"To be or not to be, ay, there's the point"
May 6, 2019 9:47 AM   Subscribe

After a catastrophic performance by Bill Barr (Atlantic), the Trump team resists oversight (AP) in a remarkable state of affairs between the executive and legislative branches, unseen in recent times, as Democrats try to break through Trump’s blockade of investigations and exert congressional oversight of the administration. On Wednesday, the House Judiciary Committee will vote to hold Barr in contempt (NYT). This is the US Politics megathread.

• Mueller Report Round-up:
The Mueller Report by the Washington Post review – the truth is out there… somewhere (Guardian) Robert Mueller’s detailed investigation into whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russia makes for a lively read • Wittes' mid-length Mueller report summary (Atlantic), which hits all of the conclusions.

Trump: 'Mueller should not testify' (Politico) A tweet by the president could now set up the most consequential legal battle related to the special counsel’s probe. • Trump Objects to Mueller Testifying Before Congress (NYT) • In reversal, Trump says Mueller ‘should not testify’ before Congress (WaPo) • 'Tentative date' of 15 May agreed for Mueller to testify before Congress (Guardian) Democratic congressman says: ‘We hope that the special counsel will appear’ while Trump tweets: ‘Bob Mueller should not testify’
• Foreign Policy Round-up:
Kim oversees missile firing drills, tells North Korean troops to be alert (Politico/AP) • Pompeo insists North Korea nuclear deal still possible despite weapons test (Guardian)

Trump Threatens China With More Tariffs Ahead of Final Trade Talks (NYT) • Trump, citing slow pace of talks, revives threat to put tariff on all Chinese goods (Politico) • Stocks plunge as Trump escalates trade war with China with plan to raise tariffs (Guardian) • After latest threats, Chinese see Trump as a Marvel villain out to destroy them (WaPo) The Chinese stock markets had their sharpest fall in more than three years Monday.

US deploys aircraft carrier and bombers after 'troubling indications' from Iran (Guardian) • Navy strike group deployed to send ‘message’ to Iran (Politico) • AP source: Possible attack on US forces led to deployments (AP)

Venezuela: Russia urges US to abandon ‘irresponsible’ plan to topple Maduro (Guardian) Secretary of state meanwhile slammed Russian meddling in the country: ‘We don’t want anyone messing around with Venezuela’ • Pompeo won’t promise to consult Congress about potential military intervention in Venezuela (WaPo)
• Domestic Policy Round-up:
The Department of Justice filed its brief arguing that the entire Affordable Care Act is unconstitutional: William Barr’s Justice Department Just Filed the Most Nakedly Political Brief in the Agency’s History (Slate) • Further analysis from Nicholas Bagley focusing on DOJ's wild contention that Judge O'Connor's opinion should stand, except for the fact that would declare unconstitutional the part of the ACA they're actively relying on: the criminal health care fraud laws they're currently using to prosecute fraudsters.
IN OTHER HEADLINES:

Trump tweets support for far-right figures banned by Facebook (Guardian) President railed against social media companies on Saturday and said he would ‘monitor the censorship’ of US citizens

• NYMag reports on a recent meeting of the Democratic Party’s highest-profile financial industry donors: Wall Street Democrats Are Absolutely Freaking Out About Their 2020 Candidates “I mean, honestly, if it’s Bernie versus Trump, I have no fucking idea what I’m going to do,” one Democratic hedge funder told me. “Maybe I won’t vote.”

Hard-line Views Made Lou Dobbs a Fox Powerhouse. Now He’s Shaping Trump’s Border Policy. (WaPo) "The 70-somethings share a penchant for schoolyard-style name-calling, grumbling about enemies seen and unseen, an apocalyptic view of illegal immigration and a deep embrace of hair-color shades not found in the natural world."

Democrats: Don’t Fall Into the ‘Electability’ Trap (Crooked) "Thus we wanted to step back and break down what people mean when they say someone is not “electable,” and explain why their assumptions are unfounded."

Why Stacey Abrams is still saying she won. (NYT Mag) "I believe we have reached a place where those who share my values actually outnumber those who share the values of my opponent. And that wasn’t made manifest because of his structural racism and how he diminished people’s ability to vote."

Today is the 837th day of the Trump administration. There are 548 days until the 2020 elections.

Previously in U.S. Politics Megathreads: The █████████ Mueller Report

Elsewhere on MetaFilter: A Massive Giveaway to the Tax Preparation Industry (Taxpayer First Act) • The rise of conspiracy entrepreneurs and their followersHuman society under urgent threat from loss of Earth's natural life • OnceUponATime's Active Measures site

MeFi ChatUnofficial PoliticsFilter SlackVenting Thread for catharsis and sympathizingPolitical Humorizing Thread for jokes and one-linersHelp fund the siteNext FPP draft • Thanks to Doktor Zed, zachlipton, and box for helping to create this thread.

posted by Little Dawn (1928 comments total) 116 users marked this as a favorite
 
I really hope we don't go to war with Iran, for any reason, let alone in a sad attempt to distract the nation from corruption and solidify the chances of a second Trump term.
posted by mecran01 at 9:56 AM on May 6, 2019 [26 favorites]


After being "stolen" due to investigation, Trump's presidency should be extended by two years. Trump retweets it.
  • Clearly, theses folks closely follow the constitution.
  • I had thought folks worrying about Trump refusing to leave office, not have elections, etc., were a bit extreme. Now, I'm not so sure.
  • President Obama and Merrick Garland would like a word.
posted by MrGuilt at 9:59 AM on May 6, 2019 [38 favorites]


Another day, another tweet sends stocks tumbling: Trump's Threats To Raise Tariffs On China Send Markets Falling (Jim Zarroli for NPR, May 6, 2019)
President Trump's latest threat to set higher tariffs on imports from China is raising new fears about the ongoing trade talks with Beijing and sending global financial markets tumbling.

Stock prices opened sharply lower in the United States on Monday — with the Dow Jones Industrial Average down more than 450 points — after Trump tweeted a vow Sunday to raise tariffs from 10% to 25% on $200 billion worth of imported Chinese goods. The stocks of companies that trade heavily with China were especially hard hit.

Earlier Monday, the Shanghai Composite Index plunged 5.6%.

"The United States has been losing, for many years, 600 to 800 Billion Dollars a year on Trade. With China we lose 500 Billion Dollars. Sorry, we're not going to be doing that anymore!" Trump said in a tweet Monday. (The goods trade deficit with China rose to a record $419.2 billion in 2018, but most economists say a deficit doesn't say much about the health of the economy. [NPR x2])

But the stock markets crept higher as the day wore on, a sign that investors may be seeing Trump's threat as a negotiating ploy that he is unlikely to follow through on. By early afternoon, the Dow was down about 235 points, or 0.9%.
Has anyone looked to see if Trump and Co are shorting stocks, to make gains from these stock drops?
posted by filthy light thief at 10:01 AM on May 6, 2019 [58 favorites]


Only a rogue nation would break a nuclear treaty and an arms control treaty, if there's no other reason than mere profit for these actions?
posted by hugbucket at 10:02 AM on May 6, 2019 [4 favorites]


This was linked near the end of the old megathread but I think everyone deserves to see it -it's a really long, really in-depth podcast about the Mueller report's content and it's equal parts hilarious and terrifying
posted by The Whelk at 10:03 AM on May 6, 2019 [11 favorites]


More background on Bolton's sleight-of-moustache: The new Lincoln carrier group is in the middle of a globe circling engagement in training to reach a new deployment certification. Nothing new, nothing special. Lincoln aircraft carrier strike group enters European waters (Apr 9 UPI).
posted by Harry Caul at 10:04 AM on May 6, 2019 [5 favorites]


the House Judiciary Committee will vote to hold Barr in contempt

I'll believe it when I see the perp walk.
posted by sammyo at 10:11 AM on May 6, 2019 [38 favorites]


After being "stolen" due to investigation, Trump's presidency should be extended by two years. Trump retweets it.

Of course this just increases the need to see his taxes so that we can verify all the income he's “lost” due to whatever has been stolen.

I'm sure something has been stolen from someone—y'know, there's always a kernel of truth to these things.
posted by XMLicious at 10:25 AM on May 6, 2019 [10 favorites]


This seems to be a significant development, at least on the PR front:

Trump would have been charged with obstruction were he not president, hundreds of former federal prosecutors assert.
posted by Shadan7 at 10:28 AM on May 6, 2019 [63 favorites]


a statement asserting special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s findings would have produced obstruction charges against President Trump — if not for the office he held.

It isn't a hard call. Mueller said this in his report. Just not so clearly that it couldn't be obfuscated by bad actors.

(Paraphrasing, but he said "I can't charge him with obstruction, but if I didn't think it was warranted, I'd say so. I'm not going to say so.")
posted by diogenes at 10:47 AM on May 6, 2019 [10 favorites]


“Each of us believes that the conduct of President Trump described in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report would, in the case of any other person not covered by the Office of Legal Counsel policy against indicting a sitting President, result in multiple felony charges for obstruction of justice,” the former federal prosecutors wrote.

If memory serves me correctly, Mueller made it quite clear that he was operating under the presumed constraint that a sitting president would not be indicted by the DoJ, and that therefore he was writing a prosecution brief for Congress. This conviction, if you will, that Trump had obviously obstructed justice was part of the contention between Mueller and Barr, who misrepresented the report in an attempt -- partially successful, thanks to the media's gullibility -- to exonerate Trump.

Consider how openly Trump commits some of his crimes, including obstruction, and then ponder how terrible whatever they're still working so hard to conceal, as with his tax returns, must be.
posted by Gelatin at 10:49 AM on May 6, 2019 [19 favorites]


Axios reports Trump reaching 46% approval in a new polling: Trump Hits All-Time High Approval Rating in Gallup Poll
Gallup notes that Trump's bump is likely due to good economic news — higher than expected GDP and jobs growth — and the administration's interpretation of the Mueller report, which the president erroneously claimed exonerated him of allegations of collusion and obstruction.

The president managed to notch a 12% approval rating from Democrats — substantially higher than his all-time low of 4% just a few months ago. His approval rating with Republicans also flirted with an all-time high, sitting at 91% — just short of the 92% reached late last year.

The poll ended on April 30, meaning that it does not include the most recent flareup between Attorney General Bill Barr and the House Judiciary Committee, which could be viewed negatively by the public. And it's of course worth nothing that Trump's disapproval rating from Gallup remains at 50%, meaning his net approval remains underwater by 4 points.
n.b. Axios’s headline indicates the diminished expectations under which the media covers Trump. By comparison, Obama’s Gallup approval rating was rarely if ever a net negative, and his highest was 67% in late January 2009.
posted by Doktor Zed at 10:54 AM on May 6, 2019 [11 favorites]


And notice that the Repubs in Congress don't give a shit about any of this, until it affects their personal bottom line. They really can stand up to Trump, they just choose not to. Hiding tax returns? Huh, we don't know what to do. Appointing a guy to the Fed who may screw up our investments? Not happening!!
posted by Melismata at 10:55 AM on May 6, 2019 [30 favorites]


Axios reports Trump reaching 46% approval in a new polling: Trump Hits All-Time High Approval Rating in Gallup Poll

Marvel at how the so-called "liberal media" trumpets a mediocre approval rating as an "all time high." But then again, it did take them a long time to recognizes that George W. Bush's obvious mendacity and incompetence brought him down from being a "popular wartime president."

Speaking of Trump's middling popularity, I wondered towards the end of the last thread how the media never seems to recognize the risks for Republicans at going all in on an obviously crooked and authoritarian President. Nixon went from a landslide victory to resignation in disgrace in a scant couple of years -- and one of the things Congress was preparing to impeach him for was refusal to abide by supboenas.
posted by Gelatin at 11:01 AM on May 6, 2019 [9 favorites]


Don’t Get Lured by False Question of Whether Mueller Got “Played” by Barr (Joshua Geltzer, Just Security)
"It’s Not How Mueller Saw His Job, and It’s Not How We Should Either"

Asking whether he was “played” by the man to whom he reported distracts public analysis away from the true subject of concern regarding how the release of Mueller’s report was handled: Barr and his distortion of Mueller’s work. It also distracts from what, in the end, should be our real focus: Mueller’s findings themselves.
posted by ZeusHumms at 11:02 AM on May 6, 2019 [10 favorites]


NY AG Letitia James is going after the hidden donor lists of shady non-501(c)(3) tax-exempt groups so beloved by conservative activists: “We've filed a lawsuit against the Trump Treasury Department & IRS for failing to respond to records requests as required by law. The agency eliminated donor disclosure requirements for tax-exempt groups & refuses to comply w/the law to explain the rationale for these changes.”

Here’s her statement, in which she elaborates, “My office depends on these critical donor disclosure forms to be able to adequately oversee non-profit organizations in New York. Not only was this policy change made without notice, the Treasury and the IRS are now refusing to comply with the law to release information about the rationale for these changes. No one is above the law – not even the federal government – and we will use every tool to ensure they comply with these regulations to provide transparency and accountability.“
posted by Doktor Zed at 11:18 AM on May 6, 2019 [50 favorites]


The agency eliminated donor disclosure requirements for tax-exempt groups & refuses to comply w/the law to explain the rationale for these changes.

They did this the day after it came to light that the NRA was getting Russian money, right?
posted by diogenes at 11:21 AM on May 6, 2019 [18 favorites]


And notice that the Repubs in Congress don't give a shit about any of this, until it affects their personal bottom line. They really can stand up to Trump, they just choose not to. Hiding tax returns? Huh, we don't know what to do. Appointing a guy to the Fed who may screw up our investments? Not happening!!


And even when it _does_ affect their personal bottom line -- see also: pointless tariffs, or the "bigot laws" noted as causing division in Texas near the end of the last thread -- they don't care. Because they reason that tax cuts and deregulation will help them more than stupid shit will hurt.

Also, because Bernie will take 90% of their money and hand it to poor and brown and poor brown people.
posted by delfin at 11:32 AM on May 6, 2019 [2 favorites]


Are centrist candidates really the most "electable"? It may be the opposite (Amanda Marcotte, Salon)
'Despite the mainstream media's centrism fetish, voters want someone inspirational, not just "nicer than Trump"'

The problem is that this category of [moderate] voters, who would be called "libertarians" in political science circles, don't really exist in American politics. As Paul Krugman of the New York Times noted in February, these fabled economically conservative but socially liberal voters only constitute about 4% of the electorate. This is in contrast with the consistently liberal (45% of voters), economically liberal but socially conservative (29%), and the consistently conservative (23%).
posted by ZeusHumms at 11:40 AM on May 6, 2019 [35 favorites]


No one is above the law – not even the federal government – and we will use every tool to ensure they comply

Statements like this are piling up. I'll feel a lot better when we get our first example of the use of the available tools resulting in compliance.

As deadline looms, Treasury expected to buck Democrats' demand for Trump tax returns, again ABC News (Today)
posted by diogenes at 11:50 AM on May 6, 2019 [20 favorites]


23% are consistently conservative white nationalist
posted by benzenedream at 11:54 AM on May 6, 2019 [23 favorites]


I'll feel a lot better when we get our first example of the use of the available tools resulting in compliance.

I wonder if the House could absolutely zero out the White House's budget. Fund the government, yes, but not a dime for, say, Steve Miller's salary, or however many acting positions Mike Pompeo is filling, and Trump would have to pay for his stupid fast food banquets out of his own pocket.

Trump might take money from somewhere else, of course, but that'd be yet another obviously impeachable offense.
posted by Gelatin at 11:55 AM on May 6, 2019 [7 favorites]


these fabled economically conservative but socially liberal voters only constitute about 4% of the electorate [...] and the consistently conservative (23%)

And there's our crazification factor.
posted by Faint of Butt at 11:59 AM on May 6, 2019 [19 favorites]


Kate Riga at TPM reports that DOJ is reaching out to Nadler to 'negotiate' re: documents and testimony. My gut tells me that they're only trying to run out the clock - even incrementally.
posted by j_curiouser at 12:03 PM on May 6, 2019 [9 favorites]


Run out the clock, indeed. DOJ invites Nadler and co. to DOJ on Wed afternoon, which would be several hours of them NOT voting on contempt citations.
posted by Harry Caul at 12:14 PM on May 6, 2019 [13 favorites]


The Intercept: “The Complete Mercenary: How Erik Prince Used the Rise of Trump to Make an Improbable Comeback”

Interview with the author Matthew Cole on today's Democracy Now! (full episode, direct .mp4, alt link, torrents 1, 2, second part of interview not yet broadcast should show up here)

Salient points for me: Erik Prince, founder of “security firm” military and CIA contractor Blackwater/Xe/Academi which repeatedly committed atrocities during the U.S. war in Iraq, (and brother of Trump Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos) moved his family to the UAE after selling off the company around a decade ago. He formed further mercenary companies in the Middle East but in recent years decided to diversify and move to providing
...an entire supply chain of warfare and conflict. He wants to be able to skim a profitable cut from each stage of a hostile operation, whether it be overt or covert, foreign or domestic. His offerings range from the traditional mercenary toolkit, military hardware and manpower, to cellphone surveillance technology and malware, to psychological operations and social media manipulation in partnership with shadowy operations like James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas.
Like a certain U.S. President, he did all kinds of conventional criming like money laundering, international mercenary-related criming, and had money problems. And this is all one reason he ended up playing the part documented in the Mueller Report and previous investigative journalism of helping to form connections between the newly-elected Trump Administration, the Russians, and Middle East actors.

The Prince family has supported, and received support from, Mike Pence during the latter's congressional career. Erik Prince was evidently offered a financial stake at one point in the Israeli company Black Cube, which does lots of sketchy stuff such as running private intelligence operations for Harvey Weinstein against his victims and journalists investigating him. Prince turned down the offer but may have liked the basic business plan of the company.

So
...in late 2015 or early 2016, Prince arranged for O’Keefe and Project Veritas to receive training in intelligence and elicitation techniques from a retired military intelligence operative named Euripides Rubio Jr. According to a former Trump White House official who discussed the Veritas training with Rubio, the former special operative quit after several weeks of training, complaining that the Veritas group wasn’t capable of learning. Rubio did not respond to requests for comment.

In the winter of 2017, Prince arranged for a former British MI6 officer to provide more surveillance and elicitation training for Veritas at his family’s Wyoming ranch, according to a person with direct knowledge of the effort. Prince was trying to turn O’Keefe and his group into domestic spies.
Of course
After Trump won the election, Prince began sending defense and intelligence policy proposals to the Trump team via Bannon, including his plan for privatizing the war in Afghanistan. The plan called for removing all U.S. troops and replacing them with a small cadre of security trainers, a small fleet of light attack aircraft, and a surge of covert CIA operations.
And also
Meanwhile, Prince’s relationship with Bannon has gone from fellow ideological traveler to business partner.
posted by XMLicious at 12:52 PM on May 6, 2019 [33 favorites]




Politico: Dems Accuse Trump of Flouting Russia Sanctions Deadline
The leaders of the House Foreign Affairs and Financial Services Committees are accusing the Trump administration of violating a law requiring a report on human rights abuses in Russia.

Rep. Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.), the chairman of the Foreign Affairs panel, and Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), the Financial Services chairwoman, on Monday said the Trump administration is four months late to a deadline requiring a report on the U.S. government’s efforts to impose sanctions on human rights abusers in Russia.
Here’s their letter, in which they demand the Trump administration’s overdue mandated 2018 report on implementing the Magnitsky Act by May 17th.
posted by Doktor Zed at 1:46 PM on May 6, 2019 [27 favorites]


fabled economically conservative but socially liberal voters only constitute about 4% of the electorate. This is in contrast with the consistently liberal (45% of voters), economically liberal but socially conservative (29%), and the consistently conservative (23%).

WTF.

Seriously, for at least a full decade I actually thought of myself as economically liberal but socially conservative, and from what I heard in the media, I would have thought that people who so identified were the 4%, and while the "fiscally conservative, socially liberal" were the 29%.

I don't know if I understand the strategic goal (enlarge/absorb the libertarian margin with liberalism?), but that in-quotes phrase was repeated often enough for a while that the chances of it being a coincidence vs a coordinated campaign to annex some cognitive linguistic territory feels small.
posted by wildblueyonder at 1:46 PM on May 6, 2019 [5 favorites]


I feel compelled* to mention that the title of this thread is from the 1603 First Quarto of Hamlet--usually called the "bad quarto". It's a fascinating read. Check it out. And now I will forcibly stop myself from going on a tangential well-nigh dissertation.

*Usually a figure of speech, but not this time. I was actually gonna have trouble sleeping until I typed this out.
posted by Mr. Bad Example at 2:22 PM on May 6, 2019 [31 favorites]


AP, Treasury denies Democrats’ request for Trump tax returns
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has made it official: The administration won’t be turning President Donald Trump’s tax returns over to the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives.

Mnuchin tells Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard Neal in a Monday letter that the committee’s request “lacks a legitimate legislative purpose.”
Here's the full letter.

So is anybody going to do anything? Congress Is Failing
posted by zachlipton at 2:50 PM on May 6, 2019 [33 favorites]


Firehouse Strategies/Optimus has a couple 2020 Dem polls out. They confirm what every other poll is showing; Biden has slightly widened his lead from medium sized to pretty big, particularly in SC where it is approaching landslide levels. However, this is a mediocre-at-best outfit per 538's ratings so I don't think looking at the full crosstabs is likely to be useful. Feel free to do so if that's your thing though.

Hopefully we'll get a more highly rated firm polling SC to confirm or rebut.
posted by Justinian at 2:59 PM on May 6, 2019 [1 favorite]


Mnuchin tells Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard Neal in a Monday letter that the committee’s request “lacks a legitimate legislative purpose.”

It bears repeating that Congress has other constitutionally-defined roles than legislation. Oversight is one of them. The White House's own website has this to say:
Both chambers of Congress have extensive investigative powers, and may compel the production of evidence or testimony toward whatever end they deem necessary. Members of Congress spend much of their time holding hearings and investigations in committee. Refusal to cooperate with a Congressional subpoena can result in charges of contempt of Congress, which could result in a prison term.
posted by sjswitzer at 3:00 PM on May 6, 2019 [21 favorites]


A Democratic Congress has exactly those powers and roles which it can successfully enforce. If they are unwilling or unable, as they have so far been, to enforce those powers then they don't actually have them.
posted by Justinian at 3:05 PM on May 6, 2019 [25 favorites]


Treasury denies Democrats’ request for Trump tax returns

UGH. Every time one of these headlines says "Democrats' request" instead of "Congress' request" smoke comes out my ears.
posted by OnceUponATime at 3:08 PM on May 6, 2019 [90 favorites]


“Catch-22,” the old woman repeated, rocking her head up and down. “Catch-22. Catch-22 says they have a right to do anything we can’t stop them from doing.”

This is our government, until we choose as a nation to change that.
posted by delfin at 3:08 PM on May 6, 2019 [36 favorites]


A Democratic Congress has exactly those powers and roles which it can successfully enforce. If they are unwilling or unable, as they have so far been, to enforce those powers then they don't actually have them.

I kind of doubt that the House Sergeant at Arms is going to get into a shootout with the Secret Service in an attempt to arrest Mnunchin.

You may recall that Republicans (along with 17 Democrats!) cited Attorney General Eric Holder for criminal and civil contempt for withholding documents related to Fast and Furious. The Obama Justice Department declined to prosecute, citing executive privilege.

So don't expect anything dramatic to happen in this case.
posted by JackFlash at 3:18 PM on May 6, 2019 [9 favorites]


I don't expect anything to happen, much less anything dramatic. That was the point I was making and the point summed up in the "So Much for Checks and Balances" article posted above. Congress has so long abdicated its authority and place in our system of government that it has become a nearly vestigial shell. Unless they start putting people in jail for contempt that isn't going to change and, as you say, that is very unlikely.
posted by Justinian at 3:22 PM on May 6, 2019 [16 favorites]


Trump would face obstruction charges if he wasn't president, prosecutors say

Hundreds of former federal prosecutors – and counting – signed an open letter published on Monday expressing their belief that Donald Trump would have faced “multiple felony charges of obstruction of justice” if he were not president.

The letter’s signatories, which include prominent Republicans from administrations going back to Richard Nixon, said it was clear that Trump would have faced charges had he not been protected by the guidelines.

“Each of us believes that the conduct of President Trump described in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report would, in the case of any other person not covered by the Office of Legal Counsel policy against indicting a sitting President, result in multiple felony charges for obstruction of justice,” the prosecutors wrote in part.
posted by xammerboy at 3:41 PM on May 6, 2019 [18 favorites]


Yes, when nearly the entire cadre of professional support personnel of an institution are thrown out in a deliberate attempt to destroy said institution, it tends to become ineffective. That is by design. Inexperience hobbles their every move. People made it that way. Most of them keep showing up around the White House whenever a Republican is holding office.
posted by wierdo at 4:06 PM on May 6, 2019 [12 favorites]


I have been saying for some time that, faced with the changing demographics of America, that the ruling classes would never just turn over the keys and shrug their shoulders. It would and will get (and has gotten) ugly. Democracy is all well and good as long as it comes up with the "right" outcomes; less so when it does not. Democrats like Biden either do not get this or... are fundamentally on the wrong side. (Maybe there's no distinction to be made there, though.)
posted by sjswitzer at 4:43 PM on May 6, 2019 [16 favorites]


NYT, In Push for Trade Deal, Trump Administration Shelves Sanctions Over China’s Crackdown on Uighurs
Administration officials have declined to use any of the economic leverage the White House amassed through tariffs placed on $250 billion worth of Chinese goods to compel China to change its policies toward Uighurs. It has also backed away from imposing economic sanctions on Chinese officials believed to be involved in the repression of Muslims in the northwest.

In the fall, the United States was on the verge of imposing sanctions on top Chinese individuals and companies but pulled back after some administration officials said doing so would jeopardize trade talks with Beijing, according to three American officials.

Outrage over China’s repressive practices has grown among officials not working on trade. On Friday, Randall G. Schriver, the assistant secretary of defense for Indo-Pacific security affairs, said at a news conference that the Pentagon had significant concerns about the “mass imprisonment of Chinese Muslims in concentration camps,” which he said could have up to three million people.
posted by zachlipton at 4:52 PM on May 6, 2019 [7 favorites]


To the surprise of no one, I'm sure, Mnuchin's letter to Congress declining to provide Trump's tax returns, is pure bullshit. The precedent cited is a Supreme Court case which Mnuchin represents as requiring a "legitimate legislative purpose" for any Congressional investigation. And the AP article a little sloppily parrots this (note the lack of quotation marks around the final phrase):
Mnuchin told Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard Neal, D-Mass., in a Monday letter that the panel’s request “lacks a legitimate legislative purpose” as Supreme Court precedent requires.
In point of fact, the case in question, McGrain v Daugherty was an outgrowth of the very same Teapot Dome scandal that also spawned 26 U.S. Code § 6103, which Congress used to make its request. It involved a Senate demand to have the Attorney General's brother testify; Daugherty refused, whereupon the Sergeant at Arms arrested him [oh lord please let this happen to Barr].

The Court adjudicated and ruled in favor of the Senate. While it did indicate a legislative purpose was a requirement of investigation (noting also that legislation is broader than the literal act of authoring a bill), the holding in the case was specifically that a legislative purpose can't be questioned by the Court:
"We are bound to presume that the action of the legislative body was with a legitimate object, if it is capable of being so construed, and we have no right to assume that the contrary was intended."
So what Neal did in his request was pretty smart--tying it to a legislative interest and betting the Court will side with him. I don't know how far Congress will go with this one or whether it would be a case that would move faster than the emoluments lawsuit, for instance. This could be a bellwether, though.
posted by Room 101 at 5:23 PM on May 6, 2019 [48 favorites]


NBC News, Trump grants pardon to Army officer who killed Iraqi prisoner
The White House says President Donald Trump has granted a pardon to a former first lieutenant in the U.S. Army convicted in 2009 of killing an Iraqi prisoner.

Press Secretary Sarah Sanders says Trump granted clemency to Michael Behenna of Oklahoma.

Behenna was convicted in 2009 of unpremeditated murder in a combat zone after killing a suspected al Qaeda terrorist in Iraq. He was paroled in 2014 and had been scheduled to remain on parole until 2024.
Trump (with the exception of the one-off pardon he granted at Kim Kardashian's request) has used the pardon and commutation power to show exactly what he thinks the justice system should be.
posted by zachlipton at 6:13 PM on May 6, 2019 [31 favorites]


Today at Chicago's Ultimate Women's Power Lunch event Democrats talked about how there was a months long investigation into Nixon before his impeachment process began, suggesting this will also need to be the case if Trump is impeached. However, just today a hundred plus lawyers, including prominent Republicans, signed a letter stating that the evidence against Trump for obstructing justice is ironclad. Democrats have all the evidence they need to move forward now.
posted by xammerboy at 7:25 PM on May 6, 2019 [19 favorites]


Mod note: Couple of comments deleted. As we've been doing for a long time now, if you want to talk about general stuff like how things are hopeless or how all the current mess makes you feel, etc, please do it over in the venting thread instead of in the main catchall/potus45 thread. Thanks.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 7:32 PM on May 6, 2019 [8 favorites]


Pompeo: Melting sea ice presents 'new opportunities for trade'

The ongoing destruction of the world isn't real until a buck can be made, then it's good.

Anyway, everybody look around you and appreciate this final stage of capitalism.
posted by Rust Moranis at 7:46 PM on May 6, 2019 [30 favorites]


It's like looking at your house burning down and speculating how easily customers will be able to enter and exit from your new wall-less business space, once you find something to sell.
posted by Scattercat at 7:49 PM on May 6, 2019 [33 favorites]


The melting sea ice probably will be good for trade. At least Russia's. Seeing as it gives them much more opportunities to ship goods.

God, they're not even pretending to hide it anymore....
posted by downtohisturtles at 7:52 PM on May 6, 2019 [4 favorites]


I'll believe it when I see the perp walk.

Who exactly would walk the perp? Like, is there any piece of Congress that can do law enforcement in this manner? I thought that it was always the Legislative Branch getting the Executive Branch to use their law enforcement powers to stand behind them when they required such a thing.
posted by hippybear at 7:57 PM on May 6, 2019


This was originally intended to be a comment just rounding up a few unrelated news stories, and then I realized they all happen to be about the same thing, Nazis, so that's just great.

Washingtonian, What Happened After My 13-Year-Old Son Joined the Alt-Right, which is just kind of devastating yet not without hope?

Michelle Goldberg, Trump Helps Bigots Go Viral
That wasn’t all; Trump also tweeted an Infowars video, as well as retweeted a message from a conspiracy account that said, “The ‘elite’ proclaim America must submit to Islam or else!!!”

It’s tempting to ignore Trump’s tweeting, even if his social media messages do occasionally cause global financial markets to plummet. Yet when Trump amplifies far-right voices, people on the fringes notice. On 8chan, the online hangout of both the man charged with slaughtering Muslims in New Zealand recently and the man charged in the Poway synagogue shooting, a poster wrote, “IF POTUS is retweeting something like this, the gloves are really off. It’s ON.”
Ken Klippenstein, ‘Put Them All in a Gas Chamber,’ Said Border Militia Member: Report: "'Why are we just apprehending them and not lining them up and shooting them,' a border militia member in New Mexico is alleged to have said of border migrants that the group had been monitoring. 'We have to go back to Hitler days and put them all in a gas chamber,' the militia member, Armando Gonzalez, is also alleged to have said." That's according to the police report. The man asking that question was armed with an AR-15 rifle while watching migrants cross the border at the time he said that.

@jdawsey1: Trump is attending a “Be Best” event for Melania Trump’s online bullying initiative at 11 am tomorrow before meeting with the Vice President and GOP senators.
posted by zachlipton at 8:08 PM on May 6, 2019 [34 favorites]


Ken Klippenstein, ‘Put Them All in a Gas Chamber,’ Said Border Militia Member

Another ranting livestreamed mass kidnapping last night. This has been made normal, and the FBI's failure to arrest any of the last batch for kidnapping is actively enabling it.
posted by Rust Moranis at 8:19 PM on May 6, 2019 [45 favorites]


National security independent journalist has posted a Twitter thread about Mueller on the timing of Wikileaks's October surprise:
Something about the Mueller report that's been nagging at me: it repeatedly mentions the one hour time gap between the Hollywood Access tape and the first Podesta release.

Mueller knew about – and apparently disregarded – claims that WL's release schedule was set and unchanged. To be clear – this is no way means that Mueller has evidence that @SMaurizi [La Repubblica reporter Stefania Maurizi] was dishonest. I think she told the truth when she said she was told about the release schedule the day before. I do think that Mueller must have a part of the story that neither Stefania nor we have. The Hollywood Access tape had been brewing for a while. Did WL learn about it the night before? Very possible, but also speculative.

I believe both Maurizi and Mueller are reliable, but what we know of their data doesn't fit together – so something's missing.
Whether the missing information lies behind the redactions or Mueller's counterintelligence referrals, it's another of the known unknowns in the wake of the redacted Mueller report's release, which continue to bother me (and don't get me started about the mysterious case of the Trump Org.–Alfa Bank servers). The only way to get to the bottom of this is to have Mueller testify, which Trump is clearly terrified of.
posted by Doktor Zed at 10:10 PM on May 6, 2019 [12 favorites]


The only way to get to the bottom of this is to have Mueller testify, which Trump is clearly terrified of.

If those questioning him during his testimony don't ask the right questions, then it all will be for naught. How do we know/guarantee that if he does testify, that he will be asked the questions that will elicit the revelations needed?
posted by hippybear at 10:32 PM on May 6, 2019 [5 favorites]


The only way to get to the bottom of this is to have Mueller testify, which Trump is clearly terrified of.

If those questioning him during his testimony don't ask the right questions, then it all will be for naught. How do we know/guarantee that if he does testify, that he will be asked the questions that will elicit the revelations needed?
posted by hippybear An hour ago [1 favorite +] [!]


I'm writing a letter to my congressional representatives along these lines: You're a great team player and you're going to totally carry the day - you play D, give Kamala the ball. Only YOU can defend the Constitution, Go!
posted by From Bklyn at 12:11 AM on May 7, 2019 [3 favorites]


Before you send your letter, you might want to re-think. Kamala Harris is a US Senator. She won't be participating in any House oversight hearings, nor (as a member of the minority party) can she control whether the appropriate Senate committees conduct hearings. A better strategy is to urge the House committee members to ensure that the hearings are structured to ensure that professional counsel are able to ask questions on behalf of the committee for at least a substantial portion of the time allotted.
posted by Nerd of the North at 12:33 AM on May 7, 2019 [16 favorites]


The committee chair could, if he so chose, have Mueller testify in narrative form for as long as he wants. Uninterrupted. I know one of the key Watergate witnesses did it that way but I wasn't born yet so I remember the details. I suppose it could have been John Dean.
posted by Justinian at 12:42 AM on May 7, 2019 [11 favorites]


Before you send your letter, you might want to re-think...
... aaaand re-think done. No, I'm still going to put forward Harris. This was the biggest disappointment to me of the Democratic side - they had the chance to let Barr (who quite clearly had not crossed all his T's or dotted any i's) hang himself and only Harris was able to make that case clearly and concisely. Barr's super-power is obfuscation, restrained to 'yes' or 'no' answers he reveals all his perfidy (perfidy I say!) for lack of material to construct himself a legal or linguistic hide-out. (Also my assumption was the hearing in question was Graham's comment about Mueller being welcome to come 'clarify' Barr's comments/prevarications about Mueller's letter) If the testimony is to be in the house, I imagine Ms. Harris would be willing to offer her legal and strategic advice (or if possible be the professional counsel ok ok ok I recognize that's not realistic): (Klobuchar made a really good point (maybe the most significant point) by suggesting Barr look at the 'pattern' of Trump's behavior as laid out in the report but of course Barr, oppositional, isn't going to look at anything that doesn't help his client. I mean, what he doesn't want to. Harris' strategic coup was recognizing that Barr would not want to reveal anything - Klobuchar asks Barr to look at, Harris asks factual 'yes' or 'no's leaving Barr's autonomy out of it.)

The best of all possible worlds would be, and I hope it goes this way:
The committee chair could, if he so chose, have Mueller testify in narrative form for as long as he wants. And Mueller lays out the case leading to the inevitable conclusion.
posted by From Bklyn at 2:08 AM on May 7, 2019 [6 favorites]


I feel like one way of combatting the insanity-causing daily shenanigans coming from the White House is for the news to begin reporting a la Ron Howard's Arrested Development narration:

"President Trump tweeted, Despite the tremendous success that I have had as President, including perhaps the greatest ECONOMY and most successful first two years of any President in history, they have stollen two years of my (our) Presidency (Collusion Delusion) that we will never be able to get back.

Narrator: "It wasn't. President Obama can be thanked for the current US economy. There is literally not one single social, economic or historical standard that can be used as measurement to confirm that Trump is the most successful President in history. The suggestion of 2 extra years violates the Constitution and if attempted, is an impeachable offense, and...

...stolen has one L."
posted by yes I said yes I will Yes at 2:48 AM on May 7, 2019 [30 favorites]


Missed this one yesterday: Joining such luminaries as Miriam Adelson, Antonin Scalia, Orrin Hatch, Babe Ruth, and Elvis, the newest Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient is... Tiger Woods.
posted by box at 4:55 AM on May 7, 2019 [3 favorites]


Manu Raju: McConnell will take to the floor this morning to say it’s time to move on from the Mueller probe and call the “case closed,” per his office

I assume this means that even if the House votes to impeach, the GOP controlled Senate will not carry out the trial.
posted by PenDevil at 5:29 AM on May 7, 2019 [2 favorites]


McConnell will take to the floor this morning to say it’s time to move on from the Mueller probe and call the “case closed,” per his office

They are absolutely going to wield the shithammer on this. It'll be game over and unrestrained everything we've seen so far without even the pretense of anything holding it back.

This is what the "ehm, er, uh" indecision to process impeachment has wrought. They are totally going to beat us up in class with everyone and the teacher watching and nothing will ever happen to dissuade them ever. Democratic Leadership: Quit Sucking And Impeach Now.*

* The argument against this is typically "polls show it would be unpopular" which I would disagree with anyway but let's say that's the case - there is a Time To Ignore Polls. This is one of those times. Suit up or GTFO.
posted by petebest at 5:45 AM on May 7, 2019 [31 favorites]


No, I'm still going to put forward Harris

OK, but you know that's not how Congress works, right? They don't bring Senators into the House.
posted by Anonymous at 5:46 AM on May 7, 2019


McConnell saying it's time to move on from a subject just means Putin pulled the string that hangs from McC's back again.
posted by Harry Caul at 6:19 AM on May 7, 2019 [10 favorites]


McConnell will take to the floor this morning to say it’s time to move on from the Mueller probe and call the “case closed,” per his office

At this point, Mueller could sit in front of Congress and cite chapter and verse with testimony and pictures and paper to prove 10 exact instances of obstruction of justice and could say that those are completely impeachable as well as felonies and Trump should go to jail.

And Trump will tweet, "lyin little Bobby M no collusion delusion" and Congress will drop it all and he'll get reelected (after he takes his two bonus years) because that's where we are right now.
posted by yes I said yes I will Yes at 6:33 AM on May 7, 2019 [5 favorites]


FBI Dir Chris Wray testifying in the Senate today. PBS Newshour stream
posted by fluttering hellfire at 6:38 AM on May 7, 2019 [2 favorites]


Manu Raju: McConnell will take to the floor this morning to say it’s time to move on from the Mueller probe and call the “case closed,” per his office

McConnell helping Trump cover up his crimes means that McConnell perceives little risk in tying the Republican Party to Trump's crimes -- possible, since the so-called "liberal media" has proven gullible twice in letting Barr spin -- by which me mean lie about -- the Mueller report, or it means that McConnell perceives a great risk in having the narrative of Trump's criminality grow out of control.

Since all we know about McConnell is that he operates in bad faith, why not presume the latter and use the opportunity to damage the Republicans? They'd do the same thing, and have done, even when there wasn't anything there.

Speaking of Mueller, I agree that he needs to testify John Dean style, as long as he needs, not a five-minute-per-Representative dog-and-pony show.
posted by Gelatin at 6:48 AM on May 7, 2019 [12 favorites]


Secretary of State's speech in Finland at yesterday's Arctic Council meeting, Pompeo "pointedly warned about China and Russia's growing “aggressive behavior” in the Arctic", which "shocked many diplomats and observers, who said the council was intended to address climate change, not security issues." Incidentally, not once in his 2,400-word speech did he use the phrase "climate change." Instead, he touted, "Steady reductions in sea ice are opening new passage ways and new opportunities for trade." (Axios)

Also, WaPo's Anton Troianovski reports: "Today: Pompeo cancels meeting with Merkel on a few hours’ notice. Russia announces Pompeo will come to Sochi to meet Lavrov and maybe Putin on May 14. https://tass.ru/politika/6408189" (Google translation)
posted by Doktor Zed at 7:08 AM on May 7, 2019 [12 favorites]


Never listen to polls. They are comprised of people too stupid not to answer a phone call from an unknown number.
posted by Manic Pixie Hollow at 7:18 AM on May 7, 2019 [33 favorites]


Shocked, shocked I say, that the Times was fooled by Guiliani and Schweizer AGAIN on sliming a D candidate.

Bloomberg: Timeline in Ukraine Probe Casts Doubt on Giuliani’s Biden Claim
posted by chris24 at 7:22 AM on May 7, 2019 [6 favorites]


So at the end of the linked podcast they ask , after reading the report, what should the next step be ? The argument is impeachment is a process not s big red button and if for whatever reason going for it is not on the table, then they should just keep issuing subpoenas and grind the administration down to a halt because we have a very good faith reason to do that because the report basically says “hey if you wanted to start investigating all the many, many crimes committed by literally everyone involved in this administration, here is where you start.”

“Don’t take the wind out of your sails” and all that, and the report does nakedly lay out a portrait of a deeply unstable person who can’t stop lying surrounded by people who can’t even commit conspiracy without accidentally documenting it.
posted by The Whelk at 7:30 AM on May 7, 2019 [6 favorites]


"Incidentally, not once in his 2,400-word speech did he use the phrase "climate change." Instead, he touted, "Steady reductions in sea ice are opening new passage ways and new opportunities for trade." (Axios)"
Its moments like this that a little tickle goes up in the back of my brain that says: "not only do they know what they're doing, we don't know the extent of their plans yet. They have an entire vision for the world. For its powers, for its people. They're moving towards it but we only get the broad strokes because their plans aren't fully realized yet. They're saying 'what climate change?' while simultaneously carefully watching the way the climate is changing to pounce on the upheaval it costs. It is very possible that they want it to change because of what they can grab as it happens.
posted by Brainy at 7:32 AM on May 7, 2019 [34 favorites]


Mod note: Couple deleted, if folk want to dig into "what's the bad guys' secret plan for climate change", probably better to make that a separate thread.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 7:54 AM on May 7, 2019 [5 favorites]


Mod note: Couple deleted; let's back up and do this without the "your wife's ass"-grab analogy, which I promise contains the ingredients for a fight we're better off avoiding.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 8:21 AM on May 7, 2019 [13 favorites]


(Trying this again, with apologies. Mods, if this still delete-worthy, please don't take this as my trying to test you or anything.)

Since all we know about McConnell is that he operates in bad faith, why not presume the latter and use the opportunity to damage the Republicans?


Exactly. What's a better message:

"As the House, we fulfilled our Constitutional oversight duty and, as a result, moved to impeach the President. This Senate, led by Mr. McConnell, has abdicated its responsibility to even *hold a trial*, let alone do the right thing in convicting the President of offenses far worse than many members of this same Senate voted, in fact, to convict President Clinton of in 1999. This is tyranny, and it's bullshit, and for the sake of democracy—and to put a stop to the very real suffering this administration has caused people around the world—these people need to go. And we need your help! Call your senators, organize yourselves, get out in the streets, or just vote Democratic in the next election, and we'll clean house. Enough is enough."

OR

"Yes, the Constitution and all that, but we won't *win*, ultimately, as we've let the other side define "winning," so why even try? Sorry, democracy, immigrants, LGBT folks, and women. But for sure, vote for us in 2020—we'll *definitely* fight for you in some similarly-high-stakes future situation."
posted by Rykey at 8:23 AM on May 7, 2019 [24 favorites]


Apropos of Pompeo's side-talks with Lavrov in Finland, WaPo last Friday: Trump echoes Putin on Venezuela — and contradicts his own secretary of state
“I had a very good talk with President Putin — probably over an hour,” Trump [tweeted]. “And we talked about many things. Venezuela was one of the topics. And he is not looking at all to get involved in Venezuela, other than he’d like to see something positive happen for Venezuela. And I feel the same way. We want to get some humanitarian aid."[…]

In an interview Thursday, Mike Pompeo said that not only had Russia gotten involved in Venezuela, but that it had actually “invaded” it. {emphasis in original} […]

"You’ll hear people saying we need to make sure there’s not an invasion in Venezuela, and yet there’s been one. I mean, it took place. The Cubans invaded some time ago; the Russians have now followed suit."
Then on Sunday, Trump said Putin isn’t looking to get involved in Venezuela. Two days later, Russia’s and Venezuela’s foreign ministers meet. (WaPo)

Meanwhile, the Miami Herald has dug up a suspicious Trump Org real estate deal in "Disneyland for Chavistas" back in 2015: Trump Deplores Chavistas, But Did He Cash In Selling Property to One Of Them?
The Trump Organization sold an ocean-view property in the Dominican Republic in 2015 to a mysterious shell company that appears tied to Venezuelans linked to a powerful politician now under U.S. sanctions, according to records obtained by McClatchy and the Miami Herald.

The Venezuelans are close associates of Diosdado Cabello Rondón, widely believed to be the second most powerful man in President Nicolás Maduro’s regime in the troubled, oil-rich South American nation. The Trump administration has accused Cabello of drug trafficking and money laundering.[…]

There is no evidence of anything illegal on the part of the Trump Organization, but the sale is notable today as President Trump tries to muscle out Maduro and blasts past U.S. presidents for failing to drive from power Venezuela’s socialist governments.
The Herald notes, "Rather than appearing to be at odds, Cabello sat next to Maduro last week during May Day pronouncements, a day after a would-be uprising failed in Venezuela."
posted by Doktor Zed at 8:34 AM on May 7, 2019 [4 favorites]


Bill Gates Actually Made a Good Point About the Socialism Debate in America (Matt Novak, Gizmodo)
Billionaires Bill Gates, Charlie Munger, and Warren Buffett were interviewed on CNBC [together in the same room], and it wasn’t surprising to hear the three men defend capitalism. But it was surprising to hear Gates make a really good point about socialism. Or, at least a good point about how socialism is defined in the U.S.

Gates pointed out that the current surge in pro-socialist rhetoric in the U.S. isn’t really socialism by any strict definition of the word. The so-called “socialist” policies we’re hearing from politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders are largely just capitalist policies with a strong social safety net. And that’s okay!

“Socialism used to mean that the state controlled the means of production,” Gates said on CNBC (YouTube). “And a lot of people who are promoting socialism aren’t using that classic definition.”
Apparently, this interview had a lot of uncomfortable squirming from the billionaires.
posted by ZeusHumms at 8:37 AM on May 7, 2019 [53 favorites]


OnceUponATime: Every time one of these headlines says "Democrats' request" instead of "Congress' request" smoke comes out my ears.

You might want to have some cold water handy for this one -- Democrats Want To End Dark Money, But First They Want To Use It (Peter Overby for NPR, May 7, 2019)
Reform-minded Democrats have long held up "dark money" — political money that can't be traced to its source — as a symptom of what's wrong with politics in Washington. But while House Democrats this winter passed a bill to end the secrecy shielding donors (NPR's previous coverage of "symbolic first act") behind unregulated dark money contributions, liberal activist groups now deploy those funds to boost the party's candidates in the 2020 elections.

A recent study by the government reform group Issue One found (PDF) that in the 2018 midterm elections, politically active tax-exempt groups spent about $150 million in secret money, and Democratic-leaning groups accounted for 54% of it.
...
Robin Kolodny, a political scientist at Temple University who studies the history of campaign finance, said there's a pattern to it.

"One party stretches the law, gets away with it, and then the other party just goes ahead and does the same thing," she said. "And then eventually the FEC [Federal Election Commission] will just say, 'Yeah, obviously, I guess this must be OK.' "
Beyond that bleak closing thought on the FEC's inaction when both parties do it, of course the other party will do it -- to even the playing field.

If you're racing cars, and someone uses unauthorized boosters and gets away with it, everyone else will do so, too, because the game was rigged otherwise. "But it tarnishes the sport!" says a commentator! Change the rules, then enforce the rules, and we're back to a (more) fair game. But expecting the "honest" players to change before then is foolish.
posted by filthy light thief at 8:43 AM on May 7, 2019 [13 favorites]


If you're racing cars, and someone uses unauthorized boosters and gets away with it, everyone else will do so, too, because the game was rigged otherwise. "But it tarnishes the sport!" says a commentator! Change the rules, then enforce the rules, and we're back to a (more) fair game. But expecting the "honest" players to change before then is foolish.

Unilateral disarmament is a sucker's game.
posted by NoxAeternum at 8:45 AM on May 7, 2019 [13 favorites]


“Socialism used to mean that the state controlled the means of production,” Gates said on CNBC

So Republicans have a problem with the state controlling the means of production. Except when they don't.
posted by ZenMasterThis at 8:45 AM on May 7, 2019 [11 favorites]




So Republicans have a problem with the state controlling the means of production. Except when they don't.

*cough* Farm subsidies *cough*
posted by Rykey at 8:51 AM on May 7, 2019 [15 favorites]


So Republicans have a problem with the state controlling the means of production. Except when they don't.

They seem to have problems when other people are in control of the state.
posted by ZeusHumms at 8:53 AM on May 7, 2019 [11 favorites]




A recent study by the government reform group Issue One found (PDF) that in the 2018 midterm elections, politically active tax-exempt groups spent about $150 million in secret money, and Democratic-leaning groups accounted for 54% of it.

This is a very misleading statistic. The study cited only refers to spending which is "reported to the FEC", which is a tiny amount of dark money spending. Most political spending by 501(c)(4) organizations is not reported to the FEC.

The only spending that these dark organizations report to the FEC is direct spending for "electioneering communications." Electioneering communications is a legal definition that refers only to radio, TV and cable ads that are run 60 days before an election and that mention a specific candidate or opponent by name or image.

It does not cover spending outside this time window. It does not cover spending for "issues ads" that only refer obliquely to a specific candidate. It does not cover ads that refer to a political party instead of an individual. It does not cover spending for mailers or telephone push polls. It does not cover millions spent on campaign offices or professional organizers. It does not cover millions of dollars that these dark organizations transfer directly to political PACs who then run campaign ads, thereby laundering the money anonymously.
posted by JackFlash at 9:26 AM on May 7, 2019 [11 favorites]




Again demonstrating courage and leadership when most Ds are running from it.
posted by chris24 at 9:35 AM on May 7, 2019 [41 favorites]


Judiciary Committee member, chicken enthusiast, and my Congressman Steve Cohen (on Facebook):
“The DOJ has agreed to meet with the House Judiciary Committee today regarding AG Barr's failure to comply with our subpoena for the full Mueller Report and underlying evidence. Chairman Nadler is willing to hear the DOJ’s offer, but, as of now, our plan to hold Barr in contempt of Congress still stands.”
posted by Huffy Puffy at 9:43 AM on May 7, 2019 [16 favorites]


is Warren just reading the currently publicly-available report into the record?
posted by Reclusive Novelist Thomas Pynchon at 10:15 AM on May 7, 2019 [4 favorites]


“Socialism used to mean that the state controlled the means of production,” Gates said on CNBC (YouTube) yt . “And a lot of people who are promoting socialism aren’t using that classic definition.”

Well, right now about 20% of GDP goes through the federal government, including state-controlled retirement funds (Social Security), state-controlled insurance (Medicare and Medicaid), and state-controlled military. All of these things could be privately run if we wanted (with of course worse service and higher waste). In addition, it's now standard doctrine on the left for the government to eventually provide medicare for all (administering another 20% of GDP, though of course not the medical services themselves) as well as college (which would probably remain a federal-state-private funding mishmash). And I expect that, should these things ever come to pass, there would be a fair amount of support on the left for nationalizing certain aspects of banking and finance, and also various essential digital services currently monopolized by entities like Google, Facebook, AT&T, Comcast, etc.

So anyway, I hear a lot from bemused left-leaning billionaires and other elites that these so-called "socialists" don't really know what socialism means. But is it really likely that smart people like AOC really don't know what the term they have adopted means or connotes? I think more likely, and unhappily for the bemused or mildly discomfited billionaires (many of whom would be perfectly happy with a billionaire-friendly scandinavian-style system), that that use of "socialism" is not just marking. It's just a slow roll-out.
posted by chortly at 10:21 AM on May 7, 2019 [15 favorites]


Mother Jones on Republican efforts in several states to make it harder to vote. The move to gut Amendment 4 is part of a broader effort by Republican-controlled states to restrict access to the ballot after voters approved ballot initiatives in November’s midterm elections to expand voting rights and elected Democrats who supported policies like automatic voter registration and felon reenfranchisement. “There is an uptick in activity around measures to restrict voting access,” the Brennan Center for Justice states in a new report, with 19 bills restricting voting access moving through state legislatures in 10 states.

For those who are tired of traditional media coverage of politics (and other things), consider donating to Mother Jones, which has launched the Mother Jones Corruption Project, "a push to do deep, time-intensive reporting on corruption as both the cause and the result of the crisis in our democracy. Our goal is to do the work to understand how we got here and how we might get out. Because like every crisis, this is also an opportunity—for clarity, transparency, and change. This project is unlike anything we’ve done at Mother Jones, and we’re asking the MoJo community for donations to help us go big. But whether or not you can contribute right now, we owe you our plan, the reasoning behind it, and the way we believe this reporting can break through the chaotic headlines."
posted by Bella Donna at 10:31 AM on May 7, 2019 [21 favorites]


TN Speaker's Racist Sexist COS Now Unemployed POS (Wonkette)

In which the TN House Leader's (Spoiler: Republican) Chief of Staff resigns after a string of gross tweets teeming with racism and sexism. Oh, at the time he was only the House Republicans' press secretary, so. And snorted coke in the office. Which. Cool.

How is it relevant to a MegaThread™ you ask? Well, it's because his boss, the GOP House Leader, who participated in these exciting threads claimed they were only "Locker room talk". So, once again for the record: no, it's not. And B: just because Turmp farted it into a phone once doesn't make it a True Thing so take this bullshit timeline and stuff it.

CASADA: So, yes, I participated in locker-room talk with two adult men that was not intended to go to anyone else, and I was wrong. In the last several years, that kind of talk has not entered and left my mouth.

And truly we are all relieved that that kind of talk has not entered his mouth in years. Those calling for the House Leader to also resign are still looking for the (Spoiler: Republican) Governor who Is Not Found.
posted by petebest at 10:53 AM on May 7, 2019 [12 favorites]


Mother Jones on Republican efforts in several states to make it harder to vote.

From the twitterverse just now:
Texas Sen. Bryan Hughes' new bill, S. Bill 9, will disallow driving of elderly, disabled, or poor people to the polls. It would ban efforts with vans full of elderly from nursing homes, disabled people, poor people who don’t have cars, would be illegal in Texas.
How low can they go?
posted by Mental Wimp at 11:09 AM on May 7, 2019 [55 favorites]


I guess all that talk about Millennials being the "me generation" was actually yet another example of right wingers projecting their own motivations onto others. There once was a time when people of principle, when confronted with a sordid affair from their past that threatened the ability of their office to discharge its duties in a competent and timely manner would simply resign.

It's the right thing to do because it's not about you the officeholder, it's about the responsibility of government to its nationals/residents and the officeholder's responsibility to effectively carry out the duties of the office. They are the real me generation, who think that everything is about what they deserve, not about their duty to their office and to the public. Fairness for me but not for thee, they cry incessantly.
posted by wierdo at 11:14 AM on May 7, 2019 [7 favorites]




CASADA: So, yes, I participated in locker-room talk with two adult men that was not intended to go to anyone else, and I was wrong.

It's a borderline miracle that this actually includes an admission of doing something wrong, though of course it includes some weasel well I certainly wouldn't ever have said it if I thought I'd get caught that I guess folks think is somehow exculptory?

I guess it is, as sort of a dogwhistle to other horrible people. I only do this when I think I can get away with it comes across even worse to people with some integrity, but if you're trying to tell the deplorable people hey look I'm just like you in this way I guess it works.
posted by phearlez at 11:16 AM on May 7, 2019 [4 favorites]


I like Pelosi a lot, but the “He’s shredding the constitution and rule of law just to get us to impeach him” is hella stupid. He’s doing it to become dictator and his base will rally regardless.

We should stop taking in good faith the party establishment's hourly excuses for not governing.
posted by Rust Moranis at 11:17 AM on May 7, 2019 [32 favorites]


is Warren just reading the currently publicly-available report into the record?

I don't believe she has any special access to the report. The Gang of Eight (which doesn't include Warren) would theoretically be able to see more of the report than is public, but as far as I know Barr hasn't thrown them that bone.

Texas Sen. Bryan Hughes' new bill, S. Bill 9, will disallow driving of elderly, disabled, or poor people to the polls. It would ban efforts with vans full of elderly from nursing homes, disabled people, poor people who don’t have cars, would be illegal in Texas.

Max Kennerly:
Can't transport more than 2 non-family voters unless you fill out a form identifying them and affirming they "are physically unable to enter the polling place without personal assistance or likelihood of injuring their health."

Seems @SenBryanHughes hates it when Texans vote.
I'm guessing that the form thing may allow the bill to have the same practical effect while helping them avoid constitutional challenges.
posted by a snickering nuthatch at 11:19 AM on May 7, 2019 [9 favorites]


But Pelosi's right -- Democrats shouldn't be reacting to Trump's taunts on Twitter; they should be patiently and steadily assembling an ironclad case for impeachment that not only even-the-liberal-NPR can equivocate. Having Mueller testify in detail and at length is one step; having the "negotiation" with the DoJ about complying with the subpoena being "is one or two pm tomorrow better for you?" would be another.
posted by Gelatin at 11:21 AM on May 7, 2019 [24 favorites]


So as not to abuse the edit window: Trump feels powerful when his taunts get a response; he feels weak -- and looks weak! -- when he feels the walls of his abundant wrongdoing closing in on him. Would we rather have Trump enjoying his "executive time" with Twitter bravado or worrying about when the Democrats will get hold of his tax returns?
posted by Gelatin at 11:24 AM on May 7, 2019 [9 favorites]


For those of you supporting Pelosi's strategy, does that automatically mean you don't support Warren's? It seems like it would have to.
posted by diogenes at 11:47 AM on May 7, 2019 [2 favorites]


I want to remind folks that you can contact Nancy Pelosi in her capacity as Speaker here: https://www.speaker.gov/contact/

and DuckDuckGo-ing "Rep Name + Contact" oughta get you to their contact page. I know we have to raise a lot more hell than online contact forms but since we're here writing comments on the internet anyway, we can do this too.

I am sure Speaker Pelosi's staff enjoys my daily emails suggesting they are late to the impeachment party for both Barr and Trump.
posted by Emmy Rae at 11:48 AM on May 7, 2019 [17 favorites]




I support Pelosi's strategy on the assumption that Warren and the left flank pushing for impeachment is part of that strategy. Given that we are where we are, which is that impeachment talk and even outright calls for Impeachment are beginning to show up in normally not-explicitly-political places, giving the appearance of this thing being pushed from the bottom up rather than the top down as in the failed impeachment of Clinton, I'm fairly secure in that assessment despite not being privy to the Speaker's internal thoughts and desires, whatever they may be.
posted by wierdo at 11:59 AM on May 7, 2019 [28 favorites]


For those of you supporting Pelosi's strategy, does that automatically mean you don't support Warren's? It seems like it would have to.

I have little doubt that Pelosi would impeach if she thought it were popular. Warren's strategy may make impeachment more popular. So the strategies can mesh.
posted by a snickering nuthatch at 12:00 PM on May 7, 2019 [38 favorites]


FBI Chief: NO SPYING. STFU Barr! (FBI chief Wray refutes Barr, says no 'spying' on Trump campaign) (NBCNews)

"I was very concerned by his use of the word spying, which I think is a loaded word," Shaheen said. "When FBI agents conduct investigations against alleged mobsters, suspected terrorists, other criminals, do you believe they're engaging in spying when they're following FBI investigative policies and procedures?"

"That's not the term I would use," Wray said of "spying." "So, I would say that's a no to that question."

... At another point, Wray was asked if he felt the federal government "spied into the 2016 presidential election," and replied that he didn’t "think it would be right or appropriate" to share his thoughts and that he wanted to respect an ongoing investigation by the Department of Justice inspector general into aspects of the Russia inquiry.

Wray's answers on Tuesday would appear to contradict Barr's testimony from last month, when he told Shaheen during a committee hearing that he felt "spying did occur" by the U.S. government on Trump's 2016 campaign.


I'm starting to think Bill Barr might be a dirty lying rat bastard who was only hired to lie and obfuscate for Trump.
posted by petebest at 12:01 PM on May 7, 2019 [28 favorites]


I have little doubt that Pelosi would impeach if she thought it were popular.

Aye, there's the rub.
posted by petebest at 12:02 PM on May 7, 2019 [5 favorites]


Both approaches complement each other. There's no contradiction.
posted by prize bull octorok at 12:04 PM on May 7, 2019 [13 favorites]


I support Pelosi's strategy on the assumption that Warren and the left flank pushing for impeachment is part of that strategy.

That theory would make more sense if Pelosi wasn't undermining Warren's message.
posted by diogenes at 12:05 PM on May 7, 2019 [6 favorites]


Pelosi is from the generation of Democrats that have political PTSD because they got crushed by Reagan and now live jumping at the shadows of the secret conservative majority they imagine must still be out there waiting to knock them out of their cushy jobs.
posted by Ghostride The Whip at 12:09 PM on May 7, 2019 [12 favorites]


I have little doubt that Pelosi would impeach if she thought it were popular.

N-billionth reminder that support for investigating and impeaching Nixon was at 19% when the impeachment process began. Current support for doing the same with Trump seems to be around 40%. Pelosi waiting for it to be popular (enough) is basically a self-defeating argument.
posted by zombieflanders at 12:10 PM on May 7, 2019 [50 favorites]


Saying that she is focused on her legislative goals and will not be goaded into arguing on Trump's terms to allow him to distract her from those goals and get mired in pointless arguments in no way undermines the push for Impeachment by other members of the party. The soup isn't done yet. If she continues to disassemble once it's time to sit down and eat, I'll eat my hat.
posted by wierdo at 12:10 PM on May 7, 2019 [4 favorites]


The Gang of Eight (which doesn't include Warren) would theoretically be able to see more of the report than is public, but as far as I know Barr hasn't thrown them that bone.

Politico 4/19: Dems reject Barr's offer to view a less-redacted Mueller report
Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer are rejecting an offer from Attorney General William Barr to view a significantly less-redacted version of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report, contending that Barr is too severely limiting the number of lawmakers who can view it.
[...]
Assistant Attorney General Stephen Boyd had said the top Republicans and Democrats on the House and Senate Judiciary committees, in addition to members of the so-called Gang of Eight and certain staffers, would be able to view the less-redacted version next week in a secure setting at DOJ headquarters.
...
But while that document would include classified information and evidence related to ongoing investigations — which were deleted from the public version of the report — lawmakers would still be blocked from viewing sensitive grand jury information.
...
Republicans have argued that Democrats’ efforts to obtain grand jury material in Mueller’s report is fruitless and that Barr is legally prohibited from doing so under Justice Department guidelines and judicial restrictions on releasing such information. Rather, they say, Democrats’ only recourse to access grand jury information is to open an impeachment proceeding, a step top Democrats have been loath to take without bipartisan buy-in.

Democrats say Congress has received grand jury material after previous special counsel investigations — including after Watergate and the Starr investigation of Bill Clinton. But Republicans say both of those reports were delivered in the context of impeachment proceedings.
I basically don't care one way or the other if Trump gets impeached unless he is also removed. Impeaching him and leaving him in office seems to me unlikely to change the political landscape much either way, and thus strikes me as mostly posturing. But if impeachment proceedings are the only way for Congress to get access to the full report, then sure, what the heck. Impeach.
posted by OnceUponATime at 12:12 PM on May 7, 2019 [2 favorites]


White House 'Directed' Ex-Counsel McGahn Not To Comply With Congressional Subpoena (Brian Naylor for NPR, May 7, 2019)
The Trump administration says it is blocking former White House counsel Don McGahn from turning over documents requested by the House Judiciary Committee, escalating the standoff between the president and congressional Democrats.

In a letter (DocumentCloud via NPR) to committee Chairman Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., current White House counsel Pat Cipollone says the documents sought by the committee "remain legally protected from disclosure under longstanding constitutional principles, because they implicate significant Executive Branch confidentiality interests and executive privilege."

Cipollone writes further that acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney "has directed Mr. McGahn not to produce these White House records in response to the Committee's April 22 subpoena." He says the committee should instead direct its requests for such records to the White House.
In some very minor good news, NPR can get OnceUponATime's smoke-free seal of approval for accurately calling this a Congressional subpoena, and stating that it's a "standoff between the president and congressional Democrats." :)
posted by filthy light thief at 12:15 PM on May 7, 2019 [10 favorites]


> I support Pelosi's strategy on the assumption that Warren and the left flank pushing for impeachment is part of that strategy.

That theory would make more sense if Pelosi wasn't undermining Warren's message.


Precisely this. Trump will of course seize on anything that helps him politically, or just make something up if it doesn't already exist, but Pelosi giving him a gift-wrapped attack on anyone who supports impeachment is a terrible move, no matter how many dimensions you imagine the game of chess is being played in. "Joe Manchin cautions warns against talk of impeachment" isn't something Trump can weaponize very well, because Manchin gonna Manchin. "Nancy Pelosi warns against talk of impeachment" is going to, for good or for ill, be taken by a lot of Pelosi supporters (and opponents) as taking impeachment off the table, or pushing it to the very edge of the table until some as-yet-unspecified steps toward making impeachment an option are taken. That undermines not only those who are calling for impeachment now, but those who are trying to marshal public support for continued investigations that could make impeachment more politically viable.
posted by tonycpsu at 12:17 PM on May 7, 2019 [12 favorites]


To go back to the beginning, since we seem to have different underlying assumptions, Pelosi explicitly said that Trump wants to have the fight right now, because he feels he can keep the Republicans on side with the currently available evidence. He knows that all the stuff that will eventually come out thanks to the subpoenas he is obstructing will really move the needle with the general public. It's probably some unspinnably shady shit rather than the relatively complicated maybe-theyre-just-morons stuff that is stuck in the public narrative.

Waiting to report articles of impeachment until the evidence is in when it's likely that will happen by the end of summer seems like good strategy to me. It will be a lot harder for the Republicans in the Senate to look the other way when their constituents are calling for his head.
posted by wierdo at 12:18 PM on May 7, 2019 [13 favorites]


To me, the fact that the Republicans are goading the Dems to impeach is a good indicator of how they think impeachment will go down. I guess I don't see the downside of holding all the hearings and picking up impeachment later.
posted by Anonymous at 12:19 PM on May 7, 2019


As of this writing, nearly 700 former federal prosecutors have signed a statement that begins like this: We are former federal prosecutors. We served under both Republican and Democratic administrations at different levels of the federal system: as line attorneys, supervisors, special prosecutors, United States Attorneys, and senior officials at the Department of Justice. The offices in which we served were small, medium, and large; urban, suburban, and rural; and located in all parts of our country. Each of us believes that the conduct of President Trump described in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report would, in the case of any other person not covered by the Office of Legal Counsel policy against indicting a sitting President, result in multiple felony charges for obstruction of justice.
posted by Bella Donna at 12:24 PM on May 7, 2019 [34 favorites]


How are Rs goading Ds into impeachment? They’re trying to shut down any and all investigations and airing of Trump’s crimes. Impeachment will defeat that.

And Trump’s not goading anyone either. He’s just committing/hiding crimes. If that’s goading then a bank robber goads the DA into charging him when he holds up a bank.
posted by chris24 at 12:29 PM on May 7, 2019 [27 favorites]


To me, the fact that the Republicans are goading the Dems to impeach is a good indicator of how they think impeachment will go down.

AFAICT, every single Republican has framed it as "PELOSI IS LITRULY HITLER" instead of "come at me, bro."
posted by zombieflanders at 12:36 PM on May 7, 2019 [9 favorites]


Trump orders McGahn not to comply with Democrats' subpoena

This is pure bluff and bluster. Trump cannot "order" McGahn to do anything. McGahn does not work for Trump anymore. He is a private citizen. There is no crime, no law, preventing McGahn from providing whatever information the Democrats request. There is no legal mechanism Trump can use to prevent McGahn from testifying. If there is some classified information involved, congressional members are cleared for classified information by virtue of being elected. They can take certain specific testimony in a closed session, if necessary.

McGahn can voluntarily decide to comply with Trump's request, but he is not bound by it. If he refuses to testify he can be cited for contempt by congress. And unlike Mnuchin and Barr, McGahn is not protected by the Secret Service.
posted by JackFlash at 12:40 PM on May 7, 2019 [21 favorites]


Daily Beast, Trump Furious With Ally David Bossie Over His Reported Self-Dealing
The drafting of the statement began only after extended internal griping by the president, according to four people with knowledge of his complaints. Trump was angry at a report from Axios that revealed how Bossie’s political group, the Presidential Coalition, had raised about $18.5 million since 2017, but had spent just $425,000 on actual political activity, a miniscule percentage for such a large outfit. The group spent even more than that buying books, including pro-Trump tracts authored by Bossie himself.
So grifters are grifting, but the interesting thing is that the statement straight-up says "there is one approved outside non-campaign group" and explicitly endorses the Super PAC America First Action. I have no idea if that's legal, but that's pretty brazen.
posted by zachlipton at 12:58 PM on May 7, 2019 [6 favorites]


I basically don't care one way or the other if Trump gets impeached unless he is also removed.

I concur, so long as all the investigating and holding hearings is going on and not explicitly impeaching isn't necessary to get it done. For example, the current tax return standoff and this well there's no legislative purpose to them getting them position.[1] If the only way someone will be compelled to hand them over is an impeachment hearing, okay, here's your monkey's paw you fuckstick.

I care a lot less about what Pelosi says than what she does, and overall I've found myself respecting her battle style. If she needs the leftward folk to be the ones to cry havoc that's fine. If she stops saying shit to reporters and starts actually impeding happenings that's not.

[1] Yes I know this doesn't matter, isn't their call, and is all bullshit, but you wanna ask for more basis then be prepared to get it.
posted by phearlez at 1:02 PM on May 7, 2019 [4 favorites]


I support Pelosi's strategy on the assumption that Warren and the left flank pushing for impeachment is part of that strategy.

We don't have any way of knowing this, though. All we have to go on is what the Democratic leadership say and does, and that's undercut the case for impeachment every time it comes up.
posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 1:05 PM on May 7, 2019 [7 favorites]


the interesting thing is that the statement straight-up says "there is one approved outside non-campaign group" and explicitly endorses the Super PAC America First Action. I have no idea if that's legal, but that's pretty brazen.

I don't think there's anything in the letter of the law that says a campaign can't express approval of a specific PAC. The issue in theory is coordination, which is why you get this weird shit where a campaign will have trackers and then just willy-nilly dump everything they record to an online drop and then the PAC slices and dices to create attack ads.

I think as a reality it matters little since all the enforcement is toothless.
posted by phearlez at 1:06 PM on May 7, 2019 [6 favorites]


unlike Mnuchin and Barr, McGahn is not protected by the Secret Service.
Does that mean that Secret Service protection includes protection from being arrested or compelled to appear before a House committee?
What does the Secret Service do with a legal demand on one in their protection?
posted by MtDewd at 1:07 PM on May 7, 2019 [6 favorites]


From Laurence Tribe on Twitter: The S.Ct. has upheld Congress’s power to jail or fine anyone who defies its subpoenas. McGrain v. Daugherty, 273 U.S. 135, 174–75 (1927). See Groppi v. Leslie, 404 U.S. 496, 500–01 (1972) (limited procedural rights accorded a defendant in Congress’ contempt proceedings). Do it!

This would be Laurence H. Tribe, the Carl M. Loeb University Professor and Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard, who has taught at its Law School since 1968. I guess I have to stop opinionating and starting calling/emailing/resistbotting all the elected politicos for my district again to insist that they do their jobs fully and completely when it comes to responding to administration officials and others who defy Congressional subpoenas. Cause that ain't right and, also, rule of law, etc.
posted by Bella Donna at 1:21 PM on May 7, 2019 [25 favorites]


“Trump is goading us to impeach him,” she said. “That’s what he’s doing. Every single day, he’s just like taunting, taunting, taunting.” Pelosi said Trump was dropping that bait because “he knows that it would be very divisive in the country, but he doesn’t really care. He just wants to solidify his base.”

This cuts both ways and Pelosi knows it. This statement also applies to Democrats who are demanding congress hold the president responsible for openly committing crimes. They must be gullible fools mindlessly helping Trump divide the country.

I've yet to hear an explanation for why Trump should not be impeached beyond this will help Trump for reasons that cannot be explained or justified but simply will, because Pelosi must know something we don't.
posted by xammerboy at 1:39 PM on May 7, 2019 [12 favorites]


ICE announces program to allow local law enforcement to make immigration arrests

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on Monday announced a new program that would allow local law enforcement officers to start arresting and temporarily detaining immigrants on behalf of the agency, even if established local policies prevent them from doing so.

Every jurisdiction is now potential volunteer gestapo. Giving special powers to those local police departments displaying the most loyalty and viciousness is a predictably grim development.
posted by Rust Moranis at 2:22 PM on May 7, 2019 [44 favorites]


I've yet to hear an explanation for why Trump should not be impeached beyond this will help Trump for reasons that cannot be explained or justified but simply will,

I don't think it's a huge secret. Some reasons have already been discussed in Thread a number of times. One that hasn't gotten much play, but I think is significant, is that one Trump's core stories is that of a strong fighter who wins despite constant persecution. One of Democrats' weaknesses is being perceived as shrill, ineffectual scolds. When impeachment fails, that will play perfectly into both of these narratives.
posted by a snickering nuthatch at 2:22 PM on May 7, 2019 [13 favorites]


One of Republicans’ weaknesses is being perceived as corrupt partisan traitors. One of Democrats’ core stories is actually believing in democracy and rule of law. Impeachment, convicted or not, plays perfectly into both of those narratives.
posted by chris24 at 2:27 PM on May 7, 2019 [35 favorites]




Trump Fails the Betty Currie Test (Paul Rosenzweig, Atlantic)
Twenty years ago, I held President Clinton accountable. That’s why I joined hundreds of prosecutors to say that Trump has obstructed justice.
Respect for the rule of law means respect for, and adherence to, the processes of law. It means not lying and not suborning others to lie for you. And that obligation falls, in my judgment, even more strongly on the president, who takes an oath to uphold the law.
posted by Little Dawn at 2:29 PM on May 7, 2019 [16 favorites]


Texas Sen. Bryan Hughes' new bill, S. Bill 9, will disallow driving of elderly, disabled, or poor people to the polls.

"what, they voted? look i just drove them to this place next door, i had no idea they were going to wander over and VOTE!"
posted by pyramid termite at 2:40 PM on May 7, 2019 [37 favorites]


I foresee "neighborhood walks" or "breakfast outings" being popular on election day in Texas.
posted by filthy light thief at 2:54 PM on May 7, 2019 [13 favorites]


Yesterday Michael Cohen reported to federal prison to begin his three-year sentence (CNN). Today Reuter’s reports: Exclusive: Trump fixer Cohen says he helped Falwell handle racy photos
Months before evangelical leader Jerry Falwell Jr.’s game-changing presidential endorsement of Donald Trump in 2016, Falwell asked Trump fixer Michael Cohen for a personal favor, Cohen said in a recorded conversation reviewed by Reuters.

Falwell, president of Liberty University, one of the world’s largest Christian universities, said someone had come into possession of what Cohen described as racy “personal” photographs — the sort that would typically be kept “between husband and wife,” Cohen said in the taped conversation.

According to a source familiar with Cohen’s thinking, the person who possessed the photos destroyed them after Cohen intervened on the Falwells’ behalf.
Maybe this is the kind of thing Cohen meant when he said, “There still remains much to be told. And I look forward to the day that I can share the truth.”
posted by Doktor Zed at 3:01 PM on May 7, 2019 [16 favorites]


Texas Sen. Bryan Hughes' new bill, S. Bill 9, will disallow driving of elderly, disabled, or poor people to the polls.

I was thinking about this last night. How many polling places take place in a church? Back in college several districts in my town had their polling places in the same church. It would be so easy to spin an arrest as "Texas arrests God fearing Christian for driving people to worship."

Granted, this law should be stopped before it becomes law, but still.
posted by gc at 3:02 PM on May 7, 2019 [8 favorites]


According to a source familiar with Cohen’s thinking, the person who possessed the photos destroyed them after Cohen intervened on the Falwells’ behalf.

Let me guess, all it cost Falwell was a $1.8m investment in a Miami youth hostel?
posted by PenDevil at 3:08 PM on May 7, 2019 [21 favorites]


Now we're cooking with gas.

House Democrats threaten salaries of Trump officials who block interviews
House Democrats are threatening the salaries of Interior, Commerce and Justice Department staff if they block ongoing committee investigations.
House Oversight and Reform Committee Chairman Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) sent letters Tuesday calling for eight current and former Trump administration officials to provide information for two of the panel’s investigations, cautioning that officials who block the interviews from taking place could see their salaries withheld.
"Please be advised that any official at the Department who 'prohibits or prevents' or 'attempts or threatens to prohibit or prevent' any officer or employee of the Federal Government from speaking with the Committee could have his or her salary withheld pursuant to section 713 of the Financial Services and General Government Appropriations Act," Cummings wrote in the letters.
posted by scalefree at 3:43 PM on May 7, 2019 [70 favorites]


maybe a stupid question: i can see the medium article featuring the federal prosecutor alumni's open letter, and i can see voluminous, breathless reporting on a-list signatories at various outlets, but i have not found an actual list of signatories. have the 600+ names of signatories to the "open letter" also been published?
posted by 20 year lurk at 3:55 PM on May 7, 2019


Don't think small -- salaries, office expenses, travel budgets, expense accounts, the works.

Those who help Trump obstruct justice should receive not one dime from the Democratic House.

And if and when they pay themselves anyway, tee up charges of misappropriation of funds.
posted by Gelatin at 3:56 PM on May 7, 2019 [16 favorites]


Slate's Dhalia Lithwick is sounding the impeachment alarm even louder than ever: The 2020 Election’s Approach Is No Reason to Avoid Impeachment—Democrats are repeating a mistake they should have learned in 2016.
On some level, Pelosi is correct to fear the spectacle of a protracted public impeachment battle, but the notion that Democrats should somehow circumvent a president who evinces no respect for the law by persuading him that this time he lost for realz strikes me as demented.

Donald Trump won’t accept a 2020 presidential election loss, whether it’s by a large margin or a small one, for the same reason he never accepted his 2016 popular vote loss—he doesn’t like it, and so he won’t let it be true. He will convince a third of the country that it wasn’t true, because he doesn’t like it. […] His psychological fragility on this matter has meant that he has done less than nothing to deter more meddling in the 2020 election. He wouldn’t even broach the topic with Russian President Vladimir Putin last week, because if you live in Donald Trump’s head, no election loss is legitimate. It’s funny to think that a “big” election loss would make the difference.[…]

It’s easy to forget this, but it bears repeating: The reason former FBI Director James Comey didn’t take the Russian threat against the elections system seriously enough in 2016 is because he believed Hillary Clinton would win by large margins. The reason President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder and others who knew about the threats before we did failed to respond with utmost urgency and seriousness is because they too believed that Hillary Clinton would win. By large margins. Time and time again, people who had access to both information and power opted to take the less draconian path because they believed that there would still be a free and fair election and that Trump would not win it. We know how that turned out.

We make the same mistake of not acting on the ongoing threats to congressional oversight, to free and fair voting, and to foreign cyberattacks because an election might solve it at our peril. An election may well become the problem. Doing less than absolutely everything possible to reinstate the rule of law in America today in the hopes that there will be less election interference next time, or more benign election interference, or less purposive election interference, is insane.
She wrote this following Pelosi's NYT interview on Saturday, so Pelosi's new "taunting, taunting, taunting" remarks only bolster her admonishments.
posted by Doktor Zed at 3:58 PM on May 7, 2019 [44 favorites]


The New York Times has a decade of Trump's taxes: 1985-1994. Spoiler alert, he lost over $1 Billion
By the time his master-of-the-universe memoir “Trump: The Art of the Deal” hit bookstores in 1987, Donald J. Trump was already in deep financial distress, losing tens of millions of dollars on troubled business deals, according to previously unrevealed figures from his federal income tax returns.
posted by Brainy at 4:03 PM on May 7, 2019 [42 favorites]


NYT, Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig, Decade in the Red: Trump Tax Figures Show Over $1 Billion in Business Losses: Newly obtained tax information reveals that from 1985 to 1994, Donald J. Trump’s businesses were in far bleaker condition than was previously known.
The data — printouts from Mr. Trump’s official Internal Revenue Service tax transcripts, with the figures from his federal tax form, the 1040, for the years 1985 to 1994 — represents the fullest and most detailed look to date at the president’s taxes, information he has kept from public view. Though the information does not cover the tax years at the center of an escalating battle between the Trump administration and Congress, it traces the most tumultuous chapter in a long business career — an era of fevered acquisition and spectacular collapse.

The numbers show that in 1985, Mr. Trump reported losses of $46.1 million from his core businesses — largely casinos, hotels and retail space in apartment buildings. They continued to lose money every year, totaling $1.17 billion in losses for the decade.

In fact, year after year, Mr. Trump appears to have lost more money than nearly any other individual American taxpayer, The Times found when it compared his results with detailed information the I.R.S. compiles on an annual sampling of high-income earners. His core business losses in 1990 and 1991 — more than $250 million each year — were more than double those of the nearest taxpayers in the I.R.S. information for those years.

Over all, Mr. Trump lost so much money that he was able to avoid paying income taxes for eight of the 10 years. It is not known whether the I.R.S. later required changes after audits.
posted by zachlipton at 4:03 PM on May 7, 2019 [34 favorites]


maybe a stupid question: i can see the medium article featuring the federal prosecutor alumni's open letter, and i can see voluminous, breathless reporting on a-list signatories at various outlets, but i have not found an actual list of signatories. have the 600+ names of signatories to the "open letter" also been published?

Statement plus signatories (735 as of now):

STATEMENT BY FORMER FEDERAL PROSECUTORS
posted by scalefree at 4:05 PM on May 7, 2019 [9 favorites]


continued to lose money every year, totaling $1.17 billion in losses for the decade

My math isn't that great, but it feels like something doesn't add up.
posted by diogenes at 4:17 PM on May 7, 2019 [3 favorites]


Scalefree, I can see a total of signatories at that link but no list of names. Am I correct in assuming that Project Democracy is tracking, tallying, and updating the number on the Medium article but not making public the actual list of signatories? Or is the list only available if you are able/willing to sign in to Medium?
posted by SpaceBass at 4:17 PM on May 7, 2019 [2 favorites]


Decade in the Red: Trump Tax Figures Show Over $1 Billion in Business Losses

Then again he could have been inflating his losses for tax purposes, but at least he can't use that excuse as it would be admission of tax fraud. Between his lying to banks and lying to the IRS, I'd at least wager that the IRS numbers are much closer to the truth.
posted by p3t3 at 4:18 PM on May 7, 2019 [8 favorites]


Trump’s steel tariffs cost U.S. consumers $900,000 for every job created, experts say (WaPo). This study is separate from the recent one showing that tariffs on washing machines cost consumers $815,000 per job created.
posted by peeedro at 4:23 PM on May 7, 2019 [36 favorites]


SpaceBass, here's a direct link to the signatories of the obstruction letter.
posted by peeedro at 4:23 PM on May 7, 2019 [6 favorites]


thanks, scalefree. guess i was at the right page, but my eyes just couldn’t see that scrollable panel of signatory tiles (right above “signatories have been vetted” notation), rolling off it as presumptive advertising or some like non-content page element.
posted by 20 year lurk at 4:26 PM on May 7, 2019 [1 favorite]


Scalefree, I can see a total of signatories at that link but no list of names. Am I correct in assuming that Project Democracy is tracking, tallying, and updating the number on the Medium article but not making public the actual list of signatories? Or is the list only available if you are able/willing to sign in to Medium?

Not signed in, don't even have one. I got the total by scrolling through the list & seeing what the highest number was. It's down at the bottom, I had to click through to get it but it appeared embedded on the same page. Or just follow the link from @peeedro.
posted by scalefree at 4:28 PM on May 7, 2019


How do you even lose a billion dollars

Money at that scale makes more money simply by existing
posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 4:32 PM on May 7, 2019 [62 favorites]


The reason President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder and others who knew about the threats before we did failed to respond with utmost urgency and seriousness is because they too believed that Hillary Clinton would win.

That's some bullshit right there. President Obama tried to get bipartisan congressional backing in September 2016 to go public about Russia trying to sway the election and McConnell blocked it.
According to several officials, McConnell raised doubts about the underlying intelligence and made clear to the administration that he would consider any effort by the White House to challenge the Russians publicly an act of partisan politics.
Now McConnell is blaming Obama for not doing more when McConnell blocked the revelation in the first place.
posted by kirkaracha at 4:49 PM on May 7, 2019 [60 favorites]


Trying to convince Mitch "The Gravedigger of Democracy" McConnell to sign off on bipartisan warning does not count as responding with the utmost urgency, especially not when there's a Russian intelligence asset running for president. Obama should have called McConnell's bluff and used the bully pulpit to warn the country himself. But, 20/20 hindsight and everything.

Of course, McConnell deserves to take the major part of the blame for this, certainly when he's on the Senate floor mocking Dems for belatedly "awakening to the dangers of Russian aggression." (w/video via Vox's Aaron Rupar).
posted by Doktor Zed at 5:03 PM on May 7, 2019 [11 favorites]




So Trump lost a billion over the decade 1985 to 1995. That means at $100,000 for that decade I made a billion more than Trump.
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 5:17 PM on May 7, 2019 [23 favorites]


How do you even lose a billion dollars

I never imagined the sequel to Brewster's Millions would involve so much Russian money laundering.
posted by mrgoat at 5:19 PM on May 7, 2019 [23 favorites]


Friends, Romans, countrymen: Case closed! (Alexandra Petri, WaPo)
Oh, could I but speak of what President Barack Obama did, that set these Russians on —

Nay, I must speak! You have compelled me. I shall unfold you how he spoke to Mitt Romney — and this was what led them to interfere! It was his weakness set the Russians on! Nay, believe me, for I shall speak at length.

Aye, rend your garments, Democrats! For see where Donald Trump’s reputation lies, stabbed through the heart by this vile insistence on continuing to follow up on the conclusions of the report.

Yet Mueller is an honorable man. I would not criticize him, but — it was not good in him to say that Barr’s summary of his report was misleading.

What! Accuse a man of misdirection, who did no more than release a letter saying that based on the report the president should be cleared of wrongdoing, though the report did not say so at all?

If each redaction in this document but had a mouth, it would cry out, exonerating the president! I am sure of it.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 5:20 PM on May 7, 2019 [19 favorites]


Reuters has no evidence that Falwell’s endorsement of Trump was related to Cohen’s involvement in the photo matter. The source familiar with Cohen’s thinking insisted the endorsement and the help with the photographs were separate issues.

About that Falwell stuff...back in January, the WSJ reported that Michael Cohen hired Liberty University's CIO, via the CIO's own company, to rig early online polls for Trump. Cohen even went down to Liberty to do this in person, and paid 50k, iirc. Did Cohen the fixer use campaign funds to pay hush money on Falwell's behalf? Cabana boy digital suppression fits nicely with poll rigging, and neatly explains the continuing support from Falwell.
posted by MonkeyToes at 5:48 PM on May 7, 2019 [14 favorites]


Daily Beast, Betsy Woodruff and Adam Rawnsley, Trump Admin Inflated Iran Intel, U.S. Officials Say
But multiple sources close to the situation told The Daily Beast that the administration blew it out of proportion, characterizing the threat as more significant than it actually was.

“It’s not that the administration is mischaracterizing the intelligence, so much as overreacting to it,” said one U.S. government official briefed on it.

Another source familiar with the situation agreed that the Trump administration’s response was an “overreaction” but didn’t dispute that a threat exists. Gen. Qasem Soleimani—the head of the Qods Force, Iran’s covert action arm—has told proxy forces in Iraq that a conflict with the U.S. will come soon, this source noted.

“I would characterize the current situation as shaping operations on both sides to tilt the field in preparation for a possible coming conflict,” continued the second source, who is also a U.S. government official. “The risk is a low-level proxy unit miscalculating and escalating things. We’re sending a message with this reaction to the intelligence, even though the threat might not be as imminent as portrayed.”
I can't help but feel I've had this nightmare before.
posted by zachlipton at 5:51 PM on May 7, 2019 [13 favorites]


Brian Buetler: Democrats Won’t Do the Right Thing Unless We Make Them
The evasive way House Democrats have responded to the report so far has done Mueller a real disservice. Their irresolution has allowed Republicans to drown the public in unanswered lies about what Mueller found and what the response to it should be. We are now likelier to witness months of full-throttled counter-investigations—of Mueller himself, and everybody who played a hand in the Russia probe—than we are to get the impeachment inquiry Mueller all but declared we need.

Their dithering about the Mueller report is sadly typical of the party’s general paralysis in the face of the most corrupt and dishonest administration in the country’s history, and it carries a sobering lesson for all those who might themselves in Trump’s crosshairs: Democrats won’t come to your rescue unless you make them.
posted by T.D. Strange at 5:54 PM on May 7, 2019 [25 favorites]


Newly obtained tax information reveals that from 1985 to 1994, Donald J. Trump’s businesses were in far bleaker condition than was previously known.

As I was just listening to this story explained by Rachel Maddow, I can’t help but think - this assumes those tax returns aren’t fraudulent. Because isn’t that what guys like him do? You inflate and lie about your losses to the IRS, while inflating and lying about your profits to potential marks.

So it’s great we finally have this insight, but I’m just not sure we can gleefully chirp “he lost billions!” Because that may only be one half of his decades of fraud.
posted by dnash at 6:31 PM on May 7, 2019 [14 favorites]


He was the biggest failure, the best at losing, the king of failure! We lose to see it.

Remember the only rule during the Comedy Central roast of Trump was that the one thing they couldn’t make fun of, they could do incest jokes small dick jokes, whatever, the only thing they could not joke about was that he wasn’t as rich as he said he was
posted by The Whelk at 6:38 PM on May 7, 2019 [26 favorites]


And that's why I don't get why someone doesn't do the nickname thing back at him. I like Broke Trump - just every single time call him Broke Trump.
posted by meech at 7:06 PM on May 7, 2019 [7 favorites]


The Biggest Loser.
posted by chris24 at 7:17 PM on May 7, 2019 [14 favorites]


And that's why I don't get why someone doesn't do the nickname thing back at him

Con Man Don
Broke Broker Trump
Real Estate MAGAt
Russian Don
Dim Donald
Don the Dotard
Dumpster Trump
Trashy Trump
Russian Agent Orange
Laundromat Man
Sleazy Donald
posted by Mental Wimp at 7:20 PM on May 7, 2019 [5 favorites]


We’re lurching toward a constitutional crisis the Democratic Party does not have the stomach or temperament for because a demented reality tv star surrounded by a bunch of criminal monstrosities ran a campaign as a PR stunt.
posted by The Whelk at 7:24 PM on May 7, 2019 [66 favorites]


don't you see: being famous for being rich while being broke _is_ winning!
posted by 20 year lurk at 7:51 PM on May 7, 2019 [4 favorites]


Amid the hundreds of figures on 10 years of tax transcripts, one number is particularly striking: $52.9 million in interest income that Mr. Trump reported in 1989. In the three previous years, Mr. Trump had reported $460,566, then $5.5 million, then $11.8 million in interest. The source of that outlier $52.9 million is something of a mystery.

Taxpayers can receive interest income from a variety of sources, including bonds, bank accounts and mortgages. Hard data on the workings of Mr. Trump’s businesses is hard to come by. But public findings from New Jersey casino regulators show no evidence that he owned anything capable of generating that much interest. Nor is there any such evidence in a 1990 report on his financial condition, prepared by accountants he hired at his bankers’ request.

Mr. Trump’s interest income fell almost as quickly as it rose. By 1992, he was reporting only $3.6 million.
posted by xammerboy at 8:10 PM on May 7, 2019 [25 favorites]


Yeah, that interest income figure sure seems weird. Tax fraud, anyone?
posted by Sublimity at 8:20 PM on May 7, 2019 [7 favorites]


Introducing Operation Synthetic Theology.

U.S. Cyber Command Bolsters Allied Defenses to Impose Cost on Moscow
Officials would not discuss the campaign, called Operation Synthetic Theology, conducted during the 2018 midterm elections. The offensive effort included sending direct messages to the Russians behind disinformation operations letting them know that they had been identified. It also included an attack that temporarily took offline the Internet Research Agency, the troll farm based in St. Petersburg that created some of the most notorious disinformation campaigns, during the midterm voting and election count.
posted by scalefree at 8:32 PM on May 7, 2019 [3 favorites]


CNN's Jeremy Herb has breaking news: DOJ says in a letter to Nadler it will ask the White House to invoke executive privilege over the entire Mueller report if he moves forward with a contempt vote tomorrow (Screenshot of letter 1, 2)

The Trump DoJ is engaging in brinksmanship as much as obstruction of justice here.
posted by Doktor Zed at 8:32 PM on May 7, 2019 [14 favorites]


Trump lost a billion over the decade 1985 to 1995. That means at $100,000 for that decade I made a billion more than Trump.

Congrats to all the Mefites who correctly predicted he was hiding how rich he wasn’t.
posted by corb at 8:33 PM on May 7, 2019 [21 favorites]


Interest on a half billion dollar Russian loan?
posted by xammerboy at 8:33 PM on May 7, 2019 [2 favorites]


@mikememoli [document attached]: NEW: DOJ throws down gauntlet. Tells House Judiciary either cancel contempt vote or AG will recommend asserting exec privilege over the Mueller report and underlying docs. The Committee sees this as not even an ultimatum: that the White House is proceeding with an assertion of privilege here after Ds made good faith counteroffer today

Here's the full letter

@kyledcheney: The language of this letter is unclear. Lots of people are reading it as "DOJ will ask for executive privilege *if* Nadler presses forward with contempt." BUT the letter also urges the committee to hold off on contempt "pending the President's determination of this question." Unless I'm reading it wrong, the letter appears to say both things. But they both can't be true.

@HeerJeet: How is this not a constitutional crisis?

Nadler says this is stupid and we're proceeding with the plan to hold Barr in contempt.
posted by zachlipton at 8:35 PM on May 7, 2019 [31 favorites]


Memoli has an update with Nadler's response: "This kind of obstruction is dangerous. ... In the coming days, I expect that Congress will have no choice but to confront the behavior of this lawless Administration. In the middle of good faith negotiations ... [DOJ] abruptly announced that it would instead ask President Trump to invoke executive privilege on all of the materials subject to our subpoena. This is, of course, not how executive privilege works. The White House waived these privileges long ago, and the Department seemed open to sharing these materials with us earlier today. The Department’s legal arguments are without credibility, merit, or legal or factual basis."
posted by Doktor Zed at 8:39 PM on May 7, 2019 [40 favorites]


Politico, Appeals court allows Trump to keep asylum seekers in Mexico, for now
A federal appeals court ruled Tuesday that the Trump administration may, for now, require certain non-Mexican asylum seekers to wait in Mexico pending resolution of their cases.

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit cited different reasons for permitting the “remain in Mexico” initiative to move forward after a lower court blocked it last month. The appeals court allowed the policy to continue only on a temporary basis, while the court considers broader issues in the case.
...
Judge William Fletcher, the Clinton appointee, argued that existing federal statute did not allow DHS to send migrants to Mexico under the program.

“The government is wrong,” he wrote. “Not just arguably wrong, but clearly and flagrantly wrong.“
So the government is flagrantly wrong, yet will be allowed to keep doing the flagrantly wrong thing pending further proceedings? What a justice system we have.
posted by zachlipton at 8:47 PM on May 7, 2019 [12 favorites]


one number is particularly striking: $52.9 million in interest income that Mr. Trump reported in 1989.

In 1989, 10-year treasury bonds were yielding about 8%. This implies that Trump had something like $660 million cash suddenly appear and disappear in his accounts over the course of the year. That's a hella lot of cash.
posted by JackFlash at 8:47 PM on May 7, 2019 [16 favorites]


So you could match up these tax returns with the timelines in this Sarah Kendzior article.
posted by fluttering hellfire at 8:51 PM on May 7, 2019 [9 favorites]


Exclusive: Trump fixer Cohen says he helped Falwell handle racy photos

The Post has the story now, but they've also obtained the actual audio (Tom Arnold gave it to them). And they're being less shy about the rather suspicious timing of this incident and Falwell's endorsement. Cohen claimed he helped bury personal photographs of Jerry Falwell Jr. before the evangelical leader backed Trump. One significant bit:
“I actually have one of the photos,” [Cohen] said on the recording. “It’s terrible.”
So to summarize here, the President's "fixer" claims he had, and continued to hold, a compromising photo of a religious leader shortly before that leader gave Trump a crucial endorsement. And in the background: $1.8 million invested in a pool attendant's business venture.
posted by zachlipton at 8:53 PM on May 7, 2019 [37 favorites]


It's not going to sate my appetite for long but if it should happen that we get treated to the public disgrace and fall of Mammon-worshipping pious hypocrite Fallwell, Jr., I would be temporarily satisfied with that as an amuse-bouche while we wait for the chefs to prepare the main course.
posted by Nerd of the North at 9:01 PM on May 7, 2019 [57 favorites]


Its Roy Cohn's world, we just live in it. Red Scare menace, Donald Trump's lawyer and the most hated gay man in America (The Nib)
posted by The Whelk at 9:06 PM on May 7, 2019 [3 favorites]


Today's Trifecta of Awful:

A day after blocking House demand for Trump’s tax returns, Mnuchin addressed gathering of his top fundraisers (Michelle Ye Hee Lee, Josh Dawsey and Damian Paletta, WaPo)
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin addressed a group of top donors backing President Trump’s reelection Tuesday evening, making an unusual political appearance at a gathering that included industry executives his agency is tasked with regulating. […]

Treasury secretaries in recent years have avoided attending fundraiser events with people they could be tasked with regulating, in part because of their unique role in overseeing a broad swath of companies in the financial system.

“There’s a legitimate concern that people may get the impression that they can get not just on Trump’s good side but the treasury secretary’s good side by donating or raising money for his campaign,” said Kathleen Clark, a legal and government ethics professor at Washington University School of Law.

Cabinet secretaries can appear at campaign events as private citizens without violating the Hatch Act, a federal law that prohibits public employees from using their official capacity to conduct political activity. But the law prohibits them from being named by their official title in connection with their appearance, either in introductory comments or official event materials, and from soliciting donations.

Trump administration wants to allow debt collectors to call 7 times a week and text, email as much as they want (Renae Merle, WaPo)
The proposal is a victory for debt collectors such as San Francisco-based TrueAccord. Instead of making a barrage of phone calls, TrueAccord sends out millions of emails and texts every month. Next, it hopes to contact delinquent consumers through chat programs such as WhatsApp.

“When you have a good online digital presence, you don’t need to make those calls,” said Ohad Samet, the company’s co-founder and chief executive. “The only question here is why hasn’t everyone else moved to digital-first models yet.”

But this digital-first approach has alarmed consumer advocates who worry that the CFPB could give an industry known for high pressure tactics a new way to violate consumers’ privacy. While many Americans understand how to deal with a pesky creditor calling their landline, their texts, emails and social media are new and more personal territory.

“People are able to ignore phone calls, and that is the thing debt collectors don’t like,” said David Phillips, an Illinois attorney who has filed dozens of lawsuits against debt collectors. “It’s as if a debt collector is able to show up at your house and pound on the door. That is the effect of a text message.”

Trump’s latest regulatory rollback should horrify you (S. Elizabeth Birnbaum, WaPo)
April 20 marked the ninth anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon blowout, an offshore drilling disaster that killed 11 men and triggered a pollution nightmare as uncontrolled oil poured into the Gulf of Mexico for almost three months. Last week, shortly after that anniversary, the Trump administration announced a rollback of regulations that had been written to prevent such an incident from happening again.

This should horrify you. Just three years after adopting the regulations in response to public outcry and the recommendations of a presidential commission, the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement has concluded that its rules caused “unnecessary burdens” on the industry.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 9:11 PM on May 7, 2019 [42 favorites]


The Post has the story now, but they've also obtained the actual audio (Tom Arnold gave it to them).

Man, this timeline is just plain fucked up

Who wants popcorn
posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 10:06 PM on May 7, 2019 [9 favorites]


Donald Trump paid no income taxes in 8 of the 10 years we examined. His losses were so big that in 1991 they accounted for fully 1% of all business losses declared that year by individual American taxpayers.

-via Susanne Craig and Russ Buettner, Twitter.
That's astounding.  The sheer level of utter incompetence…Jesus.
posted by los pantalones del muerte at 10:41 PM on May 7, 2019 [44 favorites]


"N-billionth reminder that support for investigating and impeaching Nixon was at 19% when the impeachment process began. Current support for doing the same with Trump seems to be around 40%. Pelosi waiting for it to be popular (enough) is basically a self-defeating argument."

Tonight Steve Kornacki said 17%, don't know where he got the figure. It might be 40% among Democrats.
posted by Rufous-headed Towhee heehee at 12:06 AM on May 8, 2019 [2 favorites]


Not incompentence (well, not entirely incompetence). Just lies like everything else. Yes, he's useless and awful, but do you really believe he's twice as bad as the next closest idiot? Far easier to believe he's twice as crooked.
posted by Buck Alec at 3:02 AM on May 8, 2019 [5 favorites]


The whole cultivated Apprentice mythos was that he went bankrupt and then rebuilt himself into the Strong Successful Businessman he claims to be today. So I think the age of those returns means they won't matter to people who believe the TV crap.

/buzzkill
posted by Anonymous at 3:34 AM on May 8, 2019


I apologize if I've missed this in the thread, but if they plan on holding the same public hearings they would under impeachment, then what is the downside of holding those hearings and calling for impeachment later when support (hopefully) goes up?
posted by Anonymous at 3:37 AM on May 8, 2019


How can the executive branch exert privilege over something not produced by the executive branch? If the legislative branch has to tread carefully with respect to asking Mueller to testify about work product from the DOJ, does the WH really have any ground to stand on here?
posted by emelenjr at 4:22 AM on May 8, 2019 [1 favorite]


Mueller works for the DOJ and thus is a part of the executive branch. He reports to Barr, who reports to Trump.
posted by OnceUponATime at 4:28 AM on May 8, 2019 [5 favorites]


It would be a pretty big flaw in the Special Counsel process if the subject of the investigation can declare executive privilege over the results of the investigation.
posted by diogenes at 5:12 AM on May 8, 2019 [48 favorites]


It would be a pretty big flaw in the Special Counsel process if the subject of the investigation can declare executive privilege over the results of the investigation.

It's an(other) impeachable offense. He's destroying the way the government works, because he's crooked and crazy, just as we expected he would. We were already in a Constitutional crisis by WH refusing to hand over documents, but this is just open fire.

Nadler says: "In the coming days, I expect that Congress will have no choice but to confront the behavior of this lawless Administration."

NO SHIT. Perhaps waiting for him to (cry on tv / lock himself in the bathroom / deploy toops) is the plan? There's not a lot of visible unifying leadership on the Democratic side right now. Except from the committee chairs, I guess - which, yay. Which, maybe that's the plan? Like how background characters are slowly built up over the franchise to eventually star in their own movies? It doesn't have to be complicated though - defend the Constitution and the rule of law, why don't we start there.
posted by petebest at 5:55 AM on May 8, 2019 [25 favorites]


Because why not, let's make it even more stupid/crazy: Popular Information report on the massive spending on facebook by Epoch Times, the disputed 'newsletter' for Falun Gong.
"The Epoch Times, an obscure publication aimed at the Chinese diaspora, was one of the top three political spenders on Facebook in the last week in April. The paper outspent every presidential candidate except Biden and Trump himself, according to an analysis by Acronym."

"The Epoch Times is written by people who are persecuted by the Chinese government. Trump is destabilizing the relationship between the U.S. and China through a trade war.

On Sunday, Trump "announced in two tweets...that he would raise American tariffs on Friday to 25 percent from 10 percent for $200 billion a year in Chinese goods. The Trump administration cited what it called backpedaling by Chinese officials during talks held last week in Beijing."

Tariffs are ultimately paid by American consumers, but they could also slow Chinese economic growth and make the current Chinese government less popular. A full-blown trade war could slow Chinese GDP growth by 1.2 to 1.5 percent.

"We see the Trump administration’s efforts to change socialist policies in America, as well as set policies to counter infiltration and subversion by China, as remarkable reversals from past policies, and sincere efforts that, if fully realized, will benefit America and the world as a whole," Jasper Fakkert, the Editor-in-Chief of The Epoch Times, said in an open letter responding to the BuzzFeed story."

Another enemy of China that's Trump friendly? Mar-a-Lago member Miles Kwok, who just established a 100 million dollar fund with Steve Bannon last year.
posted by Harry Caul at 6:02 AM on May 8, 2019 [9 favorites]


los pantalones del muerte: "That's astounding. The sheer level of utter incompetence…Jesus."

It's only incompetence if it's not intentional.
posted by ArgentCorvid at 6:09 AM on May 8, 2019 [2 favorites]


Tonight Steve Kornacki said 17%, don't know where he got the figure. It might be 40% among Democrats.

Nope: 37% among all Americans, 62% among Democrats, as of last week.
posted by zombieflanders at 6:22 AM on May 8, 2019 [15 favorites]


A bright spot in a bleak world: Overwhelming Public Support For Albuquerque's $250k For Migrants (Hannah Colton for KUNM, May 7, 2019)
Advocates packed the Albuquerque City Council chambers Monday night in support of a resolution to spend $250,000 to help care for migrants passing through the city as they seek asylum. Support for the measure was overwhelming, but not unanimous, and it passed by a vote of 6 to 3.

The Department of Homeland Security has dropped off more than 2,000 people in Albuquerque since March. The asylum seekers have all needed the basics – food, shelter, sometimes medical attention after traveling for many days – and many of the volunteers who’ve been providing those basics showed up on Monday night to tell the city officials what they’ve seen.
...
The City Council voted along party lines, and a cheer went up as the measure was approved.
...
The $250,000 will come out of the city’s nearly billion dollar budget, and go mostly to the handful of organizations that have been providing humanitarian aid since March.
There are heartbreaking stories in the article, but also a lot of people helping, and hope.
posted by filthy light thief at 7:05 AM on May 8, 2019 [28 favorites]


US is hotbed of climate change denial, major global survey finds
The US is a hotbed of climate science denial when compared with other countries, with international polling finding a significant number of Americans do not believe human-driven climate change is occurring.

A total of 13% of Americans polled in a 23-country survey conducted by the YouGov-Cambridge Globalism Project agreed with the statement that the climate is changing “but human activity is not responsible at all”. A further 5% said the climate was not changing.

Only Saudi Arabia (16%) and Indonesia (18%) had a higher proportion of people doubtful of manmade climate change.
There is a lot to think about in that article. Indonesia, Saudi Arabia and the US are countries that will be hit really hard by climate change. I know they also all profit from fossil fuels, but it's a bit weird to be so resistant to reality when it's about to kill you.

Also, there's a graph in there that clearly shows that most of the growth in emissions is in China, India and "other countries". So if we all want change, the way to go is diplomacy and international collaboration. For example, one of the hopes of the Iran deal was that the huge country of 80 million people or so could develop and improve its energy system and vehicle park, which are naturally old and worn down and extremely inefficient and polluting after years of isolation.
posted by mumimor at 7:06 AM on May 8, 2019 [16 favorites]


It's only incompetence if it's not intentional.

And he has declared that it _was_ intentional. Intentional tax fraud, at least.

Trump: ....you would get it by building, or even buying. You always wanted to show losses for tax purposes....almost all real estate developers did - and often re-negotiate with banks, it was sport. Additionally, the very old information put out is a highly inaccurate Fake News hit job!

The likelihood of reporters asking him "Mr. President, does this mean that you were more incompetent or fraudulent?" is, of course, miniscule.
posted by delfin at 7:14 AM on May 8, 2019 [24 favorites]


‘He’s Becoming Self-Impeachable’ (WaPo)

Okay but that's not a thing

“The point is that every single day, whether it’s obstruction, obstruction, obstruction — obstruction of having people come to the table with facts, ignoring subpoenas . . . every single day, the president is making a case — he’s becoming self-impeachable, in terms of some of the things that he is doing,” Pelosi said at a Washington Post Live event.

