READING COMEY: True belief about decent man!

TUESDAY, APRIL 17, 2018

Part 2—According to Comey, Comey was just being honest: Reading Comey may not be easy this week.

If you literally want to read his book, you may have to do so on Kindle.

Meanwhile, "reading Comey" in the more figurative sense—interpreting his personality, his character and his motivations in recent years—may perhaps never be a simple task.

Comey—for years, he was known as Comey the God—strikes us as both human and odd, which isn't the same thing as evil. Despite the years of lionization, he doesn't strike us as a person whose songs of himself will necessarily make sense.

The gentleman has been widely criticized for his snarky, "mean [teenagers]" comments regarding Donald J. Trump's skin color, his well-coiffed hair and the size of his hands. The comments about the size of Trump's hands has struck much of the world as especially low-brow and strange. Even stranger is the explanation he gave to George Stephanopoulos concerning his mots on the hands:

STEPHANOPOULOS (4/15/18): It was the first time you met Donald Trump. What was your impression?

COMEY: My impression was he looked exactly like he did on television, except he looked shorter to me than he did on television, but otherwise exactly the same. And the reason I say that is most people look slightly different in person. I don't know whether that's bad or good, but he looked the way I'd seen him look on television.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Which was?

COMEY: He had impressively coiffed hair, it looks to be all his. I confess, I stared at it pretty closely and my reaction was, "It most take a heck of a lot of time in the morning, but it's impressively coiffed." He looked—his tie was too long, as it always is. He looked slightly orange up close with small white—half moons under his eyes, which I assume are from tanning googles. And otherwise looked as I had expected him to look from—as I thought he looked on television.

STEPHANOPOULOS: You even clocked the size of his hands?

COMEY: Yeah. I— I say that in my book 'cause I'm trying to be honest, 'cause that's the truth. There had been all this controversy and mocking about hand size, I can't remember the details. But as I shook his hand I made a note to check the size and it seemed like he had average-sized hands.

Comey didn't say that in his book because he was trying to be snarky or venal. Inevitably, Comey said it in his book because he was "trying to be honest!"

(For the transcript of Comey's full interview, you can just click here.)

According to Comey, Comey is always trying to be honest. This particular personality tic doesn't make him evil or demonic, but in our view, the extreme extent of his moral self-praise makes him perhaps a bit unformed and strange.

Beyond that, it suggests one possible problem with the press corps' childish practice of taking people like James B. Comey and anointing them, for political and journalistic purposes, as moral gods.

"Judge Starr" was known for his moral greatness until the story broke down. Almost everyone running against someone named Clinton or Gore has been cast in this tired old role in the past twenty-six years, as has "flimflam man" Paul Ryan and of course General Powell, who ended up at the U.N. pimping that other flimflam around.

People the pundits have lionized in this way have frequently seemed to take advantage. Way back in Campaign 2000, Candidate McCain began rolling around on a bus which was literally called The Straight-Talk Express, a tribute to his massive and uncontrollable honesty.

Childish pundits battled for a spot on the bus, exhibiting behavior so unprofessional and foolish that the idiocy of their conduct was even cited by some of their mainstream colleagues.

We'll let the psychiatrists try to explain why the children behave this way. Whatever the answer may be, Comey came to be one of the people they anointed as The World's Most Honest. Hence his famous sobriquet, James B. Comey the God.

As with all the others, this designation fit the story the fellow tells about himself. In the past few weeks, some liberal observers have been drifting back toward that pleasing narrative structure, even after all the bullsh*t Comey performed during Campaign 2016.

Michiko Kakutani has read Comey's book. Her review in the New York Times strikes us as a masterwork of throwback true belief.

(Headline: "James Comey Has a Story to Tell. It’s Very Persuasive.")

Michelle Goldberg has apparently read the book too. In this morning's New York Times, she reads Comey the person in something like the traditional manner.

Goldberg describes Comey' book as an "earnest tome, in which he comes off as a somewhat tragic figure who, in striving for decency, makes errors of judgment that helped put the singularly indecent Trump in the White House." Alas, poor Comey! He strived to do right, sometimes failed!

Goldberg's nugget assessment isn't necessarily "wrong," of course. But was Comey really striving for decency when he put Trump's hands in his book, or when he told Stephanopoulos that he did so just to be honest?

And how about the remarkable, now convoluted way he has continued to trash Loretta Lynch, both in his book and in his five-hour session with Stephanopoulos? Was Comey really "striving for decency" in the convoluted explanation he gave to Stephanopoulos, who finally had to abandon further questioning?

It doesn't seem quite that simple to us. Who knows? Maybe to Goldberg, in the end, people like Lynch don't count!

Reading Comey is hard. He strikes us as very human; he also seems exorbitantly flawed. But to a range of liberal observers, it almost seems that it may be time to restore the gentleman's luster. He's now caught in a mano a mano with Donald J. Trump, and the press corps reflexively creates tribal angels and demons at such junctures as this.

It's a clear press corps pattern! Candidate Bradley was a saint; Candidate Gore was the world's biggest liar. This is still the type of construct we humans are strongly inclined to impose on such situations. Consider this letter, which shares a page with Goldberg's column today:

LETTERS TO THE NEW YORK TIMES (4/17/18): Re “Comey, in Interview, Launches All-Out War Against President” (front page, April 16):

Exactly the same mental process applies here as with the Stormy Daniels interview. All you have to do is listen and then consider which of the two claimants— James Comey or President Trump—is telling the truth. In simplest terms, in this case are you going to believe a man who has undoubtedly told a few lies here and there? Or one who tells, on average, five easily disprovable lies every day of his presidential life?

In sum, Mr. Comey comes across as a very credible human trying, and failing sometimes, to do what is incontrovertibly morally right.

P— N—, NEW YORK

According to this letter writer, Comey comes across exactly as Comey presents himself—"as a very credible human trying, and failing sometimes, to do what is incontrovertibly morally right."

The letter creates an angel and a demon. It doesn't imagine the possibility that, in a matter like this, neither of the two warring figures may be "telling the truth."

We humans! We love our moral dichotomies—and we love discussing The Sex. So it goes in Goldberg's column, which is all about "the pee tape."

Loretta Lynch can go jump in the lake! Goldberg wants to talk about a range of "evidence that the tape might be real"—and, as tribal warriors will do, she uses the key term rather loosely. She even finds such "evidence" in Comey's book, a book in which Comey comes off as a somewhat tragic figure who, in striving for decency, makes errors of judgment.

We'll admit to something resembling a bias against Goldberg. Among the many possibilities, we tend to view her as one of the many people who, in striving for career advantage, threw Candidate Clinton under the bus during the last election, sending a fellow who may be stark raving mad to his current address, where the nuclear warheads are.

On the brighter side, she got her position at the Times! Tomorrow, we'll take a look at the way she used that platform in this morning's column.

Reading Comey, a human, is hard. Reading the press corps may help explain how we all got to this place.

Tomorrow: "The book’s most significant new information is about Trump’s obsession with the rumored tape"

BROKEN: The Atlantic discusses the new Naep scores!

MONDAY, APRIL 16, 2018

As always, a gloomy assertion: No sooner had the new Naep scores appeared than The Atlantic published a hard-hitting essay by Natalie Wexler.

Wikipedia describes Wexler as "an education journalist, novelist and historian." As has long required by Hard Pundit Law, she offered gloomy thoughts about the work of the public schools over the past twenty years.

Below, you see the start of Wexler's essay, gloomy headline included:

WEXLER (4/13/18): Why American Students Haven't Gotten Better at Reading in 20 Years

Every two years, education-policy wonks gear up for what has become a time-honored ritual: the release of the Nation’s Report Card. Officially known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, the data reflect the results of reading and math tests administered to a sample of students across the country. Experts generally consider the tests rigorous and highly reliable—and the scores basically stagnant.

Math scores have been flat since 2009 and reading scores since 1998, with just a third or so of students performing at a level the NAEP defines as “proficient.” Performance gaps between lower-income students and their more affluent peers, among other demographic discrepancies, have remained stubbornly wide.

Among the likely culprits for the stalled progress in math scores: a misalignment between what the NAEP tests and what state standards require teachers to cover at specific grade levels. But what’s the reason for the utter lack of progress in reading scores?

We'll assume that Wexler didn't write the headline. That said, the headline captures the essence of her piece, in which she offers her expert views as to why "reading scores have been flat since 1998."

Have reading scores on the Naep been flat since 1998? That sounded a bit unlikely to us, so we decided to check. For reasons any expert would understand, we reviewed Grade 8.

(On the so-called "Main Naep" test, students are tested across the nation in Grades 4, 8 and 12. Kids in grade 8 are older than kids in Grade 4. Comparisons are tricky at Grade 12 due to lower dropout rates. Everybody understands this latter point, even Arne Duncan.)

Have reading scores been flat since 1998? For starters—and this is just a start—here are the overall average scores for the years in question, plus the percentages of kids deemed to be "proficient" (or higher):

Average scores/percentages deemed proficient
Public schools, Grade 8 reading, Naep
2017: 265.33 (34.74%)
1998: 260.66 (29.68%)

The score gain could be higher. But that score gain—4.67 points—is roughly equal to half an academic year, according to the very rough rule of thumb normally applied to Naep scores.

(For all Naep data, start here.)

That isn't a giant overall score gain. On the other hand, it was achieved at a time when demographic changes brought new challenges to classrooms.

When the scores are "disaggregated," we see that all major demographic groups achieved a larger score gain than the overall average gain during that 19-year period. (How is that possible? File under "Simpson's Paradox.")

