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Thank you Baby Jesus, we've finally seen the last of the interminable month of January. I think it was the cold but the politics certainly contributed significantly. We get a 7-day forecast app on the teevee, and at the moment the freezing rain predicted for (akkk) Super Bowl Sunday has vanished into merely cloudy and not quite freezing. We get a 17 low tomorrow night. After that (at the moment) it's 50s and a few 60s for highs, 30s for lows. Many will laugh. I too have been to Calgary in February, and experienced “ice fog.”

This “Trump Era” is the misanthropic age. They ran on an amorphous pay-back, and in the weird sense that the Electoral College confers on them, they “won.” Jimmy Kimmel did a striking piece on some folks who are all for deporting even the “dreamers” the other night. This was early before the Stormy Daniels segment. That was pretty boring. The real tension was kind of “meta.” Could she break her agreement in such a way that Trump's lawyers could sue her, given that such a suit would surely imply the truth of the affair. And how strong would Franklin Graham's “blessing” be in such a case?

But the misanthropic segment was much better, because it explained, or at least illustrated, the wrecking ball power of misanthropy when harnessed to more governmental forces. Our nearly Ambassador to South Korea warned of the dangers of the so-called “bloody nose” strategy towards North Korea, which among other horrors put at risk the lives of many thousands of Americans residing in South Korea (and never mind the millions of South Koreans). This is serious. Cha was reportedly asked, before being dropped as Ambassador nominate, if he could handle the evacuation of all Americans living in South Korea.

Meanwhile, Kimmel had created a perfect situation to make a point. He had a smallish group of folks who said that no matter the particular circumstances, anyone who was here “illegally” should be forthwith deported. Kimmel presented his human case. A young mother who'd been brought here at age 2, working in nursing and living with a soldier born and raised in Kansas. The mother would be deported, removed from her child and family. The couple would be sundered. Amazingly (to me), there were no dissenters. A middle-aged black woman offered her reasoning: “I didn't have health insurance and lost my eye. Why should this woman be treated any better?” There is apparently a deep lake of this undifferentiated bitterness in the American psyche. Read it an weep.

Preet Bharara
✔ @PreetBharara
My mom is an immigrant
My dad is an immigrant
I am an immigrant
My mother's 6 brothers came to America too
It is a deeply interdependent family
All successful
All tax-paying (one is an accountant!)
All proud & contributing Americans
Call it #ChainMigration
Or call it America
11:21 PM - Jan 30, 2018

There is a lot of bad news. I don't think they'll close down the entire "liberal" side of the media like they closed down Dan Rather. For that matter, they didn't even put Dan Rather in jail. In this sense we are not yet a fascist country.