Right, but

It was not immediately clear what she meant by “self-impeachable.” The House speaker has resisted calls by some members of her party to pursue impeachment proceedings against the president.

Yes! Good ... catch? WaPo. Although kind of a dickish way to say it, I'm not sure how else to say "Pelosi trys to have it both ways, fails". By the by here's another WaPo headline on the same front page, Should Democrats bother reaching out to rural America? Should they bother? Fuck you, WaPo.

And while typing this, the deed has apparently been done: White House asserts executive privilege over Mueller report in latest confrontation with Congress

Nadler dismissed the Justice Department’s move as “without credibility, merit, or legal or factual basis,” arguing that the White House waived privilege when it allowed aides to testify before Mueller in the first place. He promised to soon “take a hard look at the officials who are enabling this cover up.”

... “[S]uch a request would force the Department to ignore existing law,” Boyd wrote.

posted by petebest at 7:22 AM on May 8, 2019 [8 favorites]


The apathy of Republican politicians to this constitutional crisis proves once again that Republicans consider the U.S. Constitution to be the most important thing in the world, until it becomes even slightly inconvenient to do so, in which case we should just move on and worry about more important issues
posted by East Manitoba Regional Junior Kabaddi Champion '94 at 7:35 AM on May 8, 2019 [20 favorites]




Every single day, the president is making a case,” Pelosi told the Post’s Robert Costa.

Y U NO MAKE CASE
Execrable. A crouton would make a better speaker. Primary out 70% of congressional democrats now or watch the House flip back to red in the next few years and stay that way forever.
posted by Rust Moranis at 7:38 AM on May 8, 2019 [14 favorites]


Meanwhile, As Hurricane Relief Stalls In D.C., Trump To Rally Base In Florida Panhandle (Domenico Montanaro for NPR, May 8, 2019)
President Trump will hold his first 2020 Florida political rally since the 2018 elections on Wednesday, and he's doing it in the Panhandle, the heart of his base in the state.

But the region is facing setbacks because of a federal funding shortfall after Hurricane Michael last fall that threatens to dampen enthusiasm.

"As much as Bay County votes Republican, we don't need a political rally right now," said Bay County Commissioner Philip Griffitts, a Republican. Trump's rally will be in Panama City, which is in Bay County. "We need some good news from the federal government," he said.
...
Several Florida lawmakers are saying they feel as if Michael has become the "forgotten" storm (Panama City News Herald).

That's despite Trump declaring after Michael hit, "We're doing a lot, more than anybody would have ever done."

The Federal Emergency Management Agency last month touted that it had provided $1.1 billion (FEMA.gov) in funding to the Panhandle with almost $1 billion going directly to survivors. Officials on the ground, however, are frustrated with the agency's denial of claims and the slowness of aid. Bay County has seen 33,000 denials (Tampa Bay Times), for example.

"The bureaucracy of FEMA is very impressive, and that's not meant to be a compliment," Griffitts said. "The processes and bureaucracy of the federal government has been painful at times."
posted by filthy light thief at 7:40 AM on May 8, 2019 [7 favorites]


Primary out 70% of congressional democrats now or watch the House flip back to red in the next few years and stay that way forever.

This makes no sense. People are going to be so frustrated with Democrat's refusal/inability to hold Republicans to account that they will vote for Republicans instead, or allow Republicans to be elected through inaction?
posted by OnceUponATime at 7:40 AM on May 8, 2019 [13 favorites]


This makes no sense. People are going to be so frustrated with Democrat's refusal/inability to hold Republicans to account that they will vote for Republicans instead, or allow Republicans to be elected through inaction?

Demoralization regarding one's own party doesn't get out the vote. A large part of the GOP's electoral success of the last two or three decades has been due to the failures of the Democratic Party and the (charitably) incompetence now on display in doing the one job they have to do to try to save the country will not bring 'em to the polls. If being a center-right party that's supposed to represent a center-left-to-left base leads to endless electoral failure, what will "he's impeaching himself, I don't have to do anything" do to voter enthusiasm?
posted by Rust Moranis at 7:47 AM on May 8, 2019 [9 favorites]


This makes no sense. People are going to be so frustrated with Democrat's refusal/inability to hold Republicans to account that they will vote for Republicans instead, or allow Republicans to be elected through inaction?

Yep. It doesn't and they do. Reagan Democrat

As has been discussed, Pelosi's been on board for a long list of Republican administrations and Democrats are very familiar with inaction. This is THE time, THE test, THE moment in history; more of the focus-group-tested DNC consultant way is disastrous to the momentum from 2018.
posted by petebest at 7:48 AM on May 8, 2019 [12 favorites]


What happens when economic analysis doesn't agree with conservative orthodoxy, Economists flee Agriculture Dept. after feeling punished under Trump (Politico).
posted by peeedro at 7:50 AM on May 8, 2019 [9 favorites]


House committee debating vote on contempt live, WaPost youtube
Watch some history being made.
posted by Harry Caul at 8:00 AM on May 8, 2019 [8 favorites]


Mod note: Enough on same old general arguments about primarying, corporate/slowmoving/centrist Dems vs lefty Dems, etc; we don't need to re-tread that ground again today.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 8:07 AM on May 8, 2019 [13 favorites]


I'm watching some chump called Mr Jordan spouting absolute bollocks. Have I got the right link?
posted by Devonian at 8:08 AM on May 8, 2019 [4 favorites]


CNN: Exclusive: Mueller Fought Release of Comey Memos to Prevent Trump And Others From Changing Stories
Special counsel Robert Mueller's prosecutors didn't want former FBI Director James Comey's memos released because they feared that President Donald Trump and other witnesses could change their stories after reading Comey's version of events, according to an argument they made in a January 2018 sealed court hearing.

The newly released record gives a rare glimpse into the Mueller team's concerns at a time the special prosecutors were publicly silent about their work -- and before redacted versions of Comey's memos were made public.

A court order on Tuesday forced the Justice Department to provide a transcript of the hearing to CNN as part of a lawsuit over access to the Comey memos.[…]

Mueller, in his final report on his investigation, wrote that he had "substantial evidence" to corroborate Comey's version of what happened.
See also: Transcript of Mueller prosecutor fighting release of Comey memos in early 2018

I'm watching some chump called Mr Jordan spouting absolute bollocks. Have I got the right link?

That's Trump's congressional bollocks-whisperer, Rep. Jim Jordan, whom Trump earlier this morning quoted when he was on Maria Bartiromo's Fox Business show, “‘The real “Obstruction of Justice” is what the Democrats are trying to do to this Attorney General.’” It's a bollocks-spouting feedback loop.
posted by Doktor Zed at 8:14 AM on May 8, 2019 [22 favorites]


One way to look at it. Makes possible tiers pretty clear.

G. Elliott Morris
New Economist/YouGov polling on 2020:

% of Democratic primary voters saying they are considering voting for ___ divided by their name recognition:

Biden: 56%
Buttigieg: 51
Harris: 49
Warren: 47
Sanders: 44
Booker: 29
O'Rourke: 29
Castro: 21
Klobuchar: 20

Everyone else: Under 20%

GRAPH
posted by chris24 at 8:26 AM on May 8, 2019 [7 favorites]


Watching the House Judiciary Committee, where resident asshole Jim Jordan finished speaking a little while ago. Repeating the same old irrelevant, unfounded conspiracies. These mother f**kers love seizing onto one little dirty thing (omg Peter Strzok once said something in a private text- CONSPIRACY!!!)

Now, I hate this man with a burning passion. Of all these assholes, he's always been one of the worst- loudest, least honest, least scrupulous, just an all around piece of shit. But he's been very good about not just staying on message, but speaking with passion. It all stems from lies and BS, but the way Republicans frame OUTRAGE with staying on message, if I wasn't so sickened by it I'd be impressed. They persist, they persist, they lie, they don't give a fuck, they speak with passion, and they connect with their base.

And just now, Hank Johnson (D) finished speaking, where he clearly laid out the facts (which are on our side), but the difference in demeanor was striking. Jordan was animated, fierce, passionate- Johnson was subdued, slow and sounded more disconnected to what he was saying. Similar to how I find Nadler in committee- when he's giving press conferences he's good, but he seems to have a few "umm.."/stammer type moments in committee that slow momentum. Case in point: watch his interaction a while ago with Jordan, where he doesn't seem to have the quick "comeback" ability that Jordan does.

I'm not suggesting we sink to their level and use OUTRAGE as a weapon; heck, some of the Ds already do that to some effect. I don't have an answer here. But to me, it was too sharp a contrast to ignore: one person passionately fighting for their side, telling uninterrupted lie after lie, and the other side responds with the truth, yet the message tenacity is WAY tempered down. People are persuaded by strong emotion, and I worry the undecided (ugh) will see strength on one side and weakness on the other. Which is the problem with these reality TV moments.

Again, the republicans are evil masters are using disgust/outrage to solidify the base; when Dems use it, we're a little more divided about how to go about things. Because we're independent thinkers who have differences, where it's a heck of a lot easier to fall in line behind the strong man. I sure hope Jim Jordan gets what he deserves some day, but when he's allowed to lie uninterrupted like that in a House committee, I don't know how we push back.
posted by andruwjones26 at 8:26 AM on May 8, 2019 [10 favorites]


WaPo (Greg Sargent): Only one 2020 Democrat fully grasps the threat Trump poses
Warren’s call for an impeachment inquiry is linked to a big argument -- one broader than that of any other candidate -- about how the GOP has actively enabled Trump’s authoritarianism, lawlessness, shredding of governing norms, and embrace of the corruption of our political system on his behalf.

Warren is comprehensively treating Trump as both a severe threat to the rule of law in his own right, and treating this as inextricably linked to a deeper pathology -- the GOP’s drift into comfort with authoritarianism.

[...]

None of this is to say the other candidates don’t have great policies and virtues. Bernie Sanders has in some ways offered a bigger response to inequality. Biden has said good things on Trump’s racism and on impeachment. Kamala Harris has taken on Trump’s lawlessness.

But only Warren has done all of these things, and only Warren has woven them all into a big story -- one that treats Trump as both a unique threat and a symptom of so much of what’s gone so horribly wrong.
posted by chris24 at 8:34 AM on May 8, 2019 [85 favorites]


Alex Pareene for The Baffler: Teenage Pricks - "Middle school students don’t develop political identities in a vacuum. They are reflections of their parents, their peers, their society, and racist comments made by professional video game streamers. But while the adults in their lives mostly know to cloak their darker beliefs in polite (or at least ass-covering) euphemism—“patriotism” and “border security,” not white nationalism—teens, while quite good at figuring out ways to hurt people, are less skilled at plausible deniability. And so the ways certain white teenagers wield Trump banners or MAGA hats show their obvious meaning as symbols of militant white identity."
posted by the man of twists and turns at 8:42 AM on May 8, 2019 [29 favorites]


But to me, it was too sharp a contrast to ignore: one person passionately fighting for their side, telling uninterrupted lie after lie, and the other side responds with the truth, yet the message tenacity is WAY tempered down.
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
(I'm far from the first to notice how apt Yeats' poem is in these troubled times.)
posted by Gelatin at 8:46 AM on May 8, 2019 [24 favorites]


Big fan of the social media person at Yahoo News. Now if only AP, WaPo, NYT could learn this lesson.

@YahooNews
President Trump claims executive privilege over document that he said totally exonerated him yhoo.it/2V4H0AY
posted by chris24 at 8:51 AM on May 8, 2019 [59 favorites]


When John fucking Yoo says the president’s power grab is too much, you might want to open impeachment hearings.

NYT: Clash Between Trump and House Democrats Poses Threat to Constitutional Order
John Yoo, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and a former official in the George W. Bush administration, said Mr. Trump’s approach was novel and dangerous.

“The thing that’s unusual is the blanket refusal,” Professor Yoo said. “It would be extraordinary if the president actually were to try to stop all congressional testimony on subpoenaed issues. That would actually be unprecedented if it were a complete ban.”

“He’s treating Congress like they’re the Chinese or a local labor union working on a Trump building,” he said.
posted by chris24 at 8:59 AM on May 8, 2019 [45 favorites]


Eric Swallwell just called trump the "Commander in Cheat" in the house hearing and while i know pithy deprecating names wont save the republic . . . i kinda like this one.
posted by Exceptional_Hubris at 9:07 AM on May 8, 2019 [19 favorites]


pretty good, and passionate, comprehensive recitation of this misministration's performance by maryland's raskin, just now. i thought jeffries' 5 mins was pretty good too.
posted by 20 year lurk at 9:26 AM on May 8, 2019 [4 favorites]


yeah, at the risk of live-blogging its basically alternating five minute increments of Dems running down the list of trumps crimes (and further crimes covering up and obstructing investigations of those crimes) and then a republican acting indignant for 30 seconds before listing all the important things they want to be doing but arent (like border security and ACA repeal).

Pramila Jayapal continues to be inspirational - read a quote from a then-unamed congressmember saying that having staff counsel question witnesses depoliticizes the process and makes it better . . . before noting that it was what Chuck Grassley said during the Kavanaugh hearings. . . and none of her republican colleagues had issues then.
posted by Exceptional_Hubris at 9:38 AM on May 8, 2019 [26 favorites]


It's the little things: On Saturday, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez came up to Brookline, Mass. to endorse a candidate for the Select Board (which is sort of like having five mayors). He won.
posted by adamg at 9:47 AM on May 8, 2019 [25 favorites]


Odinsdream, can you elaborate on or link to something explaining the situation you’re referring to?
posted by C'est la D.C. at 10:02 AM on May 8, 2019 [2 favorites]


Ouch. Madeline Dean-PA reads from document where John Dowd, Trump's personal attorney, waived all executive privilege over Mueller's investigation last year. 
posted by Harry Caul at 10:10 AM on May 8, 2019 [81 favorites]


RAICES, the Refugee and Immigration Center for Education and Legal Services, is asking supporters to call 210-283-4723 to speak to Deborah Achim, Deputy Field Office Director of Karnes Detention Facility in Texas, and demand she restore legal access for individuals detained at the facility.

From RAICES on Twitter: It is incredibly shocking to see that the gov’t is denying access to council to Karnes’ detainees because a for-profit company is telling them to do so. This is why immigrant detention needs to 🛑 Allowing these companies to profit out of detaining our communities needs to STOP.

Basically, ICE used to give RAICES access to detainees at Karnes so the detainees had free legal representation. No longer. For over a month now @ICEgov in cahoots with the @GEOGroup have put obstacles in our way. From refusing to allow us to meet more than 1 person at a time to 🛑 us from using private rooms to meet our clients. They’re discriminating against those who cannot afford private attys.

What might the Geo Group be? GEO provides complementary, turnkey solutions for numerous government partners worldwide across a spectrum of diversified correctional and community reentry services. From the development of state-of-the-art facilities and the provision of management services and evidence-based rehabilitation to the post-release reintegration and supervision of individuals in the community, GEO offers fully diversified, cost-effective services that deliver enhanced quality and improved outcomes. Apparently "improved outcomes" does not include, say, justice.
posted by Bella Donna at 10:25 AM on May 8, 2019 [18 favorites]


Scoop: Inside a top Trump adviser's fundraising mirage
(Alayna Treene, Jonathan Swan, Harry Stevens; Axios)

Ex-Trump campaign official now scamming elderly voters out of millions (Igor Derysh, Salon)
David Bossie, who helped run Trump's 2016 campaign, raised $15.4 million from elderly voters in Facebook scam
Via a report from the Campaign Legal Center, Bossie's Presidential Coalition spent only 3% on candidates.
posted by ZeusHumms at 10:27 AM on May 8, 2019 [8 favorites]


If only we could get all Trump officials to just scam directly from their supporters without involving the rest of us, or being in office.
posted by Autumnheart at 10:33 AM on May 8, 2019 [27 favorites]


I got distracted by actually needing to work-does anyone know what the last amendment they just voted on was about?
Also, if you get a chance check out Rep. Escobar's speech. I don't have a link but just try googling "freshman rep spanks and then shames R reps."
posted by Bacon Bit at 10:42 AM on May 8, 2019 [3 favorites]


For those of us who are watching Committee hearings and don't know what "strike the last word" is all about:

... to “strike the last word” means to offer a pro-forma amendment such that you can get 5-minutes to speak on the actual amendment. Under the rules, only one 5-minute speech in support of an amendment and one 5-minute speech against it are allowed. But by motioning to “strike the last word,” you are technically offering a 2nd-degree amendment, which gives you five minutes. The 2nd degree amendment is never voted on, and after you are done the floor simply moves to the next person seeking to strike the last word.
posted by petebest at 10:44 AM on May 8, 2019 [8 favorites]


This is the US Politics megathread.

Does anyone else hear a little nightly news theme play in their head when they click on these threads? For me, it's this theme that John Williams cooked up for NBC. Thank goodness for this place and for all you folk puttin these together.
posted by longdaysjourney at 10:48 AM on May 8, 2019 [23 favorites]


> motioning to “strike the last word” ... gives you five minutes

This is real? I can see where the gold-fringe Admiralty flag people get their kooky ideas from.
(I motion to strike the last word of petebest's comment above, so that the Mods don't delete this comment as irrelevant...)
posted by RedOrGreen at 10:48 AM on May 8, 2019 [15 favorites]


Meanwhile: BREAKING: @BernieSanders workers have become the first presidential campaign staff in U.S. history to ratify a union contract. Read the full story:
posted by The Whelk at 10:59 AM on May 8, 2019 [24 favorites]


While Trumpist Matt Gaetz was mouthing off again about Democrats experiencing "The Five Stages of Grief" post-Mueller at the HJC hearing, the Tampa Bay Times has an update on his legal impropreties: Further Investigation Into Matt Gaetz Is Needed For Tweet At Michael Cohen, Florida Bar Determines.—The Panhandle Republican faces discipline for a message he posted the day before Trump’s former lawyer testified to Congress.

"The grievance committee will assign the case to an investigator who will interview witnesses and review evidence. The investigator will then make a recommendation to the committee. It could take up to 6 months. If the committee finds probable cause, a formal complaint will be filed with the Supreme Court of Florida for a trial."

Like Jim Jordan, who went full Trumpist by trying to impeach Rod Rosenstein while dodging a sex abuse scandal at Ohio State's wrestling program, Gaetz has learned that distraction is the better part of valor when it comes to surviving in Trump's GOP.
posted by Doktor Zed at 11:00 AM on May 8, 2019 [12 favorites]


This is real?

It's a direct acknowledgement that you're using the opportunity to offer an amendment as a pretext to speak on the underlying matter. You can spot people who are really fussy about procedure b/c they'll move to "strike the requisite number of words" so as not to technically propose an amendment which has already been offered. It's one of those times when someone's clever hack a long time ago turned into a normal process.

The chamber or committee can prevent it by directly or indirectly pre-specifying what the amendment tree being considered will look like.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 11:14 AM on May 8, 2019 [5 favorites]


When a work-around to a rule becomes routine, it's time to throw the rule out and consider what you want the rule to accomplish so it can be reformulated to do that thing.
posted by Mental Wimp at 11:30 AM on May 8, 2019 [13 favorites]


Paraphrasing former Governor Christie talking to Stephanie Ruhle at the SALT Conference:
RUHLE: Why does the President call the Mueller investigation a hoax?
CHRISTIE: The President is a salesman. He uses hyperbole.
RUHLE: It’s a lie.
CHRISTIE: That’s your opinion. This is the President’s opinion. If it’s an opinion, it can’t be a lie.
posted by East Manitoba Regional Junior Kabaddi Champion '94 at 11:37 AM on May 8, 2019 [14 favorites]


Daily Beast, Trump Goes to Bat for His Pal Matt Schlapp's Casino Client, in which Trump echos Schlapp's language to attack a tribal casino project and Elizabeth Warren at the same time.

Swampy.
posted by zachlipton at 11:39 AM on May 8, 2019 [2 favorites]


video clip of

@RepSwalwell: "I ask my colleagues, look at the person you're going to such great lengths to protect! Look at this pathetic person who stood at a press conference as our country was being attacked & said, 'Russia, if you're listening, you'll be rewarded if you keep attacking.'

That's the person you want to protect? That's the person you want to break the law for?

... The most basic function of government is to protect its people from a foreign attack. If this President, or the Attorney General, or his allies in Congress, are unwilling or unable to do that, then we don't have a government.

Fortunately, we're not powerless anymore. The American people voted to put a balance of power on all of these abuses of power. And this committee is going to protect and defend America, and it's going to start with holding this lawless Attorney General in contempt."


dyn-o-mite.gif
posted by petebest at 11:45 AM on May 8, 2019 [82 favorites]


Fun- on that same tweeter link above, Rep. Tom McClintock (R-CA) prounounces Mueller as "Mew-ler". Which. I don't know what to say about that. Perhaps this whole two-year national headdesking marathon is new to him?
posted by petebest at 11:50 AM on May 8, 2019 [1 favorite]


Seeing randomly on Twitter that the Wikipedia entry for Executive Privilege has been changed 7 times already today.
posted by archimago at 11:56 AM on May 8, 2019 [11 favorites]


I had to look up Fiat justitia ruat caelum, 'let justice be done though the heavens fall'. I wanted to know exactly what I would write over my back tattoo of Pelosi if she did her fucking job and successfully impeached Donald Trump. It's certainly classier than 'Impeach the motherfucker', which was my first instinct.

I thought it had the ring of antiquity, a fundamental concept understood since ancient times, but it's not as old as all that. One of the first instances I found was in the David Hume essay On passive obedience. I can't read philosophy, but it seems Hume was suggesting exceptions to this maxim, such as when it's time to overthrow a Nero. I think Hume would have liked the ending of To Kill a Mockingbird, when the policeman decides not to charge Boo Radley because no-one would be better off, knowing that it was clearly self-defense. Not very helpful here, but I hope someone would explain it better. I also noticed that Hume died in 1776, before he could see some of these ideas come to realisation on a grand historic scale.

Then I wondered if this was the orangen of the title of Skyfall, and indulged a brief fantasy that this would all end when a sexy superspy breaks a shadowy Russian cabal in an orgy of violence. We should find a better way, but it'd make a good movie.
posted by adept256 at 12:20 PM on May 8, 2019 [11 favorites]


I have to admit I pronounce Mueller mew-ler, also, petebest.
My reading voice sees that ‘u’ and must pronounce it.
posted by Gadgetenvy at 12:21 PM on May 8, 2019 [10 favorites]


Anyone? Anyone? Mewler? Mewler?
posted by JackFlash at 12:27 PM on May 8, 2019 [20 favorites]


Yeah it doesn't help that everyone else with that name pronounces it "Mew-ler" (apologies to any Muellers who don't here).

Still. If you were on the House Judiciary Committee I'd have thought you'd have gotten over that hurdle by now.
posted by petebest at 12:28 PM on May 8, 2019 [4 favorites]


East Manitoba Regional Junior Kabaddi Champion '94: CHRISTIE: That’s your opinion. This is the President’s opinion. If it’s an opinion, it can’t be a lie.

Chris Christie was formerly a federal prosecutor -- I wonder if he believed that opinions can't be lies then, too.

Meanwhile, Iran Says It Will Stop Complying With Parts Of Nuclear Deal, A Year After U.S. Left It (laurel Wamsley for NPR, May 8, 2019)
Iran's president says increased uranium enrichment will begin in 60 days if world powers don't shield it from U.S. sanctions, under the terms of the 2015 nuclear agreement. The move is a signal to the world that Tehran is losing patience with U.S. efforts to punish Iran economically.

The news comes exactly one year (NPR) after President Trump pulled the U.S. out of the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, calling it "a horrible one-sided deal." In August, the Trump administration restored some of the sanctions (NPR) that were lifted as part of the deal.

President Hassan Rouhani announced on Wednesday that Tehran will start keeping larger amounts of enriched uranium and heavy water, instead of selling the excess to other countries, as the deal requires (AP News).

And he said that if the other countries in the accord haven't figured out how to shield Iran's oil and banking industries from U.S. sanctions, Iran will begin enriching uranium to higher levels, ending a commitment made under the deal. The return of U.S. sanctions has been damaging to Iran's economy (NPR).
The Art of the Deal.
posted by filthy light thief at 12:29 PM on May 8, 2019 [13 favorites]


HuffPo's Jennifer Bendery checks in on what Mitch McConnell's been up to today:
Meanwhile, the Senate just confirmed another circuit court nominee, Joseph Bianco.

It's Trump's 38th circuit judge. That's a LOT.

McConnell held Bianco's vote over the objections of both of his home-state senators (Schumer and Gillibrand). 3rd time in history that's happened.
Next up, the Senate voted to limit debate on 2nd Circuit nominee Michael Park, whose record includes supporting the Trump administration's citizenship question for the 2020 Census, challenging affirmative action at UNC and Harvard, and representing the Kansas Department of Health against Planned Parenthood.
posted by Doktor Zed at 12:38 PM on May 8, 2019 [12 favorites]


Neal takes Munch to court: This may have gotten lost in the wash of the HJC contempt hearing this morning. I'm favoring Wonkette because not GAF is required.

(Wonkette) House Ways and Means Chair Richard Neal has had enough of Steven Mnuchin's shit, thankyouverymuch. Munch can hand over Trump's returns, or he can 'splain to a judge how there's a secret provision in that non-discretionary statute which empowers the Treasury Secretary to look into Richard Neal's soul to judge the purity of his motivations and then tell him to get lost because of very serious legal reasons, TBD.

Politico reports that Richard Neal is in no mood to screw around with a subpoena or contempt vote, since the White House has already announced it intends to stonewall indefinitely. He's ready to let a federal judge sort it out: "There doesn't have to be any intermediary step. They seem not to be paying a lot of attention to the subpoenas, so take it from there."


Rep. Neal, we will recall, spent what seemed like a long time putting together the request just for this purpose, so let's hope it hits the mark.
posted by petebest at 12:40 PM on May 8, 2019 [48 favorites]


Schiff introduces constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United

"The Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United overturned decades of legal precedent and has enabled billions in dark money to pour into our elections," Schiff said in a statement.

The amendment would also allow states to enact laws creating public financing of campaigns.

"Amending the Constitution is an extraordinary step, but it is the only way to safeguard our democratic process against the threat of unrestrained and anonymous spending by wealthy individuals and corporations," he added. "This amendment will restore power to everyday citizens."


In other news, our contest for the "Schiff Cake" recipe is now commenced. Begin taste-testing immediately.
posted by petebest at 1:04 PM on May 8, 2019 [58 favorites]




Axios, Senate Intel subpoenas Trump Jr. over Russia matters
The Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee has subpoenaed Donald Trump Jr. to answer questions about his previous testimony before Senate investigators in relation to the Russia investigation, sources with direct knowledge told Axios.

Why it matters: It's the first congressional subpoena — that we know about — of one of President Trump's children. The subpoena sets up a fight that's unprecedented in the Trump era: A Republican committee chair pit against the Republican president's eldest son.
This is focusing on the contradiction between Trump Jr's testimony that he was only "peripherally aware" of the Trump Moscow project, and Cohen's testimony that Trump Jr was more significantly involved.
posted by zachlipton at 1:12 PM on May 8, 2019 [48 favorites]


Will Wilkinson
The idea I keep hearing that impeachment without conviction is merely "symbolic" is ignorant and misunderstands how the politics of authority work. First, impeachment is a legal reality. It's a precondition for conviction, and puts it on the table. Second, and perhaps more importantly, effective authority is in part a function of perceived legitimacy. Trump understands this incredibly well, which is why he relentlessly undermines the perceived legitimacy of anyone who opposes him.

This is how Trump marshals authority -- by undermining the credibility of his opponents' claims to authority with the public. He does this in a ham-fisted way, yet it's effective, even if it's merely "symbolic." Public attitudes toward those who claim political authority place real constraint on its exercise. That's why authoritarians need propaganda, and want to control information. It keeps the ultimate source of authority, popular opinion, behind them, and against their enemies.

The House of Representatives *represents* the American people. Impeachment amounts to a vote of no confidence from the people. If public opinion is behind it, and impeachment isn't seen as mere partisan opportunism, this is incredibly damaging to POTUS's perceived legitimacy. And this, in turn, damages his effective authority. That's critical to bargaining power in standoffs between the legislative and executive branches, like the one we're having now.

This has real political and legal teeth, regardless of the prospects of conviction. The important thing for the House, before launching impeachment, is pulling public sentiment to its side by drawing a contrast between sober standard procedure and hyper-partisan lawlessness. From Day One, Trump has been "symbolically" running down the legitimacy of congressional Democrats, casting them as un-American, vaguely treasonous partisans because demagogues grasp the public psychology of authority, even if they literally don't know what the rules are.

VERY SOPHISTICATED bien pensant sighs about impeachment without conviction being "merely symbolic" amount to advising unilateral disarmament in the public relations game of contested authority, and a gift to Trump, a genius of steamrolling his opponents with "mere" symbolism.
posted by chris24 at 1:22 PM on May 8, 2019 [60 favorites]


The need to uphold norms and to re-establish congress' power and authority in the face of an increasingly Imperial executive office is the best argument I've heard for impeachment the other being well we should just subpoena everyone relentlessly and grind the administration to a halt because they are all doing all the crimes.

I find it kind of weird that the sort of center-left liberals and the leftist I kinow of reversed what you think what would be the normal position, with most lefties I know say yeah we should begin impeachment it would be a good thing
posted by The Whelk at 1:26 PM on May 8, 2019 [19 favorites]


The House Judiciary Committee has voted to hold Barr in contempt, 24-16, a party line vote. Next step is the full House.
posted by zachlipton at 1:31 PM on May 8, 2019 [65 favorites]


Second, and perhaps more importantly, effective authority is in part a function of perceived legitimacy. Trump understands this incredibly well, which is why he relentlessly undermines the perceived legitimacy of anyone who opposes him.

Absolutely -- because he doesn't want anyone thinking clearly enough to realize that the Russia scandal undermines his own legitimacy, tenuous as it was, having squeaked into a razor-thin Electoral College victory (which he keeps lying about) and having lost the popular vote by more than 2.7 million votes.

Our Constitutional crisis is this: Trump is not a legitimate president, and never has been. Therefore his SCOTUS picks, and all those judges McConnell keeps working to confirm, aren't legitimate either.

He is not legitimate because the Russians helped install him, collusion or no collusion. And he is not legitimate because of the way he has governed, including, but not limited to, being in flagrant violation of the Constitution's emoluments clause the moment he swore an oath to preserve, protect, and defend that very Constitution. He was and is in direct and obvious violation of that oath, and proves it every day.

Trump is not legitimate.
posted by Gelatin at 1:31 PM on May 8, 2019 [78 favorites]


Another quote that leapt at me from the Baffler piece linked by by the man of twists and turns:

Trumpism’s pitch to young white men is thus a stirringly amoral sort of syllogism: we can’t give you anything material, because we stole it all and are hoarding it, but we can create a world in which you can regularly act on your worst impulses and get away with it.
posted by InTheYear2017 at 1:49 PM on May 8, 2019 [45 favorites]


The Lead CNN: “We’ve talked for a long time about approaching a Constitutional crisis. We are now in it,” says Judiciary Chair Jerry Nadler moments after the committee held AG Barr in contempt. “...There can be no higher stakes than this attempt to arrogate all power to the executive branch.” (w/video)

He adds, "Now is the time of testing whether we can keep our republic, or whether this republic is destined to change into a different, more tyrannical form of government. We must resist this."
posted by Doktor Zed at 2:03 PM on May 8, 2019 [91 favorites]


WaPo, Dana Milbank, The White House revoked my press pass. It’s not just me — it’s curtailing access for all journalists.
I’m not the only one. It was part of a mass purge of “hard pass” holders after the White House implemented a new standard that designated as unqualified almost the entire White House press corps, including all six of The Post’s White House correspondents. White House officials then chose which journalists would be granted “exceptions.” It did this over objections from news organizations and the White House Correspondents’ Association.
...
Now, virtually the entire White House press corps is credentialed under “exceptions,” which means, in a sense, that they all serve at the pleasure of press secretary Sarah Sanders because they all fail to meet credentialing requirements — and therefore, in theory, can have their credentials revoked any time they annoy Trump or his aides, like CNN’s Jim Acosta did.
...
In response, it seems, the White House established a clear — if nearly impossible — standard: No credentials to any journalist who is not in the building on at least 90 out of the previous 180 days — in other words, seven of every 10 workdays. The White House wouldn’t provide numbers, but it appears most of the White House press corps didn’t qualify for credentials under the new standard, including regulars for The Post and the Associated Press. (Trump, who has spent more than 200 days at Trump properties and many more on travel, is barely in the White House this much himself.)

The White House has also restricted access by allowing only one journalist from a news organization at most events, and by admitting journalists to events only if they register days in advance. This has sharply reduced journalists’ attendance at the White House — just in time for the 90-day attendance purge.
posted by zachlipton at 2:16 PM on May 8, 2019 [64 favorites]


Our Constitutional crisis is this: Trump is not a legitimate president, and never has been. Therefore his SCOTUS picks, and all those judges McConnell keeps working to confirm, aren't legitimate either.

*hits the seekrit add-a-bajillion-favorites button*

He is not legitimate because the Russians helped install him, collusion or no collusion.

Point of order: Mew-ler did not speak to "collusion" at all.
“in evaluating whether evidence about collective action of multiple individuals constituted a crime, we applied the framework of conspiracy law, not the concept of ‘collusion.’”
His report
“did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election-interference activities,”
The trouble, as former F.B.I. counter-intelligence agent Asha Rangappa explained to me last year, is that “collusion does not necessarily have to be criminal.” ... So while the special counsel may not have found that anyone associated with the Trump campaign conspired with the Russians to hack the 2016 election, that doesn’t mean he didn’t outline a case for collusion. In fact, a closer reading of the Mueller report reveals a series of significant interactions involving Trumpworld and the Russians. In total, these six episodes paint a damning portrait of borderline criminality.

As we all know, impeachment is not a legal process as such. That said, either Mueller's got Roger Stone dead-to-rights conspiring with Wikileaks to time the release of stolen emails obtained by a cutout for the GRU; meaning the Trump Predisency is illegal AF, or golly gee wilikers that's a shit-ton of coincidences our sober Marine is not calling conspiracy. MAYBE WE SHOULD SEE THE EVIDENCE.
posted by petebest at 2:22 PM on May 8, 2019 [14 favorites]


Per Jay Rosen: Send the interns. There's not a lot of value having press at the White House when the White House lies to the press and refuses to hold press conferences anyway. The way to report on this administration is not by throwing questions at Sarah Sanders or 45 as he wobbles past on his way to another golf day.
posted by suelac at 2:23 PM on May 8, 2019 [21 favorites]


Point of order: Mew-ler did not speak to "collusion" at all.

Indeed, but as you note, he did establish that the 2016 election was the target of a concerted Russian attack in favor of Trump. That a hostile foreign power favored Trump for office and helped him get there. Trump's legitimacy does not hinge on whether he and his campaign traitorously helped the Russians do so, as McConnell did by informing Obama that he'd deny the intelligence that he, McConnell, had been made privy to and claim, falsely, that Obama revealing it was a partisan falsehood. His legitimacy is absent because the Russians put him in office in the first place.

Mueller's report, even the redacted version, establishes clearly that Trump is illegitimate -- it's right there in black and white, even if the so-called "liberal media" is too corrupt or cowardly to see it -- and that Trump obstructed justice to keep anyone from finding out. From day one, just as with Nixon, Trump has been haunted by a deep fear of his own inadequacy and unpopularity, and that fear drove him to commit many of his crimes (the rest were good old fashioned greed).
posted by Gelatin at 2:33 PM on May 8, 2019 [15 favorites]


One of the first instances I found was in the David Hume essay On passive obedience.

Interesting and perhaps related side note that David Hume was the first to articulate the counterfactual definition of causality, AFAIK:
“We may define a cause to be an object followed by another, and...where, if the first object had not been, the second never had existed.”
posted by Mental Wimp at 3:19 PM on May 8, 2019 [2 favorites]


WaPo, Dana Milbank, The White House revoked my press pass. It’s not just me — it’s curtailing access for all journalists.

Good. Maybe now we'll finally get something other than access "journalism". If they're not in the room, they can't repeat what the Trump people told them to say verbatim.
posted by T.D. Strange at 3:47 PM on May 8, 2019 [17 favorites]


The Senate Judiciary Committee's Democrats have sent a letter to Lindsey Graham to request Mueller testify before them. (PDF) a hearing with Special Counsel Robert Mueller. They list "at least _60_unanswered_questions_ related to both Russian interference and obstruction of justice" (emphasis in the original). These include the topics of:
—Offers of assistance from Russia or its potential intermediaries to the Trump campaign, including the June 9, 2016 Trump Tower meeting.
—Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort's sharing of internal campaign strategy and polling data with Russian operative Konstantin Kilimnik.
—Trump campaign efforts to benefit from Russian hacking and WikiLeaks' release of stolen documents.
—Trump campaign efforts to obtain Hillary Clinton's emails.
—Trump campaign efforts to establish "back channel" communications with Russia.
—Trump personal and business ties with Russia, including Trump Tower Moscow (2015-2016).
—No traditional prosecutorial decision on whether the President obstructed justice.
—Obstruction Standard
—Impact ofPresident Trump's limited cooperation
—President Trump's conduct towards Michael Cohen
—Paul Manafort's failure to cooperate
— President Trump's orders to White House Counsel Don McGahn to fire the Special Counsel
—President Trump's orders to White House Counsel Don McGahn to create a statement denying that he had been ordered to fire the Special Counsel
—President Trump's directive to Corey Lewandowski to order Attorney General Sessions to curtail the Special Counsel investigation
That's considerably broader than Graham's constricted invitation to Mueller "to provide testimony regarding any misrepresentation by the Attorney General of the substance of the [March 28th] phone call”, obviously.
posted by Doktor Zed at 4:02 PM on May 8, 2019 [27 favorites]


Good. Maybe now we'll finally get something other than access "journalism". If they're not in the room, they can't repeat what the Trump people told them to say verbatim.

Unfortunately, it's the other way around. When official channels of communication between the government and the press are cut off, it makes the informal access afforded to people like Maggie Haberman, Glenn Thrush, or Josh Dawsey even more valuable. It elavates sympathetic outlets like Fox or The Washington Examiner to a higher level because they're the only ones getting official coverage.
posted by peeedro at 4:36 PM on May 8, 2019 [27 favorites]


Isn't Brian Karem of Playboy one of those who gives no fucks and won't become obsequiously access hungry?
posted by fluttering hellfire at 4:38 PM on May 8, 2019 [1 favorite]


There's a really interesting part of the House Judiciary committee between Buck-R, Nadler-D, and Collins-R, where the Republicans thought they were gotcha-ing with an amendment, which the D's accepted cause it was literally nbd, and then during this matter Buck was genuinely confused about why the R's were being dicks about a particular matter and starts arguing for the D side in good faith in his conversation with Nadler. It's really interesting to watch their argument crumble through basically a Socratic Method of their own making.

Can somebody provide more context for this? What was the issue, what was Buck's position/confusion about? Best of all would be video but I'll take what I can get.
posted by scalefree at 4:58 PM on May 8, 2019


An anonymously sourced statement by someone on behalf of Donald Trump, Jr. See if you can spot where it makes a hard turn & goes off the rails.

@Bencjacobs A source close to Don Jr gives me the following statement about the Senate subpoena
Don is a private citizen, who has already been cleared by Mueller after a two year investigation. He has done 8-9 hours of testimony in front of Senate Intel already and 27 hours of testimony in front of various committees in total. When he originally agreed to testify in front of the Senate Intel Committee in 2017, there was an agreement between Don and the Committee that he would only have to come in and testify a single time as long as he was willing to stay for as long as they'd like, which Don did. Don continues to cooperate by producing documents and is willing to answer written questions, but no lawyer would ever agree to allow their client to participate in what is an obvious PR stunt from a so-called "Republican" Senator too cowardly to stand up to his boss Mark Warner and the rest of the resistance Democrats on the committee.
posted by scalefree at 5:17 PM on May 8, 2019 [17 favorites]


Message to the Congress on Designating Brazil as a Major Non-NATO Ally
TO THE CONGRESS OF THE UNITED STATES:
In accordance with section 517 of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, as amended (22 U.S.C. 2321k), I am providing notice of my intent to designate Brazil as a Major Non-NATO Ally.
I am making this designation in recognition of the Government of Brazil’s recent commitments to increase defense cooperation with the United States, and in recognition of our own national interest in deepening our defense coordination with Brazil.
DONALD J. TRUMP
THE WHITE HOUSE,
May 8, 2019.
Weirdly this was not announced via Twitter but the actual White House website.
posted by scalefree at 5:20 PM on May 8, 2019 [5 favorites]


scalefree, i believe the referenced Buck/Collins/Nadler discussion occurs here, starting about 02:36:xx and continuing through circa 02:45:00. will leave it to odinsdream to confirm.
posted by 20 year lurk at 5:30 PM on May 8, 2019 [1 favorite]


> Venezuela: Russia urges US to abandon ‘irresponsible’ plan to topple Maduro (Guardian)

“I had a very good talk with President Putin — probably over an hour,” Trump [tweeted]. “And we talked about many things. Venezuela was one of the topics.


WaPo: A Frustrated Trump Questions His Administration’s Venezuela Strategy
President Trump is questioning his administration’s aggressive strategy in Venezuela following the failure of a U.S.-backed effort to oust President Nicolás Maduro, complaining he was misled about how easy it would be to replace the socialist strongman with a young opposition figure, according to administration officials and White House advisers.

The president’s dissatisfaction has crystallized around national security adviser John Bolton and what Trump has groused is an interventionist stance at odds with his view that the United States should stay out of foreign quagmires.

Trump has said in recent days that Bolton wants to get him “into a war” — a comment he has made in jest in the past but that now belies his more serious concerns, one senior administration official said.[…]

[…] Trump has nonetheless complained over the last week that Bolton and others underestimated Maduro, according to three senior administration officials who like others interviewed for this story spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private deliberations.[…]

Despite Trump’s grumbling that Bolton had gotten him out on a limb on Venezuela, Bolton’s job is safe, two senior administration officials said, and Trump has told his national security adviser to keep focusing on Venezuela.
I wonder how Bolton feels about his job when all it apparently takes for Trump to start second-guessing him is a nice, long phone chat with Putin.
posted by Doktor Zed at 5:31 PM on May 8, 2019 [31 favorites]


Trump's incompetence goes without saying but it's still ridiculous to see him go all shocked-pikachu.jpg when John freaking Bolton gets too warmongery.
posted by jason_steakums at 5:54 PM on May 8, 2019 [12 favorites]


Trump's incompetence in world empire-ing is the only thing keeping us from destroying two continents right now. Imagine how President Tom Cotton will handle it.
posted by Rust Moranis at 6:04 PM on May 8, 2019 [5 favorites]


"Bolton's job is safe"? I doubt it. It is Trump he works for, after all.

If Trump fires Bolton it would be one of the only good things Trump has ever done in his life.
posted by litlnemo at 6:09 PM on May 8, 2019 [7 favorites]


Reuters, China backtracked on almost all aspects of U.S. trade deal - sources
The diplomatic cable from Beijing arrived in Washington late on Friday night, with systematic edits to a nearly 150-page draft trade agreement that would blow up months of negotiations between the world’s two largest economies, according to three U.S. government sources and three private sector sources briefed on the talks.

The document was riddled with reversals by China that undermined core U.S. demands, the sources told Reuters. In each of the seven chapters of the draft trade deal, China had deleted its commitments to change laws to resolve core complaints that caused the United States to launch a trade war: Theft of U.S. intellectual property and trade secrets; forced technology transfers; competition policy; access to financial services; and currency manipulation.
WSJ, Why China Decided to Play Hardball in Trade Talks
The new hard line taken by China in trade talks—surprising the White House and threatening to derail negotiations—came after Beijing interpreted recent statements and actions by President Trump as a sign the U.S. was ready to make concessions, said people familiar with the thinking of the Chinese side.

High-level negotiations are scheduled to resume Thursday in Washington, but the expectations and the stakes have changed significantly. A week ago, the assumption was that negotiators would be closing the deal. Now, they are trying to keep it from collapsing.

Adding to the pressure, the U.S. formally filed paperwork Wednesday to raise tariffs on $200 billion of Chinese goods to 25% from the current 10% at 12:01 a.m. Friday. Beijing’s Commerce Ministry responded by threatening to take unspecified countermeasures.
...
In particular, these people said, Mr. Trump’s hectoring of Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell to cut interest rates was seen in Beijing as evidence that the president thought the U.S. economy was more fragile than he claimed.
So basically, Trump spouts his usual nonsense, and China interprets that as the result of an actual coherent logical process. The art of the deal!
posted by zachlipton at 6:17 PM on May 8, 2019 [30 favorites]


If Trump fires Bolton it would be one of the only good things Trump has ever done in his life.

you say that now, but wait until he nominates henry kissinger to replace him
posted by murphy slaw at 6:23 PM on May 8, 2019 [15 favorites]


@JordanUhl [video]: At his rally tonight, Trump says the government is unable to violently attack immigrants, someone in the crowd shouted "Shoot them!" The crowd & Trump erupt in laughter & cheers. Trump says, "Only in the panhandle can you get away with that statement."
posted by zachlipton at 6:49 PM on May 8, 2019 [24 favorites]


Will no one rid me of this meddlesome immigrant?
posted by scalefree at 7:05 PM on May 8, 2019 [10 favorites]


wait until he nominates henry kissinger

more probably the disembodied shade of andrew jackson
posted by tivalasvegas at 7:36 PM on May 8, 2019 [2 favorites]


He has done 8-9 hours of testimony in front of Senate Intel already

He has done 8-9 hours of testimony? ehhh so Don Jr.'s done time, and yet it doesn't sound like a brilliant legal mind crafted this PR shart. That's some rickety big boy tweetery right there.

The ... best? People?
posted by petebest at 7:52 PM on May 8, 2019 [1 favorite]


Jim Acosta:" At rally in Panama City Trump jokes about staying in office “10 or 14” years. But he’s only joking, he says."
posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 7:54 PM on May 8, 2019 [11 favorites]





Jim Acosta:" At rally in Panama City They jokes about staying in office “10 or 14” years. But he’s only joking, he says."


Look, I know you think I've been alarmist at this, but he's not joking and I've literally put my long term plans on hold as I figure out what to do when realistically faced with the fact of a dynastic kleptocracy happening in my middle age. This is not a joke to me, as a single childfree woman. Take it seriously. I am a real person that will be hurt.
posted by fluttering hellfire at 8:13 PM on May 8, 2019 [80 favorites]


I don't think it's funny or alarmist at all.
posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 8:14 PM on May 8, 2019 [29 favorites]


Listen to the senator from Hawaii.

Brian Schatz
Kids in cages. Betsy DeVos. Bill Barr. Scott Pruitt. The Paris Climate Deal. Possible war w Iran. Negotiating poorly with North Korea. The trade war hurting farmers and consumers. Gutting the CFPB. Doing nothing on gun violence. The tax bill rip-off. Taking away your healthcare. Racism as policy and strategy. Corruption. Emoluments. Raiding military money for the wall. The wall. Undermining NATO. The War in Yemen. Record debt and deficits. Climate inaction. Gutting healthcare in native communities. The stacking of the judiciary branch with ideologues. The trans ban in the military. Opening up offshore drilling. Targeting organized labor. Being soft on our enemies and hard on our allies. Ryan Zinke. Charlottesville. Helsinki. Undermining Dodd-Frank. “Shithole countries.”

With 25 or whatever candidates in the Primary it’s just a statistical fact that your favorite candidate is unlikely to win the nomination. Make your peace with that now. Get ready for the electoral fight of our lives. Thank you.
posted by chris24 at 8:14 PM on May 8, 2019 [85 favorites]


Now, virtually the entire White House press corps is credentialed under “exceptions,” which means, in a sense, that they all serve at the pleasure of press secretary Sarah Sanders because they all fail to meet credentialing requirements […]

When I was growing up we heard lots of stories about protektsiya in the (former) Soviet Union; the way everything that was nominally available to everyone was actually only available as a favour, or to people with the right connections. This is characteristic of the slide into authoritarianism: things that were formerly available “as of right” now need authorisation, and the authorisations that were formerly governed by protocol are now subject to official discretion. This attack on press freedom is one example, but so too is immigration. It's not just refugees and people with “bad” passports: border control is becoming a more fraught experience for everyone, even someone highly privileged like me. You can see this happening across the Civil Service, too, because the loss of senior officers means more things ultimately get get passed up to political appointees. It's very troubling, and it will take a long time to reverse even with a Democratic victory in 2020.
posted by Joe in Australia at 8:21 PM on May 8, 2019 [68 favorites]


Politico: FBI to Meet With Florida Delegation to Discuss Russian Hacking
The FBI will hold a classified briefing with members of the Florida congressional delegation next week about suspected Russian hacking during the 2016 elections.

The FBI is scheduled to meet with House members May 16. The agency will sit down Republican Sen. Rick Scott* ahead of the delegation meeting.

The FBI briefings were confirmed by three people with knowledge of the meetings who weren’t authorized to discuss them publicly.
CNN backs this up: FBI to Brief House Members On Alleged Russian Hacking of Florida County
The FBI will brief Florida members of Congress next week about the claim that a Florida county was hacked by Russian intelligence in 2016, two sources familiar with the plan told CNN.

Previous reporting and government announcements have established that the GRU, Russian military intelligence, created an email phishing campaign aimed at Florida county election employees in the summer preceding the 2016 presidential election. But it wasn't until special counsel Robert Mueller's report was published that the public learned the FBI had investigated a particular county for actually being hacked.

"[T]he FBI believes that this operation enabled the GRU to gain access to the network of at least one Florida county government," the report claims.
* Remember how during the 2018 campaign Scott had attacked then-Senator Nelson as “deeply confused or very dishonest” and “irresponsible and reckless” when he warned county election supervisors that “Russians are inside our records,” and hackers “already penetrated certain counties in the state”?
posted by Doktor Zed at 8:31 PM on May 8, 2019 [34 favorites]


Trump, Democrats are locked in a constitutional showdown over Mueller’s report (WaPo)
Jack Quinn, former counsel to Bill Clinton during an independent counsel investigation of the former president, said that Wednesday’s assertion of privilege by the White House could backfire over the long run.

“They are doing it so broadly and with so little judgment that I think they are debasing their overall approach to this,” said Quinn, suggesting a judge may come to view Trump’s position as untenable. “The overreliance on executive privilege in the end will be problematic for the White House.”

Quinn said Democrats must frame their requests as part of a review to determine if Trump committed impeachable offenses.

“There is absolutely no constitutional way they can block the impeachment powers granted to the House,” said Quinn.
posted by Little Dawn at 8:35 PM on May 8, 2019 [10 favorites]


Quinn said Democrats must frame their requests as part of a review to determine if Trump committed impeachable offenses.

See, I don't see why that matters. How can the administration claim privilege over only the redacted bits of the report? That's not at all how executive privilege has worked in the past.
posted by BungaDunga at 8:43 PM on May 8, 2019 [4 favorites]


RUHLE: Why does the President call the Mueller investigation a hoax?
CHRISTIE: The President is a salesman. He uses hyperbole.
RUHLE: It’s a lie.
CHRISTIE: That’s your opinion. This is the President’s opinion. If it’s an opinion, it can’t be a lie.


This sure sounds like a summary of a familiar conservative discourse strategy. "Who is to say what the objective truth is? When it doesn't support what we want to say, we put 'truth' on a subjective footing, just another opinion, we have as much right to our opinion as someone has to any opinion that's better substantiated, and it doesn't even matter if we know it's better substantiated, you can't make us acknowledge it. We value the posture of victory more than even the notion of truth. Accountability is for losers."
posted by wildblueyonder at 8:51 PM on May 8, 2019 [8 favorites]


Some math problems for Donald Trump’s tax returns (Alexandra Petri, WaPo)
In 1991, his reported losses were $418 million, which was literally 1 PERCENT of all the losses by all individuals in that year. A full percent! How to reconcile this? Fortunately, he has a great brain. We must catch up.

Here are some Trump math problems:

Q: If you have $1 million and then you lose $55, how many dollars do you have to live on?

A: Whatever my father, Fred Trump, has.

Q: If you are $418 million in the red, do you have more money or less money than someone who has zero dollars?

A: More, $418 million more!

Q: If you have $5 of debt and someone else has zero dollars, who has more money?

A: I definitely have more money than the loser with zero dollars.

Q: It costs $0.08 to buy a banana. You have -$0.05. Can you afford to buy a banana?

A: I don’t know, let me ask Deutsche Bank.

Q: It costs $0.08 to buy a banana. Someone else has $0.16. Can she afford to buy a banana?

A: With just $0.16, she should not be wasting money on luxuries such as bananas. She should be working.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 9:11 PM on May 8, 2019 [17 favorites]


Previous reporting and government announcements have established that the GRU, Russian military intelligence, created an email phishing campaign aimed at Florida county election employees in the summer preceding the 2016 presidential election. But it wasn't until special counsel Robert Mueller's report was published that the public learned the FBI had investigated a particular county for actually being hacked.

I really don't understand what is gained by keeping these things secret. By definition, America's enemies already know.
posted by Joe in Australia at 9:29 PM on May 8, 2019 [9 favorites]


RUHLE: Why does the President call the Mueller investigation a hoax?
CHRISTIE: The President is a salesman. He uses hyperbole.
RUHLE: It’s a lie.
CHRISTIE: That’s your opinion. This is the President’s opinion. If it’s an opinion, it can’t be a lie.


Ken "Popehat" White has mentioned a particular defense against defamation: that the speaker was just trash talking or using hyperbole, such that a reasonable person would not think that the speaker was making a factual claim. Christie is, as has been noted upthread, a "real lawyer"; it would be amusing in its own way if Christie foresaw some kind of legal trouble for Trump and tried to head it off with "actually his mouth emits such an unending torrent of bullshit that he can't be liable for anything he says".
posted by a snickering nuthatch at 9:32 PM on May 8, 2019 [9 favorites]


The argument is that adversaries don't know exactly what we know, which would tell them about our capabilities and maybe make them harder to detect going forward. Learning about what we found, what we missed, and how our assessment stacks up with the reality can tell them a lot.
posted by BungaDunga at 9:34 PM on May 8, 2019 [7 favorites]


I really don't understand what is gained by keeping these things secret. By definition, America's enemies already know.

The enemy they are concerned about is us.
posted by srboisvert at 11:32 PM on May 8, 2019 [28 favorites]


adversaries don't know exactly what we know, which would tell them about our capabilities and maybe make them harder to detect

Contrariwise, if we (i.e., non-spooks) knew more about the attacks we'd be able to assess the risks and potentially prevent further incursions. Russian interference with US elections is a fundamental threat to the country and it was a mistake to treat it as either a law enforcement issue or as another move in the Great Game. If the American public had known about the Russian threat to American elections they'd have been able to oppose it at all levels: by securing their own systems; by better recognising Russian propaganda; and by demanding action from their representatives. The secrecy around Obama's attempt to build a wartime coalition, as it were, allowed Republicans to resist any action and position themselves to discredit and ridicule the warnings when we ultimately learned of them.
posted by Joe in Australia at 12:55 AM on May 9, 2019 [8 favorites]


National Review columnist David French takes the American Family Association to task: Christians, Sign the Petition. Condemn . . . Me? .

The AFA described French's earlier article condemning Falwell's support for Trump as “yellow journalism” and “character assassination”. At least the second of these articles is worth reading for its plainspoken view of the proper Evangelical attitude towards the Presidency:
We should pray for presidents, critique them when they’re wrong, praise them when they’re right, and never, ever impose partisan double standards. We can’t ever forget the importance of character, the necessity of our own integrity, and the power of the prophetic witness.
posted by Joe in Australia at 2:52 AM on May 9, 2019 [2 favorites]


Flashback Quote of the Day

“No one can be above the law, not even the Attorney General. I think an attorney general held in contempt of Congress is someone who should resign.”

— Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), quoted by the Tampa Bay Times, calling for Attorney General Eric Holder to resign after he was found in contempt of Congress in 2012.


To be fair, that was almost seven years ago. Back then they were posturing for law & order which he didn't believe in, rather than believing in it now and not saying anything. So it's 2012 Little Marco that's the rank hypocrite. 2019 Little Marco is just the silent toadying hack.
posted by petebest at 3:23 AM on May 9, 2019 [20 favorites]


That Fallwell Jr. story turns out to be pretty interesting if anyone is unfamiliar. This Buzzfeed News article has the skinny on the terrifically odd story of Falwell Jr. and his wife going into business with a young pool attendant (I thought you guys were joking about the pool boy) and buying a ~$4.5 MEEELYUN dollar youth hostel for him to manage which ... okay, how does a building of mostly empty rooms cost almost 5 mil? Granted, it sits over a liquor store but ... I dunno, but anyway here's the relevant part to our story:

The relationship between Cohen and Falwell Jr. has not been previously reported, but the two have been acquainted since 2012[*], according to a source with direct knowledge of Falwell’s decision to endorse Trump. The source, a high-ranking official at Liberty University, said that Falwell Jr. occasionally visited Cohen’s office in New York City but that there was no business relationship between the two men.

[Please note, as MonkeyToes commented above, the Liberty University CIO was paid to rig two online polls for Trump (rigged...trump...rigged) but instead of his fee of $50,000 he got $12k - in cash, in a plastic Wal-Mart bag - and a signed boxing glove. Which. is not a "business relationship" with Fallwell Jr. as such, per se, legally, so to speak. Wow that story was only 4 months ago.]

According to a separate source with knowledge of Trump’s campaign, Cohen was so confident in Falwell Jr.’s support that he and Trump assured others, even before Trump announced his candidacy, that Falwell Jr. would issue an endorsement.

... Falwell Jr.’s endorsement of Donald Trump in January 2016 was a watershed event for Trump’s candidacy. While the evangelical Christian right is now a fervent Trump constituency, it wasn’t that way when Trump first announced his run for president in 2015.

... Falwell Jr.’s endorsement “marked a turning point for the entire religious right,” said Randall Balmer, a Dartmouth University religion professor who studies the evangelical movement. “Until that moment, this is a movement that had trumpeted its support for family values, and I don’t need to tell you there is no way anyone could claim this was a candidate who supports family values.” Falwell Jr., Balmer said, “led the way. He led the charge.”


Fun Fact: the major details of the business with the young pool attendant come from a lawsuit filed by Jesus ... Fernandez, Sr.
Fun Bonus Fact: Falwell Jr. is not a pastor, he's a lawyer. Everyone's good with that.
posted by petebest at 4:03 AM on May 9, 2019 [34 favorites]


Falwell Jr. occasionally visited Cohen’s office in New York City but that there was no business relationship between the two men.

...And visiting Cohen's office for personal reasons is supposed to be less shady than visiting for business reasons? Do I have that right?
posted by Rykey at 4:23 AM on May 9, 2019 [13 favorites]


I am a little confused about who was supposed to be blackmailing Falwell in this story. The pool guy? Or Michael Cohen? Or both?
posted by OnceUponATime at 4:32 AM on May 9, 2019 [4 favorites]


Something tells me there might be more than two people in the photos Falwell Jr. wanted Cohen to disappear for him. Not judging kinks, but still.
posted by emelenjr at 4:39 AM on May 9, 2019 [3 favorites]


The pool guy, with Cohen helping to arrange for any evidence to go away.
posted by PenDevil at 4:40 AM on May 9, 2019


Allegedly The pool guy has/had the photos. Allegedly Cohen bought them in exchange for making him manager of the youth hostel ("Ashtrays on every table"!). Allegedly Falwell agreed to bring the Evangelical vote to Trump in exchange for the deal.
posted by petebest at 4:40 AM on May 9, 2019 [14 favorites]


But if Cohen had the photos ("terrible") then he was also very much in a position to blackmail Falwell. And if Trump wanted something from Falwell, and Falwell knew those photos might come out if Trump did not get what Trump wanted because Cohen had them... I guess I don't understand why the endorsement is being framed as a repayment for a favor rather than as the result of extortion. Because Cohen is the one framing this story?

Oh, such a shame about those pictures. Yes, I have them. They're terrible. Of course, we can make sure, they never get out, but we might ask you a favor...
posted by OnceUponATime at 4:49 AM on May 9, 2019 [5 favorites]


Pool guy denies all of this fwiw. I mean, if I were technically guilty of blackmail, I'd probably issue a strongly worded denial too, but...
posted by Room 101 at 4:50 AM on May 9, 2019 [6 favorites]


Nondisclosure agreements were one of Cohen's primary tactics as Trump's fixer (as in the whole Stormy Daniels thing.) If Cohen fixed stuff for Falwell, the pool guy was pressured by an NDA.
posted by Sublimity at 5:02 AM on May 9, 2019 [6 favorites]


the pool guy was pressured by an NDA.

A genuine "Team Trump!" NDA, the Strongest most reliable NDA possible (just ask Stormy Daniels!) This could get... interesting.
posted by From Bklyn at 6:10 AM on May 9, 2019 [3 favorites]


Donald Trump Lost a Billion Dollars—Just Not His Own (Henry Grabar, Slate)
He lost other people’s money, then bogusly claimed the tax benefits of those losses for himself.
Typical Trump.
posted by ZeusHumms at 6:33 AM on May 9, 2019 [24 favorites]


With 25 or whatever candidates in the Primary it’s just a statistical fact that your favorite candidate is unlikely to win the nomination. Make your peace with that now. Get ready for the electoral fight of our lives. Thank you.

Because I hate it when bad statistics happen to good people, I'll comment that this assumes the support for the 25 candidates is spread out equally among them and yes, someone who has 4% of voters is unlikely to be any given person's favorite. But verious polls show there to be just a handfull of front-runners with some numbers as high as 40%, meaning that for any given person there's a good chance their favorite is almost a toss-up depending on how other things shake out.

This mathmatical side adventure is mostly because I think we should avoid playing along with the media's fun - for them - game of ehrmagherd there's soooooo many of em! The reality of every presidential election is that there's actually a bunch more nobody bozos who file claiming they're running. Check the FEC page for the 2016 presidential election and feast your eyes on the one thousand seven hundred and forty eight declared candidates for that race. Even if you filter it down to people who actually raised more than $0 you get one hundred and thirty.

The reality is that half these people getting column inches at the moment are as significant as Wanda Duckwald turned out to be. It's fine that they're out there and maybe some of them will move the conversation places we need it to go. But in the long run they're an irrelevance and just talking about the fact that they're there - but nothing about them or their ideas - is a distraction. Let's not play along.
posted by phearlez at 6:49 AM on May 9, 2019 [21 favorites]


peeedro: When official channels of communication between the government and the press are cut off, it makes the informal access afforded to people like Maggie Haberman, Glenn Thrush, or Josh Dawsey even more valuable. It elavates sympathetic outlets like Fox or The Washington Examiner to a higher level because they're the only ones getting official coverage.

"According to Fox News, Sarah Sanders defended [x] by saying [y] ..." "According to The Washington Examiner, Trump can extend his current term by two years because of [z]."

Even if they're reporting gonzo nonsense from the White House, Fox and Washington Examiner become more cited, if not more credible, sources, boosting the signals over-all.

Meanwhile, Trump Administration Considering Changes That Would Redefine The Poverty Line (Pam Fessler for NPR, May 9, 2019)
The Trump administration is considering changing the way the government measures poverty, which has anti-poverty groups worried that many low-income individuals will be pushed off assistance programs such as food stamps, Medicaid and Head Start.

The possible change would involve adjusting the poverty line annually using a different inflation measure, one that would result in a slower increase over time.

Arloc Sherman of the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities says this change would mean that millions of people eventually could see their benefits either reduced or eliminated because they would no longer be considered poor.

"They have a goal, and the goal is to cut people of low or moderate income off of government assistance," Sherman said of the administration. He noted that the idea is being floated at the same time that the White House is proposing work requirements and steep budget cuts for safety net programs.
Nothing says "compassionate Christian" like cutting social services to reduce taxes on the wealthy.
posted by filthy light thief at 7:27 AM on May 9, 2019 [35 favorites]


He lost other people’s money, then bogusly claimed the tax benefits of those losses for himself.
So Mel Brooks' 'The Producers' ends up being the prescient narrative of our time, accurately foretelling the ineptitude, the shady accountants, and Springtime For Hitler?
posted by Harry Caul at 7:43 AM on May 9, 2019 [29 favorites]


Trust Pelosi (William Saletan, Slate)

emphasismine.boilerplate
Some critics on the left bristle at Pelosi’s language in the interview about staying in the “mainstream,” along with her refusal to support big ideas like the Green New Deal. But at the level of policy, there’s little daylight between the speaker and the left. The issues she talked about in the Times are the same ones she acts on in the House and brings up in press conferences: health care, “bigger paychecks,” infrastructure, and the environment. The list goes on: education, equal pay, gun safety, immigration reform, Social Security, violence against women.

Many progressives think the best way to attract and mobilize voters is to push big ideas like “Medicare for All” and the Green New Deal. Pelosi disagrees. Big ideas often alarm the other side’s voters more than they inspire yours. Instead, she focuses on specific policies that affect people’s lives. She knows such policies are easier to explain and harder to caricature. And she emphasizes tangible benefits. “The climate issue is a jobs issue,” she says.

The smarter play, in Pelosi’s view, is to defend policies that are well understood and supported. Let your enemy be the aggressor, and rally your base against his attack. Instead of pushing Medicare for All, the speaker targets President Donald Trump’s assault on the Affordable Care Act. She specifies elements of the ACA that score well in polls: “protections against pre-existing conditions, bans on lifetime limits and annual limits, the Medicare-Medicaid expansion, savings for seniors on their prescription drugs, [and] premium assistance that makes health coverage affordable.”

...

In Pelosi’s view, a politician’s job is to produce results. In the House, that requires 218 votes. The peril of the moment—an executive branch controlled by the most dangerous president in living memory—makes it even more crucial that Democrats maintain control of a chamber of Congress. The speaker calls herself “a liberal from San Francisco,” but she reminds colleagues that there aren’t enough deep blue districts to elect a majority. She focuses on issues that, while important to progressives, will also help Democrats in more vulnerable districts. On Tuesday, at the Cornell forum, Pelosi acknowledged that this “coldblooded” battle plan could cause “unease for some people who may want to go way in one direction.” But she warned that if Democrats were to lose the purple districts, the left would lose power altogether.
There's plenty more. Worth a read.
posted by perspicio at 7:46 AM on May 9, 2019 [31 favorites]


Schiff Makes Good On Threat, Subpoenas Mueller Report, Underlying Intel

“The department repeatedly pays lip service to the importance of a meaningful accommodation process, but it has only responded to our efforts with silence or outright defiance,” Schiff said. “Today, we have no choice but to issue a subpoena to compel their compliance.”

Sloooowly I turn ... step by step ...
posted by petebest at 7:47 AM on May 9, 2019 [40 favorites]


FBI is investigating 850 domestic terrorism cases (David Shortell for CNN, May 8, 2019)
The FBI has 850 open domestic terrorism investigations, 40% of which are cases of racially motivated violent extremism, Assistant Director for Counterterrorism Michael McGarrity said Wednesday.

Testifying before the House Homeland Security Committee, McGarrity said a "significant majority" of those racially motivated cases involved white supremacist extremists, and he called the threat posed by domestic terrorists in the US "persistent and evolving."

"The FBI assesses domestic terrorists collectively pose a persistent and evolving threat of violence and economic harm to the United States. In fact, there have been more arrests and deaths in the United States caused by domestic terrorists than international terrorists in recent years," McGarrity said.
...
While the number of open cases of domestic terrorism cases investigated by the FBI has fluctuated in recent months -- actually decreasing from the number six months ago -- McGarrity noted that the pace of new cases has increased.

"Cases are a point in time. We can literally open and close cases every day, so it's two data points," McGarrity said. "What I can tell you of what we're seeing is the velocity in which our subjects and the velocity in which we're working our cases -- both on the domestic terrorism side and the international terrorism side with homegrown violent extremists -- that velocity is much quicker than it's ever been before."

Of the 850 domestic terrorism cases open at the FBI, about half are into anti-government and anti-authority extremists, McGarrity said.
This article only gives a year-to-year trend, not pre- and post-Trump, which is the real gauge of Trump's impact (and the FBI's response).
posted by filthy light thief at 7:51 AM on May 9, 2019 [11 favorites]


Big ideas often alarm the other side’s voters more than they inspire yours.

Build that wall. Lock her up. Make America Great Again.

Sorry, no. The left needs some serious rallying cries, and we need politicians who have the spine to say "we are America, this will get done."

I'm not saying that we should lie like Trump and pretend these policies have no cost, but we should be banging the drums of moral imperative, and leave the right whinging about costs.

When the right says "they want to promise you everything," the counter isn't "no, we're making moderate promises backed by fact." The counter is, "yeah, but the Republicans want to promise you nothing."

Rhetoric and ideas got us to the moon. Rhetoric and ideas get the ball rolling. Policy and details get ironed out in legislating, not in running for office.
posted by explosion at 8:06 AM on May 9, 2019 [35 favorites]


Build that wall. Lock her up. Make America Great Again.

Sorry, no. The left needs some serious rallying cries, and we need politicians who have the spine to say "we are America, this will get done."


I agree that rallying cries are important. But in fairness to the point made in the article, I hope you would agree that two of those three rallying cries are not, in fact, big ideas. It's a distinction worth recognizing.

And it takes no spine at all, but only chutzpah, to say "this will get done" (as in the case of all three cries). Rather, it takes spine to get big ideas done, such as the ACA.
posted by perspicio at 8:25 AM on May 9, 2019 [8 favorites]




Pelosi already signaling some stalling on Barr contempt vote on the floor. CBS News.

"When we're ready, we'll come to the floor. We'll see because there might be some other contempt of Congress issues that we want to deal with at the same time."
posted by Harry Caul at 8:45 AM on May 9, 2019 [2 favorites]


I can't tell if Pelosi really does think contempt and impeachment fights are too damaging to be worth fighting, or if she just doesn't think those fights will be won, or if she's trying to run the clock closer to 2020 before unleashing it all and she's just looking for more strategic timing.

By and large I think she's done a great job until these issues became more acute since the Mueller report came out. Since then I haven't found her statements comforting or convincing at all. If she's got a plan, she's not selling it well.
posted by scaryblackdeath at 8:53 AM on May 9, 2019 [20 favorites]


The statement on the contempt vote sounds to me like she doesn't have the votes just yet.
posted by VTX at 9:08 AM on May 9, 2019 [3 favorites]


Trust Pelosi

I have so many problems with this article, but I guess the main one is that it makes it sound like we're in a normal moment of political differences and not facing an existential threat.
posted by diogenes at 9:08 AM on May 9, 2019 [13 favorites]


I don't think we can infer that she thinks contempt is too damaging. She said "We'll see because there might be some other contempt of Congress issues that we want to deal with at the same time."

That sounds like there are others who may also be held in contempt; I can't see a point in making that statement otherwise.
posted by a snickering nuthatch at 9:09 AM on May 9, 2019 [5 favorites]


If she's got a plan, she's not selling it well.

If there was a plan, it would have been acted upon from day one of the release of the report. The hedging and stammering responses to fairly straightforward questions seem indicative of a leadership that sees Trump as a historical aberration, and not the danger that he and his people truly represent.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 9:23 AM on May 9, 2019 [22 favorites]


Only a simple majority is needed to pass the contempt citation. She's got the votes.

What she is doing is managing what is within her power to manage. Congress does not have many cards to play, so they need to be played very purposefully.

Here is your periodic reminder that Neil Gorsuch's mother, Anne, was once held in contempt of Congress as the head of the EPA, and Reagan's justice department simply declined to prosecute.

It's easy to see that's where this is headed, too.

So ask yourself, if you were Pelosi, what could possibly be the point of holding Barr in contempt at all, beyond the optics of making a brave, principled, but ultimately futile stand? In other words, what would it take to make it matter, in terms of tangible results?
posted by perspicio at 9:35 AM on May 9, 2019 [7 favorites]


“Own the center left, own the mainstream,” Ms. Pelosi, 79, said. “Our passions were for health care, bigger paychecks, cleaner government — a simple message,” Ms. Pelosi said of the 40-seat Democratic pickup last year that resulted in her second ascent to the speakership. “We did not engage in some of the other exuberances that exist in our party” (NYT)

Big ideas often alarm the other side’s voters more than they inspire yours. Instead, she focuses on specific policies that affect people’s lives... she warned that if Democrats were to lose the purple districts, the left would lose power altogether. (Slate)


The Slate piece, like the Times interview before it, does clarify the meta-question at least. Whether you agree with Pelosi's strategy and statements or not, empirically speaking, we call people who talk and strategize like that "centrists" (or "center left" if you prefer). Again -- she may be right and the "go big or go home" left wing may be wrong, and it may be that her long-term goals are the same as the left wing but her strategic concerns as Speaker compel her otherwise -- but inasmuch as we do distinguish centrists from leftists by what they say and do and not just what they believe in their hearts, Pelosi is clearly and explicitly positioning herself in the centrist faction both now and looking ahead to the 2020 election cycle.
posted by chortly at 9:36 AM on May 9, 2019 [8 favorites]


Exactly.

And as far as the presidential race goes, why would we accept that many Obama voters could swing to Trump, but Trump voters would never swing to the eventual Democratic nominee?

Obama was a centrist.
posted by perspicio at 9:43 AM on May 9, 2019 [2 favorites]


Here is your periodic reminder that Neil Gorsuch's mother, Anne, was once held in contempt of Congress as the head of the EPA, and Reagan's justice department simply declined to prosecute.

See, the thing about this is that there are, in fact, ways to escalate this with effect. The Democrats can ask the House Sergeant-At-Arms to deputize somebody - probably the DC police - to bring the person(s) in contempt into custody, and just let them sit in jail until either they do what they're supposed to do or you just keep finding the next assistant down the chain in contempt until one of them does it.

Yes, it's an escalation, but at this point the question is whether or not it is justified.
posted by mightygodking at 9:48 AM on May 9, 2019 [16 favorites]


WaPo, U.S. seizes North Korean coal ship, accuses Pyongyang of violating sanctions
U.S. authorities have seized a North Korean ship used to sell coal in alleged violation of international sanctions, Justice Department officials said Thursday.

Justice Department officials confirmed the ship, the “Wise Honest,” is approaching U.S. territorial waters, with coordination of the U.S. Marshals and the Coast Guard. Officials said it was the first time the U.S. has seized a North Korean cargo vessel for violating international sanctions.
posted by zachlipton at 9:48 AM on May 9, 2019 [3 favorites]


U.S. authorities have seized a North Korean ship used to sell coal in alleged violation of international sanctions, Justice Department officials said Thursday.
Well, Donald won't be happy about that!
posted by Harry Caul at 9:49 AM on May 9, 2019 [4 favorites]


Trust Pelosi

Do not like. The list is long but here's a couple:

What's with the picture of Trump and Pelosi at the top? Ostensibly Slate is left-leaning and the article supports Pelosi. Why make Trump look normal and Pelosi look like she's pulling a hamstring? So weird right out of the gate.

Then the first sentence: "Is Nancy Pelosi a sellout?" What? No .. no one has said she's actively working for the bad guys. A sellout has sold their share of the store to the bad guys. That's not even the question. (A theory perhaps, but not a serious one.) Poor word choice? Misstated premise? *shrug*

Then: Instead, she focuses on specific policies that affect people’s lives. She knows such policies are easier to explain and harder to caricature.

In the - NO. The whole point of Trump is that Democrats fail to understand that at this level of politics reason does not matter. "Centrists" such as may be said to exist voted for Trump not because his policies were easier to explain: that presumes he had a policy! Trump caricatured the Democratic positions with alarming efficiency. Of course they're easier to caricature (for what that's worth) - Trump did it! He's a frickin demented moron!

That's just wrong at every level. Ugh. Bless her she's got mad skeelz and I wouldn't say otherwise, but she's just wrong at every level here.

Pelosi understands that Trump is just a foil. The real goal is to build a relationship with voters.

What the shit? Did the reporter just get it wrong? Trump is just a foil? For WHO? He's a frickin bull destroying the china shop! He's not a tool of ... uh ... Putin? I guess? Which ... okay that's a point I guess, but he does an amazing amount of damage all on his own. People that presume Trump is working on behalf of others like the QAnon thing are way off base. I really don't get how that's not Painfully Obvious. Impeach now.

And the opposite is somehow to build a relationship with voters ... ALERT ALERT this is the language that has lost every major election against Republicans in the last 40 years. ALERT do not go down this path. This is not a place of honor, etc. Run, Luke, run!

Ugh.
posted by petebest at 9:51 AM on May 9, 2019 [19 favorites]


With Daniel Dale apparently is a bit of a burnt-out case, here's a thread by Vox's Aaron Rupar of video highlights from Trump's Panama City Beach rally from last night. While it doesn't have Dale's fact-checking rigor, it's nevertheless instructive to see how Trump deploys his outrageous statements to play with his audience. In addition to the incredibly incendiary and provocative things he said that we've noted in this thread, it's worth mentioning how many familiar topics emerge, such as bashing PR over disaster funding, making false claims about Mueller's findings, harping on John McCain's vote against ACA repeal, inveighing against immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers, and returning to his sick human-trafficking fantasy of women with taped-over mouths. Also check out his satisfied reactions to the perennial "Build the Wall" and "Lock her up" chants. He's workshopping his 2020 campaign's themes with his crowds as oversized focus groups until he's fully confident he can manipulate his voters.

Only a simple majority is needed to pass the contempt citation. She's got the votes.

Although Pelosi needs her feet held to the fire on all sorts of issues, vote-counting is her field of expertise. If she's indicating she needs time before bringing the contempt charges to the floor, then she must feel she doesn't have the numbers for the vote. A failure on this issue would be a tremendous defeat for all the House Dems' investigations, which she obviously won't risk for her caucus. In the meantime, we keep hearing about Dems telling the media that their constituents aren't interested in pursuing these investigations or impeaching Trump and care only about bread-and-butter domestic issues. Either these reps are filtering their message in favor of their limited agenda, or they need to hear from voters who really do think that the Trump administration is an existential threat to American democracy.

Of as much importance as the contempt vote against Barr is the Senate vote for Jeffrey Rosen's nomination as Barr's deputy attorney general, which just passed the Senate Judiciary Committee along party lines of 12 to 10. His lack of any DoJ experience not only calls into question his qualifications, but also sets him up to be Barr's hatchet man (a lack of institutional ties is always a plus when firing people). Call your senators—202-224-3121.
posted by Doktor Zed at 9:55 AM on May 9, 2019 [6 favorites]


The Democrats can ask the House Sergeant-At-Arms to deputize somebody - probably the DC police - to bring the person(s) in contempt into custody, and just let them sit in jail

Barr and Mnuchin have Secret Service protection. Exactly how do you think that's going to play out?
posted by JackFlash at 9:59 AM on May 9, 2019 [2 favorites]


Barr and Mnuchin have Secret Service protection. Exactly how do you think that's going to play out?

Secret service is to protect them from threat of bodily harm, not from lawful actions. I imagine the deputy would bring the lawful order forward, and ask the secret service to step aside, and the agents would do so.

To resist a lawful arrest is a crime, and I cannot imagine the secret service agents have taken a pledge to aid and abet their charges in crimes committed.
posted by explosion at 10:05 AM on May 9, 2019 [42 favorites]


@agearan: Per ace pooler @katierogers Trump has this to say about WaPo story on Vz policy and @AmbJohnBolton “John’s very good. He has strong views on things which is ok. I’m the one who tempers him which is ok. I have John Bolton and I have people who are a little more dovish than him.”

I'm really not comfortable living in a world where we rely on Donald Trump to "temper" John Bolton.
posted by zachlipton at 10:05 AM on May 9, 2019 [19 favorites]


Secret service is to protect them from threat of bodily harm, not from lawful actions. I imagine the deputy would bring the lawful order forward, and ask the secret service to step aside, and the agents would do so.

Think again.

Secret Service is blocking lawsuit on behalf of Jared Kushner, DNC complains (Salon)
posted by perspicio at 10:13 AM on May 9, 2019 [6 favorites]


He's not a tool of ... uh ... Putin? I guess?

I just have to: he is absolutely a tool of Putin. The only thing the Mueller report showed that at all mitigates that conclusion is that he may not have realized the full extent to which he was being used.
posted by OnceUponATime at 10:23 AM on May 9, 2019 [3 favorites]




Handmaid's Tale postoned until next week in Alabama. < WaPost

"After a shouting match broke out, the Alabama Senate on Thursday voted to table an amendment to a controversial bill that would criminalize abortions by making performing the procedure a felony punishable by up to 99 years imprisonment.

A vote affecting the abortion bill was then tabled. Democrats shouted demands for a roll-call vote.

The vote was then moved until next week. The bill would be the most restrictive in the country and would impose what is in effect a near-total abortion ban."
posted by Harry Caul at 10:46 AM on May 9, 2019 [7 favorites]


I feel like we skipped right past the significance of the the Senate Intelligence Committee subpoenaing Trump Jr.

I don't think Burr is any nobler than his Republican colleagues, yet he's really sticking his neck out here. It makes me optimistic that he knows more than they do and he knows which way the wind is blowing.
posted by diogenes at 10:49 AM on May 9, 2019 [23 favorites]


I just have to: he is absolutely a tool of Putin

Agreed, I may have phrased it badly but that's what the "Which ... okay that's a point I guess, but he does an amazing amount of damage all on his own." that followed was about. The article said Pelosi believes Trump is "a foil" which I can't understand because even without Putin's leadership, he still would be a corrupt racist pig destroying the environment and stuffing his pockets. His "foil-ness" is hugely irrelevant as an argument against impeaching him immediately.

> "Only a simple majority is needed to pass the contempt citation. She's got the votes."

... vote-counting is her field of expertise. If she's indicating she needs time before bringing the contempt charges to the floor, then she must feel she doesn't have the numbers for the vote.


If she needs a simple majority, and Democrats have a majority ... there are House Democrats who wouldn't vote to impeach if it was up for vote? Who, please?
posted by petebest at 10:50 AM on May 9, 2019


The question of whether or not Pelosi and her ilk will fight for universal healthcare and to fix global warming has been answered. That answer is no. And no, saying the party is for policy to the right of nearly every Democratic candidate now and for the last two or three decades is not centrist.
posted by xammerboy at 10:55 AM on May 9, 2019 [10 favorites]


I don't think Burr is any nobler than his Republican colleagues, yet he's really sticking his neck out here. It makes me optimistic that he knows more than they do and he knows which way the wind is blowing.
It’ll just be soft questions and rehearsed answers. Then Trump jr. et al will insist that since he went and answered to the senate he doesn’t have to do anything else. They’ll spin it as republicans doing their due diligence and any further inquiry from democrats as more ‘with hunting’.
posted by vocivi at 10:59 AM on May 9, 2019 [6 favorites]


The Whelk: The ridesharing app strike terrified Uber, and politicians noticed.
For one thing, the effort attracted a ton of media interest, and it also garnered the support of high-profile politicians on the left, including presidential candidates like Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. “Your Direct Action for today: Don’t take an Uber or Lyft just for the day. (Just today! Cabs are fine! You can do it!),” tweeted Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, urging her followers not to cross the digital picket line. Even technocratic whiz kid Mayor Pete Buttigieg tweeted that he was down with the driver’s strike.
...
Consumers may love ride-hailing apps, but the more they become aware that drivers feel they’re getting a raw deal, the more they’ll be receptive to politicians who want to do something about it. If the courts don’t do it first (Reuters), lawmakers absolutely have the power to turn Uber’s big, thus-far-unprofitable experiment into something that better benefits its workforce. A bill is currently moving forward (S.F. Chronicle) in California that would reclassify drivers as employees rather than independent contractors. And Sens. Sanders, Cory Booker, and Kirsten Gillibrand have all co-sponsored legislation (Mother Jones) that would improve gig workers’ collective bargaining power.
In other news, Cocaine, racy texts and a potentially fraudulent email: A week of chaos roils one statehouse (Eli Rosenberg for Washington Post, May 9, 2019)

In which Justin Jones, a black student and activist in Nashville, was arrested in February during a protest over a statue in the State Capitol of Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Confederate general and early member of the Ku Klux Klan. Then he was told that he had violated the terms of his bail, which stipulated that he avoid contact with Republican House Speaker Glen Casada.

Except that email was sent before his arrest, and
The disclosure kicked off a chaotic week in Nashville that now threatens to bring down Casada, who observers say has helped bring the state’s House on a Trump-esque pivot to the right since he became speaker in January.
In which, we learn that House Speaker Glen Casada, left, a Republican from Franklin, Tenn., and Cade Cothren, his former chief of staff, are garbage people who say and do terrible things, but in this glorious day and age of digital records, of course there are receipts to take them down.

Good luck, Tennessee!
posted by filthy light thief at 11:01 AM on May 9, 2019 [28 favorites]


So, the legislative session has either just ended or today’s the last day (so he can’t be voted out when they’re not in session), but yeah, things in Nashville seem to be escalating around the speaker.
posted by Huffy Puffy at 11:07 AM on May 9, 2019 [1 favorite]


Perhaps instead of criticizing Pelosi, we should all get on the phone to our House reps and ask what their positions is on contempt. Ask them to make a public statement supporting a contempt vote.

And ask them to make a public statement supporting impeachment too.

I’m annoyed too, but I think it’s more productive to actually call your individual house rep than to write comments on Mefi about how the Speaker and House aren’t doing enough.
posted by nat at 11:22 AM on May 9, 2019 [37 favorites]


No we must argue it out here daily forever
posted by Huffy Puffy at 11:26 AM on May 9, 2019 [59 favorites]


Perhaps instead of criticizing Pelosi, we should all get on the phone to our House reps and ask what their positions is on contempt. Ask them to make a public statement supporting a contempt vote.

porque no los dos?
posted by absalom at 11:44 AM on May 9, 2019 [9 favorites]


> Perhaps instead of criticizing Pelosi, we should all get on the phone to our House reps and ask what their positions is on contempt. Ask them to make a public statement supporting a contempt vote.

I expect to see the "why aren't you out taking direct action instead of sitting on the Internet complaining" thing in other corners of the Internet, but seeing it here in the megathreads from longtime members who presumably know exactly what they're getting into in a MetaFilter political megathread is disappointing.

> No we must argue it out here daily forever

We can (and in my opinion should) do both.

To review some points that have been made in response to this complaint previously:

(1) Talking about these issues with other informed citizens helps us organize our thoughts, question our assumptions, and ultimately arrive at a more informed perspective on the issues we can then take to our elected officials.

(2) There is no zero sum dynamic here, since a lot of folks are reading MetaFilter during times when more direct democratic action is impossible or inconvenient.

(3) Under the same incorrect assumptions that would lead one to conclude complaining about Pelosi is counterproductive / wasteful, so too is complaining about complaining about Pelosi.
posted by tonycpsu at 11:47 AM on May 9, 2019 [19 favorites]


it’s more productive to actually call your individual house rep than to write comments on Mefi about how the Speaker and House aren’t doing enough.

Fax Zero offers a free service to send a fax to your Congressional Representative

Incidentally, I noticed on their page that Attorney General William Barr is not accepting faxes. The DoJ's contact page lists a public comment telephone line at 202-353-1555.
posted by Doktor Zed at 11:52 AM on May 9, 2019 [7 favorites]


So, in what seems like a pretty basic squid-ink obfuscation/distraction move, Individual 1 today is saying that former Secretary of State John Kerry should be prosecuted for allegedly violating the Logan Act by talking to Iran.
posted by Nat "King" Cole Porter Wagoner at 11:57 AM on May 9, 2019


Just called my Rep (Wexton, VA 10th). Here's a script for inspiration to others.
"Hello, my name is ______ and I live in _______. I'm calling Representative ______ _______ to demand they support House Resolution 257 and support an impeachment inquiry of Trump.

Can I count on your support?
Thank you for your time."

You may end up just leaving a voicemail, but that is also really good.
posted by Harry Caul at 12:04 PM on May 9, 2019 [16 favorites]


From the above article on Tenn. Speaker Glenn Casada:

Tennessee Firearms Association calls for House Members to remove Glen Casada as Speaker

Nashville, Tennessee - May 9, 2019. Tennessee Firearms Association is calling for members of the Tennessee House of Representatives to vote to remove Glen Casada as Speaker of the Tennessee House based on investigations surrounding the lewd text messaging, the attempted coverup, intentionally false statements to reporters, and related concerns. z

John Harris, Executive Director of the Tennessee Firearms Association, states “The Speaker of the House is the third most powerful position in state government. That office holds unilateral control over most of the significant affairs of the House, such as appointments and removals of committee chairs. It would be an unquestioned breach of the public’s interest and trust to have a person in that office who is now proven to be willfully false in his dealings with news reporters and in responding to matters of significant public interest.”

...The public has a right, set forth in Article I, Section 23, of the state’s Constitution to demand of their elected officials that they take action now to restore the office of Speaker by purging its current holder from power and the public should be exercising that right to demand accountability and integrity in all branches of public service.


So the Tennessee Firearms Association is feelin' it. They get it. That makes for a weird juxtaposition to what's going on in DC, like a rip in spacetime.
posted by petebest at 12:18 PM on May 9, 2019 [14 favorites]




From Insee's new CCC proposal:
Ten years ago, we built on [the legacy of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) from the Great Depression] when President Barack Obama signed the Serve America Act. As a Congressman, I was proud to have authored a provision of that law: the national Clean Energy Service Corps. This corps was created to provide service, green skills and job-training opportunities for disadvantaged youth in communities throughout the country as they implemented energy efficiency, waste reduction, and conservation projects. It contributed in building the Conservation Corps network - a movement that today involves some 30,000 Americans. But the Clean Energy Service Corps was never fully funded, after Republicans took control of Congress in 2010.

Now, 10 years later, it’s time for a bigger, more ambitious proposal. The Climate Corps will organize the greatest renewable resource of all - the talent and energy of the American people - to work together in cities and rural communities, in our great parks and public lands, and all around the planet. It will give young people the opportunity to serve in the domestic and global effort to secure a healthy future, and will provide Americans of all ages and backgrounds with education, skills, job-training and employment opportunities to thrive in building our new clean energy economy.
There are three components in his proposal:
  • The first of these programs, called the National Climate Service Corps, will give young Americans the opportunity to serve in creating sustainability solutions in their own communities.
  • The second component is a Global Climate Service Corps, which will give Americans the opportunity to conduct a tour of service overseas working side by side with local partners, as they build expertise in climate mitigation and resilience, clean water, and sustainable economic development.
  • The third component of this Climate Corps initiative is a Green Careers Network, which will build on national service to focus on the challenge of permanent job creation in a clean energy economy.
The article has more details, but I'll leave it at that.
posted by filthy light thief at 12:48 PM on May 9, 2019 [25 favorites]


Can I count on your support?

Isn't there a 100% chance that you're talking to a staffer or intern? Is actually talking to your Rep even a remote possibility?

(You should still call. The idea of talking to the Rep just doesn't sync with my experience.)
posted by diogenes at 12:50 PM on May 9, 2019 [2 favorites]


Trump: "Essentially" no obstruction (Twitter link, video)

Essentially?

Trump: No collusion, and essentially no obstruction. Of course a lot of people say, "How can you obstruct when there was no crime? When there was no collusion, how can you possibly obstruct?"

(Wonkette)
NO. Literally no legitimate legal "people" say that you can't obstruct an investigation if the underlying crime is never prosecuted. Here are 800 former federal prosecutors who say the exact opposite. But more to the point,
did Donald Trump just confess to obstruction of justice? A soupçon? A smidge? Some light treason?

... We had been led to believe that the Mueller Report was a full exoneration of the president and his family, who cooperated fully with the investigation. But in light of Mr. Trump's remarks, we just went back to give it a closer look, and HOLY HELL. It turns out Donald Trump may have essentially obstructed justice on multiple occasions. Tell us, Lawfare!

  • Trump tried to end the FBI investigation of Michael Flynn, who lied to the FBI about his conversations with the Russian ambassador.
  • Trump fired Comey and then confessed to both the Russian ambassador and Lester Holt that it was because of the Russia investigation.
  • Trump attempted on multiple occasions to get his staff to fire Robert Mueller or limit his investigation to prospective Russian interference.
  • Trump tried to get Jeff Sessions to un-recuse himself and drop the hammer on Robert Mueller.
  • Trump dangled pardons to influence the testimony of Flynn, Cohen, and Manafort.
  • Trump tried desperately to hide the substance of the Trump Tower meeting with allll the Russians.

  • So Trump's never going to give it up, Pelosi's factored that in for sure. But how long are we going to get this press swing before it heads off to SuperBowl coverage or whatever? The iron is pretty darned hot, man.
    posted by petebest at 1:01 PM on May 9, 2019 [28 favorites]


    Des Moines Register, What's on Iowans' minds going into 2020 caucuses? A look at 300 questions they asked candidates in April. Reporters attended 46 candidate events in April and recorded the 312 questions that voters asked. And when we talk about why isn't the party doing more about Trump, this is a big part of why. Iowa town-hall questioners are not the party as a whole, but you can't say they aren't politically engaged, and they do have an outsized role in setting the conversation. And they're not largely showing up to demand impeachment:
    Health care, climate change and education were asked about most and accounted for roughly a quarter of all questions asked in April.

    Cable news staple topics, like Russia and presidential impeachment, rarely were brought up — just a couple of times.
    Philip Bump, This article has an irritating headline that people will fight about instead of looking at the graph so I'm just not going to quote it here: "That shift [within the Democratic party] isn't uniform within the party." Scroll down to the "percent of Democrats identifying as liberal" chart, and you'll see that the party is moving to the left, as based on how people self-identify, but that Black and Hispanic Democrats, on average, lag white voters in that trend significantly. Again, look to the people who will decide the primary if you want to know why candidates are prioritizing certain things.

    That said, we can help change that: Tlaib, Green to deliver petition from over 10 million calling for Trump's impeachment
    "I always tell people: 'This is your House, you tell us what to do.' This is us telling this House what to do," Tlaib said at Thursday's rally.
    posted by zachlipton at 1:03 PM on May 9, 2019 [14 favorites]


    I think that if you're sending written messages the most common thing that happens is some staffer reviews it, sends a canned response, and adds it to a total on some spreadsheet of constituent opinion. There is a slim chance that your letter/e-mail/fax/whatever ends up getting used by the congressperson in a speech or something if it happens to be something that suits their needs. "I have a letter here from one of my constituents and it reads......" And then they make some comment about whatever you wrote.

    I also think that there is some value in include a quick fact or well stated opinion. The staffers may subconsciously absorb that fact and it'll color their statements to other staffers and more generally influence their feel for the "pulse" of the congressperson's constituency. I included the fact that only 19% of voters supported impeaching Nixon when the hearings began in the fax I just sent (Thanks for the reminder about Fax Zero Doctor Zed!).

    But mostly the message is just "Put another tick-mark in the 'for' column on this issue."
    posted by VTX at 1:10 PM on May 9, 2019 [9 favorites]


    Speaking of Insee's climate conservation corps, my representative, Scott Peters, put together "The Climate Playbook," which "lays out dozens of bills authored by both Democrats and Republicans, most of which have already earned bipartisan support. They are written, they are ready, and we can pass them right now in their committees of jurisdiction and on the House floor." It is a great round-up; link heads to Medium.com.

    (Do I wish that the congressman's piece noted, perhaps in an italicized boilerplate, that he served as a staff economist for the EPA before going to law school? And how Peters was a practicing environmental lawyer before entering politics? Yes, yes I do.)
    posted by Iris Gambol at 1:19 PM on May 9, 2019 [13 favorites]


    I also think that there is some value in include a quick fact or well stated opinion. The staffers may subconsciously absorb that fact and it'll color their statements to other staffers and more generally influence their feel for the "pulse" of the congressperson's constituency.

    One tactic I use when calling congress members' offices, especially when they're unsympathetic to whatever the issue in question may be, is to ask politely for the staffer to read my message back to me and, if they don't take it down verbatim, to repeat the process until they do. This only works with succinct messages, obviously, and must be practiced as courteously as possible. Even if it's only momentary, it breaks them out of autopilot and forces them to deal with the issue on a person-to-person level.

    Of course, this requires the staff to pick up in the first place, something that, for example, PA's spineless Senator Pat Toomey's almost never does.
    posted by Doktor Zed at 1:21 PM on May 9, 2019 [11 favorites]


    Remember, those tick marks really matter. Each time someone writes or calls the Rep knows there's at least a hundred other voters who feel the same way. Just writing "impeach Barr and Trump now" makes a difference.
    posted by xammerboy at 1:35 PM on May 9, 2019 [8 favorites]


    Inslee, folks. There is no Jay Insee running for president or governing WA.
    posted by a box and a stick and a string and a bear at 1:38 PM on May 9, 2019 [6 favorites]


    I got a personal return call from a state senator once that I called for something. I thought they were really on the ball until we both realized, right about the same time, that she had me confused with someone who shared my name but had much, much more money than I did.
    posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 1:40 PM on May 9, 2019 [101 favorites]


    And they're not largely showing up to demand impeachment:

    Well they wouldn't unless the candidate was an active House member, would they. I didn't see any links to the data so it's hard to know what it says other than the broad generalizations:

    Cable news staple topics, like Russia and presidential impeachment, rarely were brought up — just a couple of times.

    ... Iowans expect access

    Iowans can be a demanding bunch. They expect to see candidates face-to-face, on more than one occasion and in more than one setting. They expect candidates to address whatever topics come up.

    Sandy Madden, a Boone resident, tries to see every presidential candidate who comes to town. This cycle, she's already checked off O’Rourke, Gillibrand, Booker, entrepreneur Andrew Yang and former U.S. Housing Secretary Julian Castro.

    She had the chance to ask Booker a question when he visited Boone, and said his answer showed her he cared about what he was talking about — and cared about her as a voter.

    “It was like it was just him and I in that room,” she said. “... He was talking to me. I don’t think other places, other people, get that kind of connection with candidates.”

    ... Iowans care about more than just policy. Among some of the most-asked types of questions the Register compiled were ones in which Iowans tried to get to know candidates in a personal way.

    “Tell us about your immediate family. … Are you married? Do you have children?” Garry Puck of Manning asked Booker at an event in Carroll on April 16.


    It sounds like people who really care about policy getting an every-four-year chance to gander at people who potentially care about policy. In this climate, I'd bet they're starving.

    IMO It doesn't really hold as a "therefore Democratic voters don't really care about impeachment" although it's certainly a datapoint. It sounds, no offense intended, it sounds literally precious. Like, how lucky would other states be to get that?
    posted by petebest at 1:46 PM on May 9, 2019 [4 favorites]


    Trump Says Barr May Decide Whether Mueller Testifies Before Congress (NYT)
    President Trump said on Thursday that he would leave it up to Attorney General William P. Barr to decide whether Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel, may testify before Congress on the Russia investigation.

    His comments were a seeming reversal, since Mr. Trump wrote over the weekend on Twitter that Mr. Mueller should not be allowed to appear before Congress. Mr. Barr has told lawmakers that he has no objection to letting Mr. Mueller talk to them.
    posted by Little Dawn at 1:53 PM on May 9, 2019 [5 favorites]


    Which means that Trump, having publicly broadcast his feelings about the matter, is now confident that Barr knows what he's supposed to do. Watch for gradual reversal/layered obstruction from Barr now.

    Incidentally, Barr spent part of this afternoon in an unusual farewell ceremony for departing AAG Rod Rosenstein. Buzzfeed's Zoe Tillerman attended the somewhat surreal gathering, which included former AG Jeff Sessions, Kellyanne Conway, Special WH Counsel Emmet Flood, and his predecessor, Don McGahn.

    Sessions really laid it on thick, calling Rosenstein one of the "most important leaders in its history", while Barr made jokes about Rosenstein having the deadpan expression at press conferences and "getting the band back together" with him and Mueller as DoJ alumni from his first tenure as AG. Rosenstein, having received standing ovation, told his audience that "this department stands apart from politics" and that he leaves "confident that justice is in good hands".

    Finally, Tillman reports, "Principal Associate DAG Ed O'Callaghan, who gained some fame as the guy with the robust beard standing behind Rosenstein and Barr at press conferences, ends the ceremony by giving Rosenstein a fake beard that he can wear."

    It's not so much a going-away event for Rosenstein as Team Trump welcoming him in preparation for his inevitable subpoenas to testify on Capitol Hill. And presumably Barr is now in possession his original draft of the Comey firing memo.
    posted by Doktor Zed at 2:14 PM on May 9, 2019 [10 favorites]


    Back in the day, it was said that if four people wrote into a TV network to complain they took it seriously. They assumed that if four people were outraged enough to write there must be a million out there who felt the same. I think some of our representatives may feel something similar. So write. One resistbot message may have a greater power than one. If more of us do it the power is increased. It takes a few minutes. I just sent my rep, Pelosi, it’s time for contempt of Congress. The canned replies I ignore. I tell myself I’m doing something. It helps.
    posted by njohnson23 at 2:18 PM on May 9, 2019 [15 favorites]


    Remember that Barr said he didn't mind Mueller personally testifying.
    posted by fluttering hellfire at 2:29 PM on May 9, 2019 [1 favorite]


    a box and a stick and a string and a bear: Inslee, folks. There is no Jay Insee running for president or governing WA.

    Hah, thanks! I wrote Inslee, edited it because someone else made a typo and I didn't do my own fact-checking ;)
    posted by filthy light thief at 2:30 PM on May 9, 2019 [3 favorites]


    There was a sale a while back of Norman Rockwell themed postcards, a whole box, about 12 different type. I bought it and now whenever I want to send a message to a legislator - both positive and negative! - I write out a quick three sentence or so message and then mail it it. Considering postcards get there almost next day and design require the vetting an envelope does.

    I don’t do it to the same offices too much so it can’t be dismissed as cranberry and I figure the whole, all American images help. It’s nt as direct as a phone call, those are for bigger matters, but feedback is feedback.
    posted by The Whelk at 2:42 PM on May 9, 2019 [16 favorites]


    There's nothing more embarrassing than having your postcard design vetted and dismissed as cranberry.
    posted by perspicio at 2:54 PM on May 9, 2019 [29 favorites]


    cranberry?
    posted by SPrintF at 2:56 PM on May 9, 2019 [5 favorites]


    crankery I reckon.
    posted by orrnyereg at 2:57 PM on May 9, 2019 [4 favorites]


    Can Barr (let alone Trump) prevent Mueller from testifying. This Vox article rather gingerly gives weight to the idea that probably, while Mueller is a DOJ employee. It doesn't say what happens if Mueller resigns before his contract is up at the end of the month, nor what any mechanisms would be to stop Mueller responding to a subpoena as an ordinary citizen. I'd also think that any sanctions that could be levied against Mueller even as a DOJ employee would be limited given his tenure has just a fortnight to run.

    Trump has clearly taken on board the argument that if he tries to act to stop Mueller it really doesn't do the obstruction of justice rap sheet much good, which is why he's shifted the onus onto Barr, but does it help him much?

    Either Trump/Barr cave on delivering the report in toto plus Mueller, or it ends up with the Supremes, who get to decide whether the Constitution says what everyone thinks it says. Fun.
    posted by Devonian at 3:16 PM on May 9, 2019 [3 favorites]


    Mark Hosenball, Steve Holland, Reuters: "Donald Trump Jr. seen resisting Senate committee subpoena: sources"
    Donald Trump Jr. is unlikely to comply with a U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee subpoena to testify about his contacts with Russia, two congressional sources said on Thursday as the president publicly defended his eldest son.

    The sources said Trump Jr is expected to cite his Fifth Amendment constitutional right to avoid self-incrimination, a day after reports that the Republican-led panel had issued what is the first publicly known subpoena for a member of the president’s family.
    posted by OnceUponATime at 3:25 PM on May 9, 2019 [10 favorites]


    The sources said Trump Jr is expected to cite his Fifth Amendment constitutional right to avoid self-incrimination, a day after reports that the Republican-led panel had issued what is the first publicly known subpoena for a member of the president’s family.

    You have to show up to use your Fifth Amendment right. This does not let you fail to comply with a subpoena.
    posted by srboisvert at 3:33 PM on May 9, 2019 [21 favorites]


    You have to show up to use your Fifth Amendment right. This does not let you fail to comply with a subpoena.

    That depends. Republicans control the senate committee so they alone can decide whether to issue a subpoena. The Republican chairman could simply throw up his hands and say "What's the point, he's taking the Fifth" and give him a pass.

    If Democrats were running the show, they could at least drag Donnie Jr. in and show his Fifth Amendment face on national TV.
    posted by JackFlash at 3:42 PM on May 9, 2019 [6 favorites]


    Reuters/Ipsos poll: Americans' Support For Impeaching Trump Rises
    The number of Americans who said President Donald Trump should be impeached rose 5 percentage points to 45 percent since mid-April, while more than half said multiple congressional probes of Trump interfered with important government business, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Thursday.[…]

    In addition to the 45 percent pro-impeachment figure, the Monday poll found that 42 percent of Americans said Trump should not be impeached. The rest said they had no opinion.[…]

    It also showed that 57 percent of adults agreed that continued investigations into Trump would interfere with important government business. That included about half of all Democrats and three-quarters of all Republicans.[…]

    The poll also found that 32 percent agreed that Congress treated the Mueller report fairly, while 47 percent disagreed.

    Trump’s popularity was unchanged from a similar poll that ran last week - 39 percent of adults said they approved of Trump, while 55 percent said they disapproved.
    Team Trump is counting on stonewalling until "investigation fatigue" among the electorate convinces the Democrats to back down. It's up to the House Dem leadership to show that they can simultaneously conduct oversight of the Trump administration and pass legislation everyday issues, something that Pelosi's tried to stress in her interviews.
    posted by Doktor Zed at 3:43 PM on May 9, 2019 [32 favorites]


    NYT, Trump Says China Tariffs Will Increase as Trade Deal Hangs in the Balance
    Despite the overture, the administration official said that this round of talks had the dour feeling of heading toward a breakup. There is a growing sense of disappointment in Mr. Xi being unable to follow through on things that Mr. Trump’s trade negotiators thought had been addressed.

    Mr. Trump’s decision to impose 25 percent tariffs on nearly one-third of all Chinese products is the biggest trade action that Mr. Trump has taken so far. The higher tax would hit many consumer products that Americans rely on from Beijing, like seafood, luggage and electronics, raising prices for American companies and their customers across a large portion of sectors.
    ...
    Barring any last-minute decision to rescind the tariff increase, the new 25 percent rate will go into effect at 12:01 a.m. Friday. But the higher tariffs would hit only products that leave China as of May 10, not those already in transit. That could provide some additional time for the two sides to reach an agreement. Mr. Trump could also rescind the tariffs once a deal is reached, retroactively reversing the higher rates.
    Why is there not a "Trump is raising taxes 25% on most of what you buy" ad on every single channel?
    posted by zachlipton at 4:44 PM on May 9, 2019 [14 favorites]


    Oh, but if we say that it’s true, we’re a salesman, so it’s not actually a lie.
    posted by Autumnheart at 5:10 PM on May 9, 2019 [26 favorites]


    I'm slightly confused by tariffs - is this how they play out?

    (a) Trump Government collects a massive amount of new revenue
    (b) American import companies now sell less of their newly expensive product and Americans have more expensive products OR
    (c) American import companies make less profit by not passing on the cost of the new tax
    (d) China exports less depending on how much the higher price effects sales in the US.

    Seems like quite a few down sides for the American public...
    posted by meech at 5:13 PM on May 9, 2019 [2 favorites]


    So ask yourself, if you were Pelosi, what could possibly be the point of holding Barr in contempt at all, beyond the optics of making a brave, principled, but ultimately futile stand? In other words, what would it take to make it matter, in terms of tangible results?

    Congress has the power of inherent contempt, stemming from the constitution, not statute. It's time to revive it. And either fine Barr personally, or literally lock him up in the basement of the Capitol building. Or start impeachment against Barr.

    Pelosi and Democrats cannot keep claiming Trump and Barr are destroying our Democracy...and then doing nothing about it because they're worried about upsetting the Ohio Diner demographic. Either use the tools available, or stop pretending like you're doing anything to hold Trump accountable. You cannot do neither, that's lying to your base, and we know it.
    posted by T.D. Strange at 5:29 PM on May 9, 2019 [36 favorites]


    Tariffs aren't increasing the cost of everything, but certainly washing machines are something everyone is familiar with.
    posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 5:41 PM on May 9, 2019 [3 favorites]


    I work in consumer goods and have spent far too much time dealing with the tariffs.

    The 10% tariff is assessed on the cost of goods when purchased so it does not take into account all the other costs that are incurred by an importer - freight, warehousing etc. The landed cost of a large inexpensive item might change by only a few percent while a small expensive item might be nearly the whole ten percent.

    So that is part of why a 10% tariff does not equate to a 10% increase in retails.

    Some retailers refuse to accept any increases due to the tariff and may not increase retails. In those cases the vendor gets screwed.

    Another reason is that there are certain sticky retails that vendors and retailers do not want to move off of - 9.99 for instance. In that case the retailer may accept a lower margin on that item. This can work with a 10% tariff. It will not happen with a 25%.

    There will also be companies taking cost out of the product and selling it at the same price. You buy widget A for $10 just as you did before bit now there is 15% less material in it.

