Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Bark louder, little dog.

You can’t love your country only when you win.

An almost top 10,000 blog!

đŸŽ¶ Those boots were made for mockin’ đŸŽ”

Their freedom requires your slavery.

The revolution will be supervised.

We are builders in a constant struggle with destroyers. let’s win this.

Accountability, motherfuckers.

Consistently wrong since 2002

Republicans are radicals, not conservatives.

You can’t attract Republican voters. You can only out organize them.

Nancy smash is sick of your bullshit.

When do we start airlifting the women and children out of Texas?

I did not have telepathic declassification on my 2022 bingo card.

Do not shrug your shoulders and accept the normalization of untruths.

They fucked up the fucking up of the fuckup!

Whoever he was, that guy was nuts.

The willow is too close to the house.

It may be funny to you motherfucker, but it’s not funny to me.

If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.

So it was an October Surprise A Day, like an Advent calendar but for crime.

Accused of treason; bitches about the ratings. I am in awe.

A thin legal pretext to veneer over their personal religious and political desires

A democracy can’t function when people can’t distinguish facts from lies.

You are here: Home / Politics / Trumpery / Dolt 45 / Expansive Target Open Thread: “… Executive Time!”

Expansive Target Open Thread: “… Executive Time!”

by | 211 Comments

This post is in: , , , ,


.
It’s the Oval Office Occupancy version of “… The Aristocrats!”

… Why it matters: This unusually voluminous leak gives us unprecedented visibility into how this president spends his days. The schedules, which cover nearly every working day since the midterms, show that Trump has spent around 60% of his scheduled time over the past 3 months in unstructured “Executive Time.”

– We’ve published every page of the leaked schedules in a piece that accompanies this item. To protect our source, we retyped the schedules in the same format that West Wing staff receives them….

Yeah, this is “news” only in the sense that the Very Serious Media Village Idiots have now decided it’s important to notice. I personally prefer Bess Levin’s take from back in October:

Back in January [2018], Axios obtained an inside look at Donald Trump’s schedule, revealing that the president of the United States was doing far less work than in the early days of his term, and demanding large blocks of “Executive Time,” a euphemism created by Chief of Staff John Kelly so that White House aides didn’t have to write dick around on Twitter and shout at the TV on official documents. Now, nine months later, Politico has revisited Trump’s schedule, and it turns out that the most powerful person in the world is somehow doing even less work every day than he was earlier this year. Moreover, when Trump does deign to do his job, it’s mostly in the form of signing ceremonies and shouting at aides to craft policy around something he saw on Fox & Friends…

Trump’s supporters like to claim that it’s unfair to slag on the guy for doing hardly any work at all because apparently sometimes, during his hours of playtime, he’ll hustle everyone into his office to discuss some inane thought that popped into his head. “He might read something in the paper and immediately you’d get an impromptu meeting on trade,” a person familiar with the president’s scheduling told Politico. “It’s just more impromptu than like a month in advance you have a policy time set that you’re going to work up to.” Mostly, though, it‘s devoted to media bashing from the comfort of his bed and complaining that bombs sent to prominent Democrats will hurt Republicans in the midterm elections…

History, of a kind, in the making…

Reader Interactions

211Comments

  1. 1.

    david

    Maggie Haberman ( @maggieNYT )

    A White House aide is weaponizing his schedules, which says a lot about how people in the White House feel about the man they work for

    —–

    “weaponizing his schedules”… oh, Margaret.

  4. 4.

    Baud

    Capt. Kirk: But why Nazi Germany? You studied history. You knew what the Nazis were.

    John Gill: Most efficient state… Earth ever knew

  6. 6.

    Patricia Kayden

    Yet Trump has the nerve to claim that President Obama watched basketball all day. Projection.

  7. 7.

    Mike in NC

    But the unfortunate person who has to arrange his “hair” needs four hours to do it every morning.

  9. 9.

    dmsilev

    @Jerzy Russian: She’s saying that someone, or several someones, on his staff has so little respect for him that they’d leak something like this that makes him look bad.

  10. 10.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    Dec 2017. Documents.

    “I do not watch much television,” said the president. “I know they like to say — people that don’t know me — they like to say I watch television. People with fake sources — you know, fake reporters, fake sources. But I don’t get to watch much television, primarily because of documents. I’m reading documents a lot.”

    Documents.

  15. 15.

    Geoduck

    The Shaitgibbon is also laying serious claim to “worst dressed” President, beating out even Coolidge who used to spend his vacations wearing a cartoonish movie-cowboy outfit.

  21. 21.

    Chetan Murthy

    @Baud:

    John Gill: Most efficient state
 Earth ever knew

    Interestingly, per Adam Tooze in _Wages of Destruction_, this was *absolutely* not true. By the end of the war, the accumulation of layers-and-layers-and-layers of bureaucracy was crippling the economy. If it weren’t so tragic, it’d be a funny read, those last few chapters …..

  25. 25.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @Catherine D.: So, Eleanor, are you still like a democratic drawbridge? Laying yourself down for every passing traveller?

    These days there’s not much traffic.

  26. 26.

    Plato

    Executive time. Process crimes.

    Thanks to the third rate fourth estate, these blatant lies are now normalized.

  28. 28.

