most lunatic ideas and claims. It is a bit like watching someone choke down a sheep’s eye on a bet, then declare it fine dining. (Note to animal rights activists: This is a simile, not a recommendation.)

This process has a number of steps—the stages of servility. At first, there is stunned silence. (Did he really propose to buy Greenland?) Then the frantic search for hidden wisdom...

So it goes as apologists march behind a parade of crazy ideas. Before long, we're planning to nuke the next hurricane—or perhaps the Greenland ice sheet.

Are we humans really "the rational animal?" So we've persistently said. But according to future anthropologists, the truth is emerging, every day, in the pages of our major newspapers.

According to Gerson, a servile elite is involved in a defense of lunatic claims and crazy ideas. But even as this process unfolds, our press elite insists that we shouldn't discuss the possible source of those crazy ideas!

Yesterday afternoon, we showed you what happened when one member of that elite broke ranks with press corps guild. He tried to stage a discussion of Donald Trump's possible mental condition.

It didn't go especially well. It has been a long time since our journalistic elites were able to stage real discussions.

Gerson's column describes the mental and moral disintegration of one modern elite. For a possible analogue from within our own self-impressed liberal/progressive tribe, we invite you to read Eliza Shapiro's front-page report in today's New York Times.

In her coverage of the New York City Public Schools, Shapiro has been producing some of the worst print journalism we have ever seen. Today, she's simply reporting a major proposal for Gotham's schools from a group she describes as "a high-level panel."

A bit later, Shapiro describes the high-level panel in an even glossier way. With Shapiro leaning on the scales, here's a thumbnail of what the panel has proposed:

SHAPIRO (8/27/19): For years, New York City has essentially maintained two parallel public school systems.

A group of selective schools and programs geared to students labeled gifted and talented is filled mostly with white and Asian children. The rest of the system is open to all students and is predominantly black and Hispanic.

Now, a high-level panel appointed by Mayor Bill de Blasio is recommending that the city do away with most of these selective programs in an effort to desegregate the system, which has 1.1 million students and is by far the largest in the country.

[...]

The plan includes all elementary school gifted programs, screened middle schools and some high schools — with the exception of Stuyvesant High School and the city’s seven other elite high schools, whose admission is partially controlled by Albany.

Gifted programs and screened schools have “become proxies for separating students who can and should have opportunities to learn together,” the panel, made up of several dozen education experts, wrote in the report.

On its face, that sounds like an astonishing set of proposals. That said, are the people on this panel really "education experts?" Or are they possibly just liberal/progressive bubble-dwellers, like those in the other tribe?

The membership of this high-level collection of experts can be perused at this link. At a glance, they don't necessarily look like a group of "education experts" to us.

At a glance, that includes several members of the panel's five-person Executive Committee. This doesn't necessarily mean that the panel's proposals are bad. It tells us something about the way modern "elites" pander to one another.

According to Shapiro's report, this panel has apparently recommended "doing away" with "all elementary school gifted programs."

In fairness, the term "gifted" is overused in much the way "expert" is. But a bit later on, Shapiro extends her account of the panel's proposals:

SHAPIRO: Mr. de Blasio should also place a moratorium on new gifted programs, stop most grouping by academic ability and phase out existing gifted classes by not admitting new students, the panel said. If the recommendations are accepted, New York would shed its current gifted offerings within about five years.

Really? The New York City Public Schools should "stop most grouping by academic ability," even as it eliminates "all elementary school gifted programs?" Can that possibly be what these experts have recommended?

We ask the question because we spent a number of years in Baltimore's public school classrooms. During that time, we learned that fifth-graders are not all alike.

A similar story is told by the data produced by New York City's kids as part of the National Assessment of Education Progress (the Naep), the federal program which is universally regarded as the gold standard of domestic educational testing.

Are Gotham's fifth-graders all alike? Should they all be grouped together in their ongoing instruction? Consider the data for Grade 4 math from the most recent Naep testing for what data have been released:

Scores by percentile, Grade 4 math
New York City Public Schools, 2017 Naep
90th percentile: 269.09
75th percentile: 251.60
50th percentile: 230.43
25th percentile: 207.50
10th percentile: 186.80

For all Naep data, start here. In the most elementary sense, here's what those test scores mean:

Ten percent of Gotham's fourth-graders scored above 269 on the Grade 4 math test that year. On that same test, ten percent of Gotham's fourth-graders scored below 187.

Starting in the fall of 2017, should those kids all have been doing the same "fifth-grade math?" Consider:

According to a very rough but widely-employed rule of thumb, ten points on the Naep scale is roughly equivalent to one academic year.

As a general matter, such rules of thumb start losing their meaning the farther one moves from the median score in some data set. That said, those data suggest that giant "achievement gaps" exist within New York City's public schools by the end of fourth grade.

In the name of "desegregation," should all those kids proceed together in their fifth grade instruction, with education experts happily saying, "Grouping be damned?"

If so, the top ten percent will be bored out of their skulls during math class; the bottom ten percent will still be totally lost. Our society's "education experts" may not always suspect such things, but classroom teachers possibly will.

On their face, it doesn't sound like these proposals necessarily make good sense. It's also true, as Shapiro notes at several points, that adoption of this new regime will likely stimulate a departure of middle-class families from the public schools.

There will be that many fewer "white" kids to produce the "desegregation" these experts seek. By the time the exerts get done, those kids will all be found in one overcrowded Catholic school somewhere on Staten Island.

At present, 15 percent of Gotham's public school kids are "white." It's never clear what "desegregation" might mean with so few "white" kids to go around. But how well will "desegregation" go when that rather modest percentage drops substantially lower?

