While I’ve been watching the Peter Strzok hearing, I’ve also been reading David Dayen’s long piece at HuffPost about Mike Picarella, a Wall Street banker who took a high-ranking sales job in 2011 with HSBC, one of the world’s largest banks. As it happens, HSBC is also one of the most corrupt banks in the world: “In 2012,” Dayen writes, “the head of the Justice Department’s criminal division, Lanny Breuer, admitted that if the government pressed charges, HSBC would have ‘almost certainly’ lost its banking license in the U.S.”

But that’s not all. HSBC was also, perhaps unsurprisingly, a hotbed of sexual harassment. For example, here’s an internal message between Eileen Hedges and another manager about an attractive junior colleague:

Ha ha ha. That’s hilarious.

This is the start of Dayen’s story. It ends a few thousand words later with Picarella reporting various cases of sexual harassment to HR and then going to court when he got fired shortly thereafter. If you want to know how it ends, just click the link.

Peter Strzok (aka “FBI lover boy Peter S” when Trump tweets about him) is testifying before the House Judiciary Committee and IT IS LIT!

GOODLATTE threatened STRZOK with contempt of Congress on the *first* question because Strzok said he couldn’t answer a question directly related to the Russia investigation.

— Kyle Cheney (@kyledcheney) July 12, 2018

.@RepGoodlatte refuses to let Strzok consult with his FBI attorney. The hearing is blowing up, as Dems overwhelm Goodlatte with points of order that he can barely handle.

— David Corn (@DavidCornDC) July 12, 2018

Goodlatte’s hand is visibly shaking when he’s trying to avoid casting a vote to demand information on ongoing investigation.

— emptywheel (@emptywheel) July 12, 2018

Goodlatte is about to have a stroke

— Dirty Computer (@Johngcole) July 12, 2018

If Trey Gowdy asked you what time it is, he’d do it by shouting at you as though he had just trapped you into admitting you killed Jimmy Hoffa.

— Paul Waldman (@paulwaldman1) July 12, 2018

I have never seen a hearing like this.

— David Corn (@DavidCornDC) July 12, 2018

North Korea's Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un instructs his top agronomists in the fine points of potato horticulture last Saturday. He was supposed to meet with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo that day, but somehow their schedules got crossed up and Kim didn't make it.Yonhap News/Newscom via ZUMA

Our relationship with North Korea is getting stronger all the time thanks to President Trump:

North Korean officials did not turn up to a Thursday meeting with the U.S. military about repatriating the remains of the war dead, according to a U.S. official with knowledge of the situation. The two sides had been expected to meet at the Korean Peninsula’s demilitarized zone and discuss the return of U.S. troop remains from the 1950-1953 war — an arrangement that the State Department had announced after Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s visit to Pyongyang last Friday and Saturday.

….On Thursday, however, Department of Defense and United Nations Command officials were left waiting in the DMZ’s Joint Security Area. The expected North Korean officials never arrived, according to the official who requested anonymity as he was not permitted to talk publicly about the event. “We were ready,” the official said. “It just didn’t happen. They didn’t show.”

This is so unlike North Korea. Maybe Trump needs to pick up the phone and make a personal call to his friend Kim. Or send Dennis Rodman to straighten things out. I’m sure it was just a misunderstanding. Probably they were using Outlook and our guys were using Google Calendar and they failed to synchronize or something. It happens.

Bernd Von Jutrczenka/DPA via ZUMA

In public, Donald Trump acted like a spoiled brat during Wednesday’s NATO meeting in Brussels. But what happened when the TV cameras were turned off?

Behind closed doors, Trump was cordial and even magnanimous at times with his European counterparts, according to officials who interacted with him. And at dinner, where the leaders mingled as an acrobatic dancer performed, floating in the air, Trump said it was “a very good day at NATO.”

….During a closed-door working session of all the leaders, Trump was relatively reserved, according to attendees. He repeated the same arguments he made earlier in public that NATO member states needed to up their defense spending and that Germany is too dependent on Russia for natural gas. But he also stressed the common security threats all NATO allies face, according to a senior diplomat who was in the meeting.

….Despite Trump’s public focus on Germany’s dependence on Russian gas, he barely discussed it in his private talks with Merkel, according to an official with knowledge of the meeting. When the two leaders met face-to-face on the sidelines of the summit, Merkel defended herself and Trump did not lash out at her, the official said. Rather, their conversation focused largely on immigration, trade and Syria….Trump had a similarly nonconfrontational meeting with [Emmanuel] Macron, the European counterpart with whom he has the warmest relationship.

When is everyone going to figure out what’s going on here? “This is Trump’s strategy,” an unnamed diplomat told the Washington Post. “He raises the stakes, then he calms things down.”

No. That’s not what he does. He doesn’t have a “strategy” in the sense that normal people use the word. In private, he’s too ignorant to risk saying much of anything. In public, he has a sort of innate animal cunning about what will cause the maximum chaos and get him the most attention. This isn’t a negotiating ploy. It’s not good-cop-bad-cop. It’s not his way of eventually getting what he wants. Over and over—as this article notes—he does get much of what he wants but doubles down on the bluster anyway.