    Jerzy Russian

    @dmsilev: Thanks. One way to avoid that problem is to have full schedules. Another way would be to not be such an asshole. I don’t see much progress on either of those.

  30. 30.

    Steve in the ATL

    Speaking of cats with well-deserved reputations for being assholes, my cat has figured out how to turn the page on my Kindle and does so whenever he gets bored. Or maybe he’s just a faster reader than I am.

  33. 33.

    Ben Cisco

    No football for me. Watching “The Girl In The Spider’s Web.” Damn this is some brutal stuff.

  34. 34.

    Martin

    Man, the Oxycontin scandal should be part of ever Dems message going forward – from Medicare for All to the 70% marginal rate.

    + The spoils of OxyContin allowed the Sacklers, as board members, to vote to pay themselves more than $4 billion between 2007 and 2018. Figures for individual payments during those years are sprinkled throughout the lawsuit.
    + Members of the family personally ordered Purdue to increase the sales force on a number of occasions.
    + The family was directly involved in pushing for higher—and more dangerous—doses of OxyContin.
    + For years, the McKinsey & Company consulting firm had worked with Purdue to come up with sales tactics. According to a redacted section, the consultants “had reported to Purdue on opportunities to increase prescriptions by convincing doctors that opioids provide ‘freedom’ and ‘peace of mind’ and give patients ‘the best possible chance to live a full and active life.'”
    + Board meetings for the US-based company were held in exotic and luxurious places, such as Bermuda and a castle in Ireland.
    + Members of the Sackler family worked on a secret plan codenamed “Tango,” which would have expanded Purdue’s business into addiction-treatment drugs.
    + Purdue employees actively tried to avoid the Sacklers because of their relentless and aggressive demands
    + Richard Sackler allegedly sought revenge on an insurance company for dropping coverage of OxyContin amid the epidemic of abuse.
    + The Sacklers allegedly knew about but did not report suspected cases of diversion and abuse by doctors.

    People inside the company urged management to tell insurers which doctors were probably overprescribing and they refused.

  36. 36.

    mad citizen

    I’m also glad he doesn’t work more. The less the better!

    I’m hoping some arrests are made Monday or Tuesday ahead of the State of the Union.

  38. 38.

    dmsilev

    @Ben Cisco: I’ve been going through Kingdom on Netflix. Period (17th-ish century, I think) Korean royal succession fight, plus zombies. Lots of zombies.

  40. 40.

    ChuckInAustin

    This is why I preferred Trump over Cruz. They would do the same crap, but Cruz would not fk around. Cruz is vile, but he’s not stupid.

  41. 41.

    Sebastian

    @Baud:

    You know, the quip about the Nazis at least making the trains go on time is quite incorrect.

    It was the Italian fascists who kind of made the trains go on time. Before that it was a complete disaster, after the fascists took over it was merely standard Italian bad.

    The Nazis in Germany took German bureaucracy to fucking eleven. Combine it with mega grift for their corporate financers and you had an economy that was careening out of control pretty fast. They fucked that place up pretty good pretty fast.

  44. 44.

    ??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??

    @Baud:
    I’m not sure that was strictly true. I vaguely remember reading that Hitler often had his underlings fight among each other and that Germany’s economy probably would have collapsed sometime after 1939, if not for WW2; all the looting and pillaging they did prolonged the inevitable.

    ETA: Sebastian beat me to it.

  45. 45.

    Ken

    @dmsilev: Trust Haberman’s keen journalistic senses to detect that Trump’s staff may not have the greatest loyalty or respect for him – about two years after it became obvious to the rest of us. IIRC Drezner up there has a running series of “staff talking about him like a toddler” reports. There was also that anonymous editorial with the basic message “Don’t worry, we’re secretly derailing the really stupid and horrible things Trump comes up with.”

  46. 46.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    Rogers @ kanduthedog
    Both these teams are playing like they know the winner goes to the White House.

  47. 47.

    Steve in the ATL

    @Kdaug: he’s adamant about no Dean Koontz: “I already have to share this house with a golden retriever; I don’t want to read about them too!”

  49. 49.

    ??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??

    @Chetan Murthy:
    It’s an interesting question that had Germany won WW2, if they wouldn’t have immediately collapsed afterwards. That would depend on a number of factors, including the length of the war, casualties sustained, number of manufacturing facilities destroyed, how much/many territory/people the Third Reich controlled, and many other factors too numerous to list here.

  50. 50.

    sm*t cl*de

    @Chetan Murthy:

    Interestingly, per Adam Tooze in _Wages of Destruction_, this was *absolutely* not true. By the end of the war, the accumulation of layers-and-layers-and-layers of bureaucracy was crippling the economy.

    Everyone was on the take. Much of the in-fighting between Himmler and Speer was about who controlled the parts of the war effort that gave most chance for corruption.
    Hitler believed that a spoils system, encouraging economic rivalry between members of his staff, ensured that the war economy ran efficiently. Turned out that he was wrong.

  51. 51.

    Alternative Fax, a hip hop artist from Idaho

    @Steve in the ATL: If he’s bored get him an early Elvis Cole book. Crais writes really well and Elvis has a truly bad ass cat, who of course adores Elvis’s bad ass partner in crime investigation. Great cat books.

