Friday Reads: My Country has Dysfunctional Family Dynamics and one mean drunk Father in Charge
Posted: December 29, 2017 Filed under: 2016 elections, Donald Trump | Tags: Dangerous and Angry Donald, Delusional, Deranged 19 CommentsJust when you think it’s safe to turn the TV on …
Thursday night went out with another Dumpfster Fire Interview that is sure to cause us all to crawl back into our safe space. Kremlin Caligula gave an unsupervised interview to the NYT and it’s a doozy. I don’t know if any of you ever grew up in a family with one parent who was almost always angry, given to spontaneous fits of temper, and generally could say something to make you feel smaller than a grain of salt but this is the only way I can describe our country’s relationship with its current placeholder in the White House. He’s the mean drunk, angry father. We’re the family that knows the outbursts are at least daily events and they get worse. We have no idea how to make it go away we just hope some nice law enforcement official puts him away eventually before he kills some one.
Of course, the interview contained lie upon lie upon lie. The Toronto Star counted 25 of them. That’s 1 false claim per half hour. He’s still obsessed with the election and he is scared as shit about the Mueller investigation.
The Star is keeping track of every false claim Trump makes as president. As of Dec. 22, Trump had already made 978 false claims; adding the Times interview, the tally will pass the 1,000 mark in the next update.
Here’s every false claim Trump made in the interview:
1) “But I think it’s all worked out because frankly there is absolutely no collusion, that’s been proven by every Democrat is saying it … Virtually every Democrat has said there is no collusion. There is no collusion.”
Democratic members of Congress have not said en masse that they are convinced that there was no collusion between Trump’s campaign and Russia. Some have acknowledged that they have not seen evidence of collusion, but they have pointed out that the investigation is ongoing.
2) “And you’re talking about what Paul (Manafort) was many years ago before I ever heard of him. He worked for me for — what was it, three and a half months? … Three and a half months.”
Manafort worked for the Trump campaign for just under five months, from March 28, 2016 to his resignation on August 19, 2016.
3) “I saw (Democratic Sen.) Dianne Feinstein the other day on television saying there is no collusion.”
Trump appeared to be referring, as he has in the past, to a November CNN interview with Feinstein — in which she did not declare that there is no collusion. Feinstein was specifically asked if she had seen evidence that the Trump campaign was given Democratic emails hacked by Russia. “Not so far,” she responded. She was not asked about collusion more broadly, and her specific answer made clear that she was referring only to evidence she has personally seen to date, not issuing a sweeping final judgment.
4) “She’s (Feinstein) the head of the committee.”
Feinstein, a Democrat, is not the head of any committee: Republicans control Congress and thus lead the committees. She is the ranking member — the top Democrat — on the Senate Judiciary Committee.
5) “So, I actually think that it’s turning out — I actually think it’s turning to the Democrats because there was collusion on behalf of the Democrats. There was collusion with the Russians and the Democrats. A lot of collusion … starting with the dossier.”
The word “collusion” — in common language, a “secret agreement or co-operation especially for an illegal or deceitful purpose” — simply does not apply to the dossier produced by a former British spy about alleged ties between Trump’s campaign and Russia. Trump’s administration, seeking to turn the “collusion” allegation around on its opponents, has argued that the dossier, which was funded in part by the Clinton campaign, amounts to the “Clinton campaign colluding with Russian intelligence.” This is absurd on its face. Russian intelligence favoured Trump and tried to damage Clinton, U.S. intelligence agencies say; the British ex-spy was simply using Russian sources — who have not been identified — to attempt to figure out how Trump’s campaign was linked to the Russian government. Such research is not illegal or deceitful, and it does not come close to qualifying as the type of possible “collusion” investigators are probing with regard to the Trump campaign: coordination with the Russian government’s efforts to interfere with the election.
6) “ … it’s very hard for a Republican to win the Electoral College. O.K.? You start off with New York, California and Illinois against you. That means you have to run the East Coast, which I did, and everything else. Which I did and then won Wisconsin and Michigan. (Inaudible.) So the Democrats. … (Inaudible.) … They thought there was no way for a Republican, not me, a Republican, to win the Electoral College … The Electoral College is so much better suited to the Democrats (inaudible).”
This claim that the Electoral College is tilted in favour of Democrats — and that “they” think it is impossible for a Republican to win the election in 2016 —- is obvious nonsense. Six of the last nine presidents, all of whom except for Gerald Ford had to win an Electoral College election, have been Republicans.
7) “They made the Russian story up as a hoax, as a ruse, as an excuse for losing an election that in theory Democrats should always win with the Electoral College.”
Democrats, of course, did not invent the “Russian story” for electoral purposes, nor is it a “hoax.” U.S. intelligence agencies say that the Russian government interfered in the election for the purpose of helping Trump win; that Russian interference was the original story, and Democrats were talking about it well before Election Day. Perhaps Trump is correct that there was no illegal collusion between his campaign and the Russians, but this matter is being investigated by a special prosecutor appointed by his own deputy attorney general, not “Democrats,” and many senior Republicans believe the investigation has merit.
8) “They (Democrats) thought it would be a one-day story, an excuse, and it just kept going and going and going.”
This is simple nonsense. Democrats did not think that the question of Russian interference in the election on behalf of Trump, or the question of the Trump campaign’s relationship with those efforts, would be a “one-day story.”
Of course, that list goes on so go read it!
Axios presents evidence that Trump will be unchained in 2018. Heaven help all of us with PSTD!
If you ask some close to President Trump what worries them most about 2018, it’s not Robert Mueller’s probe. It’s that establishment guardrails of 2017 come down — and Trump’s actual instincts take over.
Next year will bring “full Trump,” said one person who recently talked to the president.
Trump has governed mostly as a conventional conservative — on tax cuts, his Supreme Court pick, and rolling back regulations. Most of his top advisers are fairly conventional conservatives, so that makes sense.
- Most of those in his current decision-making circle — even if they’re not mainstream Republicans — are defending mainstream Republican principles like free trade and an internationalist view of foreign policy.
- But top officials paint a different portrait of Trump when it comes to what he really wants on trade, immigration and North Korea — but has been tamped down by skeptical staff and Cabinet officials.
In private meetings:
- Trump keeps asking for tariffs — on steel and aluminum, in particular. He wants a trade war, and has for many years. His economic and diplomatic advisers persuaded him to delay trade actions in 2017.
- Those advisers recognize that the day of reckoning will come in 2018, regardless of whether economic adviser Gary Cohn and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson — who advocated restraint — stay or go.
- Cohn and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin successfully persuaded Trump not to do anything rash while tax reform was being negotiated.
- Trump also saw the advantage of trying to use that as leverage with China to get help on North Korea. He said yesterday in an interview with the N.Y Times: “China’s hurting us very badly on trade, but I have been soft on China because the only thing more important to me than trade is war. O.K.?”
- And he tweeted yesterday, in response to Chinese ships secretly delivering oil to North Korea: “Caught RED HANDED – very disappointed that China is allowing oil to go into North Korea. There will never be a friendly solution to the North Korea problem if this continues to happen!”
