President For All Americans

Trump and the evangelicals who think God-- rather than Putin-- put him in the White House, don't always see eye to eye. Evangelicals claim the earth was created around 7,000 years ago (and men were created 6 days later). Earth was actually created 4.5 billion years ago and some kind of human-like creatures appeared around two and a half million years ago. In the video above Trump told Sacha Baron Cohen (video above) that "hundreds of millions of years ago people were doing business and they were trading in rocks and stones and other things."

See the lunatic in the Oval Office-- the one on the right in the picture below? That's Lionel Lebron. I guess if Trump can't get LeBron James to visit the White House, he has to make do with the grifter who promotes the QAnon conspiracy theories. Señor Trumpanzee invited him and posed for this picture with him and his wife on Thursday.

You know how Trumpanzee is always ranting and raving about the baseless nonsense about "Mueller and 17 angry Democrats?" TheQAnon grifters claim that's a friendly shout out to them because "Q" is the 17th letter of the alphabet. Other theories are way crazier-- like the child sex colony on the moon run by Hillary and the Deep State, etc.

Lebron is one of the internet’s leading promoters of QAnon, the pro-Trump conspiracy theory based on a series of anonymous clues posted to internet forums. QAnon believers have interpreted the clues, which they claim without evidence are coming from a highly placed source in the Trump administration, to mean that Trump and the military are engaged in a high-stakes shadow war against a supposed globalist pedophile cult. The conspiracy theory has caught on with Trump supporters, who have held up QAnon-related signs and wear QAnon shirts to the president’s rallies.

...All four White House officials the Beast did speak with about how Trump, the leader of the free world, ended up in a smiling photo op at the Resolute Desk with a prominent QAnon conspiracy theorist, pleaded ignorance about when this occurred, and why. Two of these West Wing officials audibly could not contain their laughter.

“This president is a president for all Americans,” one joked, including conspiracy theorists.

Nice that Trump was able to take a moment off from all the scandals swirling around him to spend some time with QAnon, which has, for example, claimed that Debbie Wasserman Schultz hired MS-13 to murder DNC staffer Seth Rich. My favorite QAnon scam is that Obama, Hillary and George Soros are planning a coup and that the Mueller investigation is actually a countercoup led by Señor T himself, who pretended to collude with Putin in order to hire Mueller to secretly investigate the Deep State Democrats. I wonder what the conversation was like between Trump and Lebron.

On Friday, writing for the NY Times, Eileen Sullivan reported that Trump pulled himself away from QAnon long enough to demand that Jeff Sessions get the heat off him by charging "the other side"-- presumably the Democrats, not the other side of the moon-- with some crimes.

Sessions on Thursday issued a rare public statement defending his record as attorney general and pledging his commitment to justice after the president accused him of never taking control of the department.

“Jeff Sessions never took control of the Justice Department and it’s a sort of an incredible thing,” Trump said during a recent interview with Fox News.

On Thursday afternoon, Sessions hit back. “I took control of the Department of Justice the day I was sworn in,” he said in a written statement.

The sparring match between the president and the attorney general extended the public war that Trump has waged for more than a year on the Justice Department, training most of his fire on the special counsel investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.

Sessions’ response Thursday, his most forceful public pushback yet on Trump, showed the treacherous political terrain he is navigating: appointed by a president who has made apparent that he views law enforcement as loyal protectors, but overseeing a Justice Department that views independence from political pressure as essential to the rule of law.

The president privately vented to associates that he was furious with Sessions for failing to protect him in the way he believes Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. had protected President Barack Obama.

“Jeff, this is GREAT, what everyone wants, so look into all of the corruption on the ‘other side,’” Trump wrote in a pair of Twitter posts early Friday morning. “Come on Jeff, you can do it, the country is waiting!”

Trump listed people and political enemies who he believes deserve the attention of the Justice Department, including the targets of conservative conspiracy theories that claim the Russia investigation was motivated by politics.

How Senile Is Trump?

