"There is nothing wrong with Godly principles...."

The radical left is upset that President Trump and Dr. Ben Carson requested a #NationalDayOfPrayer.

Dr. Carson, "There is nothing wrong with Godly principles no matter what your faith is."

Will you Pray with President @realDonaldTrump & @SecretaryCarson? 🙏 pic.twitter.com/F7VZDr3OEj

— Big Dan Rodimer for Congress-Nevada's 3rd District (@DanRodimer) March 14, 2020

"During a recent meeting with local staff in San Francisco, I made reference to the fact that I had heard from many women’s groups about the difficulty they were having with women’s shelters..."

"... because sometimes men would claim to be women, and that HUD’s policy required the shelter to accept — without question — the word of whoever came in, regardless of what their manifested physical characteristics appeared to be. This made many of the women feel unsafe, and one of the groups described a situation to me in which 'big hairy men' would come in and have to be accepted into the women’s shelter even though it made the women in the facility very uncomfortable. My point was that we have to permit policies that take into consideration the rights of everybody, including those women — many of which have suffered at the hands of male domestic abusers — who believe there are men who might hurt them.... Our society is in danger when we pick one issue (such as gender identity) and say it does not matter how it impacts others because this one issue should override every other common-sense consideration. I think we have to look out for everyone, and we need to use our intellectual capabilities to find common good rather than attempting to always stir up controversy through identity politics."

Said Ben Carson, quoted in "As Democrats call for his resignation, HUD Secretary Ben Carson defends his controversial comments about transgender people" (WaPo). From the article:

"I think poverty to a large extent is also a state of mind," said Ben Carson.

"You take somebody that has the right mind-set, you can take everything from them and put them on the street, and I guarantee in a little while they’ll be right back up there...."

You take somebody with the wrong mind-set, you can give them everything in the world — they’ll work their way right back down to the bottom....

If everybody had a mother like mine, nobody would be in poverty. She was a person who absolutely would not accept the status of victim.

Ben Carson savaged for saying the slaves were a kind of immigrant...

... and then it turns out Barack Obama did the same thing at least 11 times.

I don't want to laugh in the vicinity of the suffering of the slaves, but... man, it is satisfying when the double standard pops into stark view like that. Is it too much to hope for progress in cross-party understanding?

ADDED: I'd like to know what the NYT's Frank Bruni would like to say now that these words attach also to Barack Obama:

[H]e’s a great lesson — for the left as well as the right — that sensitivity is a function of sensibility, not merely of complexion or membership in a given identity group.

A black person can bumble into racially hurtful comments....

Nominating Ben Carson for HUD Secretary, Trump spoke of "urban renewal": Doesn't that connote something racist?

Trump's press release said, in part:

"Ben Carson has a brilliant mind and is passionate about strengthening communities and families within those communities. We have talked at length about my urban renewal agenda and our message of economic revival, very much including our inner cities. Ben shares my optimism about the future of our country and is part of ensuring that this is a Presidency representing all Americans. He is a tough competitor and never gives up."

Campaigning in Charlotte, North Carolina, in late October he'd used the phrase once, at the beginning of a speech titled "New Deal For Black America":

It is great to be here in Charlotte to discuss an issue that means so much to me. That is the issue of urban renewal, and the rebuilding of our inner cities. Today I want to talk about how to grow the African-American middle class, and to provide a new deal for Black America. That deal is grounded in three promises: safe communities, great education, and high-paying jobs....

At the NYT, Emily Badger expresses anxiety about the phrase "urban renewal" (and she doesn't ignore that other historically resonant phrase, "New Deal"):

His language has an odd ring to it, not solely for marrying Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal with the post-World War II era of urban renewal. If Mr. Trump was reaching for a broadly uplifting concept — renewal — he landed instead on a term with very specific, and very negative, connotations for the population he says he aims to help....

The term “urban renewal” dates to the Housing Act of 1954; its 1949 predecessor called the same policy “urban redevelopment.” Under these laws, the federal government gave cities the power and money to condemn “slum” neighborhoods, clear them through eminent domain, then turn over the land to private developers at cheap rates for projects that included higher-end housing, hospitals, hotels, shopping centers and college expansions....