How much have different groups progressed? We wouldn't necessarily call these data "flat:"

Gain in average scores, 1998-2017
Public schools, Grade 8 reading, Naep
All students: 4.67 points
White students: 5.49 points
Black students: 6.34 points
Hispanic students: 13.17 points
Asian/Pacific Islander students: 20.00 points

Again, ten points on the Naep scale is routinely said to be the equivalent of one academic year. All those score gains could be larger, but do those data suggest an "utter lack of progress in reading scores?" Do Hispanic kids count?

We don't know why Wexler offered the gloomy claim about the "utter lack of progress in reading scores." We do know this:

For reasons we can't explain, almost everything you read about major issues, and often about major pols, seems to be written from script. Nowhere has this been more true than in the general area of public school test scores, whether from international or domestic testing programs.

In that general area, it has long been selective presentation, and apparent propaganda, pretty much all the way down.

Chomsky referred to this general phenomenon as a process of "manufactured consent." The public is led to accept the preferred outlook of elites through the process of selective and/or inaccurate presentation.

That was Chomsky's term. By way of contrast, we refer to this as "the latest from The Atlantic."

Earlier today, a friend suggested that we write a letter to the editor of The Atlantic. Incomparably, we responded like this:

Letters don't work. Neither do blog posts, comments in comment threads, op-ed columns in real newspapers, or acts of self-immolation.

Our public discourse runs on script. (Chomsky called the process "manufactured consent.") I don't know exactly how to explain this group dynamic, but nothing ever derails it, and all corrections get thrown away or ignored.

My take-away from the past twenty years: we aren't living on the planet the civics textbooks describe.

As a matter of anthropology, this is a fascinating discovery. In terms of citizenship, the implications are gloomy and rather clear.

Just to complete the record: Wexler was mainly interested in reading scores and reading instruction, but she characterized math scores too.

Just to complete the record, here are the score gains in math since 1996. During the 1990s, math and reading were tested in different years:

Gain in average scores, 1996-2017
Public schools, Grade 8 math, Naep
All students: 13.16 points
White students: 12.66 points
Black students: 20.32 points
Hispanic students: 19.31 points
Asian/Pacific Islander: 21.78 points (since 2000)

Scores have been flat in recent years, but this follows a period of very large gains. Around the world, it has seemed to be easier to create gains in math than in reading.

The public is essentially never told about public school score gains. We all know Chomsky is nuts, of course. But until Arne Duncan recently chirped, it seemed that presentation of data like these simply wasn't allowed.

READING COMEY: The book and the man!

MONDAY, APRIL 16, 2018

Part 1—First though, reading Mueller: Many people will spend time this week reading James B. Comey.

Some are already reading Comey, thanks to the mysterious process by which major news orgs get copies of ballyhooed books before the book goes on sale.

Comey's book, A Higher Loyalty, goes on sale tomorrow. People will be reading Comey all week.

For the record, people will be "reading Comey" in two different ways. In the more literal sense, people will be reading Comey's book to see what the god has to say.

In a more figurative sense, people will be "reading" Comey himself. They'll be assessing Comey the person, based on what the person has said in his ballyhooed book.

Here at THE HOWLER, we'll be reading Comey all week. First, though, it might make sense to spend one day reading Robert Mueller.

Mueller hasn't written a book, nor does he give interviews. That said, mainstream pundits constantly "read" Mueller the person in a highly uniform, perhaps unhealthy way, the same way they used to read Comey.

For members of the mainstream press. Robert Mueller is one of the gods. In yesterday morning's Washington Post, Joe Scarborough offered part of the script:

SCARBOROUGH (4/15/18): Mueller, who led a Marine rifle platoon in Vietnam, has been awarded a Bronze Star, two Navy commendations, a Purple Heart and the Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry. After being shot through the leg, the young Princeton grad continued leading his troops in battle. Later he would continue his service in Vietnam even after he was given the opportunity to go home.

Such bravery and dedication to the United States could never have been shown on the battlefield by the miserable crew who lined up to attack the special counsel [last week].

Mueller's service in Vietnam occurred in the 1960s. Using those distant events to assess his behavior today can perhaps be filed under "more prejudicial than probative," even if we assume that Scarborough's accounts of his service are accurate.

That said, the rules are clear whenever mainstream pundits read Robert Mueller. Mueller is one of the establishment gods—the latest man to be assessed as The Most Upright Person Now Living, if we might borrow from Plato's assessment of Socrates in The Seventh Letter.

A word of warning. Before his peculiar conduct during the 2016 presidential campaign, James Comey was uniformly presented as The Most Upright Person Now Living. He joined a motley crew of public figures so assessed by the mainsteram press, not excluding Paul Ryan, Paul Krugman's "flimflam man."

Comey was once the press corps' Most Upright Person; Robert Mueller still is. History tells us that this type of childish group assessment has often turned out to be disastrously wrong. Common sense suggests that lionization of this type may tend to produce the kind of hubris which may lead these lionized figures astray.

More on that as the week continues. For today, let's look in as Alan Dershowitz performs a public service by "reading" Robert Mueller. The assessment was offered yesterday on CNN's Reliable Sources.

During his interview, Dershowitz stressed the fact that he voted for Hillary Clinton in the last election. When it comes to Donald J. Trump, "I am not a supporter," Dershowitz said. "I am not a defender of Donald Trump the person."

Dershowitz isn't a fan of Donald J. Trump, but he also hasn't been blinded by the dust of stampede. Early in his interview, he made a rather obvious point—at the present time, a lot of people "want to get" Donald J. Trump.

In our view, Dershowitz was stating something which is blindingly obvious. True to mainstream "cable news" form, Brian Stelter, his CNN host, headed for the fainting couch in response to these statements:

DERSHOWITZ (4/15/18): I think the key point is to make sure that in an effort to get Trump, we don't diminish our civil liberties and create bad precedent—

STELTER: Oh, who's trying to get Trump?

DERSHOWITZ: Oh, a lot of people are trying to get Trump, a lot of radicals, a lot of lefties. A lot of people, a lot of my friends—

STELTER: You're throwing out words, you're throwing out words now.

DERSHOWITZ: —a lot of my friends and relatives are furious at me because they want to get Trump and I'm in their way, and I'm standing in the way of getting Trump by raising Article Two issues, civil rights issues, civil rights issues. If you don't think there are people out there trying to get Trump, just like they were trying get Hillary Clinton, people were trying to get Hillary Clinton, lock her up—

STELTER: I think many people are opposed to President Trump, but when you say "get Trump," it implies to me some coordinated, almost conspiracy, "Let's go out and get him." Is Robert Mueller trying to get him?

DERSHOWITZ: When they said "get Hillary," there was no conspiracy. Just a lot of people wanted to lock her up. A lot of people want to lock up Trump.

Is it true? Are "a lot of people trying to get Trump?" Do a lot of people "want to lock up Trump?"

Dearest darling, use your heads! Few statements could be more obvious.

Dershowitz was making obvious statements; Stelter recoiled in shock. That said, along the way, Stelter had asked a useful and important question:

"Is Robert Mueller trying to get him?" That's what the cable host asked.

Is Mueller trying to get Donald Trump? We think that's a useful question. Beyond that, we think Dershowitz's reply supplied a useful corrective to the era of lionization which has saddled us with deeply flawed poobahs like Comey:

STELTER (continuing directly): Do you think Robert Mueller is a part of that?

DERSHOWITZ: I think Robert Mueller has a target that he's after. When you're a special counsel, you don't want to come away with nothing after you spend millions of dollars.

STELTER: He's already got plenty.

DERSHOWITZ: So—no, I don't think he has plenty. I think he has low-hanging fruit, and right now, if he could get Trump, it would be a great feather in his cap, just like Ken Starr wanted to get [Bill] Clinton. That's what special counsels do. Their object is to get—

STELTER: You're saying it's about ego almost.

DERSHOWITZ: No, it's about reputation. It's about their perception of integrity. In the end, ego plays a role. But it's the role of the civil libertarian to make sure that they don't use means to justify their ends that lie around like loaded guns that can be used as precedents against all of us.

Does Robert Mueller want "to get Donald J. Trump?" Does he view Trump "as a target" in an unhealthy or even improper way?

Is it a matter of reputation for Mueller? Does ego play a part?

We don't know how to answer those questions. We also don't know why Dershowitz seems inclined to think such things about Mueller, if he actually does.

That said, of course it's possible that Mueller is something less than a flawless moral god! Of course it's possible that his personal feelings may lead him to make imperfect decisions as his probe continues.

Over the course of the past thirty years, the mainstream press corps—people like Stelter—have anointed a series of morally upright gods. Paul Ryan was one such selection. So was Comey the god.

No matter how many times the children are wrong in these group assessments, they just keep inventing new moral gods to lionize. These moral gods are often played against official mainstream press corps demons. This is not a healthy, intelligent process. Again and again and again and again, it has turned out extremely poorly.

In our view, and stating the obvious, citizens should regard Mueller with a normal degree of skepticism. The same process should have been followed with respect to James B. Comey, AKA Comey the god.

Instead, silly children all over the press made James B. Comey the new Socrates. This led to disaster in 2016, even as our favorite liberals refused to speak in opposition to the behavior of the establishment god.

We'll be "reading Comey" all week. For today, a spoiler alert:

In our view, James B. Comey, Comey the god, seems almost as nutty as Donald J. Trump. But so it has gone, again and again, when the children of the press corps decide to give us new gods.

Tomorrow: Reading Comey! Kakutani's true belief v. Lozada the skeptic

What Plato is said to have said: In his famous alleged Seventh Letter, Plato described the political events of his young adulthood, around 404 B.C.