  52. 52.

    sukabi

    Executive time is a euphemism for fucking off and or working on his personal grifts and coordinating with his boss Vlad.

  54. 54.

    ThresherK

    We’re watching Victoria and wondering what year this episode is. I said something about 1851 and The Ghost Map, and then someone on the show mentioned cholera. But now Jenny Lind shows up, and the wiki suggests that it was in 1847.

    I hope the writers did their homework.

  58. 58.

    Emma

    @Steve in the ATL: My dearly loved departed kitty would lay down across my ribs (I tend to read in bed laying on my left side), head hanging right by the Kindle screen and if I didn’t change pages fast enough, a very fast paw would cross in front of my face and swipe.
    I miss that danged annoyance every day.

  60. 60.

    Redshift

    @Jerzy Russian:

    what the fuck is she talking about?

    Maggie apparently sees reporting accurate information on Trump that makes him look bad as an “attack”, which I guess is why she avoids doing it.

  62. 62.

    Bill Arnold

    This rDT tweet several hours ago made me laugh; bold mine because it’s the most amusing parsing:

    With Caravans marching through Mexico and toward our Country, Republicans must be prepared to do whatever is necessary for STRONG Border Security. Dems do nothing. If there is no Wall, there is no Security. Human Trafficking, Drugs and Criminals of all dimensions – KEEP OUT!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 3, 2019

    Rule of Trump Projection suggests that he is confessing that the DJT administration has been infiltrated by extradimensional criminals. A turf war! (Would explain a lot. :-) (Reportedly he misspelled dimensions in a earlier version.)

  64. 64.

    sukabi

    @Bill Arnold: criminals of all dimensions….he does have his weigh-in in the next week or so. Perhaps Admiral Ronny won’t sign off on 239 this time.

  66. 66.

    ThresherK

    @ThresherK: Okay, Dr. Snow is on the scene. So 1851 it is.

    My wife also got a kick out the “both teams playing like the winner goes to the WH” line.

  69. 69.

    Steve in the ATL

    @satby: lol. I fixed the typo, so now you look nuts!

    Jaguars or Cougars would have worked better than Subarus, but this is Balloon Juice.

  73. 73.

    ??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??

    @Omnes Omnibus:
    I’m an alt-history buff what do you want? At least it wasn’t alien space bats-type counterfactual this time. It was just conversation.

  80. 80.

    Bill Arnold

    @Steeplejack:
    I’m old school; this is straightforward “honest” corruption. It’s the blatant lying that really bothers me. And the gaslighting.

  82. 82.

    Brickley Paiste

    Steeplejack:

    Christ fucking Jesus.

    I was kind of glad that Tiger seemed like he was getting his shit together after his drugs/mental collapse/adultery/etc.

    I mean, how in the world could stand within a 1 iron of that malevolent orange fucker without braining him?

  84. 84.

    Bill Arnold

    @Brickley Paiste:
    He bragged about it again today:

    Everyone is asking how Tiger played yesterday. The answer is Great! He was long, straight & putted fantastically well. He shot a 64. Tiger is back & will be winning Majors again! Not surprisingly, Jack also played really well. His putting is amazing! Jack & Tiger like each other.— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 3, 2019

  85. 85.

    guachi

    I get the feeling this is what Trump thought being President would be like every day – palling around with celebrities.

  87. 87.

    ??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??

    @satby:
    I can’t blame you for feeling that way. Things are pretty bleak. My interest in these dark timelines mostly disappeared after Trump’s election. Don’t take my interest in such scenarios as some kind of desire for them to have come to pass. I often wonder about more positive scenarios too, as in Stephen Baxter’s Voyage, where NASA astronauts go to Mars in 1986 and the Apollo Applications Program is expanded into a full space station program in preparation of the Mars mission during the 70s.

    I have a natural curiosity for alternate history and it’s in human nature to wonder what would have happened if this one thing changed.

  88. 88.

    Jay

    @Baud:

    Nope, you just need to read the book.

    As an example, German tanks were overdesigned, expensive and used far more precious steel and petroleum products that they needed to. As they went down the production line, constant changes and upgrades were added to the point that in order to replace a damaged transmission with one from a dead or scrapped tank, you needed a full machine shop and a team of skilled engineers.

    The Soviet Union had a steel industry 1/5th the size of Germany’s and yet they massively out produced Germany and with better quality steel, through out the entire war.

    Germany was on track to pass France economically in 1939, ( mostly because of arms production, seizure of Austria, large segments of Czechoslovakia),

    And yet, by 1945, Germany as it was, ceased to exist, bankrupted, bombed out and starving.

    That’s not efficient.

  89. 89.

    Bill Arnold

    @Brickley Paiste:
    FWIW: Tiger Woods got grilled about his relationship with Trump
    (Aug. 27, 2018)

    “Well, I’ve known Donald for a number of years,” Woods said. “We’ve played golf together. We’ve had dinner together. I’ve known him pre-presidency and obviously during his presidency.”
    …
    “He’s the President of the United States. You have to respect the office. No matter who is in the office, you may like, dislike personality or the politics, but we all must respect the office.”

    edit: he’s played with BObama as well:
    Life is good for President Obama, who teed it up with two GOATs over the holiday weekend

  90. 90.

    hitchhiker

    I don’t think I’ll ever get over Maggie effing Haberman’s bizarre behavior during this horrible era.