- NEW: Look for Trump to take action on trade in the next month. It probably won’t be next week, so as not to disrupt the afterglow of the tax cut. But nothing is final.
- Trump still wants his wall, and tighter restrictions on legal immigration. He’s a true believer on this stuff, and knows intuitively that it keeps his base stoked.
- Trump seems most interested in discussing military options on North Korea in these meetings. He is surrounded by advisers who share his concern about the rogue state, but not his fixation on a military strike.
- And some top officials have told us Trump’s belligerent rhetoric on the subject makes them nervous.
- There is a reason the harshest assessments of Trump usually leak after North Korea meetings.
This interview basically let Trump be Trump. He just wandered all over the place but always returned to the idea that Russia is a Democratic plot against his win but even if it did exist it’s no big deal and definitely not a crime. I’ve seen toddlers with a better grasp of a logical argument.
President Trump in a new interview denied any collusion between his 2016 presidential campaign and Russia, adding “even if there was, it’s not a crime.”
Speaking to The New York Times Thursday, Trump praised lawyer Alan Dershowitz, who has argued that Trump’s firing of former FBI Director James Comey was not obstruction of justice because Trump has the right to fire the head of the bureau.
“I watched Alan Dershowitz the other day, he said, No. 1, there is no collusion, No. 2, collusion is not a crime, but even if it was a crime, there was no collusion,” Trump told the newspaper. “And he said that very strongly. He said there was no collusion. And he has studied this thing very closely. I’ve seen him a number of times.”
“There is no collusion, and even if there was, it’s not a crime,” he continued. “But there’s no collusion.”
Trump also blasted special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into ties between Trump’s campaign and Russia, saying it “makes the country look very bad.”
“It puts the country in a very bad position,” Trump said. “So the sooner it’s worked out, the better it is for the country.”
More like the sooner he’s out of office, the better it is for the country. Charles Pierce says it all “Trump’s New York Times Interview Is a Portrait of a Man in Cognitive Decline.”
On Thursday, El Caudillo del Mar-A-Lago sat down with Michael Schmidt of The New York Times for what apparently was an open-ended, one-on-one interview. Since then, the electric Twitter machine–and most of the rest of the Intertoobz–has been alive with criticism of Schmidt for having not pushed back sufficiently against some of the more obvious barefaced non-facts presented by the president* in their chat. Some critics have been unkind enough to point out that Schmidt was the conveyor belt for some of the worst attacks on Hillary Rodham Clinton emanating from both the New York FBI office and the various congressional committees staffed by people in kangaroo suits. For example, Schmidt’s name was on a shabby story the Times ran on July 23, 2015 in which it was alleged that a criminal investigation into HRC’s famous use of a private email server was being discussed within the Department of Justice. It wasn’t, and the Times’ public editor at the time, the great Margaret Sullivan, later torched the story in a brutal column.
Other people were unkind enough to point out that the interview was brokered by one Christopher Ruddy, a Trump intimate and the CEO of NewsMax, and that Ruddy made his bones as a political “journalist” by peddling the fiction that Clinton White House counsel Vince Foster had been murdered, one of the more distasteful slanders that got a shameful public airing during the Clinton frenzy of the 1990’s. Neither of those will concern us here. What Schmidt actually got out of this interview is a far more serious problem for the country. In my view, the interview is a clinical study of a man in severe cognitive decline, if not the early stages of outright dementia.
Over the past 30 years, I’ve seen my father and all of his siblings slide into the shadows and fog of Alzheimer’s Disease. (the president’s father developed Alzheimer’s in his 80s.) In 1984, Ronald Reagan debated Walter Mondale in Louisville and plainly had no idea where he was. (Would that someone on the panel had asked him. He’d have been stumped.) Not long afterwards, I was interviewing a prominent Alzheimer’s researcher for a book I was doing, and he said, “I saw the look on his face that I see every day in my clinic.” In the transcript of this interview, I hear in the president*’s words my late aunt’s story about how we all walked home from church in the snow one Christmas morning, an event I don’t recall, but that she remembered so vividly that she told the story every time I saw her for the last three years of her life.
In this interview, the president* is only intermittently coherent. He talks in semi-sentences and is always groping for something that sounds familiar, even if it makes no sense whatsoever and even if it blatantly contradicts something he said two minutes earlier. To my ears, anyway, this is more than the president*’s well-known allergy to the truth. This is a classic coping mechanism employed when language skills are coming apart. (My father used to give a thumbs up when someone asked him a question. That was one of the strategies he used to make sense of a world that was becoming quite foreign to him.) My guess? That’s part of the reason why it’s always “the failing New York Times,” and his 2016 opponent is “Crooked Hillary.”
In addition, the president* exhibits the kind of stubbornness you see in patients when you try to relieve them of their car keys–or, as one social worker in rural North Carolina told me, their shotguns. For example, a discussion on health-care goes completely off the rails when the president* suddenly recalls that there is a widely held opinion that he knows very little about the issues confronting the nation. So we get this.
He’s obviously obsessed with Mueller too and of course, with Hillary, always with Hillary. Aaron Blake of WAPO focuses on some of his more bizarre thoughts on the Justice Department and the Mueller Investigation.
1. On special counsel Robert S. Mueller III: “It doesn’t bother me, because I hope that he’s going to be fair. I think that he’s going to be fair. … There’s been no collusion. But I think he’s going to be fair.”
This might have been the newsiest bit from the interview. Trump seemingly contradicts many of his supporters by saying he thinks Mueller will be fair. Conservative media and Republicans in Congress have spent much of the past few weeks attacking the credibility of the Mueller investigation. Trump hasn’t really joined in that effort publicly, but he has attacked the FBI and the Justice Department.
2. “I have absolute right to do what I want to do with the Justice Department. But for purposes of hopefully thinking I’m going to be treated fairly, I’ve stayed uninvolved with this particular matter.”
And here’s the other side of the coin. In this quote, Trump seems to buy into what those same supporters have been arguing about his authority to control the Justice Department. This is a rather remarkable assertion of power, even as it’s not terribly surprising from a president who clearly has some authoritarian tendencies. It seems Trump is suggesting he can do things like fire Mueller if he wants to, even as he says he thinks Mueller is being fair and as the White House denies that is even being considered.
3. “I don’t want to get into loyalty, but I will tell you that — I will say this: [Eric] Holder protected President Obama. Totally protected him. When you look at the IRS scandal, when you look at the guns for whatever, when you look at all of the tremendous, ah, real problems they had — not made-up problems like Russian collusion, these were real problems — when you look at the things that they did, and Holder protected the president. And I have great respect for that, I’ll be honest, I have great respect for that.”
Trump begins this quote by saying, “I don’t want to get into loyalty,” but then he goes on to unmistakably suggest that Attorney General Jeff Sessions hasn’t been loyal enough to him — or at least that he hasn’t been as loyal as then-Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. was to President Barack Obama. Add this to the list of quotes showing just how upset Trump remains with Sessions.