Despite his brilliance, Plato spoke no English. In our view, Professor Lee probably has the translation just about right:

PLATO: The existing constitution, which was subject to widespread criticism, was overthrown...and a committee of Thirty given supreme power. As it happened some of them were friends and relations of mine and they at once invited me to join them, as if it were the natural thing for me to do. My feelings were what were to be expected in a young man: I thought they were going to reform society and rule justly, and so I watched their proceedings with deep interest. I found that they soon made the earlier regime look like a golden age. Among other things they tried to incriminate my old friend Socrates, whom I should not hesitate to call the most upright man then living, by sending him, with others, to arrest a fellow-citizen, and bring him forcibly to execution; Socrates refused, and risked everything rather than make himself a party to their wickedness. When I saw all this, and other things as bad, I was disgusted and withdrew from the wickedness of the times.

The democracy was soon restored, but Socrates was brought to trial on “a monstrous charge.”

Was Socrates "the most upright man then living?" We don't know, but the press corps' attempts to name successors have routinely led to disaster and are profoundly unwise.

Mueller is their current god. We'll try to read Comey all week.

BREAKING: From Donald J. Trump to Roseanne Barr!

SATURDAY, APRIL 14, 2018

Alleged kink in Moscow, plus crazy beliefs: If you're a fan of the human race, you should probably hope that the report about the "pee tape" is false.

Just think what it means about Donald J. Trump if the report is true! In this morning's Washington Post, Ashley Parker lays out the entertaining basics—or at least, she almost does:

PARKER (4/14/18): The tawdriest detail in former FBI director James B. Comey’s new memoir offers the perfect mix of sex, spies and kink—call it “Fifty Shades of le Carré” for the Trump era.

Comey describes President Trump’s obsession with uncorroborated intelligence suggesting that Russia had compromising material on him—specifically including footage of him watching prostitutes urinate on each other in a Moscow hotel room in 2013, while Trump was in town for the Miss Universe pageant.

It's just so tawdry—so "perfectly" kinky and cool!

That's how Parker starts today's news report. Daintily, she omits part of the story, as described in the Steele dossier:

STEELE DOSSIER: According to Source D, where s/he had been present, TRUMP’s (perverted) conduct in Moscow included hiring the presidential suite of the Ritz Carlton Hotel, where he knew President and Mrs OBAMA (whom he hated) had stayed on one of their official trips to Russia, and defiling the bed where they had slept by employing a number of prostitutes to perform a ’golden showers (urination) show in front of him. The hotel was known to be under FSB control with microphones and concealed cameras in all the main rooms to record anything they wanted to.

According to the Steele dossier, Trump organized the "golden shower" cultural activity as a way of defiling a bed where the Obamas had slept. Parker had some fun with the word "golden" near the end of today's report, but she (or her editors) chose to omit this part of the dossier's story.

According to Isikoff and Corn, Steele himself has told colleagues that "it's fifty-fifty" as to whether this story is true. It seems to us we should all pray that it isn't.

This is why we say that:

How crazy would Donald J. Trump have to be if the full story is true? How crazy would he have to be to organize this cultural event as a way of lashing out at (the hated) Obama?

Answer: He'd have to be extremely crazy. If this story is actually true, it seems to us that it mandates a change in our basic assessment of Trump:

It moves him from maybe being "mentally ill" to being stark raving mad.

As you may have heard by now, Donald J. Trump holds the nuclear codes. For that reason, it seems to us that we all should pray that this "perfect mix of spies and kink" is in fact totally bogus.

Is Donald J. Trump stark raving mad? If this perfectly kinky story is true, yes, it would seem that he is. This returns us to our story line concerning Roseanne Barr, who we liked, very much, when we spent a few days around her long ago and far away, in the year 1986.

Roseanne's eponymous TV show returned to the air last month. It triggered essays by several liberal observers—essays we'd be inclined to regard as signs of the (liberal) times.

Roxane Gay was afraid, very afraid in the New York Times. Soon after, C. Nicole Mason wrote an essay in the Outlook section of the Washington Post in which she made a set of peculiar claims about what the new show hath wrought.

Mason identifies as black. She liked the original "Roseanne" series, but she didn't like the first few episodes of the reboot.

Apparently on this basis, Mason made a set of shaky claims about the new series' relationship to race. At one point, for example, she offered this assessment, which is a bit hard to parse:

MASON (4/8/18): In truth, I can’t figure out if the reboot is an indictment of working-class whites, who overwhelmingly voted for Trump and are getting very little in return, or if it is a nod to a growing narrative that attempts to define whites as the true working class in America at the expense of blacks and Latinos.

Might the new series involve an "attempt to define whites as the true working class in America at the expense of blacks and Latinos?" We have no idea what that could mean. Mason didn't try to explain.

By normal journalistic standards, Gray's essay didn't much seem to make sense. That made it perfect for the Sunday Post. When it comes to issues of gender and race, the liberal world has largely stopped attempting to fashion traditional coherent argument. We prefer to advance overwrought fears and claims.

Is the new "Roseanne," the series, some form of racial aggression? Only time will tell. But Roseanne the person is a different entity from "Roseanne" the series, and in this age of Donald J. Trump, there's a whole lot to ponder there.

In her column in the Times, Gay referred to various claims and assertions made by Roseanne the person. These claims and assertions weren't made as part of "Roseanne" the series, but there may be a lot to learn from them all the same.

Roseanne the person seems to have embraced a lot of somewhat peculiar beliefs down through the years. In another recent New York Times column, Michelle Goldberg provided a sample of same.

These beliefs by Roseanne the person may never turn up on "Roseanne" the series. But they speak to the vast problem of the current age.

Is our president stark raving mad? Since he holds the nuclear codes, we should probably hope that he isn't.

That's the skinny on Donald J. Trump. But what's the skinny on Roseanne Barr the person? And what's the skinny on us?

We live at a time when crazy belief has become major big business. Three new technologies—talk radio, the Internet and cable news—are largely devoted to helping us the people swallow ludicrous tribal beliefs.

How many crazy things are we the people prepared to believe? How many silly things are we liberals willing to swallow? The answer seems clear:

A lot.

We liked Roseanne Barr the person, a lot, when we met her in 1986. Since then, she has advanced some peculiar beliefs. Meanwhile, we liberals seem to have very few skills, and not a whole lot of discernment.

Crazy beliefs mixed with liberal derangement ended up sending Trump to the White House. Did he stage some performance art in Moscow as a lunatic way of trashing Obama?

If he did, he's stark raving mad. Even as we foolishly thrill to the perfect kink of it all, it seems to us that we better hope that he actually didn't.

NO OTHERS NEED APPLY: How many others were shot and killed?

FRIDAY, APRIL 13, 2018

Part 5—Though many, not nearly enough: We continue to dream an impossible dream about an imagined survey.

The survey we would like to see concerns police shootings and killings.

We live in a time when certain types of such events receive a great deal of attention, based on the demography of the deceaed. Extensive press coverage is augmented by embellished, false and irrelevant facts, and by facts which get disappeared.

Meanwhile, when it comes to fatal shootings by police, no other groups need apply! We wonder what this type of idiocratic coverage—we'll grant you, it's typical of the times—has done to our impoverished prehuman minds.

How many people may possibly think that none of the others get shot and killed by police? Beyond that, what sorts of answers would result from the second part of a survey question like this?

Possible survey question:
According to the Washington Post, police officers shot and killed 223 African-Americans in the year 2017.

As far as you know, did police officers shoot and kill any "whites" during that year? If so, can you give an estimate as to a possible number?

We wouldn't be asking if police had shot and killed an appropriate number of others; we'll start discussing that question below. We'd simply be asking what respondents imagined the real number was.

How many "white people" got shot and killed? We wonder what respondents would say.

How many people in "other" groups did police officers shoot and kill? We'll guess that some people may think none at all! Once again, consider that recent Washington Journal segment, in which the topic was "Race and Police Shootings."

C-Span's guest was Kirsten West Savali, an associate editor and senior writer at The Root. To watch her 34-minute appearance, you can just click here.

In the first ten minutes of the program, Savali cited an array of police shootings dating to 1965. As is fairly conventional now, only one group of victims had been asked to apply.

At the 11-minute mark, a caller said she was being selective in her presentation about one recent shooting. Savali responded like this:

SAVALI (3/31/18): [We can talk about] so many black people in this country who have been shot down by police officers, and it's because there's a devaluation of black lives, period. Period.

We see all the time that police officers are able to de-escalate encounters with white people in this country, and that same thing does not happen with black people in this country. So it is not cherry-picking, at all. And we have to be honest about the fact that this is systemic, and it is continuous, and it happens all the time.

Citing that number from the Washington Post, 223 people shot and killed is, of course, a large number. It's certainly true that a large number of African-Americans were shot and killed by police officers last year.

On the other hand, there may have been a bit of hyperbole lurking in Savali's remarks.

Later, at the 25-minute mark, Savali complained about the role of "mass incarceration" and "mass criminalization" in the black community. You'll rarely hear the topic discussed on our "corporate liberal" cable news channel, but there is no doubt that incarceration rates are astounding within black America, and that this has had some terrible effects within the black community.

That said, it's hard to know how so many people could be in prison if police systematically refuse to de-escalate arrest situations, simply shooting black people instead. If this behavior "is continuous." If it happens "all the time."

Meanwhile, do police officers "de-escalate encounters with" the others "all the time?" In fact, that isn't entirely true, based on the Washington Post's numbers:

Numbers shot and killed by police officers, 2017
Black people: 223
White people: 457

According to the Post's compilation, police officers failed to "de-escalate encounters with white people" on at least 457 occasions last year. That may not have been a large enough number of failures to get the numbers where they belong, but the number suggests that a bit of hyperbole exists in Savali's remarks.