    She knew exactly what trump was, having covered him in NYC for years as 3rd rate celebrity grifter who liked to see his own name in the papers. She knew he wasn’t fit for office. She knew he was a liar and a creep.

    And yet she has behaved right from the jump as if he were just any other Republican. She didn’t say publicly that he couldn’t be trusted or that he’s a lazy asshole, or that he doesn’t understand what shame is, or that he’s happily pig ignorant about how the government works.

    She just went right on typing her stories, like a reporter in a burning building filing news about the shape of the windows on the 2nd floor. There’s a youtube clip of her talking about being invited to a meeting before the campaign that included trump & people like Corey Lewandowski and Ivanka and Bannon, where they talked about him as a candidate.

    At that moment, she should have said, “You. are. all. insane.” and left the building. Then she could have spent the campaign publishing stories about the burning building that is trump, and, sadly, now also our government.

    Instead here she is, squeaking stupidly about how someone in his administration leaked his schedule and that means they disrespect him.

    What a dumb joke. What a disgrace.

  91. 91.

    ??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??

    @Bill Arnold:

    “He’s the President of the United States. You have to respect the office. No matter who is in the office, you may like, dislike personality or the politics, but we all must respect the office.”

    Oh christ. What weak tea! Trump isn’t the office, he’s just the occupant, Tiger. They’re two different things.

  99. 99.

    Jay

    @hitchhiker:

    “And yet she has behaved right from the jump as if he were just any other Republican. She didn’t say publicly that he couldn’t be trusted or that he’s a lazy asshole, or that he doesn’t understand what shame is, or that he’s happily pig ignorant about how the government works.”

    Which is these days, almost every existing ReThug.

  100. 100.

    Bill Arnold

    @Brickley Paiste:
    @??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??:
    I linked the business insider piece because it mentioned the weak tea (“non-compliment”) and Trump’s response, which should be a lesson:

    The Fake News Media worked hard to get Tiger Woods to say something that he didn’t want to say. Tiger wouldn’t play the game – he is very smart. More importantly, he is playing great golf again!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 27, 2018

    The lesson is that weak tea doesn’t work with DJT.

  101. 101.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    well…. I watched the whole thing

    and Brady says no way he retires. He’ll quit when he breaks a hip

  102. 102.

    Sebastian

    @Jay:

    Correct. It helps to see Nazi Germany as a gigantic corporate raid. Central to the rise of Hitler were the corporate financiers of the regime, most notably the cartel IG Farben.

    A series of “acquisitions” kept the coffers filled and supplied enough cash for the grift. More or less in order:

    Sudetendeutschland
    Austria
    Poland
    Belgium
    Netherlands
    France
    Norway
    Ukraine

    Ukraine is where it all stopped. Stalingrad was the end of that run. St Petersburg was besieged and not conquered, Moscow was a dud, too.

    Plan B, capturing Iraq, ended in El Alamein.

    Stalingrad, the Battle of Kursk, and the loss of Paulus’ 6th Army was what brought the whole fucking shitshow down. Never forget that whole fucking regime was propped up by the theft of wealth. Confiscation of Jewish property, pillaging of treasuries, stealing everything that wasn’t nailed down, and in many cases even that. These fuckers stole the gold teeth out of people’s mouths, resold their glasses and coats, even hair they cut of women.

    Pieces of shit, all of them.

  103. 103.

    TS (the original)

    And the Gov of Virginia is front page news for days and days and days – while anything to do with this failed administration lasts less than 24 hours

  104. 104.

    West of the Rockies

    Does Bellichek ever smile? He is a miserable looking guy for someone who has achieved success and fortune.

  105. 105.

    zhena gogolia

    @ThresherK:

    They never do their homework! I’ve learned not to consult Wikipedia after any episode of Victoria. It leads to deep confusion and disappointment.

  108. 108.

    Steve in the ATL

    @Sebastian:

    Central to the rise of Hitler were the corporate financiers of the regime, most notably the cartel IG Farben.

    And let’s not forget Senator Prescott Bush (R-CT), who financed the nazi war machine WHILE WE WERE AT WAR WITH THEM.

    The trump grift family is amateur hour compared to the Bush crime family.

  115. 115.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @zhena gogolia: I enjoyed the hell out of HBO’s Rome. I knew I wasn’t watching a documentary, but I was still mildly disappointed when I learned Atia of the Julii was a boringly respectable Roman matron.

  116. 116.

    Jay

    @Sebastian:

    Adam Toonze (sp) notes that the Nazi’s Finance Ministry manipulated the value of the Reichsmark based on what they wanted that month, imports, exports or wage and price controls to the point that by 1936, almost all German trade was based on forms of a Barter system.

    The Nazi’s destroyed the Reichsmark as a currency outside of Germany.

  121. 121.

    Amir Khalid

    @??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??:
    Could the Third Reich have won WWII? I very much doubt it. They were at a disadvantage in natural resources, and manufacturing capacity once the US joined the Allies; and they didn’t have enough warm bodies to keep the war effort going against enemies who outnumbered them. Of their Axis partners, Japan was concentrating on Asia and Italy was just not up to it.

  122. 122.

