Thunderous Thursday Reads: What Did Trump Promise A Foreign Leader?
Posted: September 19, 2019 Filed under: Foreign Affairs, morning reads, U.S. Politics | Tags: Acting DNI Joseph Maguire, Adam Schiff, Andrew P. Bakaj, Dan Coats, Donald Trump, House Intelligence Committee, Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson, Vladimir Putin, whisleblower, William Barr 30 Comments
Gustav Klimt, Large Poplar II (Approaching Thunderstorm)
Good Morning!!
Last night The Washington Post broke a story on the mysterious whistleblower complaint that Trump and Cover-up General Barr are trying to keep secret from Congress: Trump’s communications with foreign leader are part of whistleblower complaint that spurred standoff between spy chief and Congress, former officials say.
Trump’s interaction with the foreign leader included a “promise” that was regarded as so troubling that it prompted an official in the U.S. intelligence community to file a formal whistleblower complaint with the inspector general for the intelligence community, said the former officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.
It was not immediately clear which foreign leader Trump was speaking with or what he pledged to deliver, but his direct involvement in the matter has not been previously disclosed. It raises new questions about the president’s handling of sensitive information and may further strain his relationship with U.S. spy agencies. One former official said the communication was a phone call.
Gustav Klimt, Landscape with Birch Trees
Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson determined that the complaint was credible and troubling enough to be considered a matter of “urgent concern,” a legal threshold that requires notification of congressional oversight committees.
But acting director of national intelligence Joseph Maguire has refused to share details about Trump’s alleged transgression with lawmakers, touching off a legal and political dispute that has spilled into public view and prompted speculation that the spy chief is improperly protecting the president.
The dispute is expected to escalate Thursday when Atkinson is scheduled to appear before the House Intelligence Committee in a classified session closed to the public. The hearing is the latest move by committee Chairman Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) to compel U.S. intelligence officials to disclose the full details of the whistleblower complaint to Congress. Maguire has agreed to testify before the panel next week, according to a statement by Schiff. He declined to comment for this article.
This seems like a very big deal. Atkinson is meeting right now behind closed doors with the House Intelligence Committee. And the Dotard is up and tweeting about it.
Yes, I’d say quite a few of us believe that the dummy in the WH would do that. Some background from the WaPo story:
The complaint was filed with Atkinson’s office on Aug. 12, a date on which Trump was at his golf resort in New Jersey. White House records indicate that Trump had had conversations or interactions with at least five foreign leaders in the preceding five weeks.
Among them was a call with Russian President Vladimir Putin that the White House initiated on July 31. Trump also received at least two letters from North Korean leader Kim Jong Un during the summer, describing them as “beautiful” messages. In June, Trump said publicly that he was opposed to certain CIA spying operations against North Korea. Referring to a Wall Street Journal report that the agency had recruited Kim’s half brother, Trump said, “I would tell him that would not happen under my auspices.”
Trump met with other foreign leaders at the White House in July, including the prime minister of Pakistan, the prime minister of the Netherlands and the emir of Qatar.
The Swamp, Gustav Klimt
Most likely the call in question is the one with Putin. As you may recall, that was the call in which Trump supposedly offered Russia help with the wildfires in Siberia. The Russian readout of the call was very different. Putin claimed that Trump’s offer demonstrated that normalization of relations between the two countries was possible.
Putin, in response, expressed his “sincere gratitude” to Trump and said that if necessary, he will accept the offer, the Kremlin said on its website.
“The President of Russia regards the US President’s offer as a sign that it is possible that full-scale bilateral relations will be restored in the future,” the statement from the Kremlin read.
“The presidents of Russia and the United States agreed to continue contacts both in a telephone format and in person,” it added.
However, the two countries differed somewhat in their interpretations of the call.
As NPR’s Tamara Keith reports, “Russia announced the call first, saying President Trump offered Putin assistance fighting wildfires in Siberia. … Putin assessed the offer as a sign that relations between the two countries would be fully restored. Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election, and is still under U.S. sanctions.”
Speculation from Twitter about what happened:
Shugarman has posted a thread with timelines from other twitter users of events that took place during the time in question. Click on the above tweet to read the thread. More timelines:
Response from @swatkins109:
“Also Huntsman (Ambassador to Russia) resigns Aug 6 Sept 3 trump announces military spending for NATO countries canceled.”
Make of all that what you will. I can’t wait till the whole story comes out, and it will.
David Frum writes at The Atlantic: The Question Posed by Trump’s Phone Call: A whistle-blower complaint raises the possibility that President Trump has betrayed the duties of his office.
On the 20th of July 1787, Gouverneur Morris rose inside the stiflingly hot Independence Hall, in Philadelphia, to explain why he had changed his mind and now favored including a power of impeachment in the constitutional text.
Until that point, he and others had feared that an impeachment power would leave the president too dependent on Congress. He had thought that the prospect of reelection defeat would offer a sufficient control on presidential wrongdoing.
A Morning by the Pond, Gustav Klimt
But Morris ultimately changed his mind.
Foreign corruption inducing treason was the core impeachable offense in the eyes of the authors of the Constitution.
Which is why a whistle-blower report filed with the inspector general for the intelligence community, reportedly concerning an improper “promise” by President Donald Trump to a foreign leader, has jolted Congress.
Earlier in the constitutional debates—back when he still opposed an impeachment provision—Morris argued that a corrupt or treasonable president “can do no criminal act without Coadjutors who may be punished.” Trump is surrounded by coadjutors, yet so far all are acting with impunity, joined now by the acting director of national intelligence, Joseph Maguire, who is withholding from Congress the apparently explosive information.
Trump has been engaged in improper contacts with foreign governments for years, and built deep business relationships with foreign nationals. Russian assistance helped elect him. Money from wealthy Russians reportedly helped keep his businesses alive from 2006 to 2016. Since 2016, more and more foreign money has flowed Trump’s way. Trump literally has a hotel open on Pennsylvania Avenue to accept payments—there’s a big carpet in front, his name on the door, nothing even remotely clandestine about the flow of corruption. That corruption seeks returns. Again and again, Trump has acted in ways that align with the interests of foreign states, raising questions about his motives.
Exactly what was promised in this particular conversation, and to whom, America and the world wait to hear.
I certainly hope we learn something from Adam Schiff when he emerges from that private briefing with the Inspector General.
Gustav Klimt, The Marshy Pond
The New York Times just broke a story about the hearing: Watchdog Refuses to Detail Whistle-Blower Complaint About Trump.