In the clip above, David Parkman makes the case that Trump, the oldest person to ever occupy the White House, may be suffering from Alzheimer's disease-- like his neo-Nazi father-- or some other form of dementia. Last week Sharon Begley posted a piece at STAT headlined Experts Say Trump's Deteriorating Speech Could Be Sign of Early Dementia. "STAT," she wrote, "asked experts to compare Trump's speech from decades ago to that in 2017. All noticed deterioration, which may signal changes in Trump's brain health." This is also the only plausible reason I can think of for why Trump has made himself so dependent on Ivanka and Kushner-in-law, who are hardly brain surgeons but are family members who he can count on to abide by the Code of Omertà.

It was the kind of utterance that makes professional transcribers question their career choice:

" … there is no collusion between certainly myself and my campaign, but I can always speak for myself-- and the Russians, zero."

When President Trump offered that response to a question at a press conference last week, it was the latest example of his tortured syntax, mid-thought changes of subject, and apparent trouble formulating complete sentences, let alone a coherent paragraph, in unscripted speech.

He was not always so linguistically challenged.

STAT reviewed decades of Trump's on-air interviews and compared them to Q&A sessions since his inauguration. The differences are striking and unmistakable.

Research has shown that changes in speaking style can result from cognitive decline. STAT therefore asked experts in neurolinguistics and cognitive assessment, as well as psychologists and psychiatrists, to compare Trump's speech from decades ago to that in 2017; they all agreed there had been a deterioration, and some said it could reflect changes in the health of Trump's brain.

In interviews Trump gave in the 1980s and 1990s (with Tom Brokaw, David Letterman, Oprah Winfrey, Charlie Rose, and others), he spoke articulately, used sophisticated vocabulary, inserted dependent clauses into his sentences without losing his train of thought, and strung together sentences into a polished paragraph, which-- and this is no mean feat-- would have scanned just fine in print. This was so even when reporters asked tough questions about, for instance, his divorce, his brush with bankruptcy, and why he doesn't build housing for working-class Americans.

Trump fluently peppered his answers with words and phrases such as "subsided," "inclination," "discredited," "sparring session," and "a certain innate intelligence." He tossed off well-turned sentences such as, "It could have been a contentious route," and, "These are the only casinos in the United States that are so rated." He even offered thoughtful, articulate aphorisms: "If you get into what's missing, you don't appreciate what you have," and, "Adversity is a very funny thing."

Now, Trump's vocabulary is simpler. He repeats himself over and over, and lurches from one subject to an unrelated one, as in this answer during an interview with the Associated Press last month:

"People want the border wall. My base definitely wants the border wall, my base really wants it-- you've been to many of the rallies. OK, the thing they want more than anything is the wall. My base, which is a big base; I think my base is 45 percent. You know, it's funny. The Democrats, they have a big advantage in the Electoral College. Big, big, big advantage. … The Electoral College is very difficult for a Republican to win, and I will tell you, the people want to see it. They want to see the wall."

For decades, studies have found that deterioration in the fluency, complexity, and vocabulary level of spontaneous speech can indicate slipping brain function due to normal aging or neurodegenerative disease. STAT and the experts therefore considered only unscripted utterances, not planned speeches and statements, since only the former tap the neural networks that offer a window into brain function.

The experts noted clear changes from Trump's unscripted answers 30 years ago to those in 2017, in some cases stark enough to raise questions about his brain health. They noted, however, that the same sort of linguistic decline can also reflect stress, frustration, anger, or just plain fatigue.

Ben Michaelis, a psychologist in New York City, performed cognitive assessments at the behest of the New York Supreme Court and criminal courts and taught the technique at a hospital and university. "There are clearly some changes in Trump as a speaker" since the 1980s, said Michaelis, who does not support Trump, including a "clear reduction in linguistic sophistication over time," with "simpler word choices and sentence structure. … In fairness to Trump, he's 70, so some decline in his cognitive functioning over time would be expected."



Some sentences, or partial sentences, would, if written, make a second-grade teacher despair. "We'll do some questions, unless you have enough questions," Trump told a February press conference. And last week, he told NBC's Lester Holt, "When I did this now I said, I probably, maybe will confuse people, maybe I'll expand that, you know, lengthen the time because it should be over with, in my opinion, should have been over with a long time ago."

Other sentences are missing words. Again, from the AP: "If they don't treat fairly, I am terminating NAFTA," and, "I don't support or unsupport"-- leaving out a "me" in the first and an "it" (or more specific noun) in the second. Other sentences simply don't track: "From the time I took office til now, you know, it's a very exact thing. It's not like generalities."