    Alternative Fax, a hip hop artist from Idaho

    @Steve in the ATL: The Orange Grift family is amateur hour compared to everyone and everything, but it’s a shonda that you never read about the Bush Crime Family and Sen. Prescott Bush. Our Father Who (until recently) Art in Houston didn’t get his talent for financing war machines from the milkman.

    @Steve in the ATL: You are such a worrier. I would never.

  123. 123.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    I do enjoy seeing Bill-O get flame-broiled on twitter dot com

    Bill O’Reilly @ BillOReilly
    The Burger King spot featuring deceased Andy Warhol was terrible. And it cost 5 million dollars. More of that and I might go socialist.

    Simon Maloy @ SimonMaloy
    come on man that’s just 1/6th of a sexual harassment settlement

  124. 124.

    ??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??

    @zhena gogolia:
    Cameron’s Titanic has similar problems. He liked to go with the myths of the sinking rather than some first hand accounts. A big glaring example of this was the ship’s band playing “Nearer My God to Thee” while the ship was sinking. A passenger who survived later said that probably never happened, as he would have remembered such a morbid and inappropriate song being played. But James Cameron thought it would make for a better story I guess.

    If I could have written, produced, and directed Titanic, I wouldn’t have focused on a sappy romance story. I would have shown the stories of the various members of the crew, from the Bridge officers to the brave engineers that kept Titanic’s lights on for as long as possible, to potentially a third class family. Ismay and other VIPs would make an appearance as well.

  125. 125.

    J R in WV

    @hitchhiker:

    I don’t think I’ll ever get over Maggie effing Haberman’s bizarre behavior during this horrible era….

    What don’t you understand about being paid to do something?

    M. Haberman’s wealthy upbringing in NYC was paid for by a PR firm that paid her family to make Trump look better to the world at large — this was a challenge because Trump has been an asshole since he was sent away to military school.

    But she grew up in an environment where making an ass like Trump look good was how you afforded private school for little Maggie, as well as the private college, the trips abroad, being wealthy in Manhattan.

    Now you expect her to attack the source of her family’s wealth? Her mother’s career? Not gonna happen, never going to happen. The real problem is that the NYT assigned her to cover her family’s income stream — as if they expected Ms Haberman to be objective, penetrating to the core of Trump as he exists. As IF!!

    She is paid to do exactly what she is doing. The NY Times wants her to masturbate Trump on their front page at least once a week, more often if she can manage to type two day a week. And they pay her handsomely for her public masturbation of Trump — what’s the word for that, again? I misremember… oh! Yeah, prostitute, that’s the word I’m looking for. That’s what MS Haberman is doing.

  128. 128.

    Sebastian

    @Steve in the ATL:

    Damn right. And that was AFTER IG Farben almost destroyed the US chemical industry by proce dumping Aspirin. Alka Seltzer, anyone?

    When Marx said capitalists would sell you the rope with which they will be hung, that’s the kind of people he was referring to. Other notable idiots: Rolls Royce who sold Germany engines even though it was clear the Nazis would reverse engineer them and build engines for their bombers. Which were then used to bomb England to rubble.

    Geniuses, all of them.

  129. 129.

    ThresherK

    @zhena gogolia: Actually, I messed up. The Ghost Map outbreak was in 1854, not (as I said) 1851. The writers have a better percentage right than I do.

    And this episode had a cameo by Florence Nightingale, who actually was in a nearby hospital treating patients of this outbreak. (This was before she became “Florence Nightingale” famous during the Crimean War.).)

  130. 130.

    Jay

    @??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??:

    Some of the best history, in history is occuring now, by a whole new generation of historians.

    As an example:

    Claiming the Land
    Rhondale Press.

    “This trailblazing history of early British Columbia focuses on a single year, 1858, the year of the Fraser River gold rush — the third great mass migration of gold seekers after the Californian and Australian rushes in search of a new El Dorado. Marshall’s history becomes an adventure, prospecting the rich pay streaks of British Columbia’s “founding” event and the gold fever that gripped populations all along the Pacific Slope. Marshall unsettles many of our most taken-for-granted assumptions: he shows how foreign miner-militias crossed the 49th parallel, taking the law into their own hands, and conducting extermination campaigns against Indigenous peoples while forcibly claiming the land. Drawing on new evidence, Marshall explores the three principal cultures of the goldfields — those of the fur trade (both Native and the Hudson’s Bay Company), Californian, and British world views. The year 1858 was a year of chaos unlike any other in British Columbia and American Pacific Northwest history. It produced not only violence but the formal inauguration of colonialism, Native reserves and, ultimately, the expansion of Canada to the Pacific Slope. Among the haunting legacies of this rush are the cryptic place names that remain — such as American Creek, Texas Bar, Boston Bar, and New York Bar — while the unresolved question of Indigenous sovereignty continues to claim the land.”

    That ain’t the history that anybody was taught.

    There’s a crap load of historians out there who are flipping history by removing all the whitewashing and the “Winners” pov.

  132. 132.

    Sebastian

    @Amir Khalid:

    Stalingrad is where the war was lost. Stalin refused to have the city named after him fall, Russian soldiers who retreated were shot on the spot and so they fought until the bitter end. There is no saying what would have happened had the 6th Army broken through in time and captured the oil fields.