The internal watchdog for American spy agencies declined repeatedly in a briefing on Thursday to disclose to lawmakers the content of a potentially explosive whistle-blower complaint that is said to involve a discussion between President Trump and a foreign leader, according to two people familiar with the briefing.
During a private session on Capitol Hill, Michael Atkinson, the inspector general of the intelligence community, told lawmakers he was unable to confirm or deny anything about the substance of the complaint, including whether it involved the president, according to the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe the closed-door conversation. The meeting was still underway.
The complaint, which prompted a standoff between Congress and Mr. Trump’s top intelligence official, involves a commitment that Mr. Trump made in a communication with another world leader, according to a person familiar with the complaint….
Few details of the whistle-blower complaint are known, including the identity of the world leader. And it is not obvious how a communication between Mr. Trump and a foreign leader could meet the legal standards for a whistle-blower complaint that the inspector general would deem an “urgent concern.”
Under the law, the complaint has to concern the existence of an intelligence activity that violates the law, rules or regulations, or otherwise amounts to mismanagement, waste, abuse, or a danger to public safety. But a conversation between two foreign leaders is not itself an intelligence activity.
And while Mr. Trump may have discussed intelligence activities with the foreign leader, he enjoys broad power as president to declassify intelligence secrets, order the intelligence community to act and otherwise direct the conduct of foreign policy as he sees fit, legal experts said.
The NYT has the name of the whistleblower’s lawyer.
Andrew P. Bakaj, a former C.I.A. and Pentagon official whose legal practice specializes in whistle-blower and security clearance issues, confirmed that he is representing the official who filed the complaint. Mr. Bakaj declined to identify his client or to comment.
Obviously this story will be making news all day today. As the Dotard likes to say, “we’ll see what happens. Please post your thoughts on this story or anything else you find interesting in the comment thread below.
Tuesday Reads
Posted: September 17, 2019 Filed under: morning reads, U.S. Politics 42 Comments
Louise Williams Jackson, Woman Reading a Book on a Sofa
Good Morning!!
For months now, we’ve been talking about the society-wide depression and anxiety that Trump’s “presidency” has caused. Speaking for myself, I managed to stay glued to the news for quite a long time, but lately I’ve tried to protect myself by stepping back as much as possible and finding ways to nourish my psyche in order to avoid falling into despair over what is happening to this country.
I’ve still paid close attention to the damage Trump is doing, and I’ve found that I can do that without watching cable TV constantly and reading every horrific article I encounter. I’m still experiencing “Trump depression” though and I know I’m not alone.
In light of that, I want to begin this post by highlighting this helpful article by Paul Rosenberg at Salon: The Trump depression (and we don’t mean the economy): Key symptom of autocratic regimes. It’s quite long, but I hope you’ll go read the entire thing. Some excerpts:
Reviewing “Trump’s Wacky, Angry, and Extreme August” on Twitter, the New Yorker’s Susan Glasser said the experience “was exhausting, a dark journey to a nasty and contentious place.” But that’s hardly news: it’s a place we live in every day. We try to turn the volume down and ignore it, and that may work for a while. But it won’t last. It can’t. It’s getting worse, and we can all see where we’re headed.
We know who Donald Trump admires, who he wants to be like — “president for life” as he keeps on telling us — and the countries they rule. Even as Trump insulted Americans and allies with abandon, Glasser noted, he found time to praise North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, Chinese President Xi Jinping, and Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro.
America is nowhere near as bad as Brazil or China, much less North Korea. But our democracy is eroding significantly. Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) tracks hundreds of attributes of democracy for 202 countries, spanning more than two centuries. Its 2019 report found that “24 countries are now severely affected by what is established as a ‘third wave of autocratization,'” an erosion of democratic rights “that has slowly gained momentum since the mid 1990s. … Among them are populous countries such as Brazil, India and the United States.”
If Trump has his way — demolishing all restraints on his power — things will only get much worse, with the journey Glasser took as a tour book guide of what’s to come. And people are feeling it in their bones.
By Keith Gantos ( EUA 1957) óleo sobre madeira
I think we all acknowledge at this point that Trump wants to be a dictator in the mold of Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un. He has managed to get rid of the so-called “adults in the room” and surround himself with sycophants, yes men, and acting cabinet members whose jobs are subject to his whims. On the “Trump depression,” Rosenberg quotes “physician and scholar” Frederick Burkle.
“In America under Trump there is a population-based depression taking hold. It is a very subtle, smoldering, pervasive and serious condition that people in autocratic countries chronically live with,” physician and scholar Frederick “Skip” Burkle told me in a recent interview. Burkle has any number of academic credentials: He was founding director of the Center for Excellence in Disaster Management and Humanitarian Assistance at the University of Hawaii, and currently serves in advisory or research capacities at the Harvard School of Public Health, Johns Hopkins University Medical Institutes, the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington and elsewhere.
It was Burkle who first described Trump as a schoolyard bully to me, as I described in July. His own first childhood encounter with a bully taught him that such people were driven by “not just the violence and intimidation, but the narcissist’s hallmark sense of impunity, backed up by effortless deceit, blame-shifting, and manipulation,” as I expressed it.
“When I did see young adults with sociopathy and narcissism, the depression among their caretaker parents was pervasive,” Burkle told me in our recent conversation. “They control the agenda and suck all the oxygen out of the room every day. They also sap all the energy out of their caretaker parents and staff later in life, and are quick to blame others for the consequences.” It’s not accidental, he observed, that Trump underlings like Michael Cohen, Paul Manafort and Michael Flynn are the ones convicted of crimes.
Meanwhile, the wider public, overwhelmed by the Trumpian chaos, becomes depressed, disoriented and exhausted, as Burkle puts it.
Woman Reading In Bath by Chen Bolen
Rosenberg cites several other experts, including Elizabeth Mika who wrote a chapter in the book The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump.
When I reached out to Mika…, she cited two concepts as particularly important for “understanding our sociopolitical situation” — both what’s driving the depression Burkle speaks of, and what points toward the way out.
“The first one is pathocracy,” Mika said. “which is the rule of pathological characters — specifically, people with entirely absent or severely compromised conscience — who, because of their character defect, are devoted pretty much exclusively to the pursuit of power by any means possible.”
Pathocracies spread into general populace like cancer, taking over and destroying organs of social and political life, along with individual human beings. People living under pathocracies become demoralized and despondent. Depression and despair, along with various social pathologies, are predictable consequences of being forced to adjust to immoral and inhumane socio-political systems based on lies and exploitation.
Yet “just as pathocracy spreads in a populace, so does a healthy resistance to it,” she explained.