    Finally companies are moving production out of China. Usually not to the US but to SE Asia and other places.
    posted by nolnacs at 5:59 PM on May 9, 2019 [22 favorites]


    CNN: Judge Fast-Tracks Fight Over Congressional Subpoena of Trump Financial Records
    Judge Amit Mehta plans next week to weigh the major legal issues raised in President Donald Trump's challenge of a congressional subpoena for his accounting firm's records, according to an order issued Thursday -- putting the case on an even faster track than it previously looked to be.

    Congress has subpoenaed Trump and his business' accounting records from the firm Mazars USA, and Trump's personal legal team sued to stop the records from being turned over.

    A hearing is now scheduled for May 14.
    Elsewhere in the courts, Politico's Kyle Cheney reports, "Judge in Roger Stone case seeks to view redacted portions of Mueller report related to STONE and the "dissemination of hacked materials." Comes as Stone is claiming his case isn't related to the Russian hackers and seeking a new judge.*" (Screenshot)

    * Prosecutors said this argument, too, was flawed because the hacking case arose from "common search warrants" such as those that helped indict Stone. (Politico)
    posted by Doktor Zed at 6:12 PM on May 9, 2019 [6 favorites]


    NYT, Giuliani Plans Ukraine Trip to Push for Inquiries That Could Help Trump
    Rudolph W. Giuliani, President Trump’s personal lawyer, is encouraging Ukraine to wade further into sensitive political issues in the United States, seeking to push the incoming government in Kiev to press ahead with investigations that he hopes will benefit Mr. Trump.

    Mr. Giuliani said he plans to travel to Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, in the coming days and wants to meet with the nation’s president-elect to urge him to pursue inquiries that allies of the White House contend could yield new information about two matters of intense interest to Mr. Trump.

    One is the origin of the special counsel’s investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. The other is the involvement of former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s son in a gas company owned by a Ukrainian oligarch.
    ...
    “We’re not meddling in an election, we’re meddling in an investigation, which we have a right to do,” Mr. Giuliani said in an interview on Thursday when asked about the parallel to the special counsel’s inquiry.

    “There’s nothing illegal about it,” he said. “Somebody could say it’s improper. And this isn’t foreign policy — I’m asking them to do an investigation that they’re doing already and that other people are telling them to stop. And I’m going to give them reasons why they shouldn’t stop it because that information will be very, very helpful to my client, and may turn out to be helpful to my government.”
    Well if we're only meddling in an investigation and doing what some could say is improper, that's all ok then. Thanks for letting us know, Rudy.
    posted by zachlipton at 6:16 PM on May 9, 2019 [26 favorites]


    Tariffs aren't increasing the cost of everything, but certainly washing machines are something everyone is familiar with.

    We ordered a fridge that cost $300 more than the original quote that was only a couple months old. The fridge is American-made, but I imagine that costs of foreign steel have raised prices across the board for value-added products, like appliances.

    The bitter punchline is that tariffs go right into the treasury, where they pay for tax cuts given to the wealthiest one percent and to corporations.

    In addition to uselessly antagonizing neighbors, tariffs are a terribly regressive form of taxation that wholly benefits Trump's friends.
    posted by They sucked his brains out! at 6:16 PM on May 9, 2019 [31 favorites]


    We’re not meddling in an election, we’re meddling in an investigation, which we have a right to do

    In the Before Times that would've been an extraordinary statement from a former US associate attorney general and US attorney for the Southern District of New York.
    posted by kirkaracha at 6:32 PM on May 9, 2019 [19 favorites]


    I’m asking them to do an investigation that they’re doing already and that other people are telling them to stop.

    OK, one of you needs to delve into the fever swamps and report back about what the hell he's talking about.
    posted by diogenes at 6:41 PM on May 9, 2019 [2 favorites]


    WSJ's Rebecca Ballhaus: "Mitch McConnell, before declaring the Russia investigation “case closed” on Tuesday, privately conveyed his displeasure to Burr about his decision to subpoena Don Jr., per people familiar with the conversations. But on Thursday, during a lunch attended by Senate Republicans, McConnell expressed full confidence in Burr’s probe as dozens of Republican lawmakers—including members of the intelligence committee Burr leads—criticized the choice to subpoena Don Jr." (WSJ: Burr Draws GOP Scrutiny for Subpoena of Donald Trump J)

    The WaPo backs this up: Decision to Subpoena Donald Trump Jr. Sets Off a Republican Firefight "The abrupt disclosure this week of the Trump Jr. subpoena — issued at least a week ago, according to people familiar with the situation — came shortly after Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) insisted that he considered as closed all matters investigated by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III."

    Naturally leaks spring up when there's infighting like this, but it's interesting to see McConnell back down a little, especially since Senate leadership members Roy Blunt and Richard Shelby came to Burr's defense (while Trump lickspittles Ted Cruz, Tom Tillis, and Rand Paul attacked him).
    posted by Doktor Zed at 6:54 PM on May 9, 2019 [7 favorites]


    rudy’s comments refer to the corruption investigation by ukrainian authorities which may have involved a firm on the board of which biden’s son had a seat, and which, per the fever swamps, candidate biden had bragged publicly about pressuring that government to end when he was vice president. on train just now so cannot find clarifying non-fever-swamp reporting, that was shared in megathread above or last episode. believe the gist was that western states had issues with the prosecutor, and biden voiced them, perhaps threatening to withhold certain aid.

    more interesting to me, immediately, is that this comment/plan from rudy is reported just hours after i read a more recent fever swamp story about president suggesting john kerry should be tried under the logan act for communications with iranian parties. rudy, not being a government employee but talking to ukraine government should be about as susceptible under that act as kerry.
    posted by 20 year lurk at 7:08 PM on May 9, 2019 [4 favorites]


    missed edit. petebest posted wonkette’s coverage may 3.
    posted by 20 year lurk at 7:13 PM on May 9, 2019


    Chelsea Manning was released from jail today: "Manning spent 62 days at the Alexandria Detention Center on civil contempt charges after she refused to answer questions to a federal grand jury investigating WikiLeaks. Her lawyers fear her freedom may be short-lived, though. She was released only because the grand jury’s term expired. Before she left the jail, she received another subpoena demanding her testimony on May 16 to a new grand jury." [AP]
    posted by Iris Gambol at 7:42 PM on May 9, 2019 [21 favorites]


    The Mueller Report explicitly did not exonerate the President of obstruction of justice, but let’s pretend for a moment that it did. Is the investigation now complete? No. During the course of his investigation, Special Counsel Mueller uncovered evidence of new crimes, and chose to refer the investigation of those crimes to other parts of the Department of Justice.

    Actually, it wasn’t just one referral. It was fourteen.

    Fourteen ongoing Federal criminal investigations. Not counting counter-intelligence investigations, classified investigations, or State investigations.

    Contrary to Senator McConnell, this story isn’t over. We’re partway through the first installment of a cinematic universe.
    posted by East Manitoba Regional Junior Kabaddi Champion '94 at 9:06 PM on May 9, 2019 [29 favorites]


    He Founded ‘Students for Trump.’ Now He Could Face Jail Time for Impersonating a Lawyer.
    Meet John Lambert, a living cautionary tale of the Trump era.
    On the eve of the last presidential election, NBC’s “Nightly News” broadcast featured two skinny college students in jackets and ties, discussing the future of American politics. They were co-founders of Students for Trump, a grassroots group that had tapped the social media power of Donald Trump’s populist movement — and of photos of bikini-clad women in MAGA hats — to become the real estate mogul’s standard-bearer on college campuses around the country.
    “I see Donald Trump as reviving the Republican Party,” one of them, John Lambert, declared confidently.
    Last month, Lambert, now 23, showed up in the news again. This time, he had been arrested in Tennessee on charges of wire fraud. According to the federal government, at the same time he was building a nationwide political network and serving as one of the most visible young faces of Trump’s populist movement, Lambert was also posing online as a high-powered New York lawyer, eventually making off with tens of thousands of dollars in fees he stole from unwitting clients seeking legal services.
    Lambert’s rise to prominence and recent indictment offer a cautionary tale of an ambitious young man caught up in Trump’s allure — a get-rich-quick fantasy of the American dream — who allegedly managed to create his own reality on the internet, only to have the real world come barging in.
    It also shines a spotlight on the chaos and confusion of Trump’s ramshackle 2016 campaign, and the cast of characters who sought fame and fortune by riding in his slipstream. Trump ran as a “law and order” candidate. But time and again, the mogul has drawn outlaws and alleged outlaws into his fold, from former campaign chairman Paul Manafort and personal fixer Michael Cohen all the way down. Though he may be the youngest, Lambert is not the first prominent Trump partisan to spend 2016 taunting Hillary Clinton about her supposed criminality, only to end up facing prison time himself instead.
    posted by scalefree at 9:43 PM on May 9, 2019 [18 favorites]


    “Cautionary tale of the Trump era” I think committing wire fraud and impersonating a lawyer is cautionary tale for any era 🤔
    posted by gucci mane at 9:45 PM on May 9, 2019 [13 favorites]


    From the April 30, NYT, Trump Wants to Block Deutsche Bank From Sharing His Financial Records

    I repost this because the author, financial editor for the NYT David Enrich, has done an interview on Australian radio about Trump's relationship to Deutsche bank, which you can listen to here.

    Here's an excerpt from the article:

    Despite the amiable history between Mr. Trump and Deutsche Bank, the lawsuit is not the first court fight between them. In fall 2008, Mr. Trump defaulted on a loan from Deutsche Bank, then sued it, claiming it had caused the financial crisis and engaged in predatory lending against him. Deutsche Bank responded by suing Mr. Trump, demanding that he immediately repay the portion of the loan, $40 million, that he had personally guaranteed.

    The litigation lasted into 2010. After the suit was settled, Deutsche Bank resumed lending to Mr. Trump, dispensing more than $300 million to him over the next several years.


    So Donald Trump's name is mud with New York financiers because he defaults on loans, stiffs his contractors and flings litigation like a monkey at a zoo. No one will give him a loan. Except Deutche Bank. Then when he treats them to the same behaviour that got him shitlisted on Wall Street, well, they can't stay angry with him. They give him another fucking loan!

    This absolutely reeks of corruption. At the very least it explodes the myth that he's a successful businessman. Most likely it's all about washing rubles.

    No one ever goes to prison for this stuff though.
    posted by adept256 at 12:26 AM on May 10, 2019 [37 favorites]


    This absolutely reeks of corruption. At the very least it explodes the myth that he's a successful businessman. Most likely it's all about washing rubles.

    Don't forget his banker at DB was Justin Kennedy, Justice Kennedy's son.
    posted by PenDevil at 12:35 AM on May 10, 2019 [52 favorites]


    "Washing Rubles" was my favorite Squeeze song from that No Collusion You're the Puppet album.
    posted by petebest at 5:13 AM on May 10, 2019 [41 favorites]


    Democrats Weigh New Impeachment Rationale (Politico (via))

    Politico: “Democrats know that impeachment is a losing proposition against President Donald Trump right now. But there’s another rationale for launching impeachment that has some Democrats reconsidering the idea — getting access to the sensitive documents and testimony that Trump’s team is withholding.”

    Judges have repeatedly ruled that Congress has a greater claim to sensitive government documents and personal information when it can point to an ongoing legal matter, instead of just a congressional investigation or legislative debate. And impeachment would give lawmakers that legal matter — the process is essentially a court procedure run by Congress where the House brings charges and the Senate holds the trial.”


    Uh, sure. Yeah. That's good too. Whatever does it for ya. *checks watch*
    posted by petebest at 5:22 AM on May 10, 2019 [13 favorites]


    Apologies, the article David Enrich talks about in the interview is this one:

    Decade in the Red: Trump Tax Figures Show Over $1 Billion in Business Losses

    Newly obtained tax information reveals that from 1985 to 1994, Donald J. Trump’s businesses were in far bleaker condition than was previously known.

    ...

    In fact, year after year, Mr. Trump appears to have lost more money than nearly any other individual American taxpayer, The Times found when it compared his results with detailed information the I.R.S. compiles on an annual sampling of high-income earners. His core business losses in 1990 and 1991 — more than $250 million each year — were more than double those of the nearest taxpayers in the I.R.S. information for those years.

    Not only is he a bad businessman, he's the worst by a wide margin.

    Donald twarted a response to this article explaining that's what smart people did to dodge taxes. All out in the open, he can't stop confessing.
    posted by adept256 at 5:37 AM on May 10, 2019 [19 favorites]


    I get that Rudy is going to Kiev to dig up dirt on Biden, but why does he need to go there to research "the origin of the special counsel’s investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election"?
    posted by diogenes at 5:37 AM on May 10, 2019 [1 favorite]


    why does he need to go there to research "the origin of the special counsel’s investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election"?

    That's mostly bullshit, an attempt to create a new bullshit narrative. But Manafort is still in a joint defense agreement, so who knows? House Foreign Affairs ought to subpoena him today.
    posted by holgate at 5:48 AM on May 10, 2019 [3 favorites]


    I get that Rudy is going to Kiev to dig up dirt on Biden, but why does he need to go there to research "the origin of the special counsel’s investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election"?

    Because they're playing to base's conspiracism, which has given them plenty of cover so far. Either they have some nonsense that'e going to fit to things -- "Anti-Russian fascists in Ukraine funded the Steele Dossier with evil Hillary." -- or they're counting on the base to create the narrative for them.
    posted by kewb at 5:59 AM on May 10, 2019 [2 favorites]


    why does he need to go there to research "the origin of the special counsel’s investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election"?

    Rudy is using his NYT contacts to spread his BS Mueller report response.

    Judd Legum: The Rudy Report, Giuliani's response to the Mueller report, laundered through the front page of the NYT today AGAIN

    More from Legum on this here.
    posted by PenDevil at 6:03 AM on May 10, 2019 [7 favorites]


    A minor point, just more proof of what we already know about the jerk, but: Vox: How golf explains Donald Trump. Seriously.

    Wherein Sean Illing interviews Rick Reilly, a sportswriter, who has just come out with an entire book (Commander in Cheat) that's apparently about Trump's NPD manifesting in his behavior on golf courses.

    Wait til you get to the story about him claiming an 11-year-old kid's ball as his own because it was in the better position . . . .
    posted by soundguy99 at 6:17 AM on May 10, 2019 [35 favorites]


    If you're passing on the Golf article because sportsball - don't. It's great.

    Trump’s cheating at golf might seem trivial compared to his political shenanigans, but there’s another way to think about it: Golf is a game built on self-governance, Reilly says, and in that way, it’s like a “Rorschach test for your morality.” And some of the stories about Trump are truly absurd. “In a weird way,” Reilly told me, they “say as much about Trump as almost anything else we know about him, because it cuts to the core of his character.”

    ... Here’s
    [a story as an example]: While Trump was meeting with Kim [Jong Un] in Singapore, a club championship was held at Trump International, a course Trump built near Mar-a-Lago in Florida for his rich people friends to join. So anyway, a month later, Trump’s there at his golf course, with the Secret Service and the SWAT team guys and all that stuff. And he sees Ted Virtue, one of the financiers behind the movie Green Book.

    Virtue — who wouldn’t speak to me directly, but the story was reported by Golf.com and I confirmed it through two other members of the club — was playing with his kid, who I think is 10 or 11 years old. He [Trump] sees Ted on the 12th hole and decides to drive his cart over there. He tells Ted: Congrats on winning the club championship, but you didn’t really win it because I was out of town.

    Ted tries to laugh it off, but Trump is dead serious. Trump says, “We’re going to play these last six holes for the championship.” And Ted’s like, “I’m playing with my son, but thanks anyway.” But Trump says, “No, your son can play too.” So they end up playing.

    They get to a hole with a big pond on it. Both Ted and his son hit the ball on the green, and Trump hits his in the water. By the time they get to the hole, Trump is lining up the kid’s ball. Only now it’s his ball and the caddie has switched it. The kid’s like, “Daddy, that’s my ball.”

    But Trump’s caddie goes, “No, this is the president’s ball; your ball went in the water.” Ted and his son look at each other confused, not sure if this is really happening. And Trump’s caddie says, “This is the president’s ball. I don’t know what to tell you.”

    Trump makes that putt, wins one up, and declares himself the club champion


    Truly a fucked up dude.
    posted by petebest at 6:32 AM on May 10, 2019 [94 favorites]


    why does he need to go there to research "the origin of the special counsel’s investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election"?

    Of course it'll be easier to meet with Russian intelligence operatives there.

    And Giuliani's already been making waves there, Newsweek reports: How Rudy Giuliani’s Unfounded Claims of an Anti-Trump Conspiracy In Ukraine May Have Ousted an Ambassador
    Ukraine’s Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko, who in March claimed that the U.S. ambassador Marie Yovanovitch had given him a list of individuals who should not be prosecuted, has been meeting regularly with Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani. Some of the meetings took place in Poland, people familiar with the matter said, including on the sidelines of a U.S.-led summit on the Middle East that took place in Poland’s capital Warsaw in February.[…]

    In the wake of these meetings, Lutsenko has been publicly criticizing ambassador Yovanovitch, who was appointed by the Obama administration. Conservative commentators like Laura Ingraham also reported that Republicans were concerned that ambassador Yovanovitch was biased against Trump. The president’s son Donald Trump Jr. tweeted in favor of the ambassador’s removal, calling her “Obama’s Ambassador to Ukraine.”

    This week, the Trump administration recalled Yovanovitch two months before her scheduled departure. Voicing what appeared to be a number of theories without evidence, Giuliani told Newsweek that the ambassador was “fired” because the embassy under her direction had conspired with George Soros to have a key anti-corruption investigation quashed.
    Pompeo gets to purge another career diplomat from the State Department while the Trumpworld axis/fringe-right claims another scalp.
    posted by Doktor Zed at 6:43 AM on May 10, 2019 [5 favorites]


    All out in the open, he can't stop confessing.

    Well, given his track record of living a life of stupendous privilege and adoration by others despite his own complete incompetence and corruption—never spending a day in jail for any of it—I can't say I blame his distorted thinking entirely on him.
    posted by Rykey at 7:03 AM on May 10, 2019 [13 favorites]


    It's that, or it's the air pollution -- Researchers Now Have Even More Proof That Air Pollution Can Cause Dementia (Aaron Reuben for Mother Jones, May 2, 2019; which is a follow-up to an article from 2015).


    In other news, Alabama's senate is a fooking mess: Amid Chaos, Alabama Senate Postpones Vote On Nation's Strictest Abortion Ban (Laurel Wamsley for NPR, May 10, 2019)
    Shouting broke out on the Senate floor when the rape and incest exemption was removed without a roll call vote. Troy Public Radio's Kyle Gassiott reports from Montgomery: "Democrats loudly challenged Republicans, saying blocking the amendment violates Senate rules. ... These exceptions were added by the Senate Judiciary Committee over the objections of the bill's sponsor, who proposed it with the eventual goal of challenging Roe v. Wade in the U.S. Supreme Court."
    Alabama Republicans really want to take Roe v. Wade back to the U.S. Supreme Court, given its current conservative majority.
    posted by filthy light thief at 7:08 AM on May 10, 2019 [10 favorites]


    And Trump’s caddie says, “This is the president’s ball. I don’t know what to tell you.”

    So...a story about Trump's lack thereof involves people named Virtue. Once again, come on, writers. Come. On.

    In other news, I find myself taking great comfort from even the smallest signs of resistance nowadays. For example, a Facebook posting by one of Austin's local channels about B-52s landing in Qatar came with the line "President Donald J Trump has not offered specific details of the threat allegedly posed by Iran."

    To me, that "allegedly" is striking, and I feel like even a few months ago we wouldn't have seen something like that.
    posted by lord_wolf at 7:45 AM on May 10, 2019 [26 favorites]


    From the golf article:
    Sean Illing: What happened with his big golf venture in Puerto Rico?

    Rick Reilly: Before he was president, he went down to Puerto Rico and took a contract to help a course there called Cocoa Beach outside San Juan. He convinced these people that he was going to come down and bring all his celebrity friends and he was going to get a lot of press for them, and he was going to get their business rolling again.

    Well, it didn’t roll. In fact, they lost money. And they said, “Okay, we’re quitting. We’re going to call it bankruptcy.” Trump said, “No, you need to take out a loan from the government,” so they took out a $32 million loan. And then, again, they lost money. Trump pulled up stakes and left, and the government was stuck with a $32 million unpaid loan.

    Fast-forward to the time of his presidency, when Puerto Rico is devastated by a natural disaster, he turns his back on them again. I’m not saying these two things are linked. I’m just saying twice he’s turned his back on the same group of American citizens.


    Of course it's about golf. I didn't even think about it. There's a whole other category of finanical and political crime to be accounted for in all his golf trips.
    posted by petebest at 7:45 AM on May 10, 2019 [23 favorites]


    Pompeo gets to purge another career diplomat from the State Department while the Trumpworld axis/fringe-right claims another scalp.

    She could have been axed in 2016. Ambassadorships are pretty much a presidential prerogative and are frequently given out as rewards for campaign donation bundlers (also they are largely ceremonial wastes of money). I'd think it was weird that there was an Obama carryover in the Ukraine except with the Trump admin it was probably just simple incompetence and laziness.
    posted by srboisvert at 7:49 AM on May 10, 2019 [2 favorites]


    I'm amazed that she wasn't one of the ambassadors Trump fired on Day One.

    Also, it's not "the Ukraine" -- that's a relic of Ukrainian people and territory being controlled by other forces, who consistently used the "the" to make it seem like it was just sort of a nebulous region, like "the Midwest", and therefore had no sovereignty.
    posted by Etrigan at 7:55 AM on May 10, 2019 [29 favorites]


    Ambassadorships are pretty much a presidential prerogative and are frequently given out as rewards for campaign donation bundlers (also they are largely ceremonial wastes of money).

    The Australian ambassador to Great Britain, a fellow called Alexander Downer, heard this story from a bloke down the pub, that the Russians had all this dirt on Hillary Clinton and they were going to give it to Trump. That was George Papadopoulos. He wrote a letter to ASIO (Aussie CIA), who tipped off the FBI. And that is the oranges of the FBI investigation that Trump wants to know about.

    In general I agree, it's a ceremonial waste of money. Downer is basically retired. But on this occasion it was priceless.

    The Australian ambassador became the unwitting catalyst of the investigation when he had a late-night conversation in a London wine bar in May, 2016, with young Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos.

    For real, we have an ambassador to thank for this.
    posted by adept256 at 8:17 AM on May 10, 2019 [24 favorites]


    They get to a hole with a big pond on it. Both Ted and his son hit the ball on the green, and Trump hits his in the water. By the time they get to the hole, Trump is lining up the kid’s ball. Only now it’s his ball and the caddie has switched it. The kid’s like, “Daddy, that’s my ball.”

    But Trump’s caddie goes, “No, this is the president’s ball; your ball went in the water.” Ted and his son look at each other confused, not sure if this is really happening. And Trump’s caddie says, “This is the president’s ball. I don’t know what to tell you.”

    Trump makes that putt, wins one up, and declares himself the club champion



    Just in case you are unfamiliar with golf and think it is easy to mix up little white balls that all look alike you should know that golf has a system for this.

    Golf balls have brand names on them and also numbers. So when you start a round of golf you are supposed to make sure your ball is different from other players to avoid this potential confusion as you may not always be able to keep your eye on your ball (hitting over trees, losing sight of it in the rough, traps or behind undulations in the ground). So if you are playing the same brand of golf ball (say Titleist for example) as another player then you make sure your ball has a different number on it.

    A caddy who wants to cheat for their boss then has to make sure he pockets matching balls so that they can miraculously find balls when the real ball is lost or throw them onto the fairway when the real ball is out of sight in the rough.

    Now it is possible that the situation with Trump was one where the players were hitting a green that was out of sight from where they swinging and only the caddy was positioned to see where they landed (caddies sometimes hand off a club and then walk ahead to a vantage point where they can see the entire trajectory for ball finding purposes) but it should have been easily resolved by simply looking at the ball but it would require calling out the caddy on his lie.

    (I caddied my way through my high school years to fund my expensive BMX parts breaking habit. I knew lots of caddies who would cheat for their guys even just in no-stakes regular weekend club play. Also as an irrelevant but important to me aside the highlight of my caddying career was caddying in the same foursome as Calvin Peete in the Canadian Open Pro Am in '82. Peete at the time was the most successful African American golfer in history and just off several big tournament wins. Our gallery of fans was never more than 10 people. Fuzzy Zoeller had hundreds despite not having won anything in ages. Peete's drives were simply mind blowingly amazing and gave me an appreciation for how large a step jump it was from being a good golfer to being a pro. Peete's caddy caddied barefoot and was a pretty cool hippie who had just made about $70K in prize shares in the months before the Pro Am. I made $50 which was 3-4X what I normally made.)
    posted by srboisvert at 8:19 AM on May 10, 2019 [29 favorites]


    This absolutely reeks of corruption. At the very least it explodes the myth that he's a successful businessman. Most likely it's all about washing rubles.

    No one ever goes to prison for this stuff though.


    There's another huge money laundering scandal in Europe, with ties to Putin, and it looks a lot like people will go to jail in that. (There's also some sort of tie to the Deutsche Bank thing, but this is all very complicated and confusing to me. I'm just happy there are consequences for being a criminal.

    About ambassadors: career diplomats are a whole other species than vanity ambassadors, and normally, a president won't send a donor to a less than charming and very complicated place like Ukraine.
    posted by mumimor at 8:30 AM on May 10, 2019 [12 favorites]


    Alexander Downer was also more than a typical ambassador. He was leader of Australia’s Liberal Party (not our definition of liberal, center-right) for two years and foreign minister for 12 years previously. Which is why Pap and Rs trying to make him into some deep state stooge to help Clinton is so ridiculous.
    posted by chris24 at 8:30 AM on May 10, 2019 [15 favorites]


    The GoFundMe campaign to build the border wall promised to start construction in April. Now they've blown through that deadline, and donors are fuming.
    posted by porn in the woods at 8:39 AM on May 10, 2019 [18 favorites]


    a Snapshot of a country

    American kids are 70 percent more likely to die before adulthood than kids in other rich countries

    More Americans have died at school in the last two years then in war zones.
    posted by The Whelk at 8:46 AM on May 10, 2019 [86 favorites]


    I promise I will try harder in the future. The real link to the David Enrich interview:

    Trump's taxes and the Deutsche Bank connection

    Sorry. I wouldn't want anyone to miss it just because I'm clumsy.
    posted by adept256 at 8:59 AM on May 10, 2019 [4 favorites]


    > The GoFundMe campaign to build the border wall promised to start construction in April. Now they've blown through that deadline, and donors are fuming.

    With donors like this, why wouldn't you run repeated grifts?
    Making donors more nervous is that Kolfage has a history of participating in questionable endeavors. He was a prolific operator of hoax pages on Facebook, and money he raised in the past to help veterans’ programs in hospitals never actually went to those hospitals. [...] “I knew Brian had some previous shady GoFundMe campaigns,” Greene emailed. “I felt more confident when he brought on other big names to work with him, I haven’t seen a tweet from ANY of them.
    Like, seriously? You knew this person had run FB hoaxes and scammed money meant for vets, but this time it was going to be different? Fool me once, etc. etc.
    posted by RedOrGreen at 9:02 AM on May 10, 2019 [27 favorites]


    Ambassadorships are pretty much a presidential prerogative and are frequently given out as rewards for campaign donation bundlers (also they are largely ceremonial wastes of money).

    Marie Louise Yovanovitch isn’t some political bigwig donor like football mogul Woody Johnson, now the Ambassador of the United States to the Court of St James's (god help us); she’s a career foreign service office with over forty years of experience and expertise in this highly sensitive region, including ambassadorships to Kyrgyzstan and Armenia. Who knows, maybe Tillerson kept her around as much because of her veteran status as his inability to find a Trumpist replacement. Pompeo has no such scruples, however, and it looks like he and Giuliani are in the same page in getting rid of her as a member of the so-called Obama Deep State. And if there’s an iron law about Trump’s appointments, it’s that however bad the previous ones are, the replacements are worse.

    Foreign Policy has more on her sandbagging: U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Recalled in ‘Political Hit Job,’ Lawmakers Say—Marie Yovanovitch stepping down as ambassador follows attacks from both right-wing media figures in the United States and a senior Ukrainian official. n.b. “Yovanovitch’s early dismissal will leave the U.S. Embassy in Kiev without a top diplomat at an important juncture in Ukraine, during the transition of newly elected President Volodymyr Zelensky.”
    posted by Doktor Zed at 9:25 AM on May 10, 2019 [15 favorites]


    Complicating the effort further is that it’s not that easy to find private land right on the border where a wall can be built.

    Ah, so people donated due to emotion, not based on any sound financial investment research. Got it.
    posted by Melismata at 9:27 AM on May 10, 2019 [2 favorites]




    You knew this person had run FB hoaxes and scammed money meant for vets, but this time it was going to be different?

    They're not sending their best.
    posted by banshee at 9:47 AM on May 10, 2019 [7 favorites]


    Looks like this has gone even scammier than the Arizona border fence construction fund. I mentioned this some months back in a different thread - They actually tried something like that in Arizona. A fund was established by the state legislature to take contributions to build a border wall along private property in border areas. They thought they could raise as much as $50 million. Six years later, they closed the fund after collecting... $270,000. The crowdfunding idea for a wall is laughable.
    posted by azpenguin at 10:03 AM on May 10, 2019 [8 favorites]


    Biden looking for ‘middle ground’ climate policy

    "My starting position is halfway between the continuation and extinction of humanity. Now let's negotiate."
    posted by Rust Moranis at 10:24 AM on May 10, 2019 [42 favorites]


    "Donald twarted a response to this article explaining that's what smart people did to dodge taxes. All out in the open, he can't stop confessing."

    This is why his campaign people at one point took a look at his taxes and said "nope, I get it now, we're burying this." It's a catch-22 - admit you're not anywhere near as successful as you claimed or tell the country that you lied flagrantly to the taxman to save face. He's narcissistic enough to do the latter and now he has, even without the most recent tax returns.
    posted by Selena777 at 10:26 AM on May 10, 2019 [7 favorites]


    Since the 1970s, everything has gotten worse and worse,” said Ms. Piven, who is now 86. There were very clear reasons for this. “Poor people,” she said, had been “humiliated” and “shut up.” Those in power now are “crazy.”

    “But they’re also evil,” she continued. “And they will be evil because they are greedy.” Only one thing would stop them, she said. “We have to be noisy, and difficult and ungovernable.” (NYT)
    posted by The Whelk at 10:28 AM on May 10, 2019 [38 favorites]


    Miami Herald dives into the dirty details of Mar-a-Lago-gate: Feds Open Foreign-Money Investigation into Trump Donor Cindy Yang
    The FBI has opened a public corruption investigation into Republican donor and South Florida massage-parlor entrepreneur Li “Cindy” Yang, focusing on whether she illegally funneled money from China into the president’s re-election effort or committed other potential campaign-finance violations, the Miami Herald has learned.

    Investigators obtained a federal grand jury subpoena Tuesday seeking records from Bing Bing Peranio, an employee of Yang’s family’s spa business who last year contributed a maximum $5,400 to President Donald Trump’s re-election effort, according to a source familiar with the probe. Yang came to Peranio’s workplace and helped her write the check, Peranio told reporters from The New York Times, who first reported the contribution. Peranio told The Times she didn’t “say no.”

    The subpoena asked for any records related to that March 5, 2018, donation and possibly other contributions between 2014 and the present, said the source, who asked for anonymity to discuss an ongoing federal investigation.
    The eminently quotable Peranio told the Herald, “It’s not just me. I don’t know why I always get it.” But when the reporter asked her she had been paid back for her donation to the Trump campaign, she said she could not hear the question and hung up on them.
    posted by Doktor Zed at 10:37 AM on May 10, 2019 [13 favorites]




    Reuters: Pompeo to Raise 'Aggressive, Destabilizing' Russian Actions with Putin, Lavrov
    Pompeo would reiterate U.S. concerns about Russia’s roles in Venezuela and Syria and its breach of the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, as well as Russian attempts to meddle in U.S. elections, the official told reporters in previewing Pompeo’s trip to Moscow and Sochi next week.

    “We have many areas of disagreement with the Russian government and the secretary will have a very candid conversation about concerns in our bilateral relationship,” the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
    Why on earth is this briefing being provided only anonymously? Is the State Dept. flack leaking this because it’s otherwise confidential?! Are they afraid of being associated with a hard line against Russia when Trump is having chummy 90-minute calls with Putin?

    Incidentally, Foreign Policy has an example of Mike Pompeo’s idea of confronting Russian aggression: On Eve of Russia Trip, Pompeo Squelches Criticism of Moscow—State Department quietly takes down a statement blaming Russia for coup attempt in Montenegro.
    posted by Doktor Zed at 11:20 AM on May 10, 2019 [6 favorites]


    This is old, but it's worth bringing up again: Donald Trump Used Legally Dubious Method to Avoid Paying Taxes

    In the nineties, Trump accrued over a billion dollars in debt from his failed casinos. Banks forgave him over $900 million in debt, in exchange for repayment on part of the money he owed them. The IRS considers forgiven debt to be taxable income.

    What does Trump do? He pays back the debt to the banks. At least on paper. He gives them a partnership interest (future stake in profits) in the casinos that have already failed and are ready to be dissolved. He pays them back with something everyone agrees is worthless.

    Since he's paid by his debts, he can now write those debts off in future taxes. Who said this was legal? No one. Even Trump's own tax lawyers told him it likely wasn't. No one thought this was a valid loophole. He simply made an argument that a crazy notion was legal when it clearly wasn't, and then banked on not being called on it.
    posted by xammerboy at 11:24 AM on May 10, 2019 [25 favorites]


    US Govt and DC authorities may be in the process of seizing the Venezuelan embassy in DC, amid clashes between protesters there. < WaPost
    posted by Harry Caul at 11:27 AM on May 10, 2019 [3 favorites]


    Also, the $60 million in income from interest Trump claimed one year? Who gives someone that kind of money (probably around half a billion) to keep it sitting around in their bank account doing nothing but collecting interest for the account holder? Where did that money come from and what happened to it?
    posted by xammerboy at 11:36 AM on May 10, 2019 [10 favorites]


    Also, the $60 million in income from interest Trump claimed one year? Who gives someone that kind of money (probably around half a billion) to keep it sitting around in their bank account doing nothing but collecting interest for the account holder?

    posted by xammerboy at 11:36 AM on May 10 [2 favorites +] [!]


    Proceeds from some types of mutual funds (e.g., bonds) are designated as interest, so if you park a huge bunch of money in one, the proceeds are documented on a 1099-INT form.
    posted by Mental Wimp at 12:24 PM on May 10, 2019 [6 favorites]


    NYT, Many Hospitals Charge Double or Even Triple What Medicare Would Pay
    Across the nation, hospitals treating patients with private health insurance were paid overall 2.4 times the Medicare rates in 2017, according to the RAND analysis. The difference was largest for outpatient care, where private prices were almost triple what Medicare would have paid.
    This is both central to the argument for why we need Medicare for All and central to the problems with enacting it: we have nothing close to an idea of what hospitals actually should be paid.
    posted by zachlipton at 12:56 PM on May 10, 2019 [18 favorites]


    And medical costs vary from town to town, state to state (NPR, April 27, 2016) -- some make sense (Alaska is expensive), some less so (Oregon: higher; Nevada: lower).


    I'm really looking forward to the day that the FCC isn't an extension of private interests: FCC says carriers failed Florida after hurricane—but lets them off the hook -- FCC finds "voluntary" commitment didn't work, proposes new... voluntary commitment. (Jon Brodkin for Ars Technica, May 10, 2019)
    Mobile carriers' response to the hurricane was so bad that even FCC Chairman Ajit Pai—who normally avoids any criticism of the industry he's paid to regulate—called it "completely unacceptable" in October 2018 (Ars Technica). Outages left many customers without cell service for more than a week, as Verizon and others struggled to restore service.

    Pai initiated an investigation and released the FCC Public Safety Bureau's resulting report yesterday (FCC.gov). The report recommends changes that carriers can make to improve future hurricane responses, and Pai said he is "call[ing] on wireless phone companies, other communications providers, and power companies to quickly implement the recommendations contained in this report."

    But following the report's recommendations is optional for the carriers because the FCC didn't announce any plans to require them to implement the changes. The FCC investigation found that carriers failed to follow their own previous voluntary roaming commitments, unnecessarily prolonging outages, yet the FCC is still relying entirely on voluntary measures to prevent recurrences.
    Emphasis mine. Oh, and Ajit Pai killed rules that could have helped Florida recover from hurricane -- Pai blames carriers, but he repealed rules that were spurred by Hurricane Sandy. (Jon Brodkin for Ars Technica, Oct. 18, 2018).

    Back to the present: Ajit Pai refuses to investigate Frontier’s horrible telecom service -- Long outages and bad customer service mar Frontier's government-funded network. (Jon Brodkin for Ars Technica, May 8, 2019)
    An investigation by the Minnesota Commerce Department already found that Frontier's network has "frequent and lengthy" phone and Internet outages, that Frontier has failed to provide refunds or bill credits to customers even when outages lasted for months, that Frontier is guilty of frequent billing errors that caused customers to pay for services they didn't order, and that it has failed to promptly provide telephone service to all customers who request it. When we wrote about the investigation in January, Frontier said it "strongly disagrees" with the findings but did not dispute any of the specific allegations.

    The Minnesota Attorney General's office is investigating (Star Tribune) whether Frontier violated state consumer-protection laws, and the state's two US senators asked Pai to have the FCC investigate as well. When Pai wrote back to the senators, he said that he has asked his staff to "monitor" the state investigation but made no commitment to have the FCC investigate, too. Pai's response and the senators' letter were posted on the FCC's website this week (FCC.gov).

    "For a chairman who is so concerned with rooting out waste, fraud and abuse, it's baffling that the commission tasked with overseeing billions of dollars in public money is declining to investigate the more than a thousand allegations of poor service by a company that receives that public money to provide those services," US Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minn.) told Ars in a statement today. (The Minnesota investigation was based partly on more than 1,000 consumer complaints and statements.)
    Hear hear, Sen. Smith!
    posted by filthy light thief at 1:01 PM on May 10, 2019 [23 favorites]


    NPR has a scoop on the Butina affair: Exclusive: Documents Detail Meetings Of Russians With Treasury, Federal Reserve
    Alexander Torshin, then a Russian central banker, brought his protégée, Maria Butina, for meetings with senior officials and even sought another with the then-chair of the Fed, the documents confirm. Agency officials described what happened before and since in internal materials obtained by NPR under the Freedom of Information Act.[…]

    According to that newly revealed account, the discussion wasn't so much about banking as about denying Russia's involvement in the shoot-down of a Malaysia Airlines jetliner and amplifying Torshin's support for guns.

    "The meeting was supposed to be about economics, but the guy just went on and on about how the Russians didn't shoot down MH17 for an hour or so," the Treasury Department official wrote, referring to the Malaysia Airlines flight. "The guy was also a gun fanatic and said he was a 'life member of the NRA.' In fact I think he was even in town for personal business tied to the NRA."[…]

    Following the approval of an adviser, [Vice Chairman Stanley] Fischer took the meeting on April 8, 2015, without further investigation into Torshin's background.

    "They are in the United States to attend the NRA's annual meeting," the meeting's official notes read. Both Russians pointed out, as part of their introduction, that they were "life members" of the NRA. This meeting did turn to economic issues, including discussions about Russian credit and inflation.
    As with the Veselnitskaya Trump Tower meeting, the tradecraft angle here is not about what Torshavn and Butina accomplished from a single meeting but rather the fact that they could arrange a meeting at all. Down the road, this can be used as leverage with the attendees or with other prospectives. At least the Fed officials recorded contemporary memoranda, but at the time, Torshin's organized crime links had already been reported in the press, making him a highly questionable figure to host a meeting with in the first place.
    posted by Doktor Zed at 1:02 PM on May 10, 2019 [15 favorites]


    May your grief and anger be a catalyst to action: Proposed Rule Could Evict 55,000 Children From Subsidized Housing (Pam Fessler for NPR, May 10, 2019)
    Tens of thousands of poor children — all of them American citizens or legal residents — could lose their housing under a new rule proposed today by the Trump Administration.

    The rule is intended to prevent individuals who are in the country illegally from receiving federal housing aid, which the administration argues should only go to help legal residents or citizens.

    But the proposal targets 25,000 families that now receive such aid because they are of "mixed" status, which means that at least one member of the family is undocumented while the others are citizens or legal residents. These families now pay higher rents to account for their mixed status.

    Under the new rule, those families would lose all of their housing aid, such as vouchers and public housing.

    An impact analysis by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), which proposed the rule, acknowledges that the change could have a devastating impact. It says that 108,000 people would be affected. About 70% of them are citizens or legal residents and three quarters of those — 55,000 — are children.
    Apparently Ben Carson's spin is that this would free up housing funding for other in-need Americans, but that's questionable.

    The administration is accepting public comment on the proposed rule until July 9. Not that they'll actually listen to public comments.
    posted by filthy light thief at 1:15 PM on May 10, 2019 [27 favorites]


    It's not just questionable, it's patently false.

    "Restricting those subsidies to families in which all members are legal U.S. residents would cost an additional $193 million to $227 million a year because entire families would receive higher subsidies, the analysis said.

    Given that Congress is unlikely to allocate the additional money, HUD probably would be compelled to “reduce the quantity and quality of assisted housing in response to higher costs,” the analysis found."
    posted by Selena777 at 1:19 PM on May 10, 2019 [12 favorites]


    According to that newly revealed account, the discussion wasn't so much about banking as about denying Russia's involvement in the shoot-down of a Malaysia Airlines jetliner

    This is as transparent a fig leaf as Natalia Veselnitskaya coming to Trump Tower to talk about "Russian adoptions". In immediate response to shooting down MH17 the US and EU tightened their sanctions programs on Russia. That round of sanctions covered arms, finance (including sanctions and capital market restrictions on six Russian banks), energy and energy sector technology.
    posted by peeedro at 1:45 PM on May 10, 2019 [10 favorites]


    Trump Labor Officials Are Secretly Using Forced Arbitration to Get Corporations Off the Hook (Zachary Clopton and David Noll, Slate)
    Behind closed doors, Trump’s agencies are engaged in a quieter form of deregulation that is as hard to detect as it is insidious. We call it the “arbitration shell game,” and it works like this: First, a corporation pushes its employees or customers into arbitration, limiting their ability to sue. Then, federal agencies refuse to exercise their own enforcement authority because employees or customers “agreed” to arbitrate. The result is that corporations operate free of accountability, even when their actions affect thousands of people.
    posted by ZeusHumms at 1:58 PM on May 10, 2019 [18 favorites]


    AP: US-China Talks Break Up After US Raises Tariffs
    A White House official, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly on the matter, confirmed that the talks had concluded for the day but could not say when they would resume.

    Hours earlier, the Trump administration hiked tariffs on $200 billion worth of Chinese imports to 25% from 10%, escalating tensions between Beijing and Washington. China’s Commerce Ministry vowed to impose “necessary countermeasures” but gave no details.

    The tariff increase went ahead even after American and Chinese negotiators briefly met in Washington on Thursday and again on Friday, seeking to end a dispute that has disrupted billions of dollars in trade and shaken global financial markets.
    Trump went on Twitter to brag about his "very strong" relationship with Xi but threatened the new US tariffs "may or may not be removed depending on what happens with respect to future negotiations!"

    And why did Trump unexpectedly disrupt the negotiations with his 25% tariff tweet last Friday? Politico's Elena Johnson reports: "On China, per sources, POTUS was given overly optimistic reports about progress of trade talks in an effort to keep him patient as talks dragged on -- so he thought U.S. was closer to a deal than it was. Helps to explain the sudden backlash."
    posted by Doktor Zed at 2:09 PM on May 10, 2019 [11 favorites]


    So...a story about Trump's lack thereof involves people named Virtue. Once again, come on, writers. Come. On.

    I just watched an episode of Veep where the president sending one embarrassing tweet causes a big scandal and the administration puts trade sanctions on China. So maybe that's the timeline we're in.
    Except with many, many more terrible tweets.
    Why can't we be stuck in a West Wing timeline?
    posted by kirkaracha at 2:10 PM on May 10, 2019 [3 favorites]


    The No President Is Above the Law Act would pause the statute of limitations for any federal offense committed by a sitting president. Today, House Judiciary Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), along with Representatives Ted Deutch (D-FL) and Eric Swalwell (D-CA) of the House Judiciary Committee, introduced the No President Is Above the Law Act, which would pause the statute of limitations for any federal offense committed by a sitting president, whether it was committed before or during the president’s term of office. This legislation would ensure that presidents can be held accountable for criminal conduct just like every other American and not use the presidency to avoid legal consequences.

    While some argue there is nothing to prevent a president from being indicted while in office, the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) within the Department of Justice and others take the opposing view. In fact, Special Counsel Mueller cited the OLC opinion as the reason he believed he could neither accuse President Trump of a crime nor seek his indictment. He explained that "while the [OLC] opinion concludes that a sitting President may not be prosecuted, it recognizes that a criminal investigation during the President’s term is permissible. The OLC opinion also recognizes that a President does not have immunity after he leaves office."

    ... Most federal criminal offenses carry a five-year statute of limitations. Therefore, a president who is not prosecuted while in office for a crime they may have committed—before or during the presidency—could end up escaping liability altogether if the statute of limitations runs out before their term is over, especially if elected to a second term. This would make a mockery of the rule of law. The No President Is Above the Law Act would ensure that every person—no matter his or her title or office—is held accountable under our laws.


    Yes, I know this won't be passed by the Senate but I am happy to see this nonetheless.
    posted by Bella Donna at 2:38 PM on May 10, 2019 [55 favorites]


    Who's ready for yet another scandal? How about one connected to Fugee member Pras Michel, missing fugitive Jho Low, Obama's 2012 campaign, superPACs galore, Malaysia's 1MDB fraud scandal, Donald Trump himself, Goldman Sachs, and current AG William Barr?

    1MDB’s Jho Low, Rapper Pras Michel Indicted Over Obama Donation < Bloomberg
    posted by Harry Caul at 2:54 PM on May 10, 2019 [8 favorites]


    The No President Is Above the Law Act would pause the statute of limitations for any federal offense committed by a sitting president. Today, House Judiciary Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), along with Representatives Ted Deutch (D-FL) and Eric Swalwell (D-CA) of the House Judiciary Committee, introduced the No President Is Above the Law Act, which would pause the statute of limitations for any federal offense committed by a sitting president, whether it was committed before or during the president’s term of office.

    Fuck that. If they break the law, prosecute them and remove them from office while you lock them up if they're found guilty. That's why we have an order of succession.
    posted by Mental Wimp at 2:58 PM on May 10, 2019 [28 favorites]


    From Talking Points Memo (emphasis mine): “Never tweet,” goes the popular internet age refrain. In the case of Matt Wolking, the Trump 2020 campaign’s recently appointed director for rapid response, the aphorism should be tweaked to “never blog.” From 2008-2011, beginning in college and continuing after he graduated, the Republican communications staffer ran a blog called “Wolking’s World” rife with Islamophobic content and conspiracy theories.

    In an archived version of the site accessible via the Internet Archive, Wolking said over 90 million Muslims were “murderous thugs,” voiced support for banning the construction of mosques, and compared the passage of the Affordable Care Act to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Wolking’s blog was flagged to TPM by Democratic opposition research group American Bridge. The posts are still findable via the Internet Archive, and a 2009 blog post from the college Republican student group at Patrick Henry College, the Virginia Christian private school that Wolking attended, identifies Wolking as the blog’s author.

    ... In March, the Trump campaign brought Wolking on board as deputy director of communications to lead an “aggressive rapid response team, refuting attacks and exposing the fake news media.” Asked for comment from TPM, Trump 2020 Deputy Communications Director Erin Perrine wrote: “It’s pathetic that the third-rate Democrat opposition research firm American Bridge is now spending time combing through decade-old, college-era WordPress blogs looking for things to distort, and that they finally found someone in the media willing to play along.”

    posted by Bella Donna at 3:03 PM on May 10, 2019 [10 favorites]


    WSJ, Don McGahn Rebuffed White House Request to Say Trump Didn’t Obstruct Justice
    Within a day of the release of the Mueller report last month, President Trump sought to have former White House counsel Don McGahn declare he didn’t consider the president’s 2017 directive that he seek Robert Mueller’s dismissal to be obstruction of justice, but Mr. McGahn rebuffed the request, according to people familiar with the matter.
    posted by zachlipton at 3:06 PM on May 10, 2019 [38 favorites]


    The Wrap:
    Four companies so far have pledged to boycott the state of Georgia for new film and TV productions until the new legislation that bans abortions as early as six weeks into pregnancy is reversed.

    “The Wire” creator David Simon and his Blown Deadline Productions, Killer Films CEO Christine Vachon (“Carol,” “Vox Lux”), Mark Duplass and his Duplass Brothers Productions and “Triple Frontier” producer Neal Dodson on behalf of his CounterNarrative Films alongside J.C. Chandor, have so far publicly condemned the law that’s being called the “heartbeat bill.”
    [own links for context]
    ---

    David Simon@AoDespair, on Twitter today:

    Can only speak for my production company. Our comparative assessments of locations for upcoming development will pull Georgia off the list until we can be assured the health options and civil liberties of our female colleagues are unimpaired.

    &

    I'm sorry, but there is no conceivable way that I can, as an employer, ethically ask any of my female colleagues to work in a jurisdiction that limits their health care options and impairs their civil liberties. It isn't possible.
    posted by Iris Gambol at 3:40 PM on May 10, 2019 [82 favorites]


    Proceeds from some types of mutual funds (e.g., bonds) are designated as interest, so if you park a huge bunch of money in one, the proceeds are documented on a 1099-INT form.

    There are lots of ways of generating interest, with mutual funds being just one of them. The unanswered question is where the "huge bunch of money," more than half billion dollars of interest generating investments, came from and where it went the following year, as it suddenly materialized and then disappeared. That's not chump change for a guy who was on the brink of bankruptcy.
    posted by JackFlash at 4:29 PM on May 10, 2019 [15 favorites]


    WaPo, Trump takes over Fourth of July celebration, changing its location and inserting himself into the program
    The president has received regular briefings on the effort in the Oval Office and has gotten involved in the minutiae of the planning — and initially argued that the fireworks should be launched from a barge in the Potomac River, administration aides said. The president has shown interest in the event that he often does not exhibit for other administration priorities, the aides added.
    Trump wants to show up and give a speech from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial too. And while it's rather concerning that he's shown more interest in this than his intelligence briefings and that his own staff continue to talk about him like he's a child, I'm a big advocate of harm reduction, so letting him focus his efforts on the fireworks instead of the military seems like it's best for everyone.
    posted by zachlipton at 4:32 PM on May 10, 2019 [28 favorites]


    Dems and the press need to start referring to tariffs as taxes, which is exactly what they are...sales taxes, payed by Americans, to the US treasury.
    Republicans hate taxes. MAGA hatters hate taxes. Libertarians hate taxes. Make Trump explain to them why he's raising the taxes they pay every time they buy Chinese-made products at Walmart.
    posted by rocket88 at 5:11 PM on May 10, 2019 [19 favorites]


    The president has shown interest in the event that he often does not exhibit for other administration priorities, the aides added.

    Charles Leerhsen, Yahoo News: "Exclusive: Trump, the billion-dollar loser — I was his ghostwriter and saw it happen"
    Trump’s portfolio did not jibe with what I saw each day — which to a surprisingly large extent was him looking at fabric swatches. Indeed, flipping through fabric swatches seemed at times to be his main occupation. Some days he would do it for hours, then take me in what he always called his “French military helicopter” to Atlantic City — where he looked at more fabric swatches or sometimes small samples of wood paneling. It was true that the carpets and drapes at his properties needed to be refreshed frequently, and the seats on the renamed Trump Shuttle required occasional reupholstering. But the main thing about fabric swatches was that they were within his comfort zone — whereas, for example, the management of hotels and airlines clearly wasn’t.
    Emphasis mine.
    posted by OnceUponATime at 5:17 PM on May 10, 2019 [51 favorites]


    I'm a big advocate of harm reduction, so letting him focus his efforts on the fireworks instead of the military seems like it's best for everyone

    Why... yes! By all means, I think he should be encouraged to be as involved in designing and setting them off even. He does have one of the best minds ever, and I'm sure that extends to expertise in such matters. The fact that the track record of amateurs blowing themselves up playing with fireworks is so high... well, I'm sure that couldn't apply to such a Stable Genius.
    posted by bcd at 5:24 PM on May 10, 2019 [6 favorites]


    Dems and the press need to start referring to tariffs as taxes, which is exactly what they are...sales taxes, payed by Americans, to the US treasury.

    "The Trump Tax" as in "Your tomatoes are so expensive because you're paying the Trump Tax". The tomato price thing has legs, I've heard a lot more people concerned about that than like, actually extremely concerning things that come out of this administration. Which makes sense, his base is largely people who are privileged enough to not feel real pain from government action or inaction, but uh oh, can't escape the grocery bill.
    posted by jason_steakums at 5:27 PM on May 10, 2019 [5 favorites]


    WSJ, Don McGahn Rebuffed White House Request to Say Trump Didn’t Obstruct Justice

    The NYT confirms this story: White House Asked McGahn to Declare Trump Never Obstructed Justice
    White House officials asked at least twice in the past month for the key witness against President Trump in the Mueller report, Donald F. McGahn II, to say publicly that he never believed the president obstructed justice, according to two people briefed on the requests.

    Mr. Trump asked White House officials to make the request to Mr. McGahn, who was the president’s first White House counsel, one of the people said. Mr. McGahn declined. His reluctance angered the president, who believed that Mr. McGahn showed disloyalty by telling investigators for the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, about Mr. Trump’s attempts to maintain control over the Russia investigation.

    The White House made one of the requests to Mr. McGahn’s lawyer, William A. Burck, before the Mueller report was released publicly but after the Justice Department gave a copy to Mr. Trump’s lawyers in the preceding days. Reading the report, the president’s lawyers saw that Mr. Mueller left out that Mr. McGahn had told investigators that he believed the president never obstructed justice. Mr. Burck had told them months earlier about his client’s belief on the matter and that he had shared it with investigators.[…]

    But after the report was released, detailing the range of actions Mr. Trump took to try to impede the inquiry, Mr. McGahn decided to pass on putting out a statement supportive of the president. The report also revealed that Mr. Trump told aides he believed Mr. McGahn had leaked to the news media to make himself look good.[…]

    In the days after the report was released, White House officials asked Mr. McGahn again to put out a statement as Mr. Trump fumed about his disclosures but Mr. McGahn rebuffed the second request as well.

    White House officials believed that Mr. McGahn publicly asserting his belief would calm the president and help the administration push back on the episodes that Mr. Mueller detailed in the obstruction section of the report, said one of the people. Both spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations involving the White House.
    Giuliani's public attacks on McGahn's credibility—he told the NYT that McGahn's testimony to the SCO “can’t be taken at face value. It could be the product of an inaccurate recollection or could be the product of something else.”—probably didn't help Team Trump's relations with their former counsel.
    posted by Doktor Zed at 5:45 PM on May 10, 2019 [9 favorites]


    This part of the NYT article is fun, in the obstruction of justice kind of way:
    The president’s lawyers are particularly concerned about two episodes that Mr. McGahn detailed to prosecutors. In one, Mr. Trump asked him to fire the special counsel but backed off after Mr. McGahn refused. After that episode was revealed, the president asked Mr. McGahn to create a White House document falsely rebutting his account. Mr. McGahn declined to go along but told Mr. Mueller about the encounters.
    posted by Little Dawn at 6:01 PM on May 10, 2019 [9 favorites]


    I mean the real lesson of the “Trump’s finances are a wreck and he’s lost billions” is “our economic system means there’s no loss or rules for rich people and it’s all just an elaborate game of loopholes and legal tax evasion.”
    posted by The Whelk at 6:07 PM on May 10, 2019 [57 favorites]


    > Dems and the press need to start referring to tariffs as taxes, which is exactly what they are...sales taxes, payed by Americans, to the US treasury.

    "The Trump Tax" as in "Your tomatoes are so expensive because you're paying the Trump Tax".

    With the stipulation that Trump himself doesn't pay the Trump Tax because he's so “smart”, it's all about him getting stuff for free and getting everyone else to pay for his fuckups.
    posted by XMLicious at 6:18 PM on May 10, 2019 [4 favorites]


    This part of the NYT article is fun, in the obstruction of justice kind of way

    And that's why people call this "Stupid Watergate". If McGahn agreed to Trump's demands he publicly backtrack on his testimony to the SCO, he'd immediately leave himself open to a violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1001 and, should he ever show up before Congress, potentially 18 U.S. Code § 1621.

    Meanwhile, Trump continues to push the boundaries of authoritarianism, telling Politico in an interview:
    When asked whether he would consider directing Attorney General Bill Barr to investigate the Bidens, as some Democrats fear, Trump said he had not spoken to Barr about the issue. But he left open the possibility, saying “certainly it would be an appropriate thing to” discuss with Barr.

    “Certainly it is a very big issue and we’ll see what happens. I have not spoken to him about it. Would I speak to him about it? I haven’t thought of that. I mean, you’re asking me a question I just haven’t thought of,” he said, noting it “could be a very big situation” for Biden.

    “Because he’s a Democrat it’s about 1/100 the size of the fact that if he were a Republican, it would be a lot bigger,” he alleged. {Shome mishtake, shurely? Ed.}
    He also discussed Giuliani's Ukrainian trip:
    Trump also said that he plans to speak to Rudy Giuliani about his personal attorney’s imminent plans to go to Ukraine to reportedly encourage the Ukrainian president to investigate the origins of the Russia investigation and Hunter Biden’s role on the board of directors of an energy company owned by a Ukrainian oligarch.

    “I will speak to him about it before he leaves. I’m just curious about that,” he said, adding that he has “not spoken to him at any great length” about it.
    Hopefully Politico will post a transcript soon so we can see just how much of this is Trump rambling.
    posted by Doktor Zed at 6:19 PM on May 10, 2019 [2 favorites]


    If the IRS won't look at the taxes of the individual who has lost more money than any other individual while paying no taxes... Do we really believe they look at the taxes of any rich person at all?
    posted by xammerboy at 6:23 PM on May 10, 2019 [31 favorites]


    Mod note: There is still an open IRS post for tax discussions
    posted by Eyebrows McGee (staff) at 6:48 PM on May 10, 2019 [1 favorite]


    Politico’s published the transcript of their interview with Trump. Here’s the full exchange about impeachment:
    POLITICO: Do you want them to try to impeach you?

    TRUMP: So, you know, it's all based on high crimes and misdemeanors. And if you look at the Mueller report, there was no collusion. There was no conspiracy. And there was no obstruction. He said that in the first half of the sentence, and then said he couldn't prove it. But there was no obstruction. And then the attorney general, based on the facts, and the deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, they ruled there was no obstruction. So you have no crime. And impeachment’s based on crime. And, specifically it’s based on high crimes and misdemeanors. Not ‘plus’ or whatever -- it’s ‘and’ misdemeanors. Not separately, but together. So you need both.

    And, you know, look, I know it would be a very, very impossible thing. Plus, you know if you haven't had -- in fact, the crimes were actually committed, but they were committed by the Democrats. They were committed by the DNC, the Clinton campaign, Hillary Clinton. Those were the crimes. They weren't committed by us.

    So I must say, you know you mentioned the word [impeachment], I haven't heard that word in a while. Because since the report came out, it said no collusion, no obstruction, no conspiracy. And that was the end. I haven't heard the word mentioned, really -- essentially -- since the Mueller report came out. And it's not like it's not like they were friends of mine.
    And on asking Barr to investigate Biden:
    POLITICO: And one more. Have you asked [Attorney General] Bill Barr, or would you ask Bill Barr, to investigate Biden about his son’s -- Biden’s son’s work in Ukraine? That's become a big issue.

    TRUMP: Well, I haven't spoken to him about it. But certainly it is a very big issue and we'll see what happens. I have not spoken to him about it. Would I speak to him about it? I haven't thought of that. I mean, you're asking me a question I just haven't thought of. Certainly, it would be an appropriate thing to speak about. But I have not done that as of yet. It could be a very big -- it could be a very big situation. Of course, because he's because he’s a Democrat, it's about one 1/100 the size of the fact that if he were Republican, it would be a lot bigger.
    Chris Hayes: “The President is very obviously laying the groundwork to abuse his office in order to sic the power of the state on his political opponents. It's as corrupt as it gets.”
    posted by Doktor Zed at 6:58 PM on May 10, 2019 [38 favorites]


    Say what you will about Red Sox fans: Some Trumpies unfurled a Trump 2020 banner at Fenway Park during tonight's game. Within 20 seconds, some fans in the deck below ripped it down.
    posted by adamg at 7:08 PM on May 10, 2019 [15 favorites]


    [Impeachment] is based on high crimes and misdemeanors. Not ‘plus’ or whatever -- it’s ‘and’ misdemeanors. Not separately, but together. So you need both.

    Trump's serious... He believes every idiot thing he's ever said.
    posted by xammerboy at 7:13 PM on May 10, 2019 [30 favorites]


    [Impeachment] is based on high crimes and misdemeanors. Not ‘plus’ or whatever -- it’s ‘and’ misdemeanors. Not separately, but together. So you need both.

    The old "I committed felonies, not misdemeanors" defense.
    posted by ActingTheGoat at 7:27 PM on May 10, 2019 [27 favorites]


    Trump asked him to fire the special counsel but backed off after Mr. McGahn refused. After that episode was revealed, the president asked Mr. McGahn to create a White House document falsely rebutting his account. Mr. McGahn declined to go along but told Mr. Mueller about the encounters.

    The whole "can't say it's obstruction because his idiot henchmen never got it together to actually impede the investigation" is such outrageous bullshit. He ordered the obstruction. It's right there! It's - AAAAAARRGgh.

    Legal Definition of obstruction of justice: the crime or act of willfully interfering with the process of justice and law especially by influencing, threatening, harming, or impeding a witness, potential witness, juror, or judicial or legal officer or by furnishing false information in or otherwise impeding an investigation or legal process

    Would one say he's accelerating the process of justice? Enhancing the investigation? He's doing something to the investigation by ordering people fired and ordering people to lie, can they get that far?? G-ddamn this is SUCH BULLSHIT.
    posted by petebest at 8:31 PM on May 10, 2019 [22 favorites]


    Trump says it would be ‘appropriate’ for him to talk to Barr about launching an investigation into Biden (WaPo)
    The suggestion that Trump would contemplate directing his Justice Department to investigate Biden drew condemnation from some legal experts, who said the idea smacked of an abuse of power.

    “Does anyone doubt that this could have catastrophic consequences for democratic and electoral legitimacy?” said Susan Hennessey, executive editor of Lawfare, on Twitter. “Yet we seem to be hurtling towards this possibility with no one, certainly not congressional Republicans, drawing the line.”

    [...] Longtime Democratic adviser Ronald A. Klain warned on Twitter that, “If he can do this to @JoeBiden, he can do this to any other Democrat. If he can do this to any Democrat, he can do this to any Republican in Trump’s way. If he can do this any political rival, he can do this to any American.”

    Trump’s comments come the week after Barr appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee and seemed to stumble over his answer to questions from Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.) about Trump-directed investigations. Harris asked Barr whether the president or any other White House official had ever suggested that he open an investigation into someone.

    After an exchange, Barr told Harris, “I don’t know.”
    posted by Little Dawn at 9:09 PM on May 10, 2019 [11 favorites]


    CNN’s Manu Raju: “Giuliani tonight: “I’ve decided I’m not going to go to the Ukraine”, saying on Fox that “in order to remove any political suggestion, I will step back and I’ll just watch it unfold.””

    Presumably, now that the Ukrainian government has received the message about furnishing Team Trump with the pretexts need to smear Biden, Giuliani’s presence isn’t needed.
    posted by Doktor Zed at 9:28 PM on May 10, 2019 [15 favorites]


    do you think that guiliani knows that he’s dog whistling to the russians by calling it “the ukraine” or that he can no longer reliably access memories formed after the early 1990s
    posted by murphy slaw at 9:33 PM on May 10, 2019 [28 favorites]


    ¿Y por qué no los dos?
    posted by Ice Cream Socialist at 10:47 PM on May 10, 2019 [12 favorites]


    I knew the name of McGahn's attorney, William A. Burck, sounded familiar. Burck also represented former First Lady of Virginia Maureen McDonnell in her and her husband Gov. Bob McDonnell's corruption trial.
    posted by emelenjr at 5:18 AM on May 11, 2019 [4 favorites]


    I knew the name of McGahn's attorney, William A. Burck, sounded familiar. Burck also represented former First Lady of Virginia Maureen McDonnell in her and her husband Gov. Bob McDonnell's corruption trial.

    Speaking of de ja vu, it's a bit uncanny that this article, The Watergate Blueprint for Impeaching Donald Trump, by former NY Rep. Elizabeth Holtzman, was published by the Intercept on November 15, 2018:
    Similar behavior by Nixon became one of the grounds of the first article of impeachment against him. As part of the Watergate cover-up, Nixon was charged with making “false or misleading public statements for the purpose of deceiving the people of the United States.” This included Nixon’s claim that White House investigations had cleared everyone of any involvement with the break-in [...]

    An abuse of power. He has used the power of his office to remove or threaten to remove the security clearances of people who criticized him or who he believed were associated with the Russia investigation or could be possible witnesses against him. A historical equivalent is Nixon’s creation of an “Enemies List” of anti-Vietnam War activists, whom he directed to be audited by the Internal Revenue Service in retaliation for their political positions — actions that formed part of an article of impeachment.
    History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme.
    posted by Little Dawn at 6:37 AM on May 11, 2019 [10 favorites]


    rocket88: Make Trump explain to them why he's raising the taxes they pay every time they buy Chinese-made products at Walmart.

    But Chinese goods aren't just sold at Walmart, they're everywhere. How steeper U.S. tariffs on China could affect consumers and businesses (Rachel Layne for CBS News, May 10, 2019)
    More than half of all imported goods from China, the U.S.'s biggest trading partner last year, are now subject to tariffs imposed by the White House. Tariffs are paid by domestic companies, and when such levies increase the higher costs are often passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices.

    Oxford Economics estimates that Friday's tariff hike will cut U.S. economic output by $62 billion by next year, or 0.3 percent of gross domestic product. If tariffs are eventually imposed on all products the U.S. buys from China, as Mr. Trump has threatened, American and global GDP would fall 0.5 percent by 2020, according to the investment research firm. That amounts to $625 billion in lost economic activity.
    ...
    "It's official, we're freaked," the American Apparel & Footwear Association said in a statement after the U.S. hiked tariffs from 10 percent to 25 percent on $200 billion in Chinese imports.

    "As an Industry, we cannot survive a 25 percent tariff on top of the tariffs that we already pay," Rick Helfenbein, who heads the trade group, said in the statement. "Prices at retail will rise, sales will drop and jobs will be lost. From an administration that promised jobs, jobs, jobs, this is a Cinderella tale that has gone awry. It offers no glass slipper and no way out for years to come."
    ...
    The U.S. is already dispensing $12 billion in subsidies to help farmers affected by retaliatory measures last year, including lost access to China's market for agricultural products including soybeans and corn.

    China's move to shun U.S. soybean exports, and an ensuing decline in the global price of soybeans and grains like corn, is shifting demand away from the U.S., Brent Bible, a soybean farmer from Lafayette, Indiana, told reporters in a call on Thursday.

    "Normally, our competitive advantage has been that we are a reliable source of product, and this has taken that that away," Bible said.

    Mr. Trump said in a tweet Friday that the U.S. would buy agricultural products "in larger amounts than China ever did and ship it to poor & starving countries in the form of humanitarian assistance."
    So 1) it's definitely just impacting "Walmart shoppers" (aka people and families with low-to-moderate incomes), particularly because 2) the retaliatory tariffs are having direct impacts on the US economy, to the point that there are heavy subsidies to U.S. farmers.

    And 3) I'll applaud Trump for having an instance of being a humanitarian president with regard to sending otherwise unsold agricultural products to "poor & starving countries" (would these be the same "shithole countries," or are they different?) when I see it. Jimmy Carter he is not.

    (Also, we have a quote from Wholesome American, Brent Bible, state trooper turned soybean farmer from Lafayette, Indiana? Oh writers, go home -- you've been drunk for years now, we're worried about your health, mental and physical.)
    posted by filthy light thief at 6:40 AM on May 11, 2019 [16 favorites]


    I knew the name of McGahn's attorney, William A. Burck, sounded familiar.

    It's amusing that Trump's former White House lawyer now has a lawyer for talking to the White House. Everyone who has anything to do with Trump ends up in the muck. You would think that people would begin to realize that Trump has the reverse Midas touch.
    posted by JackFlash at 6:54 AM on May 11, 2019 [4 favorites]


    It's so simple for consumers to avoid the effects of tariffs, Trump's explained it in a single tweet this morning. The replies are as brutal as you would expect.
    posted by Rykey at 9:33 AM on May 11, 2019 [1 favorite]


    A simple man will always have a simple — and wrong — solution. A product "made-in-America" will invariably be built from components and materials from vendors around the world, which now cost more. American manufacturers are not patriotic enough to eat those costs, simply passing them on to the consumer.

    But Trump's base is just as simple and as racist as he is, and they see tariffs as a way to stick it to foreigners, even as he has his hand in their (and our) pockets.
    posted by They sucked his brains out! at 10:27 AM on May 11, 2019 [5 favorites]


    I think we've found the plot for The Big Lebowski 2. Just unbelievable.

    The Strange Saga Of A Militia Leader Arrested For Extorting His Own Members
    The leader of a right-wing militia known as the Stevens County Assembly will soon travel from West Virginia to Washington State — in law enforcement custody, accused of posing as a member of a Mexican drug cartel and extorting his fellow militiamen, according to a colorful set of court documents obtained by TPM.
    posted by scalefree at 10:51 AM on May 11, 2019 [11 favorites]


    Also, we have a quote from Wholesome American, Brent Bible, state trooper turned soybean farmer from Lafayette, Indiana?

    they're good beans brent

    Mr. Trump said in a tweet Friday that the U.S. would buy agricultural products "in larger amounts than China ever did and ship it to poor & starving countries in the form of humanitarian assistance."

    it is 1000% more likely that any government assistance program will (best case) leave the ag products to rot somewhere in silos, benefitting no one or (worst case) involve some grifting private contractor's efforts to somehow turn said ag products into the biofuels equivalent of building materials for Wall
    posted by halation at 11:02 AM on May 11, 2019 [4 favorites]




    Who really needs three branches of government anyway?

    Pence claims Trump will ask Supreme Court to bar judges from blocking his policies
    Vice president says administration hopes high court will end "nationwide injunctions" that shut down policy
    In a speech before the right-wing Federalist Society, Vice President Mike Pence complained about federal courts blocking the Trump administration’s policies from taking effect. He said President Trump would take the issue to the Supreme Court.
    Pence told the crowd that federal judges who issue nationwide injunctions against Trump’s policies “prevent the executive branch from acting, compromising our national security by obstructing the lawful ability of the president to stop threats to the homeland where he sees them.”
    Pence vowed that the administration would take their complaints to the Supreme Court.
    “The Supreme Court of the United States must clarify that district judges can decide no more than the cases before them,” Pence said. “A Supreme Court justice has to convince four of his colleagues to uphold a nationwide injunction — but a single district court judge can issue one, effectively preventing the duly-elected president of the United States from fulfilling his constitutional duties. This judicial obstruction is unprecedented. In the days ahead, our administration will seek opportunities to put this question before the Supreme Court.”
    The Trump administration previously tried to take up this issue before the Supreme Court when appealing an injunction against its travel ban. But the high court never ruled on the underlying issue because they upheld the ban in its entirety, the Associated Press reported.
    Courts will often issue injunctions while a case plays out. Nationwide injunctions apply to everyone as opposed to injunctions that only apply to people who brought the lawsuit.
    According to Pence, the Trump administration apparently wants the Supreme Court to bar lower courts from issuing nationwide injunctions — even if the administration's policies violate the law.
    posted by scalefree at 12:32 PM on May 11, 2019 [21 favorites]


    That seems to be the kind of thing that you'll hate when its the other guy in power. I'd be thinking a lot of Republicans would be wary of that kind of ruling.
    posted by Bovine Love at 1:34 PM on May 11, 2019 [1 favorite]


    I'd be thinking a lot of Republicans would be wary of that kind of ruling.

    Except they act like they don't think the other guy will be in power. And who could blame them?
    posted by holgate at 1:39 PM on May 11, 2019 [41 favorites]


    Except they act like they don't think the other guy will be in power. And who could blame them?

    And we now know that the only thing not holding them accountable has done is make them more brazen (Giuliani's message to Ukraine). There's no reason for them to expect to face any consequences.
    posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 3:57 PM on May 11, 2019 [16 favorites]


    Trump Is Pressuring Ukraine to Smear Clinton and Biden
    [...]
    So why would Ukraine pursue baseless charges? Because its government has a strong interest in mollifying Trump. The Times reported last year that Ukraine halted its cooperation with the Mueller probe because it couldn’t risk provoking Trump. “The cases are just too sensitive for a government deeply reliant on United States financial and military aid, and keenly aware of Mr. Trump’s distaste for the investigation by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, into possible collusion between Russia and his campaign, some lawmakers say.”
    Having used that leverage defensively to get Ukraine to withhold cooperation into the probe of his campaign, Trump is now using it offensively, to gin up charges against his targets. His involvement and interest in the effort is transparent. During one of Giuliani’s meetings with Ukrainian officials, he “called Mr. Trump excitedly to brief him on his findings.” Giuliani tells the Times that his work has Trump’s “full support,” and he is making the president’s interest extremely clear to Ukraine’s government. “I’m going to give them reasons why they shouldn’t stop [the investigation] because that information will be very, very helpful to my client,” he says.
    Trump is already burbling excitedly about the project. “I’m hearing it’s a major scandal, major problem,” Trump said on Fox News. “I hope for [Biden] it is fake news. I don’t think it is.”
    posted by scalefree at 6:07 PM on May 11, 2019 [9 favorites]




    Trump backers applaud Warren in heart of MAGA country (Politico)
    Kermit is one of the epicenters of the opioid addiction epidemic. The toll is visible. The community center is shuttered. Fire trucks are decades old. When Warren asked people at the beginning of the event to raise their hands if they knew somebody who’s been “caught in the grips of addiction,” most hands went up. “That’s why I’m here today,” she said. [...]

    The 63-year-old fire chief, Wilburn “Tommy” Preece, warned Warren and her team beforehand that the area was “Trump country” and to not necessarily expect a friendly reception. But he also told her that the town would welcome anyone, of any party, who wanted to address the opioid crisis. Preece was the first responder to a reported overdose two years ago only to discover that the victim was his younger brother Timmy, who died.

    [...] LeeAnn Blankenship, a 38-year-old coach and supervisor at a home visitation company who grew up in Kermit and wore a sharp pink suit, said she may now support Warren in 2020 after voting for Trump in 2016. “She’s a good ol’ country girl like anyone else,” she said of Warren, who grew up in Oklahoma. “She’s earned where she is, it wasn’t given to her. I respect that.” [...]

    As Warren posed for selfies after the town hall, several people pressed notes into her hand that she read later in the car. "Help our town of Kermit, West Virginia any way you can to help us be able to reduce the drug abuse," read one letter.
    posted by Little Dawn at 7:28 PM on May 11, 2019 [55 favorites]




    Mod note: There's a current thread on the Georgia abortion law.
    posted by Eyebrows McGee (staff) at 8:35 PM on May 11, 2019 [4 favorites]


    pretty good, and passionate, comprehensive recitation of this misministration's performance by maryland's raskin, just now... i noted during the committee contempt proceeding, above. well, mr. raskin had an excellent oped in wapo friday, presenting a sort of structural, originalist constitutional and historical assertion of congressional power in writing at the high end of the quality and pith spectrum for the forum in which it appears.

    i liked it; dudefoil at adjacent workstation stammered to dismiss it (upon the strength of its title) with a "four legs good, two legs better" quip but couldn't recall the slogan, before i beat him to it. it is a fair (tho by no means dispositive) rejoinder if soundbytes are enough and some sense of coëquality of branches is the touchstone, though i think that allegory illustrates the dangers of treating pat slogans as dispositive. raskin:
    Congress was never designed as, nor should it ever become, a mere “co-equal branch,” beseeching the president to share his awesome powers with us. We are the exclusive lawmaking branch of our national government and the preeminent part of it. We set the policy agenda, we write the laws, and we can impeach judges or executives who commit high crimes and misdemeanors against our institutions. As James Madison observed in the Federalist Papers, “In republican government, the legislative authority necessarily predominates.” Congress is first among equals.

    The founders replaced the intertwined monarchical and theocratic forms of government that prevailed in the 18th century with representative democracy so the people could govern, which is why our Constitution begins with those three magic words: “We the People.” It then establishes Congress in the very next sentence, placing our representative institutions, “a Senate and House of Representatives,” right after the sovereign people and way ahead of everything else.
    worth reading in whole.
    posted by 20 year lurk at 9:22 PM on May 11, 2019 [15 favorites]


    I was going to fix the all caps but it seems appropriate.

    TRUMP ADMINISTRATION PLANS TO END PROTECTIONS FOR ENDANGERED SPECIES AFTER UN REPORT WARNS OF 'MASS EXTINCTION EVENT'
    A United Nations report released this week found that one-eighth of the world’s animals and plants are at risk of extinction and that biodiversity was declining at an “unprecedented pace,” but David Bernhardt, U.S. Secretary of the Interior, said this dire portrait won’t stop the Trump administration from ending protections for endangered species in the United States.
    “We didn’t start doing them to not do them,” Bernhardt said of the Department of the Interior's policy revisions to limit protections for threatened animals and to factor the cost to corporations into protecting endangered species, in an interview with The Washington Post published Friday.
    posted by scalefree at 9:25 PM on May 11, 2019 [16 favorites]


    Trump's trade agenda on the verge of imploding (Politico)
    His new pact with Canada and Mexico is facing significant opposition in Congress even from Republicans, who are demanding that he lift steel and aluminum tariffs before they’ll vote on it. Deals with the European Union, Japan and Great Britain are also stalled by politics here and abroad.

    Trump’s failure to reach agreements with America’s trading partners could have a brutal impact on the economy and his reelection effort, even if his base likes his tough talk on China. By the time voters head to the polls in 2020, the prices of consumer goods could be skyrocketing. Farmers may be swamped with products they can’t sell abroad. And a bear market could be shrinking everyone’s retirement savings.
    ‘Who’s going to take care of these people?’ (WaPo)
    More than 100 of the country’s remote hospitals have gone broke and then closed in the past decade, turning some of the most impoverished parts of the United States into what experts now call “health-hazard zones,” and Fairfax was on the verge of becoming the latest. The emergency room was down to its final four tanks of oxygen. The nursing staff was out of basic supplies such as snakebite antivenin and strep tests. Hospital employees had not received paychecks for the past 11 weeks and counting.

    The only reason the hospital had been able to stay open at all was that about 30 employees continued showing up to work without pay, increasing their hours to fill empty shifts and essentially donating time to the hospital, understanding what was at stake.
    When It Comes to Republican Defectors, Current Crisis Is No Watergate (NYT)
    Mr. Hogan, a former F.B.I. agent who represented Washington’s Maryland suburbs, was seen as a reliable Nixon supporter and stunned his colleagues by voting for all three articles of impeachment.

    “Do we want to be the party loyalists who in ringing rhetoric condemn the wrongdoings and scandals of the Democratic Party and excuse them when they are done by Republicans?” Mr. Hogan wrote to his colleagues. He lost the Republican nomination for Maryland governor, and his position on the impeachment was considered a main cause. But in retrospect, he has been saluted for integrity.

    “Despite tremendous political pressure, he put aside partisanship and he answered the demands of his conscience to do what he thought was the right thing for the nation that he loved,” his son, Larry Hogan, the current Republican governor of Maryland, said at a recent journalism awards dinner.

    “Now that decision cost him dearly,” the governor said. “He lost friends and supporters and his party’s nomination for governor that year. But it earned him something more valuable: a quiet conscience and an honored place in history.”
    posted by Little Dawn at 9:44 PM on May 11, 2019 [15 favorites]


    Change Research Poll shows @JoeBiden with a commanding 46% lead in South Carolina

    All the debate over the policies GND and Medicare for all won't matter unless something changes. David Klion:
    For starters, it is wishful thinking that if we can just tell everyone why Biden is bad, they'll change their minds about him. No. On here the fight is "liberals" vs "leftists" but all the liberals and leftists combined are a minority of the Dem electorate. Millions of Democrats who voted for tough on crime policies in the 1990s, supported the Iraq War, and thought Clintonomics were good for the middle class are not going to get angry at Biden for having done the same at the time. For months I've been saying Bernie can win because he has the largest base in a crowded field. But right now it looks like Biden has, by far, the largest base in a crowded field. He doesn't need a majority. No one does. In other words, no one needs to be "right" about anything.
    posted by T.D. Strange at 7:22 AM on May 12, 2019 [4 favorites]


    Maybe instead of fighting to convince people that any particular* candidate is wrong or bad we can try to work up maximum enthusiasm for the progressive policies we want whoever wins to put in place, so that even the centrist candidates will feel some wind at their backs and some fire at their toes. If someone like Biden wins they need to understand their popularity is due to factors other than a referendum on progressivism vs. centrism, and that progressivism is a stream they need to at least work alongside.

    *vaguely competent, non-hateful...
    posted by trig at 7:38 AM on May 12, 2019 [20 favorites]


    Biden’s in good position but has been a crap campaigner in his two previous outings. And for reference, previous national primary polling...

    @LedPast (WaPo)
    541 DAYS TO GO:
    2008 Dem: Clinton led by 12.8 points.
    2008 GOP: Giuliani led by 8.1 points.
    2012 GOP: Romney led by 8.9 points.
    2016 Dem: Clinton led by 56.8 points.
    2016 GOP: Bush led by 2.2 points.
    posted by chris24 at 8:01 AM on May 12, 2019 [3 favorites]


    Biden’s in good position but has been a crap campaigner in his two previous outings.
    Yes, I have plenty of faith in Biden pulling the hat trick of presidential campaign blowouts. For that matter, it's Bernie, Biden and Beto who have the leads at number of losing campaigns among this current field.
    posted by Harry Caul at 8:05 AM on May 12, 2019 [3 favorites]


    For that matter, it's Bernie, Biden and Beto who have the leads at number of losing campaigns among this current field.

    Exactly. For all the talk about electability, Harris, Klobuchar, Warren, Gillibrand have never lost an election. The men have. Usually more than once.
    posted by chris24 at 8:13 AM on May 12, 2019 [34 favorites]


    On here the fight is "liberals" vs "leftists" but all the liberals and leftists combined are a minority of the Dem electorate.

    What? Polls indicate 80%+ D support for the Green New Deal and Medicare for All. The vast majority of the Dem electorate wants center-left to left policy; throwing up hands and saying "most democrats are right-wing, whattayagonnado" is a dishearteningly eager embrace of defeat. Don't confuse support of Biden among primary voters with most Democrats being so far to the right that they don't even count as liberals: ceding the entire left and declaring all future political battles as between the center-right and fascism is a cancellation of the future (at least in regard to electoralism) and certainly speaks to the nightmares of the pessimistic left.
    posted by Rust Moranis at 8:24 AM on May 12, 2019 [15 favorites]


    Politico: Nadler squeezed with calls for ‘inherent contempt’
    House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler is in a bind. A growing number of Democratic committee members are pushing Nadler to take more aggressive steps to force President Donald Trump and top administration officials to comply with a host of congressional subpoenas. Some lawmakers even want Congress to dust off its little-used authority to fine or even jail witnesses, something that the House hasn't done in more than 80 years and is ill prepared to execute.

    But Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her leadership team worry that such moves, while pleasing to a party base that loathes the president, would backfire and boost Trump politically.

    Will Stancil
    Pelosi two weeks ago: “We must investigate Trump aggressively, but impeaching risks too much backlash”
    Pelosi today: “Investigating Trump aggressively risks too much backlash”

    This is insane. We were told over and over that Pelosi and leadership were simply afraid of impeaching because it polled poorly, even if oversight polled much better. But now they’re backing away from oversight! There is no rational political plan under all this. They’re just guided by fear: crippling, all-consuming fear of Republican voters. Pelosi said we’re in a constitutional crisis, and she won’t even fine the people who are causing it! Because “backlash”

    At some point we need to accept that an entire generation of Democrats were psychologically broken by the 1972, 1980, and 1984 elections, and spent decades acting as if they're only allowed to govern with a permission slip from Republicans.
    posted by chris24 at 8:35 AM on May 12, 2019 [78 favorites]


    My comment disappeared but if it's not suitable please delete it again:
    This BBC article shocked me not because of the QAnon nonsense but becaused Comey bragged in his tweet about being a ""strike-replacement high school teacher". In other words, a scab?
    posted by Botanizer at 8:35 AM on May 12, 2019 [3 favorites]


    What do you think is happening to Sanders' lead and the support of Warren's candidacy in comparison to her name recognition, Rust Moranis?
    posted by Selena777 at 8:36 AM on May 12, 2019


    What do you think is happening to Sanders' lead and the support of Warren's candidacy in comparison to her name recognition, Rust Moranis?

    1) traumatized people who just want things to be feel normal again plus
    2) a D electorate trained for decades to think that politics have nothing to do with the exercise of power to achieve concrete policy goals, to the point of learned helplessness plus
    3) primary voters tending to be older plus
    4) manufactured consent from the party and mass media
    posted by Rust Moranis at 9:12 AM on May 12, 2019 [16 favorites]


    Because Trump's agitatedly tweeting this morning about being "under a sick & unlawful investigation", "a total scam, a Witch Hunt", it's useful to review the past week's developments on Capitol Hill about Mueller's potential testimony.

    Politico: Surprised Advisers Downplay Trump's Tweet About Mueller Testimony
    When President Donald Trump contradicted his own attorney general and declared on Sunday that special counsel Robert Mueller “should not testify” before Congress, he caught his inner circle by surprise.

    A day later, more than a dozen people from Trump’s close orbit downplayed in interviews the prospect that the president’s weekend tweet about Mueller should be taken as an official warning.
    AP: With Mueller on Justice Staff, Barr Has Sway Over Testimony
    After Barr skipped out on a congressional appearance last week, attention immediately turned to the possibility of Mueller testifying. And Trump was watching.

    The president stewed for days about the prospect of the media coverage that would be given to Mueller, a man Trump believes has been unfairly lionized across cable news and the front pages of the nation’s leading newspapers for two years, according to three White House officials and Republicans close to the White House.

    Trump feared a repeat — but bigger — of the February testimony of his former lawyer and fixer, Michael Cohen, which dominated news coverage and even overshadowed a nuclear summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Vietnam.

    Trump has long known the power of televised images and feared that Americans would be captivated by seeing — and hearing — Mueller, who has not spoken publicly since being named special counsel.
    Which brings us to today on ABC's "This Week": Robert Mueller 'Is Going to Testify': Rep. Adam Schiff

    Schiff told host George Stephanopoulos, "The American people have a right to hear what the man who did the investigation has to say and we now know we certainly can't rely on the attorney general who misrepresented his conclusions. So he is going to testify."
    posted by Doktor Zed at 9:28 AM on May 12, 2019 [13 favorites]


    I’ve been thinking about what Mueller could conceivably testify to that isn’t already in his report. I don’t imagine he would answer a question like “do you think the President obstructed justice?” He also won’t characterize his conclusions any more broadly than what was in the report. And there are too many things that could prejudice ongoing or future criminal proceedings.

    So what, if any, productive testimony could be produced? Possibly interactions with Barr, I guess?
    posted by Room 101 at 9:56 AM on May 12, 2019 [1 favorite]


    Trump: "Don McGahn had a much better chance of being fired than Mueller. Never a big fan!"

    Trump certainly doesn't learn his lessons. Michael Cohen will willing to "take a bullet" for him until Trump started bad mouthing him, throwing him under the bus.

    Now he's bad mouthing McGahn who refused to perjure himself with Mueller. He refused Trump's demand to lie to Mueller about Trump's request to fire Mueller.

    First Trump gets his personal lawyer to turn on him and now Trump is goading his White House lawyer to turn on him. Not very bright.

    I don't think McGahn had too much loyalty to Trump to begin with. His one and only agenda was to get two Federalist Society approved judges on the Supreme Court. This had nothing to do with Trump except providing an opportunity. Once he accomplished that, McGahn was done with Trump. Not a good idea for Trump to be burning his bridges with the Republican establishment who cares more about right wing goals than they do about Trump.
    posted by JackFlash at 10:11 AM on May 12, 2019 [7 favorites]


    I’ve been thinking about what Mueller could conceivably testify to that isn’t already in his report.

    There are a lot of people in this country who won't read Mueller's report but will tune in to televised hearings. If he makes his case before the cameras in an extended statement, that could be even more damaging to Trump in terms of public opinion than the testimonies of James Comey or Michael Cohen. (John Dean's Watergate testimony is the historical parallel that keeps coming up, and Dean himself warns, "Do not read @tribelaw’s warning about Trump blocking Mueller’s testimony as hyperbole. To the contrary, if Trump succeeds our democracy is in peril!")

    First Trump gets his personal lawyer to turn on him and now Trump is goading his White House lawyer to turn on him.

    Trump can't help but lash out at McGahn when he's feeling boxed in—it's textbook narcissistic injury. Since McGahn's cooperative testimony to the SCO features heavily in Mueller's report, Congress grilling him only about that would be extremely damaging.
    posted by Doktor Zed at 10:15 AM on May 12, 2019 [4 favorites]


    @Taniel:
    O'Rourke, Hickenlooper, Bullock, and Castro, who could run for Senate against GOP incumbents (in TX/CO/MT/TX) but are running for president instead, are polling at 2%, 1%, 0%, and 0%.
    posted by chris24 at 10:31 AM on May 12, 2019 [62 favorites]


    What? Polls indicate 80%+ D support for the Green New Deal and Medicare for All. The vast majority of the Dem electorate wants center-left to left policy

    And yet Biden only begrudgingly admitted to support for a Medicare buy-in, and his only comment on the GND is he wants a "middle ground" between extinction and no extinction. Democratic policy preferences have had little bearing on Biden's history in office or current campaigning.
    posted by T.D. Strange at 10:36 AM on May 12, 2019 [6 favorites]


    Pompeo was just a sniveling, pathetic, evasive worm on Face the Nation in response to Margaret Brennan's probing about whether there would be any U.S. response to China rounding up millions of Uyghurs into what (evidently, according to Brennan?) the Pentagon has referred to as “concentration camps”. (open thread)

    Pompeo explicitly used the Chinese government's own characterization of these as “re-education camps” and dissembled when she pointed this out, also suggesting that the numbers are in the range of “as many as a million” people whereas the figure Brennan appeared to be citing was three million.
    posted by XMLicious at 10:38 AM on May 12, 2019 [16 favorites]


    The vast majority of the Dem electorate wants center-left to left policy; throwing up hands and saying "most democrats are right-wing, whattayagonnado" is a dishearteningly eager embrace of defeat.

    Is there any skew in where the Dem electorate is that might account for this? Like, do the majority of Democrats live in D-safe districts/states, but the majority of potentially-D-voting districts/states range from light red to purple...
    posted by wildblueyonder at 10:42 AM on May 12, 2019 [1 favorite]


    Two things: people don't always identify politically in ways that align with the policies they say that they support. So a lot of people call themselves moderates, but when you ask them about policy, they answer as if they're much farther to the left than that. And the second thing is that people often vote for candidates who support different policies than they do. And again: the candidates are often farther to the right than the voters are. If you identify as a moderate, you will probably vote for a candidate who is identified as a moderate, even if you don't think that person's policies are ideal. People don't choose candidates based solely (or even primarily) on policy considerations, which can be really frustrating to people who support lefty policies.
    posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 10:50 AM on May 12, 2019 [31 favorites]


    Since McGahn's cooperative testimony to the SCO features heavily in Mueller's report, Congress grilling him only about that would be extremely damaging.

    Yeah. The template here isn't investigatory, because the investigation has already been done. Read a section of the report, ask McGahn "is that true?"; read out an I-1 tweet, ask "is that true?", job done.
    posted by holgate at 11:46 AM on May 12, 2019 [8 favorites]


    Or maybe Biden actually said that he wanted a middle ground in terms of the ideological structure of our response to climate change. Some want nationalization of resources as part of the response, others prefer carbon taxes or other market based solutions.

    That kind of middle ground is OK. It may not be my preference, but it's just as valid in terms of working to address climate change as anything else that will have the necessary effect.
    posted by wierdo at 12:04 PM on May 12, 2019 [2 favorites]


    When the woman who became the face of stopping the government shutdown and who wants to become head of the ALF-CIO (and organize tech workers and push the org into more grassroots funding and less donating to politicians) gives a speech at the Chicago DSA’s Debs Dinner talking about how Helen Keller and Einstein where socialist, I like a line may have been crossed
    posted by The Whelk at 12:37 PM on May 12, 2019 [15 favorites]


    Politico: Trump Campaign Refuses to Say Whether It Has a Policy On Foreign Agents—Several 2020 Democrats and the DNC have openly forsworn the use of hacked email and other information in their campaigns.
    The Trump campaign did not respond to numerous inquiries about whether it has implemented a policy about foreign interference — including the use of information stolen or hacked by a foreign power and whether aides must formally report outreach from foreigners. Several Democratic campaigns, by contrast, have announced policies on the subject.[…]

    The Trump campaign has given early signs of a casual approach to foreign contacts. Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale last month delivered a paid speech to a Romanian audience that included politicians and policymakers, according to a Washington Post report, and the president’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, has insisted there is nothing wrong with accepting information from a hostile foreign nation.

    “Who says it’s even illegal?” Giuliani told CNN’s Jake Tapper just over a week after the release after the Mueller report. “There’s nothing wrong with taking information from Russians, it depends on where it came from.”
    Besides the whole Guccifer 2.0/GRU operation, since the Trump campaign was actively, if incompetently, searching for this information from Russian hackers, i.e. foreign nationals who were violating 18 U.S. Code § 1030, Giuliani's already answered his question. Now the media must keep pressuring the Trump campaign about why they won't refrain from doing in 2020 what they did in 2016.
    posted by Doktor Zed at 1:34 PM on May 12, 2019 [10 favorites]


    Twitter thread from author David Rothkopf@djrothkopf (and via Threadreader):
    The GOP labels as "socialist" people pushing for health care and clean environment and women's rights and tolerance and humanity at our borders and an end to economic inequality and better jobs. But that's not radical, it's basic decency. And none of these issues are really enhanced or served by "compromise."

    We can't and mustn't compromise on the environment, on basic human rights, on fighting racism, on fighting corruption. And on some issues--like inequality--the old "center" collaborated in making it worse. So don't fall for those old labels. So-called progressive positions are supported in poll after poll by the majority of Americans (on these issues, on guns, on foreign policy, etc.) That makes them mainstream. That makes them "center."

    posted by Bella Donna at 2:12 PM on May 12, 2019 [34 favorites]


    WaPo: Trump And His Allies Are Blocking More Than 20 Separate Democratic Probes In an All-Out War With Congress
    President Trump and his allies are working to block more than 20 separate investigations by Democrats into his actions as president, his personal finances and his administration’s policies, according to a Washington Post analysis, amounting to what many experts call the most expansive White House obstruction effort in decades.

    Trump’s noncooperation strategy has shifted from partial resistance to all-out war as he faces mounting inquiries from the Democratic-controlled House — a strategy that many legal and congressional experts fear could undermine the institutional power of Congress for years to come. All told, House Democrats say the Trump administration has failed to respond to or comply with at least 79 requests for documents or other information.

    The president is blocking aides from testifying, refusing entire document requests from some committees, filing lawsuits against corporations to bar them from responding to subpoenas and asserting executive privilege to keep information about the special counsel’s Russia investigation from public view.[…]

    The Post analysis of Democratic inquiries and other records identified more than 20 investigations directly connected to Trump, his family or the White House that have been met with partial or complete stonewalling by the administration.
    The article goes into detail about the requests the Trump administration is stalling, and the extent of their obstruction would be impressive in a different context.
    posted by Doktor Zed at 2:30 PM on May 12, 2019 [22 favorites]


    An ACLU update on an ongoing lawsuit from 2017 (emphasis mine): We Got U.S. Border Officials to Testify Under Oath. Here’s What We Found Out. The information we uncovered through our lawsuit shows that CBP and ICE are asserting near-unfettered authority to search and seize travelers’ devices at the border, for purposes far afield from the enforcement of immigration and customs laws. The agencies’ policies allow officers to search devices for general law enforcement purposes, such as investigating and enforcing bankruptcy, environmental, and consumer protection laws. The agencies also say that they can search and seize devices for the purpose of compiling “risk assessments” or to advance pre-existing investigations. The policies even allow officers to consider requests from other government agencies to search specific travelers’ devices.

    CBP and ICE also say they can search a traveler’s electronic devices to find information about someone else. That means they can search a U.S. citizen’s devices to probe whether that person’s family or friends may be undocumented; the devices of a journalist or scholar with foreign sources who may be of interest to the U.S. government; or the devices of a traveler who is the business partner or colleague of someone under investigation. Both agencies allow officers to retain information from travelers’ electronic devices and share it with other government entities, including state, local, and foreign law enforcement agencies.

    Let’s get one thing clear: The government cannot use the pretext of the “border” to make an end run around the Constitution. The border is not a lawless place. CBP and ICE are not exempt from the Constitution. And the information on our phones and laptops is no less deserving of constitutional protections than, say, international mail or our homes. ... Crossing the U.S. border shouldn’t mean facing the prospect of turning over years of emails, photos, location data, medical and financial information, browsing history, or other personal information on our mobile devices. That’s why we’re asking a federal court to rule that border agencies must do what any other law enforcement agency would have to do in order to search electronic devices: get a warrant.


    The update includes examples of three people who were affected by these illegal searches.
    posted by Bella Donna at 3:01 PM on May 12, 2019 [46 favorites]


    What if the American public sees the changes necessary to stave off climate disaster as politically extremist?
    posted by Selena777 at 3:34 PM on May 12, 2019


    If we can stop this shit that's going on, we need to seriously revise a lot of laws. See also, government "norms".
    posted by Windopaene at 3:55 PM on May 12, 2019


    What if the American public sees the changes necessary to stave off climate disaster as politically extremist?

    If you set up a situation that leaves your kids locked in the car with the keys inside then yeah, you can end up where the only thing you can do is break a window. Whether it's “extreme” or not is immaterial at that point.

    Except in this case there aren't police or a fire department to come and tell you, “No, we really genuinely actually need to break the window.” Those are the scientists, who are already here and have been speaking out all our lives, for most of us. If “We, the People” half-asses our response out of fear of being too extreme, we'll just watch everything burn and melt and sink waiting for a greater authority figure who will never come.
    posted by XMLicious at 4:07 PM on May 12, 2019 [12 favorites]


    What if the American public sees the changes necessary to stave off climate disaster as politically extremist?

    A lot of scientists say that if that's the case there's a good chance we all die.

    The Democratic candidates that are suggesting modest changes are all that's needed to address global warming are acting immorally. They know it's not true, and they weaken the argument that global warming is possibly an existential crisis. This is an issue where advocating for incremental change is really, truly, dishonest and possibly as damaging as claiming global warming is not happening at all.
    posted by xammerboy at 4:07 PM on May 12, 2019 [16 favorites]


    Vox: Trump Economic Adviser Larry Kudlow Admits Tariffs Hurt Americans
    [Fox News's Chris] Wallace played Kudlow video of Trump making [an] incorrect statement about the tariffs Thursday at the White House, when the president claimed that tariffs are, “paid for mostly by China, by the way, not by us,” and said, “Larry, that isn’t true. It’s not China that pays tariffs. It’s the American importers, the American companies that pay what in effect is a tax increase and oftentimes passes it on to US consumers.”

    “Fair enough,” Kudlow responded. “In fact, both sides will pay. Both sides will pay in these things.”

    “But the tariffs on goods coming into the country, the Chinese aren’t paying,” Wallace said.

    “No, but the Chinese will suffer GDP losses and so forth,” Kudlow responded.

    “I understand that,” Wallace said. “But the president says that doesn’t — that China, it pays the tariffs, they may suffer consequences but it’s US businesses and US consumers who pay, correct?”

    “Yes, to some extent. Yes, I don’t disagree with that,” Kudlow conceded. “Again, both sides will suffer on this.”
    With video via Fox News Sunday.
    posted by Doktor Zed at 4:17 PM on May 12, 2019 [10 favorites]


    Part of what I think is happening with 3rd way candidates and other proposals is that people are doing a lot of second guessing as to true motives. After Obama became president, I ran into a lot of people that were disappointed that he was not pulling out of Afghanistan or putting any bankers in jail. This was surprising to me, as staying in Afghanistan and giving clemency to bankers were major policy platforms Obama ran on. The thing is, a lot of his voters didn't think he really meant it.

    Studies show that contrary to our expectations, politicians do generally try and do what they say they will. When Pelosi says she doesn't want to impeach Trump, she means just that. She doesn't mean she has a secret strategy. When Biden says he wants to simply shore up Obamacare, that's the limit of what he'll do. When he says incremental changes are all that's needed for global warming, he means it. He's not psyching out moderate Republicans, that's the limit of what he'll do.

    Another thing I think is happening is that a lot of voters simply want to avoid pain. My parents were against a vote recount in Bush versus Gore because it sounded like that would take a lot of time, energy, etc. and would divide the country. But if the country decided that needed to happen? Then they would have wanted it happen with all possible speed. Again to avoid as much pain as possible. It's the same with impeachment. It sounds like a pain and why do Democrats want to put me through pain? But once it needs to happen the narrative would immediately change to this needs to happen and why are Republicans dragging their feet? Why are they causing me pain?
    posted by xammerboy at 4:26 PM on May 12, 2019 [21 favorites]


    the worry, and I think it's a pretty reasonable one, is that the public is insufficiently informed to understand that "the end of the species" is likely to be a bigger pain than whatever pain is needed to avert it.
    posted by Archelaus at 4:33 PM on May 12, 2019 [17 favorites]


    Studies show that contrary to our expectations, politicians do generally try and do what they say they will.

    Aye, and there's the rub - so many people believe that all politicians are liars, or at least are just "pandering" when they say they will do (or won't do) something. Most people who voted for Trump did so gleefully and racistly, but there were those who thought that he couldn't possibly mean everything he said, he was just joking around, the leopards won't eat my face, etc.

    On the other hand, many people projected a whole progressive/very left-wing philosophy on Barack Obama that he wasn't really about. Now I love Obama (I'm alive, thanks to Obamacare), and think he basically did a good job - or as good a job as he was permitted to do - but while he was an enormously consequential President, and ran on the hope and change rhetoric, he was more a centrist than people wanted to believe.

    I don't think politicians are, or have to be, liars and face-eating leopards. I think most really do mean what they say, for good or for ill. I think the likes of Elizabeth Warren truly want to be President to help ordinary Americans, and Jay Inslee wants to do everything in his power to mitigate climate change.

    What I think happens, especially in the case of Democratic politicians, is that they really do mean what they say, but their ability to carry out those promises can be limited by opposition or just plain circumstance. (See: Obama, Barack, second term of) Obama wanted to appoint Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court but was stymied. A majority-Republican Senate could prevent a President Warren from putting her excellent policies into action. Etc.

    But the idea that politicians don't mean what they say (aka "just pandering") has got to stop. It's toxic. It keeps us from electing good people. It makes the (to put it charitably) naive and politically unaware think that Trump doesn't really mean what he says.
    posted by Rosie M. Banks at 4:35 PM on May 12, 2019 [26 favorites]


    > Trump backers applaud Warren in heart of MAGA country

    On Outreach, Buttigieg Scolds, While Warren Acts
    Here's Pete Buttigieg:
    Pete Buttigieg ... call[ed] out fellow Democrats on Saturday for playing “identity politics” and pitting one group’s grievances against another’s.

    In a risky speech to the Human Rights Campaign, a major LGBT rights group, Buttigieg warned of a “crisis of belonging in this country,” arguing it was exacerbated by “so-called identity politics” that emphasize how one person hasn’t walked in another’s shoes — “something that is true, but it doesn’t get us very far.” ...

    “What I worry about is not the president’s fantasy wall on the Mexican border that’s not going to get built anyway,” Buttigieg said. “What I worry about are the very real walls that we are putting up between us as we get divided and carved up.”
    Meanwhile, instead of scolding her opponents on the subject of outreach and inclusion, Elizabeth Warren is simply doing it -- and, according to Politico, doing it successfully: [...]

    Warren wants significantly more money for addiction treatment. She wants to use money from her proposed wealth tax to pay for it. She also wants to come down harder on pharmaceutical industry executives who profited from the crisis. If you have ideas for solving problems that matter to people outside your base, and you talk about them with those people, you don't have to prattle on about "identity politics." [...]

    You want to bring people together? Go outside your comfort zone and show them you have something to offer. Do the outreach instead of scolding other people. Talk is cheap.
    posted by tonycpsu at 4:48 PM on May 12, 2019 [61 favorites]


    What I think happens, especially in the case of Democratic politicians, is that they really do mean what they say, but their ability to carry out those promises can be limited by opposition or just plain circumstance.

    Great point. Obama only came through with Obamacare because he was totally invested. His advisors told him not to do it. They told him it wasn't smart or likely to pass, at which point he said "I don't care. I feel lucky. We're doing this."

    Will a politician who isn't as committed to healthcare or global warming have the nerve it takes to commit? Or is it even more likely that their legislation will be stymied or hopelessly compromised?
    posted by xammerboy at 5:12 PM on May 12, 2019 [6 favorites]


    What I think happens, especially in the case of Democratic politicians, is that they really do mean what they say, but their ability to carry out those promises can be limited by opposition or just plain circumstance.

    But there's no advantage in pre-conceding that. As Duncan Black / Atrios repeatedly says, if your policy proposals includes the phrases "refundable tax credit [based on certain qualifying factors]" or "tax-exempt savings account" then you've accepted "better things aren't really possible" before you've even begun.

    Anyway, as I've said before, there's a difference between structural radicalism and typical policy radicalism, and structural radicalism entails saying "people clearly want X, so what needs to change in order for X to happen?"
    posted by holgate at 5:36 PM on May 12, 2019 [6 favorites]


    Can Nancy Pelosi Keep the Democrats in Line?
    Ms. Pelosi remains dismissive, in that grandmotherly way of hers, of some of the bolder ideas backed by caucus rabble-rousers. This month, she oversaw the passage of environmental legislation focused on keeping the United States in the Paris agreement on climate change — a far cry from what she dismissed as the “Green Dream or whatever” championed by the freshman phenom Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York. And the speaker supports shoring up Obamacare rather than starting from scratch with a single-payer plan.
    Am I wrong or does Pelosi's positioning of the party match up with one candidate and one candidate only, namely Biden? If, as the article suggests, Pelosi comes across as the only grownup in the room, what does that make the other Democratic candidates running on universal healthcare?
    posted by xammerboy at 6:24 PM on May 12, 2019 [6 favorites]


    I knew before I hovered that link that it was gonna be an NYT article. They're so aggressively anti-partisan, ugh.

    And I *like* and mainly trust Nancy Pelosi, obviously the left needs to hold any leader's feet to fire but I don't hate her or anything.
    posted by tivalasvegas at 6:34 PM on May 12, 2019 [3 favorites]


    A lot of scientists say that if that's the case there's a good chance we all die.

    The Democratic candidates that are suggesting modest changes are all that's needed to address global warming are acting immorally. They know it's not true, and they weaken the argument that global warming is possibly an existential crisis.


    If they're like me, they may not know this.

    I think I roughly understand the models under which there's ecological trauma to the point where some sizable margin of humanity suffers (10-20%). I think I even roughly understand some models under which there's significant ecological collapse and the world only supports a fraction of the current human population (among other populations). I don't think I yet understand a model under which human extinction is inevitable.

    All of these possibilities are still an emergency, but I don't know how to figure out what's more likely. Maybe some political operators, even good faith ones, are confronting the same thing, on top of whatever their perspective is on what's possible.
    posted by wildblueyonder at 7:07 PM on May 12, 2019 [10 favorites]


    I don't know this is what the original poster was referring to, but the second order effects of climate change that kills off 20% of the population must not be ignored. Resources pressures lead to war and related atrocities. Seems pretty certain massive global resource pressure leads to massive global war and related atrocities.

    Oh, and happy Mother's Day.
    posted by bcd at 7:32 PM on May 12, 2019 [9 favorites]


    XMLicious: If you set up a situation that leaves your kids locked in the car with the keys inside then yeah, you can end up where the only thing you can do is break a window. Whether it's “extreme” or not is immaterial at that point.

    This is correct and it definitely applies to climate change, but one place the parallel breaks is the absence of such binary failure/success outcomes. It's more as if the car was filled with people and there was no way to break entire windows, but we could work to create holes in multiple windows, and if we do that task to the absolute best of our ability, most but not all of the occupants will make it out alive (some have already died and others are medically past hope). But if we do nothing, then at least a couple of them will manage to escape on their own -- there's almost no possibility, in the real world, of "total" failure as in extinction of all human life (barring a carbon loop that manages to emulate Venus or something).