    For starters, Rommel wouldn’t have dicked around in North Africa that long and the Germans would have still had their 6th Army with close to 1.5m soldiers.

  133. 133.

    Inventor

    @Jim, Foolish Literalist: What they did get right was the
    art direction and the sense of the times. The colorful brick buildings, (Rome wasn’t marble until Augustus) the religion(s), the role of slavery in society, and other things made the series good even without a strictly factual script.

  134. 134.

    Mnemosyne

    @Sebastian:

    Never forget that whole fucking regime was propped up by the theft of wealth.

    This. One of the reasons I’m constantly recommending The Nazis: A Warning from History is that Browning and his co-author emphasize that the Nazi regime was built on slavery and theft, and that’s what kept it running. When they had exhausted those stolen resources, they didn’t have anything left to fight with.

  135. 135.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @Inventor: I loved the news reader. I can’t remember the title, but I loved the gesturing, and the ads “real Roman bread, made by real Romans”

  136. 136.

    ??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??

    @Mnemosyne:

    Nazi regime was built on slavery and theft, and that’s what kept it running.

    That sounds disturbingly familiar. Apparently, Germans were also were inspired by America’s Manifest Destiny. That’s where Lebanstraum came from.

  138. 138.

    ??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??

    @Jay:
    Wow. That sounds really good! I’ll have to look into my local library and borrow it. Thanks for the rec!

  139. 139.

    Geoduck

    @Amir Khalid: It might depend on your definition of “win”. If Hitler had concentrated all his efforts on defeating and occupying England instead of charging into Russia, they might have conquered all of Western Europe. The whole world? No.

  140. 140.

    Jay

    @Sebastian:

    Actually, the Nazi’s lost the war when they invaded Poland.

    Because Nazi Germany was built on slavery and looting, rather than building, their earlier aquisitions became a drag on the economy, once they had been looted, rather than assets.

    Vulture Capitalism.

  141. 141.

    ??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??

    @Jim, Foolish Literalist:
    That reminds me of the Clemson Tigers going to the WH last month and the fast food junk he served. It will never cease to amaze me the depths people will go to defend Trump. One would think it uncontroversial to criticize Trump over his choice of food for the banquet. But no!

    He was clearly being cheap. He has a hotel a few miles away that has catering. If you wanted to have burgers and fries fine! Restaurant fries and burgers are miles ahead of McDonald’s and the like. The shutdown had been going on nearly a month at that point, I believe. Trump had ample time to arrange this, such as the security vetting any of his DC Hotel staff might have to go through to work in the WH kitchens.

  142. 142.

    Mnemosyne

    @Jay:

    The majority of the native population of California was murdered not by Spanish missionaries in the 1500s, but by miners in the 1840s Gold Rush.

    And yet the missions get most of the blame in popular history.

  144. 144.

    ??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??

    @Mnemosyne:
    Huh. Didn’t know that. History becomes harder to game out due to all the butterflies that start flapping their wings, the further along the TL you go from the point of divergence. The British Empire would have probably still been terrible anyway, human rights wise.

  146. 146.

    Jeffro

    Ok, we’re past Christmas and New Year’s, we’re past the (barf) Super Bowl…can we have Muellermas now, plz?

  147. 147.

    ??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??

    @zhena gogolia:
    I think it was tbh. Accounts often conflicted among survivors. Some had said that the ship had gone down in one piece, while others claimed it snapped in two. It wasn’t until 1985 when Robert Ballard rediscovered Titanic that the latter were proven correct.

  148. 148.

    ??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??

    @Jeffro:
    Mueller Claus doesn’t love us that much. But perhaps with time it will come. Keep the faith.

  150. 150.

    Jay

    @Mnemosyne:

    Polular History is written to ease the consience and hide the guilt of the winners and cast them blameless.

    It’s about as accurate as any Harlequin Romance is a how to book.

  151. 151.

    Villago Delenda Est

    No wonder the vermin of the Village give Donald a pass on just about everything; he’s as lazy as they are.

    My nym, over and over again.

    Wipe them out. All of them.

  154. 154.

    hervevillechaizelounge

    @J R in WV:

    Trump’s election was important for her career—-Haberman didn’t have a decades-long relationship with Cruz or Rubio. She wouldn’t have had the same access in their administrations, she may not have gotten the sweet book deal.

    Nothing Trump does is going to negatively impact wealthy white women. There was no downside for her in his election. She had a serious financial incentive to normalize him; Hillary was never going to call her up for girl talk.

  156. 156.

    smintheus

    @Inventor: Rome wasn’t a city of brick (faced concrete) at the time of Augustus. The structural cores of buildings ca. 100-30 BC were generally made of opus reticulatum and then faced in various ways, typically in something stucco like. Brick-faced concrete (also covered up with stucco or thin stone veneers) didn’t even begin to be used commonly until Augustus was already in power. It only becomes normal around the time of Nero. The earliest generation of brick-faced concrete (Vitruvius’ day) seems to have used unfired mud brick.

    Just in case it matters.

  157. 157.

    ??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??

    @Sebastian:

    These fuckers stole the gold teeth out of people’s mouths, resold their glasses and coats, even hair they cut of women.

    Pieces of shit, all of them.

    Yup. The Nazi Reichsbank used the fictional name “Max Heiliger” to:

    establish bank accounts to launder valuables stolen from those killed in the Nazi system of concentration camps and extermination camps.