Traditionally, grade school classrooms were split into three reading groups—The Bluebirds, The Robins and The Buzzards.

Experts say the children weren't fooled by those neutral group names. But will it help if The Bluebirds and The Buzzards are now asked to read the same books and do the same math assignments?

To certain "experts," that idea will make perfect sense. To us, it pretty much doesn't. Assigned books will often be too hard for The Buzzards. Does anyone care about them?

As Gerson notes in this morning's column, Donald J. Trump is enabled by servile defenders of crazy ideas. Our question, and it has anthropological roots:

Does some similar state of affairs occasionally obtain Over Here?

Tomorrow: We resume our postponed search for tomorrow with last Saturday's front-page report

For high achievers only: This is what those scores and those gaps looked like across all the nation's schools:

Scores by percentile, Grade 4 math
U.S. public schools, 2017 Naep
90th percentile: 278.59
75th percentile: 261.28
50th percentile: 240.70
25th percentile: 218.51
10th percentile: 197.27

What can we learn from such basic data? Such data are never reported, let alone discussed, in the New York Times.

Stelter interviews Bandy X. Lee!

MONDAY, AUGUST 26, 2019

Psychiatrists enter the crossfire: Yesterday, on Reliable Sources, CNN's Brian Stelter finally did it.

Stelter interviewed two psychiatrists about issues of Donald J. Trump's mental health—or at least, he gave it a half-hearted try.

At the start of the segment, Stelter offered a lengthy justification for the fact that he was the raising the issue at all. Here's part of what he said:

STELTER (8/25/19): Now, I get it that Trump opponents have been saying he's sick since before Election Day. I think some folks threw out terms like "cognitive decline" way too casually. They dream about the 25th Amendment.

But it is possible to have a fact-based conservation about this. In fact, it's not just possible, it's necessary. Look at the New York Times reporting that some former Trump aides are, quote, increasingly worried about his behavior. Most people who cover this world for a living know that.

[...]

So something is wrong. There are lots of theories about what it is. There are some doctors who think they know. Others say we shouldn't speculate.

There are ethical questions about having this conversation at all, but we can't tiptoe around it anymore. We've got to talk about this. So let's talk about it. Let's do it!

"Let's do it," Stelter enthused, perhaps reassuring himself.

So far, almost so good! Stelter then introduced two psychiatrists. As in the old Crossfire days, they held "opposing views:"

STELTER (continuing directly): Let me bring in two guests, two psychiatrists with different views about this.

Dr. Bandy X. Lee is a professor at the Yale School of Medicine. She co-authored a book, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump. It originally came out two years ago, started this conversation in many ways about Trump's mental health.

And Dr. Allen Frances is in Philly for us. He's a professor emeritus and former chair of psychiatry at Duke University Medical College. And he authored the book, Twilight of American Sanity: A Psychiatrist Analyzes the Age of Trump.

The contestants were in place. From that point on, we'll admit we don't exactly understand what either of Stelter's guests said.

The alleged conversation made little sense, and it didn't last long. Here, for example, is a statement by the guest who seems to think that we shouldn't be discussing Trump's mental health:

FRANCES: I think that medicalizing politics has three very dire consequences. The first is that it stigmatizes the mentally ill. I've known thousands of patients, almost all of them are well-behaved, well-mannered, good people.

Trump is none of these. Lumping the mentally ill with Trump is a terrible insult to the mentally ill, and they have enough problems and stigma as it is.

The second issue is that calling Trump crazy hides the fact that we're crazy for having elected him, and even crazier for allowing his crazy policies to persist.

Trump is as destructive a person in this century as Hitler, Stalin and Mao were in the last century. He may be responsible for many more million deaths than they were. He needs to be contained, but he needs to be contained by attacking his policies, not his person.

It's crazy for us to be destroying the climate our children will live in. It's crazy to be giving tax cuts to the rich that will add trillions of dollars to the debt our children will have to pay. It's crazy to be destroying our democracy by claiming that the press and the courts of the enemy of the people. We have to face these policies, not Trump's person.

Now, it's absolutely impossible, you can bet the house, that the Congress, that Pence, that the cabinet will never ever remove Trump on grounds of mental unfitness. That will never happen. Discussing the issue in psychological name-calling terms distracts us from getting out the vote.

We have no idea why a competent suggestion that Trump may be mentally ill in some serious way would "stigmatize the mentally ill." Just as most people who are physically ill aren't suffering from terminal cancer, most people with some sort of mental health problem aren't the most severe type of sociopath, the equivalent of Hitler or Stalin.

We have no idea if Donald Trump is "mentally ill" in some serious way. But if he is, it doesn't make sense to say we mustn't discuss the possibility because it would "stigmatize" others with mild conditions.

Beyond that, has some responsible psychiatric observer diagnosed Trump as "crazy?" In what sense have such people engaged in "psychiatric name-calling?"

To our ear, it was Frances who was starting to sound a bit unhinged this day. At times, he sounded less like a psychiatrist and more like a old-style ward-heeler trying to get out the vote.

This strangeness continued later, near the end of the segment:

STELTER: And Dr. Frances, your advice to the press? How do you feel the press should handle these situations, these ongoing questions about the president's health?

FRANCES: Well, the problem is, I thought [Lee's] book was really silly. The people most willing to offer diagnoses know the least about it, have never contributed to discussions about diagnosis.

There is absolutely no doubt that Trump is dangerous. Everyone knows that. Everyone should have known that before the election. The question is, is he dangerous because he's a bad, evil con man or is he dangerous because he's mentally ill?

And on that issue, I think it's very clear he's dangerous because he's evil. He's not dangerous because he's mentally ill.