Kremlin Caligula has a most unAmerican viewpoint of these things that it’s almost difficult to believe he was ever schooled on American soil. Where does one get such blatantly unConstitutional notions? Oh, and that’s 3 of 11.
I have to agree though, the idea that he still thinks he’s running a nationally syndicated TV show in lieu of a nation is the most curious of all the quotes. This is a man that simply is delusional and dangerous. This is number 4.
4. On 2020: “Another reason that I’m going to win another four years is because newspapers, television, all forms of media will tank if I’m not there. Because without me, their ratings are going down the tubes. Without me, the New York Times will indeed be not the failing New York Times, but the failed New York Times. So they basically have to let me win. And eventually, probably six months before the election, they’ll be loving me because they’re saying, ‘Please, please, don’t lose Donald Trump.’”
I’ve long thought Trump believed this, but it’s remarkable to hear him say it out loud. It’s almost like he’s making a case to the media for why it should help him win reelection in 2020 and/or not be too tough on him. And it’s not the first time that he’s said something that seems to misunderstand the media’s role in American governance. Reports have long suggested Trump thought his media coverage would improve once he was elected president.
There’s seven more of these too go so check them out. It’s just really a fall down a rabbit hole. Is he the Mad Hatter or the March Hare? As always, Twitter rules the response to the Demon God of Twitter.
Thursday evening brought a surprise New York Times interview with President Donald Trump. Times reporter Michael Schmidt was able to speak to the president at Trump’s golf club in West Palm Beach, Florida. In an impromptu, free-wheeling, 30-minute conversation following Trump’s latest round of golf, the president insisted numerous times that there was no collusion with Russia while also maintaining that he feels Special Counsel Robert Mueller can be fair to him.
With the Timesposting excerpts from the transcript of the interview, Media Twitter had a field day posting their favorite bits from the president rambling off-the-cuff. Let’s face it — there are fewer things reporters and journalists love more than unchained Trump.
https://twitter.com/AaronBlake/status/946562667698900993
So, I really don’t want any one to lose their lunch and appetite for life because we obviously have a severely disturbed president in charge of our nuclear arsenal. But it is what it is, and he is what he is, and this is a blog that’s always been focused on policy and politics.
We are indeed a family that needs to uplift each other before this man destroys the lot of us and drives away all of our friends. I suppose it has to be reiterated that Republicans are enabling all of this to oversee the looting of the USA by the donors. I also wonder what kind of kompromat that the Russians have on them through their hacking of the RNC and likely, other places. I certainly think that the RNC must be worried. I definitely think both Sessions and Graham must have dossiers filled with stuff and now I’m thinking Orin Hatch must be more of a wascally wabbit than any of us every supposed.
Try to stick to local happiness while we can. I’m even finding that to be difficult given that the same enterprising rapers after our National Parks and Treasury have been at it with my neighborhood. My property takes just went from an annual bill of about $750 to over $2000. I have no doubt that I have Air BnB to thank for that. Pretty sure those idiots that still live here and are now renting rooms have had a similar experience. There’s just something about the sound of stupid ass white people slitting their own throats that just endlessly appalls.
So, I’ll see you on New Year’s Day. Let’s lift our prayers to all the Wisdom Energy in the Multiverse so that it sweeps over this nation like a Renaissance of Rational Thought. Resist!
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Monday Reads: Looking for at least 3 wise men, must be bearing indictments
Posted: December 25, 2017 Filed under: just because | Tags: Destroying Environmental protection, Louisiana Coastline erosion, Poverty America, Tearing Down the New Deal 12 Comments
Happy Christmas Sky Dancers!
Fifty more days until Mardi Gras!
We’re careening towards a New Year with a hope that 2018 brings indictments, a new congress, and impeachments! I have some reads for you to let you remember why this year we RESIST!
But could extreme poverty also be a feature of what is (although perhaps not for long) one of the richecoasst and most powerful nations in the world? Quite possibly. To answer the question, the United Nations launched an investigation of extreme poverty in the United States.
Philip Alston, the United Nations special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, has just wrapped up a 15-day tour of the United States. His team visited Alabama, California, Puerto Rico, West Virginia and Washington, D.C. The findings, released last Friday, documented homelessness, unsafe sanitation and sewage disposal practices, as well as police surveillance, criminalization and harassment of the poor. The rise in poverty, they found, disproportionately affects people of color and women, but also large swaths of white Americans. The report concluded that the pervasiveness of poverty and inequality “are shockingly at odds with [the United States’] immense wealth and its founding commitment to human rights.”
To be sure, poverty in the United States is not equivalent to poverty in less developed countries. This has never been a country free of inequality and poverty, but their rapid growth over the past two decades has undermined any professed commitment to equal opportunity or the belief that the nation’s prosperity rests on the well-being of ordinary Americans.
This phenomenon will undoubtedly be exacerbated by the topic of this thoughtful piece by Heater Cox Richardson in The Guardian: ‘Bit by bit, Trump is taking apart the New Deal’s glorious legacy’.
Since January, there have been frightening signs that America is becoming an oligarchy overseen by a dictator. From the first, Donald Trump has followed an authoritarian playbook, beginning with his rejection of objective reality. Forced early on to defend the assertion that the crowd at Trump’s inauguration was the biggest ever witnessed, presidential spokesperson Kellyanne Conway explained that the administration used “alternative facts”. Since then, the president has repeatedly attacked fact-based media as “fake news”. Indeed, with his insistence on an alternative reality, Trump sometimes seems like an elderly Fox News-addled neighbour suddenly given power to make his bizarrely warped view of America real.
Since Democratic president Franklin Delano Roosevelt established the New Dealin the 1930s, radical conservatives have railed against the idea that the government should intervene in the economy. The New Deal responded to the Great Crash and the ensuing Depression by regulating business, providing a basic social safety net and promoting infrastructure in order to maintain a level playing field for all Americans. Opponents countered this principle by arguing that the government must not hem in America’s business leaders. In their view, government regulations and laws to benefit poorer members of society crippled leaders’ ability to prosper and, since their prosperity drove the economy by trickling down to everyone else, such laws destroyed progress.
Best and most appropriate holiday gift ever with the story via New York Daily News: ‘Gift-wrapped horse poop sends bomb squad to Steven Mnuchin’s Bel Air mansion’.
Los Angeles police got a whiff of horse manure intended for Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin at his Bel-Air home Saturday night.
A neighbor discovered the Christmas-themed package on the driveway of the Trump cabinet member around 5:30 p.m. local time and called police, a Los Angeles Police Department official said.
The bomb squad opened the gift-wrapped surprise and found a “pretty good quantity” of horse manure inside, LAPD Sgt. Briggs said.
And what brave man did this you may ask? Well, from AL.com we get this answer: ‘Man who left manure at Treasury Secretary Mnuchin’s house comes forward, speaks out’.
L.A. psychologist Robby Strong provided AL.com with convincing evidence that he is the man behind the now-infamous incident, which attracted the LAPD’s bomb squad and other law enforcement personnel to Mnuchin’s home in the city’s Bel Air neighborhood.