Is such hyperbole helpful? Beyond that, is it helpful when we embellish accounts of high-profile shootings—when we invent fake facts, disappear real facts and emphasize wholly irrelevant facts, all in service to our desire to make some particular shooting seem maximally heinous?

Granted, this conduct can make us feel good. But is it helpful or honest?

At this point, it might be wise to look at a fuller set of facts. These are the basic numbers the Post has established concerning police shootings last year:

Numbers shot and killed by police officers, 2017
Total: 987
Black people: 223
White people: 457
Hispanics: 179
Other: 44
Unknown: 84

Within the Post's lexicon, "Other" will typically refer to people who are Native American or Asian-American. The "identities" of the Unknown can be pondered at the link above, within their extensive body of work on this topic.

The shooting of people who are unarmed has received a great deal of attention. The term can be defined different ways, but these are the numbers the Post has compiled:

Numbers of unarmed people shot and killed by police officers, 2017
Total: 68
Black people: 20
White people: 30
Hispanics: 13
Other: 3
Unknown: 2

For the record, the Post considers "toy guns" as a separate category from "unarmed." The reason:

Despite the way we liberals play embellishment games with this topic, the types of "toy guns" in question are indistinguishable from real guns, especially after orange safety markers have been removed; are sometimes used in the commission of actual crimes; and will often be taken to be real guns when police officers are required to make instant decisions, unlike pundits examining statistics in the comfort of home.

Lots of people get shot and killed by police in this country. Sometimes, overt misconduct is involved. On most occasions, that almost certainly isn't the case—and as long as our nation is "awash in guns," the number of shootings may be reduced, but these incidents won't cease to exist.

This brings us to our final question. Shouldn't police be shooting more whites, to make the numbers proportional?

We'd like to see that question explored. For starters, though, consider this:

According to the Washington Post, the numbers broke down this additional way last year:

Numbers shot and killed by police officers, 2017
Men: 940
Women: 45
Unknown: 2

Good grief! According to the Washington Post, 95.4% of last year's victims were men!

Might we take a guess? Few people will suspect that these numbers reflect some substantial "bias" on the part of police.

Differential treatment by gender may play some role here. But most people would likely assume that this vast disparity reflects the fact that men are much more likely to be involve in violent and/or criminal behavior than women.

The difference between whites and blacks is nowhere near as extreme. In fact, police officers shot more than twice as many whites last year—but as a percentage of their overall population, blacks were much more likely to be shot and killed, as compared to whites.

Does that differential rate of victimization reflect some sort of bias? We would assume that it probably does, to some unknown extent. That said:

We'll now introduce another fact which results from our brutal racial history. Even now, in the present day, blacks are more involved in violent behavior than whites, both as perpetrators and as victims.

Please note: This involves a very small proportion of the overall population, no matter what group we discuss. That said, in the realm of homicide victims, here are some numbers from U.S. News in the less than distant past:

CELLA AND NEUHAUSER (9/29/16): Black people have consistently accounted for close to half the country's homicide victims, making up more than 50 percent of the broader pool of those killed overall every year since 2010. The number of black victims increased 15 percent in 2015 over 2014.

Of the 13,455 cases from last year in which the FBI listed a victim's racial information, 7,039 victims—or 52.3 percent—were black. That compares with 5,854 cases—or 43.5 percent—in which the victim was white, an increase of about 8 percent from last year.

You'll have to search for the numbers which break such matters down into the demographic categories of black, white and Hispanic.

Violence, poverty and despair are all part of our brutal racial history. It should be said again that criminal violence involves a very small proportion of every group's population.

That said, violent crime is more prevalent, at this time, in the black community. To what extent does that explain the disproportionate numbers of police shootings?

We have no idea! Given our idiocratic culture, you can be entirely sure that you'll see no such questions discussed within the high-profile press corps. On cable, the stars will give you The Chase and The Sex. No other topic, no matter how important, will ever need apply!

At one time, our journalistic culture was merely low-IQ. Over the past few decades, it has persistently slumped toward full-blown idiocracy.

Every matter of public interest is discussed in idiocratic fashion. That's true of our nation's public schools; of our nation's health care costs; of our nation's incarceration rates; and of Barack Obama's birthplace, along with the number of murders the Clintons committed.

It's true of our nation's federal budget, in which, as Paul Krugman notes once again, a flimflam man has long been treated as a truth-teller by the children who get hired to pose as our upper-end journalists. The ridiculous Comey was always sold as The World's Most Upright Man too!

As new technologies came into play, our public discourse steadily moved from low-IQ to full-blown idiocratic.

Nothing isn't idiocratic now. Could we make an exception for "race," our nation's most sacred topic?

BREAKING: They released the Naep scores and nobody came!

THURSDAY, APRIL 12, 2018

Arne [HEART] raising standards: "Suppose They Gave A War and Nobody Came?"

It was a 1970 feature film, in the street-fighting days of yore. Then it became a bromide.

This week, they released the new Naep scores and nobody came, at least not the New York Times. The scores in question are the scores from last year's testing.

By all accounts, these are our most reliable, most significant public school test scores. But over and over, again and again, it's quite clear that nobody cares.

In fairness, it isn't true that nobody came or that nobody cares. In Tuesday morning's Washington Post, a report on the new Naep scores appeared in the Metro, or local, section.

The Post placed its focus on DC-area scores. That said, the Post report started like this:

STEIN, ST. GEORGE AND TRUONG (4/10/18): The Washington region's fourth- and eighth-graders made no substantial gains on national math and reading tests in 2017—stagnant outcomes that mirrored results from across the country on a test administered by the federal government.

The scores on the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) highlight a persistent achievement gap between white and minority students and show just how difficult it can be to boost student achievement on standardized tests.

NAEP, which is often referred to as the "nation's report card," is considered a critical barometer of student achievement because it assesses the performance of children from all racial and socioeconomic backgrounds in urban, suburban and rural communities. The government first administered the exam in the 1990s, and it tests fourth- and eighth-graders every other year.

Nationally, 36 percent of fourth-graders were considered proficient in reading and 40 percent reached this threshold in math on the 2017 exam, according to data released Tuesday by the National Center for Education Statistics. Thirty-six percent of eighth-graders were considered proficient in reading, and 34 percent in math.

From that point on, the Post report focused on results from Washington-area school districts. (Meanwhile, please note: "proficiency" is a subjective assessment. The Naep sets a fairly high bar.)

According to the Post, the Naep "is considered a critical barometer of student achievement." That's true, but it's been three days since these new scores were released, and the New York Times hasn't yet breathed a word.

Based on what the Post has reported, it sounds like national averages didn't show growth last year, as compared to scores from 2015. Combined with lackluster results in 2015, this starts to establish a stagnant trend, after previous decades of growth.

At some point, the Times will probably get around to dispensing the skinny concerning these new results. For now, the paper seems to be transfixed by The Chase.

(According to today's page A3 in the Times, "seven of Wednesday's 10 most read articles dealt with the raid [on Michael Cohen's locales] or on its aftermath." The excitement of The Chase is what the public demands.)

We'll close on a cynical note:

When we read that Naep scores were stagnant again, we conjured a cynical thought. This may explain Arne Duncan's column in last week's Washington Post, we incomparably thought.

Arne wrote a rather illogical column attributing the nation's large score gains to the wonders of education reform. He dated the gains to 1971, when overall Naep testing began.

(Ignore the contrary claim by the Post in the passage posted above.)

Here's where the illogic comes in. The gains had been happening all along, dating to 1971. But Arne largely attributed the gains to relatively recent "reforms."

A cynical thought popped into our heads when we saw the Post's report about the mediocre new scores:

Arne knew that mediocre test score news was in the offing. As a propagandist, he wanted to get out ahead of the storm, before people began to say that modern-day "education reform" has produced a disappointing era of stagnant achievement. (This is pure speculation, of course.)

At some point in the next few weeks, we'll run through the overall look of the new Naep scores. By that time, the New York Times may even have noticed the arrival of these results from "the nation's report card."

Before we do that, we'll be returning to Arne's column to consider one more point:

In his column, Arne praised the toughening of the different states' grade-by-grade "learning standards." ("A decade ago, learning standards were all over the place. Today, almost every state has raised standards.")

Now that we all can see that these changes have coincided with an era of stagnant scores, we want to review, one more time, the fairly obvious logical problem with this widely-lauded element of "reform."

What could be wrong with "raising standards?" Complete with some truly gruesome statistics, we'll discuss that fairly obvious point in the next day or so.

BREAKING: A humane paragraph in the Times!

THURSDAY, APRIL 12, 2018

Homelessness and suspensions: It's the rare morning when you get to read a passage in the New York Times which is deeply humane.

This morning, we read such a passage in a news report by Elizabeth Harris. Harris described the emotional burdens of homeless public school students:

HARRIS (4/12/18): The upheaval of homelessness means those children are often anxious and traumatized, and that their parents are as well. Many of them travel long distances from where they sleep to school in the morning, leaving them exhausted before the day begins. Drained and frightened, they bring all of that with them to school.

Good for Elizabeth Harris! Major newspapers rarely include such overtly humane writing. That said, Harris' report struck us as perhaps a bit puzzling on the whole.

Harris describes a new report concerning suspension rates of homeless students in New York City's schools. The study was published by the Institute for Children, Poverty and Homelessness.

Surprise! Homeless students get suspended from school more often than their more advantaged peers. Given what you read in the passage above—given what anyone would assume about the burdens of homelessness—we were surprised that the difference in suspension rates is so small:

HARRIS: During the 2015-6 school year, the citywide suspension rate for middle schools was 4 percent. For homeless middle school students citywide, it was 7 percent.