Needless to say, "everyone" doesn't believe, let alone "know," that Donald J. Trump is dangerous. Meanwhile, Frances was never asked to explain how he knew that Trump isn't mentally ill, if that's what he was saying. These were his final remarks:

FRANCES: I think Trump is best characterized as a spoiled brat, as a baby having temper tantrums, as a completely unfit person unable to meet the challenges and the responsibilities of his office, as a con man, as a—the most narcissistic person maybe in our time, a narcissist for all times.

We're puzzled. If Trump is "the most narcissistic person maybe in our time, a narcissist for all times," doesn't that suggest a possible issue of mental health? Does it help that he may end up killing millions more people than Hitler, Stalin and Mao?

Alas! Stelter didn't seem ready to field these peculiar remarks in this Crossfire-style discussion, for which a limited amount of time had been scheduled and a slightly strange guest had been booked. We weren't even entirely clear about what Lee was trying to say, but the statements by Frances made little sense for us at all.

In the past, we've said two things about this long-forbidden topic. We've said the topic should be discussed. We've also said there's little chance that the mainstream press would be able to conduct that discussion in a competent manner.

It's been a long time since cable news hosts were ever really asked to try to figure anything out. Stelter seemed to be in way over his head. Beyond that, he'd been allotted a limited amount of time for this tricky discussion with, perhaps, a poorly selected guest.

After thanking his two psychiatrists, Stelter took a commercial break. He then moved to a more familiar question:

Should Sean Spicer have been picked for Dancing With the Stars?

One last very basic point: The fact that important discussions unfold this way is an anthropological problem. That said, this is the way our "national discourse" has worked for the past thirty-plus years.

This seems to be the best we can do, at least on the "elite" level.

SEARCH FOR TOMORROW: Stephens extends the search for the past!

MONDAY, AUGUST 26, 2019

The 1519 Project: Bret Stephens displayed a bit of cheek in Saturday's New York Times.

His famous newspaper is now involved in a major search involving—among other things—the brutal American past. In Saturday's column, he decided to go his paper exactly a hundred years better:

STEPHENS (8/24/19): When Hernán Cortés and his men landed on the coast of Mexico, in 1519, they encountered a world of utter barbarity: incessant warfare, endemic slavery, and human sacrifice on an immense scale. They, in turn, inflicted their own barbarities: massacres, epidemics, forced labor and religious intolerance.

Whether one barbarity was better than the other is not a particularly interesting debate. The conquest of Mexico was another chapter of history as it usually is, a contest for power with little hope for progress.

You read that year correctly! Cortés began his conquest of the Aztec empire in 1519 [sic], when he was 34.

This occurred in the part of the world now known as Mexico. According to the leading authority on his life, Cortés "was part of the generation of Spanish colonizers who began the first phase of the Spanish colonization of the Americas."

Last weekend, in its Sunday magazine, the occasionally self-involved New York Times launched a self-described "major initiative." To review that edition, click here.

This major initiative is called "The 1619 Project." A sensitive observer could almost imagine a bit of overweening pride on the part of the New York Times as the routinely ludicrous newspaper built a framework around its new undertaking:

THE NEW YORK TIMES (8/18/19): In August of 1619, a ship appeared on this horizon, near Point Comfort, a coastal port in the British colony of Virginia. It carried more than 20 enslaved Africans, who were sold to the colonists. No aspect of the country that would be formed here has been untouched by the years of slavery that followed. On the 400th anniversary of this fateful moment, it is finally time to tell our story truthfully.

That text refers to a photograph of an ocean "horizon"—one which looks exactly like every other ocean horizon everywhere in the world. That said, those were the first words a reader encountered if he or she decided to tackle the Times' new quasi-journalistic project.

At any rate, finally! Finally, after all these years, someone was finally going "to tell our story truthfully!" And sure enough:

According to the New York Times, that truth-telling entity was going to be the New York Times itself!

After this initial reveal, editors from this occasionally silly newspaper extended their words of self-praise. Mercifully, these self-impressed souls went unnamed as they offered this description:

THE NEW YORK TIMES (continuing directly): The 1619 Project

The 1619 Project is a major initiative from The New York Times observing the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are.

Finally! A persistently silly, incompetent newspaper had finally decided to "reframe our history!" Newly describing 1619 as the year of "our true founding," the persistently incompetent paper was going to reconstruct "the story we tell ourselves," the one "about who we are."

We don't mean to prejudge the value of any work the Times will publish as part of this self-ballyhooed project. And of course, everyone but the persistently silly have long understood that our nation's brutal racial history lies at the heart of the American experience, such as it has been.

We don't mean to prejudge the value of any work the Times will publish. That said, we will suggest this:

When an entity like the Times undertakes a "major initiative" on so deeply important a topic, readers would be well-advised to check their wallets every step of the way.

Was Atlanta's traffic jam this morning a result of that brutal history? Did we put too much sugar in our coffee as a result of that history?

Everything is possible! But it's also true that everything can be "reframed," and made the object of our focus, to the possibly unhelpful exclusion of everything else.

At any rate, Stephens observed his employers' year of departure and saw them a century more. As he continued, he left no doubt—his citation of Cortes' year of entry into what is now Mexico was, at least in part, meant to be ironic:

STEPHENS (continuing directly): The Conquistadors and their successors also imported millions of African slaves. Seen in the overall context of the Western Hemisphere—or, for that matter, most of the pre-modern world—the arrival of more than 20 slaves in Virginia a century later was abominable, but not unique.

The 1619 Project is named for the year when those first twenty enslaved persons arrived, against their will, on the shores of our own Virginia. But just for the record, and as Stephens notes, this was part of a hemisphere-wide—indeed, world-wide—system of "barbarities" which had already been underway for a long time at that point.

