#michael scherer

[dk-thrive]

A poem, or line of poetry, that I return to: I got to see Czesław Miłosz read “Esse” back in 1998 or 1999, a poem that starts with a fleeting infatuation on a metro train and ends up comparing love’s desire to the writer’s task: “A sponge, suffering because it cannot saturate itself; a river, suffering because reflections of clouds and trees are not clouds and trees.” But we keep trying.

— Michael Scherer, from "A Perfect Show that Doesn't Make Sense" (The Atlantic, May 2024)

[worldbodybuilders]

Michael Scherer.

[twilightronin]

The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor 2008

[whytehousetv]

Latest Time Cover On Donald Trump Jr.: ‘Red Handed’ | Morning Joe | MSNBC Time's Michael Scherer joins Morning Joe to reveal the magazine's latest cover on Donald Trump Jr. and what his meeting with a Russian lawyer says about the Trump WH.

[whytehousetv]

Why GOP Governors Recoil At Medicaid Rollback | Morning Joe | MSNBC Time's Michael Scherer discusses why Republican governors are scared by the GOP plan to overhaul health care. Scherer also discusses a new article on Trump's deportation policy.

[mysweetetc]

Michael Scherer is baaaaaaack with the first two GOP debates

the happy hour debate: 

0 minutes. You have waited long enough, flipping the channels, hoping, praying, replaying the memories. It’s been 1,018 days since the last presidential debate. 1,018 lonely, agonizing days since the last time you really knew who you were, what this country could be, the joy of televised democracy in action. But that’s all about to change. “It is debate night,” says Fox News anchor Bill Hemmer. Welcome back, America. The healing starts now.

1 minute. There are graphics with stars, hues of blue and red, little sparkly explosions. This one is special, live from a Cleveland basketball arena that fits 20,000 fans. Not one debate but two, not two hours but three, not 10 candidates but 17. The anchors welcome the first Republicans to the stage, but instead of fanfare and relief, something is horribly wrong. There is silence, emptiness, sadness, as if an evil spirit is haunting the stage. Former Hewlett-Packard executive Carly Fiorina looks uncomfortable. Sen. Lindsey Graham smiles, in a lonely, brave way. When Texas Governor Rick Perry is introduced, a few people far away offer a golf clap. Maybe six people smack hands for former New York Gov. George Pataki. Then the wide shot shows the culprit: Fox News never filled the arena. There is no audience.

2 minutes. Onward anyway. To Perry, a.k.a. Governor “Oops,” who will finally have his chance at redemption, with bold glasses and no back pain pills. “You recently said that four years ago you weren’t ready for this job,” Hemmer says. “Why should someone voter for you now?” Perry has waited for this moment, prepared for it, visualized it in his mind. Redemption is nigh. He begins: “After those four years of looking back and being prepared, the preparation to be the most powerful individual in the world requires an extraordinary amount of work.” That doesn’t make sense. The world is cruel. No one deserves this, let alone an Eagle Scout.

10 minutes. Someone named Jim Gilmore is on the stage too. He claims to be a former governor, attorney general, prosecutor and Cold War spy. The fact that no one has tackled him yet suggests he is who he says he is.

11 minutes. Topic change to Donald Trump. More than 26 million mentions of him on Facebook, “some of it good, probably, some of it bad,” says Fox anchor Martha MacCallum. Some of it, you could assume, are rapists.

14 minutes. Jindal and Graham try to outdo each other with bold ways to take the Islamic State. And Jindal hits all his points, fluidly, with perfect sentences, but his voice is nasal and distracting, with strong hints of Southern Muppet. This takes the authority out of lines like, “We’re going to take the political handcuff off the military.” Graham is just terrifying. “They are coming here just as sure as I stand here in front of you,” he says of the bloodthirsty enemy.

17 minutes. First commercial break, with spots that hit the demo of people who actually watch 5 p.m. debates live instead of reading snarky summaries online. Polident denture glue. Prevagen brain vitamins. Metamucil, which makes you poop.

21 minutes. More muscular talk about taking on Islamic terrorism. Everyone is tough. Everyone has experience. At one point this guy Gilmore interrupts to get in a word. Whoever he is, he is not a bad debater.

37 minutes. This is not going to work. These debates will last three hours, 180 minutes. You have already read 1,000 words, and we have just begun. You love debates, you love our democracy, you love our country. But you love to click away too. Don’t lie. You do it all the time. There are technologies that monitor your behavior. You will leave this webpage before long. You will return to your life. Emergency action must be taken. The summary will be summarized.

50 minutes to 67 minutes. Santorum says the Supreme Court’s same-sex marriage decision is like the Dred Scott decision, which found blacks could not be U.S. citizens, before it was undone by a constitutional amendment. A commercial for gold and silver coins. Pataki says he hates abortion but is pro-choice. Perry pantomimes holding the bottle of Wite-Out he will use on President Obama’s executive orders. It is the size of a small gopher.

68 minutes. The moderators are going over time. Graham gets personal. “When I was 21, my mom died. When I was 22, my dad died,” he says. “Today, I’m 60, I’m not married, I don’t have any kids.” He is defending Social Security but it sounds so sad.

