"So when we've met, when I came out of the plane and I said, 'Good afternoon, dear neighbor. Very good to see you in good health and to see you alive.' I think that is very neighborly."

"I think that's some kind words that we can say to each other. We're separated by the strait of Bering, though, there are two islands only between the Russian Island and the U.S. Island. They're only four kilometers apart. We are close neighbors, and it's a fact."

Said Vladimir Putin, quoted in "Here's the transcript of what Putin and Trump said in Alaska." 

I pulled that quote because it's very near the beginning and because it reminds me of "I can see Russia from my house and because "to see you alive" might be what he'd say if he had been behind the 2 assassination attempts.

But I want to read it all. I'm going to live-blog my reading of the transcript here. Sorry I missed the live event last night, but at the last second we realized we could get access to the baseball game by submitting to the plot to force us to subscribe to Apple TV. The home team extended its winning streak to 13. We're joking please, please it's too much winning, we can't take it anymore.

On to the transcript. Putin continues:

"There can be no liberty where the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person, or body of magistrates."

Wrote Montesquieu, quoted by Senator Ted Cruz in the introduction to — PDF — "THE LEGAL LIMIT: THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION’S ATTEMPTS TO EXPAND FEDERAL POWER," which is mostly a set of lists of (purported) abuses of power, with each item footnoted to a media source.

I found that via Dana Milbank's "Ted Cruz, the reckless accuser," which begins:

Sen. Ted Cruz, in a speech to fellow conservatives at the Federalist Society this week, provided detailed evidence of what the right calls the “lawlessness” of the Obama administration.

The Texas Republican, in his latest McCar­thyesque flourish, said he had a list of "76 instances of lawlessness and other abuses of power."

To his credit, Cruz made his list public.

So, basically, Dana Milbank, you old bullshitter, it wasn't McCarthyesque at all, and you knew it wasn't McCarthyesque when you wrote that it was McCarthyesque, but you just wanted to say it was McCarthyesque.

And you're calling Cruz "the reckless accuser"?!  Oh, I didn't say he was exactly the same as Joe McCarthy. I said it was McCarthyesque. Don't you know the meaning of -esque?

Yeah, it means bullshit. Joe McCarthy talked about have a list of names of individual human beings, a list he never revealed, of names that were currently unknown to the public and that he was threatening to reveal. Cruz's list was a list not of people but of things the Obama Administration has done, and these were not secret things. They were known things that Cruz had collected on a list. What is the threat of revealing the already-known things in the form of a list? And the list was made public, so it wasn't even a secret list, a list to which one could refer as a scary threat — which wouldn't even be a scary threat anyway because it wasn't a list of names of human beings whose lives would be ruined.

(Milbank goes on to question the accuracy of a few items on Cruz's list and to characterize the whole list as really about Cruz's disagreement with the "politics and policy" of the Obama administration.)