    In that sense, all proposed solutions, including everything from Bidenism to the Green New Deal to a literal overthrow of capitalism, are, unfortunately, a negotiation for the balance between survival and extinction. It's less like the action-movie depiction of the danger of radiation (our hero has only four minutes before he takes on the lethal dose, but if he escapes a second before then, he'll be just fine) and more like actual radiation. Some denialists like to deploy the fallacious, simplistic model in their arguments against serious climatology, saying "You said X was the turning point of no going back, then you said the same of Y, then Z..." Each of those turning points represented something concrete -- another person in the car -- and was indeed passed.

    For that matter, it works like a country's descent from healthy democracy to kleptocracy (no idea why that example would jump to mind). In the absence of a single date on which someone declares themself dictator, everyone saying that the process is underway can be called chicken little. As Alexandra Erin puts it:

    "Oh, don't be alarmist, the gun is in the holster. No need to shout, it's just in his hand, not even pointed at you. You're acting like he already shot you, his finger's not even on the trigger! Okay, it's on the trigger, but he hasn't pulled it. I'll be the first to oppose him if"
    posted by InTheYear2017 at 7:38 PM on May 12, 2019 [39 favorites]


    I think I even roughly understand some models under which there's significant ecological collapse and the world only supports a fraction of the current human population (among other populations). I don't think I yet understand a model under which human extinction is inevitable.

    Once we're down to arguing the fine points of whether we're looking at "a hundred million people fending off alligators and pythons in the Yukon and Tierra Del Fuego" or "a hundred thousand people surviving in caves and on mountaintops" or "Venus 2.0," it probably means we should be looking beyond carbon taxes and market based solutions.
    posted by Rust Moranis at 7:47 PM on May 12, 2019 [25 favorites]


    Pentagon will pull money from ballistic missile and surveillance plane programs to fund border wall
    The Pentagon will shift $1.5 billion for President Trump’s border wall from programs that include the military’s next nuclear intercontinental ballistic missile and a plane that provides surveillance and communications to fighter jets while airborne, according to a Defense Department document obtained by The Washington Post.
    The document includes more details about the administration’s plan, disclosed Friday, to build about 80 additional miles of border wall using Defense Department money. The document echoes acting defense secretary Patrick M. Shanahan in saying that there will be no negative effect on military readiness, though administration officials have previously acknowledged that reprogrammed money also could be put toward other unfunded military projects.
    “The Department carefully selected sources for the reprogramming that are excess or early to need and will not adversely affect military preparedness,” the document said.
    posted by scalefree at 7:51 PM on May 12, 2019 [5 favorites]


    it probably means we should be looking beyond carbon taxes and market based solutions.

    Carbon taxes are clearly not sufficient. However, they would be a positive incentive, and there's no reason to rule them out as an element of an overall strategy.
    posted by Chrysostom at 8:04 PM on May 12, 2019 [5 favorites]




    However, they would be a positive incentive, and there's no reason to rule them out as an element of an overall strategy.

    Adults keep saying: 'We owe it to the young people to give them hope.' But I don't want your hope. I don't want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act.

    Sure, carbon taxes might be a part of the vast reorganization of our economy and society that will be necessary for survival. But "how about we do some carbon taxes in order to meet climate deniers in the middle" doesn't truly recognize the crisis. It's a gesture of giving hope when we need demonstrated rational panic.
    posted by Rust Moranis at 8:15 PM on May 12, 2019 [17 favorites]


    I don't think panic usually manifests rationally. I think it's more likely that, if you extinguish any hope, then people say, "We're fucked, not worth trying to do anything."

    But I suppose this is basically a derail.
    posted by Chrysostom at 8:29 PM on May 12, 2019 [10 favorites]


    We have to an FDR moment where he calls in private automobile manufacturers and says, guess what, you're not making cars this year because we're making tanks, and we all go, U.S.A.! U.S.A.! U.S.A.! Except it has to be with solar panels and wind turbines and public transportation. I would totally America Fuck Yeah that one.
    posted by angrycat at 8:47 PM on May 12, 2019 [46 favorites]


    Carbon taxes are the homeopathy of answers to global warming.
    posted by jamjam at 9:04 PM on May 12, 2019 [18 favorites]


    All I know is that the first thing we need to do is to get out of the situation where someone is in the White House actively trying to destroy the climate and the country. If that takes electing Biden, who I disagree with on just about everything, I'll gladly do it, and then we can spend four years campaigning to get him to take climate issues seriously and then primary him out of office if we have to.
    posted by mmoncur at 9:29 PM on May 12, 2019 [10 favorites]


    I also think about Drake’s Equation and why we’ve never encountered intelligent life despite extremely high odds that exoplanets have evolved it.

    It's a Great Filter, folks. The greatest filter. We'll explain the absence of spacefaring intelligent life like you've never seen.
    posted by Rust Moranis at 9:59 PM on May 12, 2019 [10 favorites]


    I will also be voting for voting for Biden if it comes to it, but I really have to ask how the politically engaged young people are going to feel about Biden's playing around with their future. I mean, I know we're supposed to care terribly about white men, but what about the young ones? You know, the ones who stay home if they're not all fired up and shit?
    posted by angrycat at 10:01 PM on May 12, 2019 [5 favorites]


    What if Electability Is More About Authenticity than Moderation? (David Atkins, Washington Monthly)
    One consideration is that for a certain type of voter, authenticity is more important than any particular policy concern. Authenticity is a frequently misunderstood concept, and should not be confused with honesty. Trump is a breathtakingly dishonest liar, but every time he opens his mouth it’s obvious that you’re getting the real him, unfiltered. The real Trump happens to be a racist huckster with a total disregard for facts and morals, but when he speaks it’s fairly obvious where he stands on most issues and what he intends to do–even if he never follows through or has no idea how he will get there. When Trump lied about protecting Social Security and Medicare or about creating a better healthcare system without hurting pre-existing conditions, it was less tinny and inauthentic than the bravado of a man so clueless about policy that he didn’t even know that no conservative policy could accomplish those things.

    It’s also important to note that the sort of voter who switches between Obama and Trump or Romney and Clinton is not really “moderate,” but rather something that political scientists call cross pressured. Rather than seeking status quo, generally stable corporate-friendly policy, these voters tend to be more radical than typical partisans. But they tend to be on the extremes of issues that are orthogonal to the American political party divide, and oftentimes they are confused or ignorant of basic policy facts or where the political parties stand on them. They also tend to be relegated to the outskirts of American civic life: they feel both the economic resentments that progressive populists speak to and the cultural and social resentments that conservative populists exploit. As a researcher, I’ve talked to Obama-Trump voters who matched the “Bernie Bro” stereotype of both racist and economically egalitarian, as well as ones who were stridently in favor of social and racial equality but hated any form of taxation. So how do Democrats win over these sorts of voters, and how do those voters make their decisions when neither candidate matches their ideals?
    posted by Johnny Wallflower at 10:11 PM on May 12, 2019 [19 favorites]


    Ian Bassin:
    It’s telling that the very last line of the Mueller Report ends with “no person in this country is so high that he is above the law.” And then cites to U.S. v. Nixon. Then it ends. Methinks Mueller ending with that was not happenstance.
    posted by chris24 at 10:23 PM on May 12, 2019 [42 favorites]


    Re electability, here were the kooky weirdo Democratic nominees of the last 40 years: Carter, Bill Clinton, Obama. Here were the electable establishment Democratic nominees of the last 40 years: Mondale, Dukakis, Gore, Kerry. I mean, I see the logic for Biden, but the confidence the "electable" folks have in him seems rather at odds with what little historical evidence we have.
    posted by chortly at 10:24 PM on May 12, 2019 [37 favorites]


    To dovetail with Johnny Wallflower's authenticity vs moderation article: AOC talks to man hanging "Trump supporters for Ocasio-Cortez" sign outside her office.
    posted by wildblueyonder at 10:26 PM on May 12, 2019 [13 favorites]


    I will also be voting for voting for Biden if it comes to it, but I really have to ask how the politically engaged young people are going to feel about Biden's playing around with their future. I mean, I know we're supposed to care terribly about white men, but what about the young ones? You know, the ones who stay home if they're not all fired up and shit?

    You've answered your own question, I think. Bad. They're going to feel bad.

    But if you stay home unless you're fired up you lose your influence. Old people have so much influence because they show up. They show up if they are fired up. They show up if they aren't. They show up if its difficult, or boring, or annoying, or exciting, or raining, or snowing, or sunny, or...

    You get the picture.
    posted by Justinian at 10:42 PM on May 12, 2019 [7 favorites]


    but the confidence the "electable" folks have in him seems rather at odds with what little historical evidence we have.

    Speaking only for myself; I don't put any stock in theoretical arguments about electability. I do put a little stock in data showing Biden significantly up on Trump while other Democrats range from up nearly as much as Biden to barely ahead of Trump to barely behind in one case. I get the arguments that this far out that polling is of very small utility. But it's the only actual data we have so the alternative is potentially stuff with even less utility.

    So I don't blame people for taking that into account if they chose. But I also think it's completely reasonable for people to, as Chris Hayes kookily suggested on his show the other day, decide to vote for the person they actually want to be President. Since that's the easiest and most straightforward way to go and doesn't involve a lot of questionable attempts to game out various scenarios.
    posted by Justinian at 10:48 PM on May 12, 2019 [9 favorites]


    Pentagon will pull money from ballistic missile and surveillance plane programs to fund border wall

    I have no informed opinion on the US ballistic missile program &c, but I'm pretty damn certain that Putin does, and that he'd rather the US take money from missiles and spend it on Trump's stupid wall.
    posted by Joe in Australia at 11:02 PM on May 12, 2019 [28 favorites]


    adept256, the irony that these mendacious will-to-power grifters might ultimately be unseated thanks to a borderline-oblivious Australian ambassador is a never-ending source of delight to myself and all the other #auspol junkies who frequent these threads. I say 'irony' because the ambassador in question, Alexander 'Born-to-Rule' Downer, has forgotten more about working family connections and being born with a silver spoon in his mouth than anyone in TrumpWorld (with the possible exception of the DeVosses) has ever learned, with his daughter, the Empress-Presumptive Georgina, currently publicly failing to wrest control of pater-dearest's ancestral electorate of Mayo from The Pretender Rebekha Sharkie.
    posted by MarchHare at 11:29 PM on May 12, 2019 [14 favorites]


    (Sorry, that should have read "working his family connections" and not "working family connections," as 'working families' is a very specific dogwhistle left us by The Rodent.)
    posted by MarchHare at 12:04 AM on May 13, 2019 [2 favorites]


    To take that electability=authenticty argument at face value for explaining obama/trump voters or trump/ocasio-cortez supporters you'd have to accept that to some folks Trump seems authentic, which considering he cant go 30 seconds without contradicting himself or lying (or contradicting a previous lie with a new one) seems like a bit of a stretch to me. Im much more convinced by the argument that electability is nothing more than a cudgel, a meaningless weapon of bad faith or those who would capitulate to it.
    posted by Exceptional_Hubris at 5:13 AM on May 13, 2019 [9 favorites]


    From Sunday: “Do we want to be the party loyalists who in ringing rhetoric condemn the wrongdoings and scandals of the Democratic Party and excuse them when they are done by Republicans?” Mr. Hogan wrote to his colleagues. He lost the Republican nomination for Maryland governor, and his position on the impeachment was considered a main cause.

    So just to be clear, the Republicans' answer to Hogan's question has been a ringing "yes" since at least the 1970s, and all too obviously since at least the 1990s. Democrats erred greatly in giving Republicans too much credit for patriotism an not working as feverishly to brand them as the closet monarchists they are -- and since their agenda is unpopular, of course they are -- as Republicans have to demonize liberals, unions, the media, teachers, lawyers, and all other instruments of popular sovereignty.
    posted by Gelatin at 5:22 AM on May 13, 2019 [13 favorites]


    "Electability" is at best a retcon, and in the context of an electoral system that discards millions of votes for "considered electable but in a state where it doesn't matter" it's mostly meaningless.
    posted by holgate at 5:43 AM on May 13, 2019 [5 favorites]


    This is the best summation of the current situation I've seen in a long time:

    At some point we need to accept that an entire generation of Democrats were psychologically broken by the 1972, 1980, and 1984 elections, and spent decades acting as if they're only allowed to govern with a permission slip from Republicans.

    Speaker Pelosi, I need you to act aggressively towards the Trump administration and I need it six months ago.
    posted by petebest at 5:48 AM on May 13, 2019 [40 favorites]


    you'd have to accept that to some folks Trump seems authentic, which considering he cant go 30 seconds without contradicting himself or lying (or contradicting a previous lie with a new one) seems like a bit of a stretch to me.

    For some people, what he does is authentic -- because they do that themselves. They lie to cover up shitty and/or lazy stuff they've done, and they convince themselves that "everybody" does it. Because "no-one" can be perfect all the time. I've met plenty of those people in my life, or maybe rather a bit too many. My racist uncle would no doubt vote for Trump if he were American, not only because he mirrors his bullshit, but also because he mirrors his anger. There is so much in this world that racist uncle doesn't understand, and that makes him angry.

    A lot of people who are interested in politics, including myself, make the mistake of assuming that most people know at least a bit about policy. But they really don't. Most people know a bit about issues, but not a lot, and their takes on those issues are quite random. So they look for politicians they feel good about, and who talk about issues they care about.
    posted by mumimor at 5:52 AM on May 13, 2019 [32 favorites]


    you'd have to accept that to some folks Trump seems authentic, which considering he cant go 30 seconds without contradicting himself or lying (or contradicting a previous lie with a new one) seems like a bit of a stretch to me.

    Seconding what mumimor says above. Trump's authentically an asshole who governs like one, and that appeals to a far-too-good-sized chunk of the population. For them, his lack of truthfulness and sincerity have zero to do with anything.
    posted by Rykey at 6:27 AM on May 13, 2019 [16 favorites]


    CNBC: China is raising tariffs on $60 billion of US goods starting June 1
    China will raise tariffs on $60 billion in U.S. goods in retaliation for the U.S. decision to hike duties on Chinese goods, the Chinese Finance Ministry said Monday.

    Beijing will increase tariffs on more than 5,000 products to as high as 25%. Duties on some other goods will increase to 20%. Those rates will rise from either 10% or 5% previously.[…] The duties in large part target the U.S. agriculture industry, which has suffered from previous shots in the Trump administration’s trade war with China.
    The Dow Jones has reacted by dropping 415 points, while the Trump White House and Treasury have made no response.

    Naturally, @realdonaldtrump has been tweeting about China nonstop this morning, including a direct appeal: “I say openly to President Xi & all of my many friends in China that China will be hurt very badly if you don’t make a deal because companies will be forced to leave China for other countries. Too expensive to buy in China. You had a great deal, almost completed, & you backed out!”. Nothing, however, comes close in weirdness to his praise yesterday for “our Great Patriot Farmers (Agriculture)”, with whom he will “distribute the food to starving people in nations around the world! GREAT! #MAGA” as though he’s repurposing Maoist propaganda language for Twitter’s character limit.
    posted by Doktor Zed at 6:57 AM on May 13, 2019 [14 favorites]


    We need a complete overhaul of our entire society at a fundamental level. The time for patches on the system, like renewables or carbon taxes, was thirty years ago. By now it's far too late, and we need far more radical solutions.

    I was talking with my daughter about the upcoming elections (we have both EP and national elections within a month from now), and she said she doesn't trust anyone who thinks they can handle this with a tech-fix. Which is good and right.
    But I was also reminded that she, and her generation has no memory of the times where all of the world actually did something. In my life, I remember the energy crisis of 1973 fondly. It was a good time for being a child: there were car-free Sundays and a lot of other interesting restrictions. Strictly, it wasn't all the world because it was all the world except the OPEC countries, but it raised a global awareness of the limitations of fossile fuels and a lot of energy-saving innovation was made and implemented and people changed their wasteful habits. And even though the oil returned, the knowledge gained didn't disappear. If that hadn't happened, we would have been even worse off.
    When the greenhouse gas issue was understood during the 90's that was also dealt with as a global issue. The results weren't good enough, but again, if nothing had been done then, we'd have been worse off today. But most importantly: humans can get together and act. This time it's really serious, and it needs a lot of cooperation that will be hard. But it can be done and we should not despair.
    In Europe, the far right and the Russians want the upcoming elections to be about immigration. But at this point, it seems like climate is gaining traction. I guess there are more people like that guy upthread who is a Trump voter for AOC, I've heard quite a few of them in talk radio during the weekend.
    posted by mumimor at 7:05 AM on May 13, 2019 [11 favorites]


    Mod note: Folks, there are several existing climate change posts - please take that sidebar to one of them. Thanks.
    posted by restless_nomad (staff) at 7:08 AM on May 13, 2019 [7 favorites]


    companies will be forced to leave China for other countries. Too expensive to buy in China.

    American companies will find it more expensive in China, and thus buy from other countries, if they can (big if). But supply and demand dictates that the rest of the world will find it cheaper to buy from China.
    posted by DevilsAdvocate at 7:18 AM on May 13, 2019 [6 favorites]


    Pentagon will pull money from ballistic missile and surveillance plane programs to fund border wall

    So now it's officially Administration policy that poor Central and South American migrants are a bigger threat to the US than Russia and DPRK.
    posted by ZenMasterThis at 7:18 AM on May 13, 2019 [27 favorites]


    Sweden is re-opening their case against Assange and asking the UK for extradition. This will bring up an interesting dilemma for the Theresa May government because arguably the crime in Sweden is more serious but May wants to curry favor with Trump and the US, with the trade war and Brexit causing concern.

    Meanwhile, before anything else happens, Assange will serve at least 6 months in jail having been convicted of the crime of bail jumping.
    posted by JackFlash at 7:19 AM on May 13, 2019 [6 favorites]


    Why do you think they're doing this, JackFlash?
    posted by Selena777 at 7:26 AM on May 13, 2019 [1 favorite]


    American companies will find it more expensive in China, and thus buy from other countries, if they can (big if). But supply and demand dictates that the rest of the world will find it cheaper to buy from China.

    I don't even see U.S. companies leaving. They'll still want a Chinese presence, because that's the future market. Plus everyone knows the next president is going to end the tariffs. Even if that's just another 4 year wait, you're not going to pull up your factories.

    I could have gotten behind international sanctions against China for humanitarian reasons, but these tariffs are just dumb. The good news is that finally Trump seems to have shot himself in the foot.
    posted by xammerboy at 7:32 AM on May 13, 2019 [4 favorites]


    ‘At least you didn’t die’ is some next level spin.

    @CBSThisMorning
    "There will be some sacrifice on the part of Americans, I grant you that. But also that sacrifice is pretty minimal compared to the sacrifices that our soldiers make overseas that are fallen heroes or laid to rest," @SenTomCotton on trade war with China
    VIDEO
    posted by chris24 at 7:34 AM on May 13, 2019 [14 favorites]


    How Donald Trump spun three years of investigations into two words: “No collusion!” (Lucian K. Truscott IV, Salon)
    Employing The Double Reverse Triple Switchback Strategy, Trump now owns every side of the Russia argument

    Less than a month after he took office, he was already lying flat out about contacts with the Russians — there were none, and moreover, he had “no deals” in Russia, “no anything.” Then he pulled his double reverse misdirection, bringing up WikiLeaks, which he had not been asked about, and curiously, he absolved them of any crimes by pointing out that they had not released any “classified” information — an obvious, if oblique reference to the infamous Clinton emails, which if you’ll recall were alleged to have included classified information.

    And then executed his masterful triple switchback, turning himself from the beneficiary of the WikiLeaks releases of the Democrats’ emails, into the victim of it all. Hillary Clinton, whose campaign had been badly if not fatally damaged by the WikiLeaks releases, was the real criminal because she received answers to debate questions during the primary, and he didn’t. And if he had done what Hillary did . . . well, you get it.
    posted by ZeusHumms at 8:10 AM on May 13, 2019 [3 favorites]


    And today, Brett Kavanaugh sides with the liberals on the Supreme Court in a 5-4 decision against Apple. Apple had argued in the anti-trust case that consumers had no standing to complain about Apple's monopoly power in attaching a 30% commission to the sale of apps on its platform. Apple claimed that only app developers could bring the complaint, since technically, developers paid the commission, not consumers. The decision, written by Kavanaugh, said that "Apple’s line-drawing does not make a lot of sense, other than as a way to gerrymander Apple out of this and similar lawsuits."

    Yeah, Kavanaugh used the gerrymander analogy - making a liberal argument.
    posted by JackFlash at 8:12 AM on May 13, 2019 [12 favorites]


    I don't even see U.S. companies leaving. They'll still want a Chinese presence, because that's the future market. Plus everyone knows the next president is going to end the tariffs. Even if that's just another 4 year wait, you're not going to pull up your factories.

    I can't speak for every industry but they are absolutely leaving or trying to at least. Not many American companies actually own the factories they use in China so that really isn't a consideration for them.
    posted by nolnacs at 8:16 AM on May 13, 2019 [4 favorites]


    There will be some sacrifice on the part of Americans, I grant you that

    Good plan. Republican voters are famous for their willingness to sacrifice some income to support a greater good.
    posted by diogenes at 8:19 AM on May 13, 2019 [12 favorites]


    Nah, that line will still play because he pivots to fallen soldiers and there's nothing a Republican voter loves more than to "support the troops" and feel like they too are heroes.
    posted by lazaruslong at 8:23 AM on May 13, 2019 [2 favorites]


    Good plan. Republican voters are famous for their willingness to sacrifice some income to support a greater good.

    Is anything more typical of the GOP base than voting to harm their own material conditions in the hope of hurting non-white people more?
    posted by Rust Moranis at 8:36 AM on May 13, 2019 [15 favorites]


    that these mendacious will-to-power grifters might ultimately be unseated thanks to a borderline-oblivious Australian ambassador

    There's nothing borderline about Downer's obliviousness. As any politically aware Australian will tell you, he's a born-to-rule silvertail who has been professionally oblivious for his entire political career.

    Like Trump, Downer has never had any plan beyond self-aggrandizement garnished with ill-considered hot takes. He was the leader of Australia's centre-Right Liberal Party who allowed its present inexorable rightward drift to get started in earnest, essentially by being a clueless goose easily manipulated by the hard-right wing of his party.

    Not long after he assumed the leadership of the Liberal Opposition in 1994, public attention was drawn to a speech he'd given at a League of Rights meeting in 1987. He did his best to avoid answering questions about this, but when the Prime Minister of the day, Paul Keating, chose not to defend Downer against accusations of antisemitism when asked about the incident by a reporter, Downer was furious and moved a censure motion against Keating in Parliament.

    Keating's response was to move an amendment to Downer's censure motion such that all the words after the leading "That" were replaced with other words censuring Downer himself; and in the course of the subsequent debate, he gave this absolute masterclass in savaging a political opponent.

    I thought that those of you in despair over your Congressional leadership's apparent unwillingness to do something - anything! - about Trump might take a little heart from that long-ago reminder of how a centre-Left leader is supposed to behave.
    posted by flabdablet at 8:40 AM on May 13, 2019 [4 favorites]


    FT: Trump Tariffs On China Intensify Pain For US Soyabean Farmers—Plan to ship surplus to ‘starving countries’ pushes further into uncharted territory
    If free trade is the goal, the White House is taking a roundabout route. As Donald Trump raised tariffs to 25 per cent on $200bn worth of Chinese imports last week, the US president declared he would use the proceeds to buy up surplus agricultural products and ship them to “starving countries” as humanitarian aid. The US agriculture department soon announced it was readying a plan*.

    The proposed state crop purchases pushed agricultural markets further into uncharted waters a year after the dispute flared between the world’s two largest economies. Soyabean futures in Chicago settled below $8 a bushel on Friday, the lowest level in more than a decade, reflecting their importance as the top US agricultural export to China.[…]

    The new US tariffs are “going to extend this trade war,” said Bill Gordon, who farms corn and soyabeans on 2,000 acres in southern Minnesota [and is also vice-president at the American Soybean Association]. “We’re already bleeding. It’s going to prolong that haemorrhage and not a lot of us are going to be able to make it.”
    * Ron Howard Narrator Voice: They do not have a plan.

    WSJ won't come out and say that Trump's sabotaging his own administration's negotiations ("The latest breakdown shows the two countries still haven’t found a way to negotiate effectively."): Frustration, Miscalculation: Inside the U.S.-China Trade Impasse "The U.S. and Chinese governments both sent signals ahead of their trade talks in Washington last week that a pact was so near they would discuss the logistics of a signing ceremony. In a matter of days, the dynamic shifted so markedly that the Chinese deliberated whether to even show up after President Trump ordered a last-minute increase in tariffs on Chinese imports because the U.S. viewed China as reneging on previous commitments."

    Bloomberg, from last Monday, before talks broke down: Yes, Trump Tariffs Are Costing Billions. No, China Isn't Paying
    “Our results imply that the tariff revenue the U.S. is now collecting is insufficient to compensate the losses being born by the consumers of imports,” a study published in March by economists from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Princeton University and Columbia University concluded.[…]

    A separate paper published in March by economists Pinelopi Goldberg, the World Bank’s chief economist, Pablo Fajgelbaum of UCLA, Patrick Kennedy of the University of California, Berkeley, and Amit Khandelwal of Columbia Business School also found that consumers and U.S. companies were paying most of the costs of Trump’s tariffs.

    It also went a step further: After factoring in the retaliation by other countries, it concluded the main victims of Trump’s trade wars had been farmers and blue-collar workers in areas that supported Trump in the 2016 election.

    “Workers in very Republican counties bore the brunt of the costs of the trade war, in part because retaliations disproportionately targeted agricultural sectors,” the authors wrote.
    If Cotton wants American sacrifices, they're going to come first from the red parts of the map. And the Dow Jones is now down over 600 points,
    posted by Doktor Zed at 8:42 AM on May 13, 2019 [23 favorites]


    U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer said in a statement Friday that the president has ordered all remaining imports from China that aren’t yet subject to duties to face the tariffs

    Trump, after China retaliated on the new tariffs Friday, is escalating to put tariffs on all imports from China.

    Wait until Apple customers find out that their $1000 iPhones are now $1250. (Although it's unlikely Apple will pass all of the tariffs on to their customers.)
    posted by JackFlash at 8:43 AM on May 13, 2019 [1 favorite]


    Sad that our best hope of getting rid of Trump is Trump’s own stupidity wrecking the economy.
    posted by chris24 at 8:48 AM on May 13, 2019 [18 favorites]


    Is anything more typical of the GOP base than voting to harm their own material conditions in the hope of hurting non-white people more?

    For sure, but the GOP usually doesn't tell them it's going to harm their own material conditions. They usually convince them of the opposite.
    posted by diogenes at 8:49 AM on May 13, 2019 [3 favorites]


    Sad that our best hope of getting rid of Trump is Trump’s own stupidity wrecking the economy.

    What really sucks is I have to wonder if it's just stupidity or if he's acting on Putin's "advice."
    posted by diogenes at 8:50 AM on May 13, 2019 [10 favorites]


    For sure, but the GOP usually doesn't tell them it's going to harm their own material conditions. They usually convince them of the opposite.

    Just one more mask coming off. Cotton's canny (2024 presidency, here he comes) and knows that if he just came out and said "we're going to starve one of your children but all of theirs" his base would at least give it a good think.
    posted by Rust Moranis at 8:55 AM on May 13, 2019 [9 favorites]


    Wait until Apple customers find out that their $1000 iPhones are now $1250. (Although it's unlikely Apple will pass all of the tariffs on to their customers.)

    Apple is sitting on $225 billion dollars so it seems like they'd have wide latitude to decide whether to eat the increased tariffs and keep their prices the same (aiding Trump) or to pass the price increase along (aiding Trump's eventual challenger.)
    posted by contraption at 8:55 AM on May 13, 2019 [4 favorites]


    Gothamist: America's Guide To Bill de Blasio, NYC Mayor And Possible Presidential Candidate. They would not appear to be huge fans.

    Now, after seemingly every other Democratic leader in America has decided to run for president, de Blasio’s dithering feels adorably enraging, like the kid who just stands up on the high dive for ten minutes looking down at the water while the line below grows longer. “Cmon Bill it’s not THAT scary just do it or come down! We’re gonna go get some ice cream okay?”

    A more charitable interpretation is that the mayor is being “deliberative.” Either way, we deeply appreciate the extra time to put this blog post together.

    posted by showbiz_liz at 9:03 AM on May 13, 2019 [3 favorites]


    What really sucks is I have to wonder if it's just stupidity or if he's acting on Putin's "advice."

    Occam's Razor might be that it's both stupidity and a belief that socialism-for-white-people -- more than that, a quasi-planned economy for certain white people -- has electoral benefit. Direct cash payments potentially creates a greater political bond than sales in a healthy economy, and yet the Republican trope that Democrats buy votes with handouts will somehow persist.
    posted by holgate at 9:05 AM on May 13, 2019 [4 favorites]


    if he just came out and said "we're going to starve one of your children but all of theirs" his base would at least give it a good think.

    Fortunately for Cotton, it won't come to that. If there's one thing this timeline has taught us, it's that you can easily blame the Democrats for anything Republicans have caused. Republicans ruin health care? "Democrats ruined health care." Republicans collude with Russia? "It's the Democrats who have colluded with Russia." Saying "Despite all obvious, easily-accessible evidence, the Democrats starved your children, not us" is all too easy, and it's what their base wants to hear anyhow.
    posted by Rykey at 9:07 AM on May 13, 2019 [5 favorites]


    They would not appear to be huge fans.

    No one is! I think it’s rather remarkable the nation’s largest city has functioned pretty well without s mayor for years now, maybe we need to rethink the office.

    It’s like Coumo, no one likes him, no one can point to his appeal, we just accept he’s in power cause the New York State machine is more like a weather event then functioning democracry.
    posted by The Whelk at 9:11 AM on May 13, 2019 [14 favorites]


    Apple is sitting on $225 billion dollars so it seems like they'd have wide latitude

    Except most of that cash is untaxed overseas earnings. To bring it home and use it to offset tariffs would cost them a 15% repatriation tax on top of the tariffs. I expect Apple and other CEOs to start squealing soon.
    posted by JackFlash at 9:14 AM on May 13, 2019 [7 favorites]


    Remember when companies were adding an Obamacare surcharge to their bills?

    They seriously need to start adding the Trump Tariff Surcharge to all their retail advertisements.
    posted by xigxag at 9:25 AM on May 13, 2019 [13 favorites]


    I expect Apple and other CEOs to start squealing soon.

    There was one I saw, the CEO of Polaris, makers of snowmobiles and ATVs, saying the new tariffs would be "downright catastrophic" and could cut profits by a third. For the schadenfreude I googled his name and found he was a Trump tariff cheerleader just a few months ago because "Trump's goals are perfectly aligned with US manufacturers", but he said this as his company was shifting production to Poland to avoid the steel tariff.
    posted by peeedro at 9:31 AM on May 13, 2019 [27 favorites]


    FT: If free trade is the goal, the White House is taking a roundabout route

    Trump is not at all a free trader. He's very clearly a protectionist. He doesn't like international free markets at all. He wants quotas and tariffs. He would have been very comfortable in 19th or 18th century finance.

    The financial & corporate world still seems to be pussy-footing around this despite ample evidence during the USMCA renegotiation, the steel and aluminum tariffs and now the negotiations with China. They will either need to come to terms with him on this (ha) or look for new leadership in the US.
    posted by bonehead at 9:38 AM on May 13, 2019 [11 favorites]


    I would like to see some shareholder derivative suits brought against CEOs that were credulous Trump supporters or were too incompetent to understand that Trump was actually working against their interests or would inevitably turn against them.
    posted by jedicus at 9:40 AM on May 13, 2019 [21 favorites]


    Remember when companies were adding an Obamacare surcharge to their bills?

    They seriously need to start adding the Trump Tariff Surcharge to all their retail advertisements.


    They did that as a political attack on Obama and Democrats making them pay their employees more. They were pissed off about their employees gaining the slightest bit of leverage after decades of turning the screws on labor and the making the employment relationship more and more coercive from every angle. Most non-ag and non-auto companies are still EXTREMELY happy about the Trump tax cuts, and want another round of the same, they're not about to take heavy handed action against him in the same way, especially when it's consumers ultimately feeling the increased burden, not the company CEO, and the tariffs are not diminishing their stranglehold over their laborforce's choices.
    posted by T.D. Strange at 9:44 AM on May 13, 2019 [15 favorites]


    Vanity Fair's Gabriel Sherman: Trump Fund-Raising Is in Crisis, and Even Don Jr. Is Sounding the Alarm
    According to sources, Trump campaign officials are sounding the alarm over the president’s early fund-raising hauls. Trump’s son Don Jr. has privately warned donors that Trump only raised around $30 million in the last quarter, and pointed out that the number fell far short of the roughly $45 million Barack Obama raised in the second quarter of 2011 for his 2012 re-election bid, according to a source briefed on the conversations (A source close to Don Jr. disputed this). “They need more money, and there’s no enthusiasm. They need to amp it up,” a Trump donor told me. “Wall Street never liked Trump from the beginning. Goldman is filled with people who were Obama fund-raisers,” another Trump donor told me. In 2016, Trump raised only about $351 million. Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign took in $483 million.

    Sources say the anemic fund-raising is being driven by several factors. The biggest is Trump himself. Trump’s shambolic governing style and endless tweeting are exhausting donors. “There’s Trump fatigue,” the longtime Republican donor told me. “The 2020 bumper sticker should be: ‘Same Policies, but We Promise Less Crazy.’” Then there’s Trump’s difficult re-election pathway. According to a source, some donors aren’t stepping up because Trump’s numbers in must-win states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin continue to disappoint.

    Another problem is the dysfunction in Trump’s donor-outreach effort. Simply put, donors feel ignored. “There’s no follow-through,” said a donor who’s interacted with the campaign. “They don’t return favors,” another donor said. One former administration official said some donors are upset at the slow pace of confirming ambassadorships and political appointments. “Donors are not being taken care of,” the official said. “All these people were supposed to be ambassadors by now, but they’ve been slow-rolled. Trump is furious.”
    n.b. Forbes, from last month: Trump Has Now Shifted $1.3 Million Of Campaign-Donor Money Into His Business
    posted by Doktor Zed at 9:44 AM on May 13, 2019 [28 favorites]


    “The most powerful labor leader in the country right now is about 5’5” in sneakers, though her work uniform generally adds an extra inch or two. As the president of the Association of Flight Attendants (AFA-CWA) and veteran flight attendant who has worked for United Airlines since 1996, Sara Nelson is no stranger to wearing heels—but after spending some time with her, one gets the distinct impression that she’d be just as comfortable in combat boots.” Sara Nelson’s Art Of War
    posted by The Whelk at 10:05 AM on May 13, 2019 [18 favorites]


    re: need to start adding the Trump Tariff Surcharge

    Electronics supplier Digi-Key does this... affected items are flagged "tariff applied" next to the part number
    posted by tinker at 10:24 AM on May 13, 2019 [23 favorites]


    From that horrible lede to the numerous references to her appearance, it’s easy to miss how important Sara Nelson was in bringing an end to the shutdown in that article, so I’m pulling it out here as otherwise you’ll get lost in hearing how “peppy” and blond Nelson is:
    It was her call for a general strike, delivered during her acceptance speech for the 2019 AFL-CIO MLK Drum Major for Justice Award on Sunday, January 20, that was widely credited for jump-starting the endgame of President Donald Trump’s brutal five-week shutdown.
    posted by the thorn bushes have roses at 10:27 AM on May 13, 2019 [28 favorites]


    I would like to see some shareholder derivative suits brought against CEOs that were credulous Trump supporters or were too incompetent to understand that Trump was actually working against their interests or would inevitably turn against them.

    Tax cuts and the dismantling of regulatory regimes (industrial and financial) have almost certainly more than compensated shareholders of the kind who could afford to bring such suits. They'll do fine. They are doing fine.
    posted by They sucked his brains out! at 10:30 AM on May 13, 2019 [3 favorites]


    My Congressman, Michael McCaul, just did a mini town hall here at my workplace. Despite my sever social anxiety, I actually went, planning to ask his position on medical providers being able to refuse care to people like me (trans). The first question, however, was asked by another trans woman. She asked how he felt about the trans military ban. He tried to put it off by saying that General Mattis says it's okay. I actually managed to speak up and ask "Yes, but what do you think." His response was that he thinks any qualified person who wants to serve should be able to serve. I didn't get to followup and ask if he feels that a trans person can be qualified.

    There were only a few more questions, and I didn't get to ask mine, but at least I managed to speak up a little.
    posted by Tabitha Someday at 10:35 AM on May 13, 2019 [105 favorites]


    "I can still personally remember Valerie Plame’s husband Joe Wilson literally screaming obscenities at me across a table ... that Republican opposition research on Obama would see him destroyed in a landslide against McCain. ...It may well be, in other words, that Democrats have been getting electability wrong for decades now, and that the biggest obstacle facing Democratic voters is their mistaken belief in a silent majority of voters more conservative than themselves." What If Electability Is More About Authenticity than Moderation?

    And this comment from the twitter feed it was posted in

    @moneyfamine “Having actually campaigned in rural PA, serious Trump Country, I can report that the principal driver is a complete loss of hope that things will get better and a raging fear that they will get worse. Optimists do not vote Republican.”
    posted by The Whelk at 11:39 AM on May 13, 2019 [37 favorites]




    Des Moines Register: 'It Can't Get Any Worse': Iowa Farmers Suffer As U.S. Trade War With China Escalates
    "Farmers, particularly soybean farmers, have been the tip of the spear when it comes to Chinese retaliation, and I'm not sure they can take much more," said Kirk Leeds, CEO of the Iowa Soybean Association.

    Escalating tariffs "undercut any remnants of optimism," Leeds said. "That's what's most devastating about this."[…]

    Tim Bardole, a Rippey farmer, said he understands the U.S. needs a stronger trade deal with China, especially to protect intellectual property.

    "An agreement that is fair to both countries is really the light at the end of the tunnel that I'm hoping for," said Bardole, president-elect of the Iowa Soybean Association board. "But there’s no question that agriculture is suffering with the way things are. […] A lot of producers are in serious financial pain. How long we can survive and handle it, I don't know."
    CNN: Dow Plunges 700 Points After China Retaliates With Higher Tariffs "European stocks closed lower across the board. Asian markets also finished lower, with the Shanghai Composite (SHCOMP) ending Monday trading down 1.2%."

    At an Oval Office presser today, Trump said that he plans to meet both Chinese President Xi and Russian President Putin at the G-20 summit coming up in Osaka, Japan, in late June. On Twitter beforehand, Trump lied that US consumers wouldn't have to pay for the tariffs, or should buy from other countries or domestically. Predicting "There will be nobody left in China to do business with. Very bad for China, very good for USA!", he warned, "China should not retaliate-will only get worse!" As usual, he appears to have learned nothing from his own mistakes and is blaming whoever else he can for them.
    posted by Doktor Zed at 12:10 PM on May 13, 2019 [14 favorites]


    From today's WH pool reports:
    POTUS said a deal with China was “95 percent” done when Secretary Mnuchin and USTR Lighthizer we’re informed in China the deal was off. That’s when he ordered the tariff move.

    On war with Iran, “we’ll see what happens,” POTUS said.

    WILL POTUS PLEDGE TO NOT USE DIRT FROM A FOREIGN COUNTRY IN THE 2020 ELECTION?

    POTUS: “Well, I never did use [it]. As you probably know, that's what the Mueller report was all about. They said, ‘No collusion.’”

    “And I would certainly agree to that. I don't need it. All I need is the opponents that I'm looking at. I'm liking what I see.”
    posted by box at 12:12 PM on May 13, 2019 [2 favorites]


    @moneyfamine “Having actually campaigned in rural PA, serious Trump Country, I can report that the principal driver is a complete loss of hope that things will get better and a raging fear that they will get worse. Optimists do not vote Republican.”

    On one level, on might think that voting Republican leads to things not getting better, which apparently leads to voting Republican again. Though voters seem to be getting the idea that the Democrats delivered improvements in health care and the Republicans want to take it away, so there seems to be an opportunity here for Democrats to make the long-overdue pitch that Republican policies are at fault for many Americans' economic woes.

    That said, if "things will not get better" means "the nation will get progressively less white," then yeah, it will, not that that excuses voting Republican either.
    posted by Gelatin at 12:27 PM on May 13, 2019 [8 favorites]


    @CBSThisMorning
    "There will be some sacrifice on the part of Americans, I grant you that. But also that sacrifice is pretty minimal compared to the sacrifices that our soldiers make overseas that are fallen heroes or laid to rest," @SenTomCotton on trade war with China


    Perfect. Sacrifices by the wealthy for universal health care, free college education for all, housing for the homeless, better pay for teachers, improved infrastructure, making room for immigrants and refugees, reducing carbon emissions, etc., etc., are all small sacrifices compared to the sacrifices made by our brave, dead troops.
    posted by Mental Wimp at 12:57 PM on May 13, 2019 [31 favorites]




    Does either party have a solid plan to economically preserve rural areas essentially for their own sake by fostering the creation of middle class jobs for existing residents? Republicans have the military and prison industrial complexes going, but those jobs are more of a byproduct than the purpose. Rural regions would also continue to bleed young talent no matter what, because the Internet reveals that there's more ways to lead your life than the exact same way your parents did.
    posted by Selena777 at 1:10 PM on May 13, 2019 [5 favorites]


    Washingtonian, Inside the Pampered and Personalized World of DC’s VIP Diners
    One DC restaurateur who has hosted polarizing insiders including Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and White House senior adviser Stephen Miller—architect of the President’s hard line on immigration—says he prefers to seat Trump officials in a private back corner away from the sidewalk-facing windows. Secret Service like the proximity to the back door, but the restaurateur sees an added perk to hiding controversial figures who might spark a confrontation. “The only thing I wish is that nobody walks by my window and realizes she’s dining with us,” he says of DeVos.

    There was a hitch with Miller, though: He always insisted on sitting in the middle of the dining room, “so we have no choice—we do it.”
    ...
    On subsequent visits, Miller continued to greet the restaurateur like a friend. Then last summer, Miller visited around the time when family separations at the Mexican border hit the news. This time, the restaurateur decided to broach politics: “I told him that I was worried that his policy, the speech that he was writing for the President, would hurt small businesses, especially my restaurant, in the future. My restaurant wouldn’t be open if we didn’t have immigrants.”

    Miller listened politely. “He smiled and said, ‘You are entitled to your opinions.’ ” He hasn’t been back since.
    posted by zachlipton at 1:25 PM on May 13, 2019 [23 favorites]


    Here in Hampton, New Hampshire, which is fairly conservative by our state's standards, there's been a sudden crop of Tulsi Gabbard signs growing on peoples lawns on my route to work. I don't think she's come through town yet, so this is curious.

    Biden was in town today, stumping at the local brick oven pizza place (Community Oven, which I highly recommend if you're ever in town). Lots of gray heads in the crowd from the photos I saw, though I suppose it was the middle of a work day.
    posted by schoolgirl report at 1:36 PM on May 13, 2019 [1 favorite]


    Today at the Oval Office, Trump hosted Hungary's authoritarian leader Viktor Orbán, telling him: "You're respected all over Europe. Probably like me a little bit controversial, but that's okay. You've done a good job and you've kept your country safe." Trump added, ""People have a lot of respect for this prime minister… He's done the right thing, according to many people, on immigration." (w/video via Aaron Rupar)

    CNN: Trump Welcomes Hungary's Far-Right Nationalist Prime Minister After Past Presidents Shunned Him
    He's rolled back democratic checks on his power, mused about creating a European ethnostate and erected a razor-wire fence to keep migrants out, angering the rest of the European Union. So why was Hungary's far-right prime minister Viktor Orbán meeting with President Donald Trump in the Oval Office on Monday?[…]

    Administration officials say the invitation to the White House for talks — the first for a Hungarian prime minister in years — is part of a concerted strategy to re-engage Central European nations as Russia and China seek to exert influence in the region. But the visit is raising questions about which leaders Trump is looking to cultivate — including a long list of global strongmen — at the expense of more traditional US allies.[…]

    Several advisers have cautioned Trump about appearing overly chummy with his counterpart, believing a warm embrace could hamper the administration's efforts to keep Orbán at arms-length. {And we can see how that warning went over with Trump.}
    The Atlantic's Franklin Foer, who recounted Viktor Orbán’s War on Intellect in their latest issue, notes: "My jaw hit the floor, when Donald Trump's ambassador to Hungary told me: "I can tell you, knowing the president for a good 25 or 30 years, that he would love to have the situation that Viktor Orbán has."
    posted by Doktor Zed at 1:41 PM on May 13, 2019 [22 favorites]


    I'm not saying that it is what we should do, I'm saying that it is what people in those areas desire from politicians. It's not realistic nor in line with long term environmental goals, but I think it's what people are despondent about - the death of their towns.
    posted by Selena777 at 1:43 PM on May 13, 2019 [2 favorites]


    Most people don't want to live in rural areas. That's why they are rural.
    Oh god, can we not?
    Here in Hampton, New Hampshire, which is fairly conservative by our state's standards, there's been a sudden crop of Tulsi Gabbard signs growing on peoples lawns on my route to work.
    Yeah, that's interesting. I saw a never-Trump conservative person express support for Gabbard the other day. I'm not sure I understand that. I guess maybe being an isolationist and a social conservative is enough for them?
    posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 1:45 PM on May 13, 2019 [2 favorites]


    Does either party have a solid plan to economically preserve rural areas essentially for their own sake by fostering the creation of middle class jobs for existing residents?

    Yes. This is the whole reason the Green New Deal includes jobs guarantees:
    “Guaranteeing a job with a family-sustaining wage, adequate family and medical leave, paid vacations, and retirement security to all people of the United States.”
    Half of the entire plan is economic, specifically because transitioning to a no emissions economy will disrupt a ton of existing resident's jobs.

    Now wether those existing residents consider a government job to be "real" or not...

    Also we've had about 92,000 rounds of "but the rurals" here, search all the past threads.
    posted by T.D. Strange at 1:46 PM on May 13, 2019 [24 favorites]


    Massive investment in public works programs for parks/public lands/green energy/environmental rehabilitation would do a lot for the economic dignity of rural communities: all that's missing is the Democratic Party's will to govern.
    posted by Rust Moranis at 1:48 PM on May 13, 2019 [21 favorites]


    Here in Hampton, New Hampshire, which is fairly conservative by our state's standards, there's been a sudden crop of Tulsi Gabbard signs

    Daily Beast, Jan 2019: Why Conservative Media and the Far Right Love Tulsi Gabbard for President
    Gabbard first became an in-demand Fox News guest in 2015 after she criticized Barack Obama’s unwillingness to use the label “radical Islamic terrorism.” Her media tour explaining that position earned her positively-tilted coverage in right-wing outlets like Breitbart and The Daily Caller—a trend that continued when she later expressed skepticism of Obama’s Iran nuclear deal.
    NBC, Feb 2019: "Russia's propaganda machine discovers 2020 Democratic candidate Tulsi Gabbard"
    An NBC News analysis of the main English-language news sites employed by Russia in its 2016 election meddling shows Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii, who is set to make her formal announcement Saturday, has become a favorite of the sites Moscow used when it interfered in 2016.
    Can confirm from personal internet anecdata -- she is the one Democrat many internet Republicans say they like. After all, Tucker Carlson likes her. Bannon loves her. Trump interviewed her for a cabinet position.

    And Gabbard says we should move on from Russian interference. She's on board with all their messaging about themselves.
    posted by OnceUponATime at 1:49 PM on May 13, 2019 [25 favorites]


    As someone who lives in a poor, rural area, you know what would help? Returning funding for local resources to the place it was 20 years ago before Rick Perry (here in Texas) started bankrupting the state funds and programs got slashed.

    I'm a few miles from a state park that was a tourist destination for weekend boating, camping, hiking, etc. It's been closed for five years after extreme flooding damaged it. There's no intention to rebuild it. Local businesses relied on the traffic from people going to the park. So we have fewer restaurants now, fewer convenience stores, fewer jobs for local folks.

    Not to mention the giant holes in the roads and other ways the Republicans running things refuse to meet basic standards needed to have a functioning economy. And we're lucky because we're within an hour's drive of pretty well-off towns where the people who are capable go get decent jobs.
    posted by threeturtles at 2:22 PM on May 13, 2019 [46 favorites]


    The thing I've been thinking about recently, with all this stuff about Trump voters for AOC and Warren doing well in Trump country is that part of the reason a lot of people voted for Trump is that he promised them things. He promised wonderful healthcare. He promised to bring back all their jobs from overseas. He promised to lower taxes and raise incomes. He promised that his fucking wall would help them get work.

    Now, obviously to us it was obvious he was lying. That what he promised was impossible, especially through the means he proposed. But that isn't a judgement that his voters were either able or willing to make. Maybe just cause they wanted to believe it.

    These same people respond well when Democrats tell them they can have better things in life. That they are willing to try and provide the things that they desperately need. Maybe it's that fucking simple. People want politicians to promise them the things they need.

    I'm pretty sure none of those folks are going to get excited about a candidate saying "well we can't actually improve anything for you because government is complicated." Like, yes, the common view of politicians is that they'll say anything to get elected and never live up to what they say. But is not promising to do anything really the solution to that? Trump bet on the fact that people don't care how likely something is, they just want to be pandered to.
    posted by threeturtles at 2:32 PM on May 13, 2019 [24 favorites]


    The thing I've been thinking about recently, with all this stuff about Trump voters for AOC and Warren doing well in Trump country is that part of the reason a lot of people voted for Trump is that he promised them things. He promised wonderful healthcare. He promised to bring back all their jobs from overseas. He promised to lower taxes and raise incomes. He promised that his fucking wall would help them get work.

    Now, obviously to us it was obvious he was lying. That what he promised was impossible, especially through the means he proposed. But that isn't a judgement that his voters were either able or willing to make. Maybe just cause they wanted to believe it.


    I mean if someone promises you something you want you're going to belive them, right? Only real die hard cranks think that's "buying votes" by trying to make people's lives better. Obviously he couldn't deliver on them or even believe in them - all that promising the end the war and rebuild schools was just Bannon's euro-style fascist talking points being filtered through his sponge brain - but it does show a Green Left Populism has a huge chance. You have to inspire these libidinal passions and desire for change and point them in the right direction.

    you have to name an enemy, and the right is better at that cause they've had more practice, but getting to "Hey your family members and neighbors and the unseen other isn't screwing you over, it;s the banks and the big businesses and the hoarders of wealth who want to turn the entire country into a slum they can look at from their climate controlled dome cities." is a good idea.

    The average person is absolutely fucked and they know this. Point to a way out and path to put the power back in their hands. Unleash those social forces already cracking open at the seams.

    It can start with eliminating bank fees but this isn't one person or one program or one campaign. This is all of us jumping up and down on the arc of history until it bends toward justice.
    posted by The Whelk at 2:50 PM on May 13, 2019 [34 favorites]


    "My jaw hit the floor, when Donald Trump's ambassador to Hungary told me: "I can tell you, knowing the president for a good 25 or 30 years, that he would love to have the situation that Viktor Orbán has."

    As Maya Angelou said, when somebody shows you who they are, believe them the first time.

    Trump has been showing us who he is for years. Definitely every. single. day. of his Presidency.

    And I find myself astounded by the number of Democrats and people in the America media who treat him like he's some kind of blip, something "the system" will correct in a short while, instead of a critical threat to all kinds of political, governmental, and cultural norms. And by "norms" I mean the practices and shared assumptions that, while imperfect, are meant to help prevent or at least mitigate that whole nasty, brutish, and short thing.

    I know there have been American politicians who have thought and felt the same things in their bilious little hearts that Trump has said out loud. I know there have been American politicians who have "sent out feelers" on moving various policies towards the positions Trump, Miller, Devos, Carson and others concoct and enact.

    Trump seems so obviously "What if that vile, but unfettered" that the lack of universal contempt and resolve to act immediately makes me think that my own antipathy and fear must be wrong and extreme, like I'm examining the things that he has objectively said and done, the things he himself has revealed about his motivations and desires, and somehow reaching an outlandish conclusion.
    posted by lord_wolf at 3:04 PM on May 13, 2019 [26 favorites]


    RE: Tulsi Gabbard & her Russian friends - I watched She The People (a presidential candidate forum put on by an org made up of women of color). Full disclosure - I skipped Gabbard because it's pretty clear she's nonsense. Scrolled down to the comments, though, and almost every single one was about how incredibly gifted and wonderful she is, and how she is absolutely each commenter's first choice candidate. It was eerie. This forum included Warren, Harris, Klobuchar, Booker, Sanders, O'Rourke, just off the top of my head. They are not even trying to be subtle - a person informed enough to watch She The People seems unlikely to also be convinced that Gabbard has a 100% approval rating in the YouTube comments.
    posted by Emmy Rae at 3:32 PM on May 13, 2019 [10 favorites]


    Gabbard = Russian interference on social media?
    posted by njohnson23 at 3:46 PM on May 13, 2019 [7 favorites]


    NBC, back in February: Russia's Propaganda Machine Discovers 2020 Democratic Candidate Tulsi Gabbard—Experts who track websites and social media linked to Russia have seen stirrings of a possible campaign of support for Hawaii Democrat Tulsi Gabbard.
    Since Gabbard announced her intention to run on Jan. 11, there have been at least 20 Gabbard stories on three major Moscow-based English-language websites affiliated with or supportive of the Russian government: RT, the Russian-owned TV outlet; Sputnik News, a radio outlet; and Russia Insider, a blog that experts say closely follows the Kremlin line. The CIA has called RT and Sputnik part of "Russia's state-run propaganda machine."[…]

    Former FBI agent Clint Watts, author of "Messing with the Enemy: Surviving in a Social Media World of Hackers, Terrorists, Russians, and Fake News," said Gabbard has past or present positions on several issues that would be attractive to the Russian propaganda machine, and she is already popular with the U.S. "alt-left." Besides her views on Syria, she responded to reports of Russian interference in the 2016 election by saying the U.S. had interfered in foreign elections too.
    Uncoincidentally, among her supporters in the media are arch Russian interference skeptics Glenn Greenwald and Michael Tracey.
    posted by Doktor Zed at 4:01 PM on May 13, 2019 [27 favorites]


    lord_wolf: As Maya Angelou said, when somebody shows you who they are, believe them the first time.

    Trump has been showing us who he is for years. Definitely every. single. day. of his Presidency.

    And I find myself astounded by the number of Democrats and people in the America media who treat him like he's some kind of blip, something "the system" will correct in a short while, instead of a critical threat to all kinds of political, governmental, and cultural norms. And by "norms" I mean the practices and shared assumptions that, while imperfect, are meant to help prevent or at least mitigate that whole nasty, brutish, and short thing.


    And this is one reason why I'm now putting Elizabeth Warren as my #1 ahead of Kamala Harris (who is still my #2 and I still really like her). Warren, of all the candidates, seems to really get what we are up against. Her stock just keeps rising and rising with me.

    As for Tulsi Gabbard: now that Jill Stein is known to be both a grifter and a laughingstock, there needs to be a new stooge set up to play spoiler. Tag, Tulsi, you're it. The bot army is at your service.
    posted by Rosie M. Banks at 4:06 PM on May 13, 2019 [47 favorites]


    Independent of any candidate, the Democratic Party should run election ads featuring ordinary people thriving under the adequate standard of living in other countries considered modern (or Western, or industrialized, or whatever descriptor is going to resonate with terribly insulated Americans).

    Danish retirees with state pensions, excitedly making travel plans; new French parents bonding during paid parental leave, while a nurse makes a standard, non-emergency house call to check on mother and child; a newly-disabled Norweigan worker making universal-design mods their home, which their government will help pay for; an Irish entrepreneur starting a new business, because they're not worried about health-care coverage for themselves or their kids.

    Or, man, just a scrolling, stark list of how rare things like gun deaths, childhood illnesses, personal bankruptcy, and dying from exposure are elsewhere. I've never forgotten a MetaFilter commenter pointing out that Americans don't even know what 'gold-plated' medical insurance is: beyond state coverage, you can buy additional insurance which will pay for your family's stay in a nearby hotel during your hospitalization.
    posted by Iris Gambol at 4:08 PM on May 13, 2019 [56 favorites]


    Less "Make America Great Again" and more, bring this country up to par.
    posted by Iris Gambol at 4:21 PM on May 13, 2019 [14 favorites]


    And I find myself astounded by the number of Democrats and people in the America media who treat him like he's some kind of blip, something "the system" will correct in a short while, instead of a critical threat to all kinds of political, governmental, and cultural norms.

    New today from the Nation:

    How Does Donald Trump Keep Getting Away With It? Hint: From Congress to the courts, people keep treating Trump like a “normal” president. It’s time to stop.
    posted by chris24 at 4:26 PM on May 13, 2019 [37 favorites]


    NYT, Pentagon Builds Deterrent Force Against Possible Iranian Attack
    The Pentagon will deploy a Patriot antimissile battery to the Middle East to shore up defenses against Iranian threats, part of a series of carefully calibrated deployments intended to deter attacks by Iranian forces or their proxies, Pentagon officials said on Friday.

    A single Patriot antimissile battery will return to the Persian Gulf, just a few months after four batteries were withdrawn from the region. The Pentagon also said it would replace one Navy ship in the region with a more capable vessel, the Arlington, an amphibious ship designed to carry Marines and combat helicopters.
    ...
    The new steps are meant to be measured and limited, in part because a new intelligence analysis by American and allied spy services has concluded that the Iranian government, declining in popularity amid economic woes, is trying to provoke the United States into a military overreaction to cement its hold on power, according to American and allied intelligence officials. The American intelligence community has not yet done a broader official assessment that would incorporate views from multiple agencies.

    Still, divisions within the Trump administration are growing between officials advocating sharp limits on new military deployments and a more hawkish camp that believes the United States must be prepared for a larger-scale fight with Iran.

    Military planners were ordered this week to begin preparing for the possibility of a much larger deployment to the region in the event of a military conflict with Iran, two American officials said. Such plans would go well beyond the measured steps the Pentagon took this week.
    Well it's a good thing we have a President who will calmly ignore such provoc—

    @W7VOA: If #Iran provokes, it'll be "a big mistake," warns @POTUS in Oval Office meeting with #Hungary Prime Minister Viktor Orban. "If they do anything, they'll suffer greatly," says @POTUS of #Iran. "You can figure it out yourself, they know what I mean by it," replies @POTUS when asked to elaborated.

    @Nick_L_Miller: This is simultaneously a terrible red line and also a very accurate description of the Trump administration's sanctions policy toward Iran thus far.
    posted by zachlipton at 5:01 PM on May 13, 2019 [13 favorites]


    How Does Donald Trump Keep Getting Away With It? Hint: From Congress to the courts, people keep treating Trump like a “normal” president. It’s time to stop.

    Trump's China grudge match may be spinning out of control (Politico)
    Donald Trump the Dow Man and Donald Trump the Tariff Man found themselves back on a collision course Monday as U.S. markets tanked and fear of a full-scale trade war between the world’s two largest economies reemerged with a vengeance.

    The Dow Jones industrial average on Monday plunged 618 points, or roughly 2.7 percent, after a flurry of belligerent tweets from President Trump — and quick retaliation from China in the form of new tariffs — threw gut punches at hopes for a deal between the two nations.

    The sell-off framed a central conflict inside the White House — and seemingly within the president’s own mind. [...]

    “Investors have always assumed that these are rational actors who will eventually realize that it’s in nobody’s best interest to escalate this any further,” said Megan Greene, chief economist at Manulife Asset Management. “But that could turn out to be wrong.” [...]

    The back-and-forth left Wall Street investors, who have long assumed the two sides would make a deal, wondering whether Trump and Xi are now locked in a political grudge match that could blow a hole in the global economy before it is resolved.
    posted by Little Dawn at 5:15 PM on May 13, 2019 [4 favorites]


    The Nation is a progressive, weekly magazine with a small-but-select readership. Political Twitter has a limited audience, too, and Politico averages 26 million unique visitors per month to the U.S. website.

    USA Today reaches over seven million readers daily, with a weekly circulation of 2.3 million, and persists in running deplorable-bait like "'They're not going to be happy.' Trump threatens Iran over reports of sabotaged oil tankers," with an embedded video clip captioned, "President Donald Trump and his wife Melania paid tribute to military mothers at the White House on Friday (May 10)."

    The closing graph: "The Trump administration has made isolating Iran a centerpiece of its foreign policy, withdrawing from the 2015 nuclear agreement and imposing a series of crippling sanctions on the Islamic Republic. Critics fear that hawks inside the Trump administration, including Pompeo and National Security Adviser John Bolton, are pushing the U.S. toward a military conflict with Iran." At the bottom of the page, there's a photo captioned, "President Donald Trump meets with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán in the Oval Office on Monday," no further context, nothing to indicate he made these statements while in a meeting with another country's leader, one whom he admires for their despotic ways.

    This article was published 3:12 p.m. ET May 13, 2019, to the site's "front page."

    Not ten minutes later, the paper dumped the still-mild "Critics deride Trump's decision to meet with 'authoritarian' prime minister of Hungary" in the 'On Politics' newsletter section.
    posted by Iris Gambol at 5:24 PM on May 13, 2019 [10 favorites]


    WaPo, Before Trump’s purge at DHS, top officials challenged plan for mass family arrests
    In the weeks before they were ousted last month, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and top immigration enforcement official Ronald Vitiello challenged a secret White House plan to arrest thousands of parents and children in a blitz operation against migrants in 10 major U.S. cities.
    ...
    ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations branch had an initial target list of 2,500 adults and children, but the plan, which remains under consideration, was viewed as a first step toward arresting as many as 10,000 migrants. The vast majority of families who have crossed the border in the past 18 months seeking asylum remain in the country, awaiting a court date or in defiance of deportation orders.

    DHS officials said the objections Vitiello and Nielsen raised regarding the targeted “at large” arrests were mostly operational and logistical, and not as a result of ethical concerns about arresting families an immigration judge had ordered to be deported.
    posted by zachlipton at 5:27 PM on May 13, 2019 [15 favorites]


    NYT, Barr Assigns U.S. Attorney in Connecticut to Review Origins of Russia Inquiry
    Attorney General William P. Barr has assigned the top federal prosecutor in Connecticut to examine the origins of the Russia investigation, according to two people familiar with the matter, a move that President Trump has long called for but that could anger law enforcement officials who insist that scrutiny of the Trump campaign was lawful.
    This will now be the third known investigation into the origins of the investigation.
    posted by zachlipton at 5:37 PM on May 13, 2019 [21 favorites]


    The Nation is a progressive, weekly magazine with a small-but-select readership.

    I remember an interview with whoever was The Nation's editor when Dubya took office, talking about their booming subscription numbers. He said, "What's bad for the country is good for The Nation."
    posted by workerant at 5:57 PM on May 13, 2019 [3 favorites]


    That would be Katrina vanden Heuvel, who's stepping down next month. The Nation’s circulation is currently about 132,000—down from a peak of 186,000 in 2006.
    posted by Iris Gambol at 6:07 PM on May 13, 2019 [1 favorite]


    Politico: Wyden Seeks Answers In Florida Election Hacking Allegations
    The redacted version of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report indicated that in 2016 Russian hackers infiltrated a US maker of voter-registration software and installed malware on its network — information that was based on an FBI investigation.

    Furthermore, the 2017 indictment of Russian military officers for hacking Democratic computer systems that was based on the FBI investigation as well also asserted that a company fitting VR Systems’ description was hacked in 2016 and had malware installed on its network.[…]

    [Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.)] wants to know whether the company ever engaged a third party to conduct a forensic examination of its computer networks and systems since the hacking assertions first came to light after the 2016 election and has asked to see a copy of a report from any such investigation, according to a letter he sent last week to VR Systems that his office shared with POLITICO.[…]

    The security of VR Systems is important because the company’s EViD software application runs on electronic poll books in at least eight states. Election workers use the poll books to determine whether voters who arrive at precincts are registered to vote and eligible to cast a ballot.

    If the company was compromised, it raises the possibility that software supplied to its customers was altered in a way that might have caused electronic poll books to either malfunction or change voter records stored in the poll books in order to make it difficult for voters to cast ballots.

    The problem isn’t theoretical. On Election Day in November 2016, some electronic poll books in Durham County, N.C., that used VR Systems software froze or crashed. Others displayed incorrect information indicating that some voters had already cast ballots when they hadn’t or the devices displayed a message telling poll workers incorrectly that voters were required to show a photo ID.
    Wyden is asking for a response by May 16—the same day as the FBI's classified briefing with Florida Congress members about suspected Russian hacking during the 2016 elections.
    posted by Doktor Zed at 6:27 PM on May 13, 2019 [23 favorites]


    Where's that violin? I keep losing it, it's so small.

    On the Eve of a Hearing, Trump Lawyers Tell Judge They Aren’t Happy About Fast-Tracked Subpoena Fight
    President Donald Trump‘s attorneys had some thoughts for the Barack Obama-appointed federal judge who decided to quicken the pace of certain proceedings in the ongoing struggle between Team Trump and House Democrats.
    If you were paying attention last Thursday afternoon, May 9, Judge Amit Mehta entered an order revealing that it was his plan to fast-track Trump’s attempt to stop finance firm Mazars USA from complying with a congressional subpoena from the House Oversight Committee. Mehta said he was “notifying the parties that the court intends to advance Plaintiffs’ Motion for Preliminary Injunction to trial on the merits” and consolidate issues into a hearing because the court “can discern no benefit from an additional round of legal arguments.”
    Trump lawyers want no part of this streamlining and said so just before Tuesday, May 14. That’s the date the judge set for the hearing.
    posted by scalefree at 6:54 PM on May 13, 2019 [8 favorites]


    There's so much bullshit that it's hard to keep up, but here's a minor example of yet another fox being nominated to run the hen house. From the data science newsletter I subscribe to:
    The Senate will consider Trump's nominee to lead NOAA, one of the premier scientific agencies in the US and the best positioned to collect and disseminate data that will help scientists understand climate change. Trump's nominee, Barry Lee Myers, has no scientific credentials. He built and ran AccuWeather, a company that has profited handsomely off the data NOAA distributes to the public for free. His main goal may be to make NOAA data private, something he lobbied for while running AccuWeather, which would have allowed him to repackage it and sell it to consumers such as farmers and local emergency responders. He obstinately refuses to divulge who he sold his controlling stock to or release the names of the people on AccuWeather's board. Three former heads of NOAA (and Michael Lewis, for whatever that's worth) have publicly voiced opposition to Mr. Myers' nomination. Oh, and AccuWeather was investigated by the Department of Labor and found to be riddled with "widespread sexual harassment" that was "severe and pervasive."
    Why not hide taxpayer-funded resources behind a paywall and have private companies make money off of selling it back to taxpayers? So much the better if it's your own private company! Yes, it's grift all the way down.
    posted by RedOrGreen at 7:48 PM on May 13, 2019 [38 favorites]


    @jbendery: Trump just sent the Senate 6 more judicial nominations (5 for district courts, 1 for a circuit court). The Senate can fly through their confirmations now that Mitch McConnell blew up the rules. Debate time for a district judge, a lifetime post, is now 2 hours vs 30.

    The Senate has confirmed 102 federal judges (+2 Supreme Court justices) since Trump took office, with 50-some-odd nominees pending.
    posted by zachlipton at 7:56 PM on May 13, 2019 [14 favorites]




    RedOrGreen: That's exactly the situation we were in until the 90s when NOAA and NWS established a web presence. The forecasts and data were notionally free, with much data even being broadcast in the clear by satellite. High equipment costs meant that basically all weather was filtered through private entities, however. That's where AccuWeather came from. They or their predecessors and competitors are the entire reason why the National Weather Service's web presence was very limited for so long and has evolved incredibly slowly since the explicit limitations were lifted.

    Even now, some radar data is only available in near real time from third parties with few exceptions. At least there is a reasonable concern about their ability to support the demand if they did distribute the data directly in that particular case. There are no such concerns with other raw data and forecast products. Cronyism is the only argument in favor of restricting the dissemination of weather and climate data and forecast products. Even if we were able to cut back government spending by doing so, we would only increase spending elsewhere in government by doing so and also impose a much greater economic cost than the private weather companies stand to gain. Even on a purely utilitarian basis, the proposal fails.
    posted by wierdo at 8:23 PM on May 13, 2019 [17 favorites]


    WaPo reports on the Secretary of State's blundering diplomatic tour today: Pompeo Crashes Brussels Meeting of E.U. Diplomats But Changes Few Minds On Iran
    Pompeo’s last-minute decision to visit the European Union capital, announced as he boarded a plane from the United States, set up a confrontation between the top U.S. diplomat and his European counterparts, who have been scrambling to save the 2015 Iran nuclear deal in the wake of the U.S. withdrawal last year. At least one, British Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt, said he feared that unintentional escalation from the United States and Iran could spark a conflict — an unusually bold statement that appeared to assign equal culpability to Washington and Tehran.[…]

    Pompeo was rebuffed on even some basic requests in Brussels. While his plane crossed the Atlantic, European diplomats haggled over how much to accommodate him. Although Mogherini managed to find time, initially she said she had a busy day and that the pair would talk “if we manage to arrange a meeting.” The top diplomats of Britain, France and Germany agreed to meet one-on-one with Pompeo but would not allow the Americans the symbolic victory of a group meeting. (The Europeans publicly blamed scheduling difficulties.)[…]

    Pompeo scrapped a day of mostly ceremonial events in Moscow on Monday in favor of the Brussels stopover. He plans to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in the Black Sea resort of Sochi on Tuesday.

    Diplomats familiar with Pompeo’s conversations in Brussels said little new ground was covered, with each side repeating talking points about whether the nuclear deal is worth preserving.
    posted by Doktor Zed at 8:35 PM on May 13, 2019 [6 favorites]


    Rosenstein criticizes Jim Comey as ‘partisan pundit,’ defends handling of Mueller probe
    Former deputy attorney general Rod J. Rosenstein on Monday defended his role in the firing of James B. Comey from the FBI and criticized the bureau’s former director as a “partisan pundit” — offering one of his most detailed public accounts of the hectic events that led to the appointment of Robert S. Mueller III as special counsel.
    Speaking to the Greater Baltimore Committee just days after stepping down as the Justice Department’s No. 2 official, Rosenstein fired back at criticism that he acted inappropriately for President Trump and sought to present his legacy as one of an official who was thrust into a political maelstrom and did what he thought was right.
    At Trump’s request, Rosenstein wrote a memo supporting Comey’s dismissal in May 2017 and came under intense public criticism for doing so. Critics viewed the move as a way of obstructing the inquiry into Trump’s campaign.
    In prepared remarks, Rosenstein seemed to minimize the effect Comey’s firing could have had on the inquiry. He said that when a White House lawyer first told him Trump had decided to fire Comey, “Nobody said that the removal was intended to influence the course of my Russia investigation.”
    “I would never have allowed anyone to interfere with the investigation,” he asserted, though he conceded later that he “recognized that the unusual circumstances of the firing and the ensuing developments would give reasonable people cause to speculate about the credibility of the investigation.”
    posted by scalefree at 9:33 PM on May 13, 2019 [2 favorites]


    An Oral History of Trump’s Bigotry
    His racism and intolerance have always been in evidence; only slowly did he begin to understand how to use them to his advantage.
    The first quotation from Donald Trump ever to appear in The New York Times came on October 16, 1973. Trump was responding to charges filed by the Justice Department alleging racial bias at his family’s real-estate company. “They are absolutely ridiculous,” Trump said of the charges. “We have never discriminated, and we never would.”
    In the years since then, Trump has assembled a long record of comment on issues involving African Americans as well as Mexicans, Hispanics more broadly, Native Americans, Muslims, Jews, immigrants, women, and people with disabilities. His statements have been reflected in his behavior—from public acts (placing ads calling for the execution of five young black and Latino men accused of rape, who were later shown to be innocent) to private preferences (“When Donald and Ivana came to the casino, the bosses would order all the black people off the floor,” a former employee of Trump’s Castle, in Atlantic City, New Jersey, told a writer for The New Yorker). Trump emerged as a political force owing to his full-throated embrace of “birtherism,” the false charge that the nation’s first black president, Barack Obama, was not born in the United States. His presidential campaign was fueled by nativist sentiment directed at nonwhite immigrants, and he proposed barring Muslims from entering the country. In 2016, Trump described himself to The Washington Post as “the least racist person that you’ve ever encountered.”
    Instances of bigotry involving Donald Trump span more than four decades. The Atlantic interviewed a range of people with knowledge of several of those episodes. Their recollections have been edited for concision and clarity.
    posted by scalefree at 9:37 PM on May 13, 2019 [30 favorites]


    The Senate has confirmed 102 federal judges (+2 Supreme Court justices) since Trump took office, with 50-some-odd nominees pending.

    Even if we win next year, there won't be very many judges left to appoint. Only whatever vacancies open during the term. Patrick Leahy helped the GOP hold open dozens of seats and prevented Obama from filling them in favor of Trump, which is why he has this huge backlog of vacancies. The next Democratic president won't have the benefit of a huge backlog created by their political opponents and aided by moronic "institutionalists" on their own side.
    posted by T.D. Strange at 4:21 AM on May 14, 2019 [25 favorites]


    Attorney General William P. Barr has assigned the top federal prosecutor in Connecticut to examine the origins of the Russia investigation

    The Attorney General is running Rudy Giuliani's playbook. That's some scary shit.

    I'm finding this historical moment particularly creepy. The Democrats won the House and started to exercise their power as an equal branch of government. The Executive branch said, nope, fuck you. And then... silence. I wasn't expecting silence.
    posted by diogenes at 5:20 AM on May 14, 2019 [60 favorites]


    White House Reviews Military Plans Against Iran, in Echoes of Iraq War (NYT)

    At a meeting of President Trump’s top national security aides last Thursday, Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan presented an updated military plan that envisions sending as many as 120,000 troops to the Middle East...

    The revisions were ordered by hard-liners led by John R. Bolton...

    posted by diogenes at 5:33 AM on May 14, 2019 [11 favorites]


    Trump's long trade war
    Senior administration officials tell Axios that a trade deal with China isn't close and that the U.S. could be in for a long trade war.
    [...]
    Trump’s mindset on the Chinese is simple: They only respond to shows of brute force.
    And he thinks they’ll suffer more than America will, because they buy fewer products.
    I've asked several current and former administration officials whether Trump actually believes that China pays the tariffs — rather than the reality that U.S. importers and consumers do.
    The consensus is "yes": That's what he actually believes.
    And as one former aide said: There’s little point trying to persuade Trump otherwise, because his belief in tariffs is "like theology."
    posted by scalefree at 6:57 AM on May 14, 2019 [14 favorites]


    Trump’s mindset on the Chinese is simple: They only respond to shows of brute force.

    ...And any show of "brute force" toward China will cost the other side dearly, you orange asshole, which is why nobody except you thinks it's a good idea.
    posted by Rykey at 7:09 AM on May 14, 2019 [2 favorites]


    This is the nut quote from Axios, the reason I posted it:

    And as one former aide said: There’s little point trying to persuade Trump otherwise, because his belief in tariffs is "like theology."

    He's going to drive the economy off a cliff. And nobody will stop him.
    posted by scalefree at 7:15 AM on May 14, 2019 [15 favorites]


    Remember coal and all those coal miners who were going to get their jobs back? Last month, the owner of the largest coal-fired plant in New England had its 500-foot-high cooling towers imploded, to make way for a clean-energy complex that will include facilities to handle electricity coming from off-shore wind turbines.
    posted by adamg at 7:19 AM on May 14, 2019 [46 favorites]


    Politico looks into GOP Senators' latest capitulation to Trump: Republicans Surrender To Trump’s China Tariffs—GOP senators have no plans to even try to stop a trade war they oppose. One tactic the article points to is senators claiming that it's better to go after China than allies, like Canada, Mexico, and Europe (e.g. Roy Blunt, Chuck Grassley). Another is that if Trump doesn't hear criticism from the rural voters affected hardest by the tariffs, they'll just have to work with him (Mike Rounds, John Cornyn). They also don't see any point in exercising legislative checks as long as Mitch McConnell has Trump's back, such as when he blocked a bill against Trump's "national security" tariffs on steel and aluminium imports from the EU and Canada.

    Elsewhere in trade war news, CNBC reports: China’s New Tariffs Are Hitting US Farmers At ‘Every Single Angle,’ Economist Says

    And Bloomberg: Trump’s China Tariffs Hit America’s Poor and Working Class the Hardest—The burden of import taxes is five times as heavy for the bottom tenth of households as for the top tenth, research shows

    Meanwhile, @realDonaldTrump tweeted several threads about the Chinese negotiations earlier this morning, reiterating his lie about a trade gap of "almost 500 Billion Dollars", taking swipes at the Federal Reserve and WTO, and praising "great Patriot Farmers" again. If there's one thing he likes more than boasting, it's fighting, and this mess allows him to do both.
    posted by Doktor Zed at 7:33 AM on May 14, 2019 [17 favorites]


    #22: Steve Bullock, the Democratic governor of Montana, is running for president (Ella Nilsen, Vox)
    The perception the Senate is stuck and not getting anything done has discouraged numerous Democrats from mounting a Senate campaign in 2020. Bullock, like other Democrats who have turned down Senate campaigns, seems to object to going from the position of state executive to being one cog in a machine that is frequently spinning its wheels.
    posted by ZeusHumms at 7:34 AM on May 14, 2019 [3 favorites]


    Trump’s mindset on the Chinese is simple: They only respond to shows of brute force.

    ...And any show of "brute force" toward China will cost the other side dearly, you orange asshole, which is why nobody except you thinks it's a good idea.


    I will bet any amount of money on this: Trump has no idea that China is also 2-0 in World Wars.
    posted by Etrigan at 7:37 AM on May 14, 2019 [19 favorites]


    The perception the Senate is stuck and not getting anything done has discouraged numerous Democrats from mounting a Senate campaign in 2020. Bullock, like other Democrats who have turned down Senate campaigns, seems to object to going from the position of state executive to being one cog in a machine that is frequently spinning its wheels.

    "The senate is dumb so instead of trying to save it I will become the 30th presidential candidate?" Bullshit. You just want a book deal and MSNBC appearances, Steve.

    The scads of Democrats throwing away perfectly winnable senate candidacies in order to play this stupid game is an absolute indictment: turns out bleeding the party dry of ideology for decades fosters a culture of not giving a fuck about saving the country.
    posted by Rust Moranis at 7:50 AM on May 14, 2019 [64 favorites]


    Liz goes there.

    @ewarren Fox News is a hate-for-profit racket that gives a megaphone to racists and conspiracy theorists. I won’t ask Democratic primary voters to tune into an outlet that profits from racism and hate in order to see our candidates. Sign up now to join me and take a stand.

    Take a stand against an outlet that profits from racism and hate.
    posted by scalefree at 8:18 AM on May 14, 2019 [96 favorites]


    Bella Donna: The GOP labels as "socialist" people pushing for health care and clean environment and women's rights and tolerance and humanity at our borders and an end to economic inequality and better jobs. But that's not radical, it's basic decency. And none of these issues are really enhanced or served by "compromise."

    That's Seussialism! (r/ShitLiberalsSay, who don't agree with it for some good reasons, and criticize its meter ;) )

    But yeah, it's basic decency. I want to say that by turning basic decency into "socialism," it's a winning move for Republicans, until it backfires and people say "hey, I like all that stuff - maybe I am a socialist!" and things really swing hard to the left.

    At least, that's my dream.
    posted by filthy light thief at 8:23 AM on May 14, 2019 [11 favorites]


    On the Eve of a Hearing, Trump Lawyers Tell Judge They Aren’t Happy About Fast-Tracked Subpoena Fight

    Navy Seal's lawyers received emails embedded with tracking software (Guardian)
    Military prosecutors in the case of a US navy Seal charged with killing an Islamic State prisoner in Iraq in 2017 installed tracking software in emails sent to defense lawyers and a reporter in an apparent attempt to discover who was leaking information to the media, according to lawyers who said they received the corrupted messages.

    The defense attorneys said the intrusion may have violated constitutional protections against illegal searches, guarantees to the right to a lawyer and freedom of the press. “I’ve seen some crazy stuff but for a case like this it’s complete insanity,” said attorney Timothy Parlatore. “I was absolutely stunned, especially given the fact that it’s so clear the government has been the one doing the leaking.”

    [...]

    Donald Trump has demanded the case proceed quickly.
    posted by Little Dawn at 8:29 AM on May 14, 2019 [21 favorites]


    Rotten to the core. Keep up that winning streak.

    Heidi Heitkamp and Joe Donnelly's rural voter project tied to "Medicare for All" opponents
    Last month, former Sens. Heidi Heitkamp, D-N.D., and Joe Donnelly, D-Ind., announced the launch of the One Country Project, a 501(c)(4) nonprofit, to bring rural voters back to the Democratic Party. The group has already started working with the Democratic National Committee, according to Axios. Time Magazine reported that Heitkamp is using “leftover campaign funds” for the project. Records show the One Country Project’s website is registered to an executive at Forbes Tate Partners, a lobbying and public relations firm founded by former Clinton administration officials. The lobbying firm is leading the Partnership for America’s Health Care Future (PAHCF), the health industry-backed nonprofit created to crush momentum for a comprehensive universal health care system.

    Heitkamp has used the launch of the One Country Project as an opportunity to speak out against Medicare for All. “Polling indicates that most Americans are satisfied with the health care they receive and do not want their coverage options taken away and replaced with a one-size-fits-all government program,” she wrote in a Washington Post op-ed last week that echoed PAHCF talking points. Donnelly and Heitkamp both campaigned against Medicare for All during their failed re-election bids, even though polling by Data for Progress and the Kaiser Family Foundation last year found that 55 percent of Democratic voters in Indiana and 51 percent in North Dakota support Medicare for All. Heitkamp lost her 2018 race by 11 points, Donnelly by almost six.
    posted by Rust Moranis at 8:50 AM on May 14, 2019 [8 favorites]


    Tampa Bay News 9 reports on the Governor's press conference about Russian hacking: Gov. DeSantis: 2 Florida Counties Hacked in 2016 Election "Gov. Ron DeSantis says the FBI confirmed the Mueller report's assertion that Russian operatives targeted Florida in the 2016 election, but there was no manipulation of votes. […] In a news conference Tuesday, the governor said he had been briefed by the FBI and that two counties were hacked by Russian "spear-fishing" during the 2016 election."

    De Santis told reporters, "I recently met with the FBI concerning the election issues mention in the Mueller report. […] Two Florida counties experienced intrusions into supervisor of elections networks. There was no manipulation or anything, but there was voter data that was able to be get [sic]. But I think that voter data was public anyway." (w/video)

    Sounds like someone's trying to get ahead of the news story.
    posted by Doktor Zed at 8:52 AM on May 14, 2019 [9 favorites]


    Trump Tower Is Now One of NYC’s Least-Desirable Luxury Buildings (Shahien Nasiripour, Bloomberg)

    Most condo sales since 2016 have been at a loss, combined with a dramatic drop in desirability.
    posted by ZeusHumms at 8:54 AM on May 14, 2019 [15 favorites]


    Most condo sales since 2016 have been at a loss, combined with a dramatic drop in desirability.

    Did Donald Trump Lose More Than $1 Billion On Purpose? (Fortune)
    The question is, was Trump truly so bad at this business that the losses piled up sky high? Or was he engineering huge losses on paper to offset paying taxes on income?
    posted by Little Dawn at 9:02 AM on May 14, 2019 [9 favorites]


    No manipulation of the literal vote count is not the same as no tampering. Messing with the registration database and absentee list could very well have been a significant contributor to long lines, lost votes, and forced provisional ballots that were a thing in several Florida counties. Moreover, the lack of evidence showing other counties were breached is not evidence that they were not also victims. Timing or a simple fuckup in the post-election wind down of the operation could have led to evidence of intrusion being cleaned up in most cases while leaving a trail in others. Not only that, leaving evidence in a couple of counties contributes to the end goal of destabilization.
    posted by wierdo at 9:03 AM on May 14, 2019 [14 favorites]




    Joe Biden predicts that... Republicans will have “an epiphany”

    That sounds like something I would say if I knew something but couldn't reveal the actual reason. Unfortunately, it's also the kind of thing I would say if I was willfully naïve or just didn't have a plan, so "refuse to acknowledge" is my only strategy.
    posted by ctmf at 9:32 AM on May 14, 2019 [7 favorites]


    That sounds like something I would say if I knew something but couldn't reveal the actual reason.

    Like if you know you intend to govern as a right-wing president but are also so stupid that you don't remember Mitch McConnell sinking Obama's attempt to gut social security in 2011.
    posted by Rust Moranis at 9:37 AM on May 14, 2019 [16 favorites]


    Between Biden not having formed new memories since 1992 and Bezos claiming we’ll all live in space colonies soon and the current head of state swinging between word salad and active lying we really should talk abut how our entire ruling class lives inside delusional fantasies.
    posted by The Whelk at 9:40 AM on May 14, 2019 [62 favorites]


    We sure are lucky that the Russians didn't tamper with our election systems despite having the ability to do so.
    posted by diogenes at 9:43 AM on May 14, 2019 [13 favorites]


    Mod note: one deleted. folks let’s please reel it back, less “here’s what I bet would happen if-“.
    posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 9:48 AM on May 14, 2019 [5 favorites]


    scalefree: Senior administration officials tell Axios that a trade deal with China isn't close and that the U.S. could be in for a long trade war.

    U.S. Prepares Tariffs On Another $300 Billion Of Imported Chinese Goods (Bill Chappell for NPR, May 14, 2019)
    The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative published a list of Chinese goods (USTR.gov, PDF) that would be hit with new duties, ranging from artists' brushes and paint rollers to clocks and watches. The list also includes a wide range of sporting goods, from baseballs to fishing reels. And it dedicates several pages to agricultural products, from livestock to dairy, plants and vegetables. Staples such as rice and tea are on the list.

    "The proposed product list covers essentially all products not currently covered by action in this investigation," the USTR office says. It adds, "The proposed product list excludes pharmaceuticals, certain pharmaceutical inputs, select medical goods, rare earth materials, and critical minerals."

    The U.S. proposal will enter a public comment period and could take effect sometime in late June or July.

    On Monday, China's State Council Customs Tariff Commission announced it will impose tariffs of up to 25% on $60 billion worth of U.S. goods starting in June, in retaliation for Trump's tariffs on $200 billion of Chinese goods.
    Comments will likely go to Trade Representative, Office of United States, not that the Trump administration cares about what the public thinks or says. It'll cherry-pick comments in favor of the decisions, and decry the rest as whining, or paid comments by haters.
    posted by filthy light thief at 10:06 AM on May 14, 2019 [6 favorites]


    Why the U.S.-China Trade War Could Be Long and Painful: No Off-Ramps (Neil Irwin, NYT)
    Add in Mr. Trump’s tendency to view every negotiation through a zero-sum prism, and it may be hard to find a pathway for both parties to go home able to proclaim victory.
    posted by Little Dawn at 10:31 AM on May 14, 2019 [4 favorites]


    The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative published a list of Chinese goods

    I know this is the politics thread and I shouldn't be in here blabbing about myself, but let me for a minute. I'm a Mandarin-English translator. I live in China, and I'm from the US, and I'm forced to pay attention to this shit.

    In the midst of all these goods, did y'all notice how nobody hit services? I admit I should probably not be staying in China much longer, but at the same time, wtf, am I going back to the US? When this is going on? No. My services are a thing I take with me, and I'd like to be around my clients. And nobody is tariff-ing me. Will they impact me indirectly? You bet. I'm redoing my resume today because I want a ton of new clients in countries that aren't the primes in this trade war. But let's be real here for a minute - the goods won't stop the flow of information. There is nothing left to tariff by Trump's (and Xi's, frankly) conception of stuff-trade, and the diplomats are obviously idiots, so that leaves services providers as the sole mediators. I'm not looking forward to the bonanza payday of angry press releases I'll be doing in the next year or two. I mean I am, but ffs. Given China's continued openness to foreign investment, maybe it's time I run a sideline consulting business telling Chinese companies how to pay Southeast Asian manufacturers too.

    This is silly. They're hurting farmers and factory workers and producers of important things in both countries, and they're indirectly making it easier for me to sponge rent by being someone who reads the news about it and kinda knows the roadmap.

    This is not how you Fight A War.
    posted by saysthis at 10:46 AM on May 14, 2019 [32 favorites]


    I'm somewhat curious how tariffs like these prevent outsource. Lets say you have an american manufacturer who's product is, say, 35% chinese, and the remainder American. Under most regulations, that product would qualify as "Made in the USA" and be free to sell to, say, Canada or many other trade partners. Now, raise those chinese prices. Now your selling price will have to increase (you aren't going to take a bath on it forever, or possibly you might need to just to maintain your Made in the USA category). But ... Canada could make that product for the old price, so long as the final product qualifies as Made In Canada, and it can be sold back to the US for the old, cheaper price. Not to mention, Canada can sell it to the rest of the world for that price too. Jacking the prices on your supply line when other countries haven't seems like a recipe for outsourcing.
    posted by Bovine Love at 10:50 AM on May 14, 2019 [5 favorites]


    I'm somewhat curious how tariffs like these prevent outsource.

    I'm curious too, because from everything I've read...they don't. This is going to turn into a game of "who can build the most factories in Vietnam & Mexico, oh, you, so now we're allies right".
    posted by saysthis at 10:54 AM on May 14, 2019 [4 favorites]


    Size is one issue, Bovine Love. China's manufacturing capability is huge and so Canada (to take your example) literally can't produce the volume of product they do. I'd suspect that's true for almost any country you could name.

    China's labor costs are still pretty low compared to the few countries who have a chance too (e.g., Japan).
    posted by Quindar Beep at 10:57 AM on May 14, 2019


    Size is one issue, Bovine Love.
    Nono, you're missing the point. You move the American portion to Canada, and continue to import the 35% from China, but to Canada, where there is no tariff.
    posted by Bovine Love at 10:59 AM on May 14, 2019 [6 favorites]


    Photos obtained exclusively by CNN show migrants at the McAllen, Texas, Border Patrol station over the weekend, many of whom are children, sleeping on the ground on rocks and covered by Mylar blankets.

    Because of course they are. The article includes various quotes by administration officials and some of them use the terms "humanitarian crisis" and "border security," although not in that order. The Border Patrol response is, essentially, oh yeah, this totally sucks, we have way too many people to process. And maybe that is true but how would we know for sure?

    Honestly, I don't trust the administration at all, and the provider of the photos is anonymous. Then again, the administration has done everything possible to create bottlenecks in the process, so there probably is a humanitarian crisis but how is that ever going to get fixed? Hell if I know.

    Unsurprisingly, the article also notes that Democratic officials (it is less neutral than that in the article) refuse to kick more money toward solving the problem, while failing utterly to include any quotes from Democratic officials or any non-Republican sources at all apart from the single anonymous source. GRRRR!
    posted by Bella Donna at 11:03 AM on May 14, 2019 [15 favorites]


    Judge grills Trump attorney in subpoena case (Politico)
    A federal judge raised pointed doubts Tuesday about arguments by President Donald Trump’s legal team that a Democratic effort to subpoena Trump’s financial records was an invalid exercise of congressional power.

    Amit Mehta, a U.S. District Court judge in Washington, indicated that he would have trouble ruling that Congress’ goal in accessing the president’s records was unconstitutional — as Trump’s lawyers have argued — and he underscored that he believes Congress has a significant “informing function” that doesn’t necessarily require an explicit legislative purpose to justify an investigation involving the president.

    “Does Congress have to do that — do they have to identify a bill in advance? The Supreme Court has said the opposite,” Mehta said during a round of questioning with Trump’s attorney William Consovoy during a hearing. [...]

    Despite Mehta’s apparent skepticism of the Trump team’s legal arguments, the appointee of President Barack Obama declined to issue a ruling from the bench but said he would mull over the arguments in the coming days, calling the nature of the dispute too significant to decide quickly. He gave both sides until the end of the week to submit additional filings and evidence. [...]

    The committee says it needs Trump’s financial records from Mazars as part of its efforts to corroborate Cohen’s allegations.

    During the hearing, Mehta also asked pointed questions of the House Democratic side. Mehta noted that Cummings suggested at the outset of his subpoena request that he wanted to “determine whether the president may have engaged in illegal conduct” before taking office.

    “This is not an impeachment proceeding. What’s the basis to investigate illegal conduct before his tenure in office?” Mehta wondered.

    Letter replied hypothetically that there could be significant questions about whether Trump was under the thumb of a foreign power.

    “President Trump has conceded, I believe, that he was trying to get a hotel in Moscow. Had he not been elected he would have pursued that,” he said, noting that the president may have taken questionable steps to secure that hotel.
    posted by Little Dawn at 11:34 AM on May 14, 2019 [14 favorites]


    GOP smears Rashida Tlaib on the Holocaust — but Democrats won't take the bait (Sophia Tesfaye, Salon)
    Republicans take Tlaib's comments wildly out of context, Fox explodes — and for once Democrats are ignoring them
    Republicans are pretty good at ignoring nuance in order to distort comments and ideas.
    posted by ZeusHumms at 11:46 AM on May 14, 2019 [14 favorites]


    A little treat for those of us who hate the monster misnomer called Fox News via BuzzNews reporter Ruby Cramer on Twitter: Elizabeth Warren has turned down an offer to hold a Fox News town hall. The news channel is a "hate-for-profit racket" that provides "cover," she says, for the very thing she's campaigning against: "corruption that’s rotting our government and hollowing out our middle class."

    Warren's full explanation for why a Fox News town hall is a "hard pass" for her is a thing of beauty. Read and enjoy.
    posted by Bella Donna at 11:48 AM on May 14, 2019 [44 favorites]


    I will bet any amount of money on this: Trump has no idea that China is also 2-0 in World Wars.

    Not to mention they pretty much defeated the United States in Korea without even really using a fraction of their full power.
    posted by srboisvert at 12:00 PM on May 14, 2019 [6 favorites]


    The NYT podcast The Daily ran a great interview with Tlaib this morning.
    posted by AwkwardPause at 12:18 PM on May 14, 2019


    Bovine Love: You move the American portion to Canada, and continue to import the 35% from China, but to Canada, where there is no tariff.

    Ah. That looks like one difference between tariffs and sanctions, which usually do take such workarounds into consideration. I'm guessing that would be more difficult to implement if the program is a tax rather than a wholesale ban.
    posted by InTheYear2017 at 12:27 PM on May 14, 2019


    @GlennThrush:
    GOP Senators were, er, unimpressed w/ Jared, Hassett and Miller at immigration lunch today, per lawmakers, staff
    1) Jared struggled w/ basic Qs
    2) Miller kept "commandeering" podium when JK struggled, per source
    3) Hassett predicted admin plan would create $600b in econ growth
    @TalKopan:
    “I don’t think [Jared's immigration plan is] designed to get Democratic support as much as it is to unify the Republican Party,” Graham said. Achieving what? “Negotiating position,” Graham said. And he said “similar to the Gang of 8; a bit different.” “I sort of like what they’re doing."
    So that's all going great.
    posted by zachlipton at 12:41 PM on May 14, 2019 [11 favorites]


    Slate's Mark Joseph Stern on the recent SCOTUS decision on Franchise Tax Board of California v. Hyatt that reverses Nevada v. Hall: The Supreme Court’s Liberals Are Warning Us That Roe v. Wade Is in Mortal Danger
    On Monday, in a 5–4 ruling, the Supreme Court overturned a 40-year-old precedent for the simple reason that five conservative justices didn’t like it. The decision itself is unfortunate, allowing states to duck lawsuits filed against them in other states’ courts at the expense of wronged plaintiffs. But the most significant aspect of the ruling may be its cavalier treatment of precedent, which—as the dissenting justices noted in a not-so-veiled warning—signals how the majority seems to be laying the groundwork for the reversal of Roe v. Wade.[…]

    Overruling precedent typically requires a “special justification,” Breyer wrote [in the dissent], but “the majority does not find one.” Instead, it merely decides that Hall “was wrongly decided” and should go. “The law has not changed significantly since this Court decided Hall,” Breyer pointed out, “nor has our understanding of state sovereign immunity evolved to undermine Hall.” All that has changed is the composition of the court. He added:
    To overrule a sound decision like Hall is to encourage litigants to seek to overrule other cases; it is to make it more difficult for lawyers to refrain from challenging settled law; and it is to cause the public to become increasingly uncertain about which cases the Court will overrule and which cases are here to stay.
    It is “dangerous,” Breyer concluded, “to overrule a decision only because five Members” of the court disagree with it. “Today’s decision can only cause one to wonder which cases the Court will overrule next.” And if there were any doubt which cases Breyer was alluding to in this dark denouement, he cited the portion of Planned Parenthood v. Casey that explained why Roe should be upheld. The justice has hoisted a red flag, alerting the country that the court’s conservative majority is preparing an assault on the right to abortion access.
    Something to keep in mind after all those times Trump's judicial nominees paid lip service to settled law during their confirmation hearings.
    posted by Doktor Zed at 12:57 PM on May 14, 2019 [39 favorites]


    A little treat for those of us who hate the monster misnomer called Fox News via BuzzNews reporter Ruby Cramer on Twitter: Elizabeth Warren has turned down an offer to hold a Fox News town hall. The news channel is a "hate-for-profit racket" that provides "cover," she says, for the very thing she's campaigning against: "corruption that’s rotting our government and hollowing out our middle class."

    Yet another in my growing list of "Reasons Why I'm Voting For Elizabeth Warren In The Primary." She knows that Tip-n-Ronnie cross-party comity is as dead as, well, Tip and Ronnie. She isn't going to conciliate the Fox News audience, she isn't going to frantically kiss Republican ass in order to give them heckler's veto, she has principles and ethics and is standing by them.

    And I think she knows that the press is likely to be...critical, to put it nicely, and isn't going to desperately try to win them over. She's refreshingly free of "If I'm just nice enough to Republicans they'll like me!"

    We need her and a thousand more like her. #Warren2020
    posted by Rosie M. Banks at 12:57 PM on May 14, 2019 [92 favorites]


    @greenhousenyt: In a move that seems aimed at pushing up Uber's stock price after its disappointing IPO, Trump's business-friendly NLRB issues an advisory memo saying Uber drivers aren't employees. (The memo seems conveniently timed to help Uber.)

    The memo was dated last month but released today.
    posted by zachlipton at 1:19 PM on May 14, 2019 [6 favorites]


    Joe Biden predicts that... Republicans will have “an epiphany”

    Why are people taking this at face value? Just to hate on Biden?

    It's obviously electioneering aimed at getting more votes out of moderates. Biden knows full well that won't happen. He was literally (hah! because Biden says literally all the time? i kill me) part of the last administration when the GOP went full obstructionist. Really, he knows that cooperation won't happen.

    It's like when Bernie said that of course he can get his agenda passed through Congress even though he doesn't want to end the filibuster. Because he can pass it all with reconciliation! No problemo! That's just as ridiculous as Biden saying the GOP will get on board. Bernie knows it. We know it. But you gotta get votes somehow, and saying crap that isn't a lie per se but is ridiculous is how you do it I guess.

    Only Biden gets shit on when he does it though.
    posted by Justinian at 1:24 PM on May 14, 2019 [4 favorites]


    From EFF, the Electronic Frontier Foundation: Over the next few years, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) plans to implement an enormous biometric collection program which will endanger the rights of citizens and foreigners alike. The agency intends to collect at least seven types of biometric identifiers, including face and voice data, DNA, scars, and tattoos, often from questionable sources, and from innocent people.

    But DHS isn’t building all of the technology: Northrop Grumman, a defense contractor, won the nearly 100 million-dollar, 42-month contract to “develop increments one and two” of the project, named HART (Homeland Advanced Recognition Technology). Now, a group of concerned investors are demanding that the Board of Directors of the company explain how they will protect human rights while building the tech behind the massive, privacy-invasive database.

    posted by Bella Donna at 1:28 PM on May 14, 2019 [14 favorites]


    It's obviously electioneering aimed at getting more votes out of moderates. Biden knows full well that won't happen. He was literally (hah! because Biden says literally all the time? i kill me) part of the last administration when the GOP went full obstructionist. Really, he knows that cooperation won't happen.

    I mean - I don't know. I think that people to Biden's right probably see the writing on the wall, and know that Biden is the best hope for a 'lesser evil' for them. I could see them giving him things, if only to try to avoid the spectre of Sanders.
    posted by corb at 1:31 PM on May 14, 2019 [6 favorites]


    I could see people to his right voting for him or even donating to his campaign, corb, but that's a completely different kettle of fish to elected Republicans voting for his agenda once he's elected. I can't imagine that would happen. Obama offered them massive spending cuts in return for minuscule tax increases and they wouldn't give him so much as a vote.
    posted by Justinian at 1:36 PM on May 14, 2019 [9 favorites]


    Biden knows full well that won't happen. He was literally (hah! because Biden says literally all the time? i kill me) part of the last administration when the GOP went full obstructionist.

    Remember when Obama said, "I believe that If we're successful in this election, when we're successful in this election, that the fever may break, because there's a tradition in the Republican Party of more common sense than that. My hope, my expectation, is that after the election, now that it turns out that the goal of beating Obama doesn't make much sense because I'm not running again, that we can start getting some cooperation again." and then he let McConnell get away with sitting on Merrick Garland's Supreme Court nomination?

    Sorry, if Biden's going to run on Obama's coattails, he doesn't get the benefit of doubt here.
    posted by Doktor Zed at 1:50 PM on May 14, 2019 [30 favorites]


    Biden is a fucking idiot, the worst of the 22 Dems running by a long shot, with a long track record of bad decisions. So I generally assume that he is precisely as pigshit stupid

    I'ts good to see we've all learned the lessons of 2016!
    posted by Justinian at 1:57 PM on May 14, 2019 [6 favorites]


    I'ts good to see we've all learned the lessons of 2016!

    Indeed.
    posted by Rust Moranis at 1:59 PM on May 14, 2019 [6 favorites]


    There's a perfectly valid reason why one would shit upon Biden and not Sanders in this case.
    Sanders has been talking budget reconciliation, which has been shown to be something that has actually worked to pass stuff at times, as opposed to any sort of cooperation, which has been well proven as impossible for years now. It is of course still incredibly unlikely that he'd be able to enact any significant amount of his agenda this way, but it's a hell of a lot more likely that one could accomplish something positive via budget reconciliation vs. counting on a "republican epiphany" - Sanders is trying to sell the idea of a technicality, which is something that is actually believable, as opposed to cooperation, which is beyond laughable at this point to literally anyone who has been paying any attention whatsoever.

    It's not just misplaced faith or being overly optimistic, it's completely ignoring everything that has happened in the last 11 years, and Biden, more than literally anyone else running, is in a position of knowing better. So of course people who have been following these threads for several years now are going to shit on him for that - He DESERVES be shat upon for that. I'm pretty lukewarm on Sanders at present, but at least he is trying to sell the possibility of a procedural technicality as opposed to something that goes against all reason whatsoever.
    posted by MysticMCJ at 2:00 PM on May 14, 2019 [14 favorites]


    Mod note: Enough on this Biden/moderates thing, points made, been there done that many times.
    posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 2:00 PM on May 14, 2019 [7 favorites]


    Warren has tapped into the great anger that we feel here and is felt many other places. It seems like the obvious strategy and I don't really know why people haven't jumped more on it. These decisive strokes: calls for impeachment, boycotting Fox -- I guess I just wonder why people aren't doing more shit that really taps into that angry vein. Is it worrying about white men? I don't get it.
    posted by angrycat at 2:04 PM on May 14, 2019 [35 favorites]


    Warren has tapped into the great anger that we feel here and is felt many other places. It seems like the obvious strategy and I don't really know why people haven't jumped more on it.

    There are all sorts of Democrats. Trump may be an embarrassment, but from a class oppression standpoint he's preferable when the alternatives are actual progressives.
    posted by FakeFreyja at 2:09 PM on May 14, 2019 [3 favorites]


    Warren has tapped into the great anger that we feel here and is felt many other places. It seems like the obvious strategy and I don't really know why people haven't jumped more on it.

    I'm worried that the answer is that we're an outlier. Biden's polling vs Warren's would seem to confirm that.
    posted by diogenes at 2:09 PM on May 14, 2019 [16 favorites]


    Bella Donna's link about DHS's Project HART is scary and important, and tomorrow is a key vote. Please check it out!
    posted by heatvision at 2:11 PM on May 14, 2019 [7 favorites]


    It's not that we're outliers to people who are similar to us demographically, it's that our demographics here do not resemble the Democratic electorate as a whole. Metafilter skews white, skews upper middle class, skews educated, skews liberal, etc. And while the average age of a Metafilter user is probably not that different than the electorate the standard deviation is lower. (ie lots of 30-40 year olds, few 20 year olds and few 70 year olds).
    posted by Justinian at 2:13 PM on May 14, 2019 [7 favorites]


    This is not how you Fight A War.

    It's how you might fight a war if the only tool you've ever had for dealing with the world is throwing your weight around until the other side says uncle.

    Or if your purpose is to subborn institutions and accountability to your personal pursuit of status, and you're propelled less by interest in sensibly defining and strategically advancing the national well being and more on rallying a tribe to the fight against the other.

    Watching Republican conservatives defend tariffs on FB and in newspaper comment sections, watching Tom Cotton attempt to shrug off where/how those costs are falling on consumers and businesses with "well, that kind of tax is a smaller sacrifice than most soldiers make" ... that's about as sobering a moment as any I've had the last few years. You could be forgiven for thinking that the GOP really has been first about meritocratic capitalism, but this is a clear signal we're moving into tribal-fascism instead, and there is no policy wing of the GOP anymore (which isn't a surprise, as the likes of Gingrich and Rove have shown how they treat policy as politics-first for a long time).

    So, sure. This isn't how you fight a trade war.

    This is part of how you wage a war of America against itself, and then America itself.
    posted by wildblueyonder at 2:34 PM on May 14, 2019 [12 favorites]


    The NYT's Maggie Haberman has breaking news from Don Jr.: Donald Trump Jr. Strikes Deal for ‘Limited’ Interview With Intelligence Committee
    Donald Trump Jr. and the Republican-controlled Senate Intelligence Committee reached a deal on Tuesday for the president’s eldest son to sit for a private interview with senators in the coming weeks that will be limited in time, an accord that should cool a heated intraparty standoff.[…]

    Mr. Trump’s lawyer had prepared a blistering letter to send to the committee, telling its members that Donald Trump Jr. would not submit to open-ended questions before a panel that included multiple Democrats running for president, according to people familiar with its contents. The lawyers had prepared to send the letter on Monday, facing a deadline to respond to the subpoena.

    But they received a call from committee aides, asking if there was a “reasonable” path forward, according to a person familiar with the events.

    The compromise was an appearance by Mr. Trump in the middle of June, with questions limited to about a half-dozen topics, with the time no longer than two to four hours, according to a person briefed. Another person, who would not be identified, contested that the scope was of the topics had been limited.[…]

    The move by the younger Mr. Trump’s associates was straight out of his father’s playbook — set the terms of the debate at the most extreme end of the discussion by saying he would not appear, then cut a deal and look gracious.
    (It's that last bit of extra sucking up to Team Trump that's so infuriating in its editorializing.)
    posted by Doktor Zed at 2:49 PM on May 14, 2019 [5 favorites]


    It's not that we're outliers to people who are similar to us demographically

    I wonder sometimes. I go to a church full of people who are similar to me demographically, and I'm angrier and more worried than most of them. Although I guess I'm angrier than a lot of the MegaThread population, so maybe I'm just exceptionally angry ;)
    posted by diogenes at 2:51 PM on May 14, 2019 [6 favorites]


    Wilmot Collins has thrown his hat into the ring for 2020 Senate in Montana:
    Wilmot Collins, the Liberian refugee who surged into national headlines in 2017 after becoming Montana's first and only black mayor is launching a bid for higher office, officially filing paperwork with the FEC to run for the U.S. Senate seat currently held by incumbent GOP Sen. Steve Daines.
    I'm not familiar with Collins, so maybe a Montanan can chime in here, but I'm glad we have a Democrat making a challenge for the seat. I hope Montana has two Democratic Senators in 2020. We need Democrats running in every possible election. I'm glad Mr. Collins has gotten the memo.
    posted by Rosie M. Banks at 3:10 PM on May 14, 2019 [12 favorites]


    cut a deal and look gracious

    That will work for Jr. just as well as it does for his father. Which is to say, not at all.
    posted by kirkaracha at 3:11 PM on May 14, 2019 [1 favorite]


    Although I guess I'm angrier than a lot of the MegaThread population

    I don't think so. I mean, sure, we're pissed off but everywhere I go IRL or otherwise it's a variation of that tempered with acute anxiety. More than that there's a really strong undercurrent of "Are you seeing this? Can we talk?" Like everyone - I mean everyone - needs to unload. Privately.