Awakening to the reality of pathocracy, mobilizing against it and dismantling it, is a process of positive disintegration — the second concept I mentioned at the start — during which individuals come to realize the importance of higher values, and start implementing them, little by little, in their daily lives.
The way out is not a return to normalcy, since as Mika noted above, “The tyrant shows up in a society that is already weakened by disorder.”
I know I’ve quoted a lot, but there’s much more to read at the link. I hope you’ll check it out.
Fyffe Christie (1918-1979) – The artist’s wife reading (1953)
I don’t know why this story on Russian spying at Yahoo News isn’t getting more attention: Exclusive: Russia carried out a ‘stunning’ breach of FBI communications system, escalating the spy game on U.S. soil, by Zach Dorfman, Jenna McLaughlin and Sean D. Naylor.
On Dec. 29, 2016, the Obama administration announced that it was giving nearly three dozen Russian diplomats just 72 hours to leave the United States and was seizing two rural East Coast estates owned by the Russian government. As the Russians burned papers and scrambled to pack their bags, the Kremlin protested the treatment of its diplomats, and denied that those compounds — sometimes known as the “dachas” — were anything more than vacation spots for their personnel.
The Obama administration’s public rationale for the expulsions and closures — the harshest U.S. diplomatic reprisals taken against Russia in several decades — was to retaliate for Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election. But there was another critical, and secret, reason why those locations and diplomats were targeted.
Both compounds, and at least some of the expelled diplomats, played key roles in a brazen Russian counterintelligence operation that stretched from the Bay Area to the heart of the nation’s capital, according to former U.S. officials. The operation, which targeted FBI communications, hampered the bureau’s ability to track Russian spies on U.S. soil at a time of increasing tension with Moscow, forced the FBI and CIA to cease contact with some of their Russian assets, and prompted tighter security procedures at key U.S. national security facilities in the Washington area and elsewhere, according to former U.S. officials. It even raised concerns among some U.S. officials about a Russian mole within the U.S. intelligence community.
It appears that Russian interference in our elections was only the tip of the iceberg.
“It was a very broad effort to try and penetrate our most sensitive operations,” said a former senior CIA official.
Girl reading a book, (after 1930) by Bertold Piotr Oczko born 1910 in Bielsko, Poland died 1943 in Krakau, Poland
American officials discovered that the Russians had dramatically improved their ability to decrypt certain types of secure communications and had successfully tracked devices used by elite FBI surveillance teams. Officials also feared that the Russians may have devised other ways to monitor U.S. intelligence communications, including hacking into computers not connected to the internet. Senior FBI and CIA officials briefed congressional leaders on these issues as part of a wide-ranging examination on Capitol Hill of U.S. counterintelligence vulnerabilities.
These compromises, the full gravity of which became clear to U.S. officials in 2012, gave Russian spies in American cities including Washington, New York and San Francisco key insights into the location of undercover FBI surveillance teams, and likely the actual substance of FBI communications, according to former officials. They provided the Russians opportunities to potentially shake off FBI surveillance and communicate with sensitive human sources, check on remote recording devices and even gather intelligence on their FBI pursuers, the former officials said.
“When we found out about this, the light bulb went on — that this could be why we haven’t seen [certain types of] activity” from known Russian spies in the United States, said a former senior intelligence official.
The compromise of FBI systems occurred not long after the White House’s 2010 decision to arrest and expose a group of “illegals” – Russian operatives embedded in American society under deep non-official cover – and reflected a resurgence of Russian espionage. Just a few months after the illegals pleaded guilty in July 2010, the FBI opened a new investigation into a group of New York-based undercover Russian intelligence officers. These Russian spies, the FBI discovered, were attempting to recruit a ring of U.S. assets — including Carter Page, an American businessman who would later act as an unpaid foreign policy adviser to Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.
Once again, I’ve quoted a great deal, but it’s a very long piece that is both interesting and alarming.
A lady reading a book Ernst Liebermann born May 8, 1869 in Langemuss (Meiningen), Germany
This next story is horrific, and once again it began under Obama. The Washington Post: U.S. officials knew bomb-sniffing dogs were dying from neglect in Jordan. They sent more.
The State Department sent dozens of highly skilled explosive-detection dogs to Jordan, even after the agency assessed a high degree of mistreatment and failure to care for the animals in 2016, according to an inspector general report concluded last week. It ultimately led to their early deaths and crushed their spirits so brutally that the dogs “lost the will to work,” the report says.
At least 10 dogs provided to Jordan died of “various medical problems” out of at least 100 canines sent there between 2008 and 2016, the report found, and surviving dogs were starved in kennels smeared with feces and dirt. Dogs were overworked in the desert, suffered hip dysplasia and other conditions. Engorged ticks ringed their ears.
Zoe, [a] Belgian Malinois, died of heat stroke on the Syrian border in 2017, less than a year after her arrival. Veterinarians told investigators that such deaths are not accidental and pointed to negligence on the part of Jordanian handlers.
The report reveals an alarming and fast collapse of dogs that arrived healthy and strong in Jordan, only to be fighting for their lives in a matter of months….
Athena, a 2-year old Belgian Malinois, was found starved in Jordan by U.S. dog handling officials and evacuated to the United States for recovery.
Photos in Jordan show Athena’s malnourished body. Feces covered her kennel floor, her water bowl bone-dry. The State Department had two full-time dog handling mentors on the ground “during the entire time” Athena was in Jordan, the report found, but her condition did not set off any alarms until a site visit in April 2018.
By then, the State Department knew for two years — after an April 2016 site visit — that Jordan was unable to adequately care for and protect dogs carrying out dirty, hot and dangerous work to find explosives in violent places like the Syrian border.
Yet at least 60 dogs arrived in six waves through 2018 after the assessment, the report found
As the Brits say, bloody hell. This is intolerable!
Woman Reading, by Lex Veen
More reads, links only.
Vanity Fair: “They Played It Up Pretty Big”: Turmoil Engulfs The Times Over The Kavanaugh Debacle.
Mimi Rocah at USA Today: Confirmed: Powerful men ignored women in short-circuited Brett Kavanaugh investigation.
Dahlia Lithwick at Slate: The New Kavanaugh Reporting Shows How Far Trump’s Control Goes.
Vox: Susan Collins is in the political fight of her life, and Brett Kavanaugh is a huge factor.
The Washington Post: Pentagon urges restraint after strikes on Saudi oil facilities.
Washington Post Editorial Board: Trump has dug himself into a hole with Iran.
Politico: Trump’s deference to Saudi Arabia infuriates much of D.C.
Buzzfeed News: Donald Trump Keeps Telling World Leaders The Same Bizarre Story About Kim Jong Un.