In principle, it would be better if no one ever got in trouble or got suspended from school. That said, it hardly seems shocking to see a differential that small—and to see that 93 percent of those traumatized kids didn't get suspended that year.

Wouldn't a sensible person tend to assume that homeless kids would have a harder time in school due to their major challenges? Would anyone be surprised if their suspension rate was higher?

The answer may be yes! Given modern outrage culture, the people who published this new report seem to maybe perhaps be surprised—and they seem to be outraged:

HARRIS (continuing directly): “This report is another indicator of what’s happening with homeless children,” said Ralph da Costa Nunez, chief executive of the Institute for Children. “These kids are dropping out at much higher rates than regular students. They’re being suspended. They’re repeating grades. It’s almost becoming a death sentence for their future.”

Outrage culture is powerful! But what is the actual problem here? Is it the fact some of these kids are getting suspended? Or is it the fact that, through no fault of their own, these traumatized children are homeless?

No one claims in this report that the different suspension rates mean that homeless kids are being met with some sort of bias. But given the low-IQ bull-roar which tends to suffuse our mountains of such reporting, will people read such an idea into this report?

(Assuming that anyone reads it.)

Needless to say, the New York Times introduced an element of journalistic puzzlement into this matter. Online, the headline on Harris' report says this:

Homeless Children Are 3 Times as Likely to Be Suspended at Some Schools

It's always dangerous to say that some claim doesn't appear in an article. But Harris' report isn't real long, and we can find nothing in it which explains that extremely typical New York Times accusatory thunderbomb headline.

Where in the world did that headline come from? Except for one wild speculation, we have no idea. Maybe you can figure it out!

Harris included a passage which was deeply humane. Surrounding that, the deluge!

NO OTHERS NEED APPLY: The role of liberal embellishment culture!

THURSDAY, APRIL 12, 2018

Part 4—Basic facts lost, stolen and strayed: We started our current report with an award-winning question.

Our question went something like this:

If someone staged a well-designed survey, how many people would say that none of the others were shot and killed by police in recent years?

Please understand! We wouldn't be asking if enough others have been shot and killed, based on their share of the population. Our question would be different:

We'd be asking if any of the others were shot and killed—if any were killed at all.

(In an alternate part of our survey, we'd ask a different type of question. We'd ask respondents to estimate how many others were shot and killed, as compared to the number of people shot and killed within the demographic on which press reports and political activism have focused in recent years.)

According to Yevtushenko, "not nothing" is lost every time a person is shot and killed! Whatever the demographic!

Very few people will agree with such an unusual claim. That said, we the people hear a great deal about certain killings, and we don't hear about certain others at all. We wonder how this selective coverage may have affected the public's understanding of certain basic statistical facts.

On a national basis, people won't hear about Bijan Ghaisar, whose death we cited on Monday. They didn't hear about John Geer, who was shot and killed in broad daylight while standing on his front porch.

They didn't see the videotape of Gilbert Flores being shot and killed in Texas. They didn't see the videotape of the "other" kid who got shot and killed as he held a toy gun outside a convenience store.

(You can find such killings on YouTube.)

Our question on Monday was simple. As the deaths of these others have been disappeared, we wonder how many people may have ended up thinking that none of the others have been shot and killed by police in recent years.

Many such deaths have been disappeared. Then too, there's the key role embellishment has played, in recent years, in the deaths which do get widely discussed on a national basis.

In principle, it may well be well and good that these shooting deaths get discussed. It seems to us that embellishment, and flat misstatement, may not be gigantically helpful.

What kinds of embellishment do we mean? Consider something which happened when C-Span asked Kirsten West Savali to discuss the topic of "Race and Police Shootings."

(To watch her appearance on Washington Journal, you can just click here.)

Savali is an associate editor and senior writer for The Root. Shortly after the 8-minute mark, she was asked what the federal role should be in the area of police shootings.

In reply, Savali made an interesting comment:

SAVALI (3/31/18): Well, I would like to see action as far as—you know, under the Obama administration, there were all these reports done under Eric Holder's DOJ, and we still did not see police officers being charged with hate crimes.

There were a lot of great reports, there were a lot of information, so at the very least, if you're supposed to represent this country, you should be able to speak out on the violence we see in these communities.

Under Holder, the Justice Department did produce some major reports about police shootings. It was interesting to see Savali praise these reports, because the DOJ's report about the shooting of Michael Brown explained, in great detail, why the police officer in question wasn't charged with a federal hate crime.

Indeed, the DOJ report went much farther than that. It explicitly said that every shot the officer fired had been justified. Holder specifically said that he endorsed this report.

Was that a sensible, sound assessment? We can't answer that question. But we can tell you this:

That report has been widely disappeared within our liberal "community." Indeed, at the 3-minute mark of that same C-Span tape, Savali had already made these comments after C-Span's Paul Orgel specifically mentioned Ferguson:

ORGEL: Why does this happen in the way it happens these days? And has anything improved since Ferguson?

SAVALI: Well, you know, I don't think we can say "these days." You know, let's talk about Jimmie Lee Jackson, who was assassinated by a state trooper in Alabama in 1965 trying to get voting rights.

We can talk about Larry Payne. You know, this is the fiftieth anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King. Larry Payne was sixteen years old. He also had his hands up. They were also saying, "Don't shoot him."

He was sixteen years old and he was shot by a police officer. So when we talk about what's happened since Ferguson, you know what's happened since then, what's happened since the inception of police departments, there's a continuum of slave patrols who were meant to bring enslaved black people back to plantations...

Larry Payne was shot and killed in Memphis, in 1968, in the aftermath of one of Dr. King's marches on behalf of the city's sanitation workers.

For more information, click here. Now let's return to the more recent past:

By any normal interpretation, Savali is still saying, in that passage, that Michael Brown had his hands up when he was shot and killed in Ferguson, with onlookers saying "Don't shoot him."

One of the Holder reports—reports which Savali praised—explicitly rejected all such claims about the death of Michael Brown. But within our modern liberal world, "embellishment culture" is very strong when it comes to such events.

We liberals! We disappear the deaths of the others—and beyond that, we rearrange basic facts concerning the deaths we do choose to discuss. Basically, our rearrangement of basic facts takes three basic forms:

Basic elements of modern embellishment culture:
1) We invent inaccurate facts which make the event more horrific.
2) We disappear accurate facts which would make the event less horrific.
3) We stress wholly irrelevant facts, thereby adding pathos to our novelized storylines.

Hillary Clinton's chapter about black shooting deaths was larded with these behaviors. Unless we liberals have decided to embrace a very brave new world, it seems to us that such behavior is just extremely unattractive and bad.

Let's set those slave patrols to the side and consider our own more recent behavior. It seems to us that own own behavior is often very bad.

We've created a liberal embellishment culture. We'd like to see a survey of the kinds of false belief our behavior may have caused.

Tomorrow: Let's take a look at the numbers

BREAKING: Bruni says be very afraid!

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 11, 2018

Bruni gets it right: In this morning's column, we think Frank Bruni gets it right about our nation's perilous situation.

You'll rarely hear it on cable news, where they're blindly in love with The Chase. But Bruni lays it out nice and clear:

Donald J. Trump is dangerous:

BRUNI (4/11/18): We haven’t been in a safe space since Nov. 8, 2016, but we’re in especially dangerous territory now. President Trump seems closer than ever to decisions that could plunge the country into crisis. And there’s nothing in his bearing or behavior to suggest that he cares all that much about sparing America that chaos and pain.

[...]

There is no Hope Hicks anymore, no Rob Porter, no Gary Cohn, no H. R. McMaster: The ranks of people who either gave Trump a sense of comfort and stability or sought to steer him away from his most destructive impulses have thinned. He’s more alone than ever. He must be more frightened, too.

But not half as scared as the rest of us should be.

"There is no Hope Hicks anymore?" The sheer insanity of our situation lurks in that plaintive remark.

Over Here, in the liberal world, our bench is so empty that we're forced to place our hopes in a money-grubbing adult film star and her transparently ludicrous lawyer, and in our undignified hope that the high school kids from Florida will be able to bail us out. (More on our fear of the rebooted "Roseanne" to come.)

Over There, in the Oval Office, the lid was allegedly being kept on by the ministrations of a 28-year-old former model. The sheer absurdity of all this represents what's left of our culture.

Our one complaint about Bruni's column? We think he protests too little! We'll guess he may have chosen not to say what his column is really about.

If Trump's situation collapses around him, who can guarantee that he won't turn to aggressive, even deranged, military adventures? Who's to say that he might not turn to those nuclear bombs?

In today's most exciting news report, we're told that Trump wanted to fire Mueller in December. According to the exciting report, Trump's aides had decided, by that time, that they didn't have to act on an order from Trump until it had been given at least three times.

We'd better hope that someone around Trump, with Hicks now gone, has devised a similar plan if he the embattled, erratic commander in chief decides to make the missiles fly. When it comes to a matter like that, does anyone even have the means to make him give the command three times?

It amazes us to see so little of this concern when we watch cable news at night. The children are full-tilt cavorting; they're thrilled.

We think Bruni got it right.

Concerning that December episode: In the aforementioned news report, we were struck by this remarkable passage about Trump's pique in December:

HABERMAN AND SCHMIDT (4/11/18): The articles that provoked Mr. Trump’s anger in December—which were published by Bloomberg, The Wall Street Journal and Reuters—said one of Mr. Mueller’s subpoenas had targeted Mr. Trump’s and his family’s banking records at Deutsche Bank. Mr. Trump’s lawyers, who have studied Mr. Trump’s bank accounts, did not believe the articles were accurate because Mr. Trump did not have his money there.

