monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

A pressure flaked obsidian knife blade, for example is just about the swhqrpest thing you can make, since it comes pretty close to having a monomolecular edge, far sharper than steel scalpels,

It would have been entirely like having Ma Barker in the white house

The people who didn’t want television networks to cede a prime-time hour last night — or, as it turned out, a prime-time 10 minutes — to the president of the United States were implicitly giving Donald Trump a credit that he does not deserve. There is a kind of silver-tongued orator who can persuade in any situation, who like Caesar’s Mark Antony can find a crowd leaning one way and leave them stirred up for the opposite cause, who is legitimately dangerous when given a rostrum or a soapbox or a prime-time speech. But that is not our president: His rhetoric is a bludgeon, and what we saw last night was just an attempt to club his enemies and critics with the same arguments he’s made a thousand times before.

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But the problem for Trump is that presidents have to deal with changing circumstances and cope with unexpected crises, not just fulminate in the same style regardless of the context. And the world of 2019 looks different than the world in which he campaigned. The crime rate didn’t keep rising, the pace of terror attacks hasn’t quickened, and fate has given him an immigration crisis that’s substantially different than the crisis of murderers and terror plotters that he invoked in his campaign rhetoric — a humanitarian crisis, a crisis of families and children, in which the problem isn’t the people that we can’t catch crossing the borders but the people who surrender willingly, hoping to exploit our overstrained asylum system and disappear with their kids into the American interior.

A more supple strategist and orator than our president might have been able to adapt his tough-guy proposals to this complicated new reality, and in the process to exploit the Democrats’ core vulnerability — their difficulty figuring out exactly what kind of deportation policies, if any, their base will allow them to support.

daughters pay the price and not mine.