Gabriel Sherman at Vanity Fair: “Trump is Annoyed Pence Hasn’t Been Defending Him More”: Is Trump’s Long-Suffering V.P. in Danger of Getting Bounced?
Politico: Air Force crews stayed at Trump’s Turnberry resort for days at a time.
So . . . what stories are you following today?
Friday the 13th Full Moon Reads: Full on Fury
Posted: September 13, 2019 Filed under: morning reads | Tags: Democratic Primary Debate 23 Comments
Good Morning Sky Dancers!
It’s going to be an interesting Day! #FridayThe13th coincides with the full moon for the first time since 2000, So why is Friday the 13th so unlucky? Yeah, well, guess where most of our superstitions come from? If you said Christianity you were right!
And, it may have started early last night at the debates and the doddering old white grandpas on the stage and in the press who proved they’re still back in the 20th century. I about dropped my wine glass when I heard Chris Matthews discuss the concerns of the Democratic Base with Corey Booker and let slip the old school, objectification term “coloreds”. Matthews and Biden still seem to think that there’s some elusive white male working unicorn class out there like their “dads” that will come to the calming old school, whitie tightie, lexicon. Meanwhile, they both bungle forwards while stuck in the 60s with Bernie and his throwback Berners.
https://twitter.com/AnandWrites/status/1172353035487592450
I love this headline by AP’s Julie Pace: “Analysis: Biden looks like a front-runner, until he doesn’t”. He may wind up writing a thank you note to Julian Castro because the only thing that made him look sympathetic was Castro’s performance.
But the debate was punctuated by moments that highlighted why Biden can’t shake questions about his consistency and whispers about his fitness for office, despite his lead in most national polls and early state surveys. Most glaringly: a meandering answer near the end of the debate about his past statements on racial inequality. Biden said poor parents should play the “record player” for their children before veering off into comments about Venezuela.
Biden’s standing in the Democratic contest is the source of much debate within the party. Is he an experienced elder statesman who can calm an anxious nation and peel back some of the white working class voters who helped send President Donald Trump to the White House? Or is the 76-year-old past his prime and out of step with a party that’s growing younger, more diverse and more liberal?
To move further down the analysis:
Perhaps mindful of that reality, most candidates sidestepped overt criticism of the vice president in Thursday’s debate.
The one notable exception was Julián Castro, who served as Obama’s housing secretary and is in need of a jolt to break out of the lower tier of candidates. In a highly charged moment, Castro challenged Biden’s memory — a barely veiled reference to questions about the former vice president’s age.
“Are you forgetting already what you just said two minutes ago?” Castro said during an exchange on health care.
In a post-debate interview, New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker laid into Biden as well, saying there were many people concerned about Biden’s ability to carry the ball “across the end line without fumbling.”
Castro and Booker were zeroing in on real questions that are being asked about Biden. Is he too old to serve as president? If he were the nominee, would he make a mistake at a critical moment that could clear the way for Trump?
Biden’s stumbles later in the debate magnified those questions. He struggled through an answer about the war in Iraq and gave a grab-bag answer to a question about how to repair the legacy of slavery in America. He appeared to suggest that poorer families needed help learning how to raise their children.
Biden’s supporters argue that ultimately, those answers — and the questions they raise — matter less to voters than their overall impressions of the former vice president. Indeed, there is a deep reservoir of goodwill for Biden in the Democratic Party, shaped in large part by the eight years he served as Obama’s No. 2.
I do agree that the best questions of the night came for Jorge Ramos. However, I’m still highly disappointed that we got no particular information focused on women.
Ramos then turned to New Jersey Senator Cory Booker with one of the most distinctive questions asked so far in the 2020 debate season: “After the recent fires in the Amazon, some experts suggested that eating less meat is one way to help the environment. You are a vegan since 2014. That’s obviously a personal choice, but President Trump and Brazil’s President Bolsonaro are concerned that climate change regulations could affect economic growth. So should more Americans, including those here in Texas, and in Iowa, follow your diet?”
That drew laughs. Booker got even more laughs when he said, “First of all, I want to say no. Actually, I want to translate that into Spanish: No.”
I also found this analysis interesting from Buzzfeed: “The Real Democratic Primary Starts Now. And It’s All About Elizabeth Warren.“If I could be any candidate right now, I would want to be her.” by Ruby Crame and Ben Smith.
It’s impossible, stupid, and likely embarrassing to predict who is going to win the Democratic presidential primary.
But it’s already become clear who has shaped it: Elizabeth Warren.
Warren, the 70-year-old Massachusetts senator, has put her agenda for structural change at the center of the 2020 campaign, helping turn the party’s center into its right and its radical left into a plausible alternative. She’s set the standard for how you run a presidential campaign and watched her rivals — including the men who typically place ahead of her in the polls — imitate her tactics. She’s the focus of public panic on Wall Street and public attacks from the Democratic Party’s old guard. And as she ticks upward in public polling, she’s also benefiting from a remarkable consensus among the Democratic Party’s professional class, according to interviews with a dozen veterans of presidential politics this week, that she is on her way to becoming the candidate to beat.
In the days before Thursday’s debate here in Texas — a moment that marked the start of a tighter, more competitive fight for the Democratic nomination — Joe Biden and his allies telegraphed a series of new talking points, all seemingly aimed at Warren. That same day, a viral clip showed a CNBC panel voice genuine panic about a Warren presidency: “You talk to executives,” said host Jim Cramer, “they’re more fearful of her winning — I mean I’ve never heard anybody say, ‘Look! Uh, she’s gotta be stopped! She’s gotta be stopped!’” A Wall Street Journal editorial followed the next morning.
Onstage in Houston, Warren commanded the most speaking time alongside Biden, putting herself at the center of policy debates on health care while staying out of the most personal arguments between candidates. Her preparation for the third round of Democratic debates on Thursday, her aides have said, did not deviate much from the first and second rounds beyond one key difference: preparing for her opponents to turn their criticism in her direction.
“I know that the senator says that she’s for Bernie, well, I’m for Barack,” Biden said in the first answer of the night, in response to a question about whether Warren and Bernie Sanders are pushing too far left.
Warren, in her response, cut off the idea that she was out to undo Obama’s legacy. “We all owe a huge debt to President Obama, who fundamentally transformed health care in America and committed this country to health care for every human being,” she said. “And now the question is, how best can we improve on it?”
Trump’s epic physical and mental decline was on full display last night for any one that cares. Matt Fuller of HuffPo writes”Trump Gives A Rambling Mess Of A Speech At The GOP’s Baltimore Retreat — And He’s A Hit. The takeover of the Republican Party is complete.”