Urban renewal was meant to wipe clean poor, deteriorating neighborhoods, while boosting tax coffers, stimulating private investment and luring middle-class residents and shoppers back into the city.....

Did Trump mean to evoke these details when he used the old phrase? Badger says it's a "mystery" and compares it to the mystery of whether Trump knew the historical background when he had that phone conversation with the president of Taiwan.

My guess is that Trump not only knows the historical background, he intends to leave us off-balance — tangled up in the mystery of whether he knows. But I can't solve the mystery of what he intended to do by using the old phrase that James Baldwin once said was a euphemism for "Negro removal."

We know Trump has said "eminent domain is wonderful" and:

"If you have a factory, where you have thousands of jobs, you need eminent domain, it’s called economic development... Now you’re employing thousands of people and you’re able to build a factory, you’re able to build an Apple computer center, where thousands of people can work. You can do that, or you can say, ‘Let the man have his house.'"

I recommend assuming that Trump knows what he's doing. The alternative assumption — that he's a bumbling idiot — is too easy, and if you are wrong, you will be left in the dust. But to say that he knows what he's doing is not to know what he has in mind. It's easy to fall back on the old accusations of racism and to take advantage of his use of the old phrase to dangle that theory in front of NYT readers — who snap up the bait. The highest-rated comment there says:

The article makes clear "urban renewal" is code for racist policies. And the "political correctness" that clearly drove you to vote for Trump is coded language for racism.

But maybe Trump himself was baiting people like Badger and that commenter to talk about him like that and look like surly pessimists who make reckless accusations of racism over nothing. And here he has nominated that lovely man Ben Carson as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development.

"I am thrilled to nominate Dr. Ben Carson as our next Secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development."

Said President-elect Donald Trump.

"Ben Carson has a brilliant mind and is passionate about strengthening communities and families within those communities. We have talked at length about my urban renewal agenda and our message of economic revival, very much including our inner cities. Ben shares my optimism about the future of our country and is part of ensuring that this is a Presidency representing all Americans. He is a tough competitor and never gives up."

More Satanism at the convention...

... apparently... per Drudge:



Tuesday night, we had Ben Carson linking Hillary to Satan (via Saul Alinsky's dedication of his book to Lucifer), and this morning "Hell's A-Burning" for Ted Cruz. I guess that means Republicans are mad at Cruz. Tuesday night, Chris Christie had the crowd chanting — "Lock her up" — about throwing Hillary Clinton into prison, and Wednesday night — "Ted Cruz booed lustily as he refuses to endorse Donald Trump" — I guess they were ready to chuck Cruz into Hell.

I'd like to hear Ben Carson talk about Harriet Tubman's brain surgery.

I see that the brain surgeon was asked about whether Harriet Tubman belongs on the $20 bill and he said something that got him criticized about how Andrew Jackson was "a tremendous present" so maybe Tubman — whom he loves — could go on the $2 bill. (Thomas Jefferson would have to be ousted for that, but whatever.)

I'd like to hear him talk about Harriet Tubman's brain surgery:

Early in life, she suffered a traumatic head wound when an irate slave owner threw a heavy metal weight intending to hit another slave and hit her instead. [She later explained her belief that her hair – which "had never been combed and ... stood out like a bushel basket" – might have saved her life.] The injury caused dizziness, pain, and spells of hypersomnia, which occurred throughout her life. She was a devout Christian and experienced strange visions and vivid dreams, which she ascribed to premonitions from God....

As Tubman aged, the seizures, headaches, and suffering from her childhood head trauma continued to plague her. At some point in the late 1890s, she underwent brain surgery at Boston's Massachusetts General Hospital. Unable to sleep because of pains and "buzzing" in her head, she asked a doctor if he could operate. He agreed and, in her words, "sawed open my skull, and raised it up, and now it feels more comfortable." She had received no anesthesia for the procedure and reportedly chose instead to bite down on a bullet, as she had seen Civil War soldiers do when their limbs were amputated.

What could brain surgery have been like at that time? I see that Harvey Williams Cushing (April 8, 1869 – October 7, 1939), the "father of modern neurosurgery," did his internship at Massachusetts General Hospital after graduating from Harvard Medical School in 1895.



