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White House chief of staff John Kelly personally denied calling President Donald Trump an "idiot" in an afternoon conversation with the commander in chief, relaying nearly the same statement in his face-to-face talk with the President as the one he released publicly, according to an administration official.

"I spend more time with the President than anyone else and we have an incredibly candid and strong relationship. He always knows where I stand and he and I both know this story is total BS," Kelly said in a statement. "I am committed to the President, his agenda, and our country. This is another pathetic attempt to smear people close to President Trump and distract from the administration's many successes."

But the White House official pointed out a big difference between the Kelly incident and Tillerson -- Kelly immediately denied the report and denounced it to the President's face. Tillerson declined to do so, simply saying he wouldn't play that Washington game

The officials said Kelly portrays himself to Trump administration aides as the lone bulwark against catastrophe, curbing the erratic urges of a president who has a questionable grasp on policy issues and the functions of government. He has referred to Trump as "an idiot" multiple times to underscore his point, according to four officials who say they've witnessed the comment

Officials said Kelly's public image as a retired four-star general instilling discipline on a chaotic White House and an impulsive president belies what they describe as the undisciplined and indiscreet approach he's employed as chief of staff. The private manner aides describe may shed new light on why Kelly now finds himself — just nine months into the job — grappling with diminished influence and a drumbeat of questions about how long he'll remain at the White House.

Presidential historian Michael Beschloss said Kelly's comments about Trump, when compared to previous White House chiefs of staff, "suggest a lack of respect for the sitting president of a kind that we haven't seen before." Beschloss said the closest similarity would be President Ronald Reagan's chief of staff during his second term, Don Regan, who "somewhat looked down on" his boss and eventually lost the support of the staff and the president. Regan was replaced after two years by Howard Baker.

As Wolff wrote in a Hollywood Reporter essay based on the book, over the past year, the people around Trump, “all — 100 percent — came to believe he was incapable of functioning in his job.”

According to Wolff, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Reince Priebus, the former chief of staff, called Trump an “idiot.” (So did the media mogul Rupert Murdoch, owner of Fox News, though he used an obscenity first.) Trump’s chief economic adviser, Gary Cohn, compares his boss’s intelligence to excrement. The national security adviser, H. R. McMaster, thinks he’s a “dope.” It has already been reported that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson called Trump a “moron,” which he has pointedly refused to deny.

Others, Wolff writes, told themselves that they could help protect America from the president they serve: The “mess that might do serious damage to the nation, and, by association, to your own brand, might be transcended if you were seen as the person, by dint of competence and professional behavior, taking control of it.”

For more than 40 years, Eduardo Galeano’s “The Open Veins of Latin America” has been the canonical anti-colonialist, anti-capitalist and anti-American text in that region

now Mr. Galeano, a 73-year-old Uruguayan writer, has disavowed the book, saying that he was not qualified to tackle the subject and that it was badly written. Predictably, his remarks have set off a vigorous regional debate, with the right doing some “we told you so” gloating, and the left clinging to a dogged defensiveness.

 ‘Open Veins’ tried to be a book of political economy, but I didn’t yet have the necessary training or preparation,” Mr. Galeano said last month while answering questions at a book fair in Brazil, where he was being honored on the 43rd anniversary of the book’s publication. He added: “I wouldn’t be capable of reading this book again; I’d keel over. For me, this prose of the traditional left is extremely leaden, and my physique can’t tolerate it

That America can’t somehow take this in stride, and keep it in proportion, makes me think of former Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein’s apt expression to describe our coarsened society: “the idiot culture.

The AOC furor we’re seeing has plenty to do with the fact that she is a young Latina.

Plenty to do with her willingness to challenge the status quo.

Technologies that radically reduce intermediaries and other barriers to entry into society’s conversation mean that ignorance, incompetence and intellectual sociopathy are no longer obstacles.

One result is a miasma of distrust of all public speech.

He warned about what has come about: odious groups cheaply disseminating their views to thousands of the like-minded. Nevertheless, he stressed the danger of letting “government intervene when it thinks it has found ‘market failure.’ ”

An email Wolff describes as “purporting to represent the views” of chief economic adviser Gary Cohn neatly summarizes what campaign workers and White House staff have been telling me about Trump for two years. He is an “idiot surrounded by clowns. Trump won’t read anything — not one-page memos, not the brief policy papers; nothing. He gets up halfway through meetings with world leaders because he is bored. And his staff is no better.”

“Trump didn’t read,” Wolff writes. “He didn’t really even skim. If it was print, it might as well not exist. Some believed that for all practical purposes he was no more than semiliterate. Others concluded that he didn’t read because he didn’t have to . . . He was postliterate — total television.”

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin called him an “idiot,” Cohn dismissed him as “dumb,” national security adviser H.R. McMaster considered him a “dope” and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson infamously concluded that the commander in chief was a “moron.”

Haque has made a fine art of catastrophisation. The USA is dead. The UK is dead. Civilisation is dead. We’re doomed. We can’t help but wonder why it could be so bad… and so we click.

Most of the titles strike hard with a fatalism. They also hail and often bait an audience. “America” and “American” appears frequently. The words “idiot” and “idiots” too.

It’s a potent mix, a Molotov cocktail of inflammatory divisiveness that’ll stick to whomever it hits and burn ferociously. He is grandiose and petty in turns.

President Donald Trump continued his dishonesty blitz in an interview with Lesley Stahl of "60 Minutes."

Trump claimed of Whitmer, "They're not liking her so much cause she's got everybody locked down."

