Hmmmmmmmmm

The topic of UFOs was on Reid’s mind Thursday because his interview with KNPR came just before he said he was scheduled to talk with an important senator about setting up a way for members of the military to support exploring suspicious sightings without facing retribution.

“I’m going to have a call with a member of the Senate in an hour or two where we have people in the military who want to come and tell somebody what they’ve seen,” Reid said in the interview, declining to identify who that senator is. (Food for thought: Reid’s former deputy, Senate Minority Whip Richard J. Durbin, D-Ill., is the ranking member of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee.)

[...]

Back in December 2017, the New York Times reported on a Pentagon program to study UFO sightings that came about because of Reid’s advocacy back when he was serving in the Senate.

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“Frankly, I think the federal government has done almost nothing to help us with this,” Reid said.

During the interview, Reid also said he knew a lot more about classified operations undertaken at Area 51 in his home state of Nevada.

[...]

"I know Area 51 quite well, I know what they’ve done there,” said Reid. “I don’t know in recent years, of course, but I know what went on there.”

  Roll Call

Harry Reid "does not have long to live." Mark Leibovich puts it bluntly in a New York Times Magazine profile of the former Senate majority leader, who is himself quite blunt at times. Leibovich writes that he was the first to be granted an interview with Reid since it emerged in May that the 79-year-old was being treated for pancreatic cancer; he visited Reid at his Henderson, Nevada, home in December. Leibovich charts Reid's backstory, to his high school days in Henderson, a destination that required a total of 90 miles of hitchhiking to get to each day. He recalls a rough and poverty-stricken childhood and a job as a Capitol Police officer that got Reid through George Washington University Law School. Upon his return to Nevada he worked as gaming commissioner for a time, "which placed him in the cross hairs of the Las Vegas mob."

Leibovich uses that detail to segue to President Trump, asking Reid if he agrees with some critics' description of Trump as operating like a Mafia boss. Reid disagreed, citing the "chaos" surrounding Trump. Then came the blunt remarks: "I think he is without question the worst president we've ever had. We've had some bad ones, and there's not even a close second to him. He'll lie. He'll cheat. You can't reason with him."

  Newser

“Organized crime is a business,” he told me, “and they are really good with what they do. But they are better off when things are predictable. In my opinion, they do not do well with chaos. And that’s what we have going with Trump.”

Still, Reid added: “Trump is an interesting person. He is not immoral but is amoral. Amoral is when you shoot someone in the head, it doesn’t make a difference. No conscience.”

[...]

Reid was also prescient in urging the Obama administration and congressional Republicans to go public about the investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election; the letter that Republican leaders agreed to co-sign weeks after they were briefed on the investigation did not identify Russia by name. “They did nothing — or nothing that I’m aware of,” Reid said.

But McConnell’s and Trump’s own most substantial accomplishment to date, the appointment to the federal bench of an unprecedented number of conservative judges, including two Supreme Court justices who might well end up hearing a challenge to the Affordable Care Act, was made vastly easier by Reid’s decision, in 2013, to get rid of the filibuster for judicial appointments. Reid remains unrepentant about this. “They can say what they want,” he told me. “We had over 100 judges that we couldn’t get approved, so I had no choice."

[...]

Reid’s health, even before the cancer diagnosis, was a factor in opting not to seek re-election for a sixth Senate term in 2016. Over the last few months, he has had chemotherapy and two back surgeries and has suffered a range of other ordeals, some related to [a freakish exercise-session mishap in early 2015, when an elastic band apparently snapped and propelled him into some cabinets, breaking ribs and bones in his face and blinding him in his right eye], for which Trump delighted in mocking him. “I think he should go back and start working out again with his rubber workout pieces,” Trump said in an interview with The Washington Post in September 2016.

In fairness, Reid had dismissed Trump as a “spoiled brat,” a “con man” and a “human leech.”

[...]

Reid once called the Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan a “political hack,” Justice Clarence Thomas “an embarrassment” and President George W. Bush a “loser” (for which he later apologized) and a “liar” (for which he did not). In 2016, he dismissed Trump as “a big fat guy” who “didn’t win many fights.” Reid himself was more than ready to fight, and fight dirty: “I was always willing to do things that others were not willing to do,” he told me.

[...]

“No one would enjoy the fight with Trump like Harry Reid would,” said Senator Claire McCaskill, the Missouri Democrat who lost her re-election race in November. The president “is an inherently weak man,” she said. “Harry would smell the weakness and say, ‘Damn the consequences.’ ”

[...]

Still, in retrospect, [...] Trump routinely surpasses Reid’s unscrupulousness with a few tweets before breakfast.

  NYT

Too bad Harry's not still in the Senate.