Trump took the stage clapping along with his excited GOP audience, and he really never stopped praising himself. He cheered his administration’s repeal on Thursday of clean water regulations, while also congratulating himself for what he claimed is the nation’s cleanest water and air in the last 25 years. He cheered the Senate’s confirmation Thursday of his 150th nominee to federal courts. And he lauded the economy that has produced low unemployment rates for minorities.
But far from running through a scripted checklist of accomplishments, Trump delivered a largely extemporaneous ― often bizarre ― speech about, among many other topics, the Democratic presidential candidates, immigration, the 2020 campaign, the 2016 election, the border wall, even cowboy hats.
Trump also told a story about an old business rival that he used to hate and, he said, who used to hate him. He noted that the old rival — who he did not name — was now working to get Trump reelected. He ended the story by remarking that, with the crop of Democrats vying to win the nomination, this old enemy didn’t have a choice but to support him.
“Our country will go to hell if any of these people” win the White House, Trump told the Republicans.
Trump dinged Democrats for their immigration policies ― and spent a considerable amount of time joking about the name of one of the party’s presidential candidates, Pete Buttigieg. But he also praised Democrats for their unity. “We have to stick together like they do,” Trump said.
If the president had any concerns that Republican House members ― who lost their majority in last year’s midterm in a voter rebuke of Trump ― might bail on him, his audience was there to assure him there was no reason to be worried.
As Trump departed the stage to his usual campaign sign-off song, The Rolling Stones “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy stopped the music to deliver a message. “We’re with you, we’ll never get tired of winning, and we’ll always put America first,” the Californian said.
Mind you: Trump had cracked minutes before that the husky McCarthy was somewhat bovine. The joke came as Trump claimed, falsely, that the Green New Deal pushed by some progressive lawmakers would result in “no more cows, no more planes, I guess no more people.”
“Because Kevin is just like a cow, just smaller,” Trump continued. He added that he couldn’t resist the attempt at humor and he picked McCarthy because he saw his “beautiful” face smiling at him.
Well, those are some things I found but I’m sure we’ll be hearing about it all day. The only thing I haven’t written about today is the Andy McCabe situation.
I think we can clearly call this a DOJ political witch hunt but more stuff will come out I’m sure.
So, join me around the potion kettle tonight and howl at the moon a few times!
What’s on you’re reading and blogging list today?
Tuesday Reads: Is Trump Destroying U.S. Intelligence Capabilities?
Posted: September 10, 2019 Filed under: Foreign Affairs, morning reads, U.S. Politics 24 CommentsGood Morning!!
As often happens since Trump entered the White House, it’s impossible to pick the most shocking news of the day. Is it Trump’s trashing of the opportunity to get the U.S. out of Afghanistan? Is it Wilbur Ross reportedly threatening to fire National Weather Service employees for accurately reporting the weather? Is it Trump’s corrupt use of his office for self-dealing? I guess I’d have to say Trump’s efforts to destroy the U.S. government’s intelligence capabilities probably wins today’s prize.
UPDATE: Naturally, as I was wrapping up this post, another big story broke.
The New York Times: Trump Fires John Bolton as National Security Adviser
President Trump fired John R. Bolton, his third national security adviser, on Tuesday amid fundamental disagreements over how to handle major foreign policy challenges like Iran, North Korea and Afghanistan.
Mr. Trump announced the decision on Twitter. “I informed John Bolton last night that his services are no longer needed at the White House. I disagreed strongly with many of his suggestions, as did others in the Administration, and therefore I asked John for his resignation, which was given to me this morning. I thank John very much for his service. I will be naming a new National Security Advisor next week.”
His departure comes as Mr. Trump is pursuing diplomatic openings with two of the United States’ most intractable enemies, efforts that have troubled hard-liners in the administration, like Mr. Bolton, who view North Korea and Iran as profoundly untrustworthy.
The president has continued to court Kim Jong-un, the repressive leader of North Korea, despite Mr. Kim’s refusal to surrender his nuclear program and despite repeated short-range missile tests by the North that have rattled its neighbors. In recent days, Mr. Trump has expressed a willingness to meet with President Hassan Rouhani of Iran under the right circumstances, and even to extend short-term financing to Tehran, although the offer has so far been rebuffed.
Back to previous programming:
CNN: Exclusive: US extracted top spy from inside Russia in 2017.
In a previously undisclosed secret mission in 2017, the United States successfully extracted from Russia one of its highest-level covert sources inside the Russian government, multiple Trump administration officials with direct knowledge told CNN.
A person directly involved in the discussions said that the removal of the Russian was driven, in part, by concerns that President Donald Trump and his administration repeatedly mishandled classified intelligence and could contribute to exposing the covert source as a spy.
The decision to carry out the extraction occurred soon after a May 2017 meeting in the Oval Office in which Trump discussed highly classified intelligence with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and then-Russian Ambassador to the US Sergey Kislyak. The intelligence, concerning ISIS in Syria, had been provided by Israel.
The disclosure to the Russians by the President, though not about the Russian spy specifically, prompted intelligence officials to renew earlier discussions about the potential risk of exposure, according to the source directly involved in the matter….
The source was considered the highest level source for the US inside the Kremlin, high up in the national security infrastructure, according to the source familiar with the matter and a former senior intelligence official.
According to CNN’s sources, the spy had access to Putin and could even provide images of documents on the Russian leader’s desk.
At the time, Mike Pompeo was CIA director, and he claimed “too much information was coming out regarding the covert source, known as an asset.” Frankly, I don’t trust Pompeo to act in the national interest, but that’s just me. Click on the CNN link to read more about “concerns” the intelligence community had about Trump revealing classified information.
The New York Times: C.I.A. Informant Extracted From Russia Had Sent Secrets to U.S. for Decades.
Decades ago, the C.I.A. recruited and carefully cultivated a midlevel Russian official who began rapidly advancing through the governmental ranks. Eventually, American spies struck gold: The longtime source landed an influential position that came with access to the highest level of the Kremlin.
As American officials began to realize that Russia was trying to sabotage the 2016 presidential election, the informant became one of the C.I.A.’s most important — and highly protected — assets. But when intelligence officials revealed the severity of Russia’s election interference with unusual detail later that year, the news media picked up on details about the C.I.A.’s Kremlin sources.
C.I.A. officials worried about safety made the arduous decision in late 2016 to offer to extract the source from Russia. The situation grew more tense when the informant at first refused, citing family concerns — prompting consternation at C.I.A. headquarters and sowing doubts among some American counterintelligence officials about the informant’s trustworthiness. But the C.I.A. pressed again months later after more media inquiries. This time, the informant agreed.