He defended his decision to drop the box of manure – which he says he got from a horse-owning friend – off at Mnuchin’s house as a “prank” aimed at raising the awareness of Americans about the idea that “Republicans have done nothing for the American worker” and other political topics.
“The thing I live by is a rule of transparency and I was exercising my First Amendment rights,” Strong told AL.com. “A few years ago when [a Supreme Court ruling] said that corporations are persons and money equals free speech, that is so absurd and my rule of thumb is now that if corporations are free speech, then so is horses***t.”
At 12:22 p.m. PST Saturday, Strong posted three pictures to Facebook, one of which depicts himself posing with a shovel next to a gift-wrapped box, and another of which shows the box full of what appears to be fecal matter.
Festive Resistance! How very kewl!! Roll backs on environmental protection continue. Oil companies continue to look for ways to drill in pristine places like the Arctic National Refuge and the Gulf. Louisiana has to fight all kinds of issues including a proposed battery component factory in a small town surrounded by water that connects to Lake Pontchartrain.
An Australian company hoping to bring a battery components factory to a port in southern Tangipahoa Parish is running into opposition from residents concerned the plant could harm the nearby swampy waterway used for fishing and recreation.
Syrah Resources is in the permitting phase for a facility that would process graphite from Mozambique into a component for lithium ion batteries, now in high demand for electric cars. The company is touting the plant as a way for Louisiana to position itself as a player in the growing electric car industry.
Similar plants exist in China, but this would be the first in the United States, said Paul Jahn, chief operations officer for battery anode materials at Syrah Tehnologies, the company’s battery subsidiary.
The factory would be located in an existing warehouse at Port Manchac, the port and industrial complex along North Pass, a narrow waterway connecting Lake Maurepa and Lake Pontchartrain.
The company hopes to start production in the spring of 2018.
At the plant, flake graphite would be milled into a spherical shape and purified with water and acids. The final product would be shipped to battery manufacturers in the U.S. and abroad, Jahn said.
At full capacity, the plant would produce about 10,000 metric tons of spherical graphite each year, he said.
Syrah has applied to the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality for air and water permits. The company proposes to release annually about 38 tons of particulate matter, .93 tons of hydrochloric acid, .52 tons of hydrogen fluoride and .004 tons of formaldehyde into the air, according to permit documents. The plant also proposes to pump 41,000 gallons of water used in the manufacturing process into North Pass on a daily basis.
Louisiana is already making plans to move it’s coastal communities as most of its coastline continues to erode and sink into the Gulf of Mexico. This headline is from Bloomberg: ‘Louisiana, Sinking Fast, Prepares to Empty Out Its Coastal Plain’. There are so many things that need to be saved from this administration it’s becoming an endless list.
Louisiana is finalizing a plan to move thousands of people from areas threatened by the rising Gulf of Mexico, effectively declaring uninhabitable a coastal area larger than Delaware.
A draft of the plan, the most aggressive response to climate-linked flooding in the U.S., calls for prohibitions on building new homes in high-risk areas, buyouts of homeowners who live there now and hikes in taxes on those who won’t leave. Commercial development would still be allowed, but developers would need to put up bonds to pay for those buildings’ eventual demolition.
“Not everybody is going to live where they are now and continue their way of life,” said Mathew Sanders, the state official in charge of the program, which has the backing of Governor John Bel Edwards. “And that is an emotional, and terrible, reality to face.”
Dust off your pink or purple pussy hat! More women’s marches are on the way for 2018 and we’re going to need them! Here’s a jolly headline from Newsweek: ‘HOW TRUMP AND THE NAZIS STOLE CHRISTMAS TO PROMOTE WHITE NATIONALISM’.
President Donald Trump wants Americans to think he re-invented Christmas.“We can say merry Christmas again,” he has said on numerous occasions both during his campaign for president and his presidency. “Christmas is back, better and bigger than ever before,” he told supporters months before the Christmas season.
“You can say again, ‘Merry Christmas’ because Donald Trump is now the president,” said Trump’s former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski after Trump won the election.
Many of Trump’s Christian supporters argue that the president is ending the alleged “war on Christmas,” which has been presented by evangelicals and Fox news anchors as a threat to America’s Christian culture. Trump supporters say Americans have become too politically correct when they wish people happy holidays, a neutral term that can be used for people who celebrate Hanukkah, Eid, or any other religious holiday that takes place around the same time as Christmas.
But critics counter that Trump is promoting a version of the holidays that excludes members of other religions, and that his crusade to bring back Christmas is part of a larger attempt by the president to define America as a country for white Christians alone.
Wishing people “merry Christmas” instead of “happy holidays,” is thus in line with Trump’s decision to ban citizens of Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States, critics say. It fits neatly with his refusal to condemn white supremacists when they march against diversity, and with his condemnation of athletes who protest police brutality against black men.
With this in mind, the fight to end the war on Christmas is exclusionary politics at its most flagrant.
“I see such invocations of Christmas as a kind of cypher, what some would call a dog whistle. It does not appear to be intolerant or extreme, but to attentive audiences it speaks volumes about identity and belonging—who and what are fully American,” Richard King, a professor at Washington State University who studies how white supremacists exploit culture, told Newsweek.
So, that’s it for me. Let’s just get ready to take it all back in 2018!! Have a great week! 
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Leave us a greeting!!!
Friday Reads: Ho Ho Hos in the Beltway
Posted: December 22, 2017 Filed under: Afternoon Reads | Tags: Deconstruction of the Administrative State, Russian Assets, Russian Collusion, Tax Cuts for Billionaires Bill 35 Comments
Happy Friday Sky Dancers!
I’m trying to gear myself up for a better 2018. I think I may join the phone bank efforts to unseat Paul Ryan since my Congress Critter’s votes are never a problem. There have been shellackings recently but now we may be talking blood bath and I want to grave dance where ever appropriate.
A few weeks before Alabama’s special Senate election, President Donald Trump’s handpicked Republican National Committee leader, Ronna Romney McDaniel, delivered a two-page memo to White House chief of staff John Kelly outlining the party’s collapse with female voters.
The warning, several people close to the chairwoman said, reflected deepening anxiety that a full-throated Trump endorsement of accused child molester Roy Moore in the special election — which the president was edging closer to at the time — would further damage the party’s standing with women. McDaniel’s memo, which detailed the president’s poor approval numbers among women nationally and in several states, would go unheeded, as Trump eventually went all-in for the ultimately unsuccessful Republican candidate.
It’s comforting to me to think that women look like they may deliver the blow to this administration and the pandering, ass-kissing congress critters who value donors over their own constituents. Black woman already figured this out but hopefully a huge number of white women buy a clue. Kremlin Caligula has wrecked so much havoc on the nation’s institutions already that it’s difficult to imagine that it won’t be a bit of a struggle back to a functional democracy. The Republicans will now own the economy and I can tell you it won’t be pretty.