I wonder how sophisticated the surgery could have been in the late 1890s. Here we have this wonderful brain surgeon, Ben Carson, on a show to talk about Harriet Tubman, and there was a fascinating subject squarely within his expertise. I would have loved to hear what he might have said about the history of brain surgery!

Suit the suits.

"There is no question that [Cruz] has been a polarizing figure, and it’s kind of ironic that a lot of people who were so critical of him are now jumping on the bandwagon because it suits their needs."

Said Ben Carson.

"Man, you guys cannot stop talking about him. He is a dangerous presence and, you know, it’s just like candy by the bushel."

Said Hillary into a hot mike. She was talking to Chris Matthew, chatting between segments of an MSNBC town hall.

“We dip into him, dip out of him,” said Matthews. “We have a progressive audience, obviously. But, uh, nobody can tell what people want to watch.”

“Yeah,” she said, adding that people do “want to watch him.”

“— to laugh at him,” Matthews replied.

Then they talked about  Chris Christie: “Why did he support [Trump]?” Clinton wondered. And then Ben Carson, whom Matthews said he'd known "forever" and found "very soft spoken, never said a thing." Then Matthews said Carson reminded him of Tommy Smothers, and Clinton expressed appreciation to get to talk to someone who — unlike her young staffpeople — remembers the old TV shows. That caused Matthews to say "Sid Caesar" 3 times, and Clinton said "Ed Sullivan!"

A 7-point sequence beginning with the assertion that adults getting offended by language isn't a thing.

1. Scott Adams blogged: "Let’s stop pretending that other adults are offended by language. That isn’t a thing. We are offended ON BEHALF of people we imagine would be offended. But those people do not exist. Stop imagining offended people."

2. Meade said: "My 90 year-old greatest generation wise beyond her years mother is offended. My mother exists. My mother grew up on a cattle farm in central Indiana. Manure. Blood. Dirt. Guts. Varmints. Sex everywhere you looked. None of that offends her. But Trump does.... She isn't offended on anyone else's behalf. She isn't offended by any of his words. She's offended by Trump. She has voted Republican her entire life. But she's offended by Trump."

3. At the last debate and in the press conference with Ben Carson that followed, Trump introduced a new elegant, calm, presidential tone, which I blogged about here, causing R. Chatt, in the comments, to ask: "What does Meade's mother think? Is she persuaded by Trump's less offensive demeanor?"

4. 4 minutes later, Meade said, "I'll call her and get back to you."

5. About an hour and a half later, Meade came back with: "@R. Chatt, I finally got a hold of her. She said she spent the morning out on her front porch in the sun watching cement trucks moving around and she forgot to take her phone with her.  Quotes: 'Oh, I hated seeing the doctor [Ben Carson] line up behind Trump,' 'Ben might be able to keep Donald in line.' Asked about her opinion of DT's behavior during the debate last night: 'Better than usual. Trump seems to appreciate the doctor.' 'It will be hard for [Trump] to change his me, myself, and I attitude and his being money hungry because he's too old to change.' Mother said she will 'hope for the best' and will 'pray' because 'even though prayer doesn't always give us what we want, it never hurts to pray that God's will be done.' When I told her that you were interested in her opinions, she said, 'Oh, well, isn't she NICE?' By the way, I've never known my mother to use sarcasm."

6. 2 days after that, amba said: "Meade should start a blog called 'Shit My Mom Says.' She's very wise."

7. I remember the old "Shit My Dad Says" twitter feed, which recorded the things comedy writer Justin Halpern's dad said. The dad really did use words like shit (and worse). Example: "1st amendment doesn't protect assholes from criticism. The right to act like an asshole and be called an asshole's the same fucking right." That's from 3 years ago, so don't think it's Trump-inspired, even though it's Trump-applicable.

8. But, of course, Meade's mother would never use words like that, as amba necessarily knows, which is why we found her comment so amusing and I'm writing this list.

"There’s the one you see on the stage, and there’s the one who’s very cerebral, sits there and considers things very carefully."

"You can have a very good conversation with him. And that’s the Donald Trump that you’re going to start seeing more and more of right now."

