With news that Attorney General Jeff Sessions lied under oath about meeting Russian officials during last year’s presidential campaign, the unraveling story of the Trump administration’s contacts with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s government are once again dominating headlines. Earlier this morning, New York Senator Chuck Schumer tweeted:

Trump’s director of social media, Dan Scavino, Jr., responded thus:

Trump must have liked Scavino’s response because he tweeted the same point:

The parallel that Trump and Scavino are implying makes no sense. No one is claiming that Schumer met with Russian officials and lied about it under oath. But it’s not surprising that Trump has taken this tack. One of his favorite rhetorical moves is the classic first-grade response to an insult, “I know you are, but what am I?”

Update: He’s still at it.

Representative Roger Marshall is a longtime obstetrician who won a Kansas House seat least year and joined the GOP Doctors Caucus. But in an interview Friday with the medical news publication STAT, the anti-Obamacare doctor made a major misdiagnosis of America’s health care system.

“Just like Jesus said, ‘The poor will always be with us,’” he said. “There is a group of people that just don’t want health care and aren’t going to take care of themselves.”

The congressman went on to blame Americans on Medicaid for their ailments.

“Just, like, homeless people. … I think just morally, spiritually, socially, [some people] just don’t want health care,” he said. “The Medicaid population, which is [on] a free credit card, as a group, do probably the least preventive medicine and taking care of themselves and eating healthy and exercising. And I’m not judging, I’m just saying socially that’s where they are. So there’s a group of people that even with unlimited access to health care are only going to use the emergency room when their arm is chopped off or when their pneumonia is so bad they get brought [into] the ER.

Jesus, of course, wouldn’t have said any of this. But for a member of a Republican Congress hell bent on repealing health care, it’s not entirely off script.

Trump is attending a “listening session on school choice” on Friday at a Florida private school. As Politico reports, the school has one of the state’s “most controversial school choice policies” under which “corporations get 100 percent tax credits for donations that fund private school scholarships for poor children.”

Trump hasn’t yet specified if he’ll promote “school choice” nationally through a similar tax credit program—which critics call a “backdoor voucher” plan—or a more straightforward voucher scheme of the likes he proposed in the campaign. But Friday brought new evidence that vouchers would fail the vast majority of Americans—including in rural and suburban parts of the country where most Trump voters live.

“The simple fact is that most rural and suburban areas are either sparsely populated or organized in small districts where there are not enough schools for vouchers to be a viable or effective policy solution,” Neil Campbell and Catherine Brown of the Center for American Progress wrote in a new report. “In these districts, vouchers would be not just ineffective, but they could also dramatically destabilize public school systems and communities.”

CAP’s report follows The New York Times reporting last month that “a wave of new research has emerged suggesting that private school vouchers may harm students who receive them.” The Economic Policy Institute also concluded that “School vouchers are not a proven strategy for improving student achievement.”

But in a piece for Vanity Fair, James Wolcott pretends otherwise:

Disillusionment with Obama’s presidency, loathing of Hillary Clinton, disgust with “identity politics,” and a craving for a climactic reckoning that will clear the stage for a bold tomorrow have created a kinship between the “alt-right” and an alt-left. They’re not kissin’ cousins, but they caterwaul some of the same tunes in different keys.

Wolcott admits the left “can’t match” the alt-right “for strength, malignancy, or tentacled reach”—then proceeds to make just such an argument. This is bad writing in service of a bad argument: “People say things I don’t like” is not the same thing as “people advocate for a white ethnostate.” This is precisely the false equivalency Wolcott makes by using the phrase “alt-left.” It is a disingenuous characterization designed to undermine leftist claims.

His terminology—e.g. “dude-bros”—skips over women and people of color on the left, individuals who might as well not exist when it comes to this type of critic and who happen to be particularly vulnerable to alt-right violence. The aim of socialism is liberation for all, which is to be accomplished via the redistribution of wealth. The aim of the alt-right is white supremacy. There is no similarity here.

And there is little similarity between the rhetoric of leftists and the rhetoric of the alt-right. Leftists do not send Jewish journalists photos of ovens. Leftists have not called in SWAT teams to harass feminists they do not like. Leftists have not used racial slurs to intimidate journalists online, nor have they called for any restrictions on the freedom of the press.

Absent any real similarity between the left and the alt-right, smears are all some liberals have:

Let’s be honest about what is going on here. Wolcott derides a Jacobin writer for couching her arguments in “Snarkish.” In other words, he thinks she’s mean. He wants her to be nicer to people that he likes! That’s fine, but it isn’t politics.

Manners did not win the vote for women or civil rights for black Americans. They certainly didn’t spare us Donald Trump. To paraphrase Solomon: There is a time to simper and a time to raise hell. The left understands that we inhabit the latter moment. Does Wolcott?

Juan Thompson, 31, has been arrested by the FBI for phoning a series of bomb threats to at least eight Jewish community centers this year. Thompson does not appear to have been animated by Nazi sympathies but by rage at a former girlfriend: He allegedly made some of the calls in her name, and has been charged with cyberstalking. The complaint cites tweets from Thompson’s Twitter account.

Thompson was previously fired from The Intercept for fabulism. At the time, he complained that the termination was the result of a racist campaign against him and later claimed to be suffering from testicular cancer. According to his Twitter profile, he has since been working for a housing non-profit in St. Louis. (Update: The Intercept has confirmed that Thompson is in fact the person named in the suit.)