    It was apparently a sick, cynical joke, as “Heiliger” translates to “holy” as well as “saint”.

  158. 158.

    Doug R

    @Ben Cisco:

    No football for me. Watching “The Girl In The Spider’s Web.” Damn this is some brutal stuff.

    The Swedish movies are so well made, it feels pointless to make the English ones. Not that I usually mind anything Daniel Craig is in, but it didn’t add anything.
    Did they make a version of “Spider’s Web” in Swedish already?

  159. 159.

    ??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??

    @Doug R:

    Norway’s are pretty good too. I saw a Norwegian disaster movie, The Quake about Oslo getting destroyed in an earthquake. It’s a sequel to the movie, The Wave.

  160. 160.

    J R in WV

    Raining again here in the foothills of the Dragoon Mountains.

    While we were building here, that first winter, we had fierce mixtures of snow, sleet and freezing rain, and temps down to zero even down in the valley 1500 feet lower. We worked for 3 months, January-March. After that first year it was never that bad again (so far!).

    It’s interesting to hear the rain on the roof, and for the lights in the distance to vanish. Being up here all alone is also pretty interesting, and the rain enhances that feeling. Going to build a little fire now, glad I brought some firewood in before this evening rain picked up.

    By the time I got home (here on the hill) the afternoon rain had pretty much evaporated. Now it’s occasional showers moving over the mountain range in the dark… pretty cool, new to me.

  161. 161.

    Mnemosyne

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    Absolutely. And I’m not saying that the missions didn’t have a bad effect on California’s native populations — estimates are usually that about 1/3rd of the population died because of the Spanish.

    But it was the Gold Rush genocide that came close to wiping them out, not the Spanish missions.

  162. 162.

    SFAW

    @Villago Delenda Est:

    My nym, over and over again.

    After reading some MAGAt responses to a tweet about Traitor-in-Chief’s latest lies and smear about Speaker Pelosi, I’m thinking the definition of “Villago” needs to be expanded to include all the fucking morons who still idolize that Fuckhead. I read their willful insanity, and I want them to suffer the same fate as the Husnock.

  164. 164.

    jl

    Time that is officially labeled ‘executive time’ accounts for 60 percent. But then there are lunch and events.
    Lets assume that between zero and one half of Trump’s lunches are working lunches. Trump’s event time is ceremonial, so he is not studying or discussing issues with his staff.
    So, actually, Trump only spends between 10 and 12 hours actually working on how to solve the country’s problems.

    Whether that is a good or a bad or irrelevant issue is above my pay grade.

    And apologies if another commenter made this point, but I don’t have time to go over a hundred comments in detail right now.

    Edit: my real best guess is that Trump only works when his staff forces him to during meetings, so that makes about 6 hours 15 minutes per week. Plus an hour or so he spends talking with his country club cronies on the phone, if you want to call that work.

  166. 166.

    James E Powell

    @hitchhiker:

    I completely despise Haberman and every other courtier who slagged Hillary Clinton while promoting and protecting Trump. But the real hatred has to be reserved for the NYT and the institutions that hired these people and told them to do what they did. That’s where the evil is. That’s the wrong we need to right.

  167. 167.

    Sebastian

    @??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??:

    Want something more disturbing? The Nazi’s idea of racial superiority was inspired by the American treatment of African Americans and “scientific” justification of their racial inferiority.

    Want to know something really fucked up? The books the Nazis burned were not Jewish books. They were studies about gender and sexes, about transgender studies, etc. Those fuckers destroyed the entire body of science and threw us back at least 50-70 years.

  168. 168.

    Achrachno

    @sm*t cl*de: “Hitler believed that a spoils system, encouraging economic rivalry between members of his staff, ensured that the war economy ran efficiently. Turned out that he was wrong.”

    Sounds like the way Eddie Lampert ran Sears and Kmart the past several years. Luckily he has no airforce.

  169. 169.

    SFAW

    @James E Powell:

    But the real hatred has to be reserved for the NYT and the institutions that hired these people and told them to do what they did. That’s where the evil is. That’s the wrong we need to right.

    But-but-but Pinche Sulzberger “interviewed” the Traitor-in-Chief last week, and held his feet to the fire, so it’s all good. And it more than makes up for any “sub-optimal reportage” — that only the LIE-berals are upset about — ftrom 2016.

  170. 170.

    Ohio Mom

    @SWMBO: Easter is sorta fixed: the first Sunday after the first full moon after the Spring Equinox. A lot of moving parts that need to be all lined up. So yes, like Mueller Claus.

  171. 171.

    SFAW

    @Achrachno:

    Fast Eddie probably read “The Soul of a New Machine,” and figured “Hey, I can make the company as successful as Data General!”

    Actually, I doubt he ever cared about making it successful, only about how to enrich himself.

  172. 172.

    catclub

    @Martin: The real crime is that pretty much everything they did was legal.
    And once they made big donations to museums, even more so.

  174. 174.

    SFAW

    @Ohio Mom:

    Easter is sorta fixed: the first Sunday after the first full moon after the Spring Equinox.

    And then if the Easter Bunny sees his shadow, we have six more weeks of Winter? If that how it goes?