The move brought to an end the career of one of the C.I.A.’s most important sources. It also effectively blinded American intelligence officials to the view from inside Russia as they sought clues about Kremlin interference in the 2018 midterm elections and next year’s presidential contest….
The Moscow informant was instrumental to the C.I.A.’s most explosive conclusion about Russia’s interference campaign: that President Vladimir V. Putin ordered and orchestrated it himself. As the American government’s best insight into the thinking of and orders from Mr. Putin, the source was also key to the C.I.A.’s assessment that he affirmatively favored Donald J. Trump’s election and personally ordered the hacking of the Democratic National Committee.
Michelle Goldberg at The New York Times: Psst! Don’t Tell Trump.
It’s sometimes lost amid Donald Trump’s endless affronts to the Republic, but the undermining of American intelligence capabilities is one of the overarching stories of his administration….
Putin and his puppet in Helsinki
Even the possibility that Trump jeopardized America’s most important intelligence asset in Russia should be a very big deal, though I’m not sure it will be. The pundit class has mostly grown bored of the story behind Trump’s corrupt relationship with Russia. And too many in power, including almost all of the Republican Party, have grown used to the president deploying national security secrets in the same way he once traded tabloid gossip. He discloses American intelligence to deflect attention from unflattering stories, suck up to people he wants to impress, or simply on a whim. He treats it, as he treats everything else in American government, as a private tool of self-gratification.
Trump, you’ll remember, was in office for only a few months before he revealed to Russia classified intelligence about ISIS that originated in Israel, potentially endangering a source who was, as The Wall Street Journal reported, “the most valuable source of information on external plotting by Islamic State.” This led a senior German politician to describe the president as a “security risk for the entire Western world.”
Not long after, Trump bragged to Philippine strongman Rodrigo Duterte about the presence of American nuclear submarines off North Korea. (“We never talk about subs!” stunned Pentagon officials told BuzzFeed News.) Then, that September, after a subway bombing in London, Trump tweeted out that the perpetrators “were in the sights of Scotland Yard,” information that had not been publicly released. This prompted a rebuke from the British prime minister.
Less than two weeks ago, Trump tweeted what was likely a classified photo of the aftermath of an explosion at an Iranian space center. From the image, journalists and internet sleuths were able to deduce important information about the type and location of the satellite that produced it. “This is the first time in three and a half decades that an image has become public that reveals the sophistication of U.S. spy satellites in orbit,” reported Wired.
Read the rest at the NYT.
Final story on this topic from CNN: Trump skeptical of using foreign spies to collect intel on hostile countries, sources say.
President Donald Trump has privately and repeatedly expressed opposition to the use of foreign intelligence from covert sources, including overseas spies who provide the US government with crucial information about hostile countries, according to multiple senior officials who served under Trump.
Trump has privately said that foreign spies can damage relations with their host countries and undermine his personal relationships with their leaders, the sources said. The President “believes we shouldn’t be doing that to each other,” one former Trump administration official told CNN.
In addition to his fear such foreign intelligence sources will damage his relationship with foreign leaders, Trump has expressed doubts about the credibility of the information they provide. Another former senior intelligence official told CNN that Trump “believes they’re people who are selling out their country.”
Even in public, Trump has looked down on these foreign assets, as they are known in the intelligence community. Responding to reports that the CIA recruited Kim Jong Un’s brother as a spy, Trump said he “wouldn’t let that happen under my auspices.”
Why is this man still acting as “president?”
Trump’s opposition to using intelligence from foreign sources doesn’t extend to his campaign for reelection, in which he’s willing to use his pal Rudy Giuliani and withholding military aid to force Ukraine to manufacture intel on an opponent.
Just Security: Trump and Giuliani’s Quest for Fake Ukraine “Dirt” on Biden: An Explainer.
Those efforts yesterday became the focus of a new joint investigation by three House committees – Foreign Affairs, Intelligence, and Oversight and Reform. In letters to White House Counsel Pat Cipollone and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo seeking “any and all” related records and a list of personnel involved, the three Democratic committee chairs outlined a litany of meetings, phone calls, tweets and other threats, including the withholding of the $250 million of security aid the reporter had referenced in the question to Pence.
“President Trump and his personal attorney appear to have increased pressure on the Ukrainian government and its justice system in service of President Trump’s reelection campaign, and the White House and the State Department may be abetting this scheme,” the chairmen wrote.
Starting at least late last year, President Donald Trump and his personal attorney and advisor, Rudy Giuliani, have agitated for Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Biden, the current frontrunner in the Democratic presidential race and the candidate they apparently think could be Trump’s biggest rival for a second term.
Trump and Giuliani allege, contrary to evidence, that Biden improperly pressured the Ukrainian government in 2016 to fire then-Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin in the midst of a corruption investigation of one of Ukraine’s biggest gas companies, Burisma Group. Biden’s youngest son, Hunter, was serving on the company’s board at the time.
But the prosecutor, in fact, was the target of pressure by Ukrainian anti-corruption advocates and a host of international supporters of Ukraine, who argued he should be fired for failing to pursue major cases of corruption. And it was the widely known and publicly espoused position of the U.S. government, across a half dozen agencies, that the prosecutor’s ouster was among crucial anti-corruption measures that the Ukrainian government needed to take to move forward economically and politically. As President Barack Obama’s point man on Ukraine, Biden dutifully relayed those messages at every opportunity.
Yet Trump and Giuliani have turned that real-life scenario on its head, falsely alleging that Biden sought to corruptly influence a Ukrainian prosecutor’s decisions in his son’s favor.
Click on the link to read the rest.
I’ll end with this story by Jeff Hauser at The Daily Beast that would sound crazy if it were about any other president; but in the current environment it actually seems plausible: Trump’s Going to Manipulate the Government to Stay in Power.
The power of an incumbent president to aid re-election by abusing the executive branch has in the past been limited by a few powerful forces: Presidential integrity; the fear of a scandal emerging in the media; and the prospect of aggressive congressional oversight.
Due to forces outside their control, the Democratic nominee won’t be saved by the first two “norms based” options. And as a result of Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s strategy of not “focusing on Trump,” the president has every reason to scoff at the prospect of aggressive congressional oversight, up to and including a genuine “go big” effort at impeachment.
Combined, these elements must force us to consider a truly horrifying series of questions: Does President Trump have the means, motive, and opportunity to tilt the 2020 election? The answer, unfortunately, is yes, yes, and yes. And it behooves Democrats to understand that now, before it is too late.
Hauser spells out what he sees as “the means, motive, and opportunity.” Read all about it at The Daily Beast.