Said Ben Carson, endorsing Donald Trump.

It was a whole 45-minute press conference. Trump loves the press conference format. From the NYT description:

Mr. Trump, whose sedate appearance in the Miami debate Thursday evening was widely noted, said he believes it’s time to move past [debates].

“We’ve had enough debates in my opinion,” Mr. Trump told reporters at his news conference. “It would be nice to finish off with this one,” he said, pointing out that he had repeatedly called it an “elegant” debate and saying it was simply time for a calm, staid debate so that the party could come together.

If the new tone is to be elegant and calm, there's no better exemplar of the tone than Ben Carson.

Well played.

AND: This post gets the civility bullshit tag. Do you see why? There are a lot of posts with that tag, so let me save you the trouble of looking for the answer if you don't remember what that tag means. It designates a call for civility and includes my opinion on the subject: Calls for civility are always bullshit. They are never really about civility as a neutral principle. Civility is called for to tame the opposition, when it serves your interest.

Ben Carson is going to endorse Donald Trump.

That's huge.

"There’s a lot of people who love me, they just won’t vote for me."

Ben Carson's exit line.

Another GOP debate.

I'm not live-blogging (nor is John tonight), but I'm watching and very interested in how they will talk about the death of Antonin Scalia.

Please comment. I'll drop in if I can (and if not, will say a few things tomorrow).

ADDED: The first question was about the vacancy left by Justice Scalia, and all of the candidates were called upon to address whether President Obama deserves to have control of the nomination. The moderator, John Dickerson, was heavy-handed enough pushing the idea of Obama's power and duty that the audience resorted to booing. As for the candidates, it was interesting. Each showed something of his personal style in addressing the question:

Why did Donald Trump say Ted Cruz "looks like a jerk"?

It certainly wasn't — as the headlines might make you guess — a comment on the aesthetics of his facial features. It wasn't — as Politico says — "about the Texas senator's appearance," as I can tell from reading the Politico article that doesn't deserve to be linked to.

Trump was on "Morning Joe," where he was asked to comment on that new Cruz ad, which includes a clip of Trump saying "How stupid are the people of Iowa?" Trump said that in the context of mocking Ben Carson's old story of a guy's belt stopping a stabbing attack. Trump was saying that Carson must think Iowans are stupid, because only stupid people would believe that. To present Trump's "How stupid are the people of Iowa?" as if Trump were saying Iowans are stupid is to lie about Trump.

Accordingly, Trump's response to the ad was: "He's a liar." With that, Trump continued:

"That's why nobody likes him, that’s why his Senate people won’t endorse him, that’s why he stands in the middle of the Senate floor and can’t make a deal with anybody. He looks like a jerk, he’s standing all by himself. And you know, there’s something to say about having a little bit of ability to get other people to do things. You can’t be a lone wolf and stand there. That’s sort of what we have right now as a president." 

"He looks like a jerk," seen in context, refers to Cruz's standing by himself and being a "lone wolf" person in the Senate. It's an attack on his governing style — not his face! — and Trump neatly connected it to President Obama's go-it-alone style.

The co-host, Mika Brzezinski, understood what he was talking about. She broke in to ask a question, and it wasn't about the inappropriateness of attacking a man's looks. It was about whether he really meant to compare Cruz to Obama. Trump first said "they’re the same," then took it back on the ground that "Ted is more strident" and "At least some people like Obama."

Synchronizing their watches.

A sure sign of the Trump-Cruz conspiracy. Carson's in on it too.

AND: If you don't know what I mean by the conspiracy, watch Joe Scarborough speculate: "After the debate, I started thinking, ‘This was an inside deal.’ You’ve got Trump and Cruz who were kind of hitting each other, but they see now that they’re locked in first and second place, everybody else is a distant third. Notice everybody on the stage was attacking everybody but the top two guys. So Trump goes after Jeb, Cruz goes after Rubio— the establishment’s favorite candidates– and they refuse to touch each other. It smacked of an inside deal. If this maintains the status quo, neither Jeb or Rubio catches them. It’s a smart political move, and they made it; they either made a direct or indirect deal."

ALSO: A photo of Cruz that made me go "aw."