    This is what distracts me from the polls so much - polling relies on a presumption that people aren't freaking out when they tell you who they like this week. "I dunno. Biden. Sure, whatever. Aaaaaaa!"
    posted by petebest at 3:14 PM on May 14, 2019 [11 favorites]


    Buttigieg is going on the podcast of somebody who signal boosts the vile, most racist microcelebrities in America, so it's safe to say his campaign is over.
    posted by Yowser at 3:29 PM on May 14, 2019 [2 favorites]


    So I generally assume that he is precisely as pigshit stupid as he sounds when he says something completely that seems totally unmoored from reality.

    He's just playing pigshit dimensional chess, dude
    posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 3:38 PM on May 14, 2019 [8 favorites]


    Buttigieg is going on the podcast of somebody who signal boosts the vile, most racist microcelebrities in America, so it's safe to say his campaign is over.

    This works better with a link and names and such.

    Buttigieg's press secretary responded to a twitter invite from Dave Rubin to appear on his podcast with simply "DM me," and a whole bunch of people reasonably responded back saying basically "don't do that" in rather strong terms.

    No, Buttigieg shouldn't go on the podcast of someone who interviewed Cernovich today, but I haven't actually said anything that says he's actually agreed to do the interview or anything other than a "DM me" from a press secretary.
    posted by zachlipton at 3:41 PM on May 14, 2019 [20 favorites]


    But on a related note, guess who else is meeting with gross people? Yahoo, Why did right-wing troll Charles C. Johnson meet with Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross?
    “Hi Secretary Ross,” the markedly informal email sent by Johnson that day begins. “Great chatting with you the other day.” Johnson proceeds to say that he would be “speaking before about 30 congressmen on tech issues” in Washington and “would love to meet” with Ross as well.

    Ross responded about three hours later, in an email apparently typed from his iPhone. He explained that he had to fly to Wisconsin in order to attend the groundbreaking for a plant opened by Foxconn, the Chinese electronics manufacturer. He urged Johnson to schedule a time for them to meet with Macie Leach, a senior adviser to the commerce secretary who had overlapped with Johnson at Claremont McKenna College, a small and prestigious California liberal arts university with a reputation for a conservative student body.

    “Sounds good,” Johnson replied, copying several Commerce officials, as well as another email account belonging to Ross. The subject line of his email was “Tech discussion with Sec Ross.”

    Ross and Johnson did meet that summer, according to a person familiar with the matter, but Johnson’s request for a subsequent meeting in October was turned down.
    By summer 2018, it was well known that Johnson is a Holocaust denier who ran a website to fundraise for Nazis, among many other awful hings. So why is the Secretary of Commerce meting with him? Johnson naturally now claims that he went to discuss "a national security matter." Ah but there's one other detail about those emails:
    The back-and-forth with Johnson, therefore, had to have been conducted at least in part via an email address affiliated with Ross but not issued by the federal government.
    BUT HER EMAILS!
    posted by zachlipton at 3:46 PM on May 14, 2019 [37 favorites]


    So, here's the other cocaine-related story from last week:

    McConnell capitalizes on attack with ‘Cocaine Mitch’ shirts (AP), in which McConnell capitalizes on Don Blankenship's attack ad with a Narcos-themed shirt (apparently very popular (NBC)), and Trump adviser slams McConnell campaign's 'Cocaine Mitch' T-shirts (Louisville Courier-Journal), in which Trump-appointed HUD administrator (and Eric Trump wedding planner) Lynne Patton says "as somebody who has personally struggled with cocaine addiction, I don’t think that that is funny or appropriate."
    posted by box at 4:05 PM on May 14, 2019 [4 favorites]


    Warren has tapped into the great anger that we feel here and is felt many other places. It seems like the obvious strategy and I don't really know why people haven't jumped more on it.

    Warren is also directly attacking Republicans' and Trump's "economically distressed" portion of their base by going right to them and having policies aimed at the economics and distress in a way that other candidates are not.

    I could see her peeling off some voters who aren't tied up by their racism and misogyny.

    (If the NY Times can get over their misogyny)
    posted by srboisvert at 4:32 PM on May 14, 2019 [24 favorites]


    Ron DeSantis ‘not allowed’ to disclose which two Florida counties were hacked by Russians
    Gov. Ron DeSantis said two counties had their elections information accessed, but the hackers weren’t able to change or “manipulate” any data.
    TALLAHASSEE — Gov. Ron DeSantis met with the FBI and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security last Friday to discuss the revelation in Robert Mueller’s report that “at least one” Florida county had its election information accessed by Russian hackers in 2016.
    DeSantis told reporters Tuesday that he had been briefed on that breach — which he said actually happened in two counties in Florida — but that he couldn’t share which counties had been the target.
    “I’m not allowed to name the counties. I signed a (non)disclosure agreement,” DeSantis said, emphasizing that he “would be willing to name it” but “they asked me to sign it so I’m going to respect their wishes.”
    posted by scalefree at 5:01 PM on May 14, 2019 [11 favorites]


    I'm not familiar with Collins, so maybe a Montanan can chime in here, but I'm glad we have a Democrat making a challenge for the seat.

    Not a Montanan, but I remember hearing about Collins back in 2017. In fact, I posted this article to Metafilter:
    When Wilmot Collins and his wife Maddie arrived in Ghana after escaping the Liberian civil war in September 1990, he weighed just 90 pounds. Maddie was about 87 pounds. They were starving, dehydrated and sick. Both had to be rushed to the hospital.

    Four years later, they arrived in Helena, Montana, where they were resettled as refugees. Now Wilmot Collins, 52, works for the Department of Health and Human Services. Maddie Collins is a registered nurse. They own their own home. Their 24-year-old daughter is in the Navy while their 20-year-old son, formerly a high school football star, is a sophomore at the University of Montana.

    Collins wants people to hear his story because he wants them to know that new refugees have something to offer.

    [...]

    “I think the people of Montana are very accepting and welcoming,” Collins says, reflecting on the incident. “But the problems we have is that without information, we tend to stick to what we hear. That is, if we do not educate the public on what refugees are about, they will stick to whatever bigotry they hear.”

    “That’s why they tried burning my car,” he says. “That’s why the marked my home ‘KKK,’ ‘Go back to Africa’ — because they didn’t know me. Today, I don’t think they can say that. I know in my own small way, I’ve enriched the community. Talk to my students, talk to my former students, talk to my military mates, talk to my co-workers.”
    posted by galaxy rise at 5:07 PM on May 14, 2019 [21 favorites]


    I'm not familiar with Collins, so maybe a Montanan can chime in here

    I don't know how he'll play in the rest of the state, but he's quite popular in Helena, partly because he got the snow plows to run on time. A cynic might add that having one of the six or seven black people in the state as mayor makes people feel good, but he does seem to be a really nice guy.
    posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 5:08 PM on May 14, 2019 [8 favorites]


    Who would have a US State's Govenor sign an NDA? That seems insane.
    posted by Windopaene at 5:15 PM on May 14, 2019 [19 favorites]


    Fourth-largest coal producer in the US files for bankruptcy
    The company staved off bankruptcy for years but continued to face lean markets.
    Cloud Peak Energy, the US' fourth-largest coal mining company, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy late last week as the company missed an extension deadline to make a $1.8 million loan payment.

    [...]

    But thinning margins have strained the mining company as customers for thermal coal continue to dry up. Coal-fired electricity is expected to fall this summer, even though summer months are usually boom times for coal plants as air conditioning bolsters electricity demand. That's because cheap natural gas and a boost in renewable capacity have displaced dirtier, more expensive coal.
    posted by XMLicious at 5:25 PM on May 14, 2019 [10 favorites]


    CNN: Farmers Get Impatient With Trump's Trade War: 'This Can't Go On'
    "The President of the United States owes farmers like myself some type of plan of action," John Wesley Boyd Jr., a soybean farmer in Baskerville, Virginia, told CNN's Brianna Keilar on Monday.

    "Farmers were his base. They helped elect this president ... and now he's turning his back on America's farmers when we need him the most," he added.[…]

    John Heisdorffer, an Iowa farmer and chairman of the American Soybean Association, decided to plant about the same amount of corn and soybean this year, figuring a trade deal was near.

    "We kept hearing that talks were going well, it sure looked like this was all going to be taken care of soon," he said. Now, he added, "there's a lot of uncertainty and a lot of emotions right now for farmers."

    In the Midwest, they're also battling wet and cold weather that delays their planting season -- and could result in a lower yield for the year. Grant Kimberley in Iowa is still putting his corn crop in the ground, which he usually finishes planting by May 10. He hasn't started planting his soybeans yet.

    "This can't go on for an extended period of time. We need a trade deal done soon, and in the meantime farmers are probably going to need another round of aid payments," said Kimberley, who is also the director of market development at the Iowa Soybean Association.
    Start your clocks for another agriculture bailout.

    The view from Wall Street is similarly restive, the New Yorker reports: The Stock Market Intrudes on the Alternate Reality of Trump’s Trade War (The Dow has lost about 400 points since its close last Friday after Trump tweeted about new tariffs.)
    posted by Doktor Zed at 5:25 PM on May 14, 2019 [14 favorites]


    NBC News, Ship sabotage mystery raises fears of accidental conflict with Iran: The Trump administration is "playing with fire, and all it takes is for one thing to go wrong because the Middle East is a tinderbox," one expert said.
    The rising temperature has prompted some politicians and experts in Europe to urge calm — particularly when so much seems unclear about who carried out the attack.

    "We are very worried about the risk of a conflict happening by accident," British Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt said at a summit in Brussels with U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

    Hunt said he was concerned about "an escalation that is unintended really on either side but ends with some kind of conflict." He called for "a period of calm to make sure that everyone understands what the other side is thinking."
    New Yorker, Robin Wright, Is Trump Yet Another U.S. President Provoking a War?: The United States has a long history of provoking, instigating, or launching wars based on dubious, flimsy, or manufactured threats.
    posted by zachlipton at 5:29 PM on May 14, 2019 [14 favorites]


    The WaPo's Robert Costa and Josh Dawsey: ‘I Don’t See Him Crying Uncle’: Trump Believes China Tariffs Will Help Him Win Reelection
    President Trump is telling advisers and close allies that he has no intention of pulling back on his escalating trade war with China, arguing that clashing with Beijing is highly popular with his political base and will help him win reelection in 2020 regardless of any immediate economic pain.

    Administration officials and outside Trump advisers said Tuesday that they do not expect him to shift his position significantly in coming days, saying he is determined to endure an intensifying showdown with Chinese President Xi Jinping despite turbulence in global markets and frustration within his own party.[…]

    But as Trump expresses confidence, there have been tensions inside the White House, with some advisers uneasy with Trump’s strident nationalism and firm belief in tariffs as economic weapons. The disagreements reflect broader distress within Republican circles about the president’s sharp rhetoric and refusal to budge.[…]

    Trump has worked to contain his current advisers as the negotiations have unfolded and present a united front to the Chinese, who he believes are looking for weakness, according to multiple officials, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to share private discussions. With [advisors] who are alarmed now gone from the White House, Trump has found it easier to navigate his own administration and govern by his own instincts.
    And here's PA's spineless GOP senator, Pat Toomey:
    “The fact is it’s Americans who are paying the price of these tariffs,” Sen. Patrick J. Toomey (R-Pa.) told reporters on Tuesday, citing economic data showing the levies have not had the intended effect of closing the trade gap with China or measurably hurting Chinese exports.

    Asked if Trump understands this view, Toomey said, “I assume the president understands how this works. But you’d have to ask him why he comes to the conclusions he comes to.” When pressed for further explanation, he declined and said he would “leave it at that.”
    AP asks this, too: Does Trump Understand Tariffs? (Yes, the video is an example of Betteridge's Law.)
    posted by Doktor Zed at 5:42 PM on May 14, 2019 [8 favorites]


    Ship sabotage mystery raises fears of accidental conflict with Iran

    "Accidental."

    Make no mistake, whatever pretext the administration feeds to the eager and slavering media will be engineered.
    posted by Rust Moranis at 5:46 PM on May 14, 2019 [17 favorites]


    Speaking of accidental conflicts with Iran: Iran Air Flight 655, a commercial passenger airliner which in 1988 was shot down by the U.S. Navy cruiser Vincennes after the ship moved into Iranian waters, killing all 290 people onboard. No broader conflict broke out but the U.S. eventually paid a settlement of $61.8 million without admitting liability or formally apologizing to Iran, according to the Wikipedia article.

    So whether another incident were accidental or “accidental” there is precedent.
    posted by XMLicious at 5:50 PM on May 14, 2019 [12 favorites]


    Ship sabotage mystery raises fears of accidental conflict with Iran

    US always stumbling into war
    posted by rhizome at 5:53 PM on May 14, 2019 [5 favorites]


    It's rare you see this kind of frank headline on NBC news: Israel, Saudi Arabia and Trump aides want confrontation with Iran. Will Trump listen?
    posted by RobotVoodooPower at 6:02 PM on May 14, 2019 [2 favorites]


    A conflict with Iran would be devastating. To Iran most of all, of course, but to us too. Do these idiots not remember the 80s? We lost 250 Marines (and 60 French soldiers) in one incident in 1983; Iran is widely believed to have had a hand in that. Do these morons think they'd be less inclined to go all out on those kinds of bombings if we directly attacked them?

    Iran isn't Iraq. And that was terrible enough. Iran would be an order of magnitude worse.
    posted by Justinian at 6:12 PM on May 14, 2019 [16 favorites]


    having attempted to make sense of international court proceedings between usa and iran, and of payments of amounts awarded in connection with such cases, from time to time in the past, i am surprised to learn that $61 mil. settlement of the international court of justice case concerning iran air 655 was paid by president bill clinton pretty promptly upon reaching the settlement agreement! (per business insider; sorry). but not as surprised as i would be should parties of the present misministration ever willingly submit to the jurisdiction of such a tribunal.
    posted by 20 year lurk at 6:19 PM on May 14, 2019 [4 favorites]


    Slate's Mark Joseph Stern on the recent SCOTUS decision on Franchise Tax Board of California v. Hyatt that reverses Nevada v. Hall: The Supreme Court’s Liberals Are Warning Us That Roe v. Wade Is in Mortal Danger

    No, they're really not. That hyberbolic and catastrophizing title is from Slate, which has already been called out by the Washington Post for publishing dangerous clickbait about abortion rights that has made women think abortion is currently illegal, just like the anti-abortion movement wants them to believe, so they don't seek abortions, even though it is currently legal. Roe v. Wade is a very different case than Franchise Tax Board of California v. Hyatt, including because Roe is about fundamental rights that stands on a lot of other precedent, e.g.
    The Constitution does not explicitly mention any right of privacy. In a line of decisions, however, going back perhaps as far as Union Pacific R. Co. v. Botsford, 141 U.S. 250, 251 (1891), the Court has recognized that a right of personal privacy, or a guarantee of certain areas or zones of privacy, does exist under the Constitution. In varying contexts, the Court or individual Justices have, indeed, found at least the roots of that right in the First Amendment, Stanley v. Georgia, 394 U.S. 557, 564 (1969); in the Fourth and Fifth Amendments, Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1, 8 -9 (1968), Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347, 350 (1967), Boyd v. United States, 116 U.S. 616 (1886), see Olmstead v. United States, 277 U.S. 438, 478 (1928) (Brandeis, J., dissenting); in the penumbras of the Bill of Rights, Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S., at 484 -485; in the Ninth Amendment, id., at 486 (Goldberg, J., concurring); or in the concept of liberty guaranteed by the first section of the Fourteenth Amendment, see Meyer v. Nebraska, 262 U.S. 390, 399 (1923). These decisions make it clear that only personal rights that can be deemed "fundamental" or "implicit in the concept of ordered liberty," Palko v. Connecticut, 302 U.S. 319, 325 (1937), are included in this guarantee of personal privacy. They also make it clear that the right has some extension to activities relating to marriage, Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1, 12 (1967); procreation, Skinner v. Oklahoma, 316 U.S. 535, 541 -542 (1942); contraception, Eisenstadt v. Baird, 405 U.S., at 453 -454; id., at 460, 463-465 [410 U.S. 113, 153] (WHITE, J., concurring in result); family relationships, Prince v. Massachusetts, 321 U.S. 158, 166 (1944); and child rearing and education, Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 268 U.S. 510, 535 (1925), Meyer v. Nebraska, supra.

    This right of privacy, whether it be founded in the Fourteenth Amendment's concept of personal liberty and restrictions upon state action, as we feel it is, or, as the District Court determined, in the Ninth Amendment's reservation of rights to the people, is broad enough to encompass a woman's decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy.
    And according to the New York Times, discussing Hyatt,
    Overruling a 40-year-old precedent, the Supreme Court said on Monday that states may not be sued in the courts of other states. The vote was 5 to 4, with the court’s more conservative members in the majority. The ruling itself will probably not be particularly consequential, as most states already grant sovereign immunity to other states, shielding them from lawsuits.
    And contrary to Slate's fantasy:
    Justice Breyer did not address the fate of Roe v. Wade directly. But he sounded a general note of caution, saying it was “dangerous to overrule a decision only because five members of a later court come to agree with earlier dissenters on a difficult legal question.”
    There is no need for Slate to be making the anti-abortion movement's case for them, depsite how many clicks that the resulting fear and panic will gain them.
    posted by Little Dawn at 6:20 PM on May 14, 2019 [11 favorites]


    Maybe we should finish up in Iran's neighboring Afghanistan and Iraq before starting another quagmire in the Middle East. Nearly 16 years after the United States invaded Iraq, there remain about 5,200 U.S. troops stationed there. Eighteen years after the US invaded Afghanistan there are 14,000 American troops there.
    posted by kirkaracha at 6:30 PM on May 14, 2019 [15 favorites]


    Iran is 4 times the size of Iraq and has twice the people. It has a bigger and better military. It would be a disaster.
    posted by chris24 at 6:53 PM on May 14, 2019 [9 favorites]


    i didn't like the "warning" spin either in that piece, which i found otherwise unobjectionable (haven't read the opinion; did note with approval stern included that link in the story). to see the court's conservatives embrace things penumbral is less refreshing than i'd have expected . but i believe justice breyer is not warning me, or anybody, about what his colleagues might do given the opportunity -- justice breyer knows, i presume, that there's fuckall i or, short of significant civil unrest, anybody else can do about it ... except for those other eight justices and maybe their clerks, clergy, families, the appellate counsel who present cases to them and the lower courts' judges who prepare those cases. he's doing his best as a dissenting justice: noting and objecting to the radical deviation from reliable norms that the majority has embraced in accordance with his institutional role and responsibility. i know i know i know i can write my congresspersons (i did recently resistbot for the first time thanks to y'all's encouragement & info) but my congresspersons are ok ('cept: a bit heavy on the y chromosome) and don't control senate agenda or majority party anyway.
    posted by 20 year lurk at 6:58 PM on May 14, 2019


    A conflict with Iran would not be like the Iraq War. It would be worse.
    If nothing else, Iran is simply a bigger country than Iraq was before the 2003 invasion. At the time, Iraq’s population was about 25 million. Iran’s population is estimated to be more than 82 million. Iran spans 591,000 square miles of land, compared with Iraq’s 168,000 square miles.

    One estimate from 2005 suggested the Iraqi army had fewer than 450,000 personnel when the invasion began. Recent estimates suggest that Iran has 523,000 active military personnel, as well as 250,000 reserve personnel.

    Just as important, however, is Iran’s location. Unlike Iraq, Iran is a maritime power bordered by the Caspian sea to the north and the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman to the south. It shares land borders with several troubled U.S. allies, including Afghanistan, Pakistan, Turkey and Iraq.

    Its location in the center of Eurasia is particularly important for trade. About a third of the world’s oil tanker traffic passes through the Strait of Hormuz, which is bordered by Iran and Oman. At its narrowest point, this shipping route is just under two miles wide. Blocking it could lead shipments of daily global oil exports to drop by an estimated 30 percent.
    US opponents in Afghanistan and Iraq have been conducting a clinic in how to use asymmetric warfare to tie down the United States.
    posted by kirkaracha at 7:05 PM on May 14, 2019 [12 favorites]


    Millennium Challenge 2002 "was a major war game exercise conducted by the United States Armed Forces in mid-2002" between the US "Blue" forces and the "Red" forces of an unknown Middle East adversary. The Red forces "sank" half of the US fleet in the exercise using small boats and planes and employed "motorcycle couriers, messages hidden in prayers, and even coded lighting systems on his airfields — tactics employed during World War II." Instead of learning some lessons from unexpected weapons and tactics, the military "refloated" the fleet and insisted that the Red team follow the exercise playbook.

    Somehow I'm skeptical that Iran would follow our rules, and I'm pretty sure there won't be any do-overs.
    posted by kirkaracha at 7:14 PM on May 14, 2019 [46 favorites]


    Millennium Challenge 2002

    20,000 US sailors at the bottom of the Hormuz Strait in a matter of hours. Whenever you see Iran-related sabre-rattling and war-drumming, that's what you should be thinking about. That, and our likely civilization-ending response.
    posted by Rust Moranis at 7:23 PM on May 14, 2019 [26 favorites]


    There is no need for Slate to be making the anti-abortion movement's case for them, depsite how many clicks that the resulting fear and panic will gain them.

    The forced birthers make their case, and pointing out the rhetoric they use and laws passed is not 'fear and panic' it's knowing ones enemy. Yes, the Georgia law might get struck down- but with more and more right wing judges- it might not be. It's like with climate change, no we shouldn't be running around like headless chickens, but if you aren't worried, you aren't paying attention. Frankly you coming in and telling us to calm down makes me think that if they were fitting us for our red gowns and white cowls you'd be telling us "don't worry! There's no legal precedence for being a handmaiden, so we shouldn't worry." That you dismiss our fears as "clicks" is incredibly insulting.
    posted by Homo neanderthalensis at 7:27 PM on May 14, 2019 [17 favorites]




    Tonkin Gulf and bullshit wars, for the youngsters.
    posted by j_curiouser at 7:29 PM on May 14, 2019 [7 favorites]


    If your punishment for terminating a rape-inflicted pregnancy is greater than the punishment for the rapist who caused it, it's time to step back and rethink just how the FUCK you reached this point as a society and a species.
    posted by delfin at 7:50 PM on May 14, 2019 [104 favorites]


    GOP Senators were, er, unimpressed w/ Jared, Hassett and Miller at immigration lunch today, per lawmakers, staff

    The WaPo has more: Kushner Skirts GOP Senators’ Key Questions On His Immigration Plan
    President Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, faced pointed questions about his plan to overhaul the immigration system in a closed-door meeting with Republican senators Tuesday — and failed to offer solutions to some key concerns, according to GOP officials who cast doubt on the viability of the proposal.

    Publicly, senators emerged from their weekly Capitol Hill luncheon applauding the White House senior adviser’s pitch to move U.S. immigration toward a merit-based system that prioritizes highly skilled workers, a task he undertook at Trump’s behest.

    But privately, Republican officials said Kushner did not have clear answers to some questions from the friendly audience, prompting Trump’s other senior adviser, Stephen Miller, to interrupt at times and take over the conversation.[…]

    At one point, Kushner told Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) that his plan would not address Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, the program that shields some young undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children from deportation. This left several senators confused because dealing with the “dreamers,” as the group of immigrants is often called, is crucial for securing any Democratic support.[…]

    But some GOP senators left the meeting wondering whether Kushner understood the issue, the GOP officials said. Though some appreciated his efforts, they did not think his plan would advance anytime soon. No senator has stepped forward yet to turn Kushner’s plan into legislation.

    “He’s in his own little world,” said one individual familiar with the discussion in the meeting, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to freely describe the session. “He didn’t give many details about what was in [his plan]. . . . And there were a number of instances where people had to step in and answer questions because he couldn’t. […] Miller interrupted him a lot,” the individual said.
    posted by Doktor Zed at 8:00 PM on May 14, 2019 [9 favorites]


    That you dismiss our fears as "clicks" is incredibly insulting.

    I'm arguing with the evidence, not you. I am personally terrified about what is happening, and I keep reminding myself that the Constitution is on our side, and I am grateful for all of the protesting and donations that are being made to organizations that are working hard to defend our rights. I feel like Slate is essentially preying on our fears, and I am tired of the fear, and I want us to fight with clear heads, and not get knocked off guard by scare tactics that are actually hurting women right now. Slate does us no favors by misrepresenting the law and what US Supreme Court justices actually said, and what the cases are actually about.

    It is already bad enough. This is a round up of current restrictions, but they have all been struck down by lower courts: Which states are blocking abortion — and which are enacting protections? (WaPo)
    posted by Little Dawn at 8:09 PM on May 14, 2019 [7 favorites]


    You are assuming our institutions will save us and nothing in the past 2+ years has shown us that- only the opposite.
    posted by Homo neanderthalensis at 8:12 PM on May 14, 2019 [24 favorites]


    Mod note: Y’all please let the abortion back and forth drop pronto.
    posted by cortex (staff) at 8:32 PM on May 14, 2019 [6 favorites]


    A thread on the topic would not go wrong if someone (more levelheaded than I) wanted to do that.

    I am not feeling too hyped about SCOTUSBOWL 2020.
    posted by snuffleupagus at 9:21 PM on May 14, 2019


    A thread on the topic would not go wrong if someone (more levelheaded than I) wanted to do that.

    I had a thread. Guess how it went?
    posted by Homo neanderthalensis at 9:22 PM on May 14, 2019 [13 favorites]


    Ah. Oh well. Appreciate the effort.
    posted by snuffleupagus at 9:23 PM on May 14, 2019 [1 favorite]


    Millennium Challenge 2002
    Hey, remember back in the halcyon days of early 2017, when Steve Bannon was on the National Security Council and all keen on shipyards and shipbuilding?

    How Bannon’s Navy service during the Iran hostage crisis shaped his views (WaPo, February 10, 2017)
    As Bannon has told it, the failed hostage rescue is one of the defining moments of his life, providing a searing example of failed military and presidential leadership — one that he carries with him as he serves as President Trump’s chief strategist. [...] Bannon is remembered as much for his skill at sports as for his work on the ship’s deck. When the Foster docked at ports around the world, the ship’s basketball team often lined up games against local competition. Bannon’s nickname was “Coast,” short for coast-to-coast, because on the basketball court he’d never pass the ball [...] Two years before Bannon left the military in 1983 and headed to Harvard Business School, he told McKim that he had a vision of his future. “He mentioned that he’d go to Harvard and come back and be secretary of defense,” McKim recalled.
    Trump and Bannon: Busting Up the World (The American Prospect, May 1, 2019) Each in his own way, the president and his former White House strategist continue their global realignment project, tilting toward Putin.

    Bannon's far right conspiracy doesn't need a mountain retreat – it's hiding in plain sight throughout Europe (The Independent, May 13, 2019) It reads like the outline of a Dan Brown novel. A secretive training school for far-right “culture warriors” set up by the eminence grisly of the alt-right Steve Bannon, Trump’s ideological Svengali. “The Academy for the Judeo-Christian West”, housed in a remote medieval Italian former monastery has the stated aim of becoming a “gladiator school” to train the “next generation of nationalist and populist leaders”. The idea is for them to link up and spread their hate-filled, nativist nationalist ideology across the world.

    Trump handed out walking papers little less than two years ago, but Bannon didn't wander very far: "I happen to think today was the most important day of Donald Trump's presidency," Bannon said Monday on Fox Business Network's "Lou Dobbs Tonight," in response to Dobbs' praise of Trump for "standing up" to Chinese President Xi Jinping. (USA Today, May 7, 2019)
    posted by Iris Gambol at 11:03 PM on May 14, 2019 [11 favorites]


    Not 'born to be in it': Beto O’Rourke strikes more humble tone as buzz fades (The Guardian)

    Can't he just run for Senator again?
    posted by mumimor at 11:04 PM on May 14, 2019 [41 favorites]


    AP: The Latest: US Non-essential Embassy Staff to Leave Iraq

    NYT: Skeptical U.S. Allies Resist Trump’s New Claims of Threats From Iran
    “One American official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss confidential internal planning, said the new intelligence of an increased Iranian threat was “small stuff” and did not merit the military planning being driven by Mr. Bolton. The official also said the ultimate goal of the yearlong economic sanctions campaign by the Trump administration was to draw Iran into an armed conflict with the United States.”
    posted by Doktor Zed at 1:49 AM on May 15, 2019 [8 favorites]


    So I guess if they can't get a war in Venezuela, they'll gin one up with Iran? Why is nobody asking why they're so desperate for a war?
    posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 2:30 AM on May 15, 2019 [10 favorites]


    Wars provide unparalleled opportunities for graft, and it would be a good time to accomplish things by Executive fiat without any of that pesky oversight. IIRC there's a Supreme Court dictum to the effect of the President's joint position as Chief Executive and Commander in Chief means that their power is maximised during war time. Consequently, more war drums = more government by Twitter.
    posted by Joe in Australia at 3:18 AM on May 15, 2019 [4 favorites]


    Goddamnit, the threat of foreign war is yet another reason to supervise this president. The legislative branch needs to do its job before lots of people die.
    posted by angrycat at 4:38 AM on May 15, 2019 [21 favorites]


    The threat of a war against Iran is terrifying, but the US waging a war on the other side of the world with only KSA and Israel as allies is also really crazy. Would the military accept such a suicide proposition?

    Trump is deliberately isolating the USA from all allies and partners -- if it isn't at the behest of Putin it is amazingly stupid, and it is really wild to realize that the Republicans are letting this happen just so they can remain in power and suppress women for another generation. However, there may be a limit to how far the donors will go with this charade.

    Trump’s Tariffs, Once Seen as Leverage, May Be Here to Stay
    At a briefing last week, Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, praised the president’s trade policies for helping economic growth thus far and said the administration supports “free and fair reciprocal trade.”

    But if the goal really is freer trade, the administration has never been further from achieving that goal than it is today, said Chad Bown, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

    “They’re heading in the opposite direction,” Mr. Bown said.

    Beyond an update to the United States agreement with South Korea, no other free trade deals have been finalized. Mr. Trump’s revisions to the North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico still await passage in Congress, while trade talks with the European Union and Japan have been troubled from the start, with governments squabbling over the scope of the agreement.
    The easier explanation, said Michael Strain, the director of economic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, is to take the president at his word that he is a protectionist.
    “Those are the words they’re using, and those are the actions they’re taking,” he said.

    In remarks this week, Mr. Trump said companies that did not want to pay the tariffs could shift production out of China and into the United States or another country that has not been hit with tariffs. While there are signs that this shift is happening, it seems to be benefiting countries like Mexico and Vietnam more than the United States.
    posted by mumimor at 4:51 AM on May 15, 2019 [12 favorites]


    Congress needs to be 100% crystal clear that it and only it has the power to declare and wage war. If Trump wants war with Iran, he has to convince the House of Representatives first.
    posted by vibrotronica at 7:11 AM on May 15, 2019 [34 favorites]


    About a third of the world’s oil tanker traffic passes through the Strait of Hormuz, which is bordered by Iran and Oman. At its narrowest point, this shipping route is just under two miles wide.

    This is a tiny passageway for an international shipping lane. For comparison, the Mississippi River:
    The widest navigable section in the shipping channel of the Mississippi is Lake Pepin, where the channel is approximately 2 miles wide.
    posted by Mental Wimp at 7:51 AM on May 15, 2019 [1 favorite]




    I mean, he's not necessarily wrong, if we assume that at least one of those is a (likely pre-emptive) nuclear attack that would kill millions of Iranians.
    posted by zombieflanders at 8:24 AM on May 15, 2019 [6 favorites]


    At the risk of comment deletion, I'm posting this previously unposted nugget from Lawyers, Guns, and Money about the Alabama abortion bill, because it lays bare the true thinking behind its promoters. A comment on that page yields this:
    Chambliss, responding to the IVF argument from Smitherman, cites a part of the bill that says it applies to a pregnant woman. "The egg in the lab doesn’t apply. It’s not in a woman. She’s not pregnant."
    So, it never was about the fertilized egg.
    posted by Mental Wimp at 8:31 AM on May 15, 2019 [82 favorites]


    Jeff Sessions’s Grave Conflict of Interest, Murray Waas, New York Review of Books.
    Last year, in March 2018, then Attorney General Jeff Sessions enlisted his subordinates to lie on his behalf that he did not know he was under federal investigation when he fired then Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe—an investigation initiated by McCabe and overseen by him until it was taken over by Special Counsel Robert Mueller.
    posted by AwkwardPause at 8:35 AM on May 15, 2019 [13 favorites]


    Chris Baynes, The Independent: "US-Iran tensions: Trump administration orders government staff to flee neighbouring Iraq"
    The US State Department has ordered all non-emergency government staff to leave Iraq urgently amid escalating tensions with neighbouring Iran.

    An alert published on the website of the US embassy in Iraq said employees nationwide should depart “as soon as possible” and avoid American facilities in the country.

    Washington said last week said it had detected new and urgent threats from Iran and its proxy forces targeting Americans and US interests in the region.

    On Sunday, the embassy advised Americans to avoid travel to Iraq, citing “heightened tensions”.

    Wednesday’s alert said the State Department had ordered the departure of non-emergency government employees posted at both the embassy in Baghdad and the consulate in Erbil.
    posted by OnceUponATime at 8:49 AM on May 15, 2019 [4 favorites]


    The US State Department has ordered all non-emergency government staff to leave Iraq urgently

    Feel free to explain to me how this isn't as ominous as it sounds...
    posted by diogenes at 8:57 AM on May 15, 2019 [7 favorites]


    Congress needs to be 100% crystal clear that it and only it has the power to declare and wage war. If Trump wants war with Iran, he has to convince the House of Representatives first.
    Congress has already been clear since 2001, with the AUMF the President can do whatever he wants by citing the magical word 'terrorism'. Wars don't exist anymore.
    posted by Harry Caul at 8:59 AM on May 15, 2019 [18 favorites]


    In the "couldn't happen to nicer guys" department, David A. Fahrenthold and Jonathan O'Connell for the Washington Post: Trump’s prized Doral resort is in steep decline, company documents show
    “They are severely underperforming” other resorts in the area ... “There is some negative connotation that is associated with the brand.”

    [...] Eric Trump — the president’s son who runs the business day-to-day — rejected the idea that the Trump brand is damaged. “This story is completely senseless,” he said in a statement. [...]

    But the statistics provided by the company’s consultants to Miami-Dade County — which are legally required to be accurate — showed competing resorts in the same region of Florida still outperformed the Trump resort in the key metrics of room occupancy and average room rate.
    Likewise at the Trump hotel in Chicago. But alas, it's not declining fast enough to help the country out.
    posted by RedOrGreen at 9:02 AM on May 15, 2019 [12 favorites]


    at the Trump hotel in Chicago

    FYI The DuSable bridge is the best place to directly give this place the finger
    posted by fluttering hellfire at 9:29 AM on May 15, 2019 [25 favorites]


    > The US State Department has ordered all non-emergency government staff to leave Iraq urgently

    Feel free to explain to me how this isn't as ominous as it sounds...


    Because the Independent* is hyping up what is already a worrying development. The actual State Dept. bulletin does not imply this panicked level of urgency. "Depart Iraq by commercial transportation as soon as possible" is not "Trump administration orders government staff to flee" as far as evacuation goes. What's happening here is Pompeo ratcheting up the level of anxiety, building on his surprise visit to Iraq last week.

    CNN has better coverage: State Department Orders Non-Emergency Employees to Leave Iraq Amid Iran Tensions
    The State Department ordered Wednesday the departure of non-emergency US government employees from Iraq amid increasing tensions with Iran and warned US citizens not to travel to the country, citing a "high risk for violence and kidnapping."

    The announcement comes on the heels of an unannounced trip to Iraq by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo where he said he spoke to officials about he country's ability to protect Americans. The action also represents the latest maneuvering by the Trump administration in the Middle East, where the Pentagon has recently positioned a carrier strike group and a bomber task force.[…]

    The department said the sudden changes were because the US government's "ability to provide routine and emergency services to US citizens in Iraq is extremely limited" and that as a result, the threat of "terrorism, kidnapping, and armed conflict" aimed at Americans in the country was too great a risk.
    Note that although US officials are talking about "specific and credible" intelligence that Iranian forces and their surrogates are planning to target American forces in the region, their warnings are as vague as those leading up to the Iraq invasion—and the State Dept. memo about leaving does not even mention this. For what it's worth, the BBC reports, “Iraq's Prime Minister, Adel Abdul Mahdi, said on Tuesday that its security forces had not observed "movements that constitute a threat to any side".”

    Pompeo's throwing his weight around by irresponsibly increasing the tensions in the already tense region.

    * The larger problem is that the Independent's journalistic quality slumped ages ago when it was sold off. It used to be a solid competitor to the Times and the Guardian, but now it's more clickbait-as-news.
    posted by Doktor Zed at 9:37 AM on May 15, 2019 [13 favorites]


    "Depart Iraq by commercial transportation as soon as possible" is not "Trump administration orders government staff to flee" as far as evacuation goes.

    It's bad enough, isn't it?
    posted by litlnemo at 9:55 AM on May 15, 2019 [5 favorites]


    Definitely bad enough, but not last-helicopter-out-of-Saigon bad, the way the Independent was reporting it.

    "As soon as possible" is CYA language from Pompeo, not an indication of imminent danger (except, of course, what Team Trump seems set on provoking).

    The Guardian notes more dissent about the regional situation from US allies: No Increased Iran Threat In Syria or Iraq, Top British Officer Says, Contradicting US—Deputy commander of anti-Isis coalition rebuts White House justification for sending troops
    Maj Gen Christopher Ghika, who is a deputy commander of Operation Inherent Resolve (OIR), the coalition conducting counter-terrorist operations against Isis in Iraq and Syria, was repeatedly questioned by reporters about the threat from Shia militias in Syria and Iraq, cited by US officials over the past week as justification for speeding up the deployment of an aircraft carrier strike group in the Gulf and for sending B-52 Stratofortress bombers and an anti-aircraft battery to the region.

    “No – there’s been no increased threat from Iranian-backed forces in Iraq and Syria,” Ghika said in a videolink briefing from Baghdad to the Pentagon. “We’re aware of that presence, clearly. And we monitor them along with a whole range of others because that’s the environment we’re in. We are monitoring the Shia militia groups. I think you’re referring to carefully and if the threat level seems to go up then we’ll raise our force protection measures accordingly.”
    US Central Command then put out a statement objecting to that assessment—because the game plan is escalation, not de-escalation, in this wag-the-dog scenario.
    posted by Doktor Zed at 10:06 AM on May 15, 2019 [3 favorites]


    Cotton: US could win war with Iran in 'two strikes'

    Over by Christmas.

    I mean, he's not necessarily wrong, if we assume that at least one of those is a (likely pre-emptive) nuclear attack that would kill millions of Iranians.


    Second Lieutenant Tom Cotton deployed to Baghdad 37 months after the Mission Accomplished photo op. One would think that he could tell the difference between breaking a country and winning a war.

    Senator Tom Cotton is the most evil asshole in a party that is currently led by Donald Trump.
    posted by Etrigan at 10:11 AM on May 15, 2019 [36 favorites]


    The USA unquestionably has the world's best military and it's unquestionably capable of utterly annihilating any other military force in a stand up fight.

    But, as Vietnam should have taught the Republicans and yet somehow failed to, and as Iraq should have taught the Republicans and yet seems to have failed to, all that means is that people opposing the US won't try to do so via military vs. military stand up fights that the US is guaranteed to win.

    So far, other than genocide, there has not yet been a technique developed that can actually stop an insurrection or guerrilla movement that has enough popular support. The guerrillas can't actually win (if you define winning as evicting the US by force of arms), but they can make the occupation ongoing, costly, and bloody. The old Napoleonic idea that if you beat the military in a region you get to have that region with no other contest was never really true, and today it's less true than ever.

    Which is to say that, yeah, the Trump cronies are technically correct, the US can easily demolish the Iranian military. But so what? All that will do is make Iran a bitter enemy who will use asymmetric war against America in retaliation.
    posted by sotonohito at 10:20 AM on May 15, 2019 [22 favorites]


    as Vietnam should have taught the Republicans and yet somehow failed to

    What the Republicans learned from Vietnam was not to let the hippies and peaceniks fuck things up. Keep 'em occupied with abortion controversies and racists...even more, and the grift can go on forever.

    There are barely any caskets to worry about in this day and age, too, so the optics are magnitudes easier to control. Sure, the internet blows that control up a little bit more than they'd prefer, but I think the calculus is that if they generate enough light, they won't have to worry about the heat.
    posted by rhizome at 10:26 AM on May 15, 2019 [10 favorites]


    Note that although US officials are talking about "specific and credible" intelligence

    In all the time he has been president, Trump has never let up on the intelligence department and its fake news and lack of credibility. Are you telling me now they believe them and consider their data credible?

    O RLY??
    posted by hugbucket at 10:28 AM on May 15, 2019 [7 favorites]


    After the Alabama/Georgia/Ohio dystopian events, CDC weighs in with more signs we actually are living in Atwood's Handmaid's Tale.
    posted by Harry Caul at 10:58 AM on May 15, 2019 [7 favorites]


    Corey Robin, from a decade ago are you kidding me? early 2017: The Politics Trump Makes - "But there are signs of a possible disjunction, which we would be foolish to ignore. As was true of Carter, the tensions within Trump’s party may prove to be a challenge beyond his talents."

    now: The Disjunction That Was Promised - "But because the foundation of disjunctive presidencies—the regime they were elected to manage rather than maul—is so tenuous, disjunctive presidents often rush back to safe havens, placating the party and its interests with goodies like a new Department of Education. The combination of that push and pull, toward and away from the party, antagonizes everyone, provoking a potent challenge not from the forces of the new (such as Reagan’s bid to supplant Ford in 1976) but from defenders of the faith. To wit: Teddy Kennedy’s primary challenge to Carter in 1980.
    We haven’t seen that sort of challenge yet under Trump. Bill Weld notwithstanding, it seems likely we won’t. Nor have we seen the splintering of the party similar to the crackup of the New Deal coalition in the 1970s. The question is: why?"
    posted by the man of twists and turns at 11:04 AM on May 15, 2019 [2 favorites]


    The question is: why?"

    Because the factions of the GOP know that if they splinter, they're all collectively fucked.
    posted by NoxAeternum at 11:23 AM on May 15, 2019 [4 favorites]


    Quinnipiac has polled Pennsylvania for the 2020 general election matchups. (538 rating A-, so one of the top 10 pollsters). Results:
    1. Biden +11
    2. Sanders +7
    3. Warren +3
    4. Harris: tie
    5. Buttigieg -1
    6. Beto -2
    They also polled the primary and Biden walked away with it with 39% to Sanders 13%, all others in single digits.

    Early, etc etc, but you'd rather be +11 early than -2. I'm surprised PA voters seem to dislike Beto, though unless its controlled for name recognition it's tough to do apples-to-apples. Biden and Sanders have to be liking that +11/+7 in PA. Hell, +3 for Warren in PA is better than I feared. If you had a crystal ball and saw that Warren carried PA in the general I'd feel very, very confident in her chances overall.
    posted by Justinian at 11:26 AM on May 15, 2019 [7 favorites]


    Speaking of disjunction, Politico Playbook reports on what could have been a GOP come-to-Jesus meeting: What George W. Bush’s Economist Said About Trump Behind Closed Doors
    Larry Lindsey, President George W. Bush’s National Economic Council director, spoke Tuesday separately to both the elected House GOP leadership and top committee Republicans, and his presentation about China and trade turned a lot of heads, according to multiple people who were in both meetings.

    Lindsey, who has an economic consultancy, was a guest of House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy. Lindsey said he enlisted two psychiatrists to analyze the president from afar. China views President Donald Trump as a “total narcissist”* -- “a 10-out-of-10 narcissist,” he said. Lindsey attributed this to the president’s upbringing and said his mother didn’t pay him adequate attention in childhood.

    Lindsey said Trump has no long-term plans or ability to think ahead. He said the president has the long-term decision-making ability of an “empty chair.”
    But then he reverts to type and hopes against hope that somehow Trump will work out despite his better judgment and all public evidence to the contrary:
    All that aside, Lindsey did say he was in favor of the president’s China policy, and postulated that, because of some of his traits, he might be able to get a deal with Xi. He said that Trump’s position vis-a-vis China is strong, that the U.S. is in a better position than China and that it’s important that America not back down. Lindsey declined to comment.
    * That's only half the story, though. Trump's not simply a narcissist—he's a malignant narcissist. Properly speaking, he's an first-rate example of narcissistic personality disorder and antisocial personality disorder. Talking about Trump in terms of only the former misses the big picture.
    posted by Doktor Zed at 11:32 AM on May 15, 2019 [19 favorites]


    Is it a constitutional crisis yet?

    No ‘do-over’ on Mueller probe, White House lawyer tells House panel, saying demands for records, staff testimony will be refused (WaPo)
    The White House’s top lawyer told the House Judiciary Committee chairman Wednesday that Congress has no right to a “do-over” of the special counsel’s investigation of President Trump and refused a broad demand for records and testimony from dozens of current and former White House staff.

    White House Counsel Pat Cipollone’s letter to committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) constitutes a sweeping rejection — not just of Nadler’s request for White House records, but of Congress’s standing to investigate Trump for possible obstruction of justice. In his letter, Cipollone repeated a claim the White House and Trump’s business have begun making: that Congress is not a law enforcement body and does not have a legitimate purpose to investigate the questions it is pursuing.
    posted by Nerd of the North at 12:00 PM on May 15, 2019 [19 favorites]


    @kylegriffin1: A.G. Barr shook hands with Nancy Pelosi at the Peace Officers Memorial Day service event and asked, "Did you bring your handcuffs?" She smiled and indicated that the Sergeant at Arms was present should arrest be necessary. NBC has confirmed this report.

    I'm glad Barr is finding this all amusing.
    posted by zachlipton at 12:06 PM on May 15, 2019 [28 favorites]


    Some ..interesting results from landline polling

    From new Emerson poll, top 3 candidates in the landline primary vs the non-landline primary-

    Landline:
    Biden 43%
    Sanders 16%
    Harris 15%

    Non-Landline:
    Sanders 37%
    Biden 19%
    Warren 12%

    Data
    posted by The Whelk at 12:07 PM on May 15, 2019 [25 favorites]


    (Warren not getting a fraction of the news coverage that nonentities like Beto get is ...something else.)
    posted by The Whelk at 12:15 PM on May 15, 2019 [33 favorites]


    That Emerson data on landlines/nonlandlines is essentially a proxy for age, isn't it?
    posted by Justinian at 12:17 PM on May 15, 2019 [14 favorites]




    Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure that people with landlines vote at about twice the rate as those without them.
    posted by octothorpe at 12:32 PM on May 15, 2019 [6 favorites]


    After the Alabama/Georgia/Ohio dystopian events, CDC weighs in with more signs we actually are living in Atwood's Handmaid's Tale.


    Birth rate in U.S. falls to lowest level in 32 years, CDC says

    So what exactly was the apocalypse 32 years ago? Good lord that is a terrible article jumping from one measure to another without ever giving enough information for you to actually numerically understand what is happening. Also a steady decades long decline is not really a fall.
    posted by srboisvert at 12:35 PM on May 15, 2019 [6 favorites]


    If late-second-term Ronald Reagan made you feel aroused about the world that you lived in 32 years ago, I don't know what to tell you.
    posted by delfin at 12:44 PM on May 15, 2019 [9 favorites]


    angrycat: The legislative branch needs to do its job before lots of people die.

    I think you mean "a lot more people die." People have died because of Trump's hate-filled rhetoric stoked and supported violence by white supremacists. People have died because of the ramped up, self-created "migrant crisis." And that's just off the top of my head.

    Not attacking anyone here, just bringing up those who have already died.


    Huffy Puffy: Warren’s getting more TV news coverage than Beto.

    Warren is saying more than Beto these days, right? And reaching out to at-risk (white, rural) communities in Trump-territory, with positive feedback from voters.
    posted by filthy light thief at 12:46 PM on May 15, 2019 [12 favorites]


    *shovels four instances of the day's crap into one comment*

    It's worth taking a moment to read the White House Counsel's latest letter to Rep. Nadler, especially this bit:
    Third, it appears that the Committee's inquiry is designed, not to further a legitimate legislative purpose, but rather to conduct a pseudo law enforcement investigation on matters that were already the subject of the Special Counsel's long-running investigation and are outside the constitutional authority of the legislative branch. The only purpose for this duplication seems to be harassing and seeking to embarrass political opponents after an exhaustive two-year investigation by the Department of Justice did not reach the conclusion that some members of the Committee apparently would have preferred. That, of course, is not a permissible purpose for demanding confidential information from the Executive.
    @bradheath: Where this argument leaves us: The Justice Department says it can't charge a sitting president lest it interfere with his constitutional powers. And the White House says Congress can't investigate him because it doesn't have the power to conduct 'law enforcement' inquiries.

    ----

    Daily Beast, Trump Administration to LGBT Couples: Your ‘Out of Wedlock’ Kids Aren’t Citizens
    one little-noticed State Department policy has now resulted in a reverse version of Trump’s “anchor baby” scenario, where the children of U.S. citizens born abroad are effectively being stopped at the border.

    Last summer, the State Department issued new rules unilaterally changing the department’s interpretation of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), a 1952 law that, along with the 14th Amendment, codifies eligibility for U.S. birthright citizenship.

    “The U.S. Department of State interprets the INA to mean that a child born abroad must be biologically related to a U.S. citizen parent,” the State Department’s website says. “Even if local law recognizes a surrogacy agreement and finds that U.S. parents are the legal parents of a child conceived and born abroad… if the child does not have a biological connection to a U.S. citizen parent, the child will not be a U.S. citizen at birth.”

    The Kivitis are each biologically related to their children. Under the policy, however, children born via gestational surrogacy and other forms of assisted reproductive technology (ART) are considered to be born “out of wedlock,” in the State Department’s words—even if their parents, like Roee and Adiel, are legally married.
    ...
    That “assumption of parentage,” as the State Department calls it, now seems to LGBT parents to be reserved solely for heterosexual married couples. Only same-sex couples, whose non-traditional family structure sticks out like a sore thumb, end up facing scrutiny over how their children came into the world, parents told The Daily Beast—and as a result, whether they are eligible for birthright citizenship.
    ...
    “You see a gay man running for president on the cover of Time magazine with his husband, and then you get a call from the State Department essentially saying that your ‘out-of-wedlock’ daughter is not entitled to a passport,” Roee said. “You’re thinking, what is this parallel universe that we’re living in?”
    ----

    @kylegriffin1 [video attached]:
    Fire from Bob Menendez when he asks Undersecretary of State for Arms Control Andrea Thompson about Russian nuclear plans without New START.

    Thompson: "It's a good question for Russia, senator."
    ...
    Menendez: "I’m not asking Russia about our national defense. I'm asking you."
    New START expires in February 2021. The Trump administration is seemingly nowhere on even thinking about a replacement.

    ----

    McClatchy, Immigrant soldiers now denied US citizenship at higher rate than civilians: "According to the most recent USCIS data available, the agency denied 16.6 percent of military applications for citizenship, compared to an 11.2 percent civilian denial rate in the first quarter of fiscal year 2019, a period that covers October to December 2018." The number of military applications has also plummeted as the Pentagon has implemented new rules that make it harder for immigrants to enlist and harder for service members to apply for citizenship.

    ----

    Bloomberg, CFPB Official in Racist Blog Post Controversy to Depart in which the Trump-apointee responsible for the part of the CFPB that oversees anti-discrimination laws will depart. He wrote a variety of blog posts in 2004 questioning, among other things, why using the n-word is racist. The posts were uncovered last year, but he remained at the agency.
    posted by zachlipton at 12:55 PM on May 15, 2019 [31 favorites]


    <I don’t understand the State rule at all. So, if I were still of breeding age, and I had a fling in Rome, and gave birth, but didn’t marry the Italian father, when I came back to the states, my child wouldn’t be an American citizen? What about military babies who may or may not be born in wedlock, but are born on a foreign base? This rule seems not only cruel, but illogical.
    posted by SecretAgentSockpuppet at 1:16 PM on May 15, 2019 [4 favorites]


    SecretAgentSockpuppet:
    “State says children born through ART require extra paperwork for proof of citizenship, but there are no boxes on any citizenship forms which indicate ART is used,” one woman, a former U.S. military intelligence officer who is married to a senior U.S. military officer, told The Daily Beast. When their son was born on an American military base abroad last fall, it took months for their application for his U.S. passport to be processed—and only after they submitted reams of paperwork proving that one of the two women was the gestational mother, confirming whether or not the former officer had a “genetic relationship” with her son, and “physical evidence” that they had used an anonymous sperm donor.

    “If we did [in-vitro fertilization] and were hetero, we could have a different egg and sperm that were not genetically related to us, but due to… the ‘assumption of parentage’ which exists for married couples, they would not question the birth,” said the former officer, who asked to remain anonymous due to the sensitivity of her wife’s position in the military.

    “It was so dumb, regardless—we were both American citizens, so it should have been a non-issue,” the former officer added, noting that many LGBT service members having children overseas are facing similar pushback from the State Department, but the random nature of the problems, and their resolution, makes her believe that “it all depends on the individual who is handling your case and their personal feelings.”
    posted by Cheerwell Maker at 1:25 PM on May 15, 2019 [6 favorites]


    White House declines to back Christchurch call to stamp out online extremism amid free speech concerns (Tony Romm and Drew Harwell, Washington Post)

    White House refuses to sign international statement on online extremism (Timothy B. Lee, Ars Technica)
    "The United States stands with the international community in condemning terrorist and violent extremist content online in the strongest terms," the White House said in an emailed statement Wednesday. The US government says it will "continue to support the overall goals reflected in the Call," however, it is "not currently in a position to join the endorsement."
    posted by ZeusHumms at 1:31 PM on May 15, 2019 [12 favorites]


    In response to today's letter from the White House, Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler said that he is seriously considering imposing fines. (TPM)
    posted by diogenes at 1:34 PM on May 15, 2019 [11 favorites]


    WaPo, Trump signs order to protect U.S. networks from foreign espionage, a move that appears to target China
    Trump declared the emergency in the form of an executive order that says foreign adversaries are exploiting vulnerabilities in U.S. telecom technology and services. It singles out economic and industrial espionage as areas of particular concern.

    The order authorizes the commerce secretary to block transactions involving communications technologies built by firms controlled by a foreign adversary that puts U.S. security at “unacceptable” risk — or poses a threat of espionage or sabotage to networks that underpin the day-to-day running of vital public services.

    Wednesday’s announcement was expected nearly a year ago, and comes as neither Washington nor Beijing appears willing to back down in their ongoing economic dispute. The National Economic Council, which had blocked the move for months, dropped its objection as trade talks hit an impasse, said one official.
    Meanwhile, Russia accessed election information in two Florida counties, and Trump still takes Putin's word that nothing happened.
    posted by zachlipton at 1:42 PM on May 15, 2019 [11 favorites]


    I feel like the easy answer to the White House's nonsense about needing a legislative purpose for cooperation is just to begin impeachment proceedings against Barr over his handling of the Mueller Report.

    But probably they should run it up to the Supreme Court because leaving bullshit tactics like this unchallenged is a bad idea - which is why Obama should have tried seating Garland.
    posted by jason_steakums at 1:52 PM on May 15, 2019 [19 favorites]


    "Investigating the investigators": Republicans roll out a dangerous new gambit (Heather Digby Parton, Salon)
    Republicans probably won't put Comey and Mueller in prison. The goal is to blow smoke and bewilder the voters
    Same pattern they've followed for decades. Some of the same people are involved too.
    posted by ZeusHumms at 2:02 PM on May 15, 2019 [16 favorites]


    NBC, U.S. military to build 6 tent cities near border for migrants
    The U.S. military is going to provide and build tents to house 7,500 migrants at six locations near the border.

    A Defense Department spokesperson confirmed that the Department of Homeland Security made the request and a Defense official said Acting Secretary Patrick Shanahan is expected to sign the request.

    The tents will probably not be on military bases, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, not the military, will be responsible for migrant detention and custodial support.
    This Reuters photo of migrants being held in horrible-looking conditions in McAllen.

    NYT, Trump Immigration Plan Emphasizes Immigrants’ Skills Over Family Ties. I won't even bother to quote anything about what the plan actually is—Trump will give some kind of speech tomorrow about it—, because it's only a speech and not an actual plan:
    The president will reveal some details about the proposal, which was developed by Jared Kushner, his son-in-law, during a Rose Garden ceremony on Thursday afternoon. But officials conceded that the plan is a long way from becoming a legislative reality, with one saying on Wednesday that it represents a “first step toward having that discussion.”

    In fact, the broad outlines of the plan are certain to be unpopular with lawmakers in Congress.
    ...
    Officials who briefed reporters on the plan on Wednesday said the White House has begun to convert the idea into a bill that could be introduced in Congress, but declined to say whether the president intends to pursue legislation in the weeks or months ahead.
    Dreamers aren't addressed at all, deeply unpopular with Democrats and Republicans, nobody will even say whether they intend to attempt to turn it into legislation... This is Playmobil governing: Jared is pushing little bits around and making noises, but anybody can see that it bears no relationship to the actual grown-up activity.

    @TalKopan: As Republican lawmakers coming out of the briefing from Kushner made clear yesterday -- this is not a plan designed to pass Congress. It's designed to give Republicans some talking points to advocate for.
    posted by zachlipton at 2:17 PM on May 15, 2019 [11 favorites]


    @sarafischer: The White House just launched a tool for people to report if they feel they were censored by social platforms. “No matter your views, if you suspect political bias caused such an action to be taken against you, share your story with President Trump.”

    Naturally, it's a mailing list scam: they'd like your email address and phone number to "keep you posted on President Trump's fight for free speech."
    posted by zachlipton at 2:29 PM on May 15, 2019 [18 favorites]




    That Emerson data on landlines/nonlandlines is essentially a proxy for age, isn't it?
    posted by Justinian at 12:17 PM on May 15 [10 favorites +] [!]


    Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure that people with landlines vote at about twice the rate as those without them.
    posted by octothorpe at 12:32 PM on May 15 [3 favorites +] [!]


    I assume that the results are adjusted for age distribution and accompanying historical voting patterns, but who knows? If they are, then the discrepancy is driven by more subtle differences that drive the choice of having a landline. Landlines are an extra expense for most people, all else being equal, so having one indicates a higher income. It also may belie a certain level of technophobia, especially in older people. If those things are driving the discrepancy, then they have a much larger impact than I would have guessed.
    posted by Mental Wimp at 2:40 PM on May 15, 2019 [2 favorites]


    Going back to that story linked above by Nerd of the North, about White House Counsel Pat Cipollone’s letter, which "... constitutes a sweeping rejection — not just of Nadler’s request for White House records, but of Congress’s standing to investigate Trump for possible obstruction of justice" - it's a breathtaking claim, and I guess I hadn't come to terms with how they think they can get away with it. Sure, they could just "Says who?" it for a while, but eventually there would be a reckoning, no?

    So this post by Kevin Drum at Mother Jones felt like a bit of a light bulb moment for me:
    Donald Trump’s usual MO is to make breathtakingly sweeping arguments and then dare anyone to disagree. ... As I’ve said before, this is all a delaying action. It’s going to end up in court and Trump will appeal it all the way to the top. It doesn’t matter all that much whether he wins or loses, only that the final decision happens after November 3, 2020. After that, he’ll either continue stonewalling and provoke a constitutional crisis, or else he’ll be out of office and assumes that President Biden or President Harris will decide that “healing” is the order of the day, not further investigations. That’s how it usually works when Democrats win the White House, after all.
    (This is partly why I'm rooting for President Warren, who is so far - so far - the only person I can believe won't just say "Bygones".)

    And yeah, wouldn't Justice Merrick Garland have been nice to have for this upcoming crisis? Instead, we have Bart O'Kavanaugh, hand-picked for his views on Executive power and immunity.
    posted by RedOrGreen at 2:53 PM on May 15, 2019 [25 favorites]


    Barak Ravid of Israel's Channel 13 News, writing in Axios: Netanyahu Wary of Being Dragged Into U.S.-Iran Escalation
    At a special meeting on U.S.-Iran tensions with Israel's intelligence chiefs and top military brass, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel would make every effort not to get dragged into the escalation in the Gulf and would not interfere directly in the situation, Israeli officials tell me.

    Israel was one of the main sources of intelligence on alleged Iranian plots against the U.S. and its allies in the region. […] Secretary of State Mike Pompeo spoke on the phone earlier this week with Netanyahu to coordinate their responses to rising U.S.-Iran tensions, the officials say.

    The assessment from Israeli intelligence is that there is not imminent risk of attack by Iran or its proxies against Israel in Lebanon, Syria or Iraq as a result of recent escalation, according to Israeli officials.
    • During the emergency meeting, Netanyahu ordered security and intelligence chiefs to boost monitoring of Iranian forces and pro-Iranian militias in the region, Israeli officials said.
    • A State Department official told me Pompeo and Netanyahu speak frequently on a wide range of issues, including about the threat posed by Iran. The official refrained from discussing the call this week, but didn't deny that it took place.
    So that's another US ally throwing cold water on Team Trump's assessment of Iran's threat. Let's see how Pompeo's meeting with Putin tomorrow goes.
    posted by Doktor Zed at 2:54 PM on May 15, 2019 [9 favorites]


    Sure, they could just "Says who?" it for a while, but eventually there would be a reckoning, no?

    I've come to the belief that the reckoning has been postponed indefinitely.
    posted by nubs at 2:55 PM on May 15, 2019 [10 favorites]


    Re: More tent cities

    If you'll recall, NBC, June 20, 2018: Trump admin's 'tent cities' cost more than keeping migrant kids with parents
    The cost of holding migrant children who have been separated from their parents in newly created "tent cities" is $775 per person per night, according to an official at the Department of Health and Human Services — far higher than the cost of keeping children with their parents in detention centers or holding them in more permanent buildings.

    The reason for the high cost, the official and several former officials told NBC News, is that the sudden urgency to bring in security, air conditioning, medical workers and other government contractors far surpasses the cost for structures that are routinely staffed.
    Also from last year:
    Tent Cities: Defense contractors on hiring spree (Fort Worth Star-Telegram, June 18, 2018)
    Defense contractors like General Dynamics are profiting from child detention... and you might be, too (Quartz, June 19, 2018)
    The Billion-Dollar Business of Operating Shelters for Migrant Children (NYT, June 21, 2018)
    Top Buys by Directors: Malcolm's $509.6K Bet on General Dynamics (Nasdaq, October 30, 2018)
    US waived FBI checks on staff at growing teen migrant camp (AP, November 27, 2018 (& NBC, same date -- filed to "Latino" news)

    Who Has Been Buying General Dynamics Corporation (NYSE:GD) Shares? (Simply Wall St., May 10, 2019) Over the last year, we can see that the biggest insider purchase was by Independent Director Mark Malcolm for US$510k worth of shares, at about US$170 per share. So it’s clear an insider wanted to buy, even at a higher price than the current share price (being US$168).
    posted by Iris Gambol at 3:05 PM on May 15, 2019 [23 favorites]


    The characteristic quality of our age is that cause no longer follows effect no one ever gets arrested or charged for their crime there's no result of anything - the Reckoning never comes because they still have the power to put it off and everytime they put it off the effects of it will be more and more devastating for all of us
    posted by The Whelk at 3:05 PM on May 15, 2019 [16 favorites]


    It's the complete collapse of our institutions to mean anything or to do anything - all that is solid melts into air and all that, but it's also knowing that while also seeing in the media and in the popular culture this constant repetition that everything is fine, this is - to borrow Adam Curtis- hypernormalisation and it was very prevalent right before the collapse of the Soviet Union
    posted by The Whelk at 3:28 PM on May 15, 2019 [22 favorites]


    I did a couple of quick searches but did not see any comments re: (CNN) TSA to deploy hundreds, including air marshals, to border. Yes, please remove resources from other areas that have been demonstrably more high risk than the border 'threat'. That seems like a good idea, amirite?
    posted by meowf at 3:37 PM on May 15, 2019 [7 favorites]




    Meanwhile, in the "opposition" party: DCCC Chair To Help Anti-Abortion Dem Fundraise Amid Severe Abortion Laws
    posted by zombieflanders at 4:17 PM on May 15, 2019 [10 favorites]


    Abortion is a human right.
    posted by reductiondesign at 4:19 PM on May 15, 2019 [22 favorites]


    New START expires in February 2021. The Trump administration is seemingly nowhere on even thinking about a replacement.

    The only thing John Bolton has wanted his whole career more than war with Iran is withdrawing the US from every nuclear arms control agreement. He still believes that the height of the Cold War never ended, and we should've been building 1000s more nukes this entire time.

    Which really makes your head hurt if you think about who his boss' boss is. But Bolton is a land of contrasts.
    posted by T.D. Strange at 4:35 PM on May 15, 2019 [3 favorites]


    Meanwhile, Russia accessed election information in two Florida counties, and Trump still takes Putin's word that nothing happened.

    Russia reportedly penetrated election related systems in seven states: Alaska, Arizona, California, Florida, Illinois, Texas and Wisconsin. (The Senate Intelligence Committee confirmed six of these, probably because what happened in Arizona was disputed.)

    I feel like it's weird that this does not get discussed more.
    posted by OnceUponATime at 4:39 PM on May 15, 2019 [34 favorites]


    Okay then how about this one:

    A FOIA request from David Bossie's Citizens United intended to show Hillary something something SPYING has apparently blowed up spectacularly and you'll never guess what the magic sparkles that came out were about. ("OH HEY MORE Steele Dossier Says PAUL MANAFORT Used Trump Org Server To Sext The Russians? SOME COLLUSION!", Wonkette)

    This briefing with Steele happened October 11, 2016. The first public reporting on the weird Trump Organization server that mostly communicated with Alfa Bank came out October 31, 2016, by Franklin Foer over at Slate, who scooped the New York Times[*], and it was sourced through computer nerds in America who stumbled upon the server activity and analyzed it. Almost three weeks before that, Chris Steele told US officials Paul Manafort was using dark web shit to communicate with Alfa Bank, run through a hidden server? O RLY?

    Here's something we know to be a fact, according to the Mueller Report: Manafort used encrypted communications a lot, and he deleted his communications a lot, and he lied A LOT. Indeed, one of the reasons Mueller was unable to prove a criminal conspiracy beyond a shadow of a doubt is that Manafort lied and hid and deleted his communications. And what did Manafort lie about specifically? What precisely he was doing as he passed secret polling data to the Russians through his Russian spy comrade Konstantin Kilimnik, with whom he met several times during the campaign, notably on August 2, 2016, in New York.

    ... Once more, for emphasis before we move on: Franklin Foer had "Trump organization server + Alfa Bank + Spectrum Health," while Chris Steele had "Manafort + Alfa Bank," independent of each other, and that's quite frankly kinda stunning. Foer's sources said the interactions were designed so as to be concealed. Steele said Manafort and Alfa were using TOR software and a hidden server. It sure does appear to be the same story, from two different directions, with two completely different lines of sourcing.


    If this topic tickles your ivories, the story is full of goodness.

    *Bonus fun: So the NYT got scooped on AlfaBank and that's why they've shat on it since. Buzzfeed much?
    posted by petebest at 4:43 PM on May 15, 2019 [40 favorites]


    If things continue as they are, war with Iran may become inevitable. If you look at Bolton's interviews over the the last few decades he's thought of little else. Republicans answer to Iran's nuclear capability was always to go to war, and they didn't like being proved wrong. They won't take facts, like the treaty working, for an answer.

    It may be just my imagination, but I felt the Mueller investigation and threat of impeachment was keeping Trump at bay to a degree. It's harder to go to war when you can be accused of using it as a distraction and your presidency is seen by many as illegitimate. Keeping Trump focused on impeachment is reason alone for Democrats to focus on impeachment.
    posted by xammerboy at 5:03 PM on May 15, 2019 [11 favorites]


    It's the complete collapse of our institutions to mean anything or to do anything - all that is solid melts into air and all that, ...

    And the further normalisation of authoritarianism via cruelty. So things like this
    @tmorello: One homeless man when released from prison was dropped off by police under a bridge with his ankle monitor and told he must stay there.
    become unremarked, everyday, events. Same with the IVF exemption to the Alabama abortion law meaning that corporations now have a higher level of personhood there than women.

    The cruelty, and power by cruelty and control by cruelty, are the point.
    posted by Buntix at 5:12 PM on May 15, 2019 [23 favorites]


    So, this is happening: the White House has published an online form to report instances of "political bias" on social media.

    "SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS should advance FREEDOM OF SPEECH. Yet too many Americans have seen their accounts suspended, banned, or fraudulently reported for unclear “violations” of user policies.

    No matter your views, if you suspect political bias caused such an action to be taken against you, share your story with President Trump."

    Of course, the form also asks for your citizenship status.
    posted by swift at 5:17 PM on May 15, 2019 [10 favorites]


    An Encino, CA man pleaded guilty today to charges he made more than a dozen calls to the Boston Globe last August threatening to shoot reporters and editors in the head because of the paper's efforts to organize a nationwide series of editorials that the press is not the enemy of the people. He now faces up to five years in federal prison at his sentencing in September. Oh, and as a convicted felon, he has to give up all his guns, including the rifle he bought last May. An affidavit by an FBI agent on the case details the specific threats he made.
    posted by adamg at 5:23 PM on May 15, 2019 [14 favorites]


    Can someone please explain to me what de Blasio is thinking? At least the other non-entities in the race are popular in their own home states/cities. This guy is disliked even by New Yorkers. What possible route does he have to the nomination?
    posted by Justinian at 5:25 PM on May 15, 2019 [4 favorites]


    *spins the wheel of random stupid things the White House can do, watches it narrowly tick past "start a war"—for today anyway, and land on "give clemency to someone wealthy with political connections"*

    @nielslesniewski: INBOX: Statement from the Press Secretary Regarding Executive Clemency for Lord Conrad M. Black of Crossharbour

    Here's that statement.
    posted by zachlipton at 5:28 PM on May 15, 2019 [8 favorites]


    -Meanwhile, Russia accessed election information in two Florida counties, and Trump still takes Putin's word that nothing happened.
    -Russia reportedly penetrated election related systems in seven states...I feel like it's weird that this does not get discussed more.
    The Mueller Report starts with [paragraph 2] "The Russian government interfered in the 2016 presidential election in sweeping and systematic fashion.", and yet all the president says is "No collusion", as if 'I didn't do anything wrong' is the proper response to foreign intervention in our elections.
    posted by MtDewd at 5:38 PM on May 15, 2019 [22 favorites]


    Can someone please explain to me what de Blasio is thinking

    My sense is that the party is doing a Gish Gallop with candidates. It keeps Dems in the news sans legislative drama, Dems who can talk about an entire spectrum of concerns unopposed (as long as they stay off Fox) directly to the people. Some kind of hybrid GOTV and townhall strategy, but one that prevents any one candidate from taking the spotlight (an unalloyed good IMO). It's just a pure front of big-name and miscellaneous issues.

    I'd also like to think that this is essentially doing polling work, taking the temperature of the populace, after which the obviously-lesser candidates can bow out and pass their findings on up the funnel until there are a primary's worth of contenders in nine months, and twenty candidates worth of strategic research.

    Said another way, I thinkhope it's all noisy cover from Warren, with Biden/Sanders in the back pocket, comprising special teams just in case things turn out differently.
    posted by rhizome at 5:39 PM on May 15, 2019 [5 favorites]


    Russia reportedly penetrated election related systems in seven states...I feel like it's weird that this does not get discussed more

    It's bad luck for the occupied to talk shit about the occupying forces.
    posted by rhizome at 5:41 PM on May 15, 2019 [6 favorites]


    "OH HEY MORE Steele Dossier Says PAUL MANAFORT Used Trump Org Server To Sext The Russians? SOME COLLUSION!", Wonkette

    Ah, we meet again, Alfa Bank server, my old nemesis. This is the October Surprise that seemed like something out of a paranoid airport thriller, yet it never goes away. The mainstream media naturally won't touch it, but this latest wrinkle is being examined by independent outlets from Inquisitr (Trump Campaign Boss Paul Manafort Messaged Russia Via Secret Alfa Bank Server, Steele Dossier Author Told U.S.) and freelance investigative journalist Scott Stedman to Louise Mensch's conspiracy-blog. It would be nice if we knew how much Mueller pursued this trail of clues, but we only know that Peter Aven of Alfa Bank, whom Steele claimed was Manafort's link, only shows up in the moderately redacted post-election sections "High-Level Encouragement of Contacts through Alternative Channels" and "Petr Aven's Outreach Efforts to the Transition Team". Who knows if the Alfa Bank server affair was one of the items the SCO passed along to the FBI as part of their unreleased counter-intelligence findings? This goes deep into the weeds…
    posted by Doktor Zed at 5:47 PM on May 15, 2019 [16 favorites]


    INBOX: Statement from the Press Secretary Regarding Executive Clemency for Lord Conrad M. Black of Crossharbour

    The WaPo's David Fahrenthold points out, "Black is a former business partner of @realDonaldTrump’s: they were partners on Trump Tower Chicago" https://www.chicagobusiness.com/article/20080729/CRED03/200030366/trump-former-sun-times-publisher-settle

    Also, the Trump White House statement's equivocation about Black's felony record is tantamount to lying. Saying SCOTUS "largely disagreed and largely disagreed and overturned almost all charges in his case" elides over the inconvenient facts that his conviction for felony fraud and obstruction of justice were upheld and that he was re-sentenced to 42 months in prison and fined $125,000.

    Trump's not being subtle by granting clemency to an old crony for obstruction of justice.
    posted by Doktor Zed at 5:57 PM on May 15, 2019 [24 favorites]


    ‘Lord Black’ ?!?? I mean, c’mon!
    posted by Harry Caul at 6:01 PM on May 15, 2019 [8 favorites]


    The Steele briefing took place around the time he was hearing and passing on reports about Michael Cohen meeting people in Prague. His information in October (and probably long before that) was shit and likely deliberate disinfo, especially on tech-related things. Manafort's iPod touch collection was enough to give him secure messaging.
    posted by holgate at 6:06 PM on May 15, 2019


    Conrad Black is a white supremacist who said the “very fine” Nazis at Charlottesville were a Democratic false flag.

    He said white supremacist/Nazi Faith Goldy’s actions would “not be offensive to any ethnic or religious group.” He has repeatedly defended her and gone on her show.

    Faith Goldy has:

    • Said the 14 words on air
    • Marched at Charlottesville
    • Appeared on a new-Nazi podcast with the Daily Stormer after Charlottesville
    • Said the Nazi manifesto at Charlottesville, including on the JQ (Jewish Question; that Jews don’t count as white people to the alt-right), was well thought out.
    posted by chris24 at 6:12 PM on May 15, 2019 [33 favorites]


    "Trump's not being subtle by granting clemency to an old crony for obstruction of justice."

    Lord Tubby's obstruction of justice wasn't subtle, either, removing boxes of documents that were under court seal.

    Conrad Black, Joe Arpaio, Scooter Libby -- it's open season on the rule of law, as it applies to old white men, at least.
    posted by Capt. Renault at 6:22 PM on May 15, 2019 [8 favorites]




    His information in October (and probably long before that) was shit and likely deliberate disinfo, especially on tech-related things.

    Such as?

    Manafort's iPod touch collection was enough to give him secure messaging.

    Paul "whoops redacted it wrong" Manafort? He can type, I assume. That's about all I'd give him. I mean, are you saying he would have used iPods to communicate securely rather than have someone set up a TOR server? It's the case that he used encrypted apps to communicate, so what's the big stretch between WhatsApp and TOR?

    And what's so hard about independent researchers arriving at the same conclusions as Steele's earlier, still-private-until-yesterday memo being a super-duper-duper coincidence that isn't a coincidence? That's not about the validity of Steele's information, it corroborates some of it doesn't it?

    From Foer's Slate piece that broke the story:

    In late July
    [2016], one of these scientists—who asked to be referred to as Tea Leaves, a pseudonym that would protect his relationship with the networks and banks that employ him to sift their data—found what looked like malware emanating from Russia. The destination domain had Trump in its name, which of course attracted Tea Leaves’ attention. But his discovery of the data was pure happenstance—a surprising needle in a large haystack of DNS lookups on his screen. “I have an outlier here that connects to Russia in a strange way,” he wrote in his notes. He couldn’t quite figure it out at first. But what he saw was a bank in Moscow that kept irregularly pinging a server registered to the Trump Organization on Fifth Avenue.

    Registered to an address in the same building where Manafort lived.
    posted by petebest at 7:17 PM on May 15, 2019 [18 favorites]


    Oh yeah; Conrad Black is basically the Canadian answer to Rupert Murdoch. Utterly unsurprised that he's entangled with Trump.
    posted by tivalasvegas at 7:53 PM on May 15, 2019 [2 favorites]


    WaPo, Toddler apprehended at the U.S.-Mexico border dies after weeks in hospital
    A 2½-year-old Guatemalan boy apprehended at the U.S.-Mexico border died Tuesday night in El Paso after several weeks in the hospital, according to the Guatemalan Consulate and another person with direct knowledge of the case.
    ...
    The boy is the fourth migrant child to die since December after being apprehended at the southern border and taken to the hospital. All have been from Guatemala, a Central American nation experiencing severe drought and poverty, and where smugglers have been offering discounted trips to families traveling to the United States.
    posted by zachlipton at 8:46 PM on May 15, 2019 [18 favorites]


    Re: the article zombieflanders linked to above about the DCCC chair hosting a fundraiser Dan Lipinski, a horrible anti-woman Representative from Illinois's 3rd congressional district. In last year's mid-term race he nearly lost (won by 2 points) against pro-choice progressive Marie Newman. Newman is running against him again, so consider kicking some bucks her way.

    If you don't know how terrible Lipinski is, feel free to keep reading. From the most recent Primaries for Progress (a Data for Progress project) newsletter: Dan Lipinski is many awful things, but most relevant right now is that he is an anti-choice extremist who is being challenged by a pro-choice woman. From our longer look at Lipinski, which we recently published for subscribers:

    Dan Lipinski supports fetal personhood. Fetal personhood is an anti-abortion position so horrifyingly extreme it sounds like a parody of the entire movement. Personhood is the idea that a fetus must be legally treated as a person, which means an abortion is a first degree homicide. Personhood bills, which Lipinski has pledged to support, are not only unconstitutional, but so extreme in their general removal of women’s rights that none have passed anywhere in America. Even when deeply conservative states like North Dakota and Mississippi have put them on the ballot, they always fail. North Dakota’s, which lost by nearly 30%, even had in the title part of Lipinski’s response: “life begins at conception”.

    In office, Lipinski has been every bit the anti-abortion ideologue that he promised to be when his father gave him the office. For over 18 years, he has been taking vote after vote to restrict access to abortion. From the last Congress alone, he’s voted for two separate personhood bills, signed on to three attempts to shorten the window abortion is legal for, and co-sponsored an attempt to permanently end the possibility of federal assistance for poor women who are seeking to terminate a pregnancy. As the ACA has clearly demonstrated, healthcare you can’t afford is healthcare you do not have access to. And to that end, he’s been trying to defund Planned Parenthood too. Lipinski also regularly haunts the March for Life, the nation’s largest gathering of anti-choice extremists. In 2019 he was one of only two Democrats to speak at the march, the other being some state house member from Louisiana.


    The DCCC is going to do what the DCCC does, which is support incumbents. That is the entire point. It is a waste of time to criticize an organization for doing what it was created to do. That is why a bunch of new organizations, such as Data for Progress, MoveOn, etc., came into being. If we want to fight the status quo, we need to keep electing candidates who share our values. Candidates like Marie Newman, who has endorsements from EMILY’s List, the pro-abortion rights advocacy group NARAL, Planned Parenthood, MoveOn, and the Progressive Campaign Committee. Go Marie!
    posted by Bella Donna at 2:26 AM on May 16, 2019 [20 favorites]


    Dan Lipinski is fundamentally a Republican who's been running as a Democrat all these years because his father, a Democrat, gave him the office and that district won't elect a Republican.

    I like Marie Newman but she's got a bit of a popularity problem right now that I don't quite understand (maybe people are grumpy she's taking a second run?), I'll be curious to see where she's at when polling gets serious.
    posted by Eyebrows McGee at 3:47 AM on May 16, 2019 [8 favorites]


    I'm sitting here struggling to figure out what to make of the Wonkette/Christopher Steel story. Let me quote some stuff and look at the dates to establish a timeline. FYI, Manafort joined the campaign March 29, 2016 (right around the same time Papadopoulos was approached). The DNC hacking by the GRU happened in March and April, and stuff started leaking via DC Leaks in late June and early July.

    Okay, first, Foer's Slate story...
    In late July [2016], one of these scientists [...] found what looked like malware emanating from Russia. The destination domain had Trump in its name
    The timeline Foer shows has little spikes in DNS look ups of the Trump server during the conventions in late July 2016, and a much bigger spike in early August, 2016.

    Manafort resigned August 19, 2016.

    From the 2nd half of August through September the peak in DNS look ups of the Trump server by Alfa bank falls off to a level which is steady and higher than previously.

    Foer again:
    Around the same time, the New York Times’ Eric Lichtblau and Steven Lee Myers began chasing the story. [... they met with a] representative of Alfa Bank on Sept. 21, and the bank denied having any connection to Trump. [...]

    The Times hadn’t yet been in touch with the Trump campaign—Lichtblau spoke with the campaign a week later—but shortly after it reached out to Alfa, the Trump domain name in question seemed to suddenly stop working.
    [...]
    Four days later, on Sept. 27, the Trump Organization created a new host name
    [...]
    To reach the server after the resetting of the host name, the sender of the first inbound mail has to first learn of the name somehow [...] some noninternet channel
    Okay, we are up to Sep 27th, 2016. The timeline in Foer's story ends at the end of September.

    Now Wonkette...
    Steele claimed Manafort used Peter Aven of Alfa Bank to communicate with the Kremlin, and that those communications were "encrypted via TOR software and run between a hidden server managed by Alfa Bank."
    ...
    This briefing with Steele happened October 11, 2016.
    Then Foer publishes his piece on Oct 31st, 2016, and then the election happens on Nov 9th, 2016.

    Now I want to quote the Mueller report...
    Petr Aven, a Russian national who heads Alfa-Bank, Russia's largest commercial bank, described to the Office interactions with Putin during this time period that might account for the flurry of Russian activity.

    "Aven told the Office that he is one of approximately 50 wealthy Russian businessmen who regularly meet with Putin in the Kremlin; these 50 men are often referred to as "oligarchs." Aven told the Office that he met on a quarterly basis with Putin, including in the fourth quarter (Q4) of 2016, shortly after the U.S. presidential election.[...] According to Aven, at his Q4 2016 one-on-one meeting with Putin, Putin raised the prospect that the United States would impose additional sanctions on Russian interests, including sanctions against Aven and/or Alfa-Bank. Putin suggested that Aven needed to take steps to protect himself and Alfa-Bank. Aven also testified that Putin spoke of the difficulty faced by the Russian government in getting in touch with the incoming Trump Administration. According to Aven, Putin indicated that he did not know with whom formally to speak and generally did not know the people around the President-Elect."
    Emphasis mine. Why in November of 2016 would Putin be instructing Aven to reach out to the transition team, if it were true that Alfa Bank had been in contact with Manafort throughout the summer and fall? Because the server had been busted and they could not communjcate that way any more? Because Manafort was no longer with the campaign? Because now that the election had happened they needed to formalize things and make contact with someone other than Manafort?

    More Mueller:
    ""While at a 1 board meeting held in Luxembourg in late December 2016, Aven pulled [politically connected American Richard] Burt aside and told him that he had spoken to someone high in the Russian government who expressed interest in establishing a communications channel between the Kremlin and the Trump Transition Team. Aven asked for Burt's help in contacting members of the Transition Team."
    [...]
    Simes told the Office that he declined and stated to Burt that setting up such a channel was not a good idea in light of the media attention surrounding Russian influence in the U.S. presidential election.
    [...]
    "Aven replied to Burt's email on the same day, saying "Thank you. All clear." According to Aven, this statement indicated that he did not want the outreach to continue.
    [...]
    "In the first quarter of 2017, Aven met again with Putin and other Russian officials. At that meeting, Putin asked about Aven's attempt to build relations with the Trump Administration and Aven recounted his lack of success. Putin continued to inquire about Aven's efforts to connect to the Trump Administration in several subsequent quarterly meetings.""
    Was there some reason Aven could not bring up the subject of sanctions relief with Manafort over the Tor channel, while it existed?

    For that matter, if Aven had this channel to Manafort, why did Kislyak have to reach out to Flynn at the end of December?

    Did the publication of the server story itself (toward the beginning of Q4 2016) put an end to that channel and require Aven to reach out through other channels?

    Steele's story isn't eally consistent with the story Aven told Mueller, I don't think... but surely Aven is not the most reliable source himself?
    posted by OnceUponATime at 4:46 AM on May 16, 2019 [15 favorites]


    Trump Not Convinced Time Is Right to Attack Iran (WaPo)

    President Trump is frustrated with some of his top advisers, who he thinks could rush the United States into a military confrontation with Iran and shatter his long-standing pledge to withdraw from costly foreign wars.

    Trump prefers a diplomatic approach to resolving tensions and wants to speak directly with Iran’s leaders.

    Trump grew angry last week and over the weekend about what he sees as warlike planning that is getting ahead of his own thinking, said a senior administration official with knowledge of conversations Trump had regarding national security adviser John Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

    Bolton, who advocated regime change in Iran before joining the White House last year, is “just in a different place” from Trump, although the president has been a fierce critic of Iran since long before he hired Bolton. Trump “wants to talk to the Iranians; he wants a deal” and is open to negotiation with the Iranian government, the official said.


    *tents fingers* Goooood. Goooood. John Moustache was always going to be fired by tweet on the toilet, the only question was when. He's enough of a garbage human to see that, and to suck up enough to keep being a ... well here's TPM's Josh Marshall, John Bolton, Far Worse Than You Realize
    Bolton is a caricature of a militarist and warmonger. He is sometimes classed with the so-called “neo-conservatives” who played the central role getting the country into the Iraq War. This isn’t really correct, either in classification or historical terms. For all their shortcomings many of the leading neoconservative policy hands and intellectuals were big on democracy promotion – often in foolish ways, usually only when it was convenient and mainly in Europe. But this is at least part of the worldview.

    ... Bolton doesn’t come from that worldview, as limited and as disastrous as it has proven. In really every context he is for hard US dominance, unilateralism and war as the preferred course of action. Again, he’s really the caricature of a militarist, the kind of one-dimensional, clownishly hawkish type who gets described in small circulation left-wing magazines but can’t possibly exist in real life, only he does exist and his name is John Bolton.

    So if a stopped clock can accidentally do some good, I'll take it.
    posted by petebest at 4:56 AM on May 16, 2019 [13 favorites]


    House Democrats fall in line with Pelosi’s no-impeachment strategy despite Trump’s defiance (WaPo)

    [Headline photo of Pelosi looking smug and evil for ... I have no idea what photo editors are doing]

    “President Trump, who is refusing to cooperate with more than 20 congressional investigations, instructed current and former aides Wednesday to ignore a House committee’s request for documents in the latest act of defiance that has prompted Democrats to declare the nation is facing a constitutional crisis,” the Washington Post reports.

    “But House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) told Democrats in a closed-door caucus meeting Wednesday morning to stick to their policy agenda ahead of the 2020 election rather than initiate impeachment proceedings. And not a single lawmaker challenged her, according to a person in the room who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the private meeting.”


    So that SUCKS and I'm way pissed off about it but if you scrolled by this gem from yesterday you may have missed the subtext where the Joker tells Batman:

    “Madam Speaker, did you bring your handcuffs?”

    So he's yukking it up because he knows they're not going to do shit. He's publicly destroying the rule of law and faith in the courts and Democrats are going to do f*k-all about it because better jobs. Really, really f*king pissed off at the Democrats (as well) now. Great job Democrats. Way to strike out looking.
    posted by petebest at 5:07 AM on May 16, 2019 [27 favorites]


    >Why in November of 2016 would Putin be instructing Aven to reach out to the transition team, if it were true that Alfa Bank had been in contact with Manafort throughout the summer and fall?

    I read that as "Putin instructs Aven to create above-board nice-and-legal-type contact with transition team". The AlfaBank server business IMO is just Manafort settling whatever he can of his $100M debts by boosting Trump for free. It proves conspiracy (he's campaign chair) and draws a direct line to the Ukraine Republican platform change, but it wasn't intended to be a backchannel (that was Kushner who borked it up royal, natch).

    From the Inquisitr article Doktor Zed linked to yesterday, the last paragraph is relevant:

    But Mueller included a section of the report — starting on Volume one, page 163 — revealing Aven’s attempts to make contact with Trump’s transition team. Aven’s attempt to use think tank founder Dimitri Simes, who had close ties to the Trump campaign, as an intermediary failed, Mueller wrote. Mueller alleged that this failure came about because Simes “had concerns that Trump’s business connections could be exploited by Russia,” and he did not want his think tank involved in making a connection between Trump and the Russian government.

    Simes, as The Inquisitr reported, is now paid a six-figure salary to host a political TV talk show on a state-sponsored Russian TV channel.


    So that's not a great look for the Mueller Report either, I suppose. The whole thing stinks.
    posted by petebest at 5:16 AM on May 16, 2019 [3 favorites]


    Hey folks, I'm tryna start something. I'm calling it Impeachment Thursdays.

    Every Thursday, I call Nancy Pelosi - here is her number: 202-225-0100 and I demand impeachment.
    Then I call my Rep - here is the general number to get to yours: (202) 224-3121 and I demand impeachment.

    Then I tweet about it with #ImpeachmentThursdays.

    If it's effective at all, it would be much more effective to be consistent and organized in demanding justice.

    Join me!
    posted by Emmy Rae at 5:25 AM on May 16, 2019 [43 favorites]


    It's still good to keep in mind Robert Graham's description and explanation of this (non)Trump Tower server business. Errata Security :
    "According to this Slate article, Trump has a secret server for communicating with Russia. Even Hillary has piled onto this story … This is nonsense. The evidence available on the Internet is that Trump neither (directly) controls the domain “trump-email.com”, nor has access to the server. Instead, the domain was set up and controlled by Cendyn, a company that does marketing/promotions for hotels, including many of Trump’s hotels. Cendyn outsources the email portions of its campaigns to a company called Listrak, which actually owns/operates the physical server in a data center in [Philadelphia].

    In other words, Trump’s response is (minus the political bits) likely true, supported by the evidence. It’s the conclusion I came to even before seeing [Trump’s] response.

    When you view this “secret” server in context, surrounded by the other email servers operated by Listrak on behalf of Cendyn, it becomes more obvious what’s going on … It’s Cendyn that registered and who controls the trump-email.com domain, as seen in the WHOIS information. That the Trump Organization is the registrant, but not the admin, demonstrates that Trump doesn’t have direct control over it … When the domain information was changed last September 23, it was Cendyn who did the change, not the Trump Organization. This link lists a bunch of other hotel-related domains that Cendyn likewise controls, some Trump related, some related to Trump’s hotel competitors, like Hyatt and Sheraton.

    Cendyn’s claim they are reusing the server for some other purpose is likely true. If you are an enterprising journalist with $399 in your budget, you can find this out … I’ve heard from other DNS malware researchers (names remain anonymous) who confirm they’ve seen lookups for “mail1.trump-email.com” from all over the world, especially from tools like FireEye that process lots of spam email. One person claimed that lookups started failing for them back in late June — and thus the claim of successful responses until September are false. In other words, the “change” after the NYTimes queried Alfa Bank may not be because Cendyn (or Trump) changed anything, but because that was the first they checked and noticed that lookup errors were happening.

    That this is just normal marketing business from Cendyn and Listrak is the overwhelming logical explanation for all this. People are tempted to pull nefarious explanations out of their imaginations for things they don’t understand. But for those of us with experience in this sort of thing, what we see here is a normal messed up marketing (aka. spam) system that the Trump Organization doesn’t have control over. Knowing who owns and controls these servers, it’s unreasonable to believe that Trump is using them for secret emails. Far from “secret” or “private” servers as Hillary claims, these servers are wide open and obvious."

    posted by Harry Caul at 5:25 AM on May 16, 2019 [2 favorites]


    I mean, Simes was approached because of his friendly attitude toward Russia, so it's not surpising that he continues to have a friendly attitude toward Russia. But it's possible that he found the cloak and dagger stuff Burt and Aven wanted him to do to be a little too risky for him to want to get involved with. It's one thing to sympathize with Russia and another thing to put yourself in the middle of this kind of high stakes international situation.
    posted by OnceUponATime at 5:28 AM on May 16, 2019 [2 favorites]


    To clarify, the number I listed is the number to contact Pelosi as Speaker, not as a rep of her district.
    posted by Emmy Rae at 5:33 AM on May 16, 2019 [2 favorites]


    I dom't think the Mueller report is wrong about what happened with Simes. I mean... Mueller had their emails.

    In the other hand.... I don't think "All clear" is what someone would say if they meant "I understand I won't be to do this thing my terrifying boss is pressuring me to do."
    posted by OnceUponATime at 5:37 AM on May 16, 2019


    ^ Won't be ABLE to do... is what i meant to type.
    posted by OnceUponATime at 5:52 AM on May 16, 2019


    House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) told Democrats in a closed-door caucus meeting Wednesday morning to stick to their policy agenda ahead of the 2020 election rather than initiate impeachment proceedings.

    The arguments here in favor of Pelosi's strategy assumed that we were going to get investigations and hearings that would accomplish the same thing as formal impeachment proceedings. That doesn't seem to be happening. Does that warrant a reassessment of the strategy?
    posted by diogenes at 5:56 AM on May 16, 2019 [11 favorites]


    Re: the server...

    A programmer friend says Wonkette's spin does not make sense because Steele says they used Tor, and Tor is specifically designed to avoid the kind of DNS detection mentioned in the Foer article.

    Marcy Wheeler seems super skeptical, over on Twitter.

    She wrote this also skeptical piece back in 2018.
    posted by OnceUponATime at 6:31 AM on May 16, 2019 [7 favorites]


    Pelosi is sure acting like she's complicit in something.

    Nah, I believe more in the statement somewhere above that her generation was traumatized by the Reagan Revolution (and the Clinton impeachment), and are incapable of seeing now as it is.
    posted by mumimor at 6:35 AM on May 16, 2019 [13 favorites]


    The White House’s top lawyer told the House Judiciary Committee chairman Wednesday that Congress has no right to a “do-over” of the special counsel’s investigation of President Trump and refused a broad demand for records and testimony from dozens of current and former White House staff.

    WaPo's Aaron Blake (The Many Problems With Trump’s Legal Claim That Congress Can’t Investigate Him): "Trump's lawyers are making an audacious claim that Congress can't investigate him. BUT, in its 2000 memo explaining why it couldn't indict a sitting prez, DOJ mentions Congress's "investigatory powers" as a remedy."

    Lawfare's Quinata Jurecic: "And indeed, the Mueller report specifically points to this opinion! So despite Trump's argument that the House doesn't get a "do-over," the possibility of a House investigation is countenanced in the report as part of why Mueller didn't reach a prosecution decision "

    Speaking of the Mueller report, Reuters: House Democrats to Read Mueller Report Aloud In Capitol Hearing Room
    "Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives will read aloud on Thursday the redacted version of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s 448-page assessment of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. Representative Mary Gay Scanlon, one of the top Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee, will, along with nearly two dozen of her colleagues, begin reading the Mueller report at 12 p.m. (1700 GMT) in a Capitol hearing room."

    The reps participating are: Representatives Scanlon, Nadler, Waters, Lofgren, McGovern, Takano, Clark, Sarbanes, Jayapal, Jackson Lee, Dean, Escobar, Correa, Lieu, Raskin, Garcia, Demings, Neguse, Watson Coleman, Sablan, Bonamici, Huffman. The reading is expected to take 12 to 14 hours.
    posted by Doktor Zed at 6:37 AM on May 16, 2019 [18 favorites]


    After the Alabama/Georgia/Ohio dystopian events...

    This guy has his utterly cruel and massively moronic thing to say. (Twitter)

    He now faces up to five years in federal prison at his sentencing in September.

    Given the current regime, he's probably going to get pardoned.

    So despite Trump's argument that the House doesn't get a "do-over,"

    But if it's Benghazi or Clinton's email doing it over in perpetuity is just fine.
    posted by juiceCake at 6:46 AM on May 16, 2019 [7 favorites]


    I have to wonder if Jacobin has hurdled a great white when they argue that Warren was wrong to reject going on Fox News.
    posted by NoxAeternum at 7:14 AM on May 16, 2019 [10 favorites]


    ‘Get Scavino in here’: Trump’s Twitter guru is the ultimate insider
    The president turns to his digital strategy director for validation of his policies on everything from immigration to troop levels in Syria.
    Shortly after President Donald Trump announced plans to yank U.S. troops out of Syria last December, a group of lawmakers came to the White House to talk him out of the idea, which critics called a threat to national security.
    Trump responded by calling in the man who oversees his Twitter account.
    “Get Dan Scavino in here,” Trump called out in the middle of the meeting earlier this year. In walked a man in his early forties with close-cropped brown hair.
    “Tell them how popular my policy is,” Trump instructed Scavino, who, according to two people with knowledge of the exchange, proceeded to walk lawmakers through the positive reaction he had picked up on social media about Trump’s Syria decision.
    The sudden pivot from geostrategy to retweets and likes surprised the lawmakers. It was a remarkable moment given that not long ago Scavino was managing Trump’s golf club. But for Scavino himself, it was just another day on the job.
    With few allies left in the West Wing, Trump frequently leans on his unassuming social media guru for affirmation and advice about how his most sensitive policies will be received, according to interviews with more than two dozen current and former White House officials, and others close to the president.
    posted by scalefree at 7:34 AM on May 16, 2019 [12 favorites]


    Makes total sense that a narcissist President would use Twitter follower popularity in place of actual ideology-driven strategy. Narcissism is a key to understanding everything he does. Everything.
    posted by scalefree at 7:45 AM on May 16, 2019 [19 favorites]


    I have to wonder if Jacobin has hurdled a great white

    Jacobin is 100% in the bag for Bernie Sanders because Bernie says he is anti-capitalism and Warren says she is a capitalist to her bones. Doesn't matter if they're both really social democrats with similar policy platforms, doesn't matter if Warren articulates her ideas in a more charismatic and approachable way. Bernie is their guy and they will forgive anything from him while jumping on the slightest appearance of transgression from anyone else.
    posted by contraption at 7:52 AM on May 16, 2019 [37 favorites]


    Samantha Bee's sex-ed class is both sad and hilarious.
    We all need to put women in charge, because men have given up on knowledge
    posted by mumimor at 7:56 AM on May 16, 2019 [14 favorites]


    Help, I'm experiencing existential vertigo and cognitive dissonnance at the thought that Trump might be doing something I approve of, in opposition to his "serious Republican" advisors.

    > Trump Not Convinced Time Is Right to Attack Iran (WaPo)

    President Trump is frustrated with some of his top advisers, who he thinks could rush the United States into a military confrontation with Iran and shatter his long-standing pledge to withdraw from costly foreign wars. ... Trump grew angry last week and over the weekend about what he sees as warlike planning that is getting ahead of his own thinking ... Trump “wants to talk to the Iranians; he wants a deal” and is open to negotiation with the Iranian government.


    Ok, the follow-up comment from petebest:

    So if a stopped clock can accidentally do some good, I'll take it.

    Yes, but Trump canceling the sequel to the Iraq fiasco being pushed by the Mustache of Doom is an unexpected twist.
    posted by RedOrGreen at 8:00 AM on May 16, 2019 [6 favorites]


    To be fair to Jacobin, their tactical position on Sanders over Warren is a little more nuanced than I suggested (and I recognize there may be some validity to the idea that I find the more cerebral and wonky candidate compelling in a way that most Americans won't) but they have publicly stated their clear favorite and it's important to recognize them as part of the Sanders movement rather than an independent outlet.
    posted by contraption at 8:28 AM on May 16, 2019 [11 favorites]


    What Will The Biggest Obstacles To The Ballot Box Be In 2020? (Tierney Sneed, TPM)
    [...] gains in voter participation have reinvigorated GOP efforts to make it harder to vote. Voting rights advocates are already tracking new obstacles — legislative or otherwise — that Republicans are putting between voters and the ballot box ahead of the 2020 election.
    Including but not limited to:
    • Targeting Efforts To Help Voters
    • SCOTUS-Approved Voter Purges
    • Rhetoric—Paired With Laws—That Intimidates Voters
    • Stymieing Gains In Felon Re-Enfranchisement
    • Confusion Over How To Fix Ballot Issues
    • Disinformation On Social Media
    • Election Technology Challenges
    posted by ZeusHumms at 8:38 AM on May 16, 2019 [7 favorites]


    Makes total sense that a narcissist President would use Twitter follower popularity in place of actual ideology-driven strategy. Narcissism is a key to understanding everything he does. Everything.

    He's also fantastically lazy, with a very short attention span.
    posted by ZeusHumms at 8:40 AM on May 16, 2019 [7 favorites]


    That article is amazing. I knew he was a narcissist, and I knew he made the unpresidential decision to tweet like a coward instead of talking to journalists. It's still really something to see it stated so plainly that the policies of our country are being chosen by their internet popularity amongst a vicious minority, a minority so small that our shameful leader will go whine to Jack Dorsey when some fucking bots get swept in the trash. It's so ridiculous I can't even react coherently.
    posted by heatvision at 8:53 AM on May 16, 2019 [39 favorites]


    Continued vulnerability of the canvassing infrastructure and voting machines themselves to both remote and local intrusion seems to be the biggest obstacle to demonstrably free and fair elections in the future. Easily exploitable weaknesses have been known for 15 years now and still nothing of consequence is being done to secure our elections.

    It has become apparent by Republicans' long standing obstinate refusal to address the problem even superficially at any level of government that they are actively working to maintain the existence of these easily exploitable weaknesses despite the availability of alternatives. I wonder why that might be...
    posted by wierdo at 9:00 AM on May 16, 2019 [2 favorites]


    Including but not limited to:
    Targeting Efforts To Help Voters
    SCOTUS-Approved Voter Purges
    Rhetoric—Paired With Laws—That Intimidates Voters
    Stymieing Gains In Felon Re-Enfranchisement
    Confusion Over How To Fix Ballot Issues
    Disinformation On Social Media
    Election Technology Challenges


    counterpoint: "he's self-impeaching every dang day"
    posted by Rust Moranis at 9:13 AM on May 16, 2019 [6 favorites]


    Can someone please explain to me what de Blasio is thinking

    He’s the only one of these And The Rest candidates dumb enough to think he’s actually running for president.

    Like I’m not sure a majority if New Yorkers know he’s mayor of New York. His entire administration has been a compelling argument for abolishing the office of mayor.
    posted by The Whelk at 9:23 AM on May 16, 2019 [6 favorites]


    And the further normalisation of authoritarianism via cruelty. So things like this
    > @tmorello: One homeless man when released from prison was dropped off by police under a bridge with his ankle monitor and told he must stay there.
    become unremarked, everyday, events.


    Arguably it is an everyday event. Over a decade ago Florida and Dade County passed a restrictive law about where sex offenders can live in relation to certain types of locations. In Dade the restriction was so onerous that the Tuttle overpass was the only place they could live. You owe it to yourself to read the linked Wikipedia article.

    It boggles the mind. But it’s not new. As has been said over and over again, Trump is a symptom and in almost every way you can find the foreshadowing. The above insanity about sex offenders expands out to other parolees. Our current immigration horror doesn’t seem that different to me, as someone who grew up in Miami, from the starkly racist way we differentiated between Cuban and Haitian refugees for decades. The supposed family concerned republicans will look the other way on separations at the border? Just like they suddenly figured some cousins should get to hang on to Elian Gonzales against the desires of his living father, simply because of his politics.
    posted by phearlez at 9:23 AM on May 16, 2019 [9 favorites]


    Senate won’t take up any legislation to protect elections from interference
    Not that the Senate is doing much these days anyway.
    The second sentence of the Mueller report states clearly that “the Russian government interfered in the 2016 presidential election in sweeping and systematic fashion.” The Senate, however, doesn’t plan to do anything about it.
    According to Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO), election security legislation is not on the agenda. “At this point I don’t see any likelihood that those bills would get to the floor if we mark them up,” Blunt said in a Senate Rules Committee meeting Wednesday. “I think the majority leader is of the view that this debate reaches no conclusion. And frankly, I think the extreme nature of H.R. 1 from the House makes it even less likely we are going to have that debate.”
    H.R. 1, known as the “For the People Act,” is a massive election reform bill that House Democrats passed earlier this year. Republican lawmakers and their conservative supporters have opposed the legislation, in part because it would add a lot of transparency to campaign funding, and in part because its crackdowns on voter suppression and partisan gerrymandering would dismantle the unfair advantages Republicans hold in many parts of the country.
    posted by scalefree at 9:26 AM on May 16, 2019 [27 favorites]


    dems reading mueller report is up to its third reader, bob casey.
    prior reader, nadler, had enough fun reading "redacted" over and over, that now i hope for a supercut of every instance among all the readers. but no: casey just said "and the next section is deleted: harm to ongoing matter," and keeps saying "deleted" rather than redacted. that's going to spoil the supercut flow, but i'll hope for it anyway.
    posted by 20 year lurk at 10:00 AM on May 16, 2019 [2 favorites]


    dems reading mueller report

    Is it just me, or does this seem like pointless grandstanding?
    posted by diogenes at 10:17 AM on May 16, 2019 [23 favorites]


    So do you remember the weird incident where the Washington Post ended up with a transcript of Trump's call with the Australian Prime Minster? There were a lot of strange things about that, so nobody focused too much on the bit where Turnbull told Trump, "Basically, we are taking people from the previous administration that they were very keen on getting out of the United States. We will take more. We will take anyone that you want us to take."

    We've now potentially found out a piece of that puzzle: a secret side-deal to the refugee deal that Trump exploded over: Politico, Josh Gerstein, ‘That’s Just Insane’: Australia’s Secret Deal to Take In Rwandan Guerrillas, in which a couple Rwandan men who were accused of murdering tourists in Uganda were sitting in a Virginia jail for an extraordinarily long time, free from prosecution after a judge ruled their confessions were obtained through torture in Rwanda, but also claiming asylum and fighting their deportation to Rwanda. Desperate for an eventual solution, a deal was reached eventually to send two of the three to Australia; the third is entering his 17th year in US custody.
    posted by zachlipton at 10:22 AM on May 16, 2019 [3 favorites]


    It is entirely pointless grandstanding. They don't have to actually read it aloud on the floor to "read it into the record". They can just have it "read into the record" and hand over a copy of the published book. This is doing nothing, as the redacted report has been published in BOOKS. It's public already.
    posted by Xyanthilous P. Harrierstick at 10:24 AM on May 16, 2019 [15 favorites]


    >Marcy Wheeler seems super skeptical, over on Twitter.

    Very much so. To wit: "Seeing the stupid Trump Tower Alfa Bank hoax spin even worse out of control and thinking I need to drink. Stop, people. Consider what the fuck you're reading." Which - isn't really information-rich as such, but she's clearly pissed off about the idea.

    Therein follows some twitter-slap fighting with a lot of of people saying "wtf" and Wheeler saying "stfu" before abandoning it which ... again, not super helpful although her blog posts usually are so, ?

    She wrote this also skeptical piece back in 2018.

    Re-reading the piece it appears to be focused almost exclusively on a social aspect of the story which is that the DeVos family are implicated in regards to the SpectrumHealth angle. That's an odd way to dismiss a story based entirely on server logs but the larger point is the she seems to say that it couldn't happen because Dick DeVos and Betsy DeVos didn't personally set up the server, plus they didn't fall in line with Trump until after he won plus they are relatively qualified, comparitivley, for the posts Trump put them in afterwards. She doesn't like Erik Prince. Again - ?

    >It's still good to keep in mind Robert Graham's description and explanation of this (non)Trump Tower server business. Errata Security :

    Graham seems to follow a similiar link of "debunking" here: Trump doesn't own the server, therefore it's impossible. The registrant and host is a spam mail provider. Okay, and? That's almost irrelevant to the logs and the Steele memo. I mean, I didn't register metafilter.com and I have no idea who's desktop PC it's been running on for 100 years, but I'm on here commenting! Spooky right? More from Graham:

    Indeed, one journalist did call one of the public resolvers [DynDNS], and found other people queried this domain than the two listed in the Slate story -- debunking it.

    But the "debunking" from Dyn is specifically "... and researchers at Dyn have found plenty of other lookups that didn’t come from either source." Do tell. No really, is there any y'know evidence, logs, something/anything? There isn't. At least not in that 'debunking'.

    (As an additional data point, that article which Graham refers to as 'debunking' specifically says, "More importantly, there’s no evidence that either Trump or Alfa Bank took any concrete steps to conceal their identity. There are plenty of ways to stay anonymous on the internet, whether through fake names, third-party hosts, or circumvention networks like Tor — but neither party attempted anything like that. " Which - that's specifically what the Steele memo said, and there's no reference to how they've proven the negative that TOR wasn't used.)

    So, for Wheeler and Graham it's settled law, so to say, that this isn't anything unusual at all except for all the crazy unusualness. So far as I can tell, their counter-arguments are that Trump doesn't own a server and the DeVos'es, while evil, couldn't care less about Trump's Russia business. Neither of which are specifically disqualifying and, frankly, not very relevant.