So . . . what else is happening? what stories are you following today?
Manic Monday Reads: “Trump Is Not Well”
Posted: September 9, 2019 Filed under: morning reads | Tags: #PresidentPussyAssBitch 45 Comments
Good Morning Sky Dancers!
That understated headline from The Atlantic by contributing editor Peter Wehner just about sums up all the news that no one should consider fit to print but blast it at us daily because “Accepting the reality about the president’s disordered personality is important—even essential.”
I wasn’t shy about making the same case publicly. During a July 14, 2016, appearance on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, for example, I responded to a pro-Trump caller who was upset that I opposed Trump despite my having been a Republican for my entire adult life and having served in the Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations and the George W. Bush White House.
“I don’t oppose Mr. Trump because I think he’s going to lose to Hillary Clinton,” I told Ben from Purcellville, Virginia. “I think he will, but as I said, he may well win. My opposition to him is based on something completely different, which is, first, I think he is temperamentally unfit to be president. I think he’s erratic, I think he’s unprincipled, I think he’s unstable, and I think that he has a personality disorder; I think he’s obsessive. And at the end of the day, having served in the White House for seven years in three administrations and worked for three presidents, one closely, and read a lot of history, I think the main requirement for president of the United States … is temperament, and disposition … whether you have wisdom and judgment and prudence.”
That statement has been validated.
Donald Trump’s disordered personality—his unhealthy patterns of thinking, functioning, and behaving—has become the defining characteristic of his presidency. It manifests itself in multiple ways: his extreme narcissism; his addiction to lying about things large and small, including his finances and bullying and silencing those who could expose them; his detachment from reality, including denying things he said even when there is video evidence to the contrary; his affinity for conspiracy theories; his demand for total loyalty from others while showing none to others; and his self-aggrandizement and petty cheating.
It manifests itself in Trump’s impulsiveness and vindictiveness; his craving for adulation; his misogyny, predatory sexual behavior, and sexualization of his daughters; his open admiration for brutal dictators; his remorselessness; and his lack of empathy and sympathy, including attacking a family whose son died while fighting for this country, mocking a reporter with a disability, and ridiculing a former POW. (When asked about Trump’s feelings for his fellow human beings, Trump’s mentor, the notorious lawyer Roy Cohn, reportedly said, “He pisses ice water.”)
The most recent example is the president’s bizarre fixation on falsely insisting that he was correct to warn that Alabama faced a major risk from Hurricane Dorian, to the point that he doctored a hurricane map with a black Sharpie to include the state as being in the path of the storm.
“He’s deteriorating in plain sight,” one Republican strategist who is in frequent contact with the White House told Business Insider on Friday. Asked why the president was obsessed with Alabama instead of the states that would actually be affected by the storm, the strategist said, “You should ask a psychiatrist about that; I’m not sure I’m qualified to comment.”
The worst thing about this is summed up by Jonathan Chait writing for The New York Magazine today: “Trump Has Figured Out How to Corrupt the Entire Government.” And yet every one in elected office appears unable to face it and get rid of him before he does more damage.
Donald Trump came to the presidency a complete novice to government and often found his corrupt, authoritarian impulses frustrated by its bureaucracy. But he is slowly learning how to control the machine that has stymied him. This is the story of 2019, as Trump has replaced institutionalists attempting to curtail his grossest instincts with loyalists happy to indulge them. It is playing out across multiple dimensions. This is the through-line between several seemingly disconnected episodes from the last several days.
The pattern played out in its most absurd form via Trump’s manic insistence on justifying his inaccurate warning that Alabama “likely be hit (much) harder than anticipated” from Hurricane Dorian, at a time when the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration was forecasting the state faced no risk. At first, Trump attempted to justify his lie by brandishing a chart he crudely doctored.
More ominously, on Friday, the NOAA issued an official statement backing up Trump’s original false claim. And the Washington Post reported the agency had instructed its staff not to contradict Trump’s claims. “This is the first time I’ve felt pressure from above to not say what truly is the forecast,” an NOAA meteorologist told the Post. “It’s hard for me to wrap my head around. One of the things we train on is to dispel inaccurate rumors and ultimately that is what was occurring.”
The controversy might appear absurd and contentless. But Trump views the stakes as high, not without reason. Among his supporters, Trump has created a cultlike devotion to his competence and honesty, both of which are threatened by acknowledging his falsehood about the hurricane.
Also on Friday, the Wall Street Journal reported the Department of Justice is launching an antitrust investigation of automakers who had agreed with California to raise their emissions standards. Trump is driven by a desire to overturn an Obama-era rule increasing mileage standards out of an obsession with destroying his predecessor’s legacy and an automatic rejection of any policy to limit climate change. Trump took the agreement as a personal affront, raging publicly at the automakers for dealing with California and undercutting his leverage to loosen emissions standards.
The antitrust investigation is a preposterous abuse. The automakers are not conspiring to fix prices. They are negotiating pollution regulations with a state that is legally entitled to set its own air-pollution rules. But the threat of retribution has already dissuaded automakers from dealing with California. “One person with direct knowledge of negotiations said that Daimler AG’s Mercedes-Benz had indicated an interest in joining, but later abstained due to fears of political fallout,” reports the Journal. The New York Times notes that other auto firms steered clear of dealing with California because they “fear retribution from an unpredictable administration.”
You can also read Timothy L O’Brien at Bloomberg: “On Trump, Sharpiegate, Turnberry, the Taliban and Chaos. Good government decays when compromised by a cult of personality.” Does this mean the press will stop normalizing what he does now as well as how he behaves?
The U.S. military has also fallen under the president’s sway, it would appear. Politico reported on Friday night that Democrats in the House of Representatives are investigating whether Air Force crews have been improperly routed for stays at the president’s money-losing golf resort in Turnberry, Scotland, raising the possibility that taxpayers’ dollars are helping a Trump business stay afloat. As I noted in a column last year about Trump’s financial conflicts of interest there, the “Scottish government has also drawn attention for considering steering business to Turnberry as part of its courtship of the U.S. military.” Politico reported on Sunday night that in response to its reporting, the Air Force has ordered a comprehensive evaluation of its use of Trump resorts to lodge crews.
The Air Force may have chosen to patronize the president’s hotels without any pressure from the president, of course. Vice President Mike Pence bent over backward to say as much when he decided to house his official entourage in a Trump hotel on the west coast of Ireland last week, about 125 miles away from the meetings he had to attend in Dublin. Attorney General William Barr also may have just been picking the best place to throw his annual holiday party when he decided to pay at least $30,000 for the privilege of hosting it at Trump’s Washington hotel.