Does it matter if this constellation of barbarities was already well underway? Does it matter when people like Stephens place the events of 1619 (and beyond) in a wider historical context?

It's pretty much as you'd have it! Personally, we think it's unhelpful and unwise to approach this matter as the Times is doing, though our basic reasons for thinking that seem to be somewhat different from the reservations Stephens goes on to express.

In thinking that way about the Times' project, we could always be wrong. But then again, there was the latest front-page report in that Saturday morning Times, in the same edition which carried Stephens' column.

That front-page report wasn't part of The 1619 Project, except perhaps in spirit. It was the latest front-page report about New York City's public schools—a report which again suggested that "desegregation," and virtually nothing else, will affect the lives of the 1.1 million kids attending those schools today.

Just for the record, the kids attending those public schools weren't alive in 1619. They were all born in the past twenty years. In some cases, they have a younger brother or sister who was born on this very day.

Those brothers and sisters will attend Gotham's public schools too. They'll enter kindergarten in the late summer or fall of 2024, in what a sensate human might even think about calling "The 2024 Project."

What kinds of schools will those children attend? How much happiness will they find in those schools?

To what extent will they end up being equipped to play rewarding roles in the American future, to the extent that such a future exists? How much pleasure will they take from their the various things they do in public school classrooms? How much pleasure will they take from their personal reading?

We ask these questions because the New York Times won't. At that frequently fatuous newspaper, a traffic jam in Atlanta calls 1619 to mind, and the lives of 1.1 million Gotham kids are about only one thing—a "desegregation" which goes unexplained and, absent some sort of explanation, can't necessarily be imagined by sensible human beings.

The Times' ongoing treatment of this topic involves what may be the worst print journalism we have ever seen. It also involves a strange devotion to the past. Also, a refusal to come to terms with the future which rivals Mister Trump's persistently crazy claims concerning climate change.

On its front page this Saturday morning, the New York Times was humping some imagined form of "desegregation" again. Its lengthy report made no earthly sense, in all the standardized ways.

On its front page, the Times was discussing this unexplained god. On page A24, that annoying person, the columnist Stephens, was suggesting that his brutally woke employers may suffer from a type of tunnel vision concerning affairs of this type.

In our view, that front-page report validated the skepticism Stephens seemed to be shopping around. Babies are being born today. What will their histories be?

We'd call that The 2024 Project; it's a bit of a search for tomorrow. Will the tragically woke, obsessive Times ever clamber aboard that sputtering bus?

This project takes place in the future. It involves milk-drinking children born far from Atlanta on this very day.

Tomorrow: As (finally) seen in paragraph 32...

Lawrence O'Donnell gets it right!

SATURDAY, AUGUST 24, 2019

Sullivan follows suit: Wednesday evening, Lawrence O'Donnell got it right.

He got it right right on the air! Here's the way it went down:

Donald J. Trump had seemed to be behaving so oddly that even the children had noticed. For that reason, and to his credit, O'Donnell started his program as shown below, once he'd finished his standard cloying exchange with Rachel.

It's the highlighted part of O'Donnell's remarks to which we directly refer:

O'DONNELL (8/21/19): Well, Donald Trump is behaving like a man who sees his presidency slipping away. His re-election polls are consistently bad for him. And now, what he thought was his strongest claim to re-election, the performance of the economy, is no long area sure thing in the president`s mind and—or in reality.

And so, he is blasting out enraged tweets at the chairman of the Federal Reserve, who he appointed. He is admitting that the government might have to bail out one of the most successful companies in the history of American capitalism, Apple, because the Trump tariffs are hurting Apple so badly and the president knows that.

The global economy is beginning to stagger under the weight of the Trump tariffs, which could begin costing American voters $1,000 a year. More American voters are realizing every day they are paying the Trump tariffs and China does not pay one penny of the Trump tariffs.

The Trump White House is having panicked meetings about what to do about the economy, cutting payroll taxes, an idea the president has reportedly embraced and then rejected, and then embraced and then rejected. Some of those embraces and rejections have occurred in the same day.

But tax cuts can only be done by the Congress, and the House of Representatives will not cut payroll taxes without dramatically increasing taxes on the richest Americans. In other words, restoring the Obama tax rates on the rich to replace the Trump tax cut for the rich.

All of this is maddening to Donald Trump—and so he is behaving this week as a mad king. And that is not my phrase. That's the kind of comment about the president we are hearing and seeing everywhere now.

And so, it is one of those nights when we're going to have to take another professional look at the mental health of the president of the United States.

Say what? O'Donnell was going to "take a professional look" at Donald J. Trump's "mental health?" Is that sort of thing allowed?

On that morning's Morning Joe, three of the children had rather plainly refused to do so, apparently keeping themselves in line with company policy concerning this awkward matter. They've played it that way on Morning Joe roughly since forever.

O'Donnell was playing a different game. As he continued, he said this:

O'DONNELL (continuing directly): Former Harvard Medical School professor of psychiatry Lance Dodes joined us on this program one month into the Trump presidency, in 2017, to warn us about the president's mental health because he felt what psychiatrists call "a duty to warn."

He told us then that the president's mental condition was only going to get worse. Dr. Dodes is back with us tonight. We will hear from him later in this hour.

Dodes did appear that night. He was interviewed about Trump's mental health during one full solo segment.

You can read Dodes' remarks in Wednesday evening's transcript. In the segment which followed, you can see O'Donnell interviewing two MSNBC pundits about what Dodes said.

All too predictably, they dissembled, joked and generally talked around this important topic, which has been "incredibly taboo, and rightfully so. It's not an easy thing to talk about."