The lawyers were also able to learn that federal prosecutors in a different inquiry had issued a subpoena for entities connected to the family business of Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner. The news outlets later clarified the articles, saying that the subpoena to Deutsche Bank pertained to people affiliated with Mr. Trump, who was satisfied with the explanation and dropped his push to fire Mr. Mueller.

Oof! Back in December, Trump's anger at Mueller had been triggered by inaccurate news reports. When the inaccurate reports were "clarified," Donald J. Trump calmed down.

(Use of the tern "clarified" is a form of professional courtesy. You'll note from that passage that the reports by those major news orgs were wrong in two different ways.)

This morning, we went back to look at the relevant Maddow Show transcripts during that period.

Were Maddow viewers excitedly told about those erroneous news reports? When the erroneous reports were quickly corrected, were viewers told about that? Or did a cable star keep suggesting that the complaints from Trump aides had been wrong?

Perhaps you can guess what we found!

Cable news is partisan entertainment, and Maddow just isn't obsessively honest. Concerning that very key second point, we've been telling you that for years.

BREAKING: Sketchy lawyer does it again!

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 11, 2018

Avenatti's latest: We have a confession to make. Bombastic barrister Michael Avenatti strikes us as perhaps a bit of a fairly obvious con man.

We could be wrong in that impression, of course. But just consider his latest.

Monday morning, the lascivious lawyer was creating excitement again. Appearing on CNN's New Day, he made an intriguing promise, based on an earlier tweet:

ALISYN CAMEROTA (4/9/18): OK, you tweeted out this weekend:

"Expect a major announcement in the coming days regarding our efforts to identify the thug who threatened Ms. Clifford, Stormy Daniels, in Las Vegas in 2011 to leave Trump alone while making reference to her little girl. You can run but you can't hide. #thugsearch seriousconsequences basta."

So, care to tell us what your major announcement is, in terms of searching for this person?

AVENATTI: So my client sat down with Lois Gibson. She's the foremost forensic artist in the world. She has the Guinness, she has a world record for the number of IDs a composite sketches been produced. We're going to be reducing, or we're going to be releasing that tomorrow, along with a significant reward asking that the public come forward. We are very close to identifying this individual.

CAMEROTA: You are?

AVENATTI: We are.

CAMEROTA: You have a composite sketch and you think you know who this person is?

AVENATTI: We are very close. We need some assistance from the public. We're going to offer a significant reward to get us over the goal line. And I'm confident that we're going to get there.

Good lord! Seven years after being threatened, Avenatti's heroic client had gotten around to creating an artist's sketch of her alleged assailant, who may or may not exist!

And not only that! They were very close to identifying her assailant without releasing the sketch! (Las Vegas books are giving 5-to-1 that the sketch looks like O.J. Simpson!)

In our view, Camerota could have done a better job at this point. She could have asked if people can really create a sketch of this type seven years after the fact. (Avenatti would have said yes.)

Also, on what basis had they almost identified the assailant? And if they already had their man, why were they bothering with the sketch and with the huge reward? A huge reward with money coming from where?

Whatever! By the way, has anyone noted how much this lawyer's prose style resembles that of Donald J. Trump? His sketch artist was the greatest ever! This was based on his earlier tweet!

At any rate, Camerota did pose some questions about this tale. As always, Avenatti wasn't going to fall for that old trick:

CAMEROTA: Have you shared it with the police?

AVENATTI: I'm not going to answer that.

CAMEROTA: Can you show us the composite picture right now?

AVENATTI: Not right now.

[...]

CAMEROTA: How much is the reward?

AVENATTI: I'm not going to tell you.

CAMEROTA: But are police working with you on this?

AVENATTI: Again, I'm not going to answer that right now.

As usual, he couldn't tell us right now! Trump tends to play this way too.

Question: Did anyone actually threaten Clifford back in 2011? Like you, we have no idea.

It's possible that somebody did. It's also blindingly obvious that she could be making this up.

Luckily, though, her blustery barrister had a composite sketch ready to go! It would surely be big huge news when he released the sketch on Tuesday. Also, that big reward!

By Tuesday, though, there was other big news, and so the bullish barrister pulled things back. We had to laugh when the transparent phony explained his decision to Nicole Wallace on last night's 11th Hour:

WALLACE (4/10/18): Let me ask you about the sketch that you committed to releasing. And this was a sketch of the potential suspect....Where are you in that investigation, and where is that sketch?

AVENATTI: I have the sketch. Stormy Daniels, Ms. Clifford, sat down with Lois Gibson, who is a world renowned forensic artist based in Houston. She has the world record for the most identifications from sketches. She's incredibly talented. She sat down with her for an extended period of time. An accurate sketch has been compiled.

WALLACE: So it's a creative delay? An artist delay?

AVENATTI: No, it's not a creative delay. It's ready to go. We've been asked this morning to delay the release of the sketch. We were prepared to release it.

It isn't that he chose to delay the release. Mysteriously, the bumptious barrister had been asked to delay it!

He'd been asked to delay the release! Excitedly, Wallace pressed forward:

WALLACE (continuing directly): For law enforcement purposes?

AVENATTI: Well, I'm not going to get into—I'm not at liberty to discuss who asked us to delay it, but we were asked to delay it this morning, and that's what we're going to do it right now.

WALLACE: Based on how the sketch turned out, based on what the artist conjured, have you seen names of who that person might be?

AVENATTI: We have made progress relating to that identification process, and we're hopeful. At this point, I'll tell you this. We may not need to release the sketch.

The antic attorney isn't at liberty to discuss who requested the delay! Also, they may not release it at all!

Perhaps we're completely mistaken. It may be that Clifford really was threatened. It may be that they really will, by some miracle of soothsaying, come up with something resembling actual evidence to that effect.

For now, though, Avenatti continues to strike us as a transparent music man. Clifford is someone who says she had sex with a married person whose wife had just given birth, then tried to score a lot of cash by selling her sexy-time story.

She tried for the cash in 20l1, then again in 2016. We think it's good that Cohen paid her and told her to please go away.

BREAKING: Ryan retirement shocker!

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 11, 2018

Secret motive revealed: Paul Ryan, the world's most honest human, will not seek re-election.

According to people with no idea, the fellow has said that he wants to spend less time with Donald Trump's family.

NO OTHERS NEED APPLY: A candidate helped form a movement!

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 11, 2018

Part 3—Concerning who got to apply: It would be a better world if no one ever got shot and killed, including or perhaps especially by police officers.

It would also be a better world if police officers never got shot and killed. That would be better too.

In part for these reasons, the issue of police shootings began to take on a higher profile in the aftermath of the shooting death of Michael Brown, age 18, in August 2014.

The shooting death of Trayvon Martin in February 2012 had already sparked large amounts of political activism and media coverage. In this case, however, Brown had been shot and killed by a Ferguson, Missouri, police officer, not by a civilian.

The issue of police shootings has been in the news ever since. Stating the obvious, this is perfectly appropriate, though commentary and analysis have at times been imperfect.

We interrupt our current program to offer a quick observation. In a recent column, the New York Times' Ross Douthat referred to what he perceives as “the inability of contemporary liberalism to see itself from the outside, as it looks to the many people who for some reason, class or religion or historical experience, are not fully indoctrinated into its increasingly incoherent mix of orthodoxies.”

We often feel we don't quite understand what Douthat is talking about. In this case, we thought perhaps we did.

Do we the modern liberals really have an "increasingly incoherent mix of orthodoxies?” We'll offer two familiar stances which may not quite align:

A pair of familiar reactions, perceptions or claims:
1) Our nation is awash in guns.
2) It shocks the senses to think that police officers ever use their guns.

Newsflash: In a nation which is awash in guns, police officers will sometimes use their guns. Sometimes they'll do so in ways which are plainly criminal. Other times, they'll use their guns in ways which, alas, seem to make perfect sense.

Statistic-citing liberal savants will rail at their horrible conduct. At such times, as Douthat suggests, we liberals may not fully be able to grasp the way we look Out There.

We return to our regular programming:

Police shootings have been in the news since the death of Michael Brown. This led to a slightly puzzling part of Hillary Clinton's 2017 book, What Happened, in which she gives her account of the disastrous 2016 White House campaign.

We refer to the unnumbered chapter of that book which begins on page 173. The chapter is called "Turning Mourning into a Movement." The chapter starts like this:

CLINTON (page 173): They radiated strength. They were proud women who had seen a lot, cried a lot and prayed a lot. I walked around the room, introducing myself one by one to the dozen mothers who had come from all over the country. I listened to their stories and took in their quiet, fierce dignity.

It was November 2015. We were in the homey Sweet Maple Cafe on Chicago's West Side. Each of the mothers around the table had lost children to gun violence or to encounters with police officers. They had come to talk about what happened to their kids and to see if I would do something about it—or if I was just another politician after their votes.

Clinton met with a dozen mothers that day. Later in the chapter, she says that "many of them had never met [each other] before" that day in Chicago. She says they began bonding that day, and that, in that way, "The Mothers of The Movement were born."

Some of what follows will involve something which resembles criticism of Clinton. None of what follows is meant to suggest any criticism of the seven women, from that dozen, who apparently formed that group.

In that opening passage, Clinton's description of the connection between these mothers is already perhaps a bit fuzzy. As Clinton says, each of the mothers had lost a child to gun violence or to an encounter with police officers.

In some cases, those encounters did involve a police officer's use of a gun. In other instances, no police officer was involved at all.