There are numerous contrasting examples from decades ago, including this - with sophisticated grammar and syntax, and a coherent paragraph-length chain of thought-- from a 1992 Charlie Rose interview: "Ross Perot, he made some monumental mistakes. Had he not dropped out of the election, had he not made the gaffes about the watch dogs and the guard dogs, if he didn't have three or four bad days-- and they were real bad days-- he could have conceivably won this crazy election."

The change in linguistic facility could be strategic; maybe Trump thinks his supporters like to hear him speak simply and with more passion than proper syntax. "He may be using it as a strategy to appeal to certain types of people," said Michaelis. But linguistic decline is also obvious in two interviews with David Letterman, in 1988 and 2013, presumably with much the same kind of audience. In the first, Trump threw around words such as "aesthetically" and "precarious," and used long, complex sentences. In the second, he used simpler speech patterns, few polysyllabic words, and noticeably more fillers such as "uh" and "I mean."

The reason linguistic and cognitive decline often go hand in hand, studies show, is that fluency reflects the performance of the brain's prefrontal cortex, the seat of higher-order cognitive functions such as working memory, judgment, understanding, and planning, as well as the temporal lobe, which searches for and retrieves the right words from memory. Neurologists therefore use tests of verbal fluency, and especially how it has changed over time, to assess cognitive status.

Those tests ask, for instance, how many words beginning with W a patient can list, and how many breeds of dogs he can name, rather than have patients speak spontaneously. The latter "is too hard to score," said neuropsychologist Sterling Johnson, of the University of Wisconsin, who studies brain function in Alzheimer's disease. "But everyday speech is definitely a way of measuring cognitive decline. If people are noticing [a change in Trump's language agility], that's meaningful."

Although neither Johnson nor other experts STAT consulted said the apparent loss of linguistic fluency was unambiguous evidence of mental decline, most thought something was going on.

John Montgomery, a psychologist in New York City and adjunct professor at New York University, said "it's hard to say definitively without rigorous testing" of Trump's speaking patterns, "but I think it's pretty safe to say that Trump has had significant cognitive decline over the years."

No one observing Trump from afar, though, can tell whether that's "an indication of dementia, of normal cognitive decline that many people experience as they age, or whether it's due to other factors" such as stress and emotional upheaval, said Montgomery, who is not a Trump supporter.

Even a Trump supporter saw and heard striking differences between interviews from the 1980s and 1990s and those of 2017, however. "I can see what people are responding to," said Dr. Robert Pyles, a psychiatrist in suburban Boston. He heard "a difference in tone and pace. … What I did not detect was any gaps in mentation or meaning. I don't see any clear evidence of neurological or cognitive dysfunction."

Johnson cautioned that language can deteriorate for other reasons. "His language difficulties could be due to the immense pressure he's under, or to annoyance that things aren't going right and that there are all these scandals," he said. "It could also be due to a neurodegenerative disease or the normal cognitive decline that comes with aging." Trump will be 71 next month.

Northwestern University psychology professor Dan McAdams, a critic of Trump who has inferred his psychological makeup from his public behavior, said any cognitive decline in the president might reflect normal aging and not dementia. "Research shows that virtually nobody is as sharp at age 70 as they were at age 40," he said. "A wide range of cognitive functions, including verbal fluency, begin to decline long before we hit retirement age. So, no surprise here."

Researchers have used neurolinguistics analysis of past presidents to detect, retrospectively, early Alzheimer's disease. In a famous 2015 study, scientists at Arizona State University evaluated how Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush spoke at their news conferences. Reagan's speech was riddled with indefinite nouns (something, anything), "low imageability" verbs (have, go, get), incomplete sentences, limited vocabulary, simple grammar, and fillers (well, basically, um, ah, so)-- all characteristic of cognitive problems. That suggested Reagan's brain was slipping just a few years into his 1981-1989 tenure; that decline continued. He was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease in 1994. Bush showed no linguistic deterioration; he remained mentally sharp throughout his 1989-1993 tenure and beyond.