Or so one of the pundits said.

Actually, the question of Donald Trump's mental health is an extremely easy thing to discuss. You just have to avoid the careerist obedients who serve as pundits and entertainers on corporate "cable news."

You have to direct sensible, respectful questions at someone who may bring expertise to the table, while remembering that "expertise," of whatever type, is always imperfect and fallible.

That's what O'Donnell did when he spoke with Dodes. Yesterday, Andrew Sullivan followed suit. He did so in his weekly essay for New York magazine:

SULLIVAN (8/23/19): [Trump's] psychological disorder—the narcissism that guards against any hint of his own absurdity—is getting obviously worse. And it was always going to get worse. Someone with malignant narcissism has a familiar path, as Elizabeth Mika presciently wrote the week after his inauguration:

"It’s not only that he will never get better, but it is certain that he will get worse. There has never been a case of a malignant narcissist in power whose pathology improved, or even remained stable: They always deteriorate, and often rapidly, as they become drunk on (what they see as) now unlimited power and adulation."

Sullivan isn't a psychiatrist or a psychological specialist, and he knows he isn't.

Elizabeth Mika is! Like Dodes, she's one of the psychiatrists who contributed essays to The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, the 2017 book which a Yale psychiatrist compiled and the upper-end press disappeared.

The press corps has been working under the so-called Goldwater Rule. According to this ancient holding, psychiatric analysis should be banned from political journalism.

This rule dates to the 1964 presidential campaign. It's a very sound journalistic rule—until such time as a sitting president seems to be in the grip of a serious mental health problem.

On Thursday night's Hardball, a panel comprised of the usual pundits was still joking and laughing and enjoying themselves as they pretended to discuss the president's recent behavior. It's amazing to see how amusing such things can be, if you're being overpaid and you're getting TV-famous.

O'Donnell took a different approach; Sullivan followed suit. For Elizabeth Mika's fuller statement in 2017, you can (apparently) just click here.

We can't swear that she was right. But this is the saner discussion.

Rachel was clowning around last night, filling our heads with sugarplums about how great all our candidates are. Two nights earlier, Lawrence had gotten it right.

Yesterday, Sullivan followed suit. We'll leave you with this one last thought:

If Trump is suffering from some severe disorder, that's cause for pity, not loathing. We "pity the poor [metaphorical] immigrant" here. We're willing to guess that this approach would produce improved political outcomes.

We "pity the poor immigrant" here. You can try it too.

TRIBAL DECLINE: Gotham's kids outperform the rest of the state!

FRIDAY, AUGUST 23, 2019

"Entrenched segregation" to blame!: What kinds of reporting do we liberals receive from our most revered tribal sachems?

Putting it a different way, to what extent are "elites" within our self-impressed tribe in a tragicomic state of decline?

Consider a remarkable news report in today's New York Times. It concerns the way New York City's public school students performed on this year's statewide reading and math tests.

At a glance, the news to which we refer is remarkably good. It's reported by Eliza Shapiro—and yes, we're quoting Shapiro directly. Here's what her report says:

SHAPIRO (8/23/19): The city performed slightly better than the rest of the state on English, and is now nearly even with the rest of the state on math. Some of New York’s other cities have extremely low achievement rates...

Say what? According to Shapiro's report, New York City's public school kids outscored their peers across the rest of the state in this year's English (reading) tests. Also according to Shapiro, Gotham's kids nearly matched the rest of the state in math.

We can't tell you a whole lot more about this state of affairs. Shapiro's report includes no links to statewide data from these tests. We'll assume that the statewide data aren't publicly available yet.

That said, consider how remarkable that news report seems to be! New York City's public school enrollment is roughly 70% black and Hispanic. The student enrollment in the rest of the state is roughly 65% white.

Given the norms of American public education, it would be a remarkable fact if the public school kids in New York City outperformed (or matched) their counterparts across the rest of the state! But the Times, and Shapiro, don't treat today's news as a remarkable fact.

Here's what they've done instead:

Shapiro's report wasn't placed on the front page of today's print editions. Instead, it's buried at the bottom of page A21. It didn't even make the first page of today's "New York" (local news) section!

Not only that:

Shapiro didn't begin her report with that dramatic news. Instead, she mentions it, very much in passing, in the fifth paragraph of her report.

Indeed, as you can see from the passage we've posted, Shapiro devotes exactly one sentence to this remarkable fact. Instantly, she then reports how low the passing rates were in Rochester's urban schools.

New York City's public school kids outperformed the rest of the state! If true, that seems like a bit of amazing good news. To us, it seems like the kind of news the public should get to hear.

That said, Shapiro's paper is virtually a cult when it comes to public school reporting—a cult of "entrenched segregation." That may explain why this amazing good news is quickly passed over in paragraph 5 of today's news report—a report which appears on page A21 beneath this pair of headlines:

City School Test Scores Inch Up, but Less Than Half of Students Pass
Gaps between black and Hispanic students and their white and Asian-American peers remain fixed, raising questions about school segregation.

Within the world of this crackpot cult, all roads must, by rule of law, lead us back to gloomy "questions about school segregation!" This rule has come from the tribal gods to whom these adepts bow.

According to Shapiro's report, Gotham's kids outperformed the rest of the state, but the report's main headline announces that the glass is less than half full. And how did Shapiro begin her report? Bowing low to the gods of the cult, she began her report like this:

SHAPIRO (8/23/19): Entrenched segregation, rising student homelessness and break downs in special education services: Mayor Bill de Blasio will face significant hurdles when it comes to improving the school system this fall.