In one case, a young person lost his life in a police shooting which Eric Holder, Barack Obama's attorney general, declared to be fully justified in a formal report. In another incident, a 15-year-old honors student was shot and killed in a park by a random shot fired by a random teen-aged gang member.

Already, the nature of the movement these women formed may be a bit unclear. For starters, though, we want to consider Clinton's question:

Was she just another pol looking for those women's votes, perhaps for their public support?

Was Clinton just another pol? Everything is possible! Indeed, when Clinton begins describing the deaths of these women's children, it's almost possible to be almost shocked:

CLINTON (page 174): The Mothers' stories, and the stories of others who lost children to gun violence, deserve to be told and heard. We've got to keep saying their names. In that first meeting in Chicago, there was no press and no audience—just us. I was accompanied by my senior policy adviser Maya Harris and Director of African American Outreach LaDavia Drane.

Sybrina Fulton, whose unarmed seventeen-year-old son Trayvon Martin was shot and killed outside a convenience store near Orlando, Florida, in 2012, kicked things off. "We're just regular moms," she said. "We don't want to be community activists, we don't want to be the mothers of senseless gun violence, we don't want to be in this position—we were forced into this position. None of us signed up for this."

Clinton starts that passage by saying that the stories of these women's children "deserve to be told."

Surely, no one can doubt that. She proceeds to offer a strikingly inaccurate account of the death of Sybrina Fulton's son, Trayvon Martin.

As everyone knows, Trayvon Martin was not "shot and killed outside a convenience store near Orlando, Florida." As everyone but Clinton surely knows, that simply isn't his story.

Trayvon Martin was shot and killed inside a gated community in Sanford, Florida, where he and his father were visiting a friend. That story had been told a million times by the time Clinton wrote and published her book.

In another remarkable moment, Clinton refers to Martin's shooting death as a "murder." A duly constituted jury had of course ruled that it was no such thing.

It's a remarkable breach of custom for a major American pol to overturn due process that way. It's also, perhaps, a part of the way our liberal culture has strayed.

Let's return to that puzzling factual error. It's amazing to think that such an obvious error could appear in such a high-profile book, perhaps the most high-profile book of the entire year.

Everybody makes mistakes, but Martin's story had been told a million times by the time Clinton's book appeared. The fact that the error appeared in her book does make us wonder about her.

More precisely, it makes us wonder if she really was "just another politician" making an especially insincere play for a batch of votes, and later for tribal respect. In our view, it wouldn't be the worst idea if you took a moment to wonder about that too.

Nothing we say here is meant, in any way, as a criticism of any of these mothers, who aren't professional pols. We do mean to criticize Clinton—for this later passage, for example, again describing that meeting at the Sweet Maple Cafe:

CLINTON (page 180): Lezley McFadden was direct with me. Her eighteen-year-old son, Michael Brown, was shot and killed in 2014 by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. "Are we going to see change?" Lezley asked. "Once again we're around a table, we're putting our hearts out, we're getting emotional, we tell you what we feel—but are we going to see any change? Are we going to see action?"

As noted above, the attorney general of the administration in which Clinton served had ruled that Brown's death resulted from a fully justified shooting.

Whatever one thinks of that assessment, it didn't make the cut in Clinton's heartfelt book. In the current climate, which may be unwise, it seems that no such official finding needed to apply! As with that jury verdict!

As Clinton's chapter proceeds, she wanders the countryside, flirting with an elephant in the room. At one point, on page 175, she says "the common theme that ran through all the stories was race." But two paragraphs later, she tells the story of Hadiya Pendleton, who "was randomly shot in a Chicago park" by a local teen who had lost his way in a way which had nothing to do with "race" in the sense a person might think from reading Clinton's chapter.

In this chapter, Clinton tells a bunch of stories, some perhaps a bit less honestly than some others. Personally, we think every progressive should deeply resent the way she toys with these stories.

Having said that, let us also say this about the notion that says "the common theme that ran through all the stories was race:"

The women Clinton names in her book had lost children in a wide array of incidents. It's never entirely clear, in Clinton's telling, why it seems that, among the nation's many mothers, only one demographic needed to apply to membership within the circle of Clinton's concern, in which she couldn't even manage to tell Trayvon Martin's story right.

Gun violence affects people from a wide array of groups. When it comes to our nation's police, police officers have shot and killed people from various groups, sometimes in plainly criminal ways, sometimes in ways which are justified.

Believe it or not, sometimes they've even shot and killed the others!

Clinton paraded around the country talking about gun violence. But when she offered her examples of same, individual stories were often mistold, and it almost seemed that only one group needed to apply for membership within her circle of concern.

Trust us! Those mothers would never have thought that way, of that you can be sure. Clinton, a politician who was seeking votes, rather frequently acted as if she did.

When we liberals behave that way, we turn our backs on centuries of American moral ideals—on the moral ideals which were advanced by giants of various "races." When we liberals behave that way, we seem to say that only one group need apply. To cite one example, we turn our backs on Bijan Ghaisar, who was shot and killed while driving away while being Iranian-American.

There have been other glaring cases in recent years. But if the cases involve the others, nobody says those names.

Is it possible that this conduct has us drifting in an unhealthy direction? Or do we get to invent and disappear facts, while stressing evocative points of total irrelevance? Shall we limit, as prehumans always have done, which groups get to apply?

Tomorrow: Examples and statistics

BREAKING: The ridiculousness that never ends!

TUESDAY, APRIL 10, 2018

Our lives in the underwear drawer: We haven't read the actual report. We won't do so until morning.

But from the front page of the Washington Post's web site, here's the synopsis of a brand-new news report:

Federal inquiry into Trump’s lawyer seeks records on two women who alleged affairs with president

The interest in an adult-film actress and a former Playboy model indicates that investigators are trying to determine if there was a strategy among Trump associates to buy the silence of women whose accounts could harm the president’s electoral chances and whether any crimes were committed.

Really? "Investigators are trying to determine if there was a strategy among Trump associates to buy the silence of women whose accounts could harm the president’s electoral chances?"

We certainly hope there was such a strategy! Hopefully, investigators are checking this out so they can honor those Trump associates if the story pans out.

Questions:

Why should anyone care if Trump associates "bought the silence" of two women who got it on with a married person, then try to inject themselves into a presidential campaign for a big bag of cash?

Why would anyone want people behaving like that? Why would anyone be offended if someone paid such ridiculous hustlers to keep their big traps shut?

The women get the money they sought, our election campaign proceeds. Unless we want our political life to be all about who's zoomin' who—unless we want to discuss The Sex, full stop—why would anyone be concerned or offended by an arrangement like that?

This bullsh*t started with Gary Hart. Anthropologically speaking, it tells us who we are.

BREAKING: Roxane Gay finds "Roseanne" scary!

TUESDAY, APRIL 10, 2018

Look Who's Talking Today: The reboot of the "Roseanne" series debuted on March 27.

Roxane Gay says she wasn't planning to watch, but decided to do so anyway. After we read her New York Times column about the frightening experience, we decided to take a look too.

We watched the first, half-hour episode of the rebooted series. Among other things, here's what we found:

As currently constituted, the Conner family resembles half of Noah's ark. It seems to have exactly one of each living thing.

It has a black grandchild. It has a semi-gay-seeming grandchild.

It has a newly unemployed daughter. It has a second daughter who's going to be a surrogate mother. That second daughter is a widow because her husband died of a heroin overdose.

It has one politically stereotypical sister who voted for Donald J. Trump. She's balanced by a politically stereostypical sister who voted for Jill Stein, even though she loved Hillary Clinton.

The show has one pink pussy hat, which the Stein voter wears. We're told that the show was filmed before a live audience, although we found ourselves forced to guess that a laugh track was present too.

We've almost never watched sitcoms. We liked Roseanne Barr the person, a lot, when we spent a few days around her back in 1986. But when her sitcom first aired in 1987, we don't think we watched it more than a couple of times, perhaps never all the way through.

In the current instance, the show made us think of the type of classic film where every species of humanity is trapped together on an airplane which is going to crash, or on a ship which is going to sink, or in a stagecoach scarily crossing the west, or perhaps at Rick's Cafe.

This formula can produce strong results. In Stagecoach (1939), John Wayne became a star in the film in which The Duke stood up for the lady. In Casablanca (1942), the formula produced an accidentally brilliant portrait of the human condition, in which we wait...and wait...and wait, generally doing the best we can, in the rare instance surprising ourselves by rising to the occasion, sometimes as a group.

The Epstein brothers were major scriptwriters. The gods plainly scripted that film, which was leavened with so much beautiful, human-loving humor.

We'll guess that Roseanne's new sitcom won't turn out that well. That said, if it's a bomb you're hoping for, you can jump the line by reading Gay's column about her frightening viewing experience.

Inside the cafe of worried liberal "Roseanne" watchers, Gay became one of the first to express her fears. If you want to know why we liberals are forced to hope that a bunch of high school kids will be able to save us, Gay's opening passage would be a good place to start.

Hard-copy headline included. Seriously though, people—Boo!

GAY (4/10/18): 'Roseanne' Is Funny. And Scary.

It can be very difficult to separate the art from the artist. In the case of Roseanne Barr and her critically acclaimed television show based on her life, it is nearly impossible. I wasn’t going to watch the reboot because I find Ms. Barr noxious, transphobic, racist and small-minded. Whatever charm and intelligence she brought to the first nine seasons of her show, a show I very much loved, are absolutely absent in her current persona, particularly as it manifests on Twitter. She is a supporter of Donald Trump, vocalizing her thoughts about making America great, claiming that with her vote, she was trying to shake things up. She tweets conspiracy theories, rails against feminism and shares Islamophobic opinions.