The GOP tax bill will mark the Trump administration’s first major legislative achievement. It’s likely to jolt the economy more than any one political event since Trump’s election, if not since the Affordable Care Act was passed, and it may well bring about the biggest upward transfer of wealth since the recession. It will also increase the deficit by $1 trillion or more, destabilize the health-insurance market by eliminating the requirement to buy coverage, and probably lower Trump’s personal tax bill significantly. For good measure, it’s set to take effect on January 1, giving the country less than two weeks to prepare for the new regime.
However, given that the congressional year has otherwise been marked by turmoil and inaction, and given the high staff turnover and the parade of scandals at the White House, it’s been easy to miss what this administration has already done. In the background, Donald Trump’s Cabinet members and their collaborators have been working hard to deliver on Steve Bannon’s vision of dismantling the “regulatory state.” With Trump’s blessing, they have made drastic, structural changes on education, immigration, environmental protections, broadcasting and internet laws, and rules of military engagement, among other issues. Most often the changes have taken direct aim at Obama’s legacy, but some apply to regulations and programs that date back decades.
Go examine the list and be appalled. Also, realize that some of the nation’s top scientists and diplomats are fleeing public service. There are few left to contain the damage. It also has been discussed that the IRS will not be able to provide any help on any questions about the tax changes. The chaos of an insane man has spread through almost every agency implemented by talentedless trust fund babies with no clue about their jobs. The EPA has become a scene of these crimes against our country.
More than 700 people have left the Environmental Protection Agency since President Trump took office, a wave of departures that puts the administration nearly a quarter of the way toward its goal of shrinking the agency to levels last seen during the Reagan administration.
Of the employees who have quit, retired or taken a buyout package since the beginning of the year, more than 200 are scientists. An additional 96 are environmental protection specialists, a broad category that includes scientists as well as others experienced in investigating and analyzing pollution levels. Nine department directors have departed the agency as well as dozens of attorneys and program managers. Most of the employees who have left are not being replaced.
The departures reflect poor morale and a sense of grievance at the agency, which has been criticized by President Trump and top Republicans in Congress as bloated and guilty of regulatory overreach. That unease is likely to deepen following revelations that Republican campaign operatives were using the Freedom of Information Act to request copies of emails from E.P.A. officials suspected of opposing Mr. Trump and his agenda.
The cuts deepen a downward trend at the agency that began under the Obama administration in response to Republican-led budget constraints that left the agency with about 15,000 employees at the end of his term. The reductions have accelerated under President Trump, who campaigned on a promise to dramatically scale back the E.P.A., leaving only what he called “little tidbits” in place. Current and former employees say unlike during the Obama years, the agency has no plans to replace workers, and they expect deeper cuts to come.
“The reason E.P.A. went down to 15,000 employees under Obama is because of pressure from Republicans. This is the effort of the Republicans under the Obama administration on steroids,” said John J. O’Grady, president of American Federation of Government Employees Council 238, a union representing E.P.A. employees.
ProPublica and The New York Times analyzed the comings and goings from the E.P.A. through the end of September, the latest data that has been compiled, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. The figures and interviews with current and former E.P.A. officials show the administration is well on its way to achieving its goal of cutting 3,200 positions from the E.P.A., about 20 percent of the agency’s work force.
Jahan Wilcox, a spokesman for the E.P.A., said the agency was running more efficiently. “With only 10 months on the job, Administrator Pruitt is unequivocally doing more with less to hold polluters accountable and to protect our environment,” he said.
Within the agency, science in particular is taking a hard hit. More than 27 percent of those who left this year were scientists, including 34 biologists and microbiologists; 19 chemists; 81 environmental engineers and environmental scientists; and more than a dozen toxicologists, life scientists and geologists. Employees say the exodus has left the agency depleted of decades of knowledge about protecting the nation’s air and water. Many also said they saw the departures as part of a more worrisome trend of muting government scientists, cutting research budgets and making it more difficult for academic scientists to serve on advisory boards.
Meanwhile, House investigations of Russian attacks on our elections and the involvement of the Trump Campaign continue for the time being. Bannon and Lewandowski have been called to testify.
President Donald Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon and his former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski have been asked to testify to House lawmakers investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Both men were sent letters this week by the House Intelligence Committee asking them to testify in early January, according to an official familiar with the panel’s schedule.
The committee hasn’t yet received a response from either Bannon or Lewandowski. The invitation, which didn’t come in the form of a subpoena compelling them to testify, was for a “voluntary interview” in the committee’s offices, which would mean it would be held behind closed doors, the official said.
The letter doesn’t lay out specific reasons the committee wants to interview them, or the questions the panel wants to pose, but it makes clear that the interviews are part of the Russia investigation.
Bannon, who worked as Trump’s top strategist during the campaign and for several months in the White House, hasn’t been publicly accused of any wrongdoing.
Bannon was a key member of Trump’s team when the president fired national security adviser Michael Flynn and FBI director James Comey.
During the campaign, Bannon was also a liaison to its data-analytics firm, Cambridge Analytica.
Alexander Nix, the chief executive officer of Cambridge Analytica, met with the House Intelligence probe earlier this month. Nix faced questions about whether he sought material from WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange that was stolen from computers of the Democratic National Committee and John Podesta, who managed Democrat Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.
A look into the Until now. In a December 18 interview on CNN, retired Air Force Lieutenant General James Clapper, the former director of national intelligence, virtually called Trump a Putin puppet. The Russian president, Clapper noted, is a former KGB “case officer,” or spy recruiter, who “knows how to handle an asset, and that’s what he’s doing with the president. That’s the appearance to me.” (Pressed to clarify his “asset” comment, Clapper said, “I’m saying this figuratively.”)
“Wow,” tweeted former CIA Russian hand John Sipher. “The rest of us try to find other clever ways to say the same thing. Good on him for having the courage to call out Putin’s behavior. Our president shouldn’t have fallen for it.”
Veteran spy handlers have judged Trump an easy mark for Putin, who spent years in the KGB sizing up and exploiting a target’s vulnerabilities. They note how easily he falls for praise, as when Putin thanked him and the CIA for helping him thwart a bomb attack plot in St. Petersburg. “POTUS is a [spy] handlers’ dream,” Asha Rangappa, a former special agent in the FBI’s counterintelligence division, said. “He responds, without fail, to praise and flattery and telegraphs his day-to-day thoughts on Twitter. Likewise, said Harry “Skip” Brandon, a former FBI deputy assistant director of national security and counterterrorism. “He often very publicly states he goes by his instincts. If that is accurate, he may be the ultimate unwitting asset of Russia.”
And so on. The steady drip of revelations emerging from multiple Trump investigations—his business deals with Russian investors, his associates’ many undeclared meetings with Kremlin agents, his resistance to accepting evidence of Russian meddling in the 2016 election and his indiscretion with Israeli intelligence—draws a far darker picture.
Some veteran intelligence operators think it’s well past time to shift the narrative on Trump’s disturbing affinity for Putin, which the president insists is innocent and good for world peace. “Everyone continues to dance around a clear assessment of what’s going on,” says Glenn Carle, a former CIA national intelligence officer responsible for evaluating foreign threats. “My assessment,” he tells Newsweek, “is that Trump is actually working directly for the Russians.”