Quite literally, her first two words were "entrenched segregation!" To which we'll only say, Go ahead! You're allowed to laugh this one time!

Her first two words were "entrenched segregation!" And not only that! Before too long, the New York Times' young adept was telling her readers this:

SHAPIRO: [T]he results also showed wide gaps between how black and Hispanic students have performed compared with their white and Asian-American peers: 28 percent of New York City’s black students passed this year’s math exam, compared with 74 percent of the city’s Asian-American students and 67 percent of white students.

Those disparities have remained fixed during Mr. de Blasio’s tenure, and this year’s numbers are likely to raise fresh questions about his reluctance to implement citywide integration measures.

Will this year's numbers "raise fresh questions about...citywide integration measures?" Dearest readers, of course they will! At the Times, this reaction is required by law!

Mercifully, Shapiro didn't try to link those large achievement gaps to "test prep, full stop," as she has done in the past. But even here, the takeaway has to be the need for "citywide integration."

In a system whose student enrollment is only 15% white, it isn't even especially clear what such measures might look like, or how much we might expect such measures to affect overall achievement. But all roads return to this imagined solution when Shapiro sits to type.

Imagine! Gotham kids outperform the rest of the state, and what we learn is this: the mayor needs to hurry up with "citywide integration!" No attempt is made to explain what such measures might look like. But a remarkable lede gets thrown away in service to this jealous god.

Did New York City's public school kids really outperform the rest of the state on this year's statewide tests? As best we can tell from a quick review, nothing like that has ever happened on the National Assessment of Education Progress (Naep), whose most recent available data come from the 2017 testing.

(Results from the 2019 Naep aren't available yet.)

That said, Shapiro reports that this occurred, and then she does the obvious. She shows no sign of understanding what a remarkable statement she's made.

She barely mentions this remarkable fact. Instead, she bows again to "desegregation" gods.

This is the way the world is sifted for you by this frequently crackpot newspaper. So the world continues to turn at this time of tribal decline.

Just for the record, there are several technical problems with Shapiro's report, aside from her inability to link to the actual data:

An interpretive problem lurks in the fact that 16% of students statewide refused to take the statewide tests this year. Beyond that, all such data are subject to doubt given the waves of cheating which have occurred on statewide testing programs in recent years—waves of cheating our major newspapers all avoid mentioning in their ongoing reports.

(It's generally assumed that the Naep is immune from such administrative misconduct.)

It's also true that "proficiency" levels are always subjective on tests of this type and so, therefore, are "passing rates." This doesn't mean that those achievement gaps aren't both large and real. It means that "less than half the students passed" is a gloomy-sounding statement derived from a subjective measure.

Eliza Shapiro is 28 or 29 years old. She shows few signs of technical expertise or first-hand understanding of public schools. Her editor has no background in education reporting at all.

She does show signs of membership in a journalistic cult. But this is the way our elites have often behaved in these years of tribal decline.

We'd planned to spend the day discussing executive editor Dean Baquet's recent staff meeting at the Times. We'd planned to discuss the things he said about the journalistic status of two significant word clusters: "lie/liar" and "racism/racist."

We'd planned to discuss one staffer's question about the latter term. We'd also planned to discuss the political status of the word "murder"—a topic conservatives are hearing about at the current time, while our tribe is kept in the dark.

We'll try to get to those topics some other day. For today, we decided to go with our tribe's most current propaganda load, hot off this morning's press:

According to the New York Times, Gotham's mainly black and Hispanic kids outperformed their mainly white peers from across the rest of the state! How much does a tribe have to hate black kids, and love tribal lore, to bury so striking a fact?

One other basic point: At one juncture, Shapiro says this:

SHAPIRO: The latest batch of scores, while largely encouraging, do not say much about how students have improved over time. A decade of changes to the state’s testing system have rendered years of results all but meaningless, and the new results can only be compared to last year’s, not to results from previous years.

Sad! Because the state keeps changing its tests, year-to-year comparisons can't reach past last year.

That said, it would be possible to see how well New York City students performed, compared to the rest of the state, in all past years of testing.

Did they ever outperform the rest of the state? Gotham's progress could be tracked as compared to the rest of the state.

When campaign songs were tied to gaffe culture!

THURSDAY, AUGUST 22, 2019

Anthropology Then: Last night, Lawrence O'Donnell got something right.

Needless to say, his slacker network hasn't yet gotten around to creating a transcript of his program. So we'll have to wait another day to show you what he did.

In the meantime, we told you that the New York Times' exegesis of the various candidates' campaign songs is part of a long, dumb history. Let's recall a pitiful time when one candidate's choice of songs was tied to the press corps' beloved "gaffe culture."

During Campaign 2000, the songs one major candidate used became, inevitably, a part of this pitiful culture. Almost surely you can guess who the candidate was.

It was late October 1999. As a journalistic war picked up steam, Time magazine's Eric Pooley actually handed us this:

POOLEY (10/31/99): Except for his name and party affiliation, Al Gore has now changed just about everything a struggling candidate can change: clothes, consultants, message, manner. But his campaign theme song—the cheesy tune that blares at every Gore 2000 event—still needs work.

He started with Shania Twain's Rock This Country, but it only reminded people that the country isn't rocking for him. Since shelving Shania, Gore has used the soul anthem Love Train—a call to unity that rings hollow with Democrats still divided about the nomination. But there's hope. At the New Hampshire "town hall" forum with Gore and Bill Bradley last week, it was obvious what song captures Gore's new mood: the old Motown hit Ain't Too Proud to Beg.

Stalking the stage of Dartmouth College's Moore Theater, grinning fiercely and sweating like the hardest-working man in show business, Gore seemed stoked enough to belt the words himself: "I know you wanna leave me,/ but I refuse to let you go." He wanted to tell voters who have dumped him for Bradley that he'll do anything to win them back.