But however the military, the vice president, and the attorney general all ended up doing business with the president, the mere fact that they are lining Trump’s wallet looks awfully like institutional kowtowing, at a minimum. In a worst-case scenario, it smacks of financial conflicts and the possibility of deeper corruption that has hung over the White House throughout the Trump era. And it’s linked to the same loss of integrity and institutional erosion on display at NOAA.
While obsessing over his Sharpie, Alabama and the media, Trump was also doing end-runs around most of the country’s foreign policy and national security institutions as he tried to orchestrate an end to the war in Afghanistan. He landed on a showy, self-aggrandizing concept: hosting the Taliban, a terrorist organization tied to Osama bin Laden, at Camp David over the weekend – just days before the anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The summit unraveled, in part because of possibly irreparable differences between the Taliban and the Afghan government as well as infighting among White House advisers lobbying for Trump’s attention.
There are some responses today but we’ll see what happens.
From the Washington Post: NOAA’s chief scientist will investigate why agency backed Trump over its experts on Dorian, email shows — The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration acting chief scientist said in an email to colleagues Sunday that he is investigating whether the agency’s response …
From Natasha Bertrand at Politico: Air Force leaders order probe of Trump resort stays
And this one that I still can’t believe since we’ve just seen another year where we’ve got First Responders dying from the events of 9/11 of 18 years ago …
from Chas Danner at New York Magazine: Trump’s Canceled Meeting With Taliban Was a Failed Attempt to Rush a Peace Deal
On Saturday evening, just days before the 18th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks which led to America’s forever war in Afghanistan, President Trump revealed in a series of tweets that he had canceled a secret Sunday summit with Taliban and Afghan leaders at Camp David. The reason, he claimed, was that the Taliban had admitted to killing an American soldier and 11 others in a suicide bombing last week in order “to build false leverage” in its peace negotiations with the U.S.
“What kind of people would kill so many in order to seemingly strengthen their bargaining position? They didn’t, they only made it worse,” the president declared.
But speaking of making things worse, the New York Times reported on Sunday that the president’s announcement was hardly the whole story. The Camp David meeting — according to Afghan, Taliban, and Western officials — was actually a failed gamble by the Trump administration. The summit, which the Trump team proposed late last month, was an attempt rush a conclusion to the negotiations by flying Taliban and Afghan leaders to the U.S. so that the parties could iron out the remaining details and conclude with a big peace-deal announcement and photo op.
U.S. and Taliban negotiators have reportedly made real progress in nine rounds of talks over the last year, suggesting America’s 18-year war in Afghanistan may finally soon be over. But finalizing the end of an almost two-decade war is not like finishing the production of a television-show season. Though Afghan President Ashraf Ghani — who is facing reelection at the end of month and had been mostly excluded from the talks — had agreed to the summit, Taliban leaders objected to the plan. They insisted that they would not meet directly with the Afghan government or travel to America until after the deal with the U.S. had been finalized. That didn’t happen, so the hastily arranged summit was scrapped and the Taliban was blamed.
So you may ask yourselves, why am I talking about John Legend and his beautiful outspoken wife? And why am I suddenly seeing #PresidentPussyAssBitch all over Twitter?
L
ook no further than The Root for this headline “Trump Comes for John Legend and ‘Filthy Mouthed Wife’ Chrissy Teigen on Twitter; Ends Up With a New Nickname We Can All Agree On” by Genetta M Adams.
I think it goes without saying that there’s a lot of bad shit happening in the world right now: the Bahamas and the Carolinas continue to recover from the havoc wreaked by Hurricane Dorian, yet another reminder of the coming climate apocalypse; mass shootings are a regular feature of America life and the global economy is about as jittery as a junkie.
But do you know what the leader of the free world was doing Sunday night? Rage tweeting about musician John Legend and his wife, Chrissy Teigen, all because he didn’t think he was getting the credit he deserved for his work on criminal justice reform (yes, I know! I told you the world is crazy right now!)
How did we get here? On Sunday night, Legend appeared with NBC Nightly News anchor Lester Holt in a program about mass incarceration and the broken criminal justice system. Legend was on to discuss Free America, a program he initiated to end mass incarceration.
Clearly, the president tuned in because after the show aired, he threw a four-tweet tantrum because he wanted the world to know that MSNBC failed to give him and the GOP enough credit for passing the First Step Act, a bipartisan (ahem!) law that “reduced mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent drug offenses and eased the federal ‘three strike’ rule imposing a life sentence for three or more convictions,” according to the Insider.
Go to the link if you want to see the tweets. So, you can see why I think that saying “The President isn’t well” is highly understated.
The one agency that appears ready and willing to buck the trend is the NWS. From the AP: “NWS chief backs forecasters who contradicted Trump”. Jay Reeves has the byline.
The head of the National Weather Service issued a strong public defense Monday of forecasters who contradicted President Donald Trump’s claim that Hurricane Dorian posed a threat to Alabama as it approached the United States.
Director Louis Uccellini said forecasters in Birmingham did the right thing Sept. 1 when they tried to combat public panic and rumors that Dorian posed a threat to Alabama. It was only later that they found out the source of the mistaken information, he said.
Speaking at a meeting of the National Weather Association, Uccellini said Birmingham forecasters “did what any office would do to protect the public.”
“They did that with one thing in mind: public safety,” said Uccellini, who prompted a standing ovation from hundreds of forecasters by asking members of the Birmingham weather staff to stand.
Earlier, the president of the 2,100-member association, Paul Schlatter, said any forecast office “would have done the exact same thing” as the Birmingham forecast office.
Trump has defended his tweet about Alabama, and he displayed an altered forecast map in the Oval Office last week in an attempt to make his point. Apparently siding with the president, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration issued an unsigned statement critical of the Birmingham forecasters Friday.
But Alabama had never been included in hurricane advisories and Trump’s information, based on less authoritative computer models than an official forecast, was outdated when he sent a tweet saying Alabama could be affected by Dorian.
Discussing the flurry of social media contacts and phone calls that followed Trump’s tweet, Uccellini said Birmingham forecasters used “an emphasis they deemed essential to shut down what they thought were rumors” when they posted on social media that Alabama’s wasn’t at risk.
“Only later, when the retweets and politically based comments started coming to their office, did they learn the sources of this information,” he said.
Congress of the United States of America! That was the NWS! Be more like the National Weather Service! Show some fucking leadership!!!
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Oh, and if you want to see more Things that Look Just Like Donald Trump you can go to Bored Panda. And thanks to Delphyne for finding that last rooster!!!
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