    I understand their point - as soon as we point to a stack of rawlogs and say "there's a nuanced matter of international import in there" it sets off a tinderbox of People Who Don't Know Shit writing front-page articles about Shit They Don't Know, and that's super annoying. Agreed. But with the AlfaBank story, there seems to be a fair amount of professional no-foolin-we-dig-through-rawlogs-all-day types that have all said the same thing: this is super-weird. The Wonkette story pointed out that Steele's memo which was given three weeks before the Slate story (and a week after the server was supposedly 'taken offline') matched exactly: Trump's Campaign Was Communicating With The Kremlin via the AlfaBank Server. Was it Trump himself? Shit, no. Did someone with mad GRU skeelz set up Manafort with a TOR relay to promise millions of dollars and report on the campaign's progress? *KGB Shrug* Who can say.

    Wheeler and Graham are exhibiting engineer's disease. (Graham in his 'debunk' article, "“When you have only a few details, the nefarious ones loom large in your imagination,” says Errata Security’s Robert David Graham. “But for people like me who've setup and managed lots of DNS and email servers, the more likely explanation is incompetence and legacy systems.”)

    Show me the analysis of the data, show it marked up clearly, and make the case. Getting pissed off on twitter because (?) isn't it. Foer did more than either of those two in the Slate article and in the past two years we've seen enough bullshit that the "that's unpossible" excuse is not holding a lot of water. So this FOIA'd matchup between the Slate article and Steele is indeed pretty fucking interesting.
    posted by petebest at 10:24 AM on May 16, 2019 [16 favorites]


    Maybe there's an advantage to having it read into the public record? I don't exactly see what since it's already publicly available but...?
    posted by tivalasvegas at 10:24 AM on May 16, 2019 [1 favorite]


    Maybe there's an advantage to having it read into the public record? I don't exactly see what since it's already publicly available but...?

    This is that thing where you don't want to be actually bothered to do something, so you make a big show of being busy with it
    posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 10:31 AM on May 16, 2019 [17 favorites]


    Maybe there's an advantage to having it read into the public record? I don't exactly see what since it's already publicly available but...?

    They can take a book & say "entered into the record" & boom, full text of the book is entered into the Congressional Record. This is purely so they can be seen by us as doing something instead of the thing we want them to do, impeach. The media have mined it for every pull quote they want to print/broadcast, no help there. No Republican is going to hear something that suddenly shames them & makes their heart grow 3 sizes this day. It's nonproductive spectacle. Get impeaching already. With or without the Senate it's the only move to make.
    posted by scalefree at 10:34 AM on May 16, 2019 [18 favorites]


    Empty Calls for Bipartisanship Could Doom Us All
    The past few years of democratic backsliding leave the country at a fork in the road, and the Democratic Party has an opportunity to influence what happens next. It will not do so with empty promises to unite Americans. Biden is far from the only candidate basing his campaign on such appeals; Beto O’Rourke, Amy Klobuchar, John Hickenlooper, Cory Booker, and others are framing their messages around the kind of reach-across-the-aisle idealism that wasted the first half of Barack Obama’s presidency.
    ...
    There is no more time to waste on the comforting fantasy that the entire population, regardless of political ideology, will join hands and live happily ever after. It is imperative that the eventual Democratic nominee articulates a worldview based on the belief that public policy, not markets, can address social and economic problems, with specific proposals to that end. If ever there was a time to be bold rather than to play it safe, this is it. Without a compelling alternative, ideologues like Trump will succeed by filling the vacuum with a simple—and vile—worldview.

    If the Democratic Party and its leadership do not seize the next opportunity to lead, the United States is likely to be a very different, and much darker, place before they get another chance.
    posted by T.D. Strange at 10:38 AM on May 16, 2019 [15 favorites]


    WSJ: Half of 10 Biggest Federal Law Agencies Lack Permanent Chiefs—Number of acting heads produces a lack of leadership stability at agencies that enforce critical parts of Trump agenda
    Five of the nation’s 10 largest federal law-enforcement agencies are currently operating with only interim heads amid an unprecedented long-term leadership vacuum that even some of the president’s congressional allies say is untenable.

    The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and the Federal Bureau of Prisons all lack permanent heads.
    And let's not forget that while Team Trump is sabre-rattling at Iran, the US currently lacks a Senate-confirmed Secretary of Defense. Trump tweeted he'd formally nominate Patrick Shanahan to the position last week, but since then, there've been no further steps, such as scheduling hearings.

    Politico: Shanahan's Mattis Test—Can Trump's untested Pentagon chief handle the Iran hawks? (Bet on Betteridge's Law in this case.)
    "Shanahan, in that group, is the weakest link,” said a recently departed senior Pentagon official, speaking anonymously to discuss sensitive internal deliberations. “Shanahan hasn’t been around these kinds of decisions and has zero policy experience and zero military experience. Mattis had experience and gravitas that Shanahan simply doesn’t have, and Bolton has years of experience in dealing with bureaucracy in this town, which gives him a huge advantage."

    Ilan Goldenberg, a longtime foreign policy expert who served in both the Pentagon and the State Department in the Obama administration, agreed with that assessment.

    “Shanahan is certainly outmatched by Bolton and Pompeo,” said Goldenberg, who is now at the Center for a New American Security. “He has neither the bureaucratic experience or political leverage to fight with them."[…]

    “Shanahan has no experience with this — what kinds of things can happen as you mobilize and deploy forces, how escalation works, what it signals to foreign governments," said another former senior defense official who still advises Pentagon leaders. "He’s never done any of this, whereas Bolton and Pompeo have been at this a long time. How seriously are they going to take him?”
    The most notable item on Shanahan's CV is that he holds the record for longest-serving acting Secretary of Defense.
    posted by Doktor Zed at 10:50 AM on May 16, 2019 [5 favorites]


    On Alabama: This Is Class War
    posted by The Whelk at 10:59 AM on May 16, 2019 [10 favorites]


    Conrad Black is a white supremacist who said the “very fine” Nazis at Charlottesville were a Democratic false flag.

    He said white supremacist/Nazi Faith Goldy’s actions would “not be offensive to any ethnic or religious group.” He has repeatedly defended her and gone on her show.


    Also a lifetime peer of the British House of Lords (roughly the UK's senate).
    posted by srboisvert at 11:04 AM on May 16, 2019 [3 favorites]


    Can someone please explain to me what de Blasio is thinking

    My sense is that the party is doing a Gish Gallop with candidates


    I also suspect somebody is encouraging people to run who will peel off support from other democratic primary candidates. Perhaps something like Chicago's recent mayoral vote will happen and the rich white men will cannibalize each other's support and a progressive can sneak through the gap.
    posted by srboisvert at 11:09 AM on May 16, 2019 [4 favorites]


    That's what I'm hoping for -- that Harris/Klobuchar/Warren endorse whoever's doing the best and let Team White Dudes splinter the Electability vote.
    posted by tivalasvegas at 11:17 AM on May 16, 2019 [4 favorites]


    Apparently I wasn't the only one wondering what de Blasio was thinking.

    According to this tweet from a senior reporter at ProPublica, de Blasio is running for the excellent reason that he's super bored and hates being mayor. Jesus Christ.

    God grant me the confidence of a mediocre late middle aged rich white man.
    posted by Justinian at 11:24 AM on May 16, 2019 [24 favorites]


    Mod note: There's a whole post about de Blasio running, take deBlasio stuff over there please.
    posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 11:25 AM on May 16, 2019 [4 favorites]


    Therein follows some twitter-slap fighting with a lot of of people saying "wtf" and Wheeler saying "stfu" before abandoning it which ... again, not super helpful

    Yeah, Wheeler seems like a reliable source for interpreting many elements of Trump/Russia, but the Alfa Bank server isn't one of them. She's calling people crazy for thinking it might be significant, and then refusing to explain her reasoning. She's saying that she knows "stuff" from talking to "people." That's pretty lame.
    posted by diogenes at 11:29 AM on May 16, 2019 [5 favorites]


    It is entirely pointless grandstanding

    it would be grander if certain readers had made any effort at all to be prepared to pronounce those names appearing in the sections they are reading, or to more fluently, more consistently fake it.
    posted by 20 year lurk at 11:30 AM on May 16, 2019 [4 favorites]


    Oh yeah; Conrad Black is basically the Canadian answer to Rupert Murdoch.

    Just wanted to point out that Black is no longer a Canadian Citizen, he renounced his Citizenship back in 2001. But yeah it's no surprise that he fits in so well with Trump's crowd.
    posted by cirhosis at 11:40 AM on May 16, 2019 [5 favorites]


    yeah, weird how right-wingers are so nationalistic up until the time they have to choose between their country and a peerage
    posted by tivalasvegas at 11:45 AM on May 16, 2019 [8 favorites]


    Why watch Trump blather on about immigration (he looks extremely bored and uninterested in the words coming out of his mouth, though he seemed to briefly get interested when he discovered the word "progressives" like it's a new term) when it's already been pre-explained? Donald Trump’s Rose Garden immigration speech, explained

    And here's Mark Morgan, Trump's nominee to run ICE, on Tucker Carlson in January:
    And I can tell you, again, because I've worked it, and I've been there as a Chief, I've been to the detention facilities where I've walked up to these individuals that are so-called minors, 17 or under, and I've looked at them, and I've looked at their eyes, Tucker, and I said, "That is a soon- to-be MS-13 gang member." It's unequivocal.
    posted by zachlipton at 11:54 AM on May 16, 2019 [8 favorites]


    Pelosi Raises Impeachment as a Way to Break Trump’s Information Stonewall
    WASHINGTON — Speaker Nancy Pelosi suggested Thursday that House Democrats could always open an impeachment inquiry to pry free documents and testimony from stonewalling Trump administration officials — a sharp response to the White House’s blanket claim that House requests served no “legitimate” legislative purpose.

    “The courts would respect it if you said we need this information to carry out our oversight responsibilities — and among them is impeachment,” Ms. Pelosi said during her weekly news conference at the Capitol.

    “It doesn’t mean you’re going on an impeachment path, but it means if you had the information you might,” Ms. Pelosi said. “It’s about impeachment as a purpose.” (NYTimes, Glenn Trush)

    Her threat was the first time Ms. Pelosi suggested using impeachment as an information-gathering tool, although she had made the suggestion in private before, according to a person familiar with her thinking.
    posted by mumimor at 11:56 AM on May 16, 2019 [34 favorites]


    WSJ, Trump Administration Revokes $929 Million for California High-Speed Rail
    In a letter to the head of the California High Speed Rail Authority, Federal Railroad Administrator Ronald Batory confirmed the move the administration floated in February, officially terminating the Transportation Department’s agreement to provide an additional $928.6 million to help pay for the project.
    The reporter notes that the administration is "still undecided on trying to claw back the $2.55 billion in federal funds already spent."
    posted by zachlipton at 12:25 PM on May 16, 2019 [10 favorites]


    “Now @HowardSchultz is saying if @JoeBiden wins nomination he might not run but if @BernieSanders or @ewarren wins he will run. I told you - the rich will risk Trump winning again just to protect their tax cuts. This is exactly kind of Dem donor who has been controlling the party.” @cenkuygur
    posted by The Whelk at 12:27 PM on May 16, 2019 [57 favorites]


    “It doesn’t mean you’re going on an impeachment path, but it means if you had the information you might,” Ms. Pelosi said.

    Is there a way to parse this sentence to render it intelligible?

    We want to see what we can get respectfully,” she said. “First we ask. Then we subpoena, friendly. Then we subpoena otherwise. And then we see what we get — so let’s not leapfrog.

    Um, aren't we already at the "see what we get" phase? I guess she'd argue that we're at the "subpoena otherwise" step, but I'm unclear on what that looks like and why she hasn't started it yet. I'm also unclear why she thinks the result will be different than the friendly subpoenas.
    posted by diogenes at 12:33 PM on May 16, 2019 [8 favorites]


    And then we see what we get

    Thinking of it another way, didn't yesterday's letter from the White House make it clear what they are going to get? We don't need to wait and see. They already told you.
    posted by diogenes at 12:44 PM on May 16, 2019 [4 favorites]


    Bloomberg, Ukraine Prosecutor Says No Evidence of Wrongdoing by Bidens
    Ukraine’s prosecutor general said in an interview that he had no evidence of wrongdoing by U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden or his son, despite a swirl of allegations by President Donald Trump’s lawyer.
    ...
    Yuriy Lutsenko, the current prosecutor general, said that neither Hunter Biden nor Burisma were now the focus of an investigation. He added, however, that he was planning to offer details to U.S. Attorney General William Barr about Burisma board payments so American authorities could check whether Hunter Biden paid U.S. taxes on the income.

    “I do not want Ukraine to again be the subject of U.S. presidential elections,” Lutsenko said in an interview Tuesday in his office in Kiev. “Hunter Biden did not violate any Ukrainian laws -- at least as of now, we do not see any wrongdoing. A company can pay however much it wants to its board.” He said if there is a tax problem, it’s not in Ukraine.
    Sorry Rudy. Thanks for announcing you want to meddle in an investigation though; that was useful of you.
    posted by zachlipton at 12:48 PM on May 16, 2019 [19 favorites]


    @jbendery:
    Here we go: Senate voting to confirm Wendy Vitter to be a lifetime federal judge. She's said Planned Parenthood "kills over 150,000 females a year" + has urged people to tell their doctors to put materials in waiting rooms saying that abortion causes breast cancer. (Not true.)

    Lisa Murkowski, one of two pro-choice Republicans in the Senate, just voted yes on Vitter. The other pro-choice Republican in the Senate, Susan Collins, just voted NO on Vitter.

    DONE: Wendy Vitter confirmed, 52-45.
    posted by zachlipton at 12:49 PM on May 16, 2019 [30 favorites]


    Democrats News Conference and Reading of Mueller Report
    Democratic Representatives Mary Gay Scanlon (PA), Sheila Jackson Lee (TX) and Sylvia Garcia (TX) speak to reporters at a news conference ahead of a reading of the entirety of the Mueller report.

    They are reading now live on C-SPAN.

    (Edit: sorry, just saw this was posted above.)
    posted by Riverine at 12:56 PM on May 16, 2019


    Here we go: Senate voting to confirm Wendy Vitter to be a lifetime federal judge.

    Also: Senate confirms Trump judicial nominee who refused to say if 'Brown v. Board of Education' was correctly decided (CNN) Like a lot of Trump nominees to the bench, for some reason, she was extremely equivocal about answering the direct question about the correctness of the Brown decision. ("I don't mean to be coy, but I think I can get into a difficult, difficult area when I start commenting on Supreme Court decisions -- which are correctly decided and which I may disagree with.")
    posted by Doktor Zed at 12:56 PM on May 16, 2019 [9 favorites]




    In the NYT, Schmitt, Haberman, and Landler are confirming the earlier WaPo story about Trump backing away from war with Iran: Trump Tells Pentagon Chief He Does Not Want War With Iran.

    It's Haberman, so you should expect some Trump-camp spin, and of course: "Mr. Trump is less frustrated with Mr. Bolton over his handling of Iran — he favors the tougher measures as a warning to Tehran — than over the evolving narrative that his national security adviser is leading the administration’s policy in the Middle East, according to three officials. ... Mr. Bolton, officials said, has quietly voiced frustration with the president, viewing him as unwilling to push for changes in a region that he has long seen as a quagmire. That, in turn, has led people in the White House to view Mr. Bolton with deepening skepticism, with some questioning whether his job is in trouble.

    Can I still put a small wager down on "fired by tweet from the toilet"? Because that would be cake-worthy.
    posted by RedOrGreen at 1:12 PM on May 16, 2019 [4 favorites]


    Is there a way to parse this sentence to render it intelligible?

    She wants to thread the needle between "maybe we will, maybe we won't".
    posted by scalefree at 1:14 PM on May 16, 2019 [3 favorites]


    WASHINGTON — Speaker Nancy Pelosi suggested Thursday that House Democrats could always open an impeachment inquiry to pry free documents and testimony from stonewalling Trump administration officials — a sharp response to the White House’s blanket claim that House requests served no “legitimate” legislative purpose.

    Was this the game all along? Did Nancy want Trump to force her into beginning impeachment?
    posted by Mental Wimp at 1:35 PM on May 16, 2019 [1 favorite]


    Was this the game all along? Did Nancy want Trump to force her into beginning impeachment?

    Remember: If you find yourself wondering whether a politician's spineless, stupid position is really a super-secret 4D chess maneuver, it isn't. Ever.
    posted by FakeFreyja at 1:41 PM on May 16, 2019 [53 favorites]


    From Mother Jones: President Donald Trump’s latest personal financial disclosure was just released, showing that Trump, who already owed more money than any other president in history, borrowed millions more in 2018.

    According to the disclosure, Trump borrowed between $5 million and $25 million from Professional Bank, a small Florida outfit that specializes in construction and real estate loans. He borrowed the money at 4.5 percent interest through a limited liability company called 1125 South Ocean LLC. The loan was used to finance the purchase of 1125 South Ocean Avenue, a mansion located next door to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club and owned by the president’s sister, Maryanne Trump Barry. Last year, Palm Beach-area newspapers reported that Trump’s sons, Donald Jr. and Eric, had purchased Barry’s property for $18.5 million. But Trump’s financial disclosure indicates that in fact he controls the company behind the transaction. Though assets and liabilities are reported in ranges on financial disclosure forms, land records show that the value of Trump’s newest loan $11.2 million.


    You can read the financial disclosure forms at the link above.
    posted by Bella Donna at 1:47 PM on May 16, 2019 [10 favorites]


    Emmy Rae, thank you for the inspiration. I just followed your lead and called Speaker Pelosi's office and the office of Congresswoman Barbara Lee. #ImpeachmentThursdays
    posted by Bella Donna at 1:57 PM on May 16, 2019 [4 favorites]


    Politico: Lawmakers: FBI Can’t Say With ‘Certainty’ Florida Voter Databases Not Affected By 2016 Hack
    Florida lawmakers once again railed against the FBI on Thursday for its handling of the investigation into Russian election tampering in the state, and expressed skepticism that the intrusion didn't alter voter rolls.

    After a briefing with the FBI about its investigation into the 2016 cyberattacks, members of the state's congressional delegation blasted the bureau for not even revealing the names of the affected counties for almost three years.[…]

    While the FBI and Department of Homeland Security say they have "no evidence" the voter databases were tampered with by Russian hackers, "there's more to follow there," said Rep. Michael Waltz (R-Fla.) said during a Capitol Hill press conference that followed a classified briefing from the agencies.[…]

    Rep. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell (D-Fla.) likewise said lawmakers weren't able to get with "certainty" that the databases had been left alone, explaining the FBI told them hackers were able to "enter the garage" but "not the house" of the two county networks.[…]

    Rep. Stephanie Murphy (D-Fla.), who along with Waltz originally requested Thursday's briefing, called the lack of transparency “counter-productive” and predicted it would erode confidence in the election systems.
    Now Rick Scott is asking the FBI to brief any interested senators on the hacking (Roll Call).
    posted by Doktor Zed at 2:04 PM on May 16, 2019 [10 favorites]


    Mod note: One comment deleted. Please put reaction-blogging and fears in the ongoing venting and fears Metatalk thread instead; thanks.
    posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 2:09 PM on May 16, 2019 [2 favorites]


    Medicare for All’ Could Kill Two Million Jobs, and That’s O.K.
    This is an interesting perspective that needs to be addressed directly by progressives.
    posted by mumimor at 2:12 PM on May 16, 2019 [6 favorites]


    Emmy Rae, thank you for the inspiration. I just followed your lead and called Speaker Pelosi's office and the office of Congresswoman Barbara Lee. #ImpeachmentThursdays

    Calls to Pelosi's office wouldn't hurt.
    Donations to her 2020 primary challenger wouldn't either.
    posted by Rust Moranis at 2:23 PM on May 16, 2019 [3 favorites]




    “Now @HowardSchultz is saying if @JoeBiden wins nomination he might not run but if @BernieSanders or @ewarren wins he will run. I told you - the rich will risk Trump winning again just to protect their tax cuts. This is exactly kind of Dem donor who has been controlling the party.”

    If I'm reading Warren right, she'll laugh and say "Bring it on, Howie." You don't just announce a third-party run and boom, you're on the ballot. Otherwise our ballots would be ten pages of just presidential candidates, and we might have President Deez Nutz.

    Put this another way, I don't think Schultz is a Ross Perot or even a Ralph Nader. And we as Democrats also deserve to know just how corporate donors corrupt absolutely.
    posted by Rosie M. Banks at 2:26 PM on May 16, 2019 [7 favorites]


    Pelosi Calls White House Letter a ‘Joke’

    Speaker Nancy Pelosi blasted the White House for asserting that it would not comply with a range of requests from the House Judiciary Committee, NBC News reports.

    Said Pelosi: “The letter that came from the White House yesterday was completely outrageous.”

    She added: “That letter that came from the White House was a joke, beneath the dignity of the presidency of the United States, in defiance of our Constitution. Shame on them.”


    Yeah? Whatcha gonna do about it? Nothin? Huh? C'mon! Are you writing checks your caucus can't cash? Get in there! It's time! Ding frickin Ding man! Let's do this!
    posted by petebest at 2:41 PM on May 16, 2019 [32 favorites]


    From ThinkProgress, numbers on the White House's stonewalling: It’s not just the Russia probe that’s been stonewalled: The Trump administration has rejected or delayed at least 101 requests from House Democrats for testimony, documents, or interviews since January, according to a congressional source. They cover a broad range of topics, including immigration policy, allegations of political retaliation by the administration, government waste, and undue political influence by Trump associates at federal agencies.

    The Trump administration has stonewalled on 18 requests to appear before House committees, 79 requests to hand over documents, and four requests for interviews, according to the source. In response, Democratic House committee chairs have issued 11 subpoenas, seven of which have Republican support. Trump has vowed to fight those subpoenas in court, and he has already sued over one subpoena sent to his accounting firm.

    posted by Bella Donna at 2:43 PM on May 16, 2019 [6 favorites]


    NYT, Employers Could Lose Thousands of Workers as the Government Examines Work Documents
    The Trump administration is notifying tens of thousands of employers that the names of some of their employees do not match their Social Security numbers, a move that is forcing businesses across the country to brace for the loss of thousands of workers who lack legal status.

    The Social Security Administration has mailed “no-match letters” to more than 570,000 employers since March, sending shock waves through the hospitality, construction and agriculture industries, which rely heavily on undocumented workers. The letters have left many employers conflicted, uncertain whether to take action that could result in losing workers or to risk fines down the road.

    The government officially suspended the use of no-match letters in 2012, although the practice had actually been discontinued years earlier, after the government faced litigation. The resumption appears to be a response to the “Buy American, Hire American” executive order signed by President Trump to protect American workers and reduce illegal immigration.
    ...
    While employers must give workers a chance to rectify any discrepancy, “as soon as you tell the workers, they are going to disappear,” said Manuel Cunha Jr., president of the Nisei Farmers League in Fresno, whose members have received no-match letters.
    The White House seems to be adopting a two-faced strategy toward immigration that I'll just call Kushner and Miller, with Trump's muddled speech on legal immigration today blandly talking about immigrants as "cherished members of our national family" being coupled with this evening's incendiary anonymous threat in the Daily Caller to invoke the Insurrection Act in some unspecified way regarding undocumented immigrants.

    They're creating muddled, useless policy that's going nowhere, while at the same time they're going on a fear-based rampage.
    posted by zachlipton at 2:44 PM on May 16, 2019 [7 favorites]


    @Tom_Winter (NBC News): Ret. Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn told Special Counsel Mueller's Office about efforts to interfere "both before and after his guilty plea, where either he or his attorneys received communication from persons connected to the Administration or Congress that could have affected both his willingness to cooperate and the completeness of that cooperation.”

    I'm not entirely sure what that means, but yes, I would like to know more please.
    posted by zachlipton at 2:45 PM on May 16, 2019 [36 favorites]


    Ah, and here's the actual document with that, naturally unattached to the tweet:
    Potential Efforts to Interfere with. the Special Counsel's Office's Investigation
    ...
    The defendant assisted the investigation into potential efforts to interfere with or otherwise obstruct its investigation
    ...
    The defendant informed the government of multiple instances, both before and after his guilty plea, where either he or his attorneys received communications from persons connected to the Administration or Congress that could have affected both his willingness to cooperate and the completeness of that cooperation. The defendant even provided a voicemail recording of one such communication. In some of those instances, the SCO was unaware of the outreach until being alerted to it by the
    So that seems like something Mueller ought to testify before Congress about, especially that "or Congress" bit.
    posted by zachlipton at 2:50 PM on May 16, 2019 [21 favorites]


    In the NYT, Schmitt, Haberman, and Landler are confirming the earlier WaPo story about Trump backing away from war with Iran: Trump Tells Pentagon Chief He Does Not Want War With Iran.

    Assholes always say "I don't want to hurt you" before they do. That way they can say "You made me do it. I didn't want to".
    posted by srboisvert at 2:50 PM on May 16, 2019 [11 favorites]


    Trump Tells Pentagon Chief No War With Iran

    “President Trump has told his acting defense secretary, Patrick Shanahan, that he does not want to go to war with Iran… in a message to his hawkish aides that an intensifying American pressure campaign against the clerical-led government in Tehran must not escalate into open conflict,” the New York Times reports.

    “No new information was presented to the president at the meeting that argued for further engagement with Iran, according to a person in the room. But Mr. Trump was firm in saying he did not want a military clash with the Iranians.”


    Y-... yay?
    posted by petebest at 2:53 PM on May 16, 2019 [1 favorite]


    Mod note: Couple deleted; let's not link to the Daily Caller and especially not via URL shortener.
    posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 2:59 PM on May 16, 2019 [13 favorites]


    Watchdog Finds $124K of Improper Expenses by Pruitt (WaPo)

    The EPA’s inspector general recommended recovering nearly $124,000 in improper travel expenses by former EPA chief Scott Pruitt.

    ...Investigators concluded that 40 trips Pruitt either took or scheduled during a 10-month period, between March 1 and Dec. 31, 2017, cost taxpayers $985,037.

    The bulk of those expenses were for Pruitt’s round-the-clock security detail, which billed $428,896 in travel costs. The agency spent an additional $339,894 on staffers traveling with the former administrator.

    The “questioned amount” the inspector general’s office identifies for possible recovery is the $123,941 that taxpayers spent on flying both Pruitt and a security agent in first- or business class, instead of coach.


    Don't get too excited tho, because OF COURSE incompetent corruption wins:

    [The EPA] rejects the idea, calling ‘cost recovery inappropriate’ because officials had approved Pruitt’s trips at the time

    Small bullshit potatoes, but still bullshit. Too bad not a damn person in office can be arsed to hold these rotten f*s to account.
    posted by petebest at 3:11 PM on May 16, 2019 [6 favorites]


    White Supremacy Beyond a White Majority
    Charles Blow is angry in the NYTimes, and readers react. (Browse the comments, but don't read them all, you won't be able to sleep). The Times has closed for comments.
    posted by mumimor at 3:18 PM on May 16, 2019 [7 favorites]


    WSJ: Mueller Testimony to Congress Stalled by Executive-Privilege Claim—Legal questions could limit special counsel from commenting on matters beyond redacted version of his report
    The House Judiciary Committee and Mr. Mueller’s team have been in negotiations for days about the contours of the special counsel’s eagerly-awaited testimony about his 448-page report on Russian interference in the 2016 election and episodes in which President Trump allegedly sought to influence the investigation.[…]

    Legal questions on how Mr. Trump’s assertion of executive privilege would affect Mr. Mueller’s testimony are central to the continuing negotiations, said the people familiar with the matter. The privilege claim could prevent him from discussing details involving Mr. Trump and his advisers beyond what is in the redacted report, the people added. The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel is weighing the questions and is expected to provide guidance, officials said.[…]

    One person familiar with the congressional negotiations said the executive-privilege questions aren’t specifically delaying the ability to set a date for Mr. Mueller’s testimony, but declined to elaborate.
    n.b. This contradicts what Barr told the WSJ earlier this week: “It’s Bob’s call whether he wants to testify.” It’s possible that because of this someone’s leaking to the press about the real negotiating position of Team Trump/the DOJ.
    posted by Doktor Zed at 3:29 PM on May 16, 2019 [6 favorites]


    “No new information was presented to the president at the meeting that argued for further engagement with Iran, according to a person in the room. But Mr. Trump was firm in saying he did not want a military clash with the Iranians.”

    "War" with Iran seems pretty unlikely (cruise missiles, SEAL team raids, and airstrikes, maybe?), if only because any kind of serious military activity would require months of preparation and logistics work. I don't know why they spent the last 10 days talking about military action in Iran. They haven't done any of the work necessary to actually do it.
    posted by notyou at 3:35 PM on May 16, 2019 [4 favorites]


    But Mr. Trump was firm in saying he did not want a military clash with the Iranians.

    Guess it's time to book some guests on Fox News to call him a wimp, then.
    posted by RobotVoodooPower at 3:53 PM on May 16, 2019 [4 favorites]


    I know we pretend like launching air strikes and raids on other countries isn't an act of war but... it is?

    I'm trying to think of another instance where we did that in modern history to a country with the military capabilities of Iran and it didn't turn into an "actual" war. Bay of Pigs is the only thing that comes to mind and it's kind of a special case.
    posted by tivalasvegas at 3:53 PM on May 16, 2019 [6 favorites]


    WaPo, Trump wants his border barrier to be painted black with spikes. He has other ideas, too.
    The barrier that President Trump wants to build along the Mexico border will be a steel bollard fence, not a concrete wall as he long promised, and the president is fine with that. He has a few other things he would like to change, though.

    The bollards or “slats,” as he prefers to call them, should be painted “flat black,” a dark hue that would absorb heat in the summer, making the metal too hot for climbers to scale, Trump has recently told White House aides, Homeland Security officials and military engineers.

    And the tips of the bollards should be pointed, not round, the president insists, describing in graphic terms the potential injuries that border-crossers might receive. Trump has said the wall’s current blueprints include too many gates — placed at periodic intervals to allow vehicles and people through — and he wants the openings to be smaller.

    At a moment when the White House is diverting billions of dollars in military funds to fast-track construction, the president is micromanaging the project down to the smallest design details. But Trump’s frequently shifting instructions and suggestions have left engineers and aides confused, according to current and former administration officials.
    posted by zachlipton at 3:56 PM on May 16, 2019 [11 favorites]


    The slats are the "fabric swatches" of this project.
    posted by Iris Gambol at 3:59 PM on May 16, 2019 [43 favorites]


    The defendant informed the government of multiple instances... where either he or his attorneys received communications from persons connected to the Administration or Congress that could have affected both his willingness to cooperate...

    Is there a betting market where I can go all in on Devin Nunes?
    posted by diogenes at 4:01 PM on May 16, 2019 [8 favorites]


    Why is this Flynn revelation not in the report?
    posted by chrchr at 4:09 PM on May 16, 2019 [4 favorites]


    I know we pretend like launching air strikes and raids on other countries isn't an act of war but... it is?

    Like the invasion of Iraq, an attack on Iran would be illegal under US and international law.
    UN Charter Article 2(4) forbids states from using force in their international relations. Exceptions to this prohibition are acts taken in self-defence under UN Charter Article 51 or under the auspices of a UN Security Council authorization to use force under Article 42.
    Under international law, "[a threatened State] can take military action as long as the threatened attack is imminent, no other means would deflect it and the action is proportionate." (Iran has a more legitimate reason to attack the US than the US does to attack Iran.)

    The United States is a signatory of the Charter of the United Nations. The UN Charter is a treaty.

    Under the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution, treaties are "the supreme law of the land" alongside the Constitution and US laws:
    This Constitution, and the laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof; and all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law of the land; and the judges in every state shall be bound thereby, anything in the Constitution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding.
    posted by kirkaracha at 4:22 PM on May 16, 2019 [11 favorites]




    Trump Administration to LGBT Couples: Your ‘Out of Wedlock’ Kids Aren’t Citizens
    posted by adamvasco at 5:02 PM on May 16, 2019 [2 favorites]


    The Irish Times, Donald Trump trip to Ireland in doubt amid venue disagreement, in which Trump apparently wants to meet the Taoiseach at the Trump golf course in Doonbeg, and Irish officials would prefer not to. There's now question as to whether he'll go to Scotland instead of Ireland during this summer's European trip. "The unique nature of a potential visit – a US president visiting his own private property in Ireland – has thrown up complex issues around protocol, and whether it constitutes a private or official visit."
    posted by zachlipton at 5:16 PM on May 16, 2019 [5 favorites]


    Daily Beast, Trump Admin Moves Fueled Iran’s Aggression, U.S. Intel Says

    WSJ, Intelligence Suggests U.S., Iran Misread Each Other, Stoking Tensions
    Intelligence collected by the U.S. government shows Iran’s leaders believe the U.S. planned to attack them, prompting preparation by Tehran for possible counterstrikes, according to one interpretation of the information, people familiar with the matter said.
    So we threatened Iran so much that they felt threatened, thus making us think they were threatening us? Everything is just so stupid all the time now.
    posted by zachlipton at 5:21 PM on May 16, 2019 [26 favorites]


    Just for a change, here's a graphical review of the Democratic presidential candidates' web sites from Practical Typography: Typography 2020: A Special Listicle For America The implicit messages of their design choices convey as much about their presentation to the electorate as any slogan or stump speech. And the snark is exquisite.
    • Overall best in show: I am surprised to say it’s Joe Biden.
    • Overall worst in show: Cory Booker, who apparently decided to run for president on a Monday, crowdsourced his website on Tuesday, and launched it on Wednesday. Unbearable.
    • Pete Buttigieg: Pete has wisely avoided campaigning on his last name (though as a fellow Butt-prefixed American, I’m a little disappointed). The arched wordmark is a cute idea, though it appears stolen from Netflix.
    • Bill de Blasio: The good news: a genuinely novel display face (the two-tone Acier) and a solid sans for text (Gibson, also used by Bernie Sanders). The bad news: everything else.
    John Hickenlooper: It could be worse. But it still looks more like he’s starting an outdoor-clothing label, not running for president.
    • Jay Inslee: The typography makes it look like a pharmaceutical ad—Ask your doctor if Inslee™ is right for you.
    For whatever this tells us, the candidates whose sites feature suggested amounts in their donation buttons are Biden's, Booker's, and Warren's—and Biden's maximum of $500 is five times more than Warren's and twenty times more than Booker's.

    via Kottke
    posted by Doktor Zed at 5:36 PM on May 16, 2019 [10 favorites]


    Oddly enough, Practical Typography is serving me up a vaguely chiding message about predacious ad-crazy listicle sites instead of the actual article. The writing suggests that there's an explicit shitlist that MeFi is on, though I'm not clear if that's actually the case or what. Links from some of the previous front page posts about Butterick's work don't produce that gripe page, nor does the link-through from Kottke. Weird.
    posted by cortex at 5:48 PM on May 16, 2019 [9 favorites]


    That is weird. All the links work for me in Safari, but not on Chrome and Firefox, which I tested just now.
    posted by Doktor Zed at 6:07 PM on May 16, 2019 [1 favorite]




    That Typography site works in Incognito, but needs some extra javascript disablement if you want to look at it via a MeFi referrer, which is super weird and antagonistic, so I just recommend, as usual, the internet archive link
    posted by Xyanthilous P. Harrierstick at 6:14 PM on May 16, 2019 [2 favorites]


    If the Practical Typography writeup "wasn’t nerdy and detailed enough for you" 2020 Visual Identity: The View at the Starting Line is even nerdier and more detailed.

    Wow, I fucking hate Practical Typography's use of--what?--degree symbols? to indicate links.
    posted by kirkaracha at 6:18 PM on May 16, 2019 [1 favorite]


    There’s a record number of women vets in Congress. They just formed their own caucus. (Vox)
    The Servicewomen and Women Veterans Congressional Caucus, which officially launched Wednesday at a press conference outside the Capitol, is the first caucus dedicated to the issues that women service members and veterans face.

    Rep. Chrissy Houlahan (D-PA), an Air Force veteran elected in 2018, will chair the caucus. Her fellow female veterans and co-founders, Reps. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI), Elaine Luria (D-VA), and Mikie Sherrill (D-NJ) will serve as vice chairs.

    Houlahan told me Wednesday that her staff alerted her to the fact that, after the 2018 election — which saw a historic number of women elected — the number of female veterans doubled. While you’re still able to count them on one hand, she said, it was “a realization that we needed to do something with our doubling in size.”

    In total, about 50 House members have joined the bipartisan caucus to support the goals of the group.

    posted by Iris Gambol at 6:33 PM on May 16, 2019 [10 favorites]


    House committee chairmen demand investigation into Russian oligarch’s $200 million investment in McConnell’s Kentucky (Rawstory)

    The NYT originally filed this in-depth story on Rusal's new jointly owned aluminium plant in Appalachia: Democrats Seek Review of Russian Investment in Kentucky
    Mr. McConnell, the Senate majority leader, helped defeat a bipartisan effort in January to block the sanctions relief deal for Rusal. His spokesman said Mr. McConnell’s support for lifting the sanctions was unrelated to the potential investment in Kentucky, which was not publicly announced until last month — months after the vote.[…]

    Lobbying filings suggest that, just before the April announcement, David Vitter, a former Republican senator who is being paid to lobby for EN+, reached out to give Mr. McConnell “a heads-up” about the announcement.[…]

    [Rand] Paul, who also voted to lift the sanctions, said in a statement that he was “excited that Braidy Industries chose Ashland, Ky., for their headquarters and will create hundreds of jobs for Kentucky workers.” He added that he had “no knowledge of any kind as to their financing, but I do find it deplorable that the fake news media would try to turn a big win for Kentucky into some partisan propaganda story.”
    Here's the letter to the Treasury from Senators Wyden and Brown, committee chairs Schiff, Waters, Engel, and Cummings, and Representatives Himes and Doggett.
    posted by Doktor Zed at 6:36 PM on May 16, 2019 [19 favorites]


    The Trump administration is notifying tens of thousands of employers that the names of some of their employees do not match their Social Security numbers, a move that is forcing businesses across the country to brace for the loss of thousands of workers who lack legal status.



    I've gotten caught up in this net professionally, and in trying to renew my driver's license, my passport was rejected, and suddenly all my bank account access got tricky. Because I changed my name when I got married the first time, back in the 80s. It never occurred to me that I would have to do anything after the divorce 30 years ago except start using my maiden name again.

    Y'all, I had to gather birth certificate, baptismal records, marriage certificate, divorce decree, marriage certificate for the 22 year marriage I'm still a part of, passport, driver's license, and spend six hours in person at the Social Security office to get it all (hopefully) straightened out on the government end.

    I still have to deliver notarized forms to my financial institutions, because my SS doesn't match the name they have on record. I have to change my insurance policies, and policies where I am a beneficiary. I have to change my driver's license. I have to change my passport. It's crazy, and it's a law that will impact virtually no American born men, but will impact a lot of American born women. And it must be an absolute nightmare for transfolk.

    Never change your name in the Ameri-panopticon. It confuses things.
    posted by SecretAgentSockpuppet at 7:11 PM on May 16, 2019 [48 favorites]


    As entertainment and news converge, Area Man Regrets Helping Turn Joe Biden Into a Meme.
    posted by a snickering nuthatch at 7:33 PM on May 16, 2019 [13 favorites]


    WaPo: Judge orders public release of what Michael Flynn said in call to Russian ambassador
    A federal judge on Thursday ordered that prosecutors make public a transcript of a phone call that former national security adviser Michael Flynn tried hard to hide with a lie: his conversation with a Russian ambassador in late 2016.

    U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan in Washington ordered the government also to provide a public transcript of a November 2017 voice mail involving Flynn. In that sensitive call, President Trump’s attorney [John Dowd] left a message for Flynn’s attorney reminding him of the president’s fondness for Flynn at a time when Flynn was considering cooperating with federal investigators.[…]

    In the second conversation, an attorney for Trump tried to learn whether Flynn had any problematic information about the president after Flynn’s attorney signaled his client might begin cooperating with Mueller’s investigators. The attorney was John Dowd, then a private attorney for the president, according to people familiar with the episode. The special counsel was then threatening to charge Flynn with lying to FBI agents about his call to the ambassador. Dowd’s voice mail was scrutinized as Mueller’s investigators probed whether the president engaged in obstruction of justice to try to thwart the probe, and whether he deployed his aides to assist him.
    Sullivan’s given prosecutors until May 31 to post everything.
    posted by Doktor Zed at 8:07 PM on May 16, 2019 [18 favorites]


    Top House Republican McCarthy says he opposes Alabama abortion law (WaPo)
    The new antiabortion law in Alabama, the strictest in the country, has divided Republicans and put them on the defensive on the issue. Until this week, Republicans had been playing offense by casting Democrats as extreme due to a recent New York law expanding access to late-term abortion.

    [...] The debate over the Alabama law also comes at a time when Republicans are looking to make inroads with suburban women, a voting bloc that they lost when Democrats recaptured the House in 2018. [...]

    Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), who supports abortion rights and is up for reelection next year in a state Trump lost in 2016, panned the Alabama law and predicted that the Supreme Court would ultimately strike it down.

    “The Alabama law is a terrible law – it’s very extreme – it essentially bans all abortions,” she told CNN on Thursday. “I can’t imagine that any justice could find that to be consistent with the previous precedence.”
    posted by Little Dawn at 8:07 PM on May 16, 2019 [4 favorites]




    > Top House Republican McCarthy says he opposes Alabama abortion law (WaPo)

    On the Defensive? Or Bamboozling Us?
    This is how the GOP used to work in the pre-Trump era: Right-wing commentators and certain Republican politicians would advocate (and, where possible, pass) extreme laws, all while using inflammatory rhetoric about their enemies (us) and generally tossing the base the reddest of red meat. Then, particularly on Sunday mornings, the "respectable" Republicans would appear on TV, and their dulcet tones would reassure the rest of public (and nearly all mainstream pundits) that the party was made up of sober, responsible right-centrists who could always be trusted with governance. Extreme laws were passed, extreme narratives were advanced, but mostly on the down low.

    Under Trump, Republicans across the board have learned to say the quiet parts out loud (hello, Lindsey Graham) -- but these abortion laws are inspiring them to revert to the old ways. McCarthy wants his party to win back the House in 2020, and the path to that end runs through a lot of suburban swing districts; McSally wants to win her seat outright in a purple state.

    So they're saying, "Look, most Republicans are reasonable ladies and gents, not like those awful folks in Alabama (and Ohio, and Missouri and Kentucky and Georgia and ...)." It won't prevent any new state from passing a draconian abortion law. But if they're lucky, it will persuade your swing-voting relatives that most Republicans aren't like this.
    posted by tonycpsu at 8:17 PM on May 16, 2019 [22 favorites]


    The Newburyport Daily News reports the Massachusetts Board of Registration in Medicine today suspended the medical license of Fox commentator and fan of Trump penis Keith Ablow, because he posed "an immediate and serious threat to the public health, safety and welfare."
    The board alleges that Dr. Ablow engaged in sexual activity and boundary violations with multiple patients, diverted controlled substances from patients, engaged in disruptive behavior, including displaying and pointing a firearm on multiple occasions in a manner that scared an employee, and procured his license renewal fraudulently.
    posted by adamg at 8:29 PM on May 16, 2019 [15 favorites]


    > Top House Republican McCarthy says he opposes Alabama abortion law (WaPo)

    So does Pat Robertson. You'll never guess why.

    He thinks it's too extreme.
    Longtime televangelist Pat Robertson decried Alabama’s new abortion ban as “extreme,” saying on his show on Wednesday that the state legislature has “gone too far.”
    Alabama’s law, which has been passed by the legislature and signed by the governor, includes a penalty of up to 99 years in prison for doctors who perform abortions and has no exceptions for rape or incest, Robertson noted on his show.
    “They want to challenge Roe vs. Wade, but my humble view is I don’t think that’s the case I’d want to bring to the Supreme Court because I think this one will lose,” Robertson told viewers of CBN’s “The 700 Club” on Wednesday.
    Psych! Because of course.
    posted by scalefree at 8:41 PM on May 16, 2019 [3 favorites]


    Fox News, the only news channel that supports, creates and is staffed by criminals.
    posted by valkane at 8:48 PM on May 16, 2019 [12 favorites]


    almost 13 hours later, and pennsylvania's rep mary gay scanlon is still sitting there, still reading. (i haven't watched this whole time so don't know who else is still there, but she was the first reader i saw when i tuned in around noon, and she regularly returned throughout the day for a turn reading, presumably while other participating reps were being rounded up). by now, they're approaching the later sections of vol.ii, construing Sec. 1512(c)(2). it is in these last sections, explaining the law and the defenses, that it really broke for me how forcefully mueller has made his case for congressional action. anyway, salute to rep scanlon's enduring effort. (rep speier just took over; i bet scanlon will be back, but i'll probably be asleep).
    posted by 20 year lurk at 9:58 PM on May 16, 2019 [19 favorites]


    Last August, Senator Elizabeth Warren introduced the Anti-Corruption and Public Integrity Act; today, the senator, along with Rep. Jackie Speier, introduced the Department of Defense Ethics and Anti-Corruption Act.

    Senator Warren Introduces New Legislation to Strengthen Ethics and Transparency at the Defense Department (Warren's senate.gov page)

    It’s Time to Reduce Corporate Influence at the Pentagon - Sen. Warren, writing on Medium.com, outlines the goals of the new bill:

    - Slam Shut the Revolving Door Between Giant Contractors and the Pentagon
    - Ban DOD Officials from Owning Contractor Stock
    - Limit Foreign Government Hiring of American National Security Officials
    - Expose Defense Contractor Lobbying

    Democrat Warren targets Pentagon contractors, calls industry corrupt (Reuters)
    posted by Iris Gambol at 10:04 PM on May 16, 2019 [60 favorites]


    I was just having a thought about messaging... I think a good angle might be that the basic problem with Republicans is “a foreign agent is just another kind of lobbyist to them.”

    Now, that statement in quotes is technically true in that under FARA a foreign agent is a kind of lobbyist, I think? So the instinct on their part may be to affirm it or get mired in technical details trying to respond.

    But to me the valid, implied criticism of playing patty-cake with adversarial powers to the detriment of their own country goes to the heart of many of the matters which have potential for leverage with voters. Drilling down on a statement like that might be able to crystallize and convey what the tip of the iceberg is with all the things that are so, so wrong with Trump and his political fellow travellers.

    Republicans don't mind if foreign agents run American elections, funding our politics like Bijan Kian or managing campaigns like Paul Manafort, a Trump bosom buddy now in prison for committing crimes to conceal that he was a foreign agent ahead of the 2016 elections. They don't even mind foreign agents being installed as high-ranking government officials like General and convicted felon Michael Flynn.

    (Flynn and Manafort having registered themselves as foreign agents once they realized they wouldn't get away with it as opposed to having been fingered by any investigation or intelligence agency.)

    Republicans take their money, these foreign agents, and make common cause with them and hand out favors to them like they should be doing—at most—only with their constituents and other good upstanding Americans.

    A short message like that can be a launching point to dig into the usual polemic against corruption and lobbyists and special interests, but it seems like we should also be screaming our heads off about “sovereignty” in connection to Russian and other countries' espionage and influence. Maybe help ourselves to some of the motifs normally employed by conservatives saying batshit crazy stuff about the UN and international law and New World Order type conspiracies.

    And the general thrust of foreign agents and foreign influence and Republican embrace of it all goes to underline how legitimate and vital all the continuing Trump-Russia investigations are, hardly the irrelevant matters Fox News want to portray them as... giving stuff away to the NRA or extremist religious interests or American rich people, the usual Republican suspects, stays in the country but when they're giving it away to foreign powers it can only go on so long before there's nothing left. (...is how I'd pitch it to my Trump-supporting relatives.)
    posted by XMLicious at 11:40 PM on May 16, 2019 [18 favorites]


    Barr uses the S-word again in this WSJ interview: Barr Says Review of Origins of Russia Probe Could Lead to Rule Changes—‘Government power was used to spy on American citizens,’ Barr says
    Attorney General William Barr said his review of the origins of the Russia investigation is focused on U.S. intelligence gathering before the Federal Bureau of Investigation opened its formal inquiry in July 2016 and could lead to rule changes for counterintelligence investigations of political campaigns. He added: “Just like we need to ensure that foreign actors don’t influence the outcome of our elections, we need to ensure that the government doesn’t use its powers to put a thumb on the scale.”[…]

    In his Wednesday interview, he declined to elaborate or offer any details on what prompted his concerns about the genesis of the Russia probe.[…]

    [FBI Director Christopher] Wray has distanced himself from Mr. Barr’s use of the term “spying” for legally permissible FBI surveillance. Mr. Barr, meanwhile, has continued to use the word, saying he didn’t mean it pejoratively, though he has been criticized for using language that echoes Mr. Trump’s Russia probe rhetoric.

    The broad review is, at this point, not a criminal investigation, a person familiar with it said. Mr. Barr didn’t offer a timetable for the completion of the review. He is working closely with CIA Director Gina Haspel, Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats and Mr. Wray. Mr. Barr didn’t specify what changes to protocol he is considering.[…]

    Mr. Barr wouldn’t specify what pre-election activities he found troubling, nor would he say what information he has reviewed thus far or what it has shown. He said he was surprised that officials have been so far unable to answer many of his questions.

    “I have more questions now than when I came in,” he said, but declined to detail them.

    Mr. Barr said he is interested in the underlying intelligence that sparked the bureau’s decision to open the counterintelligence investigation, as well as the actions officials took based on that intelligence. Mr. Barr invoked Vietnam-era intelligence abuses like the surveillance of antiwar activists as a reason to raise these questions.
    The underlying intelligence is, of course, convicted perjurer George Papadapoulous letting slip the Trump campaign's early interest in receiving aid from Russia in the election to an Australian diplomat. Since his release from prison, he's switched his story to the rightwing press multiple times, though always casting himself as the victim. Barr has latched on to this, with Trump's approval, as a way of suppressing future counterintelligence activity, even though he sticks to the vaguest talking points in this interview.

    We're watching the roll-out of a Trumpist anti-law enforcement campaign from within the DoJ itself.
    posted by Doktor Zed at 5:52 AM on May 17, 2019 [21 favorites]


    Elizabeth Warren rolls out federal policy to protect abortion rights (CBS)
    "What I'm trying to do here is get this case in front of the Supreme Court so Roe v. Wade can be overturned," Alabama Rep. Terri Collins told The Washington Post.

    Warren's plan offers a defense in that fight, but it also goes far beyond protecting Roe; she wants to repeal the Hyde Amendment, thereby allowing abortions to be covered by programs like Medicaid, and to require private insurance providers to cover abortions.

    Additionally, Warren's plan calls for protections on the use of abortion pills, not covered under Roe.
    Warren unveils abortion rights platform following new laws (ABC)
    Warren's abortion rights platform, released Friday by her Democratic presidential campaign, centers on the establishment of "affirmative, statutory rights" that would "block states from interfering in the ability of a health care provider to provide medical care, including abortion services," and set similar restrictions on states' power to block patients from getting medical care, including abortions. [...]

    "The overwhelming majority of Americans have no desire to return to the world before Roe v. Wade," Warren said in an online post announcing her ideas. "And so the time to act is now."
    posted by Little Dawn at 6:26 AM on May 17, 2019 [75 favorites]


    One of the most interesting things I've read on abortion, initially linked in a comment (dead link) on a decade old FPP, is this: The only moral abortion is my abortion.

    It's a collection of anecdotes "directly from abortion doctors and other clinic staff in North America, Australia, and Europe" about what an anti-choice woman does when she experiences an unwanted pregnancy herself.
    posted by msbrauer at 6:49 AM on May 17, 2019 [39 favorites]


    Farmer: We're in a free fall out here Trump's trade war with China hurts the people who voted for him.

    Womp womp.
    posted by sotonohito at 7:23 AM on May 17, 2019 [23 favorites]


    Trump takes war on abortion worldwide as policy cuts off funds (Guardian)
    Sexual health organisations warn women will die if they are forced to seek DIY abortions
    The Mexico City policy, dubbed the “global gag” by its critics, denies US federal funds to any organisation involved in providing abortion services overseas or counselling women about them. It was instituted by the then US president Ronald Reagan and has been revoked by every Democrat and reinstated by every Republican president since. [...]

    The Danish and Canadian governments have given MSI funding. The movement She Decides was started in response to Trump’s reimposition of the gag by the Dutch government minister Lilianne Ploumen, along with her counterparts in the governments of Belgium, Denmark and Sweden. It has raised funds and championed women’s rights to sexual and reproductive healthcare, including abortion, but it cannot match the loss of funds from the United States.
    Alabama’s abortion ban is about keeping poor women down (Emma Brockes, Guardian Opinion)
    For the 25 white, male state senators voting for it, this is not about the foetus but about maintaining the social order
    It was pointed out that Republicans in favour of banning abortion are by and large against banning guns because, by their own logic, “banning things doesn’t work”. [...] No one at this point in the US abortion debate can believe that the foetus is the focus. It’s not about the foetus, it’s about the woman. An abortion ban as radical as the one voted for in Alabama is about the elimination of women – particularly poor women – as a threat to the social order; it is a measure designed to ensure that poor people stay poor, and women stay home. Trying to shame abortion-banners for unfairness to women is like trying to shame advocates of mandatory minimum sentencing for causing the large-scale incarceration of black people. That was kind of the point.
    On the Front Lines of the War on Women (Abbey Crain, NYT Opinion)
    In Alabama, the supermajority always wins
    But at times like these, it’s worth reminding ourselves that it doesn’t have to. Women across Alabama ran for state level office by the dozens and lost in 2018. But during that same election, in Jefferson County, the same county where four black girls were killed by Ku Klux Klan bombs 56 years ago, nine black women were elected judges.

    Alabama changed half a century ago because black and white activists from around the country poured into the state to work alongside homegrown leaders and activists, many of them women, to force change. That’s how cities like New York and San Francisco have changed too — a critical mass of people coming to a place and working, sometimes even dying, to make it better.

    So if you care about places like Alabama, if you care about women in places like Alabama, the solution isn’t a boycott or a mocking tweet. It’s pretty simple. Y’all come on down here and work with us to make a difference. Just bring sunscreen and a fan. This summer’s going to be hot.
    posted by Little Dawn at 7:34 AM on May 17, 2019 [30 favorites]


    Meanwhile, Daily News reports that trump gives $82M bailout money to Brazilian farmers while US farmers struggle.
    posted by yoga at 8:01 AM on May 17, 2019 [8 favorites]


    Remember, nothing is ever Trump's fault, e.g.

    @realDonaldTrump, this morning: "It now seems the General Flynn was under investigation long before was common knowledge. It would have been impossible for me to know this but, if that was the case, and with me being one of two people who would become president, why was I not told so that I could make a change?"

    NBC, May 8, 2017: Obama Warned Trump Against Hiring Mike Flynn, Say Officials "Former President Obama warned President Donald Trump against hiring Mike Flynn as his national security adviser, three former Obama administration officials tell NBC News. The warning, which has not been previously reported, came less than 48 hours after the November election when the two sat down for a 90-minute conversation in the Oval Office."
    posted by Doktor Zed at 8:09 AM on May 17, 2019 [32 favorites]


    Was this the game all along? Did Nancy want Trump to force her into beginning impeachment?

    Remember: If you find yourself wondering whether a politician's spineless, stupid position is really a super-secret 4D chess maneuver, it isn't. Ever.


    Or maybe, if the politician single-handedly corralled the votes for the ACA and was instrumental in passing the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, the Don't Ask, Don't Tell Repeal Act, along with the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and 2010 Tax Relief Act, and then successfully squashed a bad-faith opposition effort to become the only second-term Speaker since 1955, she may in fact have a Plan.
    posted by Johnny Wallflower at 8:10 AM on May 17, 2019 [28 favorites]


    she may in fact have a Plan.

    "Trust the Plan" (capital P and all) is a QAnon slogan. If we're going to believe that we are witnessing a grand and inscrutable strategy of salvation then we might as well also believe that Mitch McConnell has already been arrested for treason and replaced with a hologram.
    posted by Rust Moranis at 8:21 AM on May 17, 2019 [17 favorites]


    It isn't unreasonable when evaluating Pelosi to give more weight to her current words and deeds than to her previous accomplishments in an entirely different arena.
    posted by diogenes at 8:24 AM on May 17, 2019 [8 favorites]


    If 12 hours pass without us shit-talking Nancy Pelosi, have we even really lived?
    posted by Huffy Puffy at 8:30 AM on May 17, 2019 [48 favorites]


    It's... not inscrutable? She knows impeachment is not currently popular, and (as some Thread participants have been saying for some time) she may be waiting for it to become more popular or for there to be the appearance of her hand being forced by some precipitating event. (This is why it's so important to Barr to keep Mueller away from Congress; he knows he's got Pelosi caught in the gap between the Dem base and the mainstream of the country and he wants to keep her there as long as possible. If Mueller testifies, there is a much higher probability that Pelosi could use it to get out of her current stalemate). DISCLAIMER: everyone in Thread knows the argument that impeachment proceedings make impeachment more popular; my comment is about what we can reasonably infer about what's in Pelosi's head, and for whatever reason she doesn't appear to have confidence in that argument.
    posted by a snickering nuthatch at 8:33 AM on May 17, 2019 [7 favorites]


    Mod note: Enough.
    posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 8:35 AM on May 17, 2019 [26 favorites]


    Obama Warned Trump Against Hiring Mike Flynn, Say Officials

    To be fair, Trump wasn't listening.
    posted by dances_with_sneetches at 8:42 AM on May 17, 2019 [8 favorites]


    Brian Buetler: Would Democrats Restore Roe If Republicans Overturned It?
    Reversing this injustice would require radical action. Restoring the right to abortion after the Kavanaugh court obliterates it would necessitate either an amendment to the Constitution—an impossible lift—or a broad consensus on the left that the decision was illegitimate, and needed to be overturned immediately. That lift would be much lighter in theory, but would still require Democrats to adopt a clear rationale and strategy.

    The rationale might be this: The Court that overturned Roe was constituted corruptly. A Republican Senate stole one seat at the end of President Obama’s second term, and the party secured the power to fill a second by committing crimes and betraying the country to win the 2016 election—all despite losing the popular vote. As true and infuriating as this argument is, though, it would need to be deployed in service of passing a law to change the number of seats on the Supreme Court, which would in turn require abolishing the filibuster.

    This scenario is by no means inevitable—perhaps the Supreme Court will not overturn Roe so soon, perhaps Democrats will not win overwhelmingly next year. But it’s certainly plausible. And yet it is almost impossible to imagine this Democratic Party in its current configuration taking any of the steps required to reestablish Roe, should it be overturned in the coming months.
    posted by T.D. Strange at 8:43 AM on May 17, 2019 [12 favorites]


    Isn't warning about Flynn what Sally Yates was fired for?
    posted by fluttering hellfire at 8:47 AM on May 17, 2019 [11 favorites]




    emptywheel puts a different spin on it: In a Bid to Jettison Flynn, Trump Suggests Hope Hicks and Steve Bannon Lied to the FBI

    "According to the Mueller Report, both Hope Hicks and Steve Bannon not only corroborate that Obama warned Trump [about Flynn], but their FBI testimony makes it clear that Trump was really bugged about Obama’s warning."

    She speculates that Judge Sullivan's order to hand over the information about Flynn's conversations could reveal that Flynn was acting with Trump's blessing, which is why Trump is so desperate to dismiss the issue now that he'll call his (former) trusted aides lairs.
    posted by zachlipton at 8:52 AM on May 17, 2019 [36 favorites]


    Isn't warning about Flynn what Sally Yates was fired for?

    Yes. CNN, February 14, 2017: White House Was Warned Flynn Could Be Blackmailed By Russia
    "The Justice Department warned the Trump administration last month that Michael Flynn misled administration officials regarding his communications with the Russian ambassador to the United States and was potentially vulnerable to blackmail by the Russians, a person familiar with the matter told CNN. […] The message was delivered by then-Acting Attorney General Sally Yates. Other top intelligence officials, including James Clapper and John Brennan, were in agreement the White House should be alerted about the concerns."

    So Trump fired Yates (and has been trashing Clapper and Brennan at every opportunity since). Flynn of course didn't resign until two weeks later when this news story was broken by the WaPo.
    posted by Doktor Zed at 8:54 AM on May 17, 2019 [18 favorites]


    In non depressing news (unless you think too much about why its necessary or whether it will actually get turned into law):

    Applause in the House chambers as a comprehensive and inclusive LGBTQ non-discrimination bill, the Equality Act, passes in the chamber for the first time in US history.
    posted by Exceptional_Hubris at 9:18 AM on May 17, 2019 [60 favorites]


    Also: Senate confirms Trump judicial nominee who refused to say if 'Brown v. Board of Education' was correctly decided (CNN)

    More on this, because it's not remotely a one-off and is part of a troubling pattern. Trump judicial nominees decline to endorse Brown v. Board under Senate questioning

    The nominees don't want to go down the path of answering, then being asked if Roe was correctly decided, but there's a bigger problem:
    Beyond confirmation questioning, Brown has proven to be a tricky question in the past for conservative jurists. That’s especially so for “originalists” such as the late Justice Antonin Scalia, who argue that the Constitution should be interpreted based on how its words and amendments were understood at the time they were enacted.

    It is difficult to argue under an originalist approach that the promise of equal protection in the 14th Amendment required desegregation because it was adopted during a time of strict, state-sponsored segregation.
    Perhaps if your judicial philosophy is demonstrably incompatible with "bedrock civil rights law," you shouldn't get to be a federal judge. Or as Margaret Talbot put it: "And any legal philosophy that cannot be squared with that moral high point of the modern Supreme Court is fatally flawed."
    posted by zachlipton at 9:24 AM on May 17, 2019 [22 favorites]


    > Perhaps if your judicial philosophy is demonstrably incompatible with "bedrock civil rights law," you shouldn't get to be a federal judge.

    We either have to impeach and remove every single judge appointed by Trump and McConnell as illegitimate - starting with Blackout Bart and Gorsuch - or they will be a fifth column fighting a rearguard action against every democratic initiative for decades to come. Not years, decades. I don't see how we work around that.
    posted by RedOrGreen at 9:28 AM on May 17, 2019 [35 favorites]


    In case you were wondering, the House of Representatives has passed 146 bills so far this session. (Count doesn’t include resolutions.)
    posted by Huffy Puffy at 9:39 AM on May 17, 2019 [21 favorites]


    Man, The Onion is killing it right now with this story. KISS frontman Gene Simmons delivers briefing at Pentagon podium that has not seen a spokesperson in almost a year

    Hilarious! Wait, CNN?! What the wha??
    posted by misterpatrick at 11:00 AM on May 17, 2019 [29 favorites]


    Rebecca Traister, Our Fury Over Abortion Was Dismissed for Decades As Hysterical, on rage. Too good for a pull quote.
    posted by zachlipton at 11:02 AM on May 17, 2019 [31 favorites]


    Rebecca Traister, Our Fury Over Abortion Was Dismissed for Decades As Hysterical, on rage. Too good for a pull quote.

    In the context of Warren's plan announced today, this seems like an important pull quote:
    This includes, of course, the Democrats (notably Joe Biden) who long supported the Hyde Amendment, the legislative rider that has barred the use of federal insurance programs from paying for abortion, making reproductive health care inaccessible to poor women since 1976. During health-care reform, Barack Obama referred to Hyde as a “tradition” and questions of abortion access as “a distraction.”
    And this seems like a good one, too:
    Above all, do not let defeat or despair take you, and do not let anyone tell you that your anger is misplaced or silly or in vain, or that it is anything other than urgent and motivating.
    posted by Little Dawn at 11:10 AM on May 17, 2019 [39 favorites]


    Mother Jones connects the dots between the GOP's deeply unpopular policy programs like anti-abortion and voter suppression: How Gerrymandering and Voter Suppression Paved the Way for Abortion Bans—Attacks on democracy have turned into attacks on reproductive freedom.
    In recent days, Republican-dominated legislatures in Alabama, Georgia, Ohio, and Missouri have passed some of the harshest abortion restrictions in decades. But aside from their collective assault on reproductive freedoms, these states have something else in common: a systematic effort to distort the democratic process through voter suppression and gerrymandering. These tactics have greased the way for near-total bans on abortion and for other extreme right-wing policies.[…]

    Meanwhile, extreme partisan gerrymandering has helped Republicans establish strangleholds on state legislatures around the country. After winning control of the redistricting process following the 2010 election, Georgia Republicans concentrated black voters into as few districts as possible in order to maximize the number of safe, heavily white Republican seats. In 2018, Kemp narrowly won with 50.2 percent of the vote, but Republicans held nearly 60 percent of state’s legislative seats. There are few swing districts left in the state—in 2018, an incumbent was elected with no opposition in 112 of 180 House districts in the state.

    This set-up helps insulate GOP lawmakers from any public backlash over their votes. Georgians oppose the new anti-abortion law 49 percent to 44 percent, according to a recent Atlanta Journal-Constitution poll. Yet the bill easily cleared the GOP-dominated state legislature, with nearly all Republicans, and just one Democrat, voting yes.[…]

    A 2016 analysis by Rewire News found that 22 states had passed new restrictions on both voting and abortion since the 2010 election, which pro-choice advocates don’t believe is a coincidence. Many of the constituencies that strongly support abortion rights—such as women, young people, and voters of color—are among the most likely to be impacted by tactics such as gerrymandering and voter suppression.
    Stacey Abrams is putting out the word: "Bad policies like the forced pregnancy bill are a direct result of voter suppression. If leaders can silence Georgians’ voices at the ballot box, they can ignore Georgians’ voices when in office. We will fight back in court and at the voting booth. #HB481"
    posted by Doktor Zed at 11:21 AM on May 17, 2019 [43 favorites]


    Quartz, The Trump White house takes lessons from fishmongers to boost employee morale, in which the Executive Office of the President is paying nearly $18,000 for “training” from some consultants who found themselves inspired by a Seattle tourist trap:
    Charthouse says it strives to “improve teamwork, retention, service, innovation, and morale.” It uses a proprietary method it calls “FISH!” which pays homage to a group of enthusiastic (and successful) fishmongers the founder’s son says he met in Seattle.

    As CharterHouse’s website explains:

    The fishmongers greeted strangers like old friends. Despite the noise and bustle, when a fishmonger focused on serving a customer, it was as if they were the only two people in the world. Everyone was smiling—and buying lots of fish. John noticed that selling fish looked cold and exhausting, yet these fishmongers attacked their work with energy and engagement. He wondered, “How do they do it?”

    “When people experience how good it feels to be appreciated—and appreciate others—they focus on what they can ‘give’ rather than what they can ‘get,’” the company explains on its website.
    posted by zachlipton at 12:08 PM on May 17, 2019 [3 favorites]


    Mother Jones connects the dots between the GOP's deeply unpopular policy programs like anti-abortion and voter suppression

    Everyone should be doing this. I don't expect NPR to admit it knows as much, for example, but there's no excuse for every Democrat who speaks to them not to say "Republicans have to keep people from voting, because their policies aren't popular."

    Republicans created the myth of the "liberal media" by repeating it over and over, and Democrats won't even tell the obvious truth about Republicans -- they're the party of oligarchy.

    No wonder they're so cozy with the Russians.
    posted by Gelatin at 12:08 PM on May 17, 2019 [22 favorites]


    I went through FISH! Philosophy training at 2 jobs ca. 2001 and 2004. I remember it came across as a way to convince employees to gaslight themselves about poor working conditions. No wonder.
    posted by fluttering hellfire at 12:29 PM on May 17, 2019 [44 favorites]


    Some highlights from Vox's The Weeds podcast on global warming:

    1. They've been meaning to talk about global warming for months, but crisis news kept intervening. That's the story of global warming and the news in a nutshell.

    2. The language of the Green New Deal is lifted directly from Roosevelt's New Deal. The philosophy is the same. Freedom requires freedom from extreme economic hardship.

    3. Third way politics no longer works. Republicans will no longer compromise on anything. Conservative media has a stranglehold on Republicans.

    4. Third way politics fails to generate interest from liberals. No one's excited about a position they don't really believe in.

    5. Most Democratic candidates, including Warren, are not prioritizing or talking competently about global warming.
    posted by xammerboy at 12:49 PM on May 17, 2019 [14 favorites]


    From the latest FWIW, a weekly newsletter from self-described progressive digital agency ACRONYM. (Note: The newsletter contains lots of charts and stats about ad spends; it also contains examples of upsetting ads run by conservative groups lying by claiming that various Democratic officials support infanticide.)

    This week we saw women’s reproductive rights come under attack with legislation in Alabama, Georgia, and Missouri. But how has that battle manifested itself online? ... For months now, Republican groups have been using digital advertising to push extreme, coordinated, and often misleading messages against elected Democrats up and down the ballot. And as we told the New York Times yesterday, they’ve forced Democrats to react. The GOP’s motivation? There are many.

    1. Energizing the base early to expand list size and fundraise ...
    2. Energizing a conservative base electorate in low-turnout elections ...
    3. Leveraging online and offline strategies to push their message
    Here’s their playbook: A Republican-controlled legislature passes an extreme anti-choice bill. Then, a Democratic governor vetoes that legislation. Later, conservatives run attack ads against said Governor. It’s not a new strategy – but this cycle, it’s already being waged online in states with competitive gubernatorial elections in 2020. For example, this year we saw conservative state legislatures in Montana and North Carolina pass “born alive” bills rolling back abortion rights and women’s access to health care, knowing that Democratic governors in those states would veto the bills.

    Immediately following those vetoes, national conservative groups like Susan B. Anthony List started running Facebook ads targeting North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper and Montana Gov. Steve Bullock to start to motivate and engage conservative voters months before the gubernatorial elections in 2020.

    4. Influence public opinion in advance of a court battle
    The messaging being pushed by conservatives nationwide on this issue seems to be a coordinated effort to misinform voters in advance of the 2020 election and a potential battle over abortion rights in the courts. For example, Restoration PAC – the conservative super PAC bankrolled primarily by Richard Uihlein – has spent $111,149 on Facebook and Google advertising about “infanticide” since the start of February on ads targeting vulnerable Democratic senators up for reelection in 2020.

    posted by Bella Donna at 1:00 PM on May 17, 2019 [6 favorites]




    5. Most Democratic candidates, including Warren, are not prioritizing or talking competently about global warming.

    Why that's Jay Inslee's music! Jay Inslee Unveils $9 Trillion Climate Jobs Plan To Cut Emissions And Bolster Unions: The 15,000-word document includes proposals to rapidly decarbonize, create 8 million jobs and revitalize the labor movement by repealing right-to-work laws.
    The proposal lays out a five-pronged strategy to launch an unprecedented deployment of renewable energy, fortify the nation’s infrastructure to cope with climate change, spur a clean-tech manufacturing boom, increase federal research funding fivefold and level income inequality by repealing anti-union laws and enacting new rules to close the racial and gender pay gaps. By spending $300 billion per year, the plan projects another $600 billion in annual economic activity generated by its mandates.
    ...
    Inslee, 68, shies away from the Green New Deal slogan that emerged six months ago as the first framework to match the scope of the climate crisis. But, in practice, the blandly-named Evergreen Economy Plan is the closest thing yet to the World War II-style economic mobilization the Green New Deal promises. The second major proposal from the Inslee campaign, it builds on the the 100% clean energy blueprint released earlier this month, outlining a pathway to all but eliminate emissions from power plants, cars and new buildings by 2030.
    One thing I'd really like to see more attention paid to is evidence that the climate policies advocated by candidates actually work to reduce emissions. It's easy to get caught up in, say, making it easier for workers to unionize, but it's much less fun to talk about the urgent need to reduce emissions from, say, cement production.
    posted by zachlipton at 1:09 PM on May 17, 2019 [21 favorites]


    @tax [Bloomberg, letter attached]: Just under the 5 p.m. deadline, Mnuchin tells Neal he won't comply with the subpoena for Trump's tax returns

    @darth: didnt chelsea manning refuse to comply with a subpoena recently

    @tax: Now the pressure is really on a top House Democrat Richard Neal, who has to decide how ferociously to respond to the Treasury secretary's refusal. Neal’s most obvious recourse is to sue Mnuchin for failing to comply with the subpoena. This is the long-game strategy, and would likely take months, if not years, straight through the 2020 presidential election. Neal has indicated he would would rather go straight to court than hold Mnuchin in contempt of Congress.
    posted by zachlipton at 1:18 PM on May 17, 2019 [11 favorites]


    Jim Jordan, who went full Trumpist by trying to impeach Rod Rosenstein while dodging a sex abuse scandal at Ohio State's wrestling program

    AP has an update on this scandal: ‘Shocking’: Ohio State Doc Abused 177, Officials Were Aware

    "Before Friday’s release, the doctor’s accusers had alleged that Ohio Republican Rep. Jim Jordan was one of the coaches back then who were aware of concerns about Strauss and didn’t stop him. Jordan, an assistant wrestling coach from 1987 to 1995, was not mentioned by name in the report, and a spokesman said the document showed the congressman did not know about the abuse."

    Politico: Jim Jordan Claims Vindication After Ohio State Sex Abuse Report Released Jordan told reporters this afternoon, "It confirms everything I’ve said before. I didn’t know about anything. If I would’ve, I’d have done something."

    In their coverage, NBC reports, "The scandal in which Jordan figures has now attracted the attention of the House Committee on Education and Labor, which has begun looking into it, a committee aide who asked not to be identified told NBC News."

    This is a classic bury-it-on-Friday news dump. The idea that Jordan could have been an ignorant bystander while a coach for two decades during this apparently nonstop molestation defies belief, even by the standards of Republican sex scandals.
    posted by Doktor Zed at 1:38 PM on May 17, 2019 [21 favorites]


    For the non-Twitter crowd, here is the Brynn Taneehill thread via Threadreader.
    posted by Bella Donna at 1:40 PM on May 17, 2019 [11 favorites]


    Politico, Republicans take $400k from casino mogul accused of sexual assault. Yep, that's Steve Wynn we're talking about.
    Wynn gave $248,500 to the Republican National Committee and $150,000 to the National Republican Senatorial Committee in April, according to two people familiar with the contributions. The donations are set to be disclosed publicly later this month.
    The RNC, of course, demanded that Democrats return donations from Weinstein.
    posted by zachlipton at 2:00 PM on May 17, 2019 [16 favorites]


    Mod note: Couple deleted. Let's leave off the civil war/secession scenarios, and "infuriating things randoms on twitter are saying," and fears and venting can go in the fear and venting metatalk
    posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 2:44 PM on May 17, 2019 [8 favorites]


    Man, The Onion is killing it right now with this story.

    I got so excited for a feel-good Onion story about KISS that I clicked the link without reading. I got halfway through the article before realizing it was CNN. Because ... well, you know why.

    Instead of getting deleted for talking about Pelosi or pushing my award-winning petebest® NewsJuicer™ brand information filtering device (it's a pair of scissors), I'm going to talk about KISS™.

    Like a lot of stupid kids, I loved KISS. Not proud, just trying to keep it 100. So when the Turmp-era began, I dreaded the inevitable. Some misogynistic pro-Turmp rant from Gene. I didn't search. It was sure to happen. I still don't know. But now that I've clicked on the story I have to see what it was. USA Today has the details, such as there are, which include that it's "unclear" whether he met with Trump, but he and his wife watched him fly off in Marine One, so there's that.

    But there's also his comments at the DoD podium which - well, here:

    McClatchy journalist Tara Copp reported that Simmons gave an emotional speech to a room full of service members, recounting how his mother survived Nazi concentration camps before moving to Israel to give birth to him, before coming to America.

    In video from McClatchy, Simmons is seen discussing his mother's Holocaust survival story. "I'm a proud son of a concentration camp survivor, Nazi Germany. My mother was 14 when she was in the camps. I'm measuring my words because I'm about to break up again."

    He went on to discuss how his mother would cry when she saw the American flag and his gratittude for coming to America.

    "As an 8 year old boy, I didn't understand why. But from my mother's point of view, we were finally safe," Simmons continued. "I may have been born in the country that people have referred to throughout history as the promised land, but take my word for it, America is the promised land for everybody."

    He thanked the audience for their service.


    I mean - what to do with that.
    posted by petebest at 2:59 PM on May 17, 2019 [15 favorites]


    Austrian Politician Caught on Tape Taking Russian Help

    Heinz-Christian Strache, the head of Austria's right-wing populist FPÖ party, met with a purported Russian multimillionaire on Ibiza in July 2017. She offered him campaign support in exchange for public contracts. What he didn't know was that the entire exchange was being recorded by hidden cameras.

    ...
    [The woman was introduced as] the purported niece of Igor Makarova, a Russian oligarch close to President Vladimir Putin. ... The supposed investor already had a plan: She proposed acquiring a 50-percent stake in the Kronen Zeitung, a highly influential Austrian tabloid, and to use the newspaper as a mouthpiece backing Strache and his FPÖ party in the election campaign.

    ... Neither Der Spiegel nor the Süddeutsche Zeitung have any reliable information about the motives of the people who set Strache this trap in 2017 or who they may have been working for.

    ... The tabloid reaches around 2 million readers each day, a phenomenal number given Austria's total population of only 8.7 million. ... You could even say the Kronen Zeitung has crowned chancellors and deposed them. ... it would do more than just provide a tremendous boost for the party – it would be like adding rocket fuel to the election campaign.

    ... In the living room of the villa, he went through scenarios of what a takeover of the paper might look like: A few journalists would be "shown the door," a few new ones would be brought in. Journalists, he said, are "the biggest whores on the planet," so that won't be any problem.


    A well-done story both for the quality of the writing and the approach they take to this COLLUSION itself. Which is an approach that could well be described as "foreign". Fortunately in America we don't need anyone to buy 50% in a media company to boost a candidate. We'll do it for free. Our corporate news is such junk.
    posted by petebest at 3:23 PM on May 17, 2019 [11 favorites]


    In their coverage, NBC reports, "The scandal in which Jordan figures has now attracted the attention of the House Committee on Education and Labor, which has begun looking into it, a committee aide who asked not to be identified told NBC News."

    NBC has had to retract this: "CORRECTION (May 17, 2019, 5:09 p.m. ET): An earlier version of this article mischaracterized the plans of the House Committee on Education and Labor. After the article was published, a committee aide said the panel would look into the broader issue of preventing abuse, revising an earlier statement that suggested the committee would look into Jordan's involvement."

    Heinz-Christian Strache, the head of Austria's right-wing populist FPÖ party, met with a purported Russian multimillionaire on Ibiza in July 2017.

    n.b. During the transition, Strache had a meeting with Mike Flynn at Trump Tower (NYT).
    posted by Doktor Zed at 3:32 PM on May 17, 2019 [11 favorites]




    ‘We have to fight’: Alabama's extreme abortion ban sparks wave of activism (Guardian)
    Pro-choice groups see an increase in donations and are mobilizing supporters and resources in several states to combat the laws
    The state-by-state effort to confront abortion restrictions continues a decades-long, largely women-led movement that has fought for reproductive rights. During the civil rights movement, University of Chicago student Heather Booth launched Jane, a now-famous underground network that counseled women and connected them with doctors who would perform abortions.
    posted by Little Dawn at 3:43 PM on May 17, 2019 [8 favorites]


    My piping hot take on the abortion terror is that a lot of people are assuming that Roe is going to remain law of the land. I was talking to somebody from a family of lawyers about the Alabama law and they were all 'well surely it will be struck down.' Roe's been around long enough and the support for legalized abortion is high enough that I think people, Trump/Kavanaugh/Gorsuch notwithstanding, had a sense of safety. That 5/4 margin pre-Trump let a lot of shittiness through, but it kept some of that strict constructionism out too, right?

    I wonder if we're going to start hearing that strict constructionism bullshit now. I mean, plenty of people have criticized Roe on just the basis of, wait, three different standards according to state of fetal development, where in the Constitution does it say you can do that?

    Sorry if I've bargled the legal stuff--I hung up my shingle a while ago, and I'm honestly afraid to start reading up on say, Griswold rn. I have enough anxiety about Roe.
    posted by angrycat at 4:24 PM on May 17, 2019 [9 favorites]


    My piping hot take on the abortion terror is that a lot of people are assuming that Roe is going to remain law of the land.

    I don't think we can assume anything at this point, and no lawyer can predict the outcome of any case. But it's in Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992) that there is discussion of fetal viability, e.g. from the summary, not the caselaw:
    Consideration of the fundamental constitutional question resolved by Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113, principles of institutional integrity, and the rule of stare decisis require that Roe's essential holding be retained and reaffirmed as to each of its three parts: (1) a recognition of a woman's right to choose to have an abortion before fetal viability and to obtain it without undue interference from the State, whose previability interests are not strong enough to support an abortion prohibition or the imposition of substantial obstacles to the woman's effective right to elect the procedure; (2) a confirmation of the State's power to restrict abortions after viability, if the law contains exceptions for pregnancies endangering a woman's life or health; and (3) the principle that the State has legitimate interests from the outset of the pregnancy in protecting the health of the woman and the life of the fetus that may become a child.
    In Roe, the holding focuses on the fundamental right of privacy, upon which the government may not intrude without justification. The reason why lawyers may sound so assured about the recent anti-abortion legislation being overturned is because the scientific basis of these laws is so comically terrible, and Planned Parenthood v. Casey includes this:
    The soundness or unsoundness of that constitutional judgment in no sense turns on whether viability occurs at approximately 28 weeks, as was usual at the time of Roe, at 23 to 24 weeks, as it sometimes does today, or at some moment even slightly earlier in pregnancy, as it may if fetal respiratory capacity can somehow be enhanced in the future. Whenever it may occur, the attainment of viability may continue to serve as the critical fact, just as it has done since Roe was decided; which is to say that no change in Roe's factual underpinning has left its central holding obsolete, and none supports an argument for overruling it.
    And because Brown v. Board of Education has been a hot topic lately, this warning from Planned Parenthood v. Casey also seems important to note:
    The Court is not asked to do this very often, having thus addressed the Nation only twice in our lifetime, in the decisions of Brown and Roe. But when the Court does act in this way, its decision requires an equally rare precedential force to counter the inevitable efforts to overturn it and to thwart its implementation. Some of those efforts may be mere unprincipled emotional reactions; others may proceed from principles worthy of profound respect. But whatever the premises of opposition may be, only the most convincing justification under accepted standards of precedent could suffice to demonstrate that a later decision overruling the first was anything but a surrender to political pressure, and an unjustified repudiation of the principle on which the Court staked its authority in the first instance. So to overrule under fire in the absence of the most compelling reason to reexamine a watershed decision would subvert the Court's legitimacy beyond any serious question.
    posted by Little Dawn at 5:27 PM on May 17, 2019 [13 favorites]


    Newsweek: Fox's Napolitano says Trump violated the Constitution three times in the past week
    Napolitano outlined three recent directives from Trump and explained how they violated the Constitution. The first was the president’s order to Acting Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan to not purchase a missile defense system approved by Congress and instead use the funds to construct a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border. Second, the former judge cited Trump’s order to send troops to secure the border, pointing out how it violated the separation of powers, because the president’s oath does not allow military forces to be deployed to deal with domestic issues. Napolitano also argued that Trump’s decision to impose 25 percent tariffs on Chinese goods was akin to levying a “national federal sales tax” on American consumers, which the president did not have power to do under the Constitution.

    “It is dangerous when presidents write their own laws, impose their own taxes, spend money how they want and Congress looks the other way,” Napolitano asserted.
    Hmm...rewriting his own legislation, reallocating money without Congressional approval, imposing his own taxes, and deploying the military without Congressional approval to deal with domestic issues...
    posted by darkstar at 5:40 PM on May 17, 2019 [33 favorites]


    CNN has a Flynn scoop: Flynn Contacted GOP Mueller Critic While Cooperating With Special Counsel
    Flynn sent Twitter direct messages to Rep. Matt Gaetz, encouraging the Florida Republican to "keep the pressure on." It's not clear if Flynn sent additional messages to other lawmakers.

    "You stay on top of what you're doing. Your leadership is so vital for our country now. Keep the pressure on," Flynn wrote in an April 2018 message to Gaetz, which was obtained by CNN.

    On the evening Flynn sent the message to Gaetz, the lawmaker had appeared on Fox Business' "Lou Dobbs Tonight," where he criticized the Mueller investigation.[…]

    While Gaetz says he did not have a relationship with Flynn, he did call for the President to issue a pardon to Flynn and other targets of the Mueller probe last year. "If I were President Trump, I'd pardon Paul Manafort, I would commute the sentence of Michael Flynn and be done with those two," Gaetz said in a Fox News interview.
    After Trump tried to throw Flynn under a bus this morning, the timing of this leak is interesting.
    posted by Doktor Zed at 5:47 PM on May 17, 2019 [15 favorites]


    Hmm...rewriting his own legislation, reallocating money without Congressional approval, imposing his own taxes, and deploying the military without Congressional approval to deal with domestic issues...

    ...appointing family members to key positions of government responsibility, arresting lawful asylum-seeking refugee families and kidnapping their children, accepting emoluments from foreign agents, obstructing investigations, colluding with foreign powers to undermine elections, undermining foreign treaties and agreements with wanton disregard, abusing the pardon prerogative to reward political cronies and thwart justice, fomenting racial animus, fomenting violence and abuse of process against political adversaries, fomenting violence against members of the free press, enabling foreign tyrants in oppression and murder, enacting arbitrary and excessive tariffs...

    Why, it begins to read like that list of rationales for the original Declaration of Independence.
    posted by darkstar at 5:51 PM on May 17, 2019 [55 favorites]


    I thought I just heard on Chris Hayes (maybe 10 or 15 minutes into his show) that Bill Barr told Pelosi she better be careful or he'd open an investigation into her. Am I hearing things now or does anyone else know anything that reports this, I can't find anything on Google. Notice how bananas it is that an attorney general would threaten the Speaker of the House with a punitive investigation. Notice how...I don't find it completely divorced from our current reality to believe that they would.
    posted by Rufous-headed Towhee heehee at 5:52 PM on May 17, 2019 [6 favorites]




    Huh. Gaetz is the one who tweeted to Michael Cohen, back in February, "Do your wife & father-in-law know about your girlfriends? Maybe tonight would be a good time for that chat. I wonder if she’ll remain faithful to you in prison. She’s about to learn a lot." The eventually-deleted tweet was posted hours before Cohen's public testimony to the House Oversight Committee. (CNN, Feb. 27, 2019)

    Gaetz was accused of witness tampering, and he's under investigation by the Florida Bar: "The Florida Bar has determined that a tweet by U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz could warrant discipline and has assigned the case to a grievance committee for review. The committee will assign an investigator to the case to decide if a complaint filed against Gaetz, a Florida Republican, should lead to formal charges filed with the Florida Supreme Court." (Politico, May 8, 2019).
    posted by Iris Gambol at 6:04 PM on May 17, 2019 [10 favorites]


    The Daily Beast's Betsy Woodruff: DHS Urges Cybersecurity Staff to ‘Deploy’ to Border Instead—Employees are encouraged to set aside their cybersecurity work to head to the border because ‘serving the needs of the homeland is the cornerstone of what we do.’
    The Department of Homeland Security’s cybersecurity agency is urging staffers tasked with handling cyber threats to set their day jobs aside and go on mini deployments to the U.S.-Mexico border after not enough officials within the agency agreed to step up for headquarters’ earlier request, according to an email obtained by The Daily Beast.[…]

    On Friday, [Matthew Travis] the deputy director of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) sent out an email asking employees to consider a “short-term deployment to the southern border,” ranging from 30 to 45 days, due to the “ongoing surge of migrants.”[…]

    Earlier this spring, top officials asked employees from all DHS entities to go volunteer at the border, according to a DHS official. The email went out because CISA is still working to send as many people as DHS Headquarters has asked for, the official added. In other words, not enough CISA employees want to step away from their cybersecurity work to focus on border security—at least, not yet.
    Elsewhere in DHS clusterfucks, the NYT reports: Trump Administration Flying Migrants Out of Texas to Ease Overcrowding at Border
    Hundreds of migrants are being flown from South Texas to holding cells in California by the Department of Homeland Security, in a move that officials said on Friday could be expanded by sending asylum seekers to processing centers throughout the United States, including the border with Canada.

    Customs and Border Protection officials said they began flying migrant families from overcrowded facilities in the Rio Grande Valley in Texas to San Diego on Tuesday. It is expected that as many as three flights, each carrying up to 135 migrants, will be scheduled each week.

    The agency also recently started flying migrants five times each week from the Rio Grande Valley to Del Rio, Tex. Nearly all of the migrants are traveling as families, including some with young children.[…]

    The details of the flights came after Sheriff Ric L. Bradshaw of Palm Beach County, Fla., was told by regional Border Patrol officials this week to prepare for the monthly arrivals of up to 1,000 migrants from the El Paso area to South Florida.[…]

    “The entire immigration policy of the United States is relatively incoherent and lacks any logical or consequential thought patterns,” said Sheriff William D. Snyder of Martin County, Fla. “So why would this surprise anybody?”
    posted by Doktor Zed at 6:25 PM on May 17, 2019 [22 favorites]


    Yet another DHS clusterfuck. WaPo, Acting secretary blocked Stephen Miller’s bid for another DHS shakeup
    An attempt by President Trump’s senior adviser Stephen Miller to engineer a new shake-up at the Department of Homeland Security was blocked this week by Kevin McAleenan, the department’s acting secretary, who said he might leave his post unless the situation improved and he was given more control over his agency, administration officials said.

    The closed-door clash flared over the fate of Mark Morgan, the former FBI official the president has picked to be the new director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

    With Morgan eager to move into the top job at ICE, Miller on Wednesday urged the president to have Morgan installed as the new commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) instead.

    McAleenan the next day told senior White House officials that he — not Miller — was in charge of the department, said three Trump administration officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal tensions one Trump aide likened to an “immigration knife fight.” McAleenan also argued that he should make personnel decisions at his agency, or at least be involved in them, these people said, and that communication needed to improve. McAleenan met with Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff, among others, the officials said.
    So, I'm getting a sense that the fishmonger-based workplace training was ineffective at getting employees to cooperate?

    It's mostly interesting to me that we're reading this story. There really seems to be this effort to publicly trash Miller as part of the rollout of the (going nowhere) immigration "plan" this week, even as Miller-like forces fight back with leaks of their own intended to appeal to hardliners.
    posted by zachlipton at 7:22 PM on May 17, 2019 [13 favorites]


    Does Anyone Actually Want Joe Biden to Be President? (NYT, Opinion)

    It is true that Mr. Biden is polling ahead of the other Democrats in the field by a large margin, including with women and voters of color. This early in the race, though, polling is more reflective of name recognition than anything else; the two leading candidates for 2020, Mr. Biden and Bernie Sanders, are recognized by 98 percent of Democratic primary voters. This also makes early polls a poor barometer for electoral success. At this point in the lead-up to 2016, Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio and Scott Walker were the top contenders for the Republican nomination.

    ... Instead of trying to win back a waning electoral and demographic force, Democrats would be better served to consider what will get voters to the polls. Hillary Clinton’s loss can only be explained by a long list of factors, but surely one of them was apathy: The certainty that she had the election in the bag probably depressed voter turnout.

    Contrast that to the 2018 midterms, which had a record-setting turnout — and a record number of women elected. Disgust with the Trump administration surely pushed voters to the polls. But so did a slew of exciting candidates who don’t look like the old models of “electable.” They looked a lot more like the people actually electing them.


    tl;dr: "Electability" is defined by white men who should shut up.
    posted by petebest at 8:01 PM on May 17, 2019 [20 favorites]


    This early in the race, though, polling is more reflective of name recognition than anything else

    It's odd how Biden's gone up in polling since he entered the race then, since almost everyone already knew how he was. And he's way ahead of where Jeb Bush was at this point in the race.

    Look, I share the frustration with the idea that Biden might win the nomination. That's certainly not my preferred outcome. But the fact is that a lot of people who are registered Democrats like him. Our response should be to try to work for a better candidate, not stick our head in the sand about Biden's current popularity.
    posted by Chrysostom at 8:15 PM on May 17, 2019 [21 favorites]


    This early in the race, though, polling is more reflective of name recognition than anything else; the two leading candidates for 2020, Mr. Biden and Bernie Sanders, are recognized by 98 percent of Democratic primary voters. This also makes early polls a poor barometer for electoral success.

    538 has already addressed this ad infinitum. It's too bad Filipovic falls into justifying her position with dubious non-facts because she's more right than wrong. She's right that people are often bad at judging who is electable, particularly this far out. She's right that the very concept of electability that many people hold is gender coded. She's right about the changing demographics of the Democratic party, and so on. But she's not right about a lot of the groundwork she tries to lay to bolster those opinions which is a shame.
    posted by Justinian at 8:15 PM on May 17, 2019 [8 favorites]


    Biden is currently popular, and he's certainly more popular than the current runner-up, Sanders, who has similar name recognition at this point. But 538 systematically underestimates the uncertainty in how predictive this is both for (a) who will win the primary, and (b) who can better beat Trump. The regression models of early polling on primary and general elections have a huge amount of uncertainty, and furthermore a whole lot isn't even included in the model at all. Eg, everything from the fact that recent primaries have been much more volatile, with too small an N to even model, to the fact that there's a fairly significant chance that at least one of Biden, Trump, Sanders or Warren could have a significant health event in the next year. And lots more like that. (Taleb may be wrong about many things, but he's right about this.) So while, if you had to bet on "electability," it might make sense to bet a bit more on Biden over Sanders or Warren, the uncertainty is so huge than anyone who is making significant binary decisions on these grounds (such as choosing one candidate to solely support and donate to) is making a fairly significant error. When the uncertainty is this large, it calls for strategies that reflect that uncertainty, not just finding the most likely outcome by some tiny percentage and putting all your money there. I don't exactly know what the best mix of strategies is, but deciding primarily on "electability" is certainly misguided at this point.
    posted by chortly at 9:27 PM on May 17, 2019 [4 favorites]


    Anyone’s electable if enough people rally together and pull the lever for that person. That’s how Trump got elected. Granted, liberals don’t have a cultural police network where your pastor announces that you’ll burn in Hell if you don’t vote Republican, but we do have technology and creativity.
    posted by Autumnheart at 9:48 PM on May 17, 2019 [17 favorites]


    Pod Save America guesses that Biden's popularity is due to voters being terrified of Trump winning and gravitating to the candidate they think is a sure thing. I'm not sure I buy that completely. I think Biden is the candidate for the "exhausted majority" who mistakenly believe that the current political divisiveness as well as crisis issues like global warming and healthcare can be made to disappear. That's where I have a problem with him as a candidate. He knows better and should level with the people. Pretending we can solve global warming with weak sauce solutions weakens the other candidates' arguments that we can't.
    posted by xammerboy at 9:53 PM on May 17, 2019 [20 favorites]


    As Samantha Bee points out, the "electable" men—Joe Biden, Cory Booker, Pete Buttigieg, Beto O'Rourke, and Bernie Sanders—have all lost at least one election.

    Tulsi Gabbard, Kirsten Gillibrand, Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar, and Elizabeth Warren have never lost an election.
    posted by kirkaracha at 10:03 PM on May 17, 2019 [51 favorites]


    Pod Save America guesses that Biden's popularity is due to voters being terrified of Trump winning and gravitating to the candidate they think is a sure thing. I'm not sure I buy that completely. I think Biden is the candidate for the "exhausted majority" who mistakenly believe that the current political divisiveness as well as crisis issues like global warming and healthcare can be made to disappear.

    Specifically, people thinking we can make the bad stuff go away by rolling back the clock to Obama, and Biden is the closest we've got. I think Biden's popularity is largely as a proxy Obama. But yeah, doesn't work that way, we couldn't even make the bad stuff from Bush go away under Obama/Biden the first time and looking back to their administration as an oasis of stability is really ignoring the McConnells of the world and treating Trump like the only problem.
    posted by jason_steakums at 10:26 PM on May 17, 2019 [27 favorites]


    As Samantha Bee points out, the "electable" men—Joe Biden, Cory Booker, Pete Buttigieg, Beto O'Rourke, and Bernie Sanders—have all lost at least one election.

    Jon Kerry was "electable". Al Gore was "electable". Hilary Clinton was "electable". Until Obama was. And then Hilary Clinton was "electable" again. The "electable" choice this far out has a 0% ultimate success rate. Maybe Biden will win the primary as the "electable" one, and recent history suggests that will mean Trump's second term.
    posted by T.D. Strange at 11:04 PM on May 17, 2019 [17 favorites]


    I bet if we go back to 1988...we could find some NYT writer pitching Biden as the "electable" one.
    posted by T.D. Strange at 11:06 PM on May 17, 2019 [1 favorite]


    Jon Kerry was "electable". Al Gore was "electable". Hilary Clinton was "electable".

    The problem with this analysis is we have no way to evaluate whether it was true or not since we have no "control" group. It's possible people were wrong and other candidates would have done better. It's also possible those were the most electable candidates and other candidates would have lost by more.
    posted by Justinian at 12:00 AM on May 18, 2019 [13 favorites]


    Yes, but the very reasons these candidates were so electable were turned against them. Kerry was a war hero made out to be a deserter. Gore was brilliant but made out to be boring. Hillary was experienced but her history became baggage. We already see with Biden that his being relatable has been turned into his being a sexual predator.
    posted by xammerboy at 12:50 AM on May 18, 2019 [5 favorites]


    From the VICE magazine article "Area Man Regrets Helping Turn Joe Biden Into A Meme" posted upthread by Jfed, a paragraph that should be required reading for all Democrats. (Context: this is the contributing editor of the Onion during the Obama era:)

    One thing I keep coming back to—and which helps put our failure on Biden in context—is the way other comedy outlets treated Trump during his campaign.

    Trump is not a secret racist. He is not a secret sexist. He is not a secret cheat and he is not a secret liar. He’s not even a secret idiot; there is no gap between the most eviscerating parody and the man himself. A reality this twisted not only resists satire, it cannibalizes it. There are no jokes to be had at Trump’s expense, because he can afford them all.


    He's the Comedy Terminator.
    posted by petebest at 4:22 AM on May 18, 2019 [22 favorites]


    The problem with this analysis is we have no way to evaluate whether it was true or not since we have no "control" group.

    The two most popular Democratic presidents since FDR were not the "electable" choices in 1992, or 2008. Seems like a pretty good control group.
    posted by T.D. Strange at 4:42 AM on May 18, 2019 [7 favorites]


    He's the Comedy Terminator.
    You know--there's something that's hard to articulate about the desire for (white guy) authenticity and the fact that Trump is what he blatantly is.

    It's sort of like when he got laughed at at the U.N. and he just smiled and shrugged it off. That was a fascinating moment. This petty, vindictive man who apparently really thought Mueller had beef with him because of some golf fees dispute. Who sent in photos of his fingers circled to is it Vice Magazine for how many years? Yet he can somehow shrug off in real-time the collective scorn of the greatest governing body of the world.

    I don't know, maybe he went backstage and did the metaphorical or actual act of eating babies afterwards and he really does have a masterful poker face, but I don't think so. Maybe I'm also conned, but I believe he really thought he was Master and Commander up there, not the Most Despised Man of the World. His inability to be embarrassed is really quite impressive. It's his super power.

    So, given this, why doesn't he just chill and stop fucking up the world? If he's so self-assured, what does he have to prove? Unless it's the grift, maybe.
    posted by angrycat at 5:15 AM on May 18, 2019 [4 favorites]


    Why, it begins to read like that list of rationales for the original Declaration of Independence.

    If memory serves me correctly, a year or two ago when NPR put on its annual 4th of July reading of the Declaration of Independence, Trump supporters complained about their criticism of him.

    Which reveals, of course, that they know darn well Trump is a tyrant, but they don't care, because they think Trump is their tyrant.
    posted by Gelatin at 6:39 AM on May 18, 2019 [28 favorites]


    Yes, but the very reasons these candidates were so electable were turned against them. Kerry was a war hero made out to be a deserter. Gore was brilliant but made out to be boring. Hillary was experienced but her history became baggage.

    Note that the so-called "liberal media" swallowing and regurgitating Republican talking points -- particularly, and shamefully, in giving a platform to Jerome Corsi's lies about Kerry -- is a key factor in each of these outcomes.

    The media is not fair, and only pretends to be to justify its bending over backwards to appease Republicans. Democrats need to get better at their media game, and that includes working the refs as the Republicans did in their decades-long promulgation of the "liberal media" myth. (Getting NPR to fire Mara Liasson for her work on Fox might be a good start.)
    posted by Gelatin at 6:46 AM on May 18, 2019 [16 favorites]


    He's the Comedy Terminator.

    I've long thought the failure of satire in our current predicament is that it is focused on Trump, and not the people around him. In mainstream satire, even the most craven of lickspittles become heroic in the shadow of Trump. Witness the way SNL treats the people around Trump. By virtue of his absurdity, they become normalized and the audience is treated to a sympathetic Lindsey Graham by Kate Mckinnon. But if you focus on what the people around Trump have done to themselves for him, it'd be a much different story.
    posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 7:08 AM on May 18, 2019 [8 favorites]


    Peter Canello, The Atlantic: "Why Trump Should Be Thanking Alec Baldwin"
    Baldwin’s Trump bears a closer resemblance to the befuddled governor on the old “Benson” sitcom than it does “Dr. Strangelove” or “The Manchurian Candidate” or any other of the darker historical figures to whom he’s been compared. In Baldwin’s hands he’s foolish and self-deluded, all right, but he also sometimes seems abashed by the reactions he provokes and the trouble he accidentally stirs up. (“It’s awful. Everything’s falling apart. Sometimes I wish I had never been president,” he moans at the start of an “It’s a Wonderful Life” parody; “All alone again. No one understands me,” he sighs in a skit on his trip to South America.)

    By giving Trump qualities he’s shown little evidence of in public—conscience, introspection, even regret— “SNL” does him an enormous favor. It offers a glimmer of sympathy about his motives, inviting the generous assumption that there’s a better and more self-aware man lurking behind the Twitter feed.
    posted by OnceUponATime at 7:38 AM on May 18, 2019 [29 favorites]


    'There Will Be No War' With the United States, Says Iran's Top Diplomat from Haaretz, but it doesn't seem to be behind the paywall
    posted by mumimor at 8:14 AM on May 18, 2019 [3 favorites]


    Does Anyone Actually Want Joe Biden to Be President?

    I just got back from my town's Democratic caucus meeting. It's obviously a group of active and engaged Democrats. After the meeting we talked about which candidates we supported. Everyone but me liked Biden because they thought he was the most likely to beat Trump. Everybody just assumes a woman can't win :(
    posted by diogenes at 8:25 AM on May 18, 2019 [26 favorites]


    Yeah, that’s the rumble I’m hearing at grass roots level too. People have post election trauma, and they’re terrified that if they step out of the “moderate”, read old white male, lane, we are just handing the White House to Miller and Trump.
    posted by SecretAgentSockpuppet at 9:03 AM on May 18, 2019 [5 favorites]


    The idea that Jordan could have been an ignorant bystander while a coach for two decades during this apparently nonstop molestation defies belief, even by the standards of Republican sex scandals.

    Jim Jordan Claims Vindication, but Inquiry Says Talk of Abuse at Ohio State Was Rampant (NYT) (cw: sexual abuse)
    Wrestlers who worked with Mr. Jordan in the late 1980s and early 1990s continue to say that he did know of Dr. Strauss’s predatory behavior, and his claims of exoneration rankled some wrestlers. “How can he be vindicated? What he’s doing now is throwing salt in the wound,” said Dunyasha Yetts, a wrestler at the university in 1992 and 1993, who was one of the first and most outspoken victims to come forward.

    [...] Mr. Yetts said that Mr. Jordan not only knew of allegations of sexual misconduct when he was an assistant wrestling coach at the university, but he personally confronted the team doctor accused of sexually abusing athletes.
    ::quickly checks ORC 2901.13(A)(4) statute of limitiations for ORC 2901.01(A)(9)(d) complicity with ORC 2907.03 sexual battery:: and the venting thread just. isn't. enough. for. this:
    (4) Except as otherwise provided in divisions (D) to (L) of this section, a prosecution of a violation of section 2907.02 or 2907.03 of the Revised Code or a conspiracy to commit, attempt to commit, or complicity in committing a violation of either section shall be barred unless it is commenced within twenty-five years after the offense is committed.
    posted by Little Dawn at 9:07 AM on May 18, 2019 [8 favorites]


    Are any of you hearing of a true preference for another named candidate from these Democrats?
    posted by Selena777 at 9:20 AM on May 18, 2019


    Elections, consequences, Blue Wave, state houses matter too, etc: Nevada Bans Gay/Trans Panic Defense (Michael Lyle, Nevada Current):
    Nevada has become the fourth state to prohibit using the “trans panic” and “gay panic” defense in court.

    Senate Bill 97, which was signed into law Tuesday, bans people from using a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity as a defense for committing a violent crime against them.

    ...

    “I was proud to sign into law a bill to ban the discriminatory and bigoted gay and trans ‘panic’ defense tactic, which can be used to excuse violent hate crimes against LGBTQ+ individuals,” Gov. Steve Sisolak said in a statement. “Amid a disturbing rise in hate crimes against the LGBTQ+ community around the world, Nevada is reaffirming our commitment to justice and equality for all individuals.”
    I am prouder of my neighboring/sister state by the day! Turn your state blue and you can have nice things and civil rights and all that fun stuff.
    posted by Rosie M. Banks at 9:30 AM on May 18, 2019 [38 favorites]


    I’m not worrying until we see these people on the same stage together a few times. See who can string some sentences together, see who looks like they can think, knock out some of the no-hopers so the pollsters can fit all the names onto a single-digit list.

    Rick Perry used to be a front-runner, too.
    posted by Huffy Puffy at 9:31 AM on May 18, 2019 [11 favorites]


    Elections, consequences, Blue Wave, state houses matter too, etc: Nevada Bans Gay/Trans Panic Defense (Michael Lyle, Nevada Current)

    Where women call the shots (WaPo)
    The nation’s first majority-female legislature is currently meeting in Nevada. Carson City may never be the same.
    Since Nevada seated the nation’s first majority-female state legislature in January, the male old guard has been shaken up by the perspectives of female lawmakers. Bills prioritizing women’s health and safety have soared to the top of the agenda. Mounting reports of sexual harassment have led one male lawmaker to resign. And policy debates long dominated by men, including prison reform and gun safety, are yielding to female voices. [...]

    The female majority is having a huge effect: More than 17 pending bills deal with sexual assault, sex trafficking and sexual misconduct, with some measures aimed at making it easier to prosecute offenders. Bills to ban child marriage and examine the causes of maternal mortality are also on the docket. “I can say with 100 percent certainty that we wouldn’t have had these conversations" a few years ago, said Assembly Majority Leader Teresa Benitez-Thompson (D). "None of these bills would have seen the light of day.”
    posted by Little Dawn at 9:52 AM on May 18, 2019 [58 favorites]


    I don't even mind the notion of a moderate Democrat. I believe the next Democratic President will spend most of his time cleaning up the damage caused by Trump. It will take another couple of elections to build a progressive majority in Congress. But I still don't like Biden. Obama and Bill Clinton were forced into moderation by Republican majorities in Congress. I believe that Obama would have put out a kick-ass universal health bill if he didn't have to compromise with Blue Dogs.
    Biden wants to embrace some middle point with Flat-Earthers: the world is round but not spherical. Even with Anita Hill, I felt he was going for the "middle ground" of "Hill is crazy but we should appease people by holding hearings."
    What made Biden a mediocre Senator and a good vice-president (just relax and act stable) will make him a painful president.
    posted by dances_with_sneetches at 10:44 AM on May 18, 2019 [25 favorites]


    Obama and Bill Clinton were forced into moderation by Republican majorities in Congress.

    Counterpoint: Obama found himself with a republican majority after the midterms because he did not invest in state races and did not hold people accountable for the recession.
    posted by C'est la D.C. at 10:55 AM on May 18, 2019 [35 favorites]


    People have post election trauma, and they’re terrified that if they step out of the “moderate”, read old white male, lane, we are just handing the White House to Miller and Trump.

    That's post-2016-election trauma. Why isn't there more post-2018 optimism?
    posted by kirkaracha at 11:06 AM on May 18, 2019 [17 favorites]


    Because people generally tend more toward risk-aversion than opportunity-seeking.

    Fear is a helluva drug.
    posted by darkstar at 11:07 AM on May 18, 2019 [10 favorites]


    Counterpoint: Obama found himself with a republican majority after the midterms because he did not invest in state races and did not hold people accountable for the recession.

    Counterpoint to the counterpoint: Obama lost his majorities at the midterm because presidents almost always lose seats bigly. Especially when combined with a black president demonized by the other party and passing the ACA. Pelosi/Obama/Reid (heavy on Pelosi) held together the votes to pass it despite knowing and saying it would cost them seats.

