Good morning.
Sunday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of thirty-five. Sunrise is 6:53 AM and sunset 4:27 PM, for 9h 34m 41s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 1.2% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}three hundred seventy-fifth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
On this day in 1863, Pres. Lincoln delivers his Gettysburg Address.
Recommended for reading in full —
Alice Lloyd writes in Rug Money how Paul Manafort likely laundered money:
One of the more puzzling aspects of Paul Manafort’s indictment for conspiracy, money laundering and other charges was the line items detailing the he epic sums he reported spending from Cyprus-based accounts on antique rugs in Northern Virginia. There’s really no reasonable way, THE WEEKLY STANDARD learned at the time, to spend $1 million on antique carpets in Alexandria. But we have since learned, from Treasury and IRS agents, a geopolitical expert with family ties to the rug business, and two sources versed in the Iranian business world, that we were far from the first to give a second thought to the way money moves through rug shops.
An intelligence analyst and Middle East expert who recently approached TWS with his story grew up wondering exactly that: Michael Nayebi-Oskoui, a consultant for global businesses, talked candidly about his Persian-Jewish grandmother’s mysterious import-export business. “To this day, I can never tell you what my grandma’s business actually was—moving goods through places, funds come back and forth,” he reflected.
And that, he believes, is where the rug merchants come in: “The intrinsic value of these rugs is bupkis,” he said. “There’s no legal or functional tool for the IRS to judge their value.” Consequently, “if you needed someone to make a deal with you, to move some money around, this is a great way of doing it.”
(Robin Givhan, a fashion columnist at the Washington Post, wrote recently of Manafort that he is a ‘glossy, glossy man.’ See Paul Manafort’s wardrobe tells you all you need to know about power and style in the 1980s. When I first read her assessment, finding it only because I caught Manafort’s name in her title, I mistakenly thought that a discussion of Manafort’s clothing trivialized his connections to Russians and pro-Russian oligarchs & politicians in Ukraine. Oh, no: Givhan has a powerful insight into men like him: “Manafort was not dressing like a man who needs your applause. He was dressing like a man who didn’t think he needed anything at all. At least from you. He looked like someone who considered himself above everything. A man who makes things happen. A man who glides through life.” Indeed.)
Jack Shafer writes of Week 26: Donald Jr. and WikiLeaks Talk Dirty:
If we’ve learned anything from months of scandal reporting, the Russians set their sights on two types of people wandering the halls of Trump Tower. There were the self-promoters like Michael Flynn and Paul Manafort who they knew would cooperate based on direct or potential payouts. But the Russians also shopped a second group of Tower denizens, the over-their-heads strivers often compared to the hapless Fredo Corleone. These Fredos—George Papadopoulos and Carter Page—attracted Russian agents like magnets, and were easily manipulated by direct appeals to their stooped egos.
But of all the Fredos occupying Trump world, perhaps Donald Trump Jr. proved to be the easiest mark for the Russians. First, Junior embraced a gaggle of suspicious Russians for a June 2016 meeting in his Trump Tower office on the pretext that they possessed incriminating dirt on Hillary Clinton. Then, as we learned this week from the Atlantic’s Julia Ioffe, Junior became their boy when WikiLeaks tweeted some DMs at him in the early fall of 2016. The DMs, perhaps authored by Julian Assange himself, connect Junior directly to the Russian thing: U.S. intelligence believes WikiLeaks acted as Russia’s proxy in the 2016 distribution of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s emails….
(Variously greedy, ignorant, and stupid men, so easily given to corruption.)
Jim Wallis writes A year into Trump’s presidency, Christians are facing a spiritual reckoning:
Many traditions in the history of Christianity have attempted to combat and correct the worship of three things: money, sex and power. Catholic orders have for centuries required “poverty, chastity, and obedience” as disciplines to counter these three idols. Other traditions, especially among Anabaptists in the Reformation, Pentecostals and revival movements down through the years have spoken the language of simplicity in living, integrity in relationships and servanthood in leadership. All of our church renewal traditions have tried to provide authentic and more life-giving alternatives to the worship of money, sex and power — which can be understood and used in healthy ways when they are not given primacy in one’s life.
President Trump is an ultimate and consummate worshiper of money, sex and power. American Christians have not really reckoned with the climate he has created in our country and the spiritual obligation we have to repair it. As a result, the soul of our nation and the integrity of the Christian faith are at risk.
As Abraham Lincoln, a politician with a deep knowledge of Christianity, stated in his first inaugural address, political action can, undertaken rightly, appeal to the “better angels of our nature.” But political action undertaken badly, and reckless inaction, can mislead and dispirit us — and appeal to our worst demons, such as greed, fear, bigotry and resentment, which are never far below the surface.
Trump’s adulation of money and his love for lavish ostentation (he covers everything in gold) are the literal worship of wealth by someone who believes that his possessions belong only to himself, instead of that everything belongs to God and we are its stewards. In 2011, before his foray into politics, Trump said, “Part of the beauty of me is that I’m very rich.” And in his 2015 speech announcing his candidacy for president, he said: “I’m really rich. .?.?. And by the way, I’m not even saying that in a braggadocio — that’s the kind of mind-set, that’s the kind of thinking you need for this country.” Later, during the campaign, Trump suggested that our country must “be wealthy in order to be great”….
(There’s nothing in either Trump’s words or actions that suggests an understanding of Christian theology, any other theology, or even a secular philosophy of any kind. He has views, to be sure, and they may be crafted into a ideology, but it’s a crude, gutter ideology.)
The Rev. Dr. William Barber writes of The unbearable hypocrisy of Roy Moore’s Christian rhetoric (“This isn’t Christianity, it’s an extreme form of Republican religionism”):
A disturbing pattern has emerged since the Washington Post first reported that four women accused Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore of offenses ranging from the creepy to the criminal. People in Gadsden, Alabama, where Moore worked in the District Attorney’s office three decades ago, say it was “common knowledge” that Moore pursued teenagers when he was in his 30s. Locals told the New Yorker that they recall being told than the local mall banned Moore for the same reason.
Accusations of criminal assault are difficult to prove in court and the statute of limitations in these cases has since passed. But Republicans outside of Alabama have started to back away from Moore following the allegations; They have chosen to believe the accusers.
Moore’s base, on the other hand, continues to support him despite the evidence. For many of them, this is matter of faith. Jerome Cox, the pastor of Greenwood Baptist Church in Prattville, Alabama, told NBC News he would be supporting Moore because “he’s done a lot of good for the state of Alabama… Everything else is for the Lord to sort out.”
This is not Christianity. Rather, it is an extreme Republican religionism that stands by party and regressive policy no matter what. It’s not the gospel of Christ, but a gospel of greed. It is the religion of racism and lies, not the religion of redemption and love….
As well as he knows his Bible, Roy Moore never quotes from the more than 2,000 verses that exhort us to care for the poor, the sick, and the stranger in our midst. He has apparently overlooked the prophet Isaiah, who said to men like Moore in his own day: “Doom to you who legislate evil, who make laws that make victims — laws that make misery for the poor, that rob the destitute of their dignity, exploiting defenseless widows, taking advantage of homeless children” (Is.10:1-4)….
(A better understanding will endure long after Moore and Trump.)
One of America’s great and beautiful holidays draws close, and over the next few days I’ll post about Thanksgiving meals (where the meal is an outward expression of an inner reflection of gratitude. For today, here’s a recipe for Simple Roast Turkey:
