What I read while having my coffee this morning:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Over at\u00a0Emptywheel<\/a><\/em>, Marcy Wheeler<\/a> lays out the reasons why\u00a0Robert Mueller\u2019s Special Counsel Office pushed back\u00a0<\/a>on the\u00a0BuzzFeed<\/a><\/em> story claiming that\u00a0Donald Trump directed Michael Cohen to lie to Congress<\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0It boils down to a need to rehabilitate Cohen\u2019s credibility in the event Mueller calls him as a trial witness and to protect the Mueller team\u2019s reputation as a tightly-run ship that doesn\u2019t leak.\u00a0\u00a0If you want to keep up with developments in the Mueller investigation, by the way, you should read this website daily.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cBoys in \u2018Make America Great Again\u2019 Hats Mob Native Elder at Indigenous People\u2019s March\u201d\u00a0<\/a>reads the headline in the\u00a0New York Times<\/a><\/em>.\u00a0\u00a0On a field trip from\u00a0Covington Catholic High School<\/a> in Kentucky to participate in the\u00a0March for Life<\/a> yesterday, these thugs surrounded and mocked the man, a Vietnam War veteran,\u00a0screaming \u201cBuild that wall!\u201d<\/a>at him while he played a ceremonial song.\u00a0\u00a0In the video you can see many of them making fun of him while one punk stood in front of him smirking.\u00a0\u00a0We\u2019ve seen this look before, as\u00a0Ruth Graham points out<\/a>at\u00a0Slate<\/a><\/em>, and it\u2019s yet another example of Christians completely ignoring the core teachings of their faith.\u00a0\u00a0Or maybe these boys are just from families who don\u2019t want their kids in desegregated public schools.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Perhaps in an effort to distract the media from yesterday\u2019s\u00a0Women\u2019s March<\/a>, Donald Trump offered temporary relief for\u00a0Dreamers\u00a0<\/a>and other\u00a0limited immigration changes in return for the $5.7 billion he wants to build a border wall.<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0This pleased no one, including Ann Coulter<\/a>, who\u00a0whined that conservatives \u201c\u2026voted for Trump and got Jeb!\u201d<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0Of course, Trump is worried enough about what Coulter and other immigration hardliners think<\/a>that he felt the need to\u00a0respond on Twitter<\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0I spend a good bit of time trying to figure out how conservatives think, and I\u2019m frankly wondering how this works for them.\u00a0\u00a0They complain constantly about ineffective government but think it can successfully complete a massive project like a thousand-mile long wall.\u00a0They whine every day about government spending, deficits, and debt but happily advocate borrowing tens of billions of dollars for a wall that won\u2019t solve the problem anyway.\u00a0\u00a0And they prioritize property rights over community needs but don\u2019t seem to mind that a border wall project on Trump\u2019s scale would require confiscation of private land in the millions of acres.\u00a0\u00a0Could it be racism all the way down<\/a>?<\/p>\n\n\n\n On a somewhat lighter note,\u00a0at least one Harvard scientist\u00a0<\/a>seems to think an\u00a0object first spotted by University of Hawai\u2019i<\/a> astronomers\u00a0could be an interstellar probe\u00a0<\/a>sent from another galaxy.\u00a0\u00a0If so, whoever is behind it must have started the project quite a long time ago.\u00a0\u00a0Since we\u2019ve launched a few of these ourselves, it\u2019s hardly beyond imagination.\u00a0\u00a0Wonder what our interstellar counterparts will think as they watch\u00a0Voyager 1 fly by<\/a>?<\/p>\n\n\n\n And finally, today is the penultimate week of National Football League play. If I were in Las Vegas (or Virginia had already legalized sports betting<\/a>) I\u2019d take the Chiefs giving up three<\/a>and the Rams getting three and a half points<\/a>. And the over on both.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Enjoy the rest of your Sunday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" What I read while having my coffee this morning: Over at\u00a0Emptywheel, Marcy Wheeler lays out the reasons why\u00a0Robert Mueller\u2019s Special Counsel Office pushed back\u00a0on the\u00a0BuzzFeed story claiming that\u00a0Donald Trump directed Michael Cohen to lie to Congress.\u00a0\u00a0It boils down to a need to rehabilitate Cohen\u2019s credibility in the event Mueller calls him as a trial witness […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":27,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-393","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/foggybottomline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/393","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/foggybottomline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/foggybottomline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foggybottomline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/27"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foggybottomline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=393"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/foggybottomline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/393\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":395,"href":"https:\/\/foggybottomline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/393\/revisions\/395"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/foggybottomline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=393"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foggybottomline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=393"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foggybottomline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=393"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}