69 minutes to 80 minutes. The moderators ask everyone to describe Hillary Clinton in two words. Almost no one uses two words. “Good at email,” says Perry. Closing arguments. And we are done. With the first part. Now comes the main event. Get a cup of coffee. We are just getting started.

the primetime debate:

33 minutes. After a commercial break and some more immigration talk, Walker explains again why he changed his mind to oppose a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. “I actually listened to the American people.” By American people, he means Republican primary voters. In a recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, 47% of the country supported a pathway to citizenship, 17% supported some other legal status, and 32% supported deportation for undocumented immigrants.

80 minutes. Kasich gets applause for saying that he attended a gay wedding, and would love his daughter just the same if she was gay. This is a big shift from the 2012 cycle, when a gay serviceman was booed for asking a question about gay rights.

92 minutes. Huckabee is asked about transgender rights in the military. “The military is not a social experiment,” he says. “The purpose of the military is to kill people and break things.” A lot of dark places you could go with that logic.

106 minutes. The closing statements basically continue the pattern. Rubio is the best at delivering his. Huckabee is funny. Trump is self-promoting. Bush is slightly awkward but passable. Carson brags about all the brains he worked on. Walker sounds disingenuous. “I’m a guy with a wife and two kids and a Harley,” he says, leaving out the fact that he is also a governor with personal security. But the bottom line, this is a strong Republican field, much stronger that the people who filled the stage in 2012.

[rokhannausa]

SILICON VALLEY IS TRYING TO HACK WASHINGTON D.C.

From Time Magazine

By Michael Scherer

There is a reason reporters don’t often get invites to Congressional fundraisers: The politicians raking for cash don’t want anyone to know what goes on. But something different happened last month at a North Beach restaurant in San Francisco, when Ro Khanna, a Democratic candidate for California’s 17th District, worked a room filled with about 100 tech luminaries. As captured by the San Francisco Chronicle’s Carla Marinucci, the event came off less as a fundraiser than a product launch.

The person speaking in that video is Sean Parker, age 33, net worth $2 billion, founder of Napster, former president of Facebook, the guy Justin Timberlake played in the movie, the one who agreed to a $2.5 million fine for building a crumbling castle wall in a redwood forest for his wedding last weekend. “We feel for a long time that Silicon Valley hasn’t been properly represented at a federal level,” Parker said, explaining his support for Khanna.

To back up a bit, it is worth knowing about Khanna. He is not your regular Congressional candidate, but a Silicon Valley lawyer, a veteran of the Obama Commerce Department and a 36-year-old who has already hired much of Obama’s 2012 campaign talent to run his race. (Grassroots organizer Jeremy Bird, bundler Steve Spinner and ad-man Larry Grisolano are all on board.) To make matters more interesting, Khanna’s target is a well-liked fellow Democrat in good standing, Mike Honda, 71, who has held federal office a dozen years without ever facing a serious challenge. “What has been missing has been Silicon Valley being a thought leader,” Khanna told me.

So what’s going on? Parker puts it well in the video. Silicon Valley is “starting to come into a realization of our own power” in politics. And the evidence is everywhere. In 2012, for the first time, the Democratic candidate for President raised more from Northern California (read: Silicon Valley) than Southern California (Hollywood). Google in 2012 spent more on lobbying in D.C. than Pfizer, Exxon Mobile and Boeing. (In fact, only General Electric spent more as an individual company.) The biggest buzzing new soft-money group of 2012, Fwd.us, is funded by wealthy tech investors and CEOs, like Parker, Mark Zuckerberg, and Ron Conway.

High tech, the fastest growing, newest, (some-say) coolest American industry, is in short turning its sites on government, and this shift is the subject of my story this week in TIME, which is available here for subscribers. The reasons for the growing interest in Democracy are not just altruistic. They also have a lot to do with the changing business models in Silicon Valley. The days when high-tech companies just turned out chips and desktop boxes are fading fast. The new tech makes taxi-hailing apps, driverless cars and ways of tracking your every move online. And more and more, what is possible is constrained by what is legal. Here is Google’s Larry Page at his company’s recent developers conference: “There’s many, many exciting and important things you could do that you just can’t do because they’re illegal, or they’re not allowed by regulation, and that makes sense, we don’t want the world to change too fast.”

How are politicians handling this influx of interest? With bear hugs and fundraisers of course. This week, President Obama fulfilled a longtime dream of Silicon Valley leaders when he took executive actions to crack down on so-called “patent trolls,” just a few days before he jets west for another fundraiser in San Jose. Republicans have also learned to get into the game too. My favorite quote in the magazine piece comes from Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch, a longtime friend of Silicon Valley, who told me about his efforts to convert the leaders out there. “They are terrific human beings, but a lot of them, because their wives are pro-abortion, think they have to be Democrats,” he says. “I just point out how stupid they are to support one party.”

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Just a couple of quotes, one poignant and one amusing:

12:32 p.m. The ceremony over, Obama walks up the stairs to leave but won’t go inside the Capitol. He turns around to look over the crowd. “I want to take a look one more time,” he says to someone nearby, words that are picked up by a television microphone. “I’m not going to see this again.” For a moment, he looks alone, with several hundred thousand people before him, and the whole world watching. *

12:43 p.m. Inside the Capitol, Obama is surrounded by the Congressional leadership, signing some nominations with ceremonial pens. Senate Majority Leader Reid wants a pen, but Schumer tries to head him off. “Are we supposed to take them?” Schumer asks his boss, “Harry.” Obama perks up. “Are you trying to steal the pens?” the President asks. Obama solves the problem by giving Reid a pen from his jacket pocket. Reid looks pleased.