Like most people, I'm sure, I much dislike "clickbait" headlines.  Raw Story, a news website I particularly like, is a big exponent of such things, its only flaw.  But I was surprised to see the excellent tech site, CNET jump in.

Yesterday, I got the daily CNET newsletter I subscribe to.  It always includes links to a number of stories, with the main story being the email's subject line.  And this one a subject line headline that shouted out -- "The death of cash may finally be coming."  I doubted that, but still I was curious what they had to say about the technology.  And also what the other stories they were covering that day.

Fortunately, I didn't have to click through the clickbait link to the actual article, because the newsletter had a sub-heading underneath those glaring words, "The death of cash may finally be coming."  

The sub-headline was --

"E-commerce and mobile money may in the coming years take a bite out of cash's strength in the payments world. But it won't be easy."

Color me contrarian, but to me -- "may take a bite out of..." and "It won't be easy" seems to mean that, no, the death of cash may finally be coming.

What kind of a day was it?  A day like any other -- except...You Are There.  

Just another normal day in Trump Land.  His nominee to head Veteran Affairs dropped out over charges of excessive drunkenness and improper distribution of meds.  His Secretary of the EPA was dragged over the coals for ethics violations in a House hearing and told he should resign.  His controversial nominee to be Secretary of State got approved -- and nobody noticed because the day was so maniacal.  Paul Ryan actually fired the House Chaplain...for reasons unknown.  (Bill Cosby getting convicted of three counts of sexual abuse doesn't even count as an administration story -- although the fact that jurors believed women under oath from years before can't be good news for Trump...)

But for all these stories yesterday and lesser ones, I'm going to jump past them all and go straight the Trump Meltdown on Fox & Friends, which many news stories referred to as "bat sh*t crazy."  (Salon, on the other hand, referred Io it as Trump "throwing himself under the bus.)   It's difficult to point to just one single thing in the unwieldy, maniacal half hour to explain how disastrous it was for Trump, there was so much, but I think the most telling moment is that after 27 minutes, as he just was getting warmed-up ranting, the "Fox News" hosts actually cut him off and said, "We have to go, Mr. President."

(How bad was it?  Trump noting that the only thing he got for his wife's birthday birthday that very day was a "beautiful card" doesn't even register on the Debacle-o-Meter.  Here's hoping though that he doesn't try on her the excuse he gave to the TV hosts.  "I'm very busy to be running out looking for presents."  Not too busy to call a TV show and rant for a half-hour would probably be her response.  And besides, who here think Trump went out and bought the card?  All this after noting, "And she did a fantastic job with France," he said. And his thank you for hosting the President and First Lady of France at a state dinner?  A beautiful card.  And some flowers. Yes, that will go over great.  But that was just an asterisk on the phone call.)

It was disastrously bad.  Yet for how horrible as it was...I think it was even worse than generally got reported.  Because most reports understandably focused on the Very Worst Revelations.  A huge amount of self-inflicted damage.  But there was a lot more that was was as bad, just more subtle so that you had to get on your knees and dig a bit to find it.  Meanwhile, the worst was like big diamonds just laying on the surface that you could pick up without breaking a sweat.

​But let's start at the beginning.

As maniacal as the whole call-in was, what got the most attention -- and deservedly so -- was Trump undercutting his legal defense in the Michael Cohen raid.  That defense, for which Trump had just hired two new lawyers was that all the material taken shouldn't be used because of attorney-client privilege.  Yet on the air Trump said that Cohen did only a "tiny little fraction" of legal work for him.  Which if that is the case, then pretty much all the recovered documents wouldn't be lawyer-related to Trump and therefore be unprotected.

(Yes, Trump had actually been able to find two new lawyers who agreed to take him on as a client, though he had to go outside the D.C. Beltway to come across them, down to a tiny firm in Florida.  It seems likely today that they're already regretting that decision.)

But that's only the beginning of the bizarre part.  Because when asked by a TV host why Michael Cohen would plead the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination, Trump explained that it was because of Cohen's outside business work, repeating endlessly that Cohen had a lot of outside business work, a lot, though Trump made sure you were aware he didn't know what that work was.  "This has nothing to do with me," he said, adding that “I’m not involved and I’ve been told I’m not involved.”

