After ‘negotiating’ with the ‘Great Negotiator,’ who got nothing more than Jerry Brown originally offered, Brown sends the National Guard to the Mexico border

Updates

  1. Originally published, April 18, 7:51 pm.
  2. April 18, 8:22 pm:
    • The Donald Trump saga just keeps getting more ludicrous.[1] Honestly, you couldn’t make this shit up.

You wouldn’t know it from my Twitter feed, but I have been ill, probably with the flu. This is an extraordinarily rare thing for me, which is in a couple of ways bad:

  1. To all those I spread this horrendous flu to—and if it gets me, you know it’s horrendous—while I was thinking this was just a bad allergy attack, I apologize. Seriously, take care of yourselves, because you are unlikely to recover as quickly as I have. I started suffering the ‘allergy attack’ Saturday night. It was late Tuesday before I even had an appetite for a bowl of soup, and in the wee hours of Wednesday morning that I scarfed down some apple pie my mom had saved for me. My appetite is almost normal now, but I’m still a bit weak. Oh, and just so you know, this started as a really runny nose. (Umm, yeah. In April, when I might expect my allergies to start kicking in.)
  2. More generally, I have a bit of trouble actually empathizing with sick people, because it happens to me so rarely. I try to be kind but, to be honest, I really am clueless about what you’re going through. And I think even when I am sick, it’s different: I get hit hard and fast. I spend a lot of time sleeping it off. I might be coughing for a while though, trying to clear the remaining phlegm.

Unauthorized migration

This really says it all: “Despite public criticism from [Donald] Trump, who wrote on Twitter on Wednesday morning that [Jerry] Brown was ‘trying to back out of the National Guard at the Border,’ the terms of the deployment have not changed from Brown’s original announcement.”[2] But oh yeah, Trump is, in the view of some authoritarian populist quoted in an article I didn’t bother to archive, a businessman who knows how to get a good deal. Right.

Ellen Mitchell, “Officials: California ‘not participating’ yet in Trump’s border protection push,” Hill, April 16, 2018, http://thehill.com/policy/defense/383431-officials-california-not-participating-in-trumps-border-protection-push

Alexei Koseff, “Jerry Brown orders National Guard deployment of up to 400 troops,” Sacramento Bee, April 18, 2018, http://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article209292514.html


Brexit

The House of Lords is having a go at Theresa May’s Brexit strategy. She isn’t liking this.[3]

Elizabeth Piper and William James, “British PM May dealt embarrassing Brexit defeat in parliament’s upper house,” Reuters, April 18, 2018, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-britain-eu-lords-loss/british-pm-may-dealt-embarrassing-brexit-defeat-in-parliaments-upper-house-idUSKBN1HP2I0


Donald Trump

Jonathan Chait, “Trump’s Lawyer Forgets to Pretend He’s Innocent, Also Compares Him to Mobster,” New York, April 18, 2018, http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/04/trumps-lawyer-cohen-forgets-to-pretend-trump-is-innocent.html


  1. [1]Jonathan Chait, “Trump’s Lawyer Forgets to Pretend He’s Innocent, Also Compares Him to Mobster,” New York, April 18, 2018, http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/04/trumps-lawyer-cohen-forgets-to-pretend-trump-is-innocent.html
  2. [2]Alexei Koseff, “Jerry Brown orders National Guard deployment of up to 400 troops,” Sacramento Bee, April 18, 2018, http://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article209292514.html
  3. [3]Elizabeth Piper and William James, “British PM May dealt embarrassing Brexit defeat in parliament’s upper house,” Reuters, April 18, 2018, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-britain-eu-lords-loss/british-pm-may-dealt-embarrassing-brexit-defeat-in-parliaments-upper-house-idUSKBN1HP2I0

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.