    EDIT: And I say this as someone who thinks bankers/torturers should’ve been held accountable and Ds need to focus state/locally way more. I just think it’s not true that that was the 2010 difference.
    posted by chris24 at 11:20 AM on May 18, 2019 [13 favorites]


    Counterpoint to the accepted wisdom that Democrats lose because of their own flawed strategies:

    REPUBLICANS LIE, CHEAT, AND RIG ELECTIONS.
    posted by Autumnheart at 11:23 AM on May 18, 2019 [64 favorites]


    Baldwin’s Trump bears a closer resemblance to the befuddled governor on the old “Benson” sitcom than it does “Dr. Strangelove” or “The Manchurian Candidate” or any other of the darker historical figures to whom he’s been compared.

    Yes okay so Canello makes some good points and yes sure I know this is probably a dumb thing to nitpick about when the field of pickable nits is so bountiful but still: "Historical figures"? Come. The Fuck. ON.
    posted by non canadian guy at 11:54 AM on May 18, 2019 [3 favorites]


    Counterpoint to the accepted wisdom that Democrats lose because of their own flawed strategies:

    REPUBLICANS LIE, CHEAT, AND RIG ELECTIONS.


    No reason why both of these things can't be true at the same time, is there?
    posted by non canadian guy at 11:58 AM on May 18, 2019 [11 favorites]


    Speaking of Republicans lying and cheating, there seems to be an uncanny parallel between Jim Jordan's claim of "vindication" and Trump's claims of "exoneration." It's like the Mueller report all over again, this time via Politico:
    However, Friday's report states investigations "did not identify any contemporaneous documentary evidence that members of the OSU coaching staff, including head coaches or assistant coaches, received or were aware of complaints regarding Strauss sexual misconduct."

    Yet the report also notes that athletes said they openly discussed Strauss' behavior in front of the coaching staff, and 22 coaches "confirmed to the Investigative Team they were aware of rumors and/or complaints about Strauss, dating back to the late 1970s and extending into the mid-1990s."
    Note how the lack of contemporaneous documentary evidence appears to be related to a failure to adequately investigate the abuse:
    "On behalf of the university, we offer our profound regret and sincere apologies to each person who endured Strauss’ abuse," Drake wrote. "Our institution’s fundamental failure at the time to prevent this abuse was unacceptable — as were the inadequate efforts to thoroughly investigate complaints raised by students and staff members."
    I'm not going to research the statute of limitations on civil litigation related to these claims, because I trust that lawyers would have done that research before filing:
    [...] several wrestlers insist Jordan knew, directly or indirectly, about Strauss' behavior, and he was named in lawsuits against the university. Other wrestlers told POLITICO they were regularly harassed in their training facility by sexually aggressive men who attended the university or worked there and that Jordan and other coaches did nothing to stop the behavior.
    Jim Jordan's attempts to deny his involvement in perpetuating rampant abuse should be investigated by the House of Representatives immediately. Survivors are speaking out, and their courage should be honored. This isn't about a political win, this is about justice.
    posted by Little Dawn at 12:32 PM on May 18, 2019 [14 favorites]


    Speaking of Republicans lying and cheating, there seems to be an uncanny parallel between Jim Jordan's claim of "vindication" and Trump's claims of "exoneration."

    The other part of that parallel: just like Trump told us the Mueller report was going to be the biased product of 14 Angry Democrats, or whatever, right up until it was proof of "exoneration", Jordan and the right-wing noise machine have been saying the same about the Ohio State investigation. They said it was a political hit job because it was conducted by the law firm Perkins Coie; the firm's connections to Hillary Clinton, Fusion GPS, and the Steele Dossier made it untrustworthy. So before the OSU investigation "vindicated" Jordan, he was telling us that we shouldn't believe it. And now we're just supposed to move on and never look back.
    posted by peeedro at 12:59 PM on May 18, 2019 [10 favorites]


    NYT, Trump Shows Signs He Will Pardon Servicemen Accused or Convicted of War Crimes
    President Trump has requested the immediate preparation of paperwork needed to pardon several American military members accused or convicted of war crimes — including high-profile cases of murder, attempted murder and desecration of a corpse — indicating that he is considering pardons for the men on or around Memorial Day, according to two United States officials.

    The requests are for Special Operations Chief Edward Gallagher of the Navy SEALs, who is scheduled to stand trial in the coming weeks on charges of shooting unarmed civilians and killing an enemy captive with a knife while deployed in Iraq.

    They are also believed to include the case of a former Blackwater security contractor recently found guilty in the deadly 2007 shooting of dozens of unarmed Iraqis; the case of Maj. Mathew L. Golsteyn, the Army Green Beret accused of killing an unarmed Afghan in 2010; and the case of a group of Marine Corps snipers charged with urinating on the corpse of a dead Taliban fighter.
    "Believe the autocrat. He means what he says."
    posted by zachlipton at 1:24 PM on May 18, 2019 [33 favorites]


    I don't see how Democrats in Congress can continue to slow walk their investigations and such once that goes through. Eventually don't you become complicit in evil if you don't oppose it vigorously enough? I realize these are tough questions that Congressfolks aren't used to facing but at some point that ceases to be an adequate excuse, no?
    posted by Justinian at 2:02 PM on May 18, 2019 [17 favorites]


    On a different and less horrifying topic it just occurred to me one of Biden's big advantages if he ends up in the general against Trump.

    Assuming Trump hasn't driven the economy into the ditch by election day (which is not a given), on that debate stage when Trump starts boasting about the strength of the economy Biden can respond simply, truthfully, and very very memorably: "You're welcome".

    None of the other candidates could do that to the same effect. For different reasons depending on the candidate. But it would be one of those brutally effective moments that pops up from time to time in political debate. I can hear some people's objections now: But it's not fair and not completely accurate and this and that... noise noise noise. It would be extremely effective to counter Trump's strongest advantage (which is how you win, ie: Kerry & swiftboating) while being just truthful enough to pass muster with the pundits.
    posted by Justinian at 2:10 PM on May 18, 2019 [6 favorites]


    @justinamash:
    Here are my principal conclusions:
    1. Attorney General Barr has deliberately misrepresented Mueller’s report.
    2. President Trump has engaged in impeachable conduct.
    3. Partisanship has eroded our system of checks and balances.
    4. Few members of Congress have read the report.

    I offer these conclusions only after having read Mueller’s redacted report carefully and completely, having read or watched pertinent statements and testimony, and having discussed this matter with my staff, who thoroughly reviewed materials and provided me with further analysis.
    ...
    Under our Constitution, the president “shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” While “high Crimes and Misdemeanors” is not defined, the context implies conduct that violates the public trust. Contrary to Barr’s portrayal, Mueller’s report reveals that President Trump engaged in specific actions and a pattern of behavior that meet the threshold for impeachment. In fact, Mueller’s report identifies multiple examples of conduct satisfying all the elements of obstruction of justice, and undoubtedly any person who is not the president of the United States would be indicted based on such evidence.
    And it goes on from there.

    So that puts Rep. Amash (R-MI) ahead of many Democrats in calling for impeachment.
    posted by zachlipton at 2:12 PM on May 18, 2019 [81 favorites]




    They are also believed to include the case of a former Blackwater security contractor

    Blackwater, the company owned by cabinet member Betsy DoVos' brother? If President Clinton had pardoned a murderer with ties to her cabinet, we'd be reading QAnon "Clinton has an army of personal assassins" conspiracy theories for the rest of our lives.
    posted by bluecore at 2:17 PM on May 18, 2019 [23 favorites]


    A crack in the dam.

    Amash? That crack's been there a while, but has shown no real signs of spreading.
    posted by contraption at 2:23 PM on May 18, 2019 [3 favorites]


    Respectfully, unfortunately it feels to me as if I've been reading "Clinton has an army of personal assassins" conspiracy theories since circa 1992.
    posted by riverlife at 2:31 PM on May 18, 2019 [10 favorites]


    Amash, like Joe Walsh, has many many beliefs I find awful but they both seem to come by their beliefs honestly, not through blind partisanship, and they stick to them. And two of those beliefs are in democracy and rule of law. Hard to believe we’re at a point where Joe friggin’ Walsh is a Republican to be (somewhat) admired, but that’s how low the bar is.
    posted by chris24 at 2:55 PM on May 18, 2019 [18 favorites]


    Why isn't there more post-2018 optimism?

    Because the Trump Train has picked up shit-steam afterwards and the Democrats are doing nothing.

    We all know this, it's not rocket science. Bold action is required now. The political context now is not even close to what 1996 was. What's going on in the US government is nowhere near 2008 or 2012. It is NOTHING like the recent past. Everyone, mostly Democrats, desperately want it to be. "Please just get us back to boring pork-barrel politics."

    Well if the Democrats aren't acting now, then the hell with everything. You know it, I know it, and everyone who volunteered like crazy for 2018 knows it. We're getting sold out for empty bullshit bi-partisanship, a handful of 2020 hope, and a bag of unicorn farts. That is *not* what everyone ran on that now controls the House.

    If President Clinton had pardoned a murderer with ties to her cabinet, we'd be reading QAnon "Clinton has an army of personal assassins" conspiracy theories for the rest of our lives.

    Ah, yeah, about that. Bad news there, unfortunately ...

    posted by petebest at 3:37 PM on May 18, 2019 [18 favorites]


    Amash? That crack's been there a while, but has shown no real signs of spreading.

    WaPo, from last July: The New ‘Dr. No’: Rep. Justin Amash, Marooned In Congress
    Amash, who is 38 years old and in his fourth term representing Grand Rapids and its exurbs, is often on the losing end of the roll call. A self-described “Hayekian libertarian” — after F.A. Hayek, the Austrian-British libertarian economist — he’s been compared to the Texas libertarian, former congressman and three-time presidential candidate Ron Paul, who embraced the nickname “Dr. No.”

    These days, Amash doesn’t even agree with Paul on the direction of the Trump-era GOP. Since the summer of 2015, as his presidential campaign took off, Trump has split the libertarian movement that once largely united behind Paul.[…]

    “I was optimistic until about two or three years ago,” Amash said this week, in an interview at his congressional office. “Things have really taken a turn for the worse, in terms of the growth of libertarianism in Congress. You have some bright spots here and there. But for the most part, the party’s become more nationalistic, more anti-trade.”[…]

    In Amash’s conversations with Republicans, there was more frustration with the trade war than many would admit. If Trump had lost the election and Democrats had followed the same agenda, he said, the Freedom Caucus (of which he’s a member) and “all the outside groups would have petitions, demanding we stop Hillary Clinton’s socialist plot.”
    So, yeah, unlike Ron Paul and Rand Paul and Paul Ryan, Amash has stuck to his Hayekian libertarian principles in the face of Trumpist economic and foreign policy, but he's a voice in the wilderness on the right when it comes to Trump. He's an ally of convenience when it comes to impeachment.
    posted by Doktor Zed at 4:25 PM on May 18, 2019 [9 favorites]


    Joe Biden said in a speech that Democrats aren't angry.
    I think the righteous rage of millions of women rn is maybe evidence to the contrary.
    posted by angrycat at 4:29 PM on May 18, 2019 [43 favorites]


    NBC News, Trump administration identifies at least 1,700 additional children it may have separated
    The Trump administration has identified at least 1,712 migrant children it may have separated from their parents in addition to those separated under the “zero tolerance” policy, according to court transcripts of a Friday hearing.

    U.S. District Court Judge Dana Sabraw ordered the Trump administration to identify children separated before the zero tolerance policy went into effect in May 2018, resulting in the separation of over 2,800 children.

    Sabraw previously ordered those migrant families to be reunited, but the additional children were identified more recently when the Inspector General for Health and Human Services estimated “thousands more” may have been separated before the policy was officially underway.

    Other potentially separated migrant children could still be identified. The government has reviewed the files of 4,108 children out of 50,000 so far.
    posted by zachlipton at 4:48 PM on May 18, 2019 [19 favorites]


    Biden didn't say that Democrats aren't angry, he said that he doesn't believe that the angrier the candidate is the more likely they are to win the nomination. The exact quote I'm seeing is:
    “Some say Democrats don’t want to hear about unity. That they are angry– and the angrier you are – the better. That’s what they are saying to have to do to win the Democratic nomination. Well, I don’t believe it. I believe Democrats want to unify this nation. That’s what we’ve always been about. Unity. "
    He may be wrong and it may well not be time for unity when one party is all in on putting kids in cages and such. But it's not the blatantly counterfactual "Democrats aren't angry" that is being portrayed in some media outlets and they should retract those portrayals. He clearly didn't say that Democrats are not angry, he said that being the angriest candidate isn't the best way to win.
    posted by Justinian at 5:33 PM on May 18, 2019 [4 favorites]


    [sic] on the ungrammatical quote, by the way. I don't know if it is Politico's error or Biden's.
    posted by Justinian at 5:41 PM on May 18, 2019


    Who sent in photos of his fingers circled to is it Vice Magazine for how many years?

    It was Vanity Fair which makes it even more deliciously hilarious because of the name's meaning:

    noun. (in Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress ) a fair that goes on perpetually in the town of Vanity and symbolizes worldly ostentation and frivolity.
    posted by srboisvert at 5:45 PM on May 18, 2019 [4 favorites]


    I don't mind a moderate Democrat candidate

    It's one thing to honestly compromise on a difference of values or opinion. It's another thing to dishonestly compromise by telling someone you can put out the fire burning their house down with a garden hose.
    posted by xammerboy at 5:47 PM on May 18, 2019 [19 favorites]


    Meanwhile for those following the earlier-in-the-thread Austrian Ibizagate, vice-chancellor Strache has resigned while declaring that he is a victim of a smear and disinformation campaign. Of course the response is, dude, it’s on video. Meanwhile the FPÖ is calling for investigation into how the recordings were obtained.

    Does this all seem familiar? One fun twist being widely debated is what is that bag of white powder prominently displayed on the table seen in the recording?

    All politics is local but we’re just one big happy interconnected locale now.

    Austrian coverage

    Washington Post coverage
    posted by misterpatrick at 6:11 PM on May 18, 2019 [13 favorites]


    Who sent in photos of his fingers circled to is it Vice Magazine for how many years?

    It was Vanity Fair which makes it even more deliciously hilarious because of the name's meaning:


    I figured Vice was a slip that wasn't worth correcting, but now that it's been incorrectly corrected, I'll point out that it wasn't Vice, or Vanity Fair, it was Spy.
    posted by paper chromatographologist at 7:29 PM on May 18, 2019 [15 favorites]


    Australia’s Ruling Party Pulls Out Stunning Win

    “Scott Morrison, Australia’s conservative prime minister, scored a surprise victory in federal elections on Saturday, propelled by a populist wave — the ‘quiet Australians,’ he termed it — resembling the force that has upended politics in the United States, Britain and beyond,” the New York Times reports.

    “The win stunned Australian election analysts — polls had pointed to a loss for Mr. Morrison’s coalition for months. But in the end, the prime minister confounded expectations suggesting that the country was ready for a change in course after six years of tumultuous leadership under the conservative political coalition.”

    Washington Post: “The apparent upset victory was the latest election to trample predictions by polling firms, which all showed Morrison’s political bloc trailing the opposition Labor Party. It also carried other uncanny parallels with Trump’s rise.”


    Shockingly close squeaker upending months of polls based on the 'great silent majority'?? Can we count on Cambridge Analytica, David Pecker, Murdoch's Slime Brigade, Pooty-poot and a tsunami of both-sides reporting the entire time?
    posted by petebest at 7:34 PM on May 18, 2019 [16 favorites]


    The original "short fingered vulgarian" jab was from Spy, but the author recalled receiving photos annotated in gold Sharpie later, after becoming the editor of Vanity Fair.
    posted by contraption at 7:45 PM on May 18, 2019 [15 favorites]


    Pardoning war criminals telegraphs that he's going violate Posse Comitatus. He knows Congress won't do fuck all about it and he'll let his Nazis in the military commit war crimes against civilians. There will be, like everything else over the past 2 1/2 years, no consequences.
    posted by fluttering hellfire at 7:53 PM on May 18, 2019 [20 favorites]


    “Some say Democrats don’t want to hear about unity. That they are angry– and the angrier you are – the better. That’s what they are saying to have to do to win the Democratic nomination. Well, I don’t believe it. I believe Democrats want to unify this nation. That’s what we’ve always been about. Unity. "

    Apparently there are, as I recall the claim, good people on both sides. Oddly enough I'm not sure there is much useful triangulation to be done with complete abortion bans and Muslim travel bans, but thanks to Biden for reminding me of his barely warmed up centrist truth-is-in-the-middle shtick.
    posted by jaduncan at 7:54 PM on May 18, 2019 [13 favorites]


    Apparently there are, as I recall the claim, good people on both sides. Oddly enough I'm not sure there is much useful triangulation to be done with complete abortion bans and Muslim travel bans, but thanks to Biden for reminding me of his barely warmed up centrist truth-is-in-the-middle shtick.

    For real. This is somehow worse than the misquote. Biden is a poison.
    posted by codacorolla at 8:02 PM on May 18, 2019 [12 favorites]


    Amash

    Now almost as many Republican congresspeople favor impeachment as Democratic
    posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 8:02 PM on May 18, 2019 [16 favorites]


    Australia just voted against taking action to fix the climate crisis. That's sobering.
    posted by xammerboy at 8:20 PM on May 18, 2019 [20 favorites]


    "I believe Democrats want to unify this nation. That’s what we’ve always been about. Unity."

    The only "unity" the other Democratic candidates should get behind right now is unifying to fund a superpac to bring down Biden. And don't worry, it's not a circular firing squad if everyone is firing at one target.
    posted by chortly at 8:49 PM on May 18, 2019 [14 favorites]


    Sara Nelson in her own words on building a fighting labor movement, the proud history of democratic socialism in America, how workers ended the shutdown, and how they'll stop Trump, too. “People Are Ready to Fight
    posted by The Whelk at 9:37 PM on May 18, 2019 [11 favorites]


    There's an Australian election thread, if you want to discuss that situation.
    posted by Chrysostom at 10:25 PM on May 18, 2019 [3 favorites]


    @qjurecic If the argument is that talk of impeachment is virtue-signaling, well, you're goddamn right it is.

    If Congress Won't Act, Trump Will

    About the only energy I have left this month for the Trumpian cataclysm is entirely directed at wishing I could hug Quinta Jurecic.
    posted by eirias at 2:54 AM on May 19, 2019 [19 favorites]


    From the article linked above:
    The irony of Trump’s attitude toward federal law enforcement is that the president fears the FBI is exactly what he wants it to be: a gang of thugs operating on no higher principle than political advantage. His only problem is that they are not his thugs. “You’re telling me that Bobby and Jack [Kennedy] didn’t talk about investigations?” Mueller quotes the president as raging. “Or Obama didn’t tell Eric Holder who to investigate?” The man described in the report is someone so imprisoned in his own consciousness that he seems incapable of understanding that other people might, unlike him, go through the world as something other than scammers or bullies.

    This worldview depends on ignoring the post-Watergate reforms designed to prevent the president from using the nation’s intelligence and law-enforcement capabilities as political tools. More than that, it requires pretending that those reforms never existed at all—that Trump’s corruption is not an anomaly, but only an honest recognition of what everyone who’s savvy already knew to be the case. It requires erasing the Nixon impeachment process, and the fact that the House Judiciary Committee included among the high crimes and misdemeanors committed by Richard Nixon that he “repeatedly engaged in conduct … impairing the due and proper administration of justice and the conduct of lawful inquiries.”
    IMO, this is at the heart of everything Trump and his crime family and their hangers-on do. And it is what Trump voters believe. Given that Roy Cohn is the common denominator here, it is probably how Nixon die-hards explained to themselves what happened with Watergate. And it's probably deeply embedded in the Republican soul.
    posted by mumimor at 4:27 AM on May 19, 2019 [40 favorites]


    I can't remember exactly who said this, and it's probably a statement that goes back a while: the true mark of an authoritarian system isn't that it preys upon the innocent, but that the guilty go unpunished. Impunity is a cancer.
    posted by holgate at 4:34 AM on May 19, 2019 [38 favorites]




    NYT, Trump Shows Signs He Will Pardon Servicemen Accused or Convicted of War Crimes

    Army veteran and former Republican John Cole of Balloon Juice forcefully responds:
    ...pardoning war criminals doesn’t honor our troops regardless what fucking day of the year it is done. It’s a spit in the face of every man and woman who served honorably in the military. It’s saying “hey- you’re all murderers anyway.” It’s fucking disgusting.

    Third, those convicted of war crimes by the military are most assuredly guilty. It’s about as easy to convict soldiers of these things as it is to convict a cop of manslaughter. Those convicted are the most egregious cases imaginable. I mean jesus tapdancing christ, in the My Lai massacre, 500 unarmed civilians were murdered, gang raped, and had their corpses mutilated, and approximately ONE person, Lt. Calley, a platoon leader which is the lowest unit level in existence, was convicted. And then he was even pardoned had his sentence commuted.
    posted by Gelatin at 7:59 AM on May 19, 2019 [55 favorites]


    I'm grudgingly developing respect for Justin Amash. I don't agree with most of his positions at all but he seems to come by them honestly. He's an ideologue but not one that's unreasonable. And unlike anyone else in his party--or most of those in the opposition--he seems to believe truth and the public good outweigh partisan image-building.
    posted by jackbishop at 8:04 AM on May 19, 2019 [4 favorites]


    He's an ideologue but not one that's unreasonable. And unlike anyone else in his party--or most of those in the opposition--he seems to believe truth and the public good outweigh partisan image-building.

    He has scads of unreasonable positions and supports unreasonable policies. His version of "the public good" includes greenhouse gas deregulation, refusing to remediate Flint's water, opposing Roe v Wade, and stripping tens of millions of Americans of their health insurance. He doesn't deserve a cookie for standing steadfastly behind that.
    posted by Rust Moranis at 8:23 AM on May 19, 2019 [11 favorites]




    SCOTUS Wife Ginni Thomas Floated Anti-Fraud Campaign For ‘Questionable’ Precincts

    Wow! This has it all. SCOTUS spouse pumping for naked voter suppression. Targeting of said suppression. Voter suppressor arguing for it being totes cool because not illegal. Frank admission that they don't do more of it because Democrats complain loudly (keep it up, peeps!). (More) SCOTUS corruption by marriage.

    I'm dizzy from the torrent of bad crap spewing out of the GOP/Trump chimera on a daily (hourly?) basis. Please stop the world; I want to get off.
    posted by Mental Wimp at 10:00 AM on May 19, 2019 [13 favorites]


    We would also have accepted: Begin impeachment hearings.
    posted by petebest at 10:11 AM on May 19, 2019 [9 favorites]


    Deutsche Bank Staff Saw Suspicious Activity in Trump and Kushner Accounts (NYT)
    Anti-money laundering specialists at Deutsche Bank recommended in 2016 and 2017 that multiple transactions involving legal entities controlled by Donald J. Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, be reported to a federal financial-crimes watchdog.

    The transactions, some of which involved Mr. Trump’s now-defunct foundation, set off alerts in a computer system designed to detect illicit activity, according to five current and former bank employees. Compliance staff members who then reviewed the transactions prepared so-called suspicious activity reports that they believed should be sent to a unit of the Treasury Department that polices financial crimes.

    But executives at Deutsche Bank, which has lent billions of dollars to the Trump and Kushner companies, rejected their employees’ advice. The reports were never filed with the government. [...] Deutsche Bank’s decision not to report the transactions is the latest twist in Mr. Trump’s long, complicated relationship with the German bank — the only mainstream financial institution consistently willing to do business with the real estate developer. [...]

    When he became president, he owed Deutsche Bank well over $300 million. That made the German institution Mr. Trump’s biggest creditor — and put the bank in a bind. Senior executives worried that if they took a tough stance with Mr. Trump’s accounts — for example, by demanding payment of a delinquent loan — they could provoke the president’s wrath. On the other hand, if they didn’t do anything, the bank could be perceived as cutting a lucrative break for Mr. Trump, whose administration wields regulatory and law enforcement power over the bank.
    posted by Little Dawn at 10:29 AM on May 19, 2019 [50 favorites]


    Deutschbank is how we got Kavanaugh.
    posted by fluttering hellfire at 11:09 AM on May 19, 2019 [19 favorites]


    CNN: White House to focus on investment in Middle East as part of peace proposal
    The White House will announce Sunday afternoon the first part of its Middle East peace proposal, what officials are calling an economic "workshop" to encourage investing capital in the West Bank, Gaza, and the region, a senior administration official tells CNN.

    The workshop will take place in Manama, Bahrain, on June 25 and 26, bringing together finance ministers with global and regional business leaders. The effort is being headed by Jared Kushner, the senior White House adviser and President's son-in-law, and White House Middle East envoy Jason Greenblatt, who have spent years developing the proposal along with the much stickier political component, which officials said would be announced later in the year.
    Never mind how idiotic Jared’s policy follow-up is to his DOA immigration deal, why is the Trump administration announcing this on a Sunday? What are they trying to distract everyone from? (The DB story is just one headline, but Team Trump’s received such a backlash over their Iran sabre-rattling that maybe this is their idea of reassurance.)
    posted by Doktor Zed at 11:25 AM on May 19, 2019 [1 favorite]


    Eh, that may be the least stupid thing we've seen from Jared yet. Properly run rather than entirely looted (we know it won't happen and if it does, the money will indeed be looted), significant investments in infrastructure and credit systems to finance new businesses do in fact help stabilize the political situation in an area.
    posted by wierdo at 11:31 AM on May 19, 2019 [3 favorites]


    And regarding the SARs, how am I not surprised that DB didn't follow the normal policy of submitting an SAR based solely on the flag from their computer systems with no review whatsoever that basically every bank dealing with US citizens follows.

    Mountains of pointless SARs are generated daily, to the point that they are almost entirely useless except for giving investigators something to look at after someone has done something egregious enough to come to the attention of the feds. That's because there is no penalty for filing a spurious report but there are large fines for failing to file when they should have. Interesting that Trump is involved in one of the incredibly rare instances that a bank decided not to file, especially since there is zero downside to the bank unless they are so entwined in his criminal schemes that they are concerned about being implicated criminally.
    posted by wierdo at 11:43 AM on May 19, 2019 [7 favorites]


    wierdo, Trump was not involved in one such incident but several, according to the New York Times article.
    posted by Bella Donna at 11:46 AM on May 19, 2019 [5 favorites]


    significant investments in infrastructure and credit systems to finance new businesses do in fact help stabilize the political situation in an area.

    The kleptocracy notwithstanding, it was only last August that the Trump administration cut US aid to the Palestinian Authority to the tune of $200 million in aid "to ensure these funds are spent in accordance with U.S. national interests and provide value to the U.S. taxpayer." Meanwhile, the UN reports that Palestinian food aid is threatened by 'serious funding crisis' (Al Jazeera). This could be Jared's "let them eat cake" moment.
    posted by Doktor Zed at 11:57 AM on May 19, 2019 [8 favorites]


    Banks over-file SARs to keep the regulator flooded in paperwork, too. DB's silence is hugely telling.
    posted by Devonian at 12:00 PM on May 19, 2019 [9 favorites]


    mumimor IMO, this is at the heart of everything Trump and his crime family and their hangers-on do. And it is what Trump voters believe.

    My boss is a Republican, and he often affects a very world weary attitude where he'll talk about someone scamming and then sigh and say "everyone does it, just the way the world works." Basically he justifies his support for Republican cheating, graft, corruption, and crime by convincing himself that cheating, graft, corruption, and crime are universal, that therefore the Democrats do all the same stuff too, and that therefore any Democratic complaint about cheating, graft, corruption, and crime is mere political posturing.

    Worse, he sees it as whining. In his view everyone cheats so if you say people shouldn't you're just a whining hypocrite. And he can't stand a whiner, so he votes Republican because at least they're tough and get shit done and don't whine about the cheating.
    posted by sotonohito at 12:14 PM on May 19, 2019 [26 favorites]


    Deutsche Bank Staff Saw Suspicious Activity in Trump and Kushner Accounts (NYT)

    Deutsche Bank at this point is nothing more than the knowing accomplice to Russia's kleptocracy and active measures campaign against the west. They're operationalizing Russia's intent to subvert Democracy for profit. If a non-"never look backwards" Democrat wins like Warren, I want to see real enforcement and actual jail time against the entire corporate ownership structure of DB, and maybe even a corporate death penalty on its operations in the US. The scale of knowing criminality warrants it.
    posted by T.D. Strange at 12:47 PM on May 19, 2019 [14 favorites]


    Youth Climate Strike activist attempts to invite Biden to participate in a climate policy forum, Biden interrupts her and tells her "read RealClearPolitics, it will tell you about how I started this whole thing back in '87 with climate change"
    posted by Rust Moranis at 1:19 PM on May 19, 2019 [12 favorites]


    > Basically he justifies his support for Republican cheating, graft, corruption, and crime by convincing himself that cheating, graft, corruption, and crime are universal, that therefore the Democrats do all the same stuff too, and that therefore any Democratic complaint about cheating, graft, corruption, and crime is mere political posturing.

    Digital Civil War review: a stark call to save American democracy (Charles Kaiser, Guardian)
    Norman Ornstein was one the first Washington pundits to identify the big problem with the way the mainstream press deals with a sharply altered political universe, writing in 2014: “Insisting on equivalence as the mantra of mainstream journalism leaves the average voter at sea, unable to identify and vote against those perpetrating the problem. The public is left with a deeper disdain for all politics and all politicians.”

    Daou strongly agrees. The “mainstream media and the political establishment”, he writes, have failed to “serve as a counterbalance to the dishonesty and hypocrisy poisoning American politics”. Or as progressive analyst Zerlina Maxwell put it, “there will be literal Nazis marching in the streets before the [mainstream media] realizes that calling for civility from both sides is stupid. Wait. Too late.”
    posted by Little Dawn at 1:23 PM on May 19, 2019 [12 favorites]


    Youth Climate Strike activist attempts to invite Biden to participate in a climate policy forum, Biden interrupts her and tells her "read RealClearPolitics, it will tell you about how I started this whole thing back in '87 with climate change"

    He's the new Al Gore!*

    *does not include playing a large early part in raising awareness of carbon-driven climate change
    posted by jaduncan at 1:24 PM on May 19, 2019 [8 favorites]


    CNN: White House to focus on investment in Middle East as part of peace proposal

    Um, I don't know if the administration has noticed, but the "Middle East" has lots of money already. Or do they mean investing in Palestinians and Yemenis? If they want to pressure the oil-rich in the region to invest in the poverty-stricken areas, then great. Otherwise, we've got some investing to do in the US: infrastructure, education, medical care, homelessness, mental health, and income inequity.

    In addition, these guys' ideology prevents them from actually solving the economic problems in the Middle East, which stem from even greater income inequity than in the US. They're bound to trickle down, which just doesn't work.
    posted by Mental Wimp at 1:32 PM on May 19, 2019 [4 favorites]


    Axios, Exclusive: Emails show Trump nominee called administration "heartless"

    If you perhaps thought that the "heartless" part involved separating children from their parents or any of the many other heartless things this administration has done, what thread do you think you're reading? He called the administration "heartless" for pushing him out as head of the border patrol.
    President Trump's pick for director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is going to be working with the same official who fired him as head of the Border Patrol in 2017 — and internal emails obtained by Axios' Alayna Treene reveal just how bitter Morgan's exit was.

    Why it matters: The emails — dated Jan. 24 and 25, 2017 — show the depth of Morgan's anger and disappointment with the Trump administration for forcing him out of the role. But they also show how far Morgan has come to get back into Trump's good graces, after talking up Trump's immigration policies on television and endorsing his proposed border wall.

    "The fact they are pushing for me to leave immediately is heartless and void of any decency and compassion," Mark Morgan wrote to Kevin McAleenan, the former acting commissioner of Customs and Border Protection who is now Trump's acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. "This is just wrong."

    "I am being removed in the name of politics — and politics at its worst. … I will not have them believe I willingly left under these circumstances," Morgan wrote in one of the emails to McAleenan.

    In a separate email, he wrote: "This is wrong on many levels. I have several questions but I need to process through a bit more."
    This appears to be the follow-up attack to the Post's story the other day detailing how Miller wanted Morgan to be assigned to a different job instead. That didn't happen, and Miller looked stupid in the Post, so now Morgan is made to look stupid in Axios.
    posted by zachlipton at 1:45 PM on May 19, 2019 [6 favorites]


    Ashley Nicole Black
    Do you think Elizabeth Warren has a plan to fix my love life?

    Elizabeth Warren
    DM me and let’s figure this out.
    posted by chris24 at 1:55 PM on May 19, 2019 [87 favorites]


    Did you know that Warren lists the CFPB as a thing she is a mom to in her twitter bio? Well now you do. EVERYBODY LOVE HER NOW GODDAMNIT
    posted by angrycat at 2:19 PM on May 19, 2019 [55 favorites]


    Timothy Snyder's AMA (reddit): I’m Timothy Snyder, author of THE ROAD TO UNFREEDOM and ON TYRANNY, and I’ve tracked the rise of authoritarianism from Russia to Europe to America. Ask Me Anything.
    I am Timothy Snyder, the author The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America and On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. Now available in paperback, The Road to Unfreedom, is about global oligarchy and American politics, post-modern authoritarianism from Russia to Europe to us, and the ways that cyber can make us less free. It's a history of the present grounded in the hope that knowing our predicament is the first step to resolving it. It tells the "Russia story" from beginning to end – all of it. Ask me anything!
    posted by kingless at 2:32 PM on May 19, 2019 [5 favorites]


    From the LA Times: He voted for Trump. Now he and his wife raise their son from opposite sides of the border.

    In which we learn the story of mental giant Jason Rochester, who decided to support Trump despite his wife and mother of his child Cecilia being undocumented. And despite her pleas for him to consider what Trump was saying. Watch in awe as Jason travels to her poor rural town of Juanacatalan and is horrified at the lack of McDonalds and Walmart. But surely he has come to see the light and understand his mistake?

    Of course not. He still doesn't think he made a mistake because Trump is going after the true enemy: women's rights. "You have to think about the broader picture.… I feel like God will bless my decision."
    posted by Justinian at 2:46 PM on May 19, 2019 [28 favorites]


    Politico: HUD's Ben Carson broke law with furniture order, GAO says
    Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson broke the law when he failed to report an order for a $31,561 dining room table set for his office as well as the installation of an $8,000 dishwasher in the office kitchen, the Government Accountability Office found in a report published Thursday.[…]

    Carson canceled the table order after it surfaced in news reports in early 2018, and he appeared to blame the fiasco on his wife, Candy, in congressional testimony. HUD spokespeople offered conflicting accounts of what Carson knew about the order.[…]

    Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations subcommittee that oversees HUD, called the debacle “another example of the Trump administration trying to cast aside the law if it doesn’t suit them.”

    “I am also disturbed by the pattern of false statements and attempts to conceal this incident, mislead the public, and prevent Congress and the American people from seeing how taxpayer dollars are being mismanaged,” Reed said in an e-mailed statement.
    In another administration, this would have resulted in a resignation at the barest minimum, but in Trump’s, it’s nearly lost in the news cycle of even bigger scandals.
    posted by Doktor Zed at 2:47 PM on May 19, 2019 [16 favorites]


    Way back in November 2016: "Dr. Carson feels he has no government experience, he's never run a federal agency. The last thing he would want to do was take a position that could cripple the presidency."

    Well, he was right about the first part of his statement, but needn't ever have worried about that second bit.
    posted by Room 101 at 3:45 PM on May 19, 2019 [2 favorites]


    and he appeared to blame the fiasco on his wife

    As if it's better that someone's wife can spend the government's money without an actual government official being responsible for and approving the purchase?

    I mean, my budget is pretty large. I bet my wife could get me some nice stuff for my office; she's got a good eye for decorating BUT THAT IS NOT HOW IT WORKS
    posted by ctmf at 4:36 PM on May 19, 2019 [15 favorites]


    The Trump economy is hurting most Americans. Statistics won't fool voters (Robert Reich, Guardian Opinion)
    Trump is the least popular president to run for re-election in the history of polling but Mulvaney thinks Americans will vote for him anyway because unemployment has hit a 50-year low, wages are rising and economic growth exceeds 3%. A CNN poll released in early May shows 56% of Americans approve Trump’s handling of the economy. This is making Democrats nervous. No president since the second world war has failed to be reelected during a good economy. [...]

    Yet there’s a difference between how Americans view the overall economy and how they see their own personal economy. That difference has widened in recent years as more people get into financial trouble even as the economy soars. Which means the official economic statistics have less relevance to what people tell each other over the kitchen table when they’re trying to pay the bills.

    And it’s this kitchen-table economics – not the official statistics – that drives votes. [...] More Americans are employed but most jobs still pay squat. Adjusted for inflation, recent wage gains are smaller than the wage gains of 2015. [...] Employers continue to sack workers willy-nilly. [...] Add to this that almost 80% of American workers are living paycheck to paycheck, and you get a feel for the havoc so many families are living in. Meanwhile, the costs of education, childcare, housing, and healthcare are skyrocketing. Trump hasn’t done a thing to help. If anything, he’s made everything worse.

    [...] If Democrats speak to the practical economic needs of Americans and offer realistic solutions, as they’ve started to do, Americans won’t pay attention to overall economic statistics when they vote in 2020. They’ll heed what’s in their kitchen, and Trump will be toast.
    posted by Little Dawn at 6:50 PM on May 19, 2019 [8 favorites]


    Statistics won't fool voters? Absolute hogwash. We live in a country where ABSOLUTE LIES are fooling 45% of the voters every day. We're way beyond "How to Lie with Statistics" here.
    posted by mmoncur at 7:17 PM on May 19, 2019 [40 favorites]


    "You have to think about the broader picture.… I feel like God will bless my decision."


    He that troubleth his own house shall inherit the wind.
    posted by darkstar at 7:21 PM on May 19, 2019 [7 favorites]


    Youth Climate Strike activist attempts to invite Biden to participate in a climate policy forum, Biden interrupts her and tells her "read RealClearPolitics, it will tell you about how I started this whole thing back in '87 with climate change"

    You've gotta admit, that knocks Feinstein's "I know what I'm doing" right into a cocked hat.
    posted by non canadian guy at 8:23 PM on May 19, 2019 [8 favorites]


    And if Biden "started this whole thing back in '87 with climate change" ...uhh what the fuck is a bigger indictment of his performance on "this whole thing" than...looking around?

    Heck'uva job there, Uncle Joe. You solved the shit outta that. In the last...32 years.
    posted by T.D. Strange at 9:31 PM on May 19, 2019 [21 favorites]


    While I'm not a Biden fan, are we seriously going to BEC ourselves into thinking that Biden is bad because he was literally the first person to introduce climate legislation but failed to solve the problem singlehandedly?
    posted by a snickering nuthatch at 10:05 PM on May 19, 2019 [7 favorites]


    2016 was not a lightning strike. It was the consequence of everything that happened before it. a long string of things happening that formed a road to today. That's how history works. 2015 was followed by 2016. If things are bad today, things in the past are the cause.

    Literally my only problem with Biden is that he was one of the people driving the bus that got us to 2014, and then 2015, and then to 2016, and he won't admit that anything went wrong along the way. And the more he tries to take credit for anything, the worse it feels.
    posted by Rainbo Vagrant at 10:22 PM on May 19, 2019 [29 favorites]


    By the logic above, every single candidate who proposed legislation in the past for something which is still a problem is actually disqualified for being incompetent. I don't even know where to begin. It's like saying that Sanders is terrible because he's been advocating single payer health care for decades but our health care system is still garbage, and thus obviously he sucks.
    posted by Justinian at 10:45 PM on May 19, 2019 [7 favorites]


    Biden's climate advisor was on the board of a fossil fuel company until last year. If you want to make a Sanders health care analogy then it's more like we all have leprosy and Sanders's health policy advisor had been paid $1.1 million by the leprosy industry over the last four years and now he's championing finding middle ground with the pro-leprosy lobby while telling youth activists with falling-off faces that he invented that whole anti-leprosy thing back in '87.
    posted by Rust Moranis at 11:15 PM on May 19, 2019 [33 favorites]


    I don't know enough about Biden's climate record to judge it one way or the other. But I'm sensing that his reaction to just about every issue in the table is a reworded version of "I don't have a racist bone in my body", and that's why it leaves such a bad taste in my mouth and others. (Also I would not be surprised if we hear him say literally that some point.)

    It's like: Dude, you can assert one or another position, you can talk up your record and your character, but don't demonstrate such extreme defensiveness that your message becomes "I am perfection made manifest and you shall not judge me". We have enough of that already!

    I suppose it ties in with his assumption that the problems we face are more superficial than structural. So although his attitude is egotistic, it's not excessively so — his point is that he's the best anyone could expect to be because the bar is not that high. This is, of course, the other reason many are turned off; if you have any real knowledge of what's going on with climate, or government corruption, or systemic prejudice, you know how enormous the monster is and perhaps feel a little guilty for not doing more to fight it. This of course makes the supposedly relatable Joe all the less relatable to me.

    But I (and MeFi) am not everyone — it's certainly possible that his attitude is the ultimate winner for the American public come next year. If he really has a dramatic statistical edge, then the country needs him to be the nominee. But my intuition right now says that's not the case at all, and probably the opposite is truer.
    posted by InTheYear2017 at 3:45 AM on May 20, 2019 [17 favorites]


    After admitting that the Mueller report shows obvious impeachable offenses, Rep. Justin Amash (99.9%R-Michigan) picked up a primary challenger who is explicitly running to defend Trump from impeachment.
    posted by Etrigan at 4:03 AM on May 20, 2019 [21 favorites]


    Democrats May Use ‘Power of the Purse’ Next (Axios)

    House Democrats are considering a new idea to pressure the Trump administration to comply with their subpoenas. The idea is to use the appropriations process as leverage and threaten to withhold funding until they get the documents and testimony they’ve requested.

    ... It’s a move that has a high risk of failure, since appropriations bills have to be approved by a Republican-held Senate and signed by the president. But given the Trump administration’s determination to resist all of the Democrats’ oversight efforts, and the prospect that court fights could take years, they’re being forced to consider every tool they might have.

    ... Democrats on the House Appropriations Committee are writing the bills that will fund the federal government for the next fiscal year — including the ones that will fund the Justice Department and the Treasury Department, two of the departments that have been resisting subpoenas.

    ... So far, there's no detailed plan. Axios spoke with several members of Congress and staffers involved in the talks, and as of now they say discussions have been preliminary.

    ... The bottom line: There's probably no oversight tool that won't lead to months of delays if the Trump administration is determined to resist House Democrats.


    Months of delays about budget appropriations, that are, inevitably, bluster. Well, that's certain to appeal to the centrist Trump voter who might be swayed by half-hearted inaction to a Constitutional crisis.
    posted by petebest at 4:45 AM on May 20, 2019 [11 favorites]


    for the next FPP, I propose the theme war

    on trade
    on the global economy
    on china
    on huawei
    on technological dependance on silicon valley
    on iran
    on wha... oooh, look at that butterfly
    posted by hugbucket at 5:34 AM on May 20, 2019 [4 favorites]


    The White House will announce Sunday afternoon the first part of its Middle East peace proposal, what officials are calling an economic "workshop" to encourage investing capital in the West Bank, Gaza, and the region, a senior administration official tells CNN.

    The workshop will take place in Manama, Bahrain, on June 25 and 26, bringing together finance ministers with global and regional business leaders. The effort is being headed by Jared Kushner, the senior White House adviser and President's son-in-law, and White House Middle East envoy Jason Greenblatt, who have spent years developing the proposal along with the much stickier political component, which officials said would be announced later in the year.
    Noga Tarnopolsky: 🔴The Palestinians were not informed of the upcoming Bahrain summit regarding their future.
    posted by zombieflanders at 5:38 AM on May 20, 2019 [27 favorites]


    The bottom line: There's probably no oversight tool that won't lead to months of delays if the Trump administration is determined to resist House Democrats.

    I refuse to believe that it's impossible for the House to enforce subpoenas. If it is, we might as well end the experiment because the Framers fucked up.
    posted by diogenes at 5:58 AM on May 20, 2019 [35 favorites]


    Miami Herald dives into the dirty details of Mar-a-Lago-gate: Feds Open Foreign-Money Investigation into Trump Donor Cindy Yang

    MoJo: In Defamation Lawsuit, a Trump Donor Acknowledges Providing Chinese Execs “Access” in US—According to her lawyer, Cindy Yang “realized the premium attached to a picture and story that her clients would cherish.”
    Last week, Li “Cindy” Yang, the Florida massage parlor entrepreneur and Trump donor who has been part of the recent controversy involving Donald Trump’s private resort, Mar-a-Lago, filed a defamation lawsuit against the parent company of the Miami Herald. The suit focused on a Herald story that had placed Yang in the spotlight by reporting she had posed for a photo with Trump at his West Palm Beach golf club during a Super Bowl party in February and noting that Yang had founded the day spa where Robert Kraft, the owner of the New England Patriots, had been busted for allegedly soliciting prostitution. (Yang sold that particular spa years earlier.) The suit claims the newspaper published false statements about Yang and her business that suggested illegal conduct had occurred in her spas. But the suit also contained a surprising passage that acknowledged that Yang had also run a business that provided Chinese executives “access to American business and political culture”—and this included entry to events at Mar-a-Lago.[…]

    The Mar-a-Lago scandal is certainly bigger than whatever happens with Yang. After a Chinese woman named Yujing Zhang sneaked into Mar-a-Lago last month—perhaps with the participation of Charles Lee, a mysterious Chinese businessman—the Herald reported that federal investigators have been probing possible Chinese intelligence operations targeting Trump and Mar-a-Lago. The story triggered by Yang’s photo with Trump now extends far beyond her day spa business.
    And even the broader Mar-a-Lago access scandals pale in comparison to what's going on in D.C. at the Trump International Hotel and foreign governments/lobbyists.
    posted by Doktor Zed at 6:13 AM on May 20, 2019 [10 favorites]


    I refuse to believe that it's impossible for the House to enforce subpoenas. If it is, we might as well end the experiment because the Framers fucked up.

    I am reminded of a time when my teenage sister decided that rules simply no longer applied to her. My father would drive her to school and literally watch as she went through the front door; she'd walk out the back door, wait for my father to leave for work, and go home and hang out. My father would ground her; she'd go out the window, or simply sneak out and come home completely unfazed by the yelling that would ensue. My father told her that she was absolutely not going to the beach for a weekend trip; not only did she go, but she stole a check from his checkbook to pay for the room and wrote "X's beach vacation" in the Memo field.

    And my father was at his wits' end on how to proceed. In simplest terms, she completely rejected his authority over her. Punishments have no meaning if the punished can merely pretend that they don't exist. Physical force was not an option. She wasn't old enough to kick out of the house and say "fine, you're so smart, fend for yourself." He couldn't literally chain her to the radiator. If someone is so self-centered and ignorant that they destroy all social norms to get what they want, what is the recourse by those who honor those norms?

    The Trump lickspittles like Barr and Pirro mumble about a "coup attempt" because that is what they understand that a coup is what the Trump administration and its enablers themselves have accomplished. It was a democratically elected coup d'état, so to speak, subtly enabled via rigging electoral boundaries and systems across the board rather than openly at gunpoint; but it is a coup nonetheless, because the Republicans refuse to honor the results of any elections or decisions that do not benefit them directly. They can shrug off any check or balance and laugh as those who attempt to enforce it stare dumbly back and spout empty rhetoric. It is a football team playing against a Calvinball team, and until the former loses all pretenses that the latter will somehow come to its senses and return to relative normality, they will be beaten like a drum.

    Which is why Biden's line about "after Trump, the GOP will have an epiphany" disqualifies him from holding any office higher than city sanitation engineer in Dubuque, Iowa.
    posted by delfin at 6:55 AM on May 20, 2019 [85 favorites]


    On the Biden thing, it's the attitude that is so frustrating and off putting. If he and others who have been around for a while would just say, "Yes that's a huge issue. I've been concerned about it for a long time and frankly we haven't been able to get a whole lot done. We have so so much to do. Let's work on getting it done together" instead of "Shut up stupid young person I know all about this and you don't" that would go a long way.
    posted by Cocodrillo at 7:50 AM on May 20, 2019 [45 favorites]


    Trump reacts angrily to New York Times report on Deutsche Bank transactions (Guardian)
    The Times said the nature of the transactions was not clear and that the bank ultimately took no action. Some of the transactions involved money flowing back and forth with overseas entities or individuals, some in Russia. Trump claimed he did not “need or want banks” and does not receive money from Russia. [...] He also said the “fake media … always uses unnamed sources (because their sources don’t even exist)”.

    But one former Deutsche Bank employee, Tammy McFadden, who reviewed some of the transactions, spoke to the Times on the record. She said she was fired last year after raising concerns about the bank’s practices, the Times said. [...]

    On Monday, Trump tweeted: “The new big story is that Trump made a lot of money and buys everything for cash, he doesn’t need banks. But where did he get all of that cash? Could it be Russia? No, I built a great business and don’t need banks, but if I did they would be there.”

    Trump also called the Times reporting “phony” and called Deutsche Bank “very good and highly professional”.

    [...] Deutsche Bank has been fined for laundering billions of dollars for Russians.
    Lightly reorganized for emphasis.
    posted by Little Dawn at 8:03 AM on May 20, 2019 [22 favorites]


    ‘Mindless murdering savages’: Border agent used slurs before allegedly hitting migrant with his truck (WaPo):
    “PLEASE let us take the gloves off trump!” he texted another agent who, at the time, was facing criminal charges for shooting an unarmed Mexican teenager through the border fence. Migrants, Bowen suggested, are “disgusting subhuman s--- unworthy of being kindling for a fire.”

    Less than two weeks later, prosecutors say, Bowen hit one such migrant with his truck, coming inches away from running the man over — and then lied about the incident in a report.

    The texts came to light in filings last month in U.S. District Court in Tucson as Bowen’s attorney fought to suppress a flurry of messages in which the agent used slurs and made light of violence by agents. But Bowen’s views are hardly extraordinary, argued his attorney, Sean Chapman. Rather, his sentiments are “commonplace throughout the Border Patrol’s Tucson Sector,” Chapman wrote, adding that such messages are “part of the agency’s culture.”
    posted by peeedro at 8:06 AM on May 20, 2019 [39 favorites]


    Alexandra Erin's analysis of Individual-1's Deutschebank thread. Key insights: it's threaded, so probably planned and written in advance.

    That's how much he cares about this news story, that's how afraid of it is. He frequently spends anywhere from ten minutes to an hour on each tweet in a multi-parter, and rarely threads them...

    Trying to parse out whether Trump is more concerned about his own image or his legal exposure is similarly pointless, because if his image crumbles, it will expose him legally, too. His "alibi" in all this is that he's a rich, successful business man. Money laundering? Don't need to explain why a rich, successful business man has money coming in. Taking bribes? Don't need to explain why a rich, successful man has money coming in...

    (And the fact that none of this as a legal strategy actually relies on laws should tell you a lot about our justice system.)

    The interesting thing here to me is that I think he may have just elevated the Deutschebank story and the questions about his cash flow in general quite a bit in the public perception. I don't know they had the kind of popular penetration he's just given them.

    posted by InTheYear2017 at 8:19 AM on May 20, 2019 [29 favorites]


    Trump scrambles to reverse Rust Belt slide (Politico)
    His campaign is moving to shore up his standing in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — where its own polling shows him trailing Joe Biden.
    The moves come at a time of growing anxiety over the geographic linchpin of his 2020 hopes. The Trump campaign recently completed a 17-state polling project that concluded the president trails Joe Biden in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan, according to two people briefed on the results. [...] People close to the president insist they’re not panicked. [...] Yet there’s nagging concern after a midterm election in which Republicans across the Midwest got clobbered — and as Trump’s trade war is threatening farmers and factory workers who helped put him in office.

    The president won each state by less than 1 percentage point in 2016. [...]

    Former Trump White House chief of staff and ex-state GOP chairman Reince Priebus was among those who pushed for a post-midterm study to assess what went wrong for the GOP. It resulted in a scalding, 15-page autopsy concluding that the Wisconsin Republican Party had “drifted from its roots as a grassroots organization and became a top-down bureaucracy, disconnected from local activists, recklessly reliant on outside consultants and took for granted money that was raised to keep the party functioning properly.” [...]

    Released last week, the autopsy followed a brutal midterm election that saw Republicans lose the governorship, traditionally a key organizational and financial asset in presidential elections. [...] Republicans also lost the governorship in Michigan last year.
    posted by Little Dawn at 8:22 AM on May 20, 2019 [9 favorites]


    Lest you think everything is 100% fine and dandy here in deep-blue Boston, meet Suffolk County Register of Deeds Steve Murphy. Last week, a local Democratic woman explained on Facebook why the Alabama abortion law shows we need more women elected officials. For some reason this offended Murphy - he waded in and, before he was through, called the original poster and other women in the discussion a major reason the country "is fucked right now." He concluded by demanding the women (one of whom had started a comment by praising him as "an excellent public servant") "shut their pie holes!" He then deleted all his comments, but, of course, nothing ever dies on the Internet (scroll down through the comments for screenshots). Murphy is not up for reelection to his no-heavy-lifting job until 2024.
    posted by adamg at 8:46 AM on May 20, 2019 [12 favorites]


    I refuse to believe that it's impossible for the House to enforce subpoenas. If it is, we might as well end the experiment because the Framers fucked up.

    Either they're going to have to actually order the Sargent At Arms to deputize some people and physically round up the people ignoring subpoenas, or we're going to be facing the end of any pretense of rule of law in the USA.

    It is deeply disturbing that the House Democrats seem perfectly content to sit idly by and do nothing but issue sternly worded criticisms of people who are flatly, openly, breaking the law.

    I think you can argue it was a mistake for Congress to ever let enforcement be handled by another branch of the government, especially one they're supposed to be exercising oversight on. I'm not one to claim the Founders were supermen, but they foresaw **EXACTLY** this situation which is why the House and Senate both have actual enforcement officers of their own who are legally and Constitutionally empowered to physically arrest any Executive branch officials who refuse to comply with a subpoena and drag them to Congress or, if need be, hold them in cells until they yield.

    It is long past time for the House Democrats to announce that the people they've subpoenaed have exactly 48 hours to produce the required documents or they will be authorizing the Sargent At Arms to arrest them and hold them in a cell until they comply. The sort of blatant rulebreaking we're seeing from the Executive branch is not something we can permit to keep happening without serious harm to our nation.
    posted by sotonohito at 9:49 AM on May 20, 2019 [72 favorites]


    ‘Mindless murdering savages’: Border agent used slurs before allegedly hitting migrant with his truck (WaPo)

    Fifth migrant child dies after being detained by US border patrol (Guardian)
    Sixteen-year-old Guatemalan was detained in Texas on 13 May and found unresponsive on Monday, Customs and Border Protection said
    US Customs and Border Protection said in a statement that the border patrol apprehended the teenager in south Texas’s Rio Grande valley on 13 May. The agency said the teenager was found unresponsive on Monday morning during a welfare check at the agency’s Weslaco, Texas, station. The teenager’s cause of death is unknown.

    The agency did not say why the teenager had been detained for a week, but said he was “due for placement” in a facility for youth operated by the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Federal law requires the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to send minors unaccompanied by a parent or legal guardian to HHS within 72 hours of determining that the child is unaccompanied.
    posted by Little Dawn at 10:41 AM on May 20, 2019 [14 favorites]


    From the Alexandra Erin thread: People are speculating about whether or not he wrote it. When they're written in advance, that becomes a more complicated question. I said no one else would have advised him to write these messages, meaning these specific ones. They have emphases that only Trump would care about.

    The Trump or Not Bot's natural-language processor assesses the likelihood of Trump authorship as between 70% and 100% for these Deutsche Bank tweets, averaging 89%. That's significantly high, although lately Dan Scavino seems to have improved generally mimicking the Trumpian style. In any case, we know that nothing is posted to @realDonaldTrump without his OK and that he works directly with his comms team on his most important tweets, dictating the points of emphases and collaborating on the final composition.

    What's funny is that the comms team's recent experiments with threading Trump's Twitter rants culminated in a screw-up for which @realDonaldTrump issued this now-deleted statement: "Two Tweets missing from last batch, probably a Twitter error. No time for a redo! Only the Dems get redos!"

    Less amusingly, this yesterday Fox ran a story about escalating US-Iran tensions, which prompted Trump to tweet, “If Iran wants to fight, that will be the official end of Iran. Never threaten the United States again!” (via Media Matters's Matthew Gertz). And Friday, he ranted, "My Campaign for President was conclusively spied on. Nothing like this has ever happened in American Politics. A really bad situation. TREASON means long jail sentences, and this was TREASON!" This of course echoes Barr's insinuations on Fox that same day when questioning the FBI's counter-intelligence investigation of the Trump campaign, which Fox and Friends then picked up for broadcast. The NYT's Charlie Savage examines this feedback loop in his article Barr Again Casts Doubt on Russia Inquiry’s Origins, Aligning With Trump’s Attacks.

    So we're stuck having to keep an eye on Trump's tweets, applying the Twitter equivalent of Kremlinology to its batshit statements.
    posted by Doktor Zed at 10:41 AM on May 20, 2019 [8 favorites]


    yesterday Fox ran a story about escalating US-Iran tensions, which prompted Trump to tweet, “If Iran wants to fight, that will be the official end of Iran. Never threaten the United States again!”

    Iran hits back at Trump for tweeting 'genocidal taunts' (Guardian)
    “Goaded by #B_Team,” Zarif wrote on Twitter, in an apparent reference to Trump advisers such as John Bolton, “@realdonaldTrump hopes to achieve what Alexander, Genghis & other aggressors failed to do. Iranians have stood tall for millennia while aggressors all gone. #EconomicTerrorism & genocidal taunts won’t ‘end Iran’.” He added: “#NeverThreatenAnIranian. Try respect – it works!”

    [...] Trump’s tweet came after he had seemingly sought to soften his tone on Iran following days of heightened tension sparked by his administration’s sudden deployment of bombers and an aircraft carrier to the Persian Gulf over still unspecified threats.

    In the time since, officials in the United Arab Emirates allege four oil tankers sustained damage in a sabotage attack, Yemeni rebels allied with Iran launched a drone attack on an oil pipeline in Saudi Arabia, and US diplomats relayed a warning that commercial airlines could be misidentified by Iran and attacked, something dismissed by Tehran.

    All these tensions are the culmination of Trump’s decision a year ago to pull the US out of Tehran’s nuclear deal with world powers. And while both Washington and Tehran say they do not seek war, many worry any miscalculation at this fraught moment could spiral out of control.
    So we're stuck having to keep an eye on Trump's tweets, applying the Twitter equivalent of Kremlinology to its batshit statements.
    There is an open debate in Tehran over whether Trump is seriously threatening war with Iran or instead using a form of psychological warfare to persuade the Iranians to renegotiate the 2015 Iran nuclear deal.
    posted by Little Dawn at 10:53 AM on May 20, 2019 [6 favorites]


    There is an open debate in Tehran over whether Trump is seriously threatening war with Iran or instead using a form of psychological warfare to persuade the Iranians to renegotiate the 2015 Iran nuclear deal.

    Here's hoping Iran understands the concept of "bullshit artist" with regards to Trump's tweets. If they do, they'll be in a better place to assess news such as this: TIME Exclusive: U.S. Military Officials Say There Is No Actual Plan to Confront Iran
    The Trump Administration is turning up the heat on Iran, broadcasting a new plan to send as many as 120,000 U.S. forces to the Middle East to counter purported “identified, credible threats” from Iran.

    But in the world of the Pentagon, there are plans you present to politicians, and then there are real plans. And three U.S. military officials involved in planning and overseeing military forces in the region tell TIME that no actual, executable plan, or anything like it, exists for a large-scale troop deployment to the Gulf.

    “That requires knowing what contingency you’re addressing,” says one officer. “Is the target Iran’s own forces or is it a militia? Is the enemy in Iraq or Syria or someplace else? A car bomb or missiles or cyber? Is there credible evidence linking an attack to the Iranian government so that targets inside Iran are legitimate?” All three sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they had not been authorized to discuss the matter publicly, told TIME they had seen no such detailed data.[…]

    Another indicator of how far from an actual deployment of forces the U.S. remains is how little work has been done to figure out where American soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines would be based. There has been no substantial outreach to nations such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Kuwait about hosting 120,000 more U.S. forces, hundreds more aircraft, and potentially hundreds of tons of equipment, or about helping defray the costs involved, said two U.S. diplomats, who also requested anonymity to avoid White House ire.

    Nor has there been an effort to assemble a new military coalition similar to the one the U.S. mustered to repel Iraqi forces from Kuwait in 1991, the two said. It’s not at all clear who might be willing to join such a coalition. “The Saudis and the UAE (United Arab Emirates) probably would throw in,” says one of the sources, but “you can forget the Europeans this time.”
    Unfortunately, Trump's bullshitting often blows up in his face when there are real stakes involved.
    posted by Doktor Zed at 11:04 AM on May 20, 2019 [14 favorites]


    Wasn't it also Iran Trump tweeted at a while back, when he made some similar "NEVER threaten America AGAIN!" statement? I don't have the stomach to mine his tweets, but I seem to recall getting very nervous when I saw it. Either way, I'm nervous again, even knowing he supposedly doesn't want a confrontation with Iran.
    posted by Rykey at 11:19 AM on May 20, 2019


    If Trump's Iran bluster is anything like his North Korea bluster, it will follow this trajectory:

    1. Ratchet up warmongering talk and threats on Twitter, in order to

    2. goad the other country's leader into returning those threats, and

    3. when tensions are at their peak and the world is dragged to the precipice of actual war, and people are legitimately fearing for their lives, then

    4. offer some grandstanding "deal", possibly with a photo op, which basically gives away the farm while getting nothing but empty promises in return, and finally

    5. claim victory and walk away as the great "dealmaker", forgetting about the whole thing shortly thereafter, so that

    6. future generations of diplomats have to do the hard work of cleaning up the extra mess thus created around an already highly fraught geopolitical situation.


    Our best hope with this current admin is things go this way, and not the other possibility, where the trajectory veers off at step #4 into actual armed conflict.
    posted by darkstar at 11:22 AM on May 20, 2019 [16 favorites]


    I wouldn't be surprised if Trump, knowing that his approval rating has never risen higher than about 43% (per FiveThirtyEight), and that he has a rabid base but no real "swing" voters left, thought "That War Prexy gambit worked for Bush, it'll work for me!" but, being Trump, just thought he could bluff and BS his way to popularity.

    Looking at FiveThirtyEight's popularity graphs it does not seem to be working. (And the circumstances of Bush's war leader popularity catapult were entirely different - he was starting from a 50% approval rating at the very beginning of his presidency.)
    posted by Rosie M. Banks at 11:23 AM on May 20, 2019


    I know a lot of activists who have already checked out, because it’s clear we elected republicans in democrats clothing.

    "Republicans in democrats clothing" isn't accurate. If it were, we'd have a larger field of D legislators willing to do whatever it takes in order to advance their agenda rather than scared to actually try and lead -- not poll, not triangulate, but lead -- like they know the truth and they're going to get the damn population to wake up and follow along or go down trying. Like Republicans do with their propaganda arms, except with the advantage of actually having the truth.

    That said: "Dem voters won't show up" ... man I hope not. There's two caucuses. You pick one. You try to tug it the right direction. Someone who abandons the caucus when it doesn't move the way they want has no better claim to playing to win than a timid legislator who throws up their hands and says "oh well" when the other side doesn't respond to a subpoena. Taking your ball and going home really isn't an option unless you're off starting an honest-to-God revolution.
    posted by wildblueyonder at 11:29 AM on May 20, 2019 [16 favorites]


    Taking your ball and going home really isn't an option unless you're off starting an honest-to-God revolution

    Or working to build up systems of mutual aid and community defense independent of state structures. I'm not at the point of forsaking electoralism entirely, and of course everyone should make the minimal effort of casting a ballot, but I can see a legitimate dilemma on the part of activists who might be deciding between knocking doors for Joe fucking Biden and working to help prepare their own communities to endure what increasingly looks like an inevitable collapse.
    posted by contraption at 11:41 AM on May 20, 2019 [23 favorites]


    WaPo, White House intends to block former counsel Donald McGahn from testifying to Congress, defying another request from House Democrats
    McGahn had been scheduled to appear Tuesday before the House Judiciary Committee, where Democrats were hoping to make a star witness out of a central player in special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s report. An individual familiar with the strategy said Monday that the White House would move to prevent McGahn’s appearance.

    McGahn had documented in real-time President Trump’s rage against the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and his efforts to shut it down.

    Earlier this month, the White House invoked executive privilege to bar McGahn from complying with a congressional subpoena for documents related to the Mueller probe.
    McGahn doesn't work there anymore. What ability does the White House have to block him from showing up?
    posted by zachlipton at 12:03 PM on May 20, 2019 [25 favorites]


    It is long past time for the House Democrats to announce that the people they've subpoenaed have exactly 48 hours to produce the required documents or they will be authorizing the Sargent At Arms to arrest them and hold them in a cell until they comply.

    Trump Expected to Instruct McGahn to Defy Subpoena and Skip House Testimony (NYT)
    The White House plans to provide Mr. McGahn, who left the post last year, with a legal opinion from the Justice Department to justify his defying the subpoena, the person said.

    The Judiciary Committee chairman, Representative Jerrold Nadler of New York, said last week that he was prepared to have his panel vote to hold Mr. McGahn in contempt of Congress if he does not show up on Tuesday. Though a black mark on a witness’s record, a contempt citation would most likely result in the House turning to a federal court to try to enforce its subpoena.
    A subpoena isn't a self-enforcing mechanism, it's the first step in the process.

    McGahn doesn't work there anymore. What ability does the White House have to block him from showing up?
    At the same time, if he defies the White House, Mr. McGahn could not only damage his own career in Republican politics but also put his law firm, Jones Day, at risk of having the president urge his allies to withhold their business.
    And this:
    Mr. McGahn has already defied the committee’s subpoena once. In addition to his testimony, the Judiciary Committee subpoena called for Mr. McGahn to hand over a tranche of documents that he shared with Mr. Mueller and that the committee said was relevant to its own inquiry into potential obstruction of justice and abuses of power. The White House instructed Mr. McGahn not to comply, and Mr. Trump later asserted executive privilege over the material.

    Democrats believe the president’s privilege claim is illegitimate given the public nature of the material in question, but they have little recourse to access the material without a lengthy court battle.
    posted by Little Dawn at 12:12 PM on May 20, 2019 [6 favorites]


    NYT, Lisa Friedman, E.P.A. Plans to Get Thousands of Deaths Off the Books by Changing Its Math, in which the EPA will address air pollution by, er, declaring that cleaning up the air any further doesn't provide any health benefits.
    The proposed change would dramatically reduce the 1,400 additional premature deaths per year that the E.P.A. had initially forecast as a result of eliminating the old climate change regulation — the Clean Power Plan, which was President Barack Obama’s signature climate change measure. It would also make it easier for the administration to defend its replacement, known as the Affordable Clean Energy rule.
    ...
    The new modeling method, which experts said has never been peer-reviewed and is not scientifically sound, would most likely be used by the Trump administration to defend further rollbacks of air pollution rules. But the proposed change is unusual because it relies on unfounded medical assumptions and discards more than a decade of peer-reviewed E.P.A. methods for understanding the health hazards linked to the fine particulate matter produced by burning fossil fuels.
    1,400 additional deaths a year? No problem, we'll just change the math.
    posted by zachlipton at 12:39 PM on May 20, 2019 [10 favorites]


    New DOJ legal opinion on Testimonial Immunity Before Congress of the Former Counsel to the President

    Letter to Rep. Nadler citing the above as the reason "the President has directed Mr. McGahn not to appear at the Committee's scheduled hearing."

    @steve_vladeck: The key here is what the OLC opinion does not say—that McGahn can be barred from _voluntarily_ testifying before Congress. All it says on that front is that he can't be punished for refusing to testify (Part IV), not that the President has any means of stopping him from doing so. Whether or not the OLC opinion is correct that McGahn can't be punished for _refusing_ to testify (which is the weakest part of the analysis, in my view), there's nothing in these 15 pages that remotely supports the idea that McGahn can somehow be "blocked" from testifying.
    posted by zachlipton at 12:45 PM on May 20, 2019 [8 favorites]




    Or working to build up systems of mutual aid and community defense independent of state structures.

    Where the political threat is that the state cannot develop effective social safety nets or that trying to make it do so is a losing battle, maybe privatizing safety nets makes some sense (although it's worth thinking about how much this overlaps with the Republican position).

    Where the political threat is fascism, or protecting an economic engine that threatens to devastate its host ecology, or even just enough subversion of democratic institutions to normalize minority fascist-lite rule, or then... it makes much less sense.
    posted by wildblueyonder at 12:59 PM on May 20, 2019 [4 favorites]


    Though a black mark on a witness’s record, a contempt citation would most likely result in the House turning to a federal court to try to enforce its subpoena.

    If I understand correctly, Congress can't even go directly to a court, but rather goes to the Department of Justice and asks Barr to enforce their subpoena against Barr, and he laughs at them and that's the end of it.

    The Department of Justice is theoretically the enforcement here, ever since Congress stopped enforcing their own contempt charges, and the DoJ is proudly saying to the press that they intend to defy Congressional subpoenas issued to DoJ personnel, so the idea of the DoJ actually enforcing a Congressional subpoena is absurd.

    Which brings us back to the House Sargent at Arms.

    If you want to argue that they should spend another week or so making very public attempts to get the proper mechanism functioning and showing that it doesn't work, just for PR reasons, before they issue an ultimatum backed by the Sargent at Arms and whatever deputies he appoints (probably the DC police), I could see it.

    But the idea that we can, or should, wait for a long drawn out process where the very agency tasked with enforcing subpoenas is the one opposing them seems unacceptable. We need movement on this ASAP. We can't wait around months, or years even, while the DoJ stalls, balks, files appeals, etc and basically runs out the clock.
    posted by sotonohito at 1:00 PM on May 20, 2019 [12 favorites]


    New DOJ legal opinion on Testimonial Immunity Before Congress of the Former Counsel to the President

    They've been giving away the endgame/saying the quiet parts out loud for quite a while but the gall to cite a 1971 memo on executive immunity is really something else.
    posted by Exceptional_Hubris at 1:08 PM on May 20, 2019 [12 favorites]


    Wasn't it also Iran Trump tweeted at a while back, when he made some similar "NEVER threaten America AGAIN!" statement?

    Yes, that was an all-caps rant from last July after Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said, “America should know that peace with Iran is the mother of all peace, and war with Iran is the mother of all wars” (CNBC/Reuters). That rhetorical brinksmanship didn't work then, either.

    These days there are signs of division in Trumpland: Trump tweeted there’s ‘no infighting’ on U.S. policy on Iran. But does he have all the information? (WaPo)
    Like many foreign policy crises handled by the Trump administration, the latest standoff reportedly is plagued by ineffective decision-making processes between the president and his advisers.[…] Future historians will no doubt assess whether this particular case followed a dysfunctional process. But reports are consistent with how the White House advisory processes seem to have operated in Trump’s first two years. And there are good explanations for this pattern.[…]

    Trump, like every president, can benefit from this full range of information. But there’s no guarantee that he’ll get it — and past research suggests four reasons: 1. Trump is resistant to advice[…] 2. The Pentagon’s leader lacks experience […] 3. Does the State Department have its ‘swagger’?[…] 4. Bolton is unlikely to push collaboration
    CNN: Trump's hardline advisers are weakening his position "Again and again, the goal is far down the road but the rhetoric turbocharged enough to hope to reach it. There is just no presidential follow-through. With Iran, Venezuela, even North Korea, in which personal entreaties have led nowhere so far, a flurry of activity and threats leads certainly nowhere good, if not nowhere at all."

    WaPo's Josh Dawsey: Trump risks credibility with policy that veers between threats and inaction
    European allies, who agree with the administration’s assessment of Iran’s expansionist aims but are still smarting from Trump’s withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal last year, have been skeptical of the intelligence and worry about the possibility of miscalculation. “I personally believe the American president doesn’t want to go to war. But that’s not the problem,” said a senior European diplomat whose government was briefed by Pompeo this week. “The problem is that the situation may at some point become so volatile and so unstable that it’s inevitable.”[…]

    Trump has expressed frustration with Bolton, joking to him and other aides that “we’d be in war everywhere if it was up to this guy,” according to a senior administration official who has heard the comments. Trump has often told advisers that he doesn’t want to send a single additional troop anywhere.[…]

    Privately, Trump is dismissive of turmoil in the Middle East, telling White House officials and informal advisers that nothing good comes from being involved.

    As he has repeatedly described it, his goal is to have a “tough” and “strong” military that doesn’t have to do anything — and to use rhetoric that scares people. In a 70-minute meeting Wednesday with surrogates who often appear on television to back him, Trump concentrated on China and immigration. He never mentioned Iran.
    And earlier this afternoon, @realDonaldTrump tweeted that "The Fake News put out a typically false statement, without any knowledge that the United States was trying to set up a negotiation with Iran." and then opened the door to Iran calling for negotiations ( if and when they are ever ready"). (News analysts have pointed to the timing of Trump's call to Oman on Thursday and their Foreign Minister's trip to Tehran today as a sign of back-channel diplomacy.)
    posted by Doktor Zed at 1:24 PM on May 20, 2019 [5 favorites]


    Mod note: Folks, the doomsaying needs to go elsewhere. Thanks.
    posted by restless_nomad (staff) at 1:43 PM on May 20, 2019 [12 favorites]


    @ZoeTillman: BREAKING: A federal judge in DC will not block a House subpoena to Trump's accounting firm — expect a quick notice of appeal from Trump's lawyers

    Here's the court order: "It is simply not fathomable that a Constitution that grants Congress the power to remove a President for reasons including criminal behavior would deny Congress the power to investigate him for unlawful conduct—past or present—even without formally opening an impeachment inquiry."
    posted by zachlipton at 2:05 PM on May 20, 2019 [66 favorites]




    Cohen told lawmakers Trump attorney Jay Sekulow instructed him to falsely claim Moscow project ended in January 2016 WaPo
    Michael Cohen, President Trump’s former longtime personal attorney, told a House panel during closed-door hearings earlier this year that he had been instructed by Trump lawyer Jay Sekulow to falsely claim in a 2017 statement to Congress that negotiations to build a Trump Tower in Moscow ended in January 2016, according to people familiar with his testimony.
    posted by mumimor at 2:14 PM on May 20, 2019 [15 favorites]


    Guardian: Can the White House actually block its former counsel Don McGahn from testifying before Congress?
    Legal experts say not so fast...

    Here’s an interesting thread from Seth Abramson, an attorney and professor at the University of New Hampshire, stating that Donald Trump does not, in fact, possess the power to prevent McGahn from appearing before lawmakers.

    Seth Abramson (@SethAbramson) It's settled law in DC federal court that there's no unqualified immunity for a former White House Counsel. Don McGahn doesn't work for the White House, and in fact Trump has no power to stop him from testifying tomorrow. If he doesn't show up, send the U.S. Marshals out. Period. May 20, 2019

    2/ I'm sorry, but this isn't an issue that Congress should or must take to court to litigate. It's settled law. You have a judge send U.S. Marshals out to take McGahn into custody, and if the WH wants to file for an emergency injunction, it can do it *after* McGahn is in custody.
    May 20, 2019
    I'll be thrilled to be wrong about how I read the NYT previously.
    posted by Little Dawn at 2:19 PM on May 20, 2019 [8 favorites]


    The House has shown no indication of any kind that they are willing or able to take such decisive action. Until they do it's just fanfic, in my opinion.
    posted by Justinian at 2:25 PM on May 20, 2019 [11 favorites]


    The United States Marshal Service is a part of the Department of Justice.

    The underlying problem here is that the Department of Justice is headed by an Attorney General who gives every indication of being willing to use his powers to block investigation of the president, which he has described as being illegitimate.

    Any plan which relies on sending part of the DoJ to enforce Congress' will therefore has a glaring potential problem.

    I'm not sure whether the nation is best served by letting these problems remain "potential" or whether it would be better to force Barr to make a move, but "just send a US Marshal" was a reasonable suggestion in the world we used to live in, not the one in which we currently find ourselves.
    posted by Nerd of the North at 2:32 PM on May 20, 2019 [7 favorites]




    sounds like judge mehta wasn't buying that used counter-covfefe covode argument.
    posted by 20 year lurk at 2:52 PM on May 20, 2019 [2 favorites]


    AP has an interesting leak in the McGahn developments: Trump tells ex-counsel McGahn to defy congressional subpoena
    If McGahn were to defy Trump and testify, it could endanger his own career in Republican politics and put his law firm, Jones Day, in the president’s crosshairs. Trump has mused about instructing Republicans to cease dealing with the firm, which is deeply intertwined in Washington with the GOP, according to one White House official and a Republican close to the White House not authorized to speak publicly about private conversations.

    Administration officials mulled various legal options before settling on providing McGahn with a legal opinion from the Department of Justice to justify defying the subpoena.[…]

    The president has bashed his former White House counsel on Twitter and has insisted to advisers that the attorney not be allowed to humiliate him in front of Congress, much as his former personal legal fixer Michael Cohen did, according to the official and Republican.
    It's possible that if Team Trump were doubtful about Barr's obstruction capabilities, they'd resort to mafioso tactics like this. Then again, it could just be second nature. In any case, McGahn’s lawyer has said it's up to the White House and the committee to negotiate his client's appearance.
    posted by Doktor Zed at 2:58 PM on May 20, 2019 [2 favorites]


    Michael Cohen, President Trump’s former longtime personal attorney, told a House panel during closed-door hearings earlier this year that he had been instructed by Trump lawyer Jay Sekulow to falsely claim in a 2017 statement to Congress that negotiations to build a Trump Tower in Moscow ended in January 2016, according to people familiar with his testimony.

    Yes but Buzzfeed News is a sub-par outlet whose "scoop" was directly denied by Mueller's office in an extraordinary statement so that's ... *listens to earpiece* ... I'm sorry, I'm being told that this article is WashingtonPost reporting. As such, it's Officially Real Life, and therefore this story is shocking, yes, shocked I am.

    However, the impeachment buzz is all gone, as it was intended to be. Not that it would have gone anywhere, anyway. Apparently.

    *cough*
    posted by petebest at 3:04 PM on May 20, 2019 [3 favorites]




    However, the impeachment buzz is all gone

    Rep. David Cicilline (D-RI, House Judiciary Committee member, DPCC Chair): "If Don McGahn does not testify tomorrow, it will be time to begin an impeachment inquiry of @realDonaldTrump."

    Next week the congress is scheduled for district work, so it's vital that their constituents send the message that the impeachment of Donald Trump is needed and wanted.
    posted by Doktor Zed at 3:11 PM on May 20, 2019 [29 favorites]


    McClatchy had an interesting little story the other day: Kansas’ Kobach is weighing a Senate bid. National Republicans are ready to stop him.

    So desperate are they to stop Kobach from running that someone called up Maggie Haberman and unloaded on the guy, in a story just published. NYT, A Would-Be Trump Aide’s Demands: A Jet on Call, a Future Cabinet Post and More
    Access to a government jet 24 hours a day. An office in the West Wing, plus guaranteed weekends off for family time. And an assurance of being made secretary of homeland security by November.

    Those were among a list of 10 conditions that Kris Kobach, the former Kansas secretary of state, has given to the White House if he is to become the administration’s “immigration czar,” a job President Trump has been looking to create to coordinate immigration policy across government agencies. The list was described by three people familiar with it.
    posted by zachlipton at 3:13 PM on May 20, 2019 [11 favorites]




    We're gonna need some cache links for those docs.. The house website is slammed.
    posted by Xyanthilous P. Harrierstick at 4:01 PM on May 20, 2019 [1 favorite]


    We're gonna need some cache links for those docs.. The house website is slammed.

    Or use Firefox.
    posted by Little Dawn at 4:16 PM on May 20, 2019


    @realDonaldTrump: Looks like Bernie Sanders is history. Sleepy Joe Biden is pulling ahead and think about it, I’m only here because of Sleepy Joe and the man who took him off the 1% trash heap, President O! China wants Sleepy Joe BADLY!
    posted by xammerboy at 4:33 PM on May 20, 2019 [1 favorite]


    Not to pick on you xammerboy, but I think it's probably best not to signal boost Trump's opinion of the Democratic primary here. See also, The narrator in chief: Trump opines on the 2020 Democrats — and so much more (WaPo).
    posted by peeedro at 4:39 PM on May 20, 2019 [17 favorites]


    Starting at internal page 22 of the first transcript, discussing Trump's 'code'
    THE CHAIRMAN: So it was understood by you and by others working for him that if he said something either publicly or in the presence of others that you all knew to be untrue, you were to repeat the untruth?

    MR. COHEN: Yes.

    THE CHAIRMAN: Nothing further. My colleagues? Mr. Swalwell.

    MR. SWALWELL: Mr. Cohen, thank you. Mr. Schiff alluded to there's further questioning on other matters, but just generally, have you ever seen Mr. Trump direct his son Donald Trump, Jr., to also make false statements?

    MR. COHEN: And this goes to the whole point on how Mr. Trump speaks. It's not as though he directs you. I would say to you in normal conversation, Congresswoman Swalwell, I want you to say that Poland Spring is the greatest water on the planet. That's not how he would say it to you. He would just say, Congressman, Poland Spring is the greatest water on the planet, right? What are you going to say, no? Okay. So then when you are talking to him about Poland Spring, what do you say? That's his message.

    MR. SWALWELL: Did you see that occur between Mr. Trump and his son Donald Jr. where --

    MR. COHEN: I've seen him do it with everybody.

    MR. SWALWELL: And that would include lvanka?

    MR. COHEN: Yes.

    MR. SWALWELL: Would that include Jared Kushner?

    MR. COHEN: Yes.

    MR. SWALWELL: How about Mr. Manafort?

    MR. COHEN: Absolutely.

    MR. SWALWELL: How about Rhona Graff?

    MR. COHEN: Yes.

    MR. SWALWELL: How about Keith Schiller?

    MR. COHEN: Yes.
    posted by Little Dawn at 4:56 PM on May 20, 2019 [22 favorites]


    Politico, Pelosi clashes with fellow Dems in closed-door debate on impeachment
    House Democratic leaders sparred internally on Monday over whether to begin an impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump, with Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her allies rejecting the call to move forward for now, according to multiple sources.

    Reps. David Cicilline (D-R.I.), Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), and Joe Neguse (D-Colo.) — all members of the Democratic leadership — pushed to begin impeachment proceedings during a leadership meeting in Pelosi's office, said the sources. Pelosi and Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) — one of her key allies and a member of leadership herself — rejected their calls, saying Democrats' message is being drowned out by the fight over possibly impeaching Trump.

    And in a Democratic Steering and Policy Committee meeting, Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.) stood up and demanded Trump's impeachment. Pelosi then countered, "This is not about politics, it's about what's best for the American people," said a member who attended the meeting.
    ...
    Several members and aides said an impeachment inquiry resolution could be introduced in the House Judiciary Committee in the next several days, spurring more Democratic debate over how to respond to Trump.
    Or as Jeff Daniels asked today on MSNBC as he put The Newsroom to shame "Who are the heroes going to be?...And to look at Congress with all their politics going 'well if I do this, I can't do that,' you are all worthless to me right now. You are all worthless. I need people to stand up and be heroic. Who are you? Because democracy is at stake."
    posted by zachlipton at 5:02 PM on May 20, 2019 [51 favorites]


    Why would names of people on HPSCI questioning Cohen be classified? There's a whole list of (presumably) names at the beginning of part 1, and on page 166 (and elsewhere... I'm flipping around) the question at the bottom of the page is asked by a redacted name. Maybe I'm just being dense. What am I looking at?
    posted by emelenjr at 5:13 PM on May 20, 2019


    Starting at the bottom of internal page 36 of the first transcript, discussing Trump's coordination with Putin on the Moscow real estate deal:
    Q: Did you come to learn that there was anything different or special about conducting a real estate deal in Moscow, Russia?
    A: Well, I didn't learn it; l already knew it. I mean, everything runs through the Kremlin. Everything runs through Putin. He doesn't want to look out the window and see anything that he didn't approve.
    Q: And how do you know that?
    A: I just know people who have done business in Russia, and I just know that everything runs through the Kremlin. [...]
    Q: And we'll get, again, into more detail about this later, but did Mr. Sater also discuss to you the fact that everything needed to go through the Kremlin when it came to a project in Moscow?
    A: Yes. He said it many times.
    Q: Did you ever discuss this requirement that projects be vetted by the Kremlin with anyone in The Trump Organization?
    A: Not that I recall.
    Q: Was it your understanding that Mr. Trump or others at The Trump Organization nevertheless understood that any real estate deals in Moscow required the Kremlin's approval?
    A: I believe they know that like everybody else.
    Q: So what's the basis for that belief?
    A: Well, I know that Don and lvanka had been there looking at projects. Mr. Trump had been looking at projects there going back to the, you know, late '90s, I think, or mid-'90s.
    Q: So it's their past experiences in that country?
    A: lt's also -- it's widely reported that -
    Q: And common knowledge.
    A: And common knowledge, yes.
    posted by Little Dawn at 5:16 PM on May 20, 2019 [14 favorites]


    If there is a decision to pass an impeachment bill, Joe Biden will have to take a stand. I'm willing to bet he doesn't want to do that and he's counting on Pelosi to hold the fort. In fact, has Biden been asked?
    posted by kemrocken at 5:39 PM on May 20, 2019 [6 favorites]


    Starting at internal page 77 of the first transcript, there are seemingly desperate and repeated attempts to get Cohen to deny there is any evidence of anything against Trump:
    MR. RATCLIFFE: All right. And I'm establishing that, notwithstanding that fact, your testimony in October of 2017 was that you were aware of no collusion, coordination, or corspiracy. And you, of all people, today are still testifying -
    MR. COHEN: That I have no direct -
    MR. RATCLIFFE: - that you have no evidence of collusion, conspiracy, or coordination.
    MR. COHEN: I, to this day, sitting here, I have no direct evidence.
    MR. RATCLIFFE: ls that accurate?
    MR. DAVIS: As counsel, excuse me --
    MR. RATCLIFFE: Hold on. I want an answer. ls that -
    MR. DAVIS: As counsel-- don't say "excuse me." I am going to speak. Then you can say "excuse me." As counsel, he has repeatedly modified your use of the word "evidence" with the word "direct." Yet you continue and persist to omit the word "direct evidence." So let the record reflect that, despite Mr. Cohen constantly changing your expression, he is inserting the word "direct evidence." Are we clear?
    MR. RATCLIFFE: That's fine.
    And then there's this, starting at internal page 79:
    MR. RATCLIFFE: So I want to be clear. You've got no direct evidence of collusion, coordination, or conspiracy with the Russian Government by Donald Trump or anyone on his campaign, and you're aware of no information, direct or circumstantial, of obstruction of justice with respect to the Russia investigation.
    MR. COHEN: When he started to attack myself, my parents, my in-laws, my wife, not wanting me to come and to testify to be here today, would you call that obstruction of justice?
    MR. RATCLIFFE: My question was regarding the Russia investigation.
    MR. COHEN: Well, are we not here talking about the Russia investigation? I mean, I've been here for 2-1/2 hours; we haven't stopped talking about the Russia investigation.
    posted by Little Dawn at 5:48 PM on May 20, 2019 [34 favorites]


    The redoubtable Daniel Dale, apparently back from hiatus, live-tweeted/fact-checked Trump's Montoursville, Pennsylvania rally. Here are just some of the highlights:
    —Trump accurately says that Pennsylvania has hit an all-time low in the unemployment rate, misleadingly says America is "now" the world's top producer of oil and natural gas. That was also the case in the Obama era. It's crude in particular in which the US recently became #1.
    —Trump is lying about polls being "fake" "suppression polls" designed to depress his voters. He mentions hgw Hillary Clinton was favoured in Pennsylvania. There is a vigorous "Lock Her Up" chant, for which he pauses.
    —For the 24th time, Trump lies that California and San Diego were begging him for a wall and then hypocritically started criticizing him after he built it. There was no begging. San Diego opposes the wall. Even San Diego's Republican mayor opposes the wall.
    —Trump says that the PA12 special election is "a little bit of a referendum" on him. He says he doesn't know if there are other races tomorrow, then says, "Who the hell cares."
    —Warning people they need to vote tomorrow, Trump acts out a reporter saying that Trump went to Pennsylvania and went home a loser. "I never want to be called loser," he says.
    —Trump says that Biden didn't have 600 people at his first public event, it was 150, he knows because he's good at crowd estimates. It was 600. Trump is likely America's single worst crowd estimator.
    —Trump is now criticizing Pete Buttigieg...and Fox News for hosting his town hall. "What's going on with Fox...what's going on there? They're putting more Democrats on than you have Republicans. It's something strange is going on at Fox, folks. Something very strange."
    —Trump says he signed the Right to Try law "eight months ago." It was a year ago next week. He perpetually moves accomplishments closer to the present.
    —There is another medical issue in the crowd. This time, Trump says, "I don't know what this does to television, but that's OK." "But that's OK" is one of the things he says when he isn't happy about something but knows he can't complain about it.
    —Trump is now falsely accusing unspecified opponents of "treason." There is a Lock Them Up chant. Trump responds that there is a great new attorney general "who's gonna give it a very fair look."
    —Trump: "Don't forget: Biden deserted you. He's not from Pennsylvania. I guess he was born here, but he left you, folks. He left you for another state. Remember that, please."
    Dale sums it up: "Relatively newsless. Other than the incessant dishonesty, I'd say the most noteworthy features were the focus on Biden and the criticism of Fox News." (It would of course be great if American reporters in the mainstream media could cover Trump with such diligence, scepticism, and objectivity. Watch for how this rally is covered in the local press as a "presidential visit" and whether they allude to all the lies and inaccuracies.)
    posted by Doktor Zed at 5:51 PM on May 20, 2019 [13 favorites]


    Starting towards the end of internal page 84, the definition of a conspiracy, and why circumstantial evidence is still evidence:
    THE CHAIRMAN: You have also been asked questions that sometimes goto legal conclusions rather than a witness' observation, what constitutes a conspiracy or coordination or collusion. I wouldn't describe myself as an expert in law, but I am a lawyer, as are you. My understanding of "conspiracy," which would be the legal term, not "collusion," is that it involves an agreement, an offer, an acceptance, as well as an overt act in furtherance of that agreement. ls that your understanding as well?
    MR. COHEN: lt's certainly plausible, yes.
    THE CHAIRMAN: If the Russians offered help to the Trump campaign and the campaign said they would like that help and then met in furtherance of that agreement, would that, in theory, meet the definition of "conspiracy"?
    MR. COHEN: If those facts, yes.
    THE CHAIRMAN: Now, I know you weren't present at the Trump Tower New York meeting, correct?
    MR. COHEN: That's correct. I was not.
    THE CHAIRMAN: But you did overhear a conversation that, in retrospect, you believe referred to that meeting?
    MR. COHEN: Yes.
    THE CHAIRMAN: And in that conversation, it was your impression they were describing, in fact, the meeting at Trump Tower. This was a conversation between Donald Trump and his son Don Jr.
    MR. COHEN: The conversation that I overheard was very short, and it was just that a meeting - that I set up a meeting. And Mr. Trump responded back, okay, good, let me know. So it was about setting up the meeting and that it had been set up.
    THE CHAIRMAN: And is it your belief that that discussion was potentially about the Trump Tower New York meeting with the Russian delegation?
    MR. COHEN: I ultimately -- in my mind, I concluded that, yes, it was.
    THE CHAIRMAN: And did that indicate to you that Donald Trump had knowledge, prior knowledge, of that meeting?
    MR. COHEN: I do. I believe Mr. Trump had prior knowledge of that meeting.
    THE CHAIRMAN: And if that's the case -- and I'm asking you as a lawyer --
    MR. COHEN: Unfortunately, sir, I was disbarred 2 days ago as a result of this.
    THE CHAIRMAN: Well, a nonpracticing lawyer.
    MR. COHEN: I'll take that. Thank you.
    THE CHAIRMAN: Would that be circumstantial evidence that Donald Trump was a party to that agreement or potential conspiracy?
    MR. COHEN: Yes.
    THE CHAIRMAN: And if he were to later deceive people about his prior knowledge, would that deception be potential evidence, circumstantial evidence, of his particlpation in that agreement?
    MR. COHEN: Yes, I believe it would be circumstantial evidence.
    posted by Little Dawn at 6:05 PM on May 20, 2019 [16 favorites]


    Starting towards the end of internal page 87 of the first transcript, discussion of the false statement related to the meeting about "adoptions"
    MR. COHEN: [...] So he told me that he was with Don Jr. and that they were communicating back and forth with Air Force One. And he goes, you know how it gets, back and forth and back and forth. He goes, it was such a process. That was the conversation with Alan Garten.
    THE CHAIRMAN: And tell me what raised your suspicion about that conversation.
    MR. COHEN: lt was about how to describe the meeting, the Trump Tower meeting, as to whether it was about obtaining dirt on Hillary Clinton or it was about adoption. And what he expressed to me is that, you know, Mr. Trump drafted the first round, and it came to Don and him, and then they sent it back, and back and forth.
    THE CHAIRMAN: So what he described to you was Mr. Trump's participation in the creation of a false statement about what took place in that meeting?
    MR. COHEN: Yes, that's how he described it. Well, that's how I understood it.
    THE CHAIRMAN: My colleague Mr. Ratcliffe asked you about potential evidence of obstruction. And, again, this calls for more of your legal conclusion than a factual one. But if Mr. Trump was involved in producing a false statement to cover up a meeting with a Russian delegation where the subject was the Russian Government's offer to provide dirt on Hillary Clinton, would you consider that an act of obstruction?
    MR. COHEN: I would.
    THE CHAIRMAN: Would you consider public statements from the President lauding witnesses who weren't cooperative and/or the dangling of pardons to be potential acts of obstruction?
    MR. COHEN: That, as well as threatening individuals who want to appear, yes.
    And because they spend so much time on this, at internal page 90:
    Q: [...] Now, are you aware, Mr. Cohen, that, in law, direct evidence and circumstantial evidence are given the same weight?
    A: Yes, they are.
    posted by Little Dawn at 6:31 PM on May 20, 2019 [19 favorites]


    More on impeachment, this time from the Post: Pelosi’s leadership team rebels on impeachment, presses her to begin an inquiry
    During the Monday night leadership meeting, Pelosi was speaking about how Democrats’ messaging isn’t breaking through because everyone is talking about corruption, special counsel Robert S. Mueller’s report and impeachment. She argued that last week the investigations were making page one news while the House move to pass the Equality Act —a bill ensuring gay, lesbian and bisexual people [and transgender people, who the Post just decided to leave out here] are not discriminated against —was on “page 26.”

    That’s when Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), a subcommittee chairman on Judiciary, jumped in to tell Pelosi that it amounted to a good case for launching an impeachment inquiry, according to people in the room who recounted the exchange. Raskin argued that an inquiry would allow leadership to streamline and centralize all of the investigations into one inquiry — then let everyone else to focus and talk about the Democratic agenda items that won them the majority in 2018.

    Pelosi and Hoyer retorted that the panel shouldn’t cut off other committee investigations, which they said are bearing fruit. Judiciary, after all, is not the only panel investigating Trump. Five others are as well, and an impeachment inquiry might undercut those probes, some think. “You want to tell Elijah Cummings to go home?” Pelosi said, referring to the House Oversight Committee chairman.
    ...
    At one-point Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), a fierce Pelosi defender and ally, grew angry and scolded the members that an impeachment inquiry would further distract from legislating. Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chairwoman Cheri Bustos (D-Ill.) — who has argued that it is time for members to move on from impeachment talk before — pushed back as well, arguing that the DCCC did focus groups on topics voters cared about and said Mueller’s inquiry ranked among the bottom.
    There's much more in here. It's a pretty detailed account, which gives you an idea how upset people are to relay such detail to the press.

    The problem here is that Trump will always suck up all the oxygen in the room. If Democrats weren't investigating Trump, the Equality Act might make page 24 instead of page 26, but "Democrats pass bill that's going absolutely nowhere" is never going to be front page news, no matter how newsworthy something like the Equality Act should be. Trump gets a major round of news coverage out of making up a new mocking nickname for an opponent; he will constantly get in the way of any effort Democrats make to show their priorities through dead-end legislative efforts. We do not live in a universe in which Democrats can quietly amass a pile of legislation and successfully show it off as a model for how great it would be if Democrats had more power, because everyone will have stopped reading three words into that sentence to pay attention to whatever lies are coming out of Trump's mouth.

    How does she think this strategy is going to work? Is there any possible reason to believe the news is really going to go "we'll get to President Trump's new plans to carve himself onto Mount Rushmore later but first, here's a Democratic bill to lower drug prices with a 0% chance of enactment?"

    The focus is going to be on Trump no matter what Democrats do. It's a hopeless cause to try to grab the spotlight for anything else. Might as well use it for yourself and make the focus specifically be Trump's crimes.
    posted by zachlipton at 6:36 PM on May 20, 2019 [49 favorites]


    Starting at internal page 116 of the first transcript, describing Trump directing Cohen to lie to Congress, and directing illegal campaign finance violations:
    MR. RATCLIFFE: Okay. Did he indirectly in some way tell you to lie to Congress?
    MR. COHEN: Yes.
    MR. RATCLIFFE: ls that through the code that you talked about earlier?
    MR. COHEN: Yes.
    MR. RATCLIFFE: Okay. So that the record is clear, notwithstanding whatever statements you made yesterday, you believe that Donald Trump indirectly told you to lie to Congress.
    MR. COHEN: Yes. That along with the statement that was presented, going through his counsel and others, part of the joint defense agreement.
    And at internal page 117:
    MR. RATCLIFFE: All right. You also pled guilty to one count of making an unlawful corporate contribution. ls it your testimony that Donald Trump in any way directed you totake actions for which you pled guilty to making an unlawful corporate contribution?
    MR. COHEN: lf you're referring to counts 7 and 8, illegal campaign finance violations, one to Karen McDougal where there was no exchange of money, and count 8, of Ms. Clifford, yes, it was done at the direction of Mr. Trump and in accordance with his instructions.
    posted by Little Dawn at 6:51 PM on May 20, 2019 [9 favorites]


    Sargent At Arms to deputize some people

    Oh yeah. Got to give it a good name, though, and maybe a TV show like NCIS. Sergeant at Arms Corps, Special Ops Force. SOF-SAAC. Too bad your ass got SAAC'd!

    More seriously, we do need that, or the whole concept of congressional subpoenas becomes toothless.
    posted by ctmf at 7:02 PM on May 20, 2019 [5 favorites]


    Other than the incessant dishonesty, I'd say the most noteworthy features were the focus on Biden and the criticism of Fox News.

    NBC: The Trump and Biden Camps Are Butting Heads Like It's 2020 Already—One state in particular has provided the starkest blueprint for how the two campaigns plan to attack each other: Pennsylvania.

    The NYT's Maggie Haberman reports from within Trumpland: Trump Can’t Stop Attacking Biden. G.O.P. Strategists Wish He Would.
    For Mr. Trump’s advisers, [Trump's tweet about Biden and China on Saturday] was one more example of the president’s inability to resist offering what amounts to an in-kind contribution to a Democrat who, according to their own polling, is positioned to soundly defeat them next year.

    The president, though, has told advisers he believes he can portray Mr. Biden, a longtime Washington veteran, as representative of an ossified political class the same way he did Hillary Clinton, wounding him with enough attacks and put-downs that Mr. Biden will either stagger into the general election or collapse in the primary.[…]

    Mr. Trump’s attacks on Mr. Biden have defied the pleadings of his own aides, who think almost any other candidate would be easier to defeat, and left Republicans puzzled while delighting Biden supporters.[…]

    Yet some Democrats, having witnessed how Mr. Trump lampooned and eventually bulldozed the Republican field in 2016, are nervous that Mr. Trump has shrewdly chosen to define Mr. Biden as the front-runner early on, identifying him as the greatest threat in a general election.[…]

    But some Republicans close to Mr. Trump paint a more simplistic portrait of the president’s actions: That he has simply been consuming cable news coverage about Mr. Biden, and firing off tweets based on the coverage and polling on the Democratic race he hears about on the air. And senior Trump campaign aides have recently told other Republican officials that they would rather not face Mr. Biden in the general election, according to one party figure familiar with the conversations.
    Apart from Biden's pole position in the Dem primaries, it's hard to see why Trump's been attacking him lately. Biden's direct criticisms of Trump have been rather anodyne compared to other Dem primary candidates'. As for the impeachment issue, on April 30 Biden told Good Morning America, "If in fact [the Trump and his lawyers] block the [congressional] investigation, [the Democrats] have no alternative but to go to the only other constitutional resort they have, [which] is impeachment." (video via ABC Politics), but otherwise, he hasn't revisited the issue.

    Biden did get in one good zinger on Saturday: "President Trump inherited an economy from the Obama/Biden administration that he given to him, just like he inherited everything else in his life." That must have gotten under Trump's skin.
    posted by Doktor Zed at 7:08 PM on May 20, 2019 [6 favorites]


    Pelosi was speaking about how Democrats’ messaging isn’t breaking through because everyone is talking about corruption, special counsel Robert S. Mueller’s report and impeachment. She argued that last week the investigations were making page one news while the House move to pass the Equality Act... was on “page 26.”

    Let me get this straight. Pelosi doesn't want Trump's corruption and the results of Mueller's report to lead the news? She'd prefer it was below the fold?

    Pelosi and Hoyer retorted that the panel shouldn’t cut off other committee investigations, which they said are bearing fruit.

    This is demonstrably untrue, isn't it? How can they be bearing fruit without any documents or testimony? What are some examples?

    the DCCC did focus groups on topics voters cared about and said Mueller’s inquiry ranked among the bottom

    It's like they are trying to be a caricature of my worst imaginings.
    posted by diogenes at 7:14 PM on May 20, 2019 [20 favorites]


    Wow. The Cohen testimony is, from what I've read so far, completely useless.

    Really? I've been outlining highlights that look like 'high crimes and misdemeanors' in the testimony, but I could skip the sad trombone for Don, Jr. at internal pages 139 - 141, even though it appears to be circumstantial evidence of Trump's participation in a conspiracy to interfere with the election.

    As to the quality of the questioning, the transcript goes back and forth with the Republicans trying to muddle the testimony (not always successfully), and the Democrats clarifying that yes, Cohen has brought forth what appears to be significant evidence of impeachable offenses.

    Ultimately, Cohen is just one part of this, and the transcript so far also keeps mentioning things to come, like Deutsche Bank. I don't think it is fair to write it off as useless, because the apparent corruption is massive, and the investigations and the pressure on the Democrats to do something seems to be accelerating.
    posted by Little Dawn at 7:16 PM on May 20, 2019 [16 favorites]


    I think Cohen's testimony provides good elaboration on the few items that were relevant in his open hearing but were buried by the signal-to-noise ratio of 5-minute partisan sessions.

    There's a good examination regarding what Cohen interprets as a pardon float starting on page 134:
    A This is an email, again, from Robert Costello to me dated Wednesday,
    June 13,2018, timestamped at 3:21 p.m.
    Q The first paragraph reads: "Since you jumped off the phone rather abruptly, I did not get a chance to tell you that my friend has communicated to me that he is meeting with his client this evening." And he added that "if there is anything you wanted to convey, you should tell me and my friend will bring it up for discussion this evening."
    Who is Robert Costello referring to as his friend?
    A His friend is Rudy Giuliani.
    Q And who is referred to here as his client?
    A The President.
    Q And what did you understand him to mean when he asked you
    whether there was anything you wanted to convey?
    A The issue of a pardon.
    And then there's this gem near the end at 249, which has me wondering why no one has a criminal inquiry open against Weisselberg yet:
    I knew what -- the reason why he was putting it there. He considered the foundation to be his checkbook, it's his money, that's how he would refer to it. That's exactly what he did. He had me do a contract that had the funds wired to the foundation, and, you know, he would direct me to speak to Alan Weisselberg in order to get all the wiring instructions and to establish it with Alan so that the payment would be made.
    (Pee tape on pg. 225, for anyone who needs the levity)
    posted by Room 101 at 7:21 PM on May 20, 2019 [9 favorites]


    which has me wondering why no one has a criminal inquiry open against Weisselberg yet

    Trump Org CFO Allen Weisselberg given immunity by prosecutors to testify (NBC News, Aug. 24, 2018)
    The longtime chief financial officer of the Trump Organization, Allen Weisselberg, was given immunity by federal prosecutors in New York during the course of the Michael Cohen investigation, according to two people with knowledge of the matter.
    posted by Little Dawn at 7:24 PM on May 20, 2019


    zachlipton: The focus is going to be on Trump no matter what Democrats do. It's a hopeless cause to try to grab the spotlight for anything else. Might as well use it for yourself and make the focus specifically be Trump's crimes.

    It's interesting how the notion that Democrats could grab the spotlight and drive the whole narrative if they really wanted to has, in the past, been pointed as an accusation against Pelosi, but this time she seems to be the one engaging in that same fallacy.
    posted by InTheYear2017 at 7:25 PM on May 20, 2019 [2 favorites]


    the DCCC did focus groups on topics voters cared about

    OK I'm even a person who trusts that pros like Pelosi actually know something about the minds of voters that are not like us on the blue and I'd even believe that a lot of us here don't fully appreciate how big that difference is. And I would even believe we are going to have to fight like hell in order to get the media to walk and chew gum at the same time because, as zacklipton says, the story is going to bend towards Trump no matter what, partly because it's not like many members of major media outlets have done enough real introspection about their own culpability in saying the word "emails" and "FBI" or doing other bullshit horserace crap rather than actually covering Clinton's policy platform, but also because Trump's corruption is real news and it's important even if some damn focus group doesn't see it.

    So holy hell. Lead people. You're members of the United States Congress, not plucky upstarts with no resources. Figure out a way to get people to talk about what you want to. Start impeachment proceedings. Keep it quiet. Play hardball with journalists. Promise them scoops in return for talking the policies you want ALSO featured in the news. Hell, sign us up. We'll post on social media about your bills and your policies. We'll call in to talk shows. We'll do what Republicans do and whine about the mainstream media not covering them even when they actually do cover them, because it works on people who aren't paying attention.

    (I know, I'm writing to the wrong audience, but trust me, this is getting copied to my house rep and senators.)
    posted by wildblueyonder at 7:38 PM on May 20, 2019 [18 favorites]


    I haven't seen any meaningful evidence in any of the excerpts you've posted.

    I'm not going to argue with you, especially if you can't identify the hearsay exception to Garten's statement. Ultimately, it's up to Congress to decide what to do with the testimony, and from my view, there is a lot of damning testimony by Cohen that suggests there is a lot of other damning evidence available if the Democrats (and Republicans) continue to look for it.
    posted by Little Dawn at 7:58 PM on May 20, 2019 [1 favorite]


    WSJ, Richard Rubin, IRS Audit Rate Drops Again as It Examines Fewer High-Income Households

    This tweet really captures the point:

    @RichardRubinDC:
    IRS audit rate for households with incomes over $10 million.

    Fiscal 2015: 34.69%
    2016: 18.79%
    2017: 14.52%
    2018: 6.66%
    posted by zachlipton at 8:20 PM on May 20, 2019 [35 favorites]



    Trump gives up the game he’s playing with Congress during Fox News interview
    -- Trump admits he’s relying on the courts — not Congress — to change policy. (Aaron Rupar for Vox, May 20, 2019)
    During an interview on Steve Hilton’s Fox News show on Sunday, President Donald Trump bragged about how rapidly his administration is getting stuff done. But he revealed a profound misunderstanding of how federal lawmaking is supposed to work in the process.

    “We’re changing laws as rapidly as we can get them through the courts,” Trump said.
    (tweet from Rupar, with video clip of Trump's interview)

    Congress, of course, is supposed to be in the business of “changing laws.” Courts, on the other hand, interpret them.

    The trend of the executive branch cutting Congress out of the picture to make policy didn’t begin with Trump. Faced with gridlock in Congress, President Obama, for instance, used executive action to create the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program in 2012. But Trump has gone even further to circumvent lawmakers.
    ...
    Trump’s comment about “changing laws as rapidly as we can get them through the courts” came in the context of him touting the vague immigration plan he unveiled at the White House last week. While details of the plan remain unclear, as my colleague Dara Lind explained, the core of the proposal is restricting legal immigration “by cutting family-based immigration and focusing instead on the ‘merit-based’ immigrants Trump does hypothetically want to allow to settle in the US.” The proposal would also make immigration whiter by requiring prospective immigrants to have some level of English proficiency.
    ...
    Instead of negotiating with Democrats to overhaul the nation’s immigration laws, Trump has resorted to emergency declarations and executive orders — blowing up potential deals again and again.
    posted by filthy light thief at 8:30 PM on May 20, 2019 [14 favorites]


    I find it exasperating that they did not continue to look for it when they had the witness on the stand.

    Agreed. And in related news: How a Lone Republican Set an Example for Democrats on the Mueller Report (Cristian Farias, NYT Opinion)
    More than a year before the House Judiciary Committee adopted articles of impeachment against President Richard Nixon, Representative Pete McCloskey, a California Republican, became the first member of Congress to call for a discussion about whether to begin an impeachment inquiry over Watergate. Over the weekend, Representative Justin Amash of Michigan pulled a McCloskey of sorts. He became the first Republican in Congress to say that the report of the special counsel, Robert Mueller, showed that President Trump had committed impeachable offenses. [...]