The Israelis can’t say they weren’t warned. In January 2017, a few weeks before Trump’s inauguration, top U.S. intelligence officials welcomed a delegation of their Israeli counterparts to Washington. The meeting proceeded uneventfully, according to veteran Israeli intelligence journalist Ronen Bergman, although the Americans vented their dismay over a president who had loudly disparaged their past work. “Just as their meeting was wrapping up,” according to Bergman and a later report in Vanity Fair, “an American spymaster solemnly announced there was one more thing: They believed that Putin had ‘leverages of pressure’ over Trump.” His advice: “Be careful.”
Five months later, the Israelis came to rue what they had shared with Trump’s new CIA director, former Republican Representative Mike Pompeo. They were astonished to read media reports that Trump had told the Russian foreign minister and ambassador about their top secret operation in Syria to penetrate a cell of the Islamic State militant group (ISIS). U.S. intelligence experts assumed the Russians had shared the information with their allies in Iran, Israel’s mortal enemy.
Former CIA Director John Brennan has not minced words about Kremlin Caligula. ‘ Donald Trump shows ‘qualities usually found in narcissistic, vengeful autocrats’, says former CIA Director. President ‘expects blind loyalty and subservience from everyone’, says John Brennan.’ This is about the trick pulled by Haley this week at the UN.
Donald Trump behaved like “narcissistic, vengeful autocrat” when he threatened to withhold aid from United Nations (UN) members who criticised the US, a former CIA director has said.
John Brennan said it was “beyond outrageous” that the President had warned of retaliations against nations that voted to condemn his decision to recognise Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.
The resolution to declare Washington’s decision on the city’s status “null and void” was backed by 128 countries at the UN General Assembly, including the UK, despite American ambassador Nikki Haley promising the US would be “taking names” of any nations who supported it.
Only nine countries voted against the motion but 35 abstained. Twenty-one were not present. Experts had predicted at least 150 countries would back the resolution, prompting speculation that some nations had caved in to US threats.
“Trump Admin threat to retaliate against nations that exercise sovereign right in UN to oppose US position on Jerusalem is beyond outrageous,” Mr Brennan tweeted. ”Shows Donald Trump expects blind loyalty and subservience from everyone – qualities usually found in narcissistic, vengeful autocrats.”
Meanwhile, Trump signed the Tax Bill to destroy middle and working Class Americans and headed off to Florida where holiday celebration tickets prices have been bumped up once again. He must need the extra change for the junk food machines at Fort Leavenworth he’ll be patronizing soon.
President Trump signed a bill Thursday ordering $4 billion in “top of the line missile defense,” before signing the $1.5 trillion GOP tax legislation. Now he’s jetting off to Mar-a-Lago for the holidays.
Timing: Trump said he was planning to sign the bill in January, but after watching the news this morning and seeing “every one of the networks” ask if he will he keep his promise and sign it before Christmas, he “called everyone up and said get ready we have to sign this now … I didn’t want you folks to say I wasn’t keeping my promise.”
What’s next: Trump said they’ll have a formal signing ceremony in two weeks.
Key quotes:
- Trump said his friend Robert Kraft, CEO of the New England Patriots, called him to praise him for the tax bill, and promised to build a “tremendous paper mill” in North Carolina after the news.
- “I think that essentially Obamacare is over because we got rid of [the individual mandate].”
- He made nice with reporters: “Many of you have worked very fairly.”
- He wants to see a lot more bipartisanship in 2018.
I’m pretty sure the bipartisanship spirit has flew the coop this year.
Meanwhile, the Senate has begun to release details of taxpayer funded harassment settlements by members of its body. It’s incomplete but I’m assuming more will be forthcoming.
Nearly $600,000 worth of taxpayer-funded settlements have been paid out for workplace misconduct in the Senate over the past 20 years, according to new data released by the Senate Rules Committee Thursday night.
But the release lists just one claim for $14,260 for “sex discrimination and reprisal” — failing to include a $220,000 settlement for sexual harassment in 2014 that was recently made public.
The information was released as pressure has been mounting for more transparency on how cases of harassment are handled in Congress and how much public money is spent on such settlements especially in light of the the wave of revelations about sexual harassment in the workplace. The Senate had been holding on to the information as it has rested with the chairman of two Senate committees: Rules and Appropriations.
So, I’m just finishing up grading and trying to get some time off next week. I’m usually not in much of a holiday mode but this year seems more bleak than others. I feel unmoored by the unpredictable and insecure future in store for me. The rules of the game have so changed recently that it appears there’s no much you can depend on other than businesses trying to find a way to screw you out of money.
Take care! Hugs your friends and family! Grab every bit of peace and happiness you can find as the year winds down.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Monday: Foggy Day Reads
Posted: December 18, 2017 Filed under: Afternoon Reads | Tags: Al Franken, Climate change 50 Comments
Good Afternoon Sky Dancers!
I’ve talked to people from several places around Texas and they have the same eerie fog that we’ve got here in New Orleans. Foggy is also a good description for my brain activity today. It’s also foggy in Minnesota. Nothing seems clear at the moment.
Four US Senators are urging Senator Al Franken to reconsider his resignation over alleged sexual misconduct. It’s a rare day I’m in agreement with Joe Manchin.
“What they did to Al was atrocious, the Democrats,” said West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin in an interview for POLITICO’s Off Message podcast to post on Tuesday.
Franken’s unusual timeline — in his departure announcement he said he’d go “in the coming weeks,” without setting a date — has fed the fleeting hopes that there’s still time to reverse course. However, Tina Smith, Minnesota’s Democratic lieutenant governor, was named last week as his appointed successor.
People familiar with Franken’s plans said he has not changed his mind and intends to formally resign in early January. He praised the selection of Smith and has begun working with her on the transition.
At least four senators are urging Al Franken to reconsider resigning, including two who issued statements calling for the resignation two weeks ago and said they now feel remorse over what they feel was a rush to judgment.
Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), who urged Franken not to step down to begin with — at least not before he went through an Ethics Committee investigation — said the Minnesota senator was railroaded by fellow Democrats.
An Amtrack train derailed this morning outside of Seattle. It actually dropped from a raise overpass onto a section of I-5. It is also drizzly and foggy up there too. The cause, extent of damages, and the number of folks injured are unknown. There are eyewitness accounts indicating there are cars beneath the fallen cars.
The Amtrak train car fell from an overpass, landing on the I-5 highway outside Seattle. All lanes of traffic have been closed.
Authorities have not yet confirmed the extent of casualties. But witnesses say several people have been injured.
Local news stations report that this was the inaugural run of the new high-speed rail line.
The crash occurred around 07:30 (15:30 GMT), about 45 minutes into train 501’s journey between Portland and Seattle.
Before the crash, it was travelling at more than 80mph (130kmh), with at least 75 people aboard.
It is unclear if it landed on any cars below, but CNN reports that several cars are crushed below the train.
The National Transportation Safety Board is investigating.