Truest oxymoron of the day: "Aggravating Snoozefest"... "CNN Turns Debate Into Aggravating Snoozefest."

I'm checking the headlines at Real Clear Politics:



That last headline goes to a "no longer available" dead end at The Washington Times, but I've got to admit that I was aggravated and I also snoozed.

I googled my way to what I assume is the article: "CNN turns GOP debate into aggravating, irrelevant snoozefest — as planned." Oh! As planned.

By keeping the stage crammed with a couple of actual front-runners and cluttered with has-been also-rans like Ohio Gov. John Kasich, debate moderators are managing to do what once seemed impossible: Boring voters even though real estate mogul Donald Trump is still on the debate stage. They will stop at nothing to water down the goliath front-runner for the GOP nomination....

Instead of a substantive debates with actual front-runners, we get these shoutfests with nine people, each one wasting their microphone time to complain about getting short-shrift or barking at one another over irrelevant details....

It doesn’t help that just about every question begins with, “Donald Trump said …”

It is like some kind of therapy session for a group of people suffering from Donald Trump Derangement Syndrome. It got so bad Tuesday night that Mr. Trump himself finally called out moderators for making him a star of even the undercard GOP debate — that he wasn’t even in!

“It was Trump this, Trump that,” Mr. Trump said, rolling his eyes. “I think it was very unprofessional.”

Adding to the bizarreness was some person off camera who kept coughing and sniffling into a microphone. Was that one of the candidates? One of the moderators? Or was it some kind of special effect that was piped in from the outside? Message: GOP has sniffling, coughing fits.

ADDED: The question of who was coughing consumed social media.

Has no one at #CNN production heard of a cough button? Good Lord! It sounds like someone's dying up there. #republicandebate

— Rob Lowe (@RobLowe) December 16, 2015

Suspicions converged on Ben Carson:

If it is, you'd think he'd take lozenge. Man's an MD!! https://t.co/pUrBQoDlEe

— Rob Lowe (@RobLowe) December 16, 2015

"Donald Trump has reached a new high in support for the Republican presidential nomination in a new ABC News/Washington Post poll..."

"... drawing on GOP support for his proposed ban on Muslims along with his powerful outsider credentials. Ben Carson’s cratered, while Ted Cruz has advanced to join the double-digit club – but with Trump now unrivaled for the lead."(PDF.)



AND: Yikes, look at this:

Chuck Todd was heavily pushing the politicization of the Colorado Planned Parenthood shooting.

It permeated "Meet the Press" today. The worst part was in this segment of the interview with Ben Carson:

CHUCK TODD: There was this shooting in Colorado Springs. And overnight, there's now been reports that the shooter was yelling about baby parts. 

Yelling? I thought "no more baby parts" only appeared somewhere in the shooter's rambling, unfocused interview with the police. Todd is making it seem like an Allahu-Akbar-type battle cry.

CHUCK TODD: Planned Parenthood put out this statement, "We've seen an alarming increase in hateful rhetoric and smear campaigns against abortion providers and patients over the last few months. That environment breeds acts of violence. Americans reject the hatred and vitriol that fueled this tragedy." That was, again, from a Planned Parenthood Rocky Mountain spokesperson. Do you believe that the rhetoric got too heated on Planned Parenthood? And are you concerned that it may have motivated a mentally disturbed individual?

Carson handled the question by going utterly generic —  rejecting "any hateful rhetoric directed at anyone from any source" and recommending that we "stop trying to destroy each other" and "work constructively."

Earlier, Todd asked a similar question of Donald Trump, albeit without the inappropriate reference to "yelling."

CHUCK TODD: Now, a spokesperson for Planned Parenthood is concerned that the heated rhetoric around the Planned Parenthood debate could've had an adverse effect, basically, on this mentally disturbed individual. Do you think the rhetoric got out of hand on Planned Parenthood?

Trump stuck to his idea that the man (Robert Lewis Dear) is mentally ill. And that's when Todd brought up that "he was talking about baby parts and things like that... during his interview." Todd seemed to be trying to get Trump to back off on the political headway that anti-abortion forces have made with the undercover Planned Parenthood videos. Trump did not give him that (though he took a sideswipe at Republicans):