For all the coverage that this stunning phone call got, a few important things got overlooked and unmentioned at the expense of the major headline items.  And one of the most important relates to that, what he just said there  

First, I suspect that there is a great deal Trump is not told about, so as to not upset him.  (Seriously, who wanted to say, "Er, no, sir, that wasn't the biggest Inaugural ever, half the fairgrounds were empty"?)  But second, and far more to the point is that, in fact, he is involved here and it's monumentally foolish for him not to grasp how. so  Because even if we accept on face value what he says (something one should pretty much never do with Trump, but let's just play along...), the fact that Michael Cohen is being investigated for federal crimes which could get him up to 30 years in prison, it seems likely that he'll be given a plea bargain, but only on the condition that he flips and gives up evidence of his work with Trump that is criminal.  So, although this may not be the kind of "involvement" Trump is thinking of, he has his head in the sand if he doesn't think he's "involved."  He is involvement from the ground up to his comb-over.  And that leads directly to the third point about that statement which tended to get overlooked.  When Trump tried to distance himself from Michael Cohen by saying how Cohen took the Fifth because of his extensive outside business work, though he insisted he didn't even know what it was -- understand this:  most of Michael Cohen's outside business work, separate from being a lawyer...was with the Trump Organization!!

There is also another major item during the Phone-a-thon from Hell that tended to get overlooked in most of coverage, although it did get noted in some.  And that's how Trump seemed to be using the Felix Sater-George Papadopoulos Gambit.  That's the ploy where he attempts to distance himself from people who could cause him trouble, saying that he doesn't really know the person, and they didn't do much work for him.  He couldn't even identify if they stood next to him (which photos actually showed).  That they just got the coffee.  With Trump doing that here, talking about how utterly insignificant and "tiny" Cohen was.  Well...if I was someone who knew Michael Cohen I would tell him not to expect a pardon.

Yet as bad as all that was, there was still yet another major story in Trump's meltdown, and it was that for the first time Trump (at least as president...) mentioned the name "Stormy Daniels" -- and not only mentioned her, but for the first time he actually acknowledged that Michael Cohen represented him in dealing with her!  Those whoops you heard, which could be heard from outer space, were from her lawyer Michael Avanati.  All of that contradicted everything he and Michael Cohen have said up to now, which had been that Cohen acted entirely on his own without any of Trump's knowledge.  If Trump's current lawyers were lucky, when they heard this admission their heads were only spinning -- and not exploding.

And yet that that wasn't the only admission Trump made for the first time.  Because there was another (!), but it it too didn't get much attention, especially compared to the other Major Headline rants.  And it's that -- for the first time -- Trump admitted staying overnight in Moscow.  That's something he's long-insisted Was Not True, which he would then explain proved that the "Golden Shower" part of the Steele Memo was not and could not possibly be true.  Thereby (he hoped) undercutting all the veracity, despite most of it already being confirmed.  But here he was yesterday, acknowledging that, yes, he was in fact there in Moscow over night.

It was all nuts.  Absolutely "bat sh*t crazy."  And not only loopy, but horrible to the extent that it caused him him actual, massive, real-world legal problems.  Indeed, within only two hours of his meltdown phone call to Fox & Friends, the U.S. Attorneys sent a new filing to federal court to make their case that they should have access to the documents seized in the Cohen raid as not being lawyer-client work product, quoting Trump himself for saying that Michael Cohen only did a "tiny, little fraction" of legal work for him.

And the meltdown only grew from there.  And the bizarre thing is that it all would have been even worse if the "Fox News" supplicants hadn't protected him and said the almost-unthinkable, actually cutting him off and saying, "We have to go, Mr. President."

A far-better phrase, and one we may be hearing, in part as a result of all this, would have been, "You have to go, Mr. President."

At least it's a start.  Hopefully there will be more.

Northwestern just posted a four-minute video on its website about that "A Starry Night" gala event I wrote about here the other day.  It's mainly a behind-the-scenes look at the night, with several of the performers talking about why they came back to the school for the show.  However, interspersed are a bunch of clips from the event itself, and it begins with a few seconds of the opening video with host Stephen Colbert and Seth Meyers -- supposedly talking from the elegant and fictitious "Northwestern Lounge" in New York City.

A few quick notes about some of the people you'll see in the video. whose names (though not credentials) might be a bit more under-the-wire  --

Craig Bierko starred as Prof. Harold Hill in the recent revival of The Music Man.  Heather Headley starred in Elton John's Broadway version of Aida and was in the original Broadway cast of his The Lion King, as well as starred in the musical version of A Color Purple.  Frank Galati -- who is the fellow who looks like Santa Claus -- was a long-time professor who, while teaching there, got an Oscar nomination for co-writing The Accidental Tourist, and won two Tony Awards for writing the adaptation and directing The Grapes of Wrath, and also directed the musical Ragtime.  Stephanie D'Abruzzo got a Tony nomination for the Tony-winning musical Avenue Q.  Harry Lennix currently plays the Assistant FBI Director on The Blacklist.  And Sharif Atkins was a regular cast member on E.R.   Also, student performer Lucy Godinez won a local award for her performance in the Chicago production of Lin-Manuel Miranda's In the Heights.  