Trump claimed that coronavirus cases are rising simply "because we're doing so much testing.""If we didn't do testing, cases would be way down," he added in the extended footage.

Confusing entertainment with substance, we turned celebrities into senators, and reality tv stars into presidents; millions of Americans think that an over-leveraged performative asshole has somehow cracked the code of... well, pretty much everything.

Our starf**king culture simply can’t get enough of starf**king someone who is not just famous, but rich beyond the dreams of avarice. And has 114 million followers on Twitter.

In a long-vanished century, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that the rich “are different from you and me,” but the new class of FU rich are something else altogether. They live in self-created bubbles of reinforcement that let them live lives of self-fondling solipsism

From my parents’ teenage years in the 1930s and ’40s through my teenage years in the 1970s, American economic life became a lot more fair and democratic and secure than it had been when my grandparents were teenagers. But then all of a sudden, around 1980, that progress slowed, stopped, and in many ways reversed.

I read an article about that year’s record-setting bonuses on Wall Street. The annual revenues of Goldman Sachs were greater than the annual economic output of two-thirds of the countries on Earth—a treasure chest from which the firm was disbursing the equivalent of $69 million to its CEO and an average of $800,000 each to everybody else at the place.

“This is not the America in which we grew up,” I wrote in a magazine column at the time, by which I meant America of the several very prosperous decades after World War II, when the income share of the super-rich was not yet insanely high. Since the 1980s, the portion of income taken each year by the rich had become as hugely disproportionate as it had been in the 1920s, with CEOs paid several hundred times more than the average worker, whose average income had barely budged for decades. “We’ve not only let economic uncertainty and unfairness grow to grotesque extremes,” I wrote, but “also inured ourselves to the spectacle.”

How was anger hijacked?

In its pure form, anger is a wonderful force of change.

Karl Marx was a Wutbürger. So were Montesquieu, William Wilberforce, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

This is what Trump has done over the last year: He’s whipped up the darkest, angriest demons in the electorate. He has not simply given people permission to indulge any racist, sexist, xenophobic, or religiously intolerant tendencies they may harbor. He has insisted—loudly—that such bigotry is only common sense and mocked anyone who refuses to see the danger presented by “the other” as a blind idiot. Those not sharing Trump’s grim vision are, by definition, suckers being taken for a ride.

If anything, Trumpism has, in part, made the rest of the nation all the more eager to ignore the millions of white voters living on the edges of the economy. Many may now be written off without guilt, because they have shown themselves to be not just unfortunates but undesirables—irredeemable hate-mongers itching to reassert their cultural dominance.

No matter where you fall on the political spectrum, this is a tragic outcome. It leaves Americans that much more segregated and alienated from one another. It’s exactly this kind of cross-cultural suspicion and mistrust that has enabled Trump to come within spitting distance of the presidency.

The researchers used Internet analytics tools to trace the origins of particular tweets and mapped the connections among social-media accounts that consistently delivered synchronized messages. Identifying website codes sometimes revealed common ownership. In other cases, exact phrases or sentences were echoed by sites and social-media accounts in rapid succession, signaling membership in connected networks controlled by a single entity

PropOrNot’s monitoring report, which was provided to The Washington Post in advance of its public release, identifies more than 200 websites as routine peddlers of Russian propaganda during the election season, with combined audiences of at least 15 million Americans

On Facebook, PropOrNot estimates that stories planted or promoted by the disinformation campaign were viewed more than 213 million times.

How Donald Trump captures the White House

The Republican Party is too badly divided. His rhetoric is too incendiary. Republican voters may be "idiots", but the general public is wiser. The US electoral map, which places a premium on winning key high-population "swing" states, is tilted against the Republican Party.

Those states - which account for 67 electoral votes - all went for Democrat Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012. Add them to the states Republican Mitt Romney carried in 2012, and it delivers 273 electoral votes - three more than the 270 necessary to win the presidency.

DEATH VALLEY: Three suspects ID'd in death of rare Devil's Hole pupfish (UPDATE)

It only lives in one spot – the 93-degree waters of Devil’s Hole, part of a detached unit of Death Valley National Park in Nye County, Nevada.

Three men on a drunken spree killed one of the Devil’s Hole pupfish late last month. The men left behind beer cans, vomit and boxer shorts, according to National Parks Service surveillance footage.

"Consumers don't know what anything should cost," William Poundstone writes in Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value. "They walk the supermarket aisles in a half-conscious daze, judging prices from cues, helpful and otherwise." The rational customer is a myth. We're more likely to pay more attention to objects on our right. More likely to gravitate to the number 9. More likely to buy cheap indulgences at the check-out. What's wrong with us?

It's not that we're idiots so much as we're lazy. Choosing anything is hard work, and our brains don't like to work that hard. As a result, we are attracted to simple answers to our difficult questions. This is the foundation of most biases, and it's true for shopping. Which of these similar shirts gives me the best value? That's a ridiculously hard question. What shirt will I get the best deal on? That's easy: It's the one that says "25% OFF", probably. Discounts make shopping simple -- not just on our wallets, but also on our brains.

It's no wonder bargains can become addictions. They give us a sense of accomplishment. They make us feel smart and frugal. For experiential shoppers, they punctuate the shopping landscape like road signs. For time-oriented shoppers, they save time.

The Republican candidate for US President has demanded all Muslims to be shut out of the USA, prompting calls to give him the same treatment

Donald Trump is an outright fascist

"We must confront the reality that his comments have provoked, and consider whether we want to import such hatred to this country"