Of course, since this was Al Gore talking, the words came out a bit differently: "I would like to have your support for me," and "Fighting for all the people—that's what I want to do," and finally, "I would like to work hard; if you elect me President, I will work hard." Which is just the Vice President's way of saying, "Please, baby, please, baby, please, baby, please."

For the record, Time magazine was still a major big deal at that time.

By rule of law within the guild, Everything This Candidate Did Was Laughably Wrong at This Time. "Rock This Country" had been wrong, oh so wrong—but so, of course, was "Love Train." Pooley went on to ridicule Gore through his creative use of the lyrics of yet another old song.

Pooley was having his fun this day in the wake of the first Gore-Bradley debate—the Dartmouth event at which the mainstream press corps, isolated in a separate press room, were reported to have hissed, jeered and booed every word Gore said.

In his mocking "news report," Pooley became the first of three establishment journalists to describe what happened inside that press room that night. In fairness, Pooley seemed to be so dumb he didn't seem to understand that what he was describing here was vast journalistic misconduct:

POOLEY: Last week the ache was unmistakable—and even touching—but the 300 media types watching in the press room at Dartmouth were, to use the appropriate technical term, totally grossed out by it. Whenever Gore came on too strong, the room erupted in a collective jeer, like a gang of 15-year-old Heathers cutting down some hapless nerd.

According to Pooley, the 300 media types only erupted in their collective jeer "whenever Gore came on too strong." Here at this site, we'd heard a somewhat different story from a mainstream scribe who called us from Dartmouth minutes after the debate was done.

Two other reports did surface. On Monday, November 1, the Hotline's Howard Mortman stated to us, on a cable news show, that "the media groaned, howled and laughed almost every time Al Gore said something" that night.

In mid-December, Jake Tapper, then of Slate, made it three. Tapper said this on C-Span's Washington Journal:

TAPPER (12/13/99): Well, I can tell you that the only media bias I have detected in terms of a group media bias was, at the first debate between Bill Bradley and Al Gore, there was hissing for Gore in the media room up at Dartmouth College. The reporters were hissing Gore, and that's the only time I've ever heard the press room boo or hiss any candidate of any party at any event.

Plainly, this was an astounding event. No one ever heard about it because of the stifling code of silence under which this pathetic guild works.

Pooley's mocking discussion of Gore's campaign songs extended the media's jeering. The ridiculous fellow went on to say this in his report for Time:

POOLEY (continuing directly): Poor Gore. For months the press has been hammering him for taking the nomination for granted and not showing emotion. Now it's hammering him for trying too hard and showing too much. Of course he was sometimes overbearing at Dartmouth—asking faux-Clintonian personal questions ("How old is your child, Corey?") and then, after the event, sitting on the lip of the stage for 90 minutes to expound—impressively, by the way—on policy until everyone was exhausted, and Tipper said, "Al, I'm going to have to go." But the interesting question isn't whether Gore's exhibitionism is a tactic (it is) but whether groveling works any better in politics than it does in love.

Today, pundits praise Candidate Warren for staying late at campaign events until everyone get to take a selfie. Back then, scribes took turns ridiculing Gore for staying late at campaign events until everyone got his or her question answered.

(Until everyone got his question answered? By rule of law, this had to be reframed this way: "until everyone was exhausted.")

Twenty years later, the New York Times decided to analyze ten candidates' campaign songs. They filled three pages of yesterday's paper with their thoroughly typical low-IQ pabulum and piddle.

During the press corps' twenty-month war against Gore, this sort of thing was directly tied to their famous, dim-witted "gaffe culture." By the rules of the game, Gore was wrong when he played Shania Twain, wrong when he played something else.

Final point: Gore asked that "faux-Clintonian personal question" when a young woman at the Dartmouth "town hall" event stood and asked him this question:

QUESTION (10/26/9): Hi, my name is Corey Martin and I live in Hanover. There's been talk tonight about health care reform and I'm the parent of a child who has diabetes and I spend a lot of time dealing with the insurance companies and what's covered and what's not covered and it eats up a lot of time and effort. So I'm wondering, if you were to implement health care reform, who would be the decision-makers? Who decides what's covered?

Gore asked how old the child was (five). He asked if Martin had good insurance (she did). He then proceeded to answer her policy question, and a gaggle of zombified "journalists" mocked him for trying to be just like Bill Clinton, always without providing the context within which his questions were asked.

From that day right through to this, we've asked if these life-forms are human. We've most commonly asked that question about the people, like Gail Collins, who ridiculed Gore for having had the decency to ask Martin that simple question about her daughter. But the same question must be asked about the long lines of careerist types who have agreed, to this very day, to pretend that none of this ever occurred.

Martin's daughter was five years old at that time. Children that age were soon dying all over Iraq because of what these zombified idiots did, as a group, from March 1999 on.

Today, future experts keep telling us, quite late at night, that this is an anthropological question. It goes to the heart of what we "rational animals" are actually like—to the intellectual and moral limits within which our self-impressed species functions, especially among its elites.

Last night, Lawrence got something right. If his lazy, self-impressed corporate network ever get around to creating a transcript, we'll show you what it was.

But way back when, one major candidate's choice of songs was quickly put to a use. When Candidate Gore played Shania Twain, it was peddled to us rubes as his latest ridiculous gaffe!

Visit our incomparable archives: As done in real time, with links.

TRIBAL DECLINE: Liar, racist, murder, slur?