(And for readers of these pages, you can see my pal Shelly Goldstein, who gets mentioned around these parts, in the image below.  The Lady Shellington was Head Writers of the show, and as a fine chanteuse even appeared in on of the sketches.  She's the first person you see in full on the right -- or five people to Stephen Colbert's left.  Or as I prefer to put it, Stephen Colbert is the one who is five people to Shelly's right...)

I'll keep checking for more material from the night, which I hope shows up.  But at least for now, there's this.

The other day, there was a very sad story about a 11-year-old boy in El Paso, Texas, getting hit by a truck and killed while other high school students left school for a "March for Our Lives" walk-out protest, which the boy was not participating in.

So, it was almost adorable -- in a teeth-grinding, galling way -- to see the gun manufacturer corporate-owned NRA send out a video of one of their commentators on NRA TV, Grant Stinchfield, saying, “I have warned over and over again that kids skipping school to protest something they have been duped into protesting is never a good idea…now a child is dead because of it.”

To start with, it's important to repeat that the student who was hit by a truck was not involved in the protest.  And this wasn't too difficult to find out, a very simple Internet search would have sufficed.  As the local newspaper, the El Paso Times reported, "The student was hit while crossing the highway during the walkout, but was not participating in the walkout,," adding that the school superintendent said it was "'a separate, isolated event of a group of students' who left the school as other students protested gun violence."  So, "skipping school to protest something" had absolutely nothing -- zero -- to do with why he was hit by a truck.  Being accurate is always a Good Thing when trying to make a point.  But then, when you don't have a real point to make, I guess you grasp at anything you can is your only remaining option, no matter how false.

Then again, if the NRA is actually so deeply concerned with kids being hit and killed by vehicles, I look forward to tracking down all their past commentary and reading future statements about car safety.  After all that appears to be their mission.  The NRA: Our Only Concern is to Keep You Safe from Cars.

But far more importantly, there's something pathetic about the gun-manufacturer corporate owned NRA shedding crocodile tears in their fake-concern about ONE child tragically killed by a truck while regularly ignoring the many hundreds of children horrifyingly killed by guns in school shootings.  And worse (and yes, that's possible), trying to regularly shame schoolkids as "dupes" for trying to stop those very same gun deaths.  One would think that someone so deeply concerned about a single child -- and rightly so -- would be concerned about the many hundreds of deaths of school children and fully-support the protest of those deaths.  That is, if their initial concern of that single death was real, and not just a disingenuous issue to use to slam the kids over gun control.  And all the more disingenuous when the reality is that the boy killed was not even participating in the walkout protest.  But then, why worry about the truth when your sole corporate concern is selling as many guns as possible, regardless of who actually gets killed by them.

Mr. Stinchfield and the NRA can have their fake "warnings" when trying to terrorize the public into  buying guns, and I can have mine.  And me, I have warned over and over again that being oblivious to school gun massacres because of pure corporate greed to sell guns and semi-automatic weapons is never a good idea…and now many hundreds of children are dead because of it.

Back in Los Angeles, and the elves taking care of the homestead left it in reasonable shape.  The flight was crowded but fine.  But the whole trip began inauspiciously.

I got a cab to O'Hare and within about two minutes the drivers's phone range.  He had it on speaker, so I could hear the conversation -- though he was still holding it in his hand while driving, something which didn't thrill me, though it got worse.

The caller was from an insurance company handling the accident he'd had last week!  (And no, that didn't thrill me either, though in fairness I don't know whose fault it was.  Though in equal fairness, given that he's driving while holding his phone and talking, he's not getting the benefit of the doubt.)

They talked for a couple minutes about what company she's calling from and never quite clarified that.  (English wasn't the driver's first language.  I don't say that pejoratively, just explaining why the details of the call weren't getting settled and taking longer than they might otherwise.)

The insurance woman asked if this was an okay time to talk, and the driver did mention that he had a passenger and asked if he could call back later.  It seemed like that would end the conversation...except that it continued and touched on another topic, which got the insurance lady interested in pursuing it.  Eventually, I heard her ask the driver if he could discuss that now.

At which point I couldn't take it any longer and called out loudly, "NO!  He can't, he's driving!!" 

The driver took the hint, said he'd call back and immediately ended the call.  I actually think he appreciated me saying that because I sensed he didn't want to hang up on an insurance adjuster.  In fact, I mentioned that that, in part, was why I called out so loudly, so she'd hear it and know it was my "fault" for him hanging up, and not his.  It turns out I was right, and he was appreciative that I'd done it, which got him off the hook.

​But still -- pretty odd.

​

​Heading back to Chicago today.  I particularly give this notice to the elves taking care of the homestead so that they can clean the place up before I get there.

​I'll try to post something later tonight, but can't guarantee when that will occur...