Thompson’s Twitter account is packed with obsessive tweets about his former girlfriend; his pinned tweet even claims she attempted to frame him for the calling in the threats. That now appears to be an elaborate attempt at misdirection. Thompson was allegedly the one making the calls.

According to the Indianapolis Star, Pence used a personal email account (an AOL account, proving that he is indeed a grumpy old man with Lego hair) to conduct official business, including matters of homeland security, when he was governor of Indiana. While public officials are not barred from using private email accounts in Indiana, they are supposed to retain and record any emails involving official business for the public record. Per the Star’s reporting, Pence did not start preserving his private emails until he was leaving the governor’s office.

The funniest bit part of the story is the fact that Pence’s AOL account was hacked in the same way old people’s accounts have been hacked since email has existed: “Pence’s account was actually compromised last summer by a scammer who sent an email to his contacts claiming Pence and his wife were stranded in the Philippines and in urgent need of money.” Pence had to send an email apologizing to his friends and family.

Of course, EMAILS: Mike Pence Edition is not quite as damning as the not-so-damning Hillary Clinton private email server situation, in which she was dealing with classified information as secretary of state. But it’s still a double-standard for Pence, who excoriated Clinton during the campaign for her lack of transparency and diligence.

Trump does not like to admit mistakes. Just this week, we saw the ugly side of that narcissistic trait when he blamed the military for the loss of a Navy SEAL in a botched raid in Yemen. This refusal to admit mistakes—combined with a stubborn and bewildering refusal to do self-oppo research—has only exacerbated the fallout from the scandal over the Trump campaign’s ties to the Russian government and/or intelligence agencies. On Thursday, a number of top Trump aides, including son-in-law Jared Kushner, admitted that they had met with the Russian ambassador over the course of the campaign. It’s hard to imagine, say, Mitt Romney’s team having this much contact with the Russian government. And yet we’re supposed to believe that this is entirely normal.

But that simply doesn’t track. If these contacts were totally innocent, then why lie about them? This is what Jeff Sessions did, to the point he almost lost his job. The desire to avoid the appearance of impropriety is the most charitable explanation, but the Trump administration of course won’t admit that. Instead, Trump is doubling down on his narrative: The Democrats are just mad and jealous because they lost the election.

It is obvious to anyone paying attention that the leaks are not the real story here. And, five months later, Trump is the only person still obsessing over the election result.

Sessions announced on Thursday that he would recuse himself from the Department of Justice’s investigation into contacts between Trump’s campaign and Russian intelligence agents, after The Washington Post reported that he had lied during his confirmation hearings about his own contacts with the Russian ambassador during the campaign. “I should not be involved in investigating a campaign I had a role in,” Sessions said.

This was what Sessions had to do. By Thursday morning the consensus in both parties was that the attorney general had to recuse himself. But, in characteristic Trump administration fashion, he half-assed it. Sessions’s recusal is partial and limited to investigations of the campaign, which as Ari Melber pointed out on MSNBC, means that he is not recusing himself from the investigation into contacts between Russia and the Trump transition team that occurred after the election. (You will recall that it was in this period that Michael Flynn got into trouble.)

Similarly, Sessions did little to explain why he lied to Congress. In fact, in his statement, he only made the lie seem worse. On Wednesday evening, for instance, Sessions said, “I don’t remember the contents of the meeting” he had with the Russian ambassador. But in a press conference on Thursday he suddenly remembered the conversation in vivid detail:

I don’t remember a lot of it, but I do remember saying I’d gone to Russia with a church group in 1991, and he said he was not a believer himself but he was glad to have church people come there. Indeed, I thought he was pretty much of an old-style Soviet type ambassador.

And so, we talked about a little bit about terrorism as I recall.

And somehow the subject of the Ukraine came up. I had had the Ukraine ambassador in my office the day before. And to listen to him, nothing that Russia—Russia had done nothing that was wrong in any area, and everybody else was wrong with regard to the Ukraine. It got to be a little bit of a testy conversation at that point.

By recusing himself—sort of—Sessions has temporarily stopped the bleeding. It’s possible, given his closeness to Trump and his importance to the administration’s immigration and crime policies, that he’s untouchable. But after the events of the last 24 hours, it looks like he’s one revelation away from losing his job.

And, even with this recusal, his influence will still hang over any investigation of Trump. It’s still his Department of Justice, and any investigation will therefore be tainted by Sessions. An independent investigation is becoming more of a possibility with each new revelation, and that is very bad news for Trump indeed.

The education secretary started the week by calling historically black colleges and universities “pioneers when it comes to school choice,” appearing ignorant that these schools started because black Americans typically had no educational choices under segregation. Her comment was criticized for its ahistoricism and racial insensitivity, but journalist Soledad O’Brien pointed out it was part of a broader statement that included some pretty poor writing. Then, on Thursday, in an opinion piece for USA Today, DeVos referred to former President Barack Obama’s School Improvement Grants as “Student Improvement Grants.”

It’s a minor mistake, perhaps—one that would probably go unnoticed if its author weren’t famously lacking in basic knowledge about education. DeVos flubbed the difference between academic proficiency and growth—and seemed unaware of federal disability law—during her confirmation hearing. Then she insulted teachers at a Washington, D.C., public school by saying they were operating in “receive mode.”

A good editor can’t save DeVos from verbal gaffes. But knowing that journalists will scrutinize her prepared statements, she ought to find someone in her press shop who can polish and fact-check her prose.