THURSDAY, AUGUST 22, 2019

What's in a handful of words?: On page A2 of this morning's hard-copy New York Times, senior news assistant Hannah Wulkan describes a meeting which was held this past spring.

A few years back, the New York Times' pages A2 and A3 were officially "reimagined." Page A2 became the page on which the Times attempts to persuade Times readers to be impressed with the Times.

Despite her title as senior assistant, Wulkan's a bit of a youngster. She prepped at Deerfield, then graduated from Brandeis in 2016.

On line, Wulkan's page A2 report appears at the Times Insider site. The report begins like this:

WULKAN (8/22/19): This spring, a group of editors sat in a white-walled conference room at The New York Times, throwing out ideas.

A group of Times editors threw out ideas? History tells us that nothing good can come from such an event.

In yesterday morning's report, we reviewed the three pages of blather which resulted when politics editor Patrick Healy got an idea last spring. According to Wulkan, some Times insiders gathered at roughly the same time and began throwing out ideas!

What emerged from the editors' meeting? After all the ideas had been discarded, they ended up with this:

WULKAN (continuing directly): The 60th anniversary of the day that Hawaii became a state was coming up. The editors, part of a team that tells stories through The Times’s vast photo archive in a project called Past Tense, wanted to highlight images from across America.

They also wanted to find an interesting way to tell the story.

If they ran a slide show, readers might lose interest after clicking through a few photographs. A long article with a running list of photos could lose readers well before they made it to Wyoming. They wanted it to be engaging.

For reasons which go unexplained, the editors "wanted to find an interesting way" to tell a basically pointless anniversary story.

Hawaii had been a state for almost sixty years? Stating the obvious, there was no reason to think that any reader would take much interest in this basically pointless fact.

Apparently understanding this point, the editors reportedly scrambled for ways keep readers from "losing interest."

Wulkan never explains why these Times insiders wanted to bother with this project at all. Eventually, though, they forged a plan, and the field hands fell to their labors:

WULKAN (continuing directly): The final idea, published this week, is a quiz that presents photos pulled from The Times’s archives from all 50 states and invites readers to identify each location. The project would take several months to complete and involve more than 20 people from around the newsroom.

Each page of the quiz shows the photo alongside a question with clues, such as “A fleet of blimps rises over the Goodyear Airdock in this Midwestern state.” If readers spend a long time on the page, another hint, like “The state is also the birthplace of seven U.S. presidents and home to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame,” flies into frame. Once the quiz-taker makes a guess, a paragraph with information about the photo and state appears.

“I wanted this to be a moment where readers in every single state can have a look back at their own history,” said Lauren Reddy, the audience director for special projects, who first suggested the quiz.

Finally, a New York Times "audience director" came up with a plan!

More than twenty hands from around the newsroom fell to work on the project; it took several months to complete. Here on our own spartan campus, idealistic young analysts roared as Reddy's plan was described.

Yay yay yay yay yay yay yay! Times subscribers would get to enjoy the massive great fun of a quiz! And so cool! If a reader spent too long on any one question, a hint would appear to help him or her out, supplementing some initial clues!

Audience, let's review:

According to Wulkan, more than twenty Times staffers worked on this photo quiz project. The project took months to complete.

As a result of those months of effort, the audience can now enjoy a quiz which features a photo from each of the fifty states. Having noted this fact, might we take a moment to discuss a project the New York Times hasn't yet undertaken?

Below, you see the remarkable OECD data we showed you yesterday afternoon. To date, editors haven't sat in a white-walled conference room, discussing ways to present and explore the remarkable state of affairs defined by these puzzling statistics:

Per capita spending, health care, 2018
United States: $10,586
Germany: $5986
Canada: $4974
France: $4965
Japan: $4766
United Kingdom: $4070
(South) Korea: $3192

One of those numbers is not like the others. Where the heck is all that missing money going?

That missing money lies at the heart of our stagnant wages, our federal deficits and our failure to provide universal coverage. So where the heck is that money going? Is money being looted?

At the endlessly fatuous New York Times, editors and "audience directors" don't seem to care about that.

Editors sit in mahoganied rooms trying to devise amusing Hawaii-based photo quiz games. They assign their droogs to spend several months laboring on the project.

They fill three pages of the paper with analyses of the songs the top ten candidates play at their campaign events. They even create an astounding site where they help readers figure out how to select a book if the readers have decided that they want to read one.

This has been the culture of the New York Times forever. Years ago, on the Sunday before a White House election, editors even let their highest-profile columnist start a column like this, headline included:

DOWD (11/5/00): I Feel Pretty

I feel stunning
And entrancing,
Feel like running and dancing for joy . . .

O.K., enough gloating. Behave, Albert. Just look in the mirror now and put on your serious I only-care-about-the-issues face.

If I rub in a tad more of this mahogany-colored industrial mousse, the Spot will disappear under my Reagan pompadour.

It was the seventh column Dowd had built around Candidate Gore's imagined obsession with his troubling bald spot. This is the type of work which has come from the fatuous world of the Times.

The fact that these events can take place in plain sight is an anthropological matter. It's a fact about the moral and intellectual horizons of our floundering, self-impressed species and our own self-impressed tribe.

On Monday, August 11, executive editor Dean Baquet held a New York Times staff meeting. As far as we know, Baquet is a thoroughly decent person. We'll quickly say that, in our view, he expressed some sound ideas at this meeting.

A transcript of this meeting leaked; you can review it here. During that meeting with his staff, Baquet discussed the appropriate journalistic use of certain familiar key words.

Setting aside the weighty yet amusing topic we'd originally planned to pursue, we'll review that discussion tomorrow.

Liar, racist, murder, slur? What's in a handful of words?

Tomorrow: What's in a handful of words?