David Leonhardt has a great Op Ed up in the NY Times about the Republican Tax Plan and how it will exacerbate income in equality. Here is one significant finding of three provided in the piece.
The great tax-cutting revolution of the last half-century hasn’t actually been a tax-cutting revolution for most Americans.
True, they have benefited from a series of cuts in income-tax rates, signed by Lyndon B. Johnson, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush and Barack Obama. At the same time, though, another tax has been rising. It is the quiet giant of federal tax policy: the payroll tax.
It funds Social Security and Medicare, and it has been rising in response to the aging of society and rising medical costs. It increased from 2 percent just after World War II to 6 percent in 1960 to 12.4 percent in 1990, where it is today. It has risen so much that it’s now the largest tax that 62 percent of American households pay — larger than the income tax, which gets much more attention.
The increases in the payroll tax have more than offset the declines in the income tax for most middle-class and poor families. They now face higher total tax rates than a half-century ago.
Kremlin Caligula and his krazy krewe of kooks have developed a new Security Strategy that doesn’t include climate change. It also has weird language for traditionally hostile nations like China and Russia.
The White House will unveil a new national security strategy that, according to multiple reports, will break with the Obama administration by declining to recognize climate change as a threat to national security interests.
Why it matters: The report is the latest sign of how the Trump administration, in addition to unwinding domestic global warming rules, has made a sharp rhetorical break with its predecessor when it comes to the geo-politics of climate change.
Buzz: The New York Times points out that climate will surface in the report in a section on embracing U.S. “energy dominance.” The Federalist reported Friday that the strategy will note that “[c]limate policies will continue to shape the global energy system” but will also state:
“U.S. leadership is indispensable to countering an anti-growth, energy agenda that is detrimental to U.S. economic and energy security interests. Given future global energy demand, much of the developing world will require fossil fuels, as well as other forms of energy, to power their economies and lift their people out of poverty.”
It also underscores the mixed messages from the administration on how to assess climate change.
Russia and China are now “competitors”.
President Donald Trump will declare that China and Russia are competitors seeking to challenge U.S. power and erode its security and prosperity, in a national security strategy he will lay out in a speech on Monday.
“They are determined to make economies less free and less fair, to grow their militaries, and to control information and data to repress their societies and expand their influence,” according to excerpts of Trump’s strategy released by the White House.
Still no word about the cyber threat to our elections and the capture of the administration by our ‘competitor’ Mother Russia.’
Twitter has announced new rules designed to promote safety and reduce “hateful conduct and abusive behavior”. Will it ban Kremlin Caligula?
Today, we will start enforcing updates to the Twitter Rules announced last month to reduce hateful and abusive content on Twitter. Through our policy development process, we’ve taken a collaborative approach to develop and implement these changes, including working in close coordination with experts on our Trust and Safety Council.
New Policies
New Rules on Violence and Physical Harm
Specific threats of violence or wishing for serious physical harm, death, or disease to an individual or group of people is in violation of our policies. Our new changes include more types of related content including:
- Accounts that affiliate with organizations that use or promote violence against civilians to further their causes. Groups included in this policy will be those that identify as such or engage in activity — both on and off the platform — that promotes violence. This policy does not apply to military or government entities and we will consider exceptions for groups that are currently engaging in (or have engaged in) peaceful resolution.
- Content that glorifies violence or the perpetrators of a violent act. This includes celebrating any violent act in a manner that may inspire others to replicate it or any violence where people were targeted because of their membership in a protected group. We will require offending Tweets to be removed and repeated violations will result in permanent suspension
We shall see.
What’s on your reading and blogging list? How’s the weather and end of the year stuff going?
Friday: America held hostage Day 329
Posted: December 15, 2017 Filed under: morning reads | Tags: Hanukkah, Paul Ryan retire 14 Comments
Good Morning Sky Dancers!
We’re ending the second year of an annus horribilis (to borrow from HRH Elizabeth ll). It’s difficult to image that the future of our country is in the hands of an incompetent, bullying madman still but it is what it is. I’m certain that most of the population is trying to burrow itself into one holiday or another being nostalgic for a less stressful time. There exist a few glimmers of hope which put me in mind of the story behind Hanukkah. Our lives are very much under siege and we need glimmers of lasting light.
Is it really possible that Paul Ryan will retire? I’m going straight to Charles Pierce on this one because I really need words that bite.
Ring and run, you wretched cur.
In what passes for a genuine scoop, Tim Alberta and Rachael Cade broke the news in Politico on Thursday that Paul Ryan, the zombie-eyed granny starver from the state of Wisconsin, may well be hanging them up at the end of the 2018 midterms. Of course, Ryan—and various People Who Are Familiar With His Thinking—has a number of deeply pious, and unquestionably phony, reasons for his departure.
On a personal level, going home at the end of next year would all0w Ryan, who turns 48 next month, to keep promises to family; his three children are in or entering their teenage years, and Ryan, whose father died at 55, wants desperately to live at home with them full time before they begin flying the nest.
Isn’t that just too fcking sweet for words? Of course, young Paul Ryan had Social Security survivor’s benefits to live on when his pappy kicked and, once again, you’re welcome, dickhead. And I’m sure that his own children have excellent health care in his magnificent Georgian Revival home back in Janesville. I tell you, I’m almost as moved as I was when Ryan washed some clean pots and pans at that soup kitchen, or those several times when he dropped by impoverished neighborhoods in order to have his picture taken there.
Also, I’m sure that the fact that, in 2018, all indications are that his party will be facing a bloodbath in the midterm elections, and that the abomination of a tax bill that is his crowning achievement will be one of the party’s larger millstones, have absolutely nothing to do with the fact that Paul Ryan’s giant, if remarkably delicate, intellect suddenly can no longer handle the hurly-burly of everyday politics. Good god, this man could not be a bigger fake if he were made of papier-mâché.
This may be my favorite passage in the Politico account.
As the deciding votes were cast—recorded in green on the black digital scoreboard suspended above the floor—the speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, threw his head back and slammed his hands together. Soon he was engulfed in a sea of dark suits, every Republican lawmaker wanting to slap him on the shoulder and be a part of his moment.
He has tough competition from a Steel Worker Dem and Bannon has promised him a tough primary. Could he really cut and run?
The first denial leans heavily on the definition of the word “soon,” while the second only specifies Ryan is committed to the agenda for 2018. Politico isn’t reporting Ryan will resign before next year’s election — that would be highly unorthodox and potentially deadly for a party that is facing an increasingly fraught midterm — but rather he might quit afterward.
Whether that happens or not, it would be completely understandable, and perhaps even predictable.
So predictable, in fact, that The Post’s Paul Kane did predict it back in 2015 when Ryan first became speaker. “I think he’ll do this for three or four years,” Kane said in October 2015, more than three years before the 2018 election. That three-plus-year tenure would also be completely in line with other recent speakerships. Looking back, six of the last seven speakers have served fewer than five years in the job (three voluntarily and three because their party lost the majority). Ryan committing to another two-year Congress would put him over that five-year mark, which is a very long time to be in that job even for a relatively youthful 47-year-old.