Ali G Loves Romans... And Brunch; Caitlin Jenner Really Hates Hillary; And Marcy Kaptur Endorses Bernie

No matter how horrid a monster, Ted Cruz acknowledges all his fanatic racist and bigoted endorsers. He's always "proud" to be endorsed by someone advocating stoning gay people to death or firebombing women's health clinics. But Caitlin Jenner was a step too far. When the reality show celebrity endorsed him he ignored the vote of confidence. And when she offered to be his "trans ambassador," he refused to comment. Undaunted, she's been pretty vicious towards Hillary Clinton, even using her Kardashian spin-off show-- one of the most universally panned TV shows in the history of the medium-- to slap down Hillary. She said she's supporting a Republican candidate because none of the Republicans say "I hate trans people or I hate gays and "I want a driving economy so every trans person has a job... [I]f we’re unfortunate enough get Hillary as our next president, we need her on our side. Although she won’t be. She couldn’t care less about women. She cares about herself." In the video above Jenner explains why she prefers Herr Trumpf over Hillary.

This afternoon a rumor swept the left blogosphere that Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur had endorsed Bernie 4 days before Tuesday's Ohio primary. At first I thought it was just something that started bout a month ago when she said she was staying neutral but made it clear that she's voting for Bernie.

The longest-serving woman in the US House, Kaptur, a Democrat officially neutral in the race, called Sanders “the only voice we’ve had the last three decades, of all these presidential candidates, who is actually talking about the economic issues that are actually affecting American families.”

Kaptur, a longtime ally of organized labor and outspoken opponent of President Clinton’s free-trade policies, stopped just shy of endorsing Sanders, but praised him for his ideological consistency.

“He hasn’t changed anything, and people are hearing the message now. Unvarnished, now, for the first time in my career,” she told the Globe in a phone interview Wednesday afternoon. “First time in my career that I’ve heard a candidate give voice to what we’ve been struggling for and against in this Congress for the last quarter century.”

She contrasted that with Clinton, saying, “I must say that when Secretary Clinton was secretary of state, I don’t recall her ever attempting to balance [free-trade agreements] or change them in any way.”

...A Toldeo Democrat and member of the House Progressive Caucus, Kaptur said her comments Wednesday were her most discursive yet about Sanders’s candidacy, and came in response to a question about the day’s back-and-forth between Sanders and Clinton over progressive credentials.

Much of the sizzle in the Democratic primary has focused on Sanders’s ability to corral the energy in the party’s left-wing base, assailing Wall Street and pushing populist rhetoric. In Wednesday night’s town hall, Clinton pushed back, arguing that she and Sanders share the same goals. But she also stumbled over questions about her six-figure payments for speeches to investment bank Goldman Sachs.

Said Kaptur, “Senator Sanders has always been there. He has never been a ‘Johnny-Come-Lately’ and he has never changed positions.”

Kaptur said Clinton had belatedly come to oppose the Trans-Pacific Partnership, noting, “Senator Sanders was there from the very beginning.”

“The issue that has been the most cutting for the American people has been their economic welfare,” Kaptur said. “Over the last quarter century, they have been dealt such heavy blows. I have always regarded Senator Sanders as one of the most pristine voices on their behalf, whether it was auto workers in Ohio or farm workers from New Mexico.”

Comparing Sanders to former President Harry Truman, Kaptur said, “In many ways, his struggle in this campaign is very noble, because he is up against the most powerful forces, economic forces, that have caused so much harm … They’ll try to diminish him. I admire the fact that he’s running, that he is an agent of change in our society, and he doesn’t have the billionaire class lined up behind him. He’s a senator from Vermont.”

However, late in the day, I found a story by Tom Troy in the Toledo Blade that confirmed Kaptur had indeed ditched the neutrality and formally endorsed Bernie when she introduced him at a rally at the SeaGate Convention Centre in Toledo. Until today, she was the only member of the Ohio Democratic Congressional delegation to not endorse Hillary. Now she's the sixth sitting Member of Congress to have endorsed Bernie, following Raul Grijalva (AZ), Keith Ellison (MN), Alan Grayson (FL), Tulsi Gabbard (HI) and Peter Welch (VT).

Miss Kaptur thanked the crowd for "coming to build a stronger a better America. We love you and we desperately love this country and want it to be a country for all, not just the privileged few."

"I come here to introduce the next president of the United States," she said.