  175. 175.

    catclub

    @jl:

    So, actually, Trump only spends between 10 and 12 hours actually working on how to solve the country’s problems.

    per week, per month, or per year?

  177. 177.

    SFAW

    @Steve in the ATL:

    six more weeks of omelettes

    Eggs-cellent idea. Around Easter, I make omelettes using Cadbury free-range eggs.

    ETA: The creme makes them extra-fluffy. Or something.

  186. 186.

    TriassicSands

    Uh, oh. This proves that a properly motivated (i.e., lazy POS) president can ruin the country working part-time. Does that mean government is unnecessary? Fox News wants to know.

  187. 187.

    jl

    @Mnemosyne: Missions didn’t come to California until the mid 18th century, so you are probably thinking of New Mexico for early missions. And the CA Gold Rush started in 1848, and went through the 1850s.

    I think there is plenty of blame for the genocide of California Natives to go around. Disease and social disruption during the mission period did a lot of damage in the 1800s to 1830s as contact with whites rapidly increased. The anglo whites during the California Republic and early statehood had to treat the Hispanic Californios well because anglo whites needed their cooperation for the statehood project to work, but the anglos came down hard on Native Americans. Slavery, bounty hunting of humans, kidnapping children, policies like that were sanctioned by the state government. It was horrendous, and lasted until the 1870s, not just miners, but ranchers, farmers, and professional bounty hunter mass murderers and kidnappers did horrendous damage, in addition to disease and social disruption.

    That is why I think it is very fair to call my home state of California one of the slave states, we just enslaved and murdered a different group.

    After the CA Natives were almost exterminated, the anglo whites when after the Hispanics in the second state constitution of 1878.

  188. 188.

    ??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??

    @debbie:
    I actually got to read that. Checked it out after Trump’s “election”. It was pretty good until the end, where history magically went back to the original timeline after (probably) no lend-lease to the Allies for like a year and a half, with WW2 ending more or less normally.

  192. 192.

    Jay

    @Brickley Paiste:

    Memosyne amended it to:

    “But it was the Gold Rush genocide that came close to wiping them out, not the Spanish missions.”

    Which your wiki link supports.

  193. 193.

    ??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??

    @Mnemosyne:
    I built a Roman aqueduct out of clay for Spanish class once in HS. It was modeled after the Aqueduct of Segovia, I think.

  195. 195.

    Jay

    @Brickley Paiste:

    Memosyne amended it to:

    “But it was the Gold Rush genocide that came close to wiping them out, not the Spanish missions.”

    Which your wiki link supports.

  198. 198.

    Mary G

    @hervevillechaizelounge: Maggie always gets a mite pissy when some other outlet comes up with a scoop like these schedules showing 60% executive time. She probably already had them, was saving them for her book, then whoever gave them to her got pissed off that she was sitting on them and took another copy to Axios.

  200. 200.

    H.E.Wolf

    @??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??:

    I have a natural curiosity for alternate history

    I have some SF alternate-history classics to recommend to you! I read them all in my teens, which was approximately the same era in which “The Lion In Winter” is set, and some of the novels hold up better than others – but these are all authors who have a place in American science fiction.

    The Female Man, by Joanna Russ (2 alternate timelines intersecting with 1970s USA)

    Native Tongue, by Suzette Haden Elgin (alternate future US history)

    The Dragon Waiting, by John M. Ford (alternate European history, late 1400s, Richard III makes an appearance; there’s a concordance online which is very helpful)

    The Phoenix and the Mirror, by Avram Davidson (alternate ancient Roman history, with alchemy)

    If This Goes On, by Robert Heinlein (alt. US history; religious dictatorship, with a Sekrit Society organizing the resistance)

    Those 5 authors run the gamut in terms of writing style, and if I had to pick one to start with, I’d pick Joanna Russ. She has a mordant sense of humor.

  202. 202.

    LosGatosCA

    Likely redundant –

    When you’ve outsourced the foreign policy to Putin and domestic policy to Faux News – how much work is there left?

    Picking which Trump property to golf at this week? Making sure Steven Miller mistypes the right words on Twitter?

  206. 206.

    West of the Rockies

    I was hoping for a fresh thread to ask all resident nerds… Does anyone find that Star Trek Discovery is maybe trying to weave too many stories together at once?

    In the episode I watched tonight, there are references to possibly mentally ill Spock, a return of the multi-tribe Klingon empire (complete with seeming decapitation by a female of “her man” and their infant son), a return of the parallel universe Empress Georgiou, an interdimensional ghost spore (captured or destroyed by an interdimensional ghost spore eradicator the ship just happened to have on hand), and anothe4 appearance by the weird winged angel thing.

    It is crazy complex to me. I WANT to love it. I do not.

  208. 208.

    SFAW

    @Luthe:

    I read that as “six more weeks of Wilmer” and momentarily had a blech.

    I say this with love (figuratively speaking): you need help.

  210. 210.

    NotMax

    @West of the Rockies

    Wouldn’t know. As a fan of Trek since the beginning, watched the free first episode which I found dismally designed, sloppily executed and so far removed from the ethos and innate optimism of what once was ST that gave up on it right then and there. It might or might not since have turned out to be a halfway decent science fiction show under some other name, but it sure isn’t Star Trek.

Comments are closed.