Op-ed by Molly Winker @ NYTimes.com, May 19

[....] Divorced, disrespectful and domineering, Mr. Trump might not have been the first choice of many Christians, but he was certainly more likely than his Democratic opponent to advance cultural conservatism on the court.

Plenty of young evangelicals I know, however, were not persuaded by that argument. Claire Waugh, a senior from Woodbridge, Va., told me that she refused in November to have a Trump vote on her conscience, and that she hates to see the country being “led by a man who spews vitriol against anyone who is unlike him, a man who tries to invoke God’s name when he is acting utterly ungodly.”

And for many on campus, Mr. Pence’s reputation for being a very faith-oriented politician does not make up for his being Mr. Trump’s vice president. “It baffles me that a Christian institution, that supposedly values every human life and facilitates Christian education and beliefs, would allow someone as divisive as Mike Pence to come speak," [.....]

...The Democratic Party is a coalition of interest groups, with some shared views but also a lot of conflicts, and politicians get ahead through their success in striking compromises and finding acceptable solutions.

The G.O.P., by contrast, is one branch of a monolithic structure, movement conservatism, with a rigid ideology — tax cuts for the rich above all else. Other branches of the structure include a captive media that parrots the party line every step of the way. Compare the coverage of recent political developments on Fox News with almost everywhere else; we’re talking North Korea levels of alternative reality.

And this monolithic structure — lavishly supported by a small number of very, very wealthy families — rewards, indeed insists on, absolute fealty. Furthermore, the structure has been in place for a long time: It has been 36 years since Reagan was elected, 22 years since the Gingrich takeover of Congress. What this means is that nearly all Republicans in today’s Congress are apparatchiks (Russian term- member of the Communist Party apparatus), political creatures with no higher principle beyond party loyalty.....

Still fantasizing and in love with miasmas, Peggy continues to dream of a non-Donald Donald as I noted last fall. To paraphrase the old Salem cigarette commercial, you can take the smokes out of the country, but you're still going to die an awful death with lung cancer and emphysema. A cleaned up, silent Donald is still an abomination on wheels. Okay, you could take him out of the country permanently, but I'm not sure who's lining up behind this extraordinary rendition.

By Ben Hubbard @ NYTimes.com, May 18

BEIRUT, Lebanon — When President Trump lands in Saudi Arabia on Friday for his first trip overseas since taking office, it will be for much more than a run-of-the-mill state visit.

The Saudis have internationalized the event, organizing a sprawling “Arab Islamic American Summit” with leaders from dozens of Muslim countries, as well as talks with the king, the inauguration of a counterterrorism center, and public forums for business executives and young people.

Saudi Arabia, home to some of Islam’s holiest sites, will be pulling out all the stops for a man who has declared “Islam hates us” and said the United States is “losing a tremendous amount of money” defending the kingdom [....]

By Amanda Hess @ NYTimes.com, May 17

[....] These companies occupy real estate at the margins of websites like CNN, Politico and TMZ, and fill them with links to content landfills with names like Buzz-Hut, CollegeFreakz, Dogsome and TimezOff. The links are often ads for stuff like bedsheets and dental implants that are disguised as news articles — or else barrel-scraping clickbait that tempts the reader toward still more ads — and because the thumbnails and headlines are written by the individual advertisers themselves, they range in caliber from straightforward sales pitches to gross body stuff. The links appear under the banner of “Related Content,” “You May Also Like,” or — their most accurate descriptor — “Around the Web.”

While some news sites, including The New Yorker and Slate, have recently banished such links from their pages, deeming them too déclassé to rub shoulders with their own content, others welcome the easy revenue boost. According to the data analysis firm Datanyze, Taboola and Outbrain are the oldest and biggest services in the business, but even upstarts like Revcontent and Adblade have significant sway over what we see on the web [....]

A month before Donald Trump clinched the Republican nomination, one of his closest allies in Congress — House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy — made a politically explosive assertion in a private conversation on Capitol Hill with his fellow GOP leaders: that Trump could be the beneficiary of payments from Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“There’s two people I think Putin pays: Rohrabacher and Trump,” McCarthy (R-Calif.) said, according to a recording of the June 15, 2016 exchange, which was listened to and verified by The Washington Post. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher is a Californian Republican known in Congress as a fervent defender of Putin and Russia.

This struck a chord:

You know who weren’t cops? All the radicals and queers and artists and dreamers that were there while I grew up, my mom and dad’s old friends from New York and the wider bohemian world, the actors and the drag queens and the dilettantes and the ex junkies and the current junkies, the kind of queer people who wouldn’t get caught dead getting married, the people who actually made the “old New York” of the myth into what it was. They were smart and they were funny and they were tougher than I can imagine and they were possessed of an existential commitment to the idea that life is complicated and so we shouldn’t be quick to judge. They were tolerant, in the true sense, even while they were tireless advocates for actual justice. They knew that genuinely progressive, left-wing people had to embody a rejection of the old moralisms. They weren’t religious but they embraced Christian forgiveness more than any people I’ve ever known. They were the kind to say to newcomers at AA meetings, “I don’t care who you are or what you’ve done, you’re welcome here.” Most of them are dead now, from AIDs or cancer or drugs or just living life. I miss them so fucking much. I miss when we were the cool ones, the implacable ones, the ones too principled to judge.

Everyone and everything he touches dies.