This is just Pavlovian behavior from Trump. When there’s a crowd or a TV camera around, he undergoes a phase change as reliably as water turns to ice at zero degrees. Then, when the crowds and the cameras are gone, he switches back. It’s not conscious and it’s not strategic. It just is.

None of the words he says in public mean anything. They’re just phonemes that are somehow generated in Trump’s limbic system and proceed directly to his vocal cords. Everyone needs to stop taking them seriously.

Here are headlines from the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post this afternoon:

This is an example of how Donald Trump has hacked the media. On the one hand, he did say this, and he’s the president of the United States. You have to give it major play. On the other hand, it’s obvious claptrap that no one, including Trump himself, takes seriously. He said it just to make sure he remained the center of attention.

So what is the press supposed to do? Rein in their headlines based on their own judgment of whether Trump is just making a bid for attention? Print whatever he says because, hey, he’s the president of the United States? Something in between?

As near as I can tell, today’s NATO summit basically went fine. On a purely operational basis, everyone agreed to the various initiatives they’ve been working on, and everyone signed the usual communique at the end, including the United States. At a working level, there were no hiccups. Literally the only thing that made it any different from any other NATO meeting was the fact that Donald Trump took advantage of the massive press presence to get off a few zingers that shocked all the normies.

But you can’t really report it that way, can you?

When the general says "breakfast," this is what he's talking about. Capiche?

From White House flack Sarah Sanders, asked why Chief of Staff John Kelly looked disgusted this morning when President Trump opined that “Germany is totally controlled by Russia”:

He was displeased because he was expecting a full breakfast and there were only pastries and cheese.

Oooh. Excellent use of sarcasm in response to an obviously dumb question! I give it a 9.8.

Say hello to my little backyard snail.

In news that will shock no one, the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy has tallied up the results of all the Republican tax cuts since 2000 and concluded that … most of it went to the rich. The average rich household today pays nearly $100,000 less in taxes than they would under the Clinton-era tax code, while the working and middle classes pay about $1,000 less:

ITEP figures that total taxes paid in 2018 are about $600 billion less than they would be if we had just left the tax code alone. That’s nearly the entire federal deficit projected for this year.

Just to make sure you get that: Republican tax cuts since 2000 are responsible for nearly the entire federal deficit. Repeal them all and the budget would be almost balanced.

Reporters via ZUMA

Longtime readers may remember my unhappiness about modern french fries cooked in vegetable oil. Back in the day, fries were cooked in beef tallow or something similar, and they tasted great! Today everybody is afraid a bit of cow fat is going to kill them, so fries are universally cooked in corn oil or some other vegetable shortening. But since you’re eating the damn things with a hamburger, why get bent out of shape about the fries being cooked in saturated fat in the first place?

That’s America for you, I guess. But now someone is fighting back. Coast Packing, “the number one supplier of animal fat shortenings in the Western United States,” has announced that Friday is #NationalBeefTallowDay. It is also #FRYdayThe13th. Plus there’s this:

Coast has put out a call for the public’s most poetic/ecstatic/witty/tasty tweets, proclaiming their hunger for beef tallow fries, in the first-ever #BeefTallowFrenchFries “Tweet-to-Win” Contest….The contest’s expert judge is blogger/columnist/beef tallow fries lover Kevin Drum. “Nobody makes fries the old way anymore,” Drum lamented in Mother Jones a few years back. “They used to be so good. These days—phhht. There’s no taste at all… Fries made in beef tallow are unquestionably better.”

I’ve finally made the big time! Details here, winner to be announced on July 27. And if you’re an Orange County local, come on out to the fair on Friday to hear chef Ernie Miller talk about the science of french fries and then sample some fries cooked in both peanut oil and beef tallow. What better way to spend a Friday evening?

Pool Christophe Licoppe/Belga via ZUMA

Blah blah blah:

Naturally we get all the usual stuff, barely updated from 2015 when Trump was using it on the campaign trail:

President Trump unleashed a blistering attack Wednesday on Germany and other NATO allies… Washington bears an unfair burden… “Germany…getting so much of its energy from Russia”… complained bitterly about Europe’s lagging defense spending… Even Stoltenberg…appeared reduced to spluttering… aides on both the U.S. and NATO side of a long table shifted in their seats and sat stonefaced… Munich’s Süddeutsche Zeitung headlined its story: “It is not only bad, it is catastrophic.”

Trump wants to be the center of attention and he wants to destroy anything that Barack Obama built. Obama worked hard on the NATO alliance and built a strong relationship with Angela Merkel, so Trump is tearing down NATO and howling about Merkel. There’s nothing more to this, and no one should bother pretending otherwise. Just let him howl and then settle down to business. If Trump theatrically decides not to sign the usual communique at the end of the summit, let him. But whatever anyone does, don’t give him the panic that he wants. Just stare at the ceiling while he rants and then deal with Pompeo and Mattis when it’s all over.