Kremlin Caligula has reached historical lows in polls. Eleanor Clift–writing for The Daily Beast–suggests a tipping point.
Public opinion can take off like a runaway train once it gets going. President Donald Trump, already polling lower than any of his predecessors in his first year, might soon be hearing the hoofbeats of history.
At 32 percent in the most recent Pew and Monmouth polls, he is perilously close to what most historians and political scientists say is a tipping point of 30 percent, below which a president can no longer effectively lead.
President Nixon was at 22 percent when he resigned in August of 1974 and Republican Party affiliation had dropped to 18 percent, recalls Reagan historian Craig Shirley.
“Going below 30 percent kept Truman from seeking another term and going below 30 percent eventually drove Nixon out of office,” he says. “In the modern era, beginning with FDR, presidents get into trouble when they fall below 30.”
Nixon won a landslide re-election in 1972 with 61 percent of the vote, but it was all downhill after that. For most of the next year, his polls lingered in the mid to high 30s, a downward trajectory that began even before the White House taping system was revealed in July of 1973, exposing his legal jeopardy.
Prior to that, Watergate had taken a steep toll on his numbers, along with campus discord over the Vietnam War and an oil embargo that led to long gas lines—all of which led to “a general sense of America in decline,” says Shirley.
Trump, much earlier in a presidency predicated on his promise to “make America great again,” is facing his own challenges. The GOP’s loss of a Senate seat in ruby red Alabama thanks to the sexual misconduct allegations against Republican Roy Moore has to make President Trump uneasy about the power of today’s newly awakened movement. Over a hundred members of Congress are calling for an investigation into claims of sexual harassment brought by multiple women against Trump before he was president. While the lawmakers are all Democrats for now, public opinion doesn’t always abide by party lines.
A Financial Times Op Ed outlines how incompetent the UK and US leadership has become under their white nationalist leaders. This is no liberal rag.
In the US, when Republicans finally got their chance to abolish Obamacare, it turned out they had spent seven years not preparing an alternative. Much of their tax bill got handwritten overnight by lobbyists. And Russiagate’s key characteristic is amateurism. Mike Flynn and others didn’t declare obvious contacts with foreign officials, assuming nobody would notice. Trump appeared to incriminate himself by tweeting that he knew Flynn broke the law, but then his lawyer said he’d written the tweet. Richard Nixon’s downfall was not his crime but his cover-up; this time there’s hardly any cover-up. The only comparable folly in recent US-UK history is the Iraq war. So what explains this incompetence?
Former NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg trashes the Republican Tax Plan in an op-ed from his media empire. He calls it a ‘blunder’. What is amazing to me is watching dueling policy objectives between the Fed and Republicans in Congress. The Fed is putting on the breaks while the Republicans throw money at their favorite donors.
Last month a Wall Street Journal editor asked a room full of CEOs to raise their hands if the corporate tax cut being considered in Congress would lead them to invest more. Very few hands went up. Attending was Gary Cohn, President Donald Trump’s economic adviser and a friend of mine. He asked: “Why aren’t the other hands up?”
Allow me to answer that: We don’t need the money.
Corporations are sitting on a record amount of cash reserves: nearly $2.3 trillion. That figure has been climbing steadily since the recession ended in 2009, and it’s now double what it was in 2001. The reason CEOs aren’t investing more of their liquid assets has little to do with the tax rate.
CEOs aren’t waiting on a tax cut to “jump-start the economy” — a favorite phrase of politicians who have never run a company — or to hand out raises. It’s pure fantasy to think that the tax bill will lead to significantly higher wages and growth, as Republicans have promised. Had Congress actually listened to executives, or economists who study these issues carefully, it might have realized that.
Instead, Congress did what it always does: It put politics first. After spending the first nine months of the year trying to jam through a repeal of Obamacare without holding hearings, heeding independent analysis or seeking Democratic input, Republicans took the same approach to tax “reform” — and it shows.
Only a few greedy republican donors want this bill.
A few other things today to note. Bill Moyers is calling it quits. I can imagine that he’s quite tired after the last two years.
Nikki Haley pulled a ‘Colin Powell’ on Iran yesterday with pictures supposedly showing Iran cheating on its agreements. No one was impressed at the UN.
Nikki Haley, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, claimed Thursday that the international body has obtained “undeniable” evidence that Iran supplied Yemeni insurgents with missiles and other arms.
But U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres reached no such conclusion in his report this month that addresses U.S. and Saudi claims the Houthi insurgents fired Iranian short-range ballistic missiles that nearly missed Riyadh’s King Khalid International Airport on Nov. 4.
A U.N. panel of experts has reviewed missile fragments from the strike that show the missile resembles the Qiam-1, an Iranian-made Scud variant that lacks the tail fins typically found in Yemen’s previously known missile arsenal. The panel noted in a confidential report, which was obtained by Foreign Policy, that the missile also contained a tail component that bore the logo of an Iranian company targeted by U.S. and U.N. sanctions.
But the panel, which reported that the missile also contained an American-made component, concluded it “has no evidence as to the identity of the broker or supplier.
Net Neutrality removal means court challenges are up next. It could trigger the Millennial voter turnout.
The US Federal Communications Commission vote on Thursday to roll back net-neutrality rules could galvanize young voters, a move Democrats hope will send millennials to the polls in greater numbers and bolster their chances in next year’s elections.
Democrats are hoping to paint the repeal of the rules by the FCC, which is now chaired by a President Donald Trump appointee, Ajit Pai, as evidence Republicans are uninterested in young people and consumer concerns at large.
“The American public is angry,” said FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel, a Democrat. She added that the actions of the Republican majority had “awoken a sleeping giant.”
Attitudes toward so-called net neutrality, or rules that prevent internet providers from limiting customers’ access to certain websites or slowing download speeds for specific content, are largely split along party lines in Congress. The heated debate has turned into the kind of election issue that Democrats think will help them.
Studies show young people disproportionately use the internet compared with older Americans, and polls have shown they feel passionately about fair and open internet access. Democrats believe the issue may resonate with younger voters who may not be politically active on other issues like taxes or foreign policy.
Sen. Brian Schatz, a Hawaii Democrat, on Twitter said “young people need to take the lead on net neutrality.” He added: “It’s possible for Millennial political leadership to make a real difference here.”
The scrapping of the Obama administration’s rules is likely to set up a court battle and could redraw the digital landscape, with internet service providers possibly revising how Americans view online content. The providers could use new authority to limit or slow some websites or offer “fast lanes” for certain content.
Republicans on the FCC have sought to reassure young people that their ability to access the internet will not change after the rules take effect. People who favor the move argue that after users realize that little or nothing has changed in their internet access, it will not resonate as a political issue.
So, I’ll end here. Happy Hanukkah to 
all our Jewish Sky Dancers!!
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
peej
Carissa
bostonboomer
dakinikat
ecocatwoman
mablue2
Mama Lopez
peggysue22
quixote
skydancingguestblogger
Mona (aka Wonk the Vote)
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