Where once she was edgy and provocative, she is now absurd and offensive. Her views are muddled and incoherent. She is more invested in banal and shallow provocation than engaging with sociopolitical issues in a thoughtful manner. No amount of mental gymnastics can make what Roseanne Barr has said and done in recent years palatable.

Nonetheless, I was curious about what Roseanne Conner, her famous television alter ego, has been up to. The original “Roseanne” was a smart, hilarious and groundbreaking show that covered a lot of important ground in prime-time television. I wanted to see how the Conners were doing 20 years later.

What I found is that the tensions in the TV show—which more than 18 million people watched, a network TV high since 2014—are the same tensions that shape this current political climate. Roseanne the character voted for Donald Trump because he talked about “jobs.” For that she sacrificed so many other things. The promise of jobs and the myth of the white working class as the only people struggling in this country, which animates so much of our present political moment, are right there, in this sitcom.

Did Gay write her own headline, as Times columnists supposedly do?

We don't know the answer to that. That said, the reason Gay finds this sitcom "scary" seems to reside, in substantial part, in that final highlighted point, where Gay says, on the basis of two half-hour episodes, that the new series advances "the myth of the white working class as the only people struggling in this country."

Because we didn't find the first episode funny, and because it didn't exactly strike us as "art," we only watched one of those half-hour programs. That said, we'll have to admit we didn't feel that the program we watched was advancing any such myth, and we find it hard to believe that the second episode could have done a whole lot to advance it either.

How would a sitcom advance such a myth? We're not sure we know, nor does Gay really attempt to explain. All in all, we liberals no longer bother. We just stamp our feet at each other, loudly shouting "Boo!"

Why is the progressive world forced to hope that a bunch of high school kids will be able to provide the leadership we adults can't muster, helped along by the heroism of an adult film star who wanted to f**k and tell, needless to say for cash?

With respect to Gay, the problem starts with the silly idea that the two programs she watched were "art," and that their featured performer was an "artist." If you're willing to start by swallowing that, it's straight downhill from there!

We liked Roseanne Barr the person, a lot, back in 86. Since then, she has apparently advanced a lot of infelicitous ideas, though we aren't current on that to the extent that Gay may be.

There may well be lessons to learn from the false or "noxious" ideas Roseanne Barr the person may have expressed. We remember being disappointed when she grabbed her crotch while singing the Star Spangled Anthem so poorly—disappointed because massive fame can do lots of harm, and it looked like it might be doing some harm to her, a person we'd very much liked.

Why does the current person believe some of the things she may believe? We don't know, but that question strikes us as very important. Over the past thirty years, our politics has been eaten alive by weird, absurd and false belief, and if we hope to right our sinking ship, we'll have to come to terms with the idiocracy in which we all now reside.

That said, when it comes to silly beliefs, how about Gay, and how about us Over Here? Did two episodes of "Roseanne" really advance "the myth of the white working class as the only people struggling in this country?"

To us, that seems a bit hard to believe, but it has Gay scared. That said, we liberals now tend to see these Trumpian monsters under every bed. Please don't interview Them!

However silly or even "noxious" Roseanne the person may have become, she can't be much sillier than We are Over here. This became clear in an essay on the front page of the Washington Post's Outlook section this Sunday.

Matched with the earlier effort by Gay, that column helps explain why broken, frightened people like us have to hope that Emma and the rest of the kids will be able to bail us out.

Tomorrow: Additional frightened thoughts, this time in the Post

NO OTHERS NEED APPLY: Arguably, a slightly odd headline!

TUESDAY, APRIL 10, 2018

Part 2—No others seem to matter: We'll have to admit it. At least to us, it seemed like a slightly odd headline.

It appeared on Sunday, March 18, in the Washington Post's Outlook section. It stretched across the top of Outlook's page 3.

We thought the headline was slightly odd. Slightly oddly, the headline said this:

Police are still killing black people. Why don't we notice?

In fairness, that headline begins with an accurate statement. The full stack of the Post's headlines that day said this:

Police are still killing black people. Why don't we notice?
The Post's Wesley Lowery says activists, reporters and the zeitgeist have moved on

Today, online, the pair of headlines are slightly different. So you can perform your usual full meditation, we present those headlines here:

Police are still killing black people. Why isn’t it news anymore?
The activism never stopped. But the attention to it vanished.

As fate would have it, Stephon Clark was shot and killed by two Sacramento police officers on the evening of March 18, mere hours after that hard-copy headline appeared. And Clark's death has been treated as news, for an array of reasons.

Having said that, let us also say this. That morning, we thought that headline in the Washington Post was perhaps slightly odd, but also perhaps instructive. Thoughtfully, we'll explain why.

In our view, the headline basically captured the point of Wes Lowery's 1449-word essay. Lowery never exactly said that only one type of decedent need apply in the matter of police shootings. But the editor who penned that headline basically captured his drift.

Example:

In the course of his essay, Lowery named sixteen people who had famously or semi-famously been the victims of some sort of alleged or actual police misconduct. But only one of these sixteen names was borne by one of The Others:

Cited in Lowery's essay:
Edward Minguela
Rodney King
Alton Sterling
Michael Brown
Eric Garner
Sandra Bland
Philando Castile
Johnnie Jermaine Rush
Henry Louis Gates
Trayvon Martin
Jordan Edwards
Daniel Shaver
Tamir Rice
Walter Scott
Freddie Gray
Laquan McDonald

Need the others even apply? Only one of their number was cited this day. We'll guess that you can puzzle out which of those names it is.

Essentially, Lowery's essay asked a question, just as that headline implied. His essay asked why black victims of real or apparent police misconduct weren't getting a lot of press coverage any more.

The headline made it sound like Lowery was only speaking about police killings. That wasn't precisely the case, but we'd say it was close enough for mainstream press corps work.

"Police are still killing black people. Why isn’t it news anymore?" In principle, that's a perfectly sensible question, based upon a perfectly accurate statement of fact.

A person could perhaps and possibly say that the headline may be a bit "loaded." But the headline stated an accurate fact and, in theory at least, there are no invalid questions.

So how about it? Why wasn't it news any more when police kill black people? In his discussion, Lowery placed a lot of blame on the mountains of attention being paid to the conduct of Donald J. Trump.

But as the headline indicated, his emphasis— and, apparently, his interest—clearly lay on the killing of "black people," full stop, as seen in this passage:

LOWERY (3/18/18): [U]nlike President Barack Obama, Trump isn't interested in police reform...

And unlike Obama, who was immediately and persistently asked to weigh in on issues of race and policing—from Henry Louis Gates's arrest to Trayvon Martin's death to the Ferguson protests—Trump faced no such questioning when police in Texas shot and killed 15-year-old Jordan Edwards last April or when a video of an Arizona officer fatally shooting unarmed Daniel Shaver was released last year.

Among other complicating factors is that, while police shootings have continued, the number of unarmed people being killed has dipped and therefore so has the number of videos of such shootings that galvanize the public. In 2015, 36 unarmed black men were fatally shot by police; footage of the armed yet compliant Castile, 12-year-old Tamir Rice and Walter Scott dying from their wounds prompted massive protests. In 2017, the figure was 19. Of the 33 black people fatally shot by police so far in 2018, only two incidents are known to have been caught on a body camera. Some policing experts say officers have become more cautious.

Explicitly, we're discussing "race and policing." Beyond that, you'll note the possible oddness of that last paragraph, perhaps as it was edited. To wit:

As least as the paragraph was edited, Lowery starts by talking about "unarmed people being killed." At that point, there seemed to be no demographic requirement for inclusion in the circle of concern.

Instantly, though, that changed. From the number of unarmed people being killed, we move directly to the numbers of "unarmed black men" being killed in 2016 and 2017. Among the others who need not apply, he even excluded black women!

(At least as the passage appeared. And yes, there have been some.)

It was perhaps from that chunk of text that some editor get the impression that Lowery was concerned about the killing of people who are socially defined as black, full stop, with there being no apparent need for anyone else to apply. For our money, the headline did capture the gist of the piece—and the headline struck us as perhaps somewhat regrettable and as perhaps slightly odd.

Of one thing you can be sure; the Washington Post's Wes Lowery is a good, decent person. We've never met him in our lives, but we're totally and completely sure of that fact.

We also think that headline, and the essay beneath it, may lead us in two directions:

First, it helps explain our interest in the survey we imagined yesterday. How many people might believe that today's police officer is shooting and killing black people only, and nobody else?

We'd be curious to see an approximate answer. In fairness, if some people have formed that impression, it isn't because they haven't been getting plenty of help.

Second, it seems to us that Lowery's essay may have a good and decent person tilting toward a type of moral mistake. We think of this glorious passage from Yevtushenko's poem, People. Granted, he was a Russkie:

In any man [sic] who dies there dies with him
his first snow and kiss and fight
it goes with him.

There are left books and bridges
and painted canvas and machinery
Whose fate is to survive.

But what has gone is also not nothing:
by the rule of the game something has gone.
Not people die but worlds die in them.

"Who we knew as faulty, the earth's creatures," Yevtushenko says as he continues.

When a person dies, "what has gone is not nothing?" Yevtushenko didn't add the limiting phrase, "depending on the demographics," although, anthropologically speaking, many people all over the world have always been so inclined.

How many people think that only "black" people are being shot and killed by today's out-of-control police officer, who hasn't kept up with the statistics about today's improved teens?

We're curious about the answer to that. It seems to us that, much as once was said at Woodstock, there's some bad information and faulty suggestions possibly going around.

Tomorrow: Clinton promotes a (slightly peculiar?) movement