Good morning.
Friday in Whitewater will be party cloudy with a high of nine. Sunrise is 7:25 AM and sunset is 4:36 PM, for 9h 10m 43s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 83% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}four hundred twenty-first day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
On this day in 1855, King Camp Gillette is born: “On this date King Camp Gillette was born in Fond du Lac. He worked for many years as a traveling salesman. After much experimentation, he developed a disposable steel blade and razor. He established the Gillette Safety Razor Company in 1901. Sales for his product skyrocketed. Gillette remained president of his company until 1931 and was a director until his death the following year.”
Recommended for reading in full —
James Fallows writes It’s Been an Open Secret All Along (“The scandal of Michael Wolff’s new book isn’t its salacious details—it’s that everyone in Washington has known its key themes, and refused to act”):
The details in Michael Wolff’s new book Fire and Fury make it unforgettable, and potentially historic. We’ll see how many of them fully stand up, and in what particulars, but even at a heavy discount, it’s a remarkable tale.
But what Wolff is describing is an open secret.
Based on the excerpts now available, Fire and Fury presents a man in the White House who is profoundly ignorant of politics, policy, and anything resembling the substance of perhaps the world’s most demanding job. He is temperamentally unstable. Most of what he says in public is at odds with provable fact, from “biggest inaugural crowd in history” onward. Whether he is aware of it or not, much of what he asserts is a lie. His functional vocabulary is markedly smaller than it was 20 years ago; the oldest person ever to begin service in the White House, he is increasingly prone to repeat anecdotes and phrases. He is aswirl in foreign and financial complications. He has ignored countless norms of modern governance, from the expectation of financial disclosure to the importance of remaining separate from law-enforcement activities. He relies on immediate family members to an unusual degree; he has an exceptionally thin roster of experienced advisers and assistants; his White House staff operations have more in common with an episode of The Apprentice than with any real-world counterpart. He has a shallower reserve of historical or functional information than previous presidents, and a more restricted supply of ongoing information than many citizens. He views all events through the prism of whether they make him look strong and famous, and thus he is laughably susceptible to flattering treatment from the likes of Putin and Xi Jinping abroad or courtiers at home.
And, as Wolff emphasizes, everyone around him considers him unfit for the duties of this office….
Joe Scarborough writes I asked Trump a blunt question: Do you read?:
Mika Brzezinski and I had a tense meeting with Trump following what I considered to be a bumbling debate performance in September 2015. I asked the candidate a blunt question.
“Can you read?”
Awkward silence.
“I’m serious, Donald. Do you read?” I continued. “If someone wrote you a one-page paper on a policy, could you read it?”
Taken aback, Trump quietly responded that he could while holding up a Bible given to him by his mother. He then joked that he read it all the time.
I am apparently not the only one who has questioned the president’s ability to focus on the written word. “Trump didn’t read,” Wolff writes. “He didn’t really even skim. If it was print, it might as well not exist. Some believed that for all practical purposes he was no more than semiliterate. Others concluded that he didn’t read because he didn’t have to …. He was postliterate — total television.” But “Fire and Fury” reveals that White House staff and Cabinet members believed Trump’s intellectual challenges went well beyond having a limited reading list: Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin called him an “idiot,” Cohn dismissed him as “dumb,” national security adviser H.R. McMaster considered him a “dope,” and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson infamously concluded that the commander in chief was a “moron”….
(There are problems either of character or cognition that might make reading difficult.)
Brian Stelter writes This is bigger than Trump vs. Bannon; it’s about Trump’s capability:
Some commentators raised doubts about Trump’s competency even before Election Day. But there’s been a palpable change as of late. Media conversations about Trump’s competency are certainly more common than, say, six months ago.
Jake Tapper said on CNN’s “The Lead” on Thursday that “this new book and the new tweet about his big and powerful button” are “renewing talk about the 25th Amendment and lawmakers’ fears about President Trump’s mental health.” He asked: “Is this all below board?”
Related: Wolff’s Trump book going on sale four days early amid furor
White House aides and pro-Trump hosts on Fox News say that it is completely inappropriate to be questioning his stability.
But Republican Senator Bob Corker has broached the subject several times in recent months. Last October he called the White House “an adult day care center.”
On Thursday it was reported that a Yale psychiatrist briefed a dozen members of Congress — mainly Democrats — last month on Trump’s mental fitness.
The meeting was kept private at the time. These questions about fitness are more frequently whispered than shouted.
On MSNBC on Thursday, anchor Katy Tur, who covered the Trump campaign, recalled that a former Trump staffer asked her a couple of months ago, “Do you think he’s lost a step since the campaign?”
“This,” she said, “is a pervasive view among those who know him. That should not be surprising”….
Steve Vladeck explains The Fatal (Procedural) Flaw In the New Manafort Suit:
For the second time in as many months, “Younger abstention” is in the news. Last month, it was as a legal concept sufficiently foreign to one of President Trump’s district court nominees so as to turn him into a viral internet meme (and, ultimately, lead him to withdraw from consideration). Now, it’s because of the… odd… lawsuit filed on Wednesday by Paul Manafort, seeking to invalidate the authority of Special Counsel Mueller to prosecute him. I already tweeted about why, on the merits, there’s very little to Manafort’s substantive claim until and unless the Supreme Court actually wants to revisit Morrison v. Olson—and perhaps not even then….
the doctrine of “equitable restraint” precludes collateral attacks on ongoing criminal proceedings absent some showing that there is no adequate remedy available to the plaintiff within the ongoing criminal proceeding (e.g., a motion to dismiss the indictment or disqualify the prosecutor). And there is no dispute that equitable restraint applies with equal force to suits to enjoin ongoing federalcriminal proceedings—where there will often be far less of a concern about the availability of an adequate remedy within the criminal process.
In that regard, what is striking about the complaint in Manafort v. U.S. Dep’t of Justiceis what it has to say about the absence of a meaningful remedy for Manafort’s claims within his ongoing criminal proceeding: Absolutely nothing. Instead, Manafort is asking a different judge of the same district court to provide relief that is unquestionably available to him, if appropriate, from the trial judge, without any allegation of the type of bad faith or misconduct by that court (to say nothing of irreparable harm stemming from the same) that would justify an exception….
(Manafort has nothing here except a public-relations angle.)
Iguanas are falling out of trees in Florida:
One of the strongest winter storms on the East Coast in modern history has pummeled cities with snow and sleet, forcing schools and businesses to close while grounding thousands of flights.
And in South Florida, it is “raining iguanas.”Green iguanas, like all reptiles, are coldblooded animals, so they become immobile when the temperature falls to a certain level, said Kristen Sommers of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. Under 50 degrees Fahrenheit, they become sluggish. Under 40 degrees, their blood stops moving as much, Sommers said.
They like to sit in trees, and “it’s become cold enough that they fall out.”
This is not a new phenomenon — there were similar reports in 2008 and 2010 — though it is not typical.