    But what is remarkable about Mr. Amash’s stand is how much tougher it is than that of the House’s Democratic leaders to date. Wary of a move that has little public support, Speaker Nancy Pelosi and prominent committee leaders have avoided talk of impeachment and have focused on learning what Attorney General William Barr redacted from the report, as well as subpoenaing testimony and documents. [...]

    Adam Schiff, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, who has long been one of Mr. Mueller’s strongest defenders, said last week that a “sterile report” was no match for direct congressional testimony from Mr. McGahn or Mr. Mueller. As the Watergate hearings showed, there is power in the public hearing directly from key officials.

    But there is nothing sterile about the report, as Mr. Amash and others, including Senator Elizabeth Warren, have eloquently noted. In damning detail it describes the depth of Russian interference with our democracy, Mr. Trump’s associates’ willingness to engage with a foreign adversary and the president’s efforts to thwart Mr. Mueller’s operation.

    It’s understandable that Democrats are concerned that an impeachment fight could distract from the issues at the heart of their campaign to unseat Mr. Trump and Republican members of Congress next year. The House needs to investigate aggressively the questionable conduct by this president and follow that inquiry where it leads.

    But Democratic leaders also need to be stronger and clearer about what we know.
    posted by Little Dawn at 8:32 PM on May 20, 2019 [7 favorites]


    But some Republicans close to Mr. Trump paint a more simplistic portrait of the president’s actions: That he has simply been consuming cable news coverage about Mr. Biden, and firing off tweets based on the coverage and polling on the Democratic race he hears about on the air.

    This is the purest expression of Trump's Razor I think I've ever seen. Given two explanations for Trump's actions, always prefer the stupider one. There's no strategy, not even low cunning. He's watching Biden getting attention in the media & it's triggering him to attack. He has no agency, no free will; he sees Biden getting attention that belongs to him, he must attack to steal it back from him.
    posted by scalefree at 8:35 PM on May 20, 2019 [22 favorites]


    saying Democrats' message is being drowned out by the fight over possibly impeaching Trump.

    Is the message "We don't care about the Constitution or the rule of law"? Because, yeah that message is getting drowned out in these games of "how many neat bills can we punt into a brick wall" while the most corrupt President in the history of the country carries on so.

    What's fascinating is that Pelosi has got to be in posession of more and better intel that we are here and yet she is still so annoyed that people still want to impeach him. I really have no idea how she thinks this point in history is supposed to work.
    posted by petebest at 8:37 PM on May 20, 2019 [31 favorites]


    It’s understandable that Democrats are concerned that an impeachment fight could distract from the issues at the heart of their campaign to unseat Mr. Trump and Republican members of Congress next year.

    The issue *is* government by democratic rule of law. If we can't get that fixed, we're fucked on climate change and health care and infrastructure and human rights and everything else.

    Voters aren't connecting those dots yet? Then it's time for our elected leaders (and 2020 hopefuls) to stand up and lead.
    posted by tivalasvegas at 8:37 PM on May 20, 2019 [33 favorites]


    Hm, the more I think about it, the more the Sergeant-at-Arms idea seems kind of problematic. Not in this case, but generally. What protections from abuse are there? How do you appeal that? Would the judicial branch be able to issue a writ of Habeas Corpus?

    Not that I mind Barr having to figure all of this out while locked in the Capitol basement.
    posted by ctmf at 9:03 PM on May 20, 2019 [5 favorites]


    Voters aren't connecting those dots yet? Then it's time for our elected leaders (and 2020 hopefuls) to stand up and lead.

    It seems well past time for leadership: Republicans outraise Democrats in April fundraising (Politico)
    The Republican National Committee raised $15.9 million in April, according to new campaign finance disclosures, as the committee prepared for President Donald Trump’s reelection — a sum that is more than double the $6.6 million raised by the Democratic National Committee during the same time period. [...]

    Financier John Childs — who has been accused of being involved in a Florida prostitution ring — gave the committee $100,000. Childs also donated to the RNC in February shortly before news of his alleged involvement in the prostitution ring broke. He has denied the allegations.

    And casino mogul Steve Wynn — who was accused of sexually assaulting employees at his casinos — donated $248,500 the RNC. Investigations into Wynn have concluded and Wynn denies all wrongdoing, and “at this point, there is no reason for refusing his support,” RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel told POLITICO last week.
    posted by Little Dawn at 9:13 PM on May 20, 2019 [4 favorites]


    NBC News, Russian documents reveal desire to sow racial discord — and violence — in the U.S.
    Russians who were linked to interference in the 2016 U.S. election discussed ambitious plans to stoke unrest and even violence inside the U.S. as recently as 2018, according to documents reviewed by NBC News.

    The documents — communications between associates of Yevgeny Prigozhin, a Kremlin-linked oligarch indicted by special counsel Robert Mueller for previous influence operations against the U.S. — laid out a new plot to manipulate and radicalize African-Americans. The plans show that Prigozhin’s circle has sought to exploit racial tensions well beyond Russia’s social media and misinformation efforts tied to the 2016 election.

    The documents were obtained through the Dossier Center, a London-based investigative project funded by Russian opposition figure Mikhail Khodorkovsky. NBC News has not independently verified the materials, but forensic analysis by the Dossier Center appeared to substantiate the communications.

    One document said that President Donald Trump’s election had “deepened conflicts in American society” and suggested that, if successful, the influence project would “undermine the country’s territorial integrity and military and economic potential.”
    I've got to say, some of the plans seem far-fetched enough that it's a little hard to take them seriously, or at least to take them seriously when they come from the same people who have previously run some operations of questionable at best competence:
    The documents contained proposals for several ways to further exacerbate racial discord in the future, including a suggestion to recruit African-Americans and transport them to camps in Africa “for combat prep and training in sabotage.” Those recruits would then be sent back to America to foment violence and work to establish a pan-African state in the Southern U.S., including South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana.
    posted by zachlipton at 9:59 PM on May 20, 2019 [14 favorites]


    Cohen: Trump’s attorney urged false testimony (Politico)
    The revelations — gleaned from more than 600 pages of lawmaker questions and answers with the one-time Trump loyalist — offer Democrats a chance to rekindle public attention on a Russia investigation that has been stymied in recent weeks by a White House eager to turn the page after special counsel Robert Mueller completed his probe.
    Lawmakers Bring Familiar Claims From Michael Cohen Into the Open (NYT)
    The details of his testimony also hand House Democrats investigating Mr. Trump yet another thorny mound of evidence to try to untangle as they weigh whether to begin impeachment proceedings or otherwise hold the president accountable.
    Michael Cohen: Trump's lawyer advised me to lie about Moscow tower project (Guardian)
    During the interviews, legislators repeatedly pressed Cohen for details on his false statement to Congress and tried to nail down whether he was directly told by Trump’s legal team to mislead the committee, but the transcripts provide no slam-dunk evidence. [...] House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff said in a statement last week that Cohen’s testimony this year, along with materials in the committee’s possession, raises “serious, unresolved concerns about the obstruction of our committee’s investigation that we would be negligent not to pursue”.
    posted by Little Dawn at 10:01 PM on May 20, 2019 [7 favorites]


    Hm, the more I think about it, the more the Sergeant-at-Arms idea seems kind of problematic. Not in this case, but generally."

    In the House, who else is supposed to Present the Mace?

    What protections from abuse are there? How do you appeal that? Would the judicial branch be able to issue a writ of Habeas Corpus? Not that I mind Barr having to figure all of this out while locked in the Capitol basement

    Marshall v. Gordon, 243 U.S. 521 (1917) suggests habeas is available.

    2019 CRS report on subpoena enforcement powers.

    LLI's Annotated Constitution page on investigatory powers and contempt:

    "Because Congress has invoked the aid of the federal judicial system in protecting itself against contumacious conduct, the consequence, the Court has asserted numerous times, is that the duty has been conferred upon the federal courts to accord a person prosecuted for his statutory offense every safeguard that the law accords in all other federal criminal cases, and the discussion in previous sections of many reversals of contempt convictions bears witness to the assertion in practice. What constitutional protections ordinarily necessitated by due process requirements, such as notice, right to counsel, confrontation, and the like, prevail in a contempt trial before the bar of one House or the other is an open question. Groppi v. Leslie, 404 U.S. 496 (1972)."[other citations omitted]
    posted by snuffleupagus at 2:12 AM on May 21, 2019 [7 favorites]


    The documents contained proposals for several ways to further exacerbate racial discord in the future, including a suggestion to recruit African-Americans and transport them to camps in Africa “for combat prep and training in sabotage.” Those recruits would then be sent back to America to foment violence and work to establish a pan-African state in the Southern U.S., including South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana.

    So if they got one black dude to buy into this plan, and got him on Fox talking about his plans for this state, and showed some footage of black people training with guns...exactly what do you imagine would be the response? How many people would be attacked as a result, do you think? If you're trying to increase racial violence in a group of people who are already inclined towards it (American white racists) it doesn't need MUCH success to have an effect. The plans don't have to have anything like a chance of succeeding to serve Russia's ends. This is what is needed to justify the actions racists already want to take.
    posted by threeturtles at 3:52 AM on May 21, 2019 [21 favorites]


    What if they IM'ed about throwing away absentee ballots? ("Miami Candidate's Campaign Workers May Have Tampered With Absentee Ballots UPDATED") (MiamiNewTimes)

    In which (apparently/allegedly) campaign workers for Miami-Dade County Commission District 5 candidate Alex Diaz de la Portilla discuss phone banking, what to do for lunch, canvassing, oh and also what to do with the absentee ballots they steal/find. Spoiler: they throw it away.

    The story was updated with a strong denial of any knowledge by the candidate. The candidate came in third in the election. It is left as an exercise to the reader to deduce the political party affiliation of the candidate and the absentee voter(s).

    Thank goodness this sort of behavior won't be a part of the 2020 presidential election either.
    posted by petebest at 5:22 AM on May 21, 2019 [6 favorites]


    Prosecutors examining tens of thousands of Trump inauguration documents

    The President's Inaugural Committee handed over the cache of documents over the course of several weeks in response to a wide-ranging subpoena seeking documents, records, and communications concerning the inaugural's finances, vendors, and donors sent in February by the US attorney's office with the Southern District of New York. The last set of documents was produced within the last month, people familiar with the matter said.

    Administration's response to USSDNY subpoena? Sure, here.
    Administration's response to US Congressional subpoena? Get bent.
    posted by petebest at 5:33 AM on May 21, 2019 [3 favorites]


    threeturtles: If you're trying to increase racial violence in a group of people who are already inclined towards it (American white racists) it doesn't need MUCH success to have an effect.

    It's the same as with the plan (possibly still happening? Maybe not happening?) to release some migrants from detention into sanctuary zones. If the supposed goal is some statistical increase in crime, that's nonsensical, but it's not if you just need one incident to exploit. (The right wing spent months making hay from an incident that was awful but not first-degree murder, involving a bullet that ricocheted, and at least half of the "angel families" lost their kids to vehicular accidents such as DUI or hit-and-run.)
    posted by InTheYear2017 at 5:42 AM on May 21, 2019 [3 favorites]


    NYT, Trump Shows Signs He Will Pardon Servicemen Accused or Convicted of War Crimes

    Remember how Trump first involved himself in Eddie Gallagher's case after watching an interview with Rep. Rep. Ralph Norman (R-SC) on Fox & Friends (MoJo)?

    It turns out that in addition to the on-air pardon campaign for convicted war criminals, Fox News Host Pete Hegseth privately lobbied Trump to pardon accused war criminals (Daily Beast)
    Since as early as January, Hegseth has repeatedly pressed the president to support the accused and convicted servicemen. Among those Hegseth—himself an Iraq War veteran and formerly the head of the conservative group Concerned Veterans for America—has advocated for is Special Operations Chief Edward Gallagher, a Navy SEAL platoon leader set to stand trial on May 28 for allegedly shooting civilians, including a school-age girl, and knifing to death a captured ISIS fighter receiving medical treatment in Iraq in 2017.

    According to three people with knowledge of the situation, Hegseth had multiple private conversations on the topic with President Trump over the past four-and-a-half months, with Gallagher’s case among those he pushed. The Fox & Friends host repeatedly told Trump that the process had been “very unfair” to Gallagher, two of these sources tell The Daily Beast. Hegseth pushed the president not only to publicly help Gallagher, but since at least March has specifically advised Trump to pardon him and the other men, the sources said.[…]

    Hegseth and his Fox & Friends colleagues have interviewed the families of Gallagher and Maj. Mathew Golsteyn—who was charged with murdering an Afghan male detainee and burying the body rather than releasing him in 2010—often pleading with Trump to pardon the men.[…]

    In April, Hegseth interviewed Don Brown, a defense lawyer for 1st Lt. Clint Lorance, who was convicted in 2013 of ordering the murder of two Afghan civilians who his own soldiers said posed no threat.[…]

    Those who have talked to Hegseth tell The Daily Beast that he strongly views current rules of engagement as too restrictive, and that that restrictive nature sets U.S. troops up for failure and to be unfairly branded as criminals or monsters in combat zones.
    Fox's transition from supplying partisan propaganda to influencing government policy is another dismaying development in the Trump administration.
    posted by Doktor Zed at 6:04 AM on May 21, 2019 [16 favorites]


    A reminder from last year.

    NYT: The Myth of Watergate Bipartisanship: The Republicans stuck with their president, right up to the end.
    In late 1972, when a Democratic congressman, Wright Patman of Texas, began to investigate connections between Mr. Nixon’s aides and the Watergate burglary, the House Republican leader, Gerald Ford of Michigan (who later succeeded Mr. Nixon as president), called it a “political witch hunt,” according to the historian Stanley I. Kutler in his book “The Wars of Watergate.”

    Mr. Ford wasn’t alone, and the countercharges didn’t end even as the evidence piled up. After reporters revealed close ties between the Watergate burglars and Mr. Nixon’s administration and re-election campaign, Senator Robert Dole of Kansas jumped to the president’s defense. He labeled the media accounts “a barrage of unfounded and unsubstantiated allegations by George McGovern” — whom Mr. Nixon defeated in the 1972 election — “and his partner in mud-slinging, The Washington Post.” [...]

    While the Senate Watergate Committee was being created, Republican Senator Edward Gurney of Florida belittled the investigation as “one of those political wing-dings that happen every political year.” Ted Stevens, a Republican senator from Alaska, repeated Mr. Ford’s warning that the investigation could become a “political witch hunt,” according to Mr. Kutler.

    Meanwhile, the ranking Republican on the Senate Watergate Committee, Howard Baker of Tennessee — a man often lauded for putting principle over party — met with Mr. Nixon to discuss strategy. To “maintain his purity in the Senate,” Mr. Baker didn’t want anyone to know about meeting Mr. Nixon, wrote the White House counsel, John Dean, in a memo before a meeting with Mr. Nixon. Once the hearings started in late spring of 1973, Mr. Baker’s staff leaked information about the committee’s witnesses and plans to Mr. Nixon.

    When Mr. Baker famously asked, “What did the president know, and when did he know it?” during the Watergate hearings, he meant to protect Mr. Nixon in the mistaken belief that the president didn’t know about the Watergate cover-up until many months after it occurred. The question backfired once evidence mounted that Mr. Nixon was involved in the cover-up from the start, and Mr. Baker eventually became a critic of the president.

    After it was revealed in July 1973 that Mr. Nixon had secretly taped conversations, Mr. Ford said he found nothing wrong with the president’s practices. Republican Senator John Tower of Texas later warned Congress not to get caught up in “the hysteria of Watergate.”

    Most congressional Republicans rallied around Mr. Nixon when the White House released edited transcripts of those tapes in April 1974 that showed Mr. Nixon scheming with his aides. As the House Judiciary Committee began debating possible impeachment in July, Representative Delbert Latta of Ohio said the evidence failed to prove Mr. Nixon’s direct involvement in Watergate.

    Mr. Latta and most other Republicans on the Judiciary Committee voted against all articles of impeachment on July 27-30, 1974. Eleven of 17 Republicans voted against the obstruction-of-justice article, 10 of 17 opposed the abuse-of-power resolution, and 15 of 17 voted against the article based on the president’s refusal to produce tapes in response to the committee’s subpoenas.

    More Republicans abandoned Mr. Nixon on the obstruction-of-justice charge only after he complied with the Supreme Court’s order on Aug. 5, releasing the “smoking gun” tapes that proved he had ordered a cover-up of the Watergate crimes. Still, many party members of the Judiciary Committee later filed reports arguing that Mr. Nixon was innocent of two of the three articles of impeachment sent to the full House.
    posted by chris24 at 6:25 AM on May 21, 2019 [36 favorites]


    Those who have talked to Hegseth tell The Daily Beast that he strongly views current rules of engagement as too restrictive, and that that restrictive nature sets U.S. troops up for failure and to be unfairly branded as criminals or monsters in combat zones.
    I would bet all the money in my checking account that Lieutenant Hegseth did some shit that he knows could put him in the dock of a war crimes tribunal but wasn't quite as bad as what Lorance did. Hegseth wants the bar to be reset so low that he'll have retroactively cleared it.
    posted by Etrigan at 6:27 AM on May 21, 2019 [21 favorites]




    RCP shows the same trend. God forbid we challenge this popular president.

    Simon Rosenberg
    Something is going on w/Trump's approval rating. In Rasmussen he's dropped from + 4 to -10 in the last few weeks. He's also losing ground in @FiveThirtyEight's aggregate, and is now -11.5, 1.5 pts lower than EDay 2018. Helps explain panicky, wild WH of late. He's in danger.
    posted by chris24 at 7:09 AM on May 21, 2019 [22 favorites]


    Guardian: Don McGahn expected to be held in contempt over refusal to testify – live

    Also: House Judiciary Committee chairman Jerry Nadler said Donald Trump’s behavior as outlined in the Mueller report “constitutes a crime.”
    Nadler made the declaration after listing incidents detailed in the report in which Trump told then-counsel Don McGahn to have special counsel Robert Mueller fired, and then told him to lie about it.

    “But for the Department of Justice’s policy of refusing to indict a sitting President, I believe he would have been charged with these crimes,” Nadler said. Trump has continued a “pattern of obstruction and coverup” by seeking to block congressional inquiries after the release of the report, he said.

    “Let me be clear: this Committee will hear Mr. McGahn’s testimony, even if we have to go to court to secure it,” he said in his opening statement. “We will not allow the President to stop this investigation, and nothing in these unjustified and unjustifiable legal attacks will stop us from pressing forward with our work on behalf of the American people. We will hold this President accountable - one way or the other.”
    posted by Little Dawn at 7:22 AM on May 21, 2019 [19 favorites]


    A reminder, Trump’s approval lives below Obama’s all-time low and yet despite the constant articles and punditry about how could Obama possibly lead and be successful or reelected president when he was mid 40s, the media and politicians act like Trump is teflon.

    For fucks sake, yes he’s subject to political gravity, yes things matter and affect him. Otherwise he wouldn’t be way underwater with a good economy. Throwing more shit at him will work, and you know it because it already is.
    posted by chris24 at 7:25 AM on May 21, 2019 [49 favorites]


    A reminder, Trump’s approval lives below Obama’s all-time low and yet despite the constant articles and punditry about how could Obama possibly lead and be successful or reelected president when he was mid 40s, the media and politicians act like Trump is teflon.

    It took the so-called "liberal media" years to recognize that the American people grew weary of George W. Bush's mendacity and incompetence and that polls showed he was no longer a "popular wartime president." And Trump has never been popular, except among his base.
    posted by Gelatin at 7:28 AM on May 21, 2019 [9 favorites]


    McGahn Skips Hearing, Defying Subpoena, and Democrats’ Anger Swells (NYT)
    A group of influential and outspoken Judiciary Committee Democrats were expected to go public with new calls for the panel to open a formal impeachment inquiry into Mr. Trump. An investigation of that nature would streamline disparate House inquiries and lend greater powers to the committee in its fight against the executive branch, their reasoning goes.

    “If they continue to pull the plug on congressional investigations and thumb their noses at congressional power, they leave us very few choices,” said one of the committee’s members, Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland, in an interview. [...]

    The Judiciary Committee has already voted to recommend that the full House hold Attorney General William P. Barr in contempt for his defiance of another subpoena asking for Mr. Mueller’s full report and underlying evidence. But the House has yet to take up the contempt citation, and with Congress leaving town this week for the Memorial Day holiday, it is unlikely to consider it until June, delaying an eventual court case to try to pry free the material.

    A contempt recommendation against Mr. McGahn could also take time. In a three-page letter to Mr. McGahn late Monday, Mr. Nadler argued that the Justice Department’s legal opinion would not hold up in court and did not, for that matter, preclude Mr. McGahn from appearing before the committee. He also reiterated his view — which legal experts have endorsed — that the president’s claim of executive privilege over the full Mueller report and underlying evidence is likely to crumple in court.
    posted by Little Dawn at 7:38 AM on May 21, 2019 [10 favorites]


    "It took the so-called 'liberal media' years to recognize that the American people grew weary of George W. Bush's mendacity and incompetence and that polls showed he was no longer a 'popular wartime president.'"

    Yes, but I have embarrassing and painful memories of confidently arguing here on MetaFilter all through 2004 that Bush's numbers were unprecedentedly low and indicated that he wouldn't be re-elected.

    I've been pretty confident that there's no way Trump will be re-elected in 2020. But at this point I wouldn't be surprised to wake up after Election Day to discover the deceased Pat Paulson was President. Of course, that would be a vast improvement.
    posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 7:45 AM on May 21, 2019 [6 favorites]


    In a three-page letter to Mr. McGahn late Monday, Mr. Nadler argued that the Justice Department’s legal opinion would not hold up in court and did not, for that matter, preclude Mr. McGahn from appearing before the committee. He also reiterated his view — which legal experts have endorsed — that the president’s claim of executive privilege over the full Mueller report and underlying evidence is likely to crumple in court.

    This is all well and good, but the Democrats need to say, for the record and for the microphones, that Trump is obviously hiding something and that Republicans are helping him cover it up. They need to use those words, "cover-up." That's what everyone remembers about Watergate; it wasn't the break-in that brought Nixon down, and sent many of his aides to prison, but the cover-up.
    posted by Gelatin at 7:45 AM on May 21, 2019 [21 favorites]


    From The Myth of Watergate Bipartisanship quoted by chris24: When Mr. Baker famously asked, “What did the president know, and when did he know it?” during the Watergate hearings, he meant to protect Mr. Nixon in the mistaken belief that the president didn’t know about the Watergate cover-up until many months after it occurred. The question backfired once evidence mounted that Mr. Nixon was involved in the cover-up from the start, and Mr. Baker eventually became a critic of the president.

    I feel like those last words conceal quite a bit in the overall thesis, like the cartoon of a math equation with "Then a miracle occurs" written inside...

    It may be a myth that Nixon lost the good will of the Republican party by numerical majority. But compared to today's atmosphere, it's not a myth that shock/disgust over Watergate was "bipartisan" (a word I've generally seen used to mean something with nontrivial representation in both parties, e.g a bill having "bipartisan support", and not the more restrictive requirement of a majority of both parties).

    And it was also somehow bipartisan among the citizenry outside DC! When I read about Jimmy Carter's successful 1976 election, I do a triple-take when learning that conservative evangelicals, who helped him carry most Southern states, saw him as the more moral candidate thanks mainly to his own evangelism plus the contrast with the corruption of Watergate. That's so surreal. They didn't know back then that all liberals are godless and so-called obstruction is just fighting back? The mind boggles.

    Throwing more shit at him will work, and you know it because it already is.

    I think this is true, and I think the Pelosis of Congress are more focused on the empty half of the glass: If Trump's star is already plummeting, they figure, why taking even the smallest risk of interfering with that?

    But that's the wrong inference, and pretty much the only way for it to be right is if middle/undecided/whatever America could be convinced, by either Republicans or bad horse-race media, not merely that, eg, bank fraud is no big deal, but in fact there's something especially noble about committing it and something villainous about investigating it. Such an attitude is limited to the deplorable set that Hillary (in a quote meant to sympathize with Trump supporters) correctly diagnosed as about 25% of the population or less. Beyond that, impeachment could be a wash, with most people shrugging their shoulders, and even then it would be worth perusing on the electoral math. I think it will just increase the existing momentum into a place where the math is especially promising.

    (That math, I repeat until I am hoarse, remains the most important factor, because the Constitution explicitly states "Subsequent to the Year two thousand and ten, no Senator, being of a Faction or Party beginning with the letter R, shall concur with the Impeachment of a President of the same Faction or Party". And a second-which-probably-becomes-third term would jeopardize rule of law way more than present Democratic cowardice does. Their priorities are right, but their priors are way off, and the same applies to "Nominate Biden because defeating Trump is paramount".)
    posted by InTheYear2017 at 7:47 AM on May 21, 2019 [4 favorites]


    Mod note: Couple deleted; I get the frustration but remember we're aiming for more signal in here, so rather than just expressions of the same - again understandable - frustration/ anger/ exasperation/ fear/ etc, please stick to updates, new developments etc.
    posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 7:51 AM on May 21, 2019 [2 favorites]


    When I read about Jimmy Carter's successful 1976 election, I do a triple-take when learning that conservative evangelicals, who helped him carry most Southern states, saw him as the more moral candidate thanks mainly to his own evangelism plus the contrast with the corruption of Watergate. That's so surreal.

    The fact that in 1980 evangelicals abandoned Carter, an actual born-again christian whose closest hint of personal scandal was admitting to Playboy magazine that he committed adultery in his heart by looking at other women with lust -- who was satirized in an Oliphant cartoon as a prim Puritan for eliminating the tax deduction for "three martini lunches" -- that they abandoned him for Ronald Reagan tells you all you need to know about them.
    posted by Gelatin at 7:53 AM on May 21, 2019 [40 favorites]


    Justin Amash is again showing up D leaders. He followed up his initial call for impeachment with another tweetstorm yesterday countering the BS fellow Republicans threw at him.

    Justin Amash
    People who say there were no underlying crimes and therefore the president could not have intended to illegally obstruct the investigation—and therefore cannot be impeached—are resting their argument on several falsehoods:
    1. They say there were no underlying crimes. In fact, there were many crimes revealed by the investigation, some of which were charged, and some of which were not but are nonetheless described in Mueller’s report.
    2. They say obstruction of justice requires an underlying crime. In fact, obstruction of justice does not require the prosecution of an underlying crime, and there is a logical reason for that. Prosecutors might not charge a crime precisely *because* obstruction of justice denied them timely access to evidence that could lead to a prosecution. If an underlying crime were required, then prosecutors could charge obstruction of justice only if it were unsuccessful in completely obstructing the investigation. This would make no sense.
    3. They imply the president should be permitted to use any means to end what he claims to be a frivolous investigation, no matter how unreasonable his claim. In fact, the president could not have known whether every single person Mueller investigated did or did not commit any crimes.
    4. They imply “high Crimes and Misdemeanors” requires charges of a statutory crime or misdemeanor. In fact, “high Crimes and Misdemeanors” is not defined in the Constitution and does not require corresponding statutory charges. The context implies conduct that violates the public trust—and that view is echoed by the Framers of the Constitution and early American scholars.

    - - -

    And now today...

    Bo Erickson (CBS)
    Wow: @justinamash is NOT backing down. He is now talking to a school group on steps of the Capitol about why Trump impeachment proceedings should begin. “Really dangerous for our country” when ppl don’t tell the truth PIC
    posted by chris24 at 8:01 AM on May 21, 2019 [68 favorites]


    2. They say obstruction of justice requires an underlying crime. In fact, obstruction of justice does not require the prosecution of an underlying crime, and there is a logical reason for that. Prosecutors might not charge a crime precisely *because* obstruction of justice denied them timely access to evidence that could lead to a prosecution.

    And this fact should be well known by anyone who covers, or whose newsroom covers, crime and/or politics. Any time a media source prints or airs a Republican's assertion that Trump can't have obstructed justice for this reason, they're helping Republicans air a propaganda point that they know, or should know, is not true, and they're under no obligation to do so, even in the name of "balance." They can, and should, make clear that they can't and won't air that assertion. But air it they do.
    posted by Gelatin at 8:07 AM on May 21, 2019 [16 favorites]


    The morality questions always put me in mind of Paths from Vampire: The Masquerade. Default players are on the path of Humanity, where killing, stealing, and lying are all bad and behaving badly makes you have to roll to see if your character slips further down the path to giving in to the monstrous urges of being a vampire. But you can change to other Paths and redefine what counts as a sin, so that you only roll for killing cult-members or failing to look cool or whatever. Reagan was more moral than Carter if you knew the tenets of the Path evangelicals switched to.
    posted by Scattercat at 8:13 AM on May 21, 2019 [9 favorites]


    MSNBC
    Speaker Pelosi says Rep. Amash's "voice speaks to the silence of all the other Republicans not to hold this president accountable," though, she adds, she feels no increased pressure to pursue impeachment after Amash's tweets.


    Will Stancil
    “Justin Amash shows the Republicans’ cowardly unwillingness to confront Trump”

    “So will you, then, confront Trump yourself”

    “Oh god no haha of course not”
    posted by chris24 at 8:15 AM on May 21, 2019 [45 favorites]


    That RCP polling average posted above is quite revealing -- not to denizens of this thread necessarily, but it's good to step back from the newscycle once in a while.

    Trump had virtually no honeymoon period; favorable/unfavorables were roughly equivalent at the Inauguration but the unfavorables quickly shot up to the low 50s, where they've mainly been since. Worst unfavorables were high 50s from mid-summer 2017 through the end of the year, and since the beginning of 2018 they've hovered at 53% +/-2% or so (with favorables at 43% +/-2%).

    Bush's favorability
    didn't hit the low 40s until Katrina in Sept. 2005. However, it was much more elastic and steadily fell until his term ended at about 30% favorability.

    Obama's numbers are also much more elastic, bouncing back and forth from the mid-50s to the lower 40s.

    Going back to Trump, it's interesting that it looks like there is a very consistent 10% of respondents who (I assume) are in a don't know/refused to say category -- the RCP graphs don't break that out directly but I looked at a couple data points and it looks like that category is much lower for the Bush years and somewhat lower for Obama.

    I interpret this as saying that a solid 10% of respondents are not willing to say they support Trump. The question, of course, is whether they're still going to vote for him, whether they'll skip that vote or stay home, or even may vote for the Democrat.

    My guess is as good as yours, but I can't see more than a 5% Trump voter --> Dem voter swing at best. Those favorable/unfavorable/other numbers are pretty damn stable.

    Meanwhile, let's take a half-second to remember that 40% of eligible Americans didn't vote in the 2016 general election.
    posted by tivalasvegas at 8:18 AM on May 21, 2019 [5 favorites]


    Reagan was more moral than Carter if you knew the tenets of the Path evangelicals switched to.

    Yeah, "It's Okay If You're A Republican."

    "It’s used to describe words or actions that would cause firestorms if the responsible people were Democrats, but nothing when a Republican’s behind them."
    posted by Gelatin at 8:19 AM on May 21, 2019 [1 favorite]


    The MSM are not our friends.
    “the 20th century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance: the growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy." Australian social scientist Alex Carey
    posted by Harry Caul at 8:20 AM on May 21, 2019 [23 favorites]


    Speaker Pelosi says Rep. Amash's "voice speaks to the silence of all the other Republicans not to hold this president accountable," though, she adds, she feels no increased pressure to pursue impeachment after Amash's tweets.

    "My own view is that Justin Amash has reached a different conclusion than I have. I respect him, I think it's a courageous statement. The American people just aren't there. The Senate is certainly not there, either."

    Pelosi agreeing with Mitt Romney over the voice of her electorate is the bipartisanship Biden dreams of.
    posted by Rust Moranis at 8:39 AM on May 21, 2019 [47 favorites]


    What possibly could have induced McGahn to defy the subpoena (other than general scumbaggery)?

    Maybe the $2 million that the RNC paid his firm last month. (disclosure, reporter is a friend)

    (Reminder, McGahn joined Jones Day in March)

    For comparison, btw, the Democrats don't seem to be pumping that kind of money into their law firm.
    posted by martin q blank at 8:41 AM on May 21, 2019 [19 favorites]


    I think it's a courageous statement. The American people just aren't there. The Senate is certainly not there, either.

    Umm, saying something because you believe it's right and true regardless of the prevailing political winds is exactly what makes it courageous.
    posted by diogenes at 8:46 AM on May 21, 2019 [24 favorites]


    AOC:
    Just as what happens in the House doesn’t control Senate, what happens in the Senate shouldn’t control the House. DoJ outlined ev of 10 criminal instances. Pres is now obstructing legally binding subpoenas. We need to do our job & vote on impeachment. What Sen does is on them. Remember, Clinton was also impeached - that failed in Sen too. Our institutions didn’t suffer then, but they have been damaged greatly today w unwillingness to impeach. Whether it’s Dem fear or GOP recklessness, doesn’t matter. Failure to impeach now is neglect of due process.
    AOC/Amash for Speaker/Majority Leader.
    posted by T.D. Strange at 8:47 AM on May 21, 2019 [61 favorites]


    Can someone show me these American people who "just aren't there" on impeachment and yet are aware of the crimes and corruption?

    I think Pelosi's math is wrong. Can anyone review the miles of damning evidence we've seen through these threads and not "get there"? If not, it seems like the House has a neat way to ensure everyone gets to see that evidence.

    Otherwise, isn't the statement that "The American people just aren't there" a statement promoting continued ignorance of the President's many crimes? That seems just so odd for an opposition leader to do.
    posted by petebest at 8:48 AM on May 21, 2019 [9 favorites]


    Via Election Law Blog: Federal District Court Allows Suit Against Georgia’s Use of Unsecure DRE Machines without a Paper Trail to Go Forward, Partially Denying Motion to Dismiss.
    posted by Bella Donna at 8:52 AM on May 21, 2019 [13 favorites]


    I think Pelosi's math is wrong.

    Its not her math its her logic. Shes counting senators and you're counting representatives.
    posted by Exceptional_Hubris at 9:00 AM on May 21, 2019 [5 favorites]


    She's definitely counting Senators, but she's also saying the American people don't number significantly when it comes to the question of impeachment. I think she's wrong, unless she's only counting people who haven't read/heard much of anything about his obvious crimes.

    Barr's obstruction and the subsequent crowing buried the story for all but the most interested, who were already aware of things like Kushner's backchannel to Russia and firing Comey in order to obstruct. Impeachment hearings would change all that.
    posted by petebest at 9:05 AM on May 21, 2019 [1 favorite]


    The American people just aren't there. The Senate is certainly not there, either.

    I was talking with a friend the other day about Michael Jackson and Cosby, about how people did know about their crimes years before any public outrage. Both of them had paid damages to victims through the courts for their crimes. It took people coming forward and telling their stories in a visceral way for their crimes to become undeniable and catch fire with the public. This is why we need impeachment proceedings.
    posted by xammerboy at 9:09 AM on May 21, 2019 [47 favorites]


    By all means, Pelosi deserves every bit of criticism for this, and AOC deserves much credit, but let's ease up the idea that Justin freaking Amash is some kind of resistance hero. I mean, Majority Leader? Really?
    posted by tonycpsu at 9:11 AM on May 21, 2019 [19 favorites]


    When your own leaders won't lead, this is what you get. People start looking for strength...possibly in all the wrong places.
    posted by FireballForever at 9:16 AM on May 21, 2019 [20 favorites]


    The Senate also isn't there on most of the legislation that the House has passed, such as HR1 -and won't be there for much of what the House wants to pass in the near future. Put simply - The Senate is NEVER going to be there for almost anything the house could champion. So why is it OK to proceed with legislation that is certainly doomed to fail in the Senate, but not anything related to impeachment, which is something that the House actually has a bit more power over with regards to proceedings even if it the actual impeachment vote would fail in the Senate today?
    posted by MysticMCJ at 9:17 AM on May 21, 2019 [26 favorites]


    Pelosi seems to consider it important that Impeachment not be seen as coming from her. Hearings are continuing, consequences for failing to comply are in the pipeline. These things take time. That there is a clear trend in sentiment and no apparent letup in the bad news for Trump is a clear sign that the current strategy is working.

    It would be insane for her to publicly call for impeachment right now. It would put the focus on her and give Trump a specific person to attack rather than his present old man shouts at cloud counterproductive Twitter rants. Give the subpoena situation time to work itself out, which also gives the slow-ass crotchety old men who aren't Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham in the Senate to wrap their brains around how deep Trump's shit really goes and see their constituents' anger first hand over the summer, before saying the sky is falling and Democrats are worthless.

    Like it or not, government doesn't move at the speed of Twitter. If it ever does, we are doomed.
    posted by wierdo at 9:20 AM on May 21, 2019 [17 favorites]


    ICYMI with all the McGahn drama, Dick Durbin D-IL is requesting the Int'l Red Cross to the border.
    posted by fluttering hellfire at 9:23 AM on May 21, 2019 [10 favorites]


    From Politico: “Judiciary members may be intense. But I fully support Nancy Pelosi where she is right now,” Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.) said. “We also have to deliver on prescription drugs and infrastructure, and a partisan impeachment would tear this country apart.”

    The magic word here is partisan. The Representative is trying hard to pretend that the Emperor has a g-string, at least, and is not completely naked. But she is wrong and that kind of thinking is toxic IMO.
    posted by Bella Donna at 9:23 AM on May 21, 2019 [12 favorites]


    Also, why do we have to label hearings as being capital-I Impeachment hearings for them to count? There has been no shortage of public attention on the hearings they have been having, so why upset the apple cart before getting the courts fully on side so that a conviction is actually possible? That's really what my confusion over the much of the discontent I read here stems from, I think.
    posted by wierdo at 9:25 AM on May 21, 2019 [1 favorite]


    Pelosi's bot army and her daughter are also going after Sarah Kendzior.
    posted by fluttering hellfire at 9:26 AM on May 21, 2019 [5 favorites]


    Manu Raju:
    NEWS: Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team has expressed reticence to him testifying publicly in front of the House Judiciary Committee, according to sources familiar with the matter. His team has expressed that he does not want to appear political.

    One option is to have him testify behind closed doors, but sources caution numerous options are being considered in the negotiations between the committee and the special counsel’s team. Nadler has called for public testimony. CNN link
    posted by a snickering nuthatch at 9:28 AM on May 21, 2019 [3 favorites]


    Also, why do we have to label hearings as being capital-I Impeachment hearings for them to count?

    It's not that they won't count, but the House gets a lot more leverage with their subpoenas and other investigations if it's an impeachment hearing. Apparently the procedures are more binding and it's less easy for witnesses to blow them off.

    That's my understanding, therefore.

    As a result, I just faxed my Representative encouraging her to push for impeachment hearings, so the public can get informed (and maybe the GOP too). Nobody needs to commit to actual impeachment yet, but if we can at least get investigations with more teeth, that would be a good step.
    posted by suelac at 9:33 AM on May 21, 2019 [8 favorites]


    His team has expressed that he does not want to appear political.

    Truth isn’t political. Letting the partisan hack protecting the criminal you investigated control and lie to the public about the facts you found is political.
    posted by chris24 at 9:36 AM on May 21, 2019 [33 favorites]


    a partisan impeachment would tear this country apart

    A nonpartisan/bipartisan impeachment is one million percent impossible and Dingell knows it. Pretty much a bald admission that a Trump impeachment will never happen. In the coming years expect to be told that every anti-fascist responsibility of any Democratic-held branch of government is impossible because it'd "tear this country apart."
    posted by Rust Moranis at 9:38 AM on May 21, 2019 [12 favorites]


    a partisan impeachment would tear this country apart

    How about a descent into fascism? That gonna do anything to this country?
    posted by chris24 at 9:41 AM on May 21, 2019 [55 favorites]


    In lighter news, from Mother Jones:

    On Thursday, lawyers for Roger Stone, whose travel is restricted ahead of his November trial on obstruction of justice and perjury charges, requested a judge’s permission to visit Tennessee and Illinois “for business opportunities.” One of those opportunities is at the Pony, an adult entertainment club in Memphis, where Stone is scheduled to appear June 5-7. A longtime political adviser to President Donald Trump, Stone “is coming out to judge the national exotic dancer competition that we’re hosting,” the club’s owner, Jerry Westlund, tells Mother Jones. ...

    Stone has complained publicly about his mounting legal expenses and his loss of income due to his prosecution. He has hustled to drum up support for a legal defense fund, selling T-shirts and rocks with his signature on them. Last week, he launched a “Family Support Fund” to seek donations to cover “rent, food, medical expenses, insurance, gasoline, and the most basic of living expenses” for him and his wife. Strip-club appearance fees may be an emerging source of income for the cash-strapped dirty trickster. He gave a lecture earlier this month at an adult club in Richmond, Virginia.

    posted by Bella Donna at 9:43 AM on May 21, 2019 [4 favorites]


    The American people just aren't there. The Senate is certainly not there, either.

    Pelosi should be condemning and shaming the Republican Party for helping Trump cover up his crimes and shielding him from those crimes' consequences. That'd help the American people get there.

    Trump is guilty, he's obviously guilty, and the Republicans are desperate to keep his crimes from blowing up on all of them -- which, ironically, should make it all the more likely that his crimes eventually do blow up on all of them.
    posted by Gelatin at 9:46 AM on May 21, 2019 [21 favorites]


    How would testifying behind closed doors be less political? I suppose it would avoid televising any grandstanding and general bloviating by committee members, but I'd put up with the theatrics in exchange for more transparency.
    posted by emelenjr at 9:48 AM on May 21, 2019 [2 favorites]


    As predicted, CNN: Trump Attorneys Appeal Ruling Ordering Accounting Firm To Hand Over Records to Congress
    President Donald Trump's attorneys are appealing a ruling by a federal judge ordering an accounting firm to comply with a congressional subpoena, acting fast on the one-week window until the firm turns over Trump's personal, business and charity financial records and communications to House Democrats.

    The President's private legal team filed the notice of appeal at the DC Circuit Court of Appeals not even a day after losing their fight against the subpoena in the lower court. The deadline for the accounting firm, Mazars, to comply with the subpoena is next Monday.
    MSNBC's Matthew Miller: "I wonder who the chief judge is in the circuit where all of the fights between Congress and Trump will play out and whether he cares about partisan norm-busting. Oh that's right...it's some guy named Merrick Garland."
    posted by Doktor Zed at 9:53 AM on May 21, 2019 [65 favorites]


    Robert Mueller’s team has expressed reticence to him testifying publicly in front of the House Judiciary Committee, according to sources familiar with the matter. His team has expressed that he does not want to appear political.

    If Mueller needs to be subpoenad, and even found to be in contempt of Congress if he doesn't show, so be it. Contrary to the Trump narrative, this isn't about Mueller per se, it's about an investigation. Follow through.
    posted by Rykey at 10:09 AM on May 21, 2019 [24 favorites]


    This is the standard Republican strategy, from Fox on down, and Mueller appears to be playing along: Republicans "politicize" an issue that had heretofore been fairly apolitical and widely agreed-upon -- everything from climate science or evolution down to Congress's subpoena powers -- and those committed to centrist non-bias then do backflips to avoid "the appearance" (to whom?) of bias by trying to find the midpoint between a vast scientific/legal/political consensus and the 40% of Americans who move in lockstep with a Republican leadership who can politicize anything as needed. So now something as well-precedented as a special council appearing before Congress is politicized, and anyone who plays this game (such as the Republican Mueller) now jumps as far rightward as required to find that middle ground. And incidentally, he already tried to split the baby once before by taking his stance of: "won't call it obstruction and won't outright say he would have called it that if DOJ policy on indictments were otherwise" -- a position that is only the judicious middle relative to the extreme efforts DOJ made to tank the entire report.

    Pelosi is doing the same. If you don't want to make a stink, then Republicans can take whatever position they like, ever more rightward, and you have to go (half-way) along: wait for the Mueller report, don't start impeachment proceedings, don't freak out over McGahn or even Mueller refusing to testify, don't do more than half-criticize X as X moves farther and farther rightward. I'd like someone to ask her, if she's frustrated that her domestic agenda is currently getting no attention and thinks impeachment would make it worse, then exactly how much attention does she think Congress should be giving Trump right now? If the domestic agenda is even now being buried by Trump hearings, wouldn't that mean that Congress should be giving even less attention to all that than it is now? Not just non-impeachment, but even fewer hearings and investigations than are currently happening?
    posted by chortly at 10:11 AM on May 21, 2019 [33 favorites]


    It's not that they won't count, but the House gets a lot more leverage with their subpoenas and other investigations if it's an impeachment hearing.

    This is a baseless and self serving misconception trotted out by one of Trump's toadies and was laughed right out of the only courtroom it's ever disgraced. And when I say baseless, I mean completely made up from whole cloth, not that they found some fringe legal theory someone else made up and published.

    Congress must be able to investigate anything they damn well please as a matter of course, otherwise it would be impossible to legislate or carry out any of their other Constitutional duties and authorities. The argument is absurd on its face and deserves no consideration except to sully the reputation of anyone actively promoting or using it.
    posted by wierdo at 10:14 AM on May 21, 2019 [16 favorites]


    If the domestic agenda is even now being buried by Trump hearings, wouldn't that mean that Congress should be giving even less attention to all that than it is now? Not just non-impeachment, but even fewer hearings and investigations than are currently happening?

    Yup, that's the logical conclusion of her most recent statements. The lower Trump's corruption and lawlessness falls in the news, the easier it will be for Democratic policy initiatives to rise above it.
    posted by diogenes at 10:20 AM on May 21, 2019 [1 favorite]


    “This seems rather noteworthy. Philadelphia's City Council primary elections are on May 21 and leading candidates are directly criticizing capitalism.

    "Capitalism has created extreme economic inequality"
    "It exploits victims of poverty"
    "Capitalism is an immoral system"”

    Vote in your primaries today Philly
    posted by The Whelk at 10:39 AM on May 21, 2019 [28 favorites]


    Um, did Trump's team not file a petition for writ of supersedeas to stay the District Court's order pending appeal and a request for temporary stay pending the outcome of the writ petition?

    I don't see one on the DC Circuit's docket for the case, only the notice of appeal, but that was entered ~90 minutes ago, so it may be coming later today. With a deadline of Monday and the accounting firm signaling that they will comply with the subpoena, a stay pending appeal is basically the ballgame, since the actual appeal is likely a losing case.*

    * The standard of review for denial of an injunction is abuse of discretion; even discounting everything else about the case, it's just really difficult to get an appellate court to overturn a decision like this.
    posted by jedicus at 10:48 AM on May 21, 2019 [6 favorites]


    US intercepts Russian bombers, fighter jets off the coast of Alaska

    "Two of the Russian bombers were intercepted by two F-22s, and a second group of bombers with Su-35 fighters was intercepted later by two additional F-22s, while the E-3 provided overall surveillance," NORAD said, adding that "the Russian bombers and fighters remained in international airspace and at no time did the aircraft enter United States or Canadian sovereign airspace."

    Apparently this happens on the reg. Now.

    "Patrols by Russian military aircraft off the coasts of the United States and Canada have grown increasingly complex in recent years," O'Shaughnessy said in written testimony submitted to Congress earlier this month.

    He wrote that the bomber patrols were a "highly visible" message intended "to underscore Russia's capabilities" and develop "a new generation of air crews," adding that "NORAD fighter aircraft routinely intercept Russian military aviation missions inside the US and Canadian Air Defense Identification Zones, and there is no indication that Russian leadership intends to reduce the number of these missions in the near future."


    So that's fun.
    posted by petebest at 10:58 AM on May 21, 2019 [9 favorites]




    By all means, Pelosi deserves every bit of criticism for this, and AOC deserves much credit, but let's ease up the idea that Justin freaking Amash is some kind of resistance hero. I mean, Majority Leader? Really?

    When your own leaders won't lead, this is what you get. People start looking for strength...possibly in all the wrong places.


    Our actual Majority Leader literally could not run fast enough to a microphone to take impeachment off the table the moment the Mueller Report came out. He sprinted to get that out there. So yes. At this point give me Amash. At least I know he's got one thing right, and it's the one thing our Democratic so-called leaders were specifically elected to do in the last cycle and now refuse to do.
    posted by T.D. Strange at 11:28 AM on May 21, 2019 [16 favorites]


    If you're referring to Chuck Schumer, Senate minority leader, he might just be the one person who has a better reason to avoid making this about themselves than Nancy Pelosi does. He and Trump have a well known history that makes it impossible for him to visibly support impeachment without the narrative turning into Chuck Schumer persecuting Trump over a personal vendetta, regardless of reality.
    posted by wierdo at 11:36 AM on May 21, 2019 [1 favorite]


    The House majority leader, which is a separate post from Speaker, is noted vacant suit Steny Hoyer.
    posted by Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish at 11:39 AM on May 21, 2019 [10 favorites]


    > If you're referring to Chuck Schumer, Senate minority leader

    Not to speak for T. D. Strange here but he's referring to Steny Hoyer, our House Majority leader.

    Specifically, @danabashcnn: House Majority @LeaderHoyer just told me : “Based on what we have seen to date, going forward on impeachment is not worthwhile at this point. Very frankly, there is an election in 18 months and the American people will make a judgement” (12:36 PM - 18 Apr 2019)
    posted by RedOrGreen at 11:41 AM on May 21, 2019 [5 favorites]


    So then the question posed after that statement is "when -45 gets re-elected via Russian interference and voter suppression, as well losing the popular vote, you're gonna be totes cool with that?" right?
    posted by Bacon Bit at 11:43 AM on May 21, 2019 [10 favorites]


    You've lost the plot when you're suggesting putting a guy who's more conservative than 90+% of the House in the leadership of the Democratic House delegation.
    posted by tonycpsu at 11:50 AM on May 21, 2019 [9 favorites]


    If he opposes the Democrats' messaging bills but supports impeachment of the Republican president, is he actually more conservative than the current Dem leadership?
    posted by Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish at 11:53 AM on May 21, 2019 [9 favorites]


    There are plenty of active Democratic Representatives to pick from who have endorsed impeachment now or previously and/or starting an impeachment investigation and have said so repeatedly on TV and the Internet. Slow your roll and get you some day-old fried chicken, and let’s stop with this stupid stupid “these Republicans are actually not as bad as the Dems” refrain.
    posted by Huffy Puffy at 11:57 AM on May 21, 2019 [9 favorites]


    I mean, I'd take AOC/Tlaib/etc over the most impeachment-happy Republican in a heartbeat. "Amash would be better" is more about what a low bar the actual leadership is setting here.
    posted by Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish at 12:03 PM on May 21, 2019 [8 favorites]


    Ashley Nicole Black
    Do you think Elizabeth Warren has a plan to fix my love life?

    Elizabeth Warren
    DM me and let’s figure this out.


    Ashley Nicole Black
    Guess who's crying and shaking and just talked to Elizabeth Warren on the phone?!?!? We have a plan to get my mom grandkids, it's very comprehensive, and it does involve raising taxes on billionaires.
    posted by chris24 at 12:04 PM on May 21, 2019 [116 favorites]


    CNN: Justice Department willing to hand over counterintelligence if Schiff backs off 'enforcement action'
    The Justice Department is trying to stave off an "enforcement action" against Attorney General William Barr this week, making a rare offer to have the House Intelligence Committee review materials from special counsel Robert Mueller's report if House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff agrees to back down.

    Last week Schiff said that he would hold a business meeting Wednesday to take an unspecified action against the Justice Department for not providing the committee documents related to Volume I of Mueller's report on links between the Trump campaign and the Russian government.

    The Justice Department […] now says it's continuing to review the initial tranche of 12 categories of documents Schiff wants, and will make them available "in relatively short order," according to a letter obtained by CNN.
    posted by Doktor Zed at 12:04 PM on May 21, 2019 [13 favorites]


    The WaPo has coverage of a 2017 transcript from a closed-door hearing with Loretta Lynch in which she contradicts Comey's testimony that she directed him to downplay the Her Emails investigation. According to Comey, Lynch's directive "was one of the bricks in the load that led me to conclude, ‘I have to step away from the department if we’re to close this case credibly’", but according to Lynch she merely suggested some bland talking points to acknowledge the investigation which were consistent with long-standing Justice Department policy.

    The transcript was released by Republican Rep. Douglas Collins (Ga.) and appears to be well coordinated with the right wing noise machine. The Post is the only reputable source so far reporting on it so far, meanwhile Fox News, The Washington Times, The Washington Examiner, The National Review, Townhall, WorldNetDaily, The Blaze, and the rest of the nut-o-sphere all have coverage on it. They're even running with the second wave of stories about Hannity and Huckabee reacting to the story. It's amazing how fast Republican can eat their own.
    posted by peeedro at 12:05 PM on May 21, 2019 [3 favorites]


    Mod note: Couple deleted, enough on "is Amash better"/"are Pelosi and mainstream Dems worst". Points made; let's please drop it now rather than going another ten rounds restating positions.
    posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 12:08 PM on May 21, 2019 [7 favorites]


    "when -45 gets re-elected via Russian interference and voter suppression, as well losing the popular vote, you're gonna be totes cool with that?" right?

    Fortunately, this plot arc has prior art.
    posted by rhizome at 12:17 PM on May 21, 2019 [1 favorite]


    Meanwhile in Tennessee (from earlier in the comments), the scandal-prone new state House Speaker is resigning.
    posted by Huffy Puffy at 12:30 PM on May 21, 2019 [9 favorites]


    Daily Beast, Rex Tillerson Secretly Meets With House Foreign Affairs Committee to Talk Trump: "Tillerson’s appearance took place as virtually every other Trumpworld luminary has been stonewalling congressional oversight efforts"

    Can we do Mattis next?
    posted by zachlipton at 12:41 PM on May 21, 2019 [13 favorites]


    > Rex Tillerson Secretly Meets With House Foreign Affairs Committee to Talk Trump: "Tillerson’s appearance took place as virtually every other Trumpworld luminary has been stonewalling congressional oversight efforts"

    So confusing. Does this mean that Rex Tillerson - former CEO of Exxon, awarded the Order of Friendship by Putin himself, Trump's top diplomat - that Rex Tillerson - has less to fear from an oversight inquiry than the rest of this corrupt mafia? How deep down the rabbit hole are we, really?
    posted by RedOrGreen at 1:11 PM on May 21, 2019 [8 favorites]


    Something is going on w/Trump's approval rating. In Rasmussen he's dropped from + 4 to -10 in the last few weeks. He's also losing ground in @FiveThirtyEight's aggregate, and is now -11.5, 1.5 pts lower than EDay 2018. Helps explain panicky, wild WH of late. He's in danger.

    Eh, Trump's approval is essentially exactly where it has been for a year now. The 538 aggregate shows this clearly. All that has happened in the last 2 weeks is a reversion to that mean after a very slight pop upwards for Trump which was probably just statistical noise.

    Trump's approval would need to drop another couple points and stay there for it to be anything meaningful.
    posted by Justinian at 1:12 PM on May 21, 2019 [15 favorites]


    How the Rural-Urban Divide Became America’s Political Fault Line
    Such a conflict isn’t unique to the U.S., but the consequences are far-reaching here.
    Emily Badger, NYTimes
    posted by mumimor at 1:13 PM on May 21, 2019 [4 favorites]


    What's it take to get someone disbarred? I am beyond irritated that Manning can be sitting in jail because she refuses to testify in response to a subpoena but McGahn gets to just ignore it and not only stay free but also keep plying his trade. Seems to me that if Trump is managing to use continued business for Jones Day as a lever then the sensible thing for House Dems to do is play along with that same strategy.
    posted by phearlez at 1:18 PM on May 21, 2019 [15 favorites]


    Democratic Calls for Impeachment Inquiry Grow as Leaders Instead Vow to Toughen Tactics (NYT)
    Their concerns that Mr. Trump might be permanently weakening Congress’s powers prompted prominent progressive lawmakers on and off the Judiciary Committee to declare in private meetings and public statements in the past 24 hours that they saw no choice but to initiate an impeachment inquiry.

    The new supporters of impeachment included Representative Mark Pocan, Democrat of Wisconsin and a co-chairman of the influential Congressional Progressive Caucus, and Representative Mary Gay Scanlon, Democrat of Pennsylvania and the vice chairwoman of the Judiciary Committee.

    They argued that such an investigation would streamline disparate House inquiries and empower the committees in their push to conduct oversight of the executive branch. And they expressed hope it would show the public that the fight over documents and witnesses is not just another Washington partisan squabble, but a showdown with historic implications.

    [...] in a sign that Ms. Pelosi senses her caucus growing restless, she called a Wednesday morning meeting to update them on the status and strategy behind the House’s investigations. And people involved in the investigations say that the speaker approved an escalation of tactics short of impeachment to try to turn the tables.
    In related news, the NYT is Tracking 29 Investigations Related to Trump, which include 10 federal criminal investigations, 8 state and local investigations, and 11 congressional investigations.

    'We’re at an inflection point': More Dems pressure Pelosi on impeachment (Politico)
    Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.), a member of the Judiciary Committee, said he has drafted articles of impeachment and they're "ready to go." But he said he won't file them until the House hears from special counsel Robert Mueller about his report describing efforts by Trump to thwart his two-year Russia investigation. He also said Democrats are grappling with what to do if they support impeachment but can't convince Pelosi to do the same. [...]

    Several other key Judiciary members, including Congressional Progressive Caucus co-chair Pramila Jayapal, also said for the first time this week that they backed an impeachment inquiry. [...] with McGahn defying Democrats, impeachment was on the minds of many rank-and-file members — several of whom say they were warming to the idea of moving toward impeachment. “A couple of more moves like that latest is probably going to push me over. And I don’t celebrate it, it’s not something that makes me happy,” Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.) said.
    posted by Little Dawn at 1:41 PM on May 21, 2019 [16 favorites]


    What's it take to get someone disbarred?

    The Democrats don't need to threaten McGahn's livelihood.

    They need to arrest him.
    posted by murphy slaw at 1:42 PM on May 21, 2019 [27 favorites]


    Guardian: The House Judiciary Committee has sent subpoenas to Hope Hicks, the former White House communications director, and Annie Donaldson, the chief of staff to ex-White House counsel Don McGahn, the Washington Post reports.
    Zoe Tillman (@ZoeTillman) You may remember Annie Donaldson from notes she wrote that were quoted in Mueller's report, such as "POTUS in panic/chaos" and "[i]s this the beginning of the end?" (see: https://t.co/g44EqTjeUv) https://t.co/reEL0L6p2T
    May 21, 2019
    WaPo: It’s unclear, however, if the two [witnesses] will comply with the subpoenas — particularly after the White House earlier this month moved to block similarly subpoenaed document requests to McGahn. McGahn faced a deadline to hand over all communications pertaining to the Mueller probe, but the White House told McGahn it would invoke executive privilege over the material. [...] The White House is expected to do the same for both [witnesses], daring the Judiciary panel to hold all three former White House aides in contempt of Congress.

    /edited for sexism
    posted by Little Dawn at 1:56 PM on May 21, 2019 [6 favorites]


    > What's it take to get someone disbarred?

    The Democrats don't need to threaten McGahn's livelihood.

    They need to arrest him.


    Yeah, and I need to learn to fly by flapping my wings because that would be better for carbon emissions. But since the DoJ controlls enforcement and all that leaves is fan fiction about the Sergeant at Arms deputizing House pages and rolling out a mad max convoy to pick up the scofflaws, presumably fighting off standard law enforcement with commerative House letter openers... maybe we can just prevent McGahn from plying his trade first?
    posted by phearlez at 1:58 PM on May 21, 2019 [11 favorites]


    mcgahn's jones day bio lists membership in the district of columbia bar; is there a particular rule of professional conduct for the undisputed violation of which he should be subject to professional discipline?
    posted by 20 year lurk at 2:15 PM on May 21, 2019 [3 favorites]


    A glimmer of ... maybe not horrifying news, for a change? WaPo: White House, congressional leaders push for two-year budget deal
    Top White House officials and congressional leaders pushed Tuesday for a sweeping two-year budget deal that would suspend the debt ceiling and reduce the possibility of another government shutdown later this year, a potential bipartisan breakthough following months of acrimony and standoffs. Such a deal would ratchet back budget brinkmanship for the remainder of President Trump’s first term in office.

    ... The deal, if agreed to, ... would reduce the possibility of a government shutdown in the next two years, but it would not eliminate the possibility entirely.

    ... “Trust but verify, we’ll have to wait and see and obviously we need the president to publicly sign off on whatever we agree to,” Schumer said.
    Maybe I'm just easily amused, but their hypocrisy is just something else:
    We’re all for trying to rein in spending, but at what cost?” [Senate Appropriations Chairman Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.)] said Monday evening after meeting with Trump. “And I don’t think the president wants to rein in spending at the cost of national security.” ... The deficit, which represents the gap between spending and revenue, has risen each year of Trump’s presidency and is projected to near $1 trillion this year.
    posted by RedOrGreen at 2:25 PM on May 21, 2019 [7 favorites]


    mcgahn's jones day bio lists membership in the district of columbia bar; is there a particular rule of professional conduct for the undisputed violation of which he should be subject to professional discipline?

    Very likely Rule 8.4(d):
    It is professional misconduct for a lawyer to: ... (d) Engage in conduct that seriously interferes with the administration of justice;
    There are numerous cases in various jurisdictions indicating that Rule 8.4(d) (and its equivalents in other jurisdictions) prohibits attorneys from failing to respond to a subpoena. Since nothing is stopping McGahn from voluntarily testifying, I think he is violating 8.4(d). I'm not licensed in DC or I'd file a report myself.
    posted by jedicus at 2:27 PM on May 21, 2019 [12 favorites]


    A second 30-day cease-and-desist letter

    The above is a threadreader link to a tweetering by @admiralmpj (who "is not a lawyer") wherein it is written - on whatever it is they write it on up there - That the Democrats are slowly, methodically moving towards their Day In Court, which will go their way and be immediately defied by Turmp.

    In terms of Impeachment, we are on the second 30 day cease and desist letter, metaphorically speaking.

    The Democrats are bound for court and are now collecting documentation to show how much the Administration is acting unlawfully. 6/12

    We are going after Tax Returns via Ways and Means.
    We are going after Bank Records via Intelligence and Finance.
    We are after Testimony via Judiciary and Oversight.
    All of which we have a right to.
    All of which have been subpoenaed. 7/12

    So when you see the Chairmen of these various committees "not going fast enough" remember, they are collecting documentation with each of these extended deadlines. 8/12

    ...and once that happens, once Trump defies a Federal Judge's ruling (which I expect to happen 100%), well the pressure to impeach won't be on the Democrats. It'll be on the Republicans. 11/12

    posted by petebest at 2:44 PM on May 21, 2019 [16 favorites]


    That the Democrats are slowly, methodically moving towards their Day In Court, which will go their way and be immediately defied by Turmp.

    This is obviously true. What isn't obviously true is that, after Trump defies a court order, Congress will actually do anything? The Republicans obviously won't under any circumstances? Also, the idea that this is a grand strategy is belied by the reporting of infighting in the Democratic caucus over impeachment. If it was a coherent strategy rather than just the way it is coincidentally shaking out you wouldn't have all the bickering and leaking to the press about bickering.
    posted by Justinian at 2:49 PM on May 21, 2019 [13 favorites]


    Also, the idea that this is a grand strategy is belied by the reporting of infighting

    Agreed. We're getting a very clear picture of what Pelosi is telling her caucus about her strategy, and it very much isn't the process that @admiralmpj so optimistically describes.
    posted by diogenes at 2:59 PM on May 21, 2019 [8 favorites]


    The Democrats are bound for court and are now collecting documentation to show how much the Administration is acting unlawfully.

    I've seen this thread making the rounds, and I believe it radically misunderstands impeachment as a legal process when it's a political one. Impeachment isn't a Day In Court. Carefully collecting evidence of non-compliance may get the attention of a federal judge, but there's no reason to believe it works with Republicans in the Senate.

    The theory rests on the idea that Republicans who are fine ignoring obstruction of justice will suddenly leap up and demand answers if Trump defies demands to hand over his tax returns a few more times. In reality, he'll blow off a federal judge and appeal. And then appeal that. And maybe in two years we'll be asking how John Roberts is going to wiggle his way out of this jam. But in the meantime, I don't see how the promised day of reckoning is coming any day soon under this theory.
    posted by zachlipton at 2:59 PM on May 21, 2019 [21 favorites]


    A glimmer of ... maybe not horrifying news, for a change? WaPo: White House, congressional leaders push for two-year budget deal

    That news isn't not-horrifying; it's stupid. The power of the purse is one of the few levers Congress has over the Trump Administration, and a two-year budget deal would remover that leverage for the rest of Trumps' first term.

    There's much that should be funded for two years, yes, but Democrats should fund every White house office on a month-by-month contingency basis subject to lawful behavior. If Mick Mulvaney wants to stonewall the House, he can forget about being paid seven "acting" positions' salaries to do so.
    posted by Gelatin at 3:45 PM on May 21, 2019 [23 favorites]


    Confidential draft IRS memo says tax returns must be given to Congress unless president invokes executive privilege (WaPo):
    Trump has refused to turn over his tax returns but has not invoked executive privilege. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has instead denied the returns by arguing there is no legislative purpose for demanding them.

    But, according to the IRS memo, which has not been previously reported, the disclosure of tax returns to the committee “is mandatory, requiring the Secretary to disclose returns, and return information, requested by the tax-writing Chairs.”

    The 10-page document says the law “does not allow the Secretary to exercise discretion in disclosing the information provided the statutory conditions are met” and directly rejects the reason that Mnuchin has cited for witholding the information.
    posted by peeedro at 4:02 PM on May 21, 2019 [14 favorites]


    How can Trump exert executive privilege over tax returns from before he was President?

    "Executive privilege" doesn't just mean "I'm the executive and I don't wanna.." (Or at least it shouldn't. I guess we'll find out whether it does mean that in practice.)
    posted by Nerd of the North at 4:11 PM on May 21, 2019 [22 favorites]


    That news isn't not-horrifying; it's stupid. The power of the purse is one of the few levers Congress has over the Trump Administration, and a two-year budget deal would remover that leverage for the rest of Trumps' first term.

    One of the many ways that the structure and funding of our federal government is counterintuitive at best: A budget deal is not a spending deal. The deal they're talking about would only set the debt limit and total, government-wide funding levels. Each chamber would still have to work out budgets for each agency, which is the process that has produced all of our recent shutdowns.
    posted by Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish at 4:18 PM on May 21, 2019 [4 favorites]


    How can Trump exert executive privilege over tax returns from before he was President?

    He can't. And so far as I am aware he hasn't?
    posted by Justinian at 4:20 PM on May 21, 2019 [1 favorite]


    Oh you're asking for the basis of the memo. There isn't one.
    posted by Justinian at 4:22 PM on May 21, 2019 [1 favorite]


    Carefully collecting evidence of non-compliance may get the attention of a federal judge, but there's no reason to believe it works with Republicans in the Senate.

    Sure. After watching Senate Republicans for the last two years, I don't blame anyone who believes there isn't a single one of them who'd care about a judge's order (or really any social principles / institutions beyond personal and party power).

    That said, I can see the case that if you're going to pick a time to send the sergeant-at-arms to lock Mnuchin or Barr in the capitol basement, a time where you have another co-equal branch of government in your corner might be an especially good one. Then the story is harder to color as "House Democrats go too far in their Witch Hunt!" -- which of course is exactly what Republicans will say no matter what, but it'll be a harder sell to people who haven't already been swallowed by their propaganda machine.
    posted by wildblueyonder at 4:23 PM on May 21, 2019 [3 favorites]


    How can Trump exert executive privilege over tax returns from before he was President?

    Presumably in the context of the IRS memo, it means that if the President says "this is privileged" then it's the Secretary's obligation in the context of his working for the President to not hand it over until the courts weigh in. This would make sense for an internal department memo, and honestly, I would want executive departments to behave in this manner under rational circumstances.
    posted by Room 101 at 4:33 PM on May 21, 2019 [2 favorites]


    Oh, it's not taking a position on the merits of a privilege claim in your opinion? Just saying "let the courts fight it out"?
    posted by Justinian at 4:38 PM on May 21, 2019 [2 favorites]


    Yeah, a thing to remember about the president's taxes is that they're important because of who he is more than just a generl Congressional right to any old taxes. That's why his counter-suits is done in his capacity as an individual rather than as POTUS, because otherwise the argument becomes even flimsier. As such the White House is saying that it has every right to protect that poor Donald Trump schmuck from governmental interference; at least, that's my understanding.
    posted by InTheYear2017 at 5:13 PM on May 21, 2019 [3 favorites]


    NBC News, DHS backup border funding plan would take millions from TSA, other agencies: "The funding from TSA includes $50 million planned for advanced screening equipment and $3 million collected from loose change left in trays at airports."

    You did not read that wrong; TSA is preparing a contingency plan that includes handing over $3 million worth of loose change if Congress does not approve $1.1 billion in funds for the border.
    posted by zachlipton at 5:17 PM on May 21, 2019 [22 favorites]


    Trump officials brief a divided Congress on escalating tensions with Iran (WaPo)
    Shortly before the briefings, members of the House Appropriations Committee included a provision in the annual defense appropriations bill that would end the 2001 authorization, which gave the administration permission to pursue al-Qaeda and its affiliates into Afghanistan. In the years since, the law has been used to justify campaigns against the Islamic State and other extremist groups. Lawmakers have never been able to agree across party lines on a replacement.

    Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.), the author of the new provision, said it “absolutely” was part of the strategy to constrain the Trump administration’s options on Iran and was confident it would reach the floor for a vote.

    Republicans seemed largely unconcerned with whether Congress would be consulted in advance of military action.

    When asked whether officials would justify action under the president’s authority as commander in chief or under existing authorizations, Graham brushed off both suggestions, classifying any potential military action as falling under the “inherent right to defend yourself.”
    posted by Little Dawn at 5:19 PM on May 21, 2019 [3 favorites]


    If Politics Is All About Pushing Hot Buttons, Is There Anything That Can Cool Us Down? (Gail Collins and Bret Stephens, NYT Opinion) (cw: gross)
    Impeachment will suck up all available political time and oxygen.
    And if it keeps us from going to war with Iran, then it seems more than worthwhile.
    posted by Little Dawn at 5:44 PM on May 21, 2019 [12 favorites]


    Sitting Kentucky Governor and tiniest in a series of Trump-shaped nesting dolls Matt Bevin barely won his Republican primary against a no-name challenger tonight.
    posted by T.D. Strange at 5:49 PM on May 21, 2019 [8 favorites]


    Shortly before the briefings, members of the House Appropriations Committee included a provision in the annual defense appropriations bill that would end the 2001 authorization, which gave the administration permission to pursue al-Qaeda and its affiliates into Afghanistan.

    Daily Beast also reports: U.S. Intel to Congress: No Evidence al Qaeda Is Helping Iran—The admission could complicate any potential effort to make the legal case for war with Iran.
    The American intelligence community has no evidence that al Qaeda has cooperated with the Iranian government in its recent aggressive moves in the Persian Gulf region, a senior U.S. government official told members of Congress on Tuesday.

    That finding, which was relayed to The Daily Beast by three sources familiar with the matter, could undercut a potential legal case for going to war with Iran if tensions between Washington and Tehran keep escalating.

    The assessment was delivered in a classified briefing with dozens of House members on Capitol Hill. According to the three sources, one of the officials who briefed the members said the U.S. government does not have evidence of operational coordination between the Iranian government and the terrorist group responsible for 9/11 with respect to the current threat stream.[…]

    Last month, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo publicly connected Iran and al Qaeda, calling the ties “very real.”

    “They have hosted al Qaeda, they have permitted al Qaeda to transit their country,” said Pompeo, “There is no doubt there is a connection between the Islamic Republic of Iran and al Qaeda. Period, full stop.”
    Falsely linking al Qaeda with a Middle Eastern regime the GOP wants to go to war with worked out so well with Iraq…
    posted by Doktor Zed at 5:49 PM on May 21, 2019 [8 favorites]


    Impeachment will suck up all available political time and oxygen.

    It's already sucked up! Politics is nothing but Trump now. All the time. Where have these people been for the last 2 and a half years?
    posted by thelonius at 5:57 PM on May 21, 2019 [59 favorites]


    Trump administration will hire Cuccinelli for senior DHS border role (Josh Dawsey and Nick Miroff, WaPo)
    The Trump administration will hire conservative firebrand and former Virginia attorney general Ken Cuccinelli II to coordinate immigration policy at the Department of Homeland Security, three administration officials said Tuesday.

    Cuccinelli will work at DHS in a senior role and will report to acting DHS secretary Kevin McAleenan, while also providing regular briefings to President Trump at the White House, according two officials briefed on the appointment.
    This fucking guy. Getting rid of him was one of Virginia's finest moments.
    posted by Johnny Wallflower at 6:01 PM on May 21, 2019 [8 favorites]


    T.D. Strange: "Sitting Kentucky Governor and tiniest in a series of Trump-shaped nesting dolls Matt Bevin barely won his Republican primary against a no-name challenger tonight."

    Dem turnout was also way up versus 2015, I'll have final numbers later.
    posted by Chrysostom at 6:41 PM on May 21, 2019 [18 favorites]


    You did not read that wrong

    The old "pay your bill with a giant pile of pennies, that'll show 'em" maneuver, eh?

    I'm actually ok with taking ALL of TSA's money, on the condition that they get the F out of the airports. Instead though, they will change no procedures, just make the entire airport's foot traffic wait in line on the one agent they can afford.
    posted by ctmf at 7:01 PM on May 21, 2019 [7 favorites]


    In the Philly sheriff race, Rochelle Bilal (aligned with reformist DA Krasner) has defeated incumbent Williams.

    (this being Philly, winning the Dem primary is tantamount to winning the general)
    posted by Chrysostom at 7:07 PM on May 21, 2019 [16 favorites]


    Here's the Kentucky turnout comparisons:
    Dem:
    2015 178,514
    2019 394,490 (+120%)

    GOP:
    2015 214,187
    2019 259,854 (+21%)
    Now, the Dem 2015 primary was only semi-competitive, but this is still somewhat eyebrow-raising, especially combined with the sitting governor only getting 52% in a primary.
    posted by Chrysostom at 7:20 PM on May 21, 2019 [37 favorites]


    Stone aide denied stay in Mueller grand jury subpoena fight (Politico)
    The legal options for former Roger Stone aide Andrew Miller narrowed further Tuesday as a federal appeals court denied a stay that could have made it easier for Miller to take his fight against a grand jury subpoena to the Supreme Court.

    Without comment, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals turned down a request from Miller’s attorney to put off its formal release of the case to allow him to try to interest the Supreme Court in the challenge to special counsel Robert Mueller’s authority. Having turned down a series of pleas from Miller, the appeals court said it plans to issue its final disposition of the case next Tuesday.

    At this point, the cost to Miller of pressing the issue further could be high — he’d likely be sent to the D.C. jail while the high court considers whether to take the case.
    posted by Little Dawn at 7:37 PM on May 21, 2019 [2 favorites]


    Democratic impeachment calls swell as McGahn defies subpoena (AP)
    Some other Democratic leaders, while backing Pelosi, signaled that a march to impeachment may at some point become inevitable.

    “We are confronting what might be the largest, broadest cover-up in American history,” Majority Leader Steny Hoyer told reporters. If a House inquiry “leads to other avenues including impeachment,” the Maryland Democrat said, “so be it.”

    Reps. Joaquin Castro of Texas and Diana DeGette of Colorado added their voices to the impeachment inquiry chorus. “There is political risk in doing so, but there’s a greater risk to our country in doing nothing,” Castro said on Twitter. “This is a fight for our democracy.”

    Tweeted DeGette: “The facts laid out in the Mueller report, coupled with this administration’s ongoing attempts to stonewall Congress, leave us no other choice.”

    [...] “We’ve been in this thing for almost five months and now we’re getting some results,” Pelosi told lawmakers Monday night. “We’ve always said one thing will lead to another as we get information.”

    But other Democrats in the meeting, several of whom have spoken publicly about a need to be more aggressive with Trump, are increasingly impatient. They include Reps. David Cicilline of Rhode Island, Ted Lieu of California and freshman Joe Neguse of Colorado.

    “We’re in a very grave moment,” said Rep. Madeleine Dean of Pennsylvania, and “probably right now are left, with nothing but that we must open an inquiry.”

    Tweeted Rep. Veronica Escobar of Texas: Congress has made “accommodation after accommodation. I don’t think we should wait any longer.”
    posted by Little Dawn at 7:44 PM on May 21, 2019 [19 favorites]


    New York about to enact the double jeopardy loophole closure.
    posted by Chrysostom at 7:55 PM on May 21, 2019 [21 favorites]


    NBC News, Thousands of immigrants suffer in solitary confinement in U.S. detention centers [cw: suicide attempt]
    Rivera's case is not unique.

    Thousands of others were outlined in a trove of government documents that shed new light on the widespread use of solitary confinement for immigrant detainees in ICE custody under both the Obama and Trump administrations.

    The newly-obtained documents paint a disturbing portrait of a system where detainees are sometimes forced into extended periods of isolation for reasons that have nothing to do with violating any rules.

    Disabled immigrants in need of a wheelchair or cane. Those who identify as gay. Those who report abuse from guards or other detainees.

    Only half of the cases involved punishment for rule violations. The other half were unrelated to disciplinary concerns — they involve the mentally ill, the disabled or others who were sent to solitary largely for what ICE described as safety reasons.
    ...
    According to ICE, the agency only tracks cases in which detainees have a "special vulnerability," such as the mentally ill, or were put in solitary for more than 14 days.
    posted by zachlipton at 9:22 PM on May 21, 2019 [15 favorites]


    As terrible as ICE isolating people because they are disabled, mentally ill, or gay is, what makes me even more sad is how casually solitary confinement is used here in general. It is often the thing "they" reach for first when someone requires more attention than is the norm. Years of understaffing in prisons "necessitating" such extreme policies has normalized the use of isolation to the point where many people don't see it as any particular punishment despite it actually being full throated torture that traumatizes people at least as much as any form of physical torture.
    posted by wierdo at 11:59 PM on May 21, 2019 [18 favorites]


    This Twitter thread (Threadreader version) from Julia Peacock (a teacher running in California's 42nd District against a 25-year incumbent Republican Representative) expresses well my feelings these days. Like, we have impeachment for a reason. Of course the Senate won't convict. That is not the point. The point is that sometimes you have to say this is wrong, wrong, wrong and use every tool you have to stand up for the rule of law. The entire thing is well worth reading.

    Dear whoever is listening, We are so tired. Tired of hearing you talk on and on about his crimes then doing almost nothing about it. We are tired of twitter platitudes that lack substance, heart, or a plan. We are tired of hearing the same thing on the news every night only to wake up the next day to some new insanity while we hear you utter the same hollow refrains. We are tired of the Blue Wave that has left merely a puddle under our shoes that quickly blends in with the shadows of the treachery that is the traitorous leadership of our democracy. ...

    We are tired of trying to explain to our daughters why, no matter how hard we rage against the dying of the light, that we haven’t done enough to ensure the courts will be fair to them as they grow into adulthood and inherit this mess we’ve created. ... We are tired of marching and protesting and petition signing and hearings and reports and all the rot of evidence you have before you that you won’t do anything productive with. We are tired of your whimpering and simpering and “we can’t do this because of his base” that leaves us hollow and heartbroken. We are tired of trying to explain why all of this is so damn dangerous and potentially irreversible while you beg for patience. ...

    BUT DO NOT MISUNDERSTAND. We are tired, but we are not done. See, we are watching YOU. We are remembering your promises and your vows to protect us and to fight for us and to not go gently into that good night. We remember. We are going to remember so much more of what you said you’d do but didn’t. What you promised but ignored. ...

    We are tired. But we will fight on. And for every one of us who loses their way and cannot take another single step, five more of us will take their place. But you owe it to us, the tired, poor and huddled masses yearning to breathe free, to do your jobs. To protect our democracy and our Constitution. To hold the lawbreakers and cheats accountable. Now. Right now. No more obfuscating. No more placating. Do. Your. Jobs.

    Sincerely,
    We the People.

    posted by Bella Donna at 12:14 AM on May 22, 2019 [76 favorites]


    Like, we have impeachment for a reason. Of course the Senate won't convict. That is not the point. The point is that sometimes you have to say this is wrong, wrong, wrong and use every tool you have to stand up for the rule of law.
    We choose to go to the Moon! We choose to go to the Moon...We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win, and the others, too.

    President John F. Kennedy - September 12, 1962
    (Emphasis mine)
    posted by mikelieman at 4:01 AM on May 22, 2019 [24 favorites]


    CNN: Schiff cancels 'enforcement' meeting after Justice Department offers to share Mueller documents
    House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff is scrapping a Wednesday morning meeting intended to take an "enforcement action" against the Justice Department after it agreed to begin providing the committee with counterintelligence documents from special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation.

    The decision to postpone the business meeting -- where Schiff was threatened to take an unspecified action against Attorney General William Barr for not complying with the committee's subpoena for Mueller's counterintelligence materials -- is a rare sign of the Trump administration and a House panel successfully negotiating around a Democratic subpoena for documents.

    The development also is a significant boost to Schiff in his effort to view the special counsel's investigative materials beyond what was contained in the public Mueller report, especially given the Trump administration's typical stance of all-out resistance to Democrats' subpoenas and investigative requests.[…]

    "The Department of Justice has accepted our offer of a first step towards compliance with our subpoena, and this week will begin turning over to the Committee twelve categories of counterintelligence and foreign intelligence materials as part of an initial rolling production. That initial production should be completed by the end of next week," Schiff said in a statement Wednesday morning.

    "As a result of the Department's acceptance, the business meeting has been postponed," Schiff added. "The Committee's subpoena will remain in effect, and will be enforced should the Department fail to comply with the full document request."
    Looks like Barr blinked.
    posted by Doktor Zed at 5:28 AM on May 22, 2019 [21 favorites]


    Nancy Pelosi began her Congressional work in 1987, a year after charges were brought in the Iran-Contra affair. Steny Hoyer has been "on the hill" since 1981. It's fair to say they've seen a lot of bullshit.

    Wave after wave of Republican administrations, presidential contenders, and outright mobs (Gingrich) have paraded between and around them for many decades. Calling for impeachment is not anything they haven't seen pretty much all year every year.

    So it's the case that they're experienced here. It's also the case that they know Turmp is a corrupt politician at best - a crime boss at worst. Probably both. They know that too. And seeing the corporate media horse-race Turmp into office was also par for the course for them - they're not expecting much in the way of fair coverage on impeachment hearings. Everything's going to lead with Turmp's spin, just like it always does.

    So they won't get to lead the House they wanted. Civil rights, environment, education, infrastructure - all the things a good Democrat spends all of their careers trying to do. This orange cretin is going to ruin that for them too.

    They don't want to impeach, but not just because they think it might help Turmp in 2020. They don't wanna because it's a pain, it's not going to go through the senate, it's not going to result in jail time that the Orange Menace won't immediately pardon, and it deep-sixes the legislating they've worked to get to for 40 years. I appreciate it's not just a button-push. And the timing isn't optimal. But, yeah, it's long past time to punch back. If they can't do it or don't want to do it, please give the job to someone who can and will.
    posted by petebest at 5:37 AM on May 22, 2019 [17 favorites]


    Guess who's up eeeearrrrrrllyyyyyyy??!

    Trump rails about impeachment in tweetstorm

    "Everything the Democrats are asking me for is based on an illegally started investigation that failed for them, especially when the Mueller Report came back with a NO COLLUSION finding," Trump tweeted. "Now they say Impeach President Trump, even though he did nothing wrong, while they 'fish!'"

    "After two years of an expensive and comprehensive Witch Hunt, the Democrats don't like the result and they want a DO OVER," he added in another tweet. "In other words, the Witch Hunt continues!"

    PRESIDENTIAL HARASSMENT!


    He wants this impeachment fight so bad. It's almost like Pelosi is just putting it in neutral, and letting him drag the whole car uphill by a rope in his teeth.

    If impeachment hearings can get the story that in fact Mueller *Never talked about collusion, at all. Explicitly. "I'm not going to talk about collusion" he said* that would be a big win.

    Too bad Barr doesn't tweet (does he?), this kind of thing would be perfect fodder for a "Well actually" series. I know there are millions upon millions of very smart people who are engaged in politics who are still unaware of why those Turmp toots are complete bullshit. Grinding through them for months in the front pages might help, y'know? Seriously, he wants it so bad, let's punch him right in the tweeter.
    posted by petebest at 5:48 AM on May 22, 2019 [11 favorites]


    Pelosi’s last refusal to try to hold Republicans accountable helped led to Trump and where we are today.

    Ben Alpers
    In evaluating House Democratic leadership's refusal to open an impeachment inquiry, historians' most common comparisons have been (understandably): Watergate (nicely discussed by @KevinMKruse), Clinton's impeachment, and Iran-Contra. But I've been thinking about another one: 1/
    2/ In November 2006, in the wake of Dems retaking the House in George W. Bush's second midterm elections, there was also a lot of talk about impeachment. But Nancy Pelosi, who was about to become Speaker for the first time, was having none of it (NYT).
    3/ As they took power in 2007, Pelosi and the Democratic leadership did what they're doing now. They refused to consider impeachment. They figured that the politically smart move was to look toward 2008 and retaking the White House.
    4/ In terms of the electoral politics, this gamble seemed to have worked. 2008 was a fantastic election for the Democratic Party, which retook the White House and expanded its hold on Congress, including, crucially, if only briefly, a 60-vote majority in the Senate
    5/ But in terms of holding the George W. Bush administration to account, Pelosi's strategy was an utter failure. Predictably, once W was out of office, there was little appetite to investigate his administration. And its crimes went not only unpunished, but largely forgotten.
    6/ And now John Bolton is National Security Advisor and there is a non-trivial chance that he will drive us into war with Iran.
    7/ Pelosi's political instincts haven't changed since 2006-7. But there's no guarantee of a repeat of 2008. 2020, with an incumbent president seeking reelection and a much tougher Senate map, looks less good for Democrats than 2008 did (even in 2007).
    8/ But, today, there has not been nearly enough talk about the medium- and long-run political costs of Pelosi's refusal to hold the Bush administration to account back in 2007-2008.
    9/ This reflects two parallel, unfortunate cognitive tendencies. As historians, when thinking about a potential investigation, we tend to reach for other investigations that took place when looking for comparisons. But investigations that didn't take place are important, too.
    10/ Similarly, House Democrats's calculations seem to be weighing the (short-run) political costs of conducting an investigation vs the political gains of doing so. But they don't seem to be considering the political costs of NOT opening an impeachment inquiry.
    11/ We historians -- and Congressional Democrats -- need to attend more closely to the last major potential impeachment inquiry that did _not_ happen...and to the costs that resulted from that failure.
    posted by chris24 at 6:06 AM on May 22, 2019 [42 favorites]


    Dear whoever is listening, We are so tired.

    I just found the content for today's resistbot letter to my Rep :)
    posted by diogenes at 6:16 AM on May 22, 2019 [13 favorites]


    Deutsche Bank Finds Flaw in Software Used to Assess Money Transfers, Steven Arons, Bloomberg

    In which, "After being tied to a series of money laundering scandals," the bank explains that they were tied to those series of money laundering scandals because "two parameters out of 121 weren’t correctly defined in one of its applications."

    So that explains that, I guess.
    posted by mcdoublewide at 6:16 AM on May 22, 2019 [6 favorites]


    Impeachment will suck up all available political time and oxygen.

    From what exactly?

    I keep hearing this, from Pelosi herself and from others who are opposed to impeachment. The idea that somehow it will consume all resources and we won't get stuff done.

    What, precisely, are we getting done right this second? The House has passed over 140 bills this year and every single one of them has been denied even a reading in the Senate. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate passing good laws out of the House even if they go nowhere, and the possible PR value that can be obtained by parading that fact.

    But, first and most important, Pelosi and the Democrats don't seem to be parading the list of good laws they've passed that the Senate has stonewalled. It isn't just minor news, it's not news at all. I've literally never once seen a press conference from Pelosi where she rails on the Senate for its inaction on all her good laws.

    So yes, I'll agree fully that impeachment proceedings would put everything else the House is doing on hold. But so what? Is it really that important to pass the 150th good bill that the Senate will ignore?
    posted by sotonohito at 6:21 AM on May 22, 2019 [58 favorites]


    Dear whoever is listening, We are so tired.

    Amy Walter (Cook Political)
    After watching the Biden campaign thus far + Philly rally yesterday, my takeaway is that his candidacy is like one of those ‘casual’ nice restaurants that you go to b/c they have a big menu and everyone in your group can find something they’ll eat. No one is unhappy (“look, honey they have grilled cheese for the kids and I can get a salad), but no one walks away thinking that was an amazing meal or experience. It’s not risky, but it’s also not totally satisfying either.


    Dave Weigel (WaPo)
    This is the best analogy I've seen; I've been working with "the median voter is exhausted and just wants grandpa to take over so he/she can take a nap."

    This may end up being what the "heighten the contradictions and let Trump win" people didn't appreciate. Most people are too busy for constant political action. Constant struggle doesn't turn them into revolutionaries; they just want some rest.
    posted by chris24 at 6:24 AM on May 22, 2019 [29 favorites]


    POLITICO Playbook reports from inside Capitol Hill: Inside Pelosi’s Impeachment Battle Plan As clear and succinct an account of what Pelosi and the Dem leadership are thinking strategically about impeachment, it's worth quoting at length:
    If you’ve watched Speaker Nancy Pelosi for any period of time in the majority, you know she has an uncanny ability to stay unflinchingly focused on a goal, without getting panicked or itchy or changing course. […] At the moment, Pelosi’s goal is quite clear: to avoid rushing to impeach President Donald Trump. If you talk to her allies, her advisers and people close to her, they’ll tell you she believes the impeachment route is an all-around loser right now.

    Pelosi allies firmly believe that if Democrats impeach Trump, they will lose the presidency and the House in 2020 -- period. They also don’t believe Congress or the American public is behind impeachment at the moment. {emphasis added, because this is their mindset that their constituents have to change if we're to stop arguing in circles about impeachment} Further, they say that launching an inquiry that isn’t airtight could backfire as they pursue other legal options to extract documents from the White House.

    House Democratic Leaders are keeping a very close eye on who comes out in favor of impeachment, but so far, they see mostly Judiciary Committee members who are living the day-to-day back-and-forth over document production and stonewalling, and progressives who have long been on the path to impeachment.

    Here is what Pelosi-world is thinking, and the points they are making privately:

    — Their go-through-the-courts play is working. house Democrats scored a big victory last week when a federal judge ruled that Mazars Group, Trump’s accounting firm, needed to hand over the president’s financial records. Pelosi and her team believe they will score other victories in court and ultimately get many of the documents they are seeking. Impeachment, many of them argue, is not a magical key to unlock a trove of documents. And there’s a fear, too, that a rush to impeachment could undermine some of these court efforts.
    — The leadership team is with Pelosi. yes, Reps. David Cicilline (D-R.I.) and Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) have called for impeachment, but notice who has not: Reps. Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.) and Cheri Bustos (D-Ill.). And that’s important. The cracks at her leadership table are at the bottom, not the top.
    — Democrats are planning to move a package of contempt citations in June. That’s the next punishment they are meting out.

    There is, at the moment, a remarkable sense of unity atop the leadership. They recognize that the angst is rising in the rank and file. No one seems completely convinced Democrats can hold this position for 18 months. Yes, the majority of the caucus opposes impeachment at the moment — but for how long?

    The internal politics are complicated. Democrats have been taken aback at how Trump has injected himself personally into the decisions to withhold documents and block testimony, which has corresponded with rising blood pressure among many of the rank and file.

    What to watch for … Top Democrats are absolutely convinced that if Trump defies a court order to fork over documents, then they will be forced to begin impeaching him.
    posted by Doktor Zed at 6:27 AM on May 22, 2019 [26 favorites]


    his candidacy is like one of those ‘casual’ nice restaurants

    Ha. One of my friends called this last week. She said, "Joe Biden is the Applebee's of presidential candidates. No wonder old white people like him."
    posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 6:35 AM on May 22, 2019 [42 favorites]


    There is, at the moment, a remarkable sense of unity atop the leadership. They recognize that the angst is rising in the rank and file. No one seems completely convinced Democrats can hold this position for 18 months. Yes, the majority of the caucus opposes impeachment at the moment — but for how long?

    How politically out of touch do you have to be to disregard the potential damage 18 more months of inaction could bring?
    posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 6:40 AM on May 22, 2019 [8 favorites]


    his candidacy is like one of those ‘casual’ nice restaurants

    Ha. One of my friends called this last week. She said, "Joe Biden is the Applebee's of presidential candidates. No wonder old white people like him."


    This is not wrong, but it leaves off explicitly including the fact that part of the appeal for these folks is also that it's a place to go where there won't be any PoC making things that might "challenge" their palates or "weird" music or people talking in languages they don't know or family structures that don't look like theirs or or or or. I lack a clever analogy for the misogyny/patriarchy issue but obvs that's there too.

    *sigh* I really want Warren but I can just hear the but the older white woman lost last time! pieces echoing back from the future, as if bland-ass old white dudes haven't lost plenty of presidential races as well.
    posted by phearlez at 6:46 AM on May 22, 2019 [26 favorites]


    Impeachment, many of them argue, is not a magical key to unlock a trove of documents.

    This is where I stop being able to follow their logic, even on its own terms. What are the document requests for if not impeachment? And, of course, if their trigger for escalation is Trump defying a court order, that puts the ball in the Supreme Court's.....er, court:

    "We'll impeach if Trump refuses to obey one of your orders!"

    "So if we just rule in his favor all the time, there's no threat of impeachment and everything coasts along?"

    "Er....."
    posted by Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish at 6:52 AM on May 22, 2019 [5 favorites]


    "We'll impeach if Trump refuses to obey one of your orders!"
    "Okay then, we should be able to get to these cases by say Nov-Dec of 2020. See you on the other side!"
    posted by Harry Caul at 6:55 AM on May 22, 2019 [2 favorites]


    Ha. One of my friends called this last week. She said, "Joe Biden is the Applebee's of presidential candidates. No wonder old white people like him."

    This is not wrong, but it leaves off explicitly including the fact that part of the appeal for these folks is also that it's a place to go where there won't be any PoC making things that might "challenge" their palates or "weird" music or people talking in languages they don't know or family structures that don't look like theirs or or or or. I lack a clever analogy for the misogyny/patriarchy issue but obvs that's there too.


    Biden is the overwhelming choice of black voters right now, more so than white voters (you can click the links to see comparisons to white voter support.) From the recent Morning Consult poll:

    Black men
    Biden:42%
    Sanders 22%
    Harris 9%
    Booker 7%
    Warren 5%
    O'Rourke 2%

    Black women
    Biden 49%
    Sanders 15%
    Hams 11%
    Warren 6%
    Booker 4%
    O'Rourke 3%
    Buttigieg 2%

    And yesterday’s Fox poll (reminder Fox is a good polling unit not biased like the news division.)

    Black Voters
    Biden 38%
    Sanders 14%
    Harris 6%
    O’Rourke 6%
    Warren 5%
    Booker 5%
    Buttigieg 1%
    posted by chris24 at 6:57 AM on May 22, 2019 [13 favorites]


    The House has passed over 140 bills this year and every single one of them has been denied even a reading in the Senate.

    This is predictable enough that it feels like deliberate positioning to justify re-election.
    posted by ZeusHumms at 7:06 AM on May 22, 2019 [3 favorites]


    Pelosi allies firmly believe that if Democrats impeach Trump, they will lose the presidency and the House in 2020 -- period.

    Has this camp ever explained why they believe this? (Please don't tell me what you think is in their minds. I'm looking for details about what they have actually said is in their minds.)
    posted by diogenes at 7:09 AM on May 22, 2019 [9 favorites]


    Has this camp ever explained why they believe this?

    The short answer, from what I can glean from interviews with Pelosi, et al. and Capitol Hill leaks, is that they're worried losing an impeachment fight with Trump will demoralize the Dem base and depress their turnout at the polls next November while emboldening MAGA-hatters and driving up their get-out-the-vote numbers.
    posted by Doktor Zed at 7:12 AM on May 22, 2019 [12 favorites]


    Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish: What are the document requests for if not impeachment?

    Essentially the same thing that impeachment is for if not removal from office. All the options are somewhere on the spectrum of messaging, energizing the base, and driving knowledge about the extent of venality into the public skulls. What we're negotating are the ways that should be done, not the question of whether or not to pursue the get-rid-of-Trump course of action, any more than NASA should consider whether a Mars mission is a lesser priority to the seemingly more potent possibility of developing faster-than-light travel (or, similarly, regard a Mars mission as a stepping stone to such tech).

    That's why, though I support impeachment pretty vigorously now, I'm not fond of drawing some bright line such that everything on the "impeachment" side is Fighting the Good Fight and everything on the other side is Spineless Cowardice. For example, if they arrested Barr (which really needs to happen sooner rather than later), that would be a strong move without being impeachment-related at all. For that matter, some documents and/or testimony could implicate Don, Jared, or Ivanka, who can't be protected from consequences by the Senate and whose fate (ostensibly) has zero to do with whether or not impeachment happens.

    Doktor Zed: The short answer, from what I can glean from interviews with Pelosi, et al. and Capitol Hill leaks, is that they're worried losing an impeachment fight with Trump will demoralize the Dem base and depress their turnout at the polls next November while emboldening MAGA-hatters and driving up their get-out-the-vote numbers.

    Correct. I estimate that about 20% (or fewer) of the 55%-ish Democrats who currently support impeachment will become angry if/when it happens and fails to result in conviction, because Why Didn't They Just Do X, Democrats Sure Suck. Of course, doing full calculations, that's something like 5% of the public and fewer than half would vote anyway, so we're talking about some 1% total, but yeah, it's not a nonexistent factor.
    posted by InTheYear2017 at 7:18 AM on May 22, 2019 [6 favorites]


    And Pelosi doesn’t think Trump getting away with it will embolden his base? His base will be fired up regardless. You win by firing up your base. And another year and a half of continued and increasing lawlessness and Dem inaction is gonna depress our base. Especially with Trump strutting around saying “I didn't do anything, if I did those crazy Dems would’ve impeached me for sure.”

    Ethan Grey
    The dumbest argument against impeachment, by far, is that "it will fire up Donald Trump's base." As if the birther, "BENGHAZI!", "Lock her up!", Pizzagate, QAnon people who collectively shit their pants when Gillette made an ad about men being good aren't always fucking fired up.



    There’s the old joke that there’s nothing Republicans are more afraid of than the Republican base. And nothing Dems are more afraid of than the Republican base. They seem to still think it’s 1980 and they outnumber us. They don’t.
    posted by chris24 at 7:19 AM on May 22, 2019 [51 favorites]


    Former immigration judges are upset that the DOJ's Executive Office for Immigration Review, whose mission is to "adjudicate immigration cases by fairly, expeditiously, and uniformly interpreting and administering the Nation's immigration laws," recently issued something called “Myths vs. Facts About Immigration Proceedings.” According to Immigration Impact (from the American Immigration Council), "The document, which claimed to bust 18 different 'myths,' seemed intended to assuage concerns about the agency. Instead, it was met with widespread condemnation for demonstrating the exact kind of politicization that has led to calls for reform." Such as the letter below.

    As former Immigration Judges and BIA Board Members, we write to state our offense at EOIR’s recently issued memo purporting to present imagined “myths” and wildly inaccurate and misleading information labeled as “fact.” The issuance of such a document can only be viewed as political pandering, at the expense of public faith in the immigration courts you oversee.

    Even if anything contained in the memo is actually correct, it is simply not EOIR’s place to be
    issuing such a document. EOIR’s function is to protect the independence and integrity of the
    hundreds of judges who sit in its Immigration Courts, on the BIA, and within OCAHO.

    American courts do not issue propaganda implying that those whose cases it rules on for the most part have invalid claims; that the participation of lawyers in its hearings provides no real value and has no impact on outcome; that the government’s own program to assist litigants in obtaining legal representation is a waste of taxpayer money; or that those unable to surmount the government-created obstacles to filing asylum applications are somehow guilty of deceit. Such statements indicate a bias which is absolutely unacceptable and, frankly, shocking.


    Of course, the former judges are wrong: American courts do issue propaganda. At least these days. I find it touching that there are still people left to be shocked. Not convinced a stern letter will do much but it's a start.
    posted by Bella Donna at 7:23 AM on May 22, 2019 [15 favorites]


    The short answer, from what I can glean from interviews with Pelosi, et al. and Capitol Hill leaks, is that they're worried losing an impeachment fight with Trump will demoralize the Dem base and depress their turnout at the polls next November while emboldening MAGA-hatters and driving up their get-out-the-vote numbers.

    It's sort of mind-boggling the degree to which they have failed to learn the lessons of framing even as Trump uses it to punch them in their soft spots over and over. Yeah, losing bums people out. But exactly what losing means is subject to definition. Trump redefines himself to not be losing at every turn, keeping the enthuseasm of his base even as he fails to improve their lives, deliver on what he promises, or even be honest about their situation. The impeachment process has impediments for sure, with one of the top ones being that people don't understand that impeachment itself doesn't mean removal. But almost every Dem on the hill is complicit in that failure of understanding.

    I support impeachment but I'd be okay with a full throated and loud bunches of investigation instead, for reasons many above have explained with InTheYear2017 being most recent. But these doofuses keep shredding the sails by rejecting impeachment left and right, pissing off and demoralizing the not-small number of us who think it would be a good idea. Stop declaring failure before you have done anything! You don't want to demoralize folks who oppose Trump? Then stop demoralizing them yourself. You don't have to go screaming into the breach for impeachment but you can talk up all the investigation and doing your fucking jobs as you walk towards the decision. Barr fucking handed you a great way to do that by giving you this redacted lump. Since the actual content of the investigation is being hidden from us by Trump's lapdog we have no choice but to keep digging and find out the details ourself about these things that Mueller told us did not exonerate the president, no matter how Trump lies about what's in it.

    For fucks sake just typing this makes me angrier. It's not hard! You don't have to emulate Trump in all the lying and bullshit, but can't you take one look at even 10 minutes of his behavior and see that he never once lays down and declares a loss when communicating to the world? He'll full on fucking Baghdad Bob the reality of shit because it projects strength. We don't have to lie to do it, we just have to stop ceding ground.
    posted by phearlez at 7:27 AM on May 22, 2019 [39 favorites]


    The American intelligence community has no evidence that al Qaeda has cooperated with the Iranian government in its recent aggressive moves in the Persian Gulf region, a senior U.S. government official told members of Congress on Tuesday.

    Wait, wait. We needed an intelligence report to know this? I mean, I know that to the average American, the Middle East is this uniform amorphous blob made up of crazy dark-skinned Muslim-type people, but if you know one goddamn thing about Iran's government, it's that their theocracy, unlike most other major extreme-Islamic movements in the Near East, is Shia. al Qaeda is a Sunni militant organization and their primary goal is the establishment of a Sunni caliphate. It's possible for Sunni and Shiite Muslims to get along, of course, but not really possible for theocratic Muslims of the different sects to get along, since the structure of the Islamic state is a fundamental point of disagreement. Barring extraordinary evidence to the contrary, I would assume Iran and al Qaeda are not in any sort of cooperation (I suppose that might change if we continue being atrocious dickbags to Iran, since if we present an imminent threat they might well make common short-term cause with anyone who hates us enough).
    posted by jackbishop at 7:37 AM on May 22, 2019 [15 favorites]


    To which we might add the simple observation that in the proxy theatre of Yemen, the somewhat Iranian aligned Houthis are a distinct faction arrayed against, among others, Al Qaeda.
    posted by stonepharisee at 7:44 AM on May 22, 2019 [6 favorites]


    You know what's more demotivating than losing an absolutely critical fight for justice and democracy and against oppression and facism? Complacency and unwillingness to step up and fight at a time when it's most important.

    Talking about impeachment as a thing that likely won't be won is horribly missing the point. It's not some thing that's happening in a vacuum just purely to win political points for our side.
    Impeachment isn't the thing in question that needs to be won or lost, it's a self-defense technique against a fight that has already been started - a fight that has already taken a real toll on several people, that is sabotaging our institutions for the long term, tha has no sign of slowing down, and that is escalating daily.
    posted by MysticMCJ at 7:54 AM on May 22, 2019 [39 favorites]


    And Pelosi doesn’t think Trump getting away with it will embolden his base? His base will be fired up regardless. You win by firing up your base. And another year and a half of continued and increasing lawlessness and Dem inaction is gonna depress our base. Especially with Trump strutting around saying “I didn't do anything, if I did those crazy Dems would’ve impeached me for sure.”

    Apparently, she must think that the difference between losing impeachment and letting the Trump administration continue on its present course is worth it. From a psychological standpoint, we know that Trump loves to fight and will claim victory no matter what the outcome (whether it's his bankruptcy battles or the Mueller report). Perhaps she believes that denying Trump this battle while waiting for his ineptitude to bring him down is the better longterm strategy. The big question is if she understands that Trump has always gotten away with his misdeeds and mistakes by grinding down his opponents until they're willing to settle. That repeatedly worked for him with banks, investors, and civil lawsuits, so why shouldn't he continue this tactic in politics?

    It's sort of mind-boggling the degree to which they have failed to learn the lessons of framing even as Trump uses it to punch them in their soft spots over and over.

    Time and again in the megathreads, we've discussed Prof. George Lakoff's advice for how to frame the debate with Trump, but the Dem leadership haven't even picked up the basics. To editorialize for a moment, they should have started talking back in late November about how the new Congress would investigate all Trump's scandals and follow the evidence wherever it took them, even if it meant beginning the process of impeachment. First, that would have required them to tee up impeachment as a possibility, instead of outright resisting it whenever pressed by the media or their constituents. They'd then have to frame impeachment properly as a legitimate congressional action, like a court inquiry, instead of a political outcome, like a verdict. Instead of laying this groundwork, they dithered until Trump retook the initiative by shutting down the government, which meant that the transition period between the midterms and the new congress was lost time from a Democrat perspective.

    But that's 20/20 hindsight, and right now, the upcoming battle is how to pressure the various Dems next week when they're back in their home districts—they need to hear from us directly. Meanwhile, the news cycle keeps turning up new scandals and fiascos…
    posted by Doktor Zed at 7:57 AM on May 22, 2019 [19 favorites]


    Mod note: A few deleted. Please take dark zingers, satirical articles, etc to the jokes humor creative responses thread, thanks.
    posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 8:05 AM on May 22, 2019 [7 favorites]


    From: Was There a Connection Between a Russian Bank and the Trump Campaign? (Dexter Filkins, The New Yorker)
    A team of computer scientists sifted through records of unusual Web traffic in search of answers.
    Don McGahn's Wikipedia profile noted his work with Jones Day, apparently from this paragraph from the New Yorker article.
    Trump’s victory appeared to elevate Alfa Bank’s connections there—at least by association. Don McGahn, the White House counsel, came from Jones Day, one of the law firms that represent Alfa Bank in the United States. McGahn brought five Jones Day lawyers with him into the White House; six more were appointed to senior posts in the Administration. Jones Day has done work for businesses belonging to a long list of Russian oligarchs, including Oleg Deripaska, Viktor Vekselberg, and Alexander Mashkevich. The firm has also represented the Trump campaign in its dealings with Robert Mueller. For this reason, McGahn secured an ethics waiver that allows him to talk to his old firm when its clients have business before the U.S. government.
    posted by ZeusHumms at 8:15 AM on May 22, 2019 [11 favorites]


    No one has mentioned this, but it doesn't look good: Robert Costa reported on twitter last week:
    An unusual group on Air Force Two today: Vice President, Senate Majority Leader, and Chief Justice all on the plane. Rare to have that trio together, particularly on a flight.
    posted by Manic Pixie Hollow at 8:33 AM on May 22, 2019 [11 favorites]


    An unusual group on Air Force Two today: Vice President, Senate Majority Leader, and Chief Justice all on the plane.

    This was to attend former Sen. Richard Lugar's funeral (USA Today), so it wasn't out of the blue. Sen. Pat Leahy and former senator Sam Nunn were also on the flight (WaPo).
    posted by Doktor Zed at 8:43 AM on May 22, 2019 [16 favorites]


    Trump just had an impromptu press conference where he complained about Democrats discussing "the I-word", while refusing to say the word himself. I don't think he meant "infrastructure".
    posted by East Manitoba Regional Junior Kabaddi Champion '94 at 8:53 AM on May 22, 2019 [15 favorites]


    In better news, and why it's important to vote blue in every election, for every office: Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers, elected in the 2018 blue wave, will veto Republican-backed anti-choice bills (Molly Beck, Wisconsin Journal-Sentinel):
    Gov. Tony Evers plans to veto a slate of Republican bills aimed at further limiting access to abortions — a move that comes as abortion opponents nationwide eye an opportunity to give state Legislatures the ability to ban abortions.

    Evers, a Democrat, said Tuesday he would veto four bills passed by the state Assembly on Thursday that seek to reduce the number of abortions in Wisconsin by taking away funding for health clinics that provide abortions and banning women from seeking abortions because of a fetus' race, sex or disability.
    States which have elected Democratic governors and put Democrats in state houses seem to be going forward instead of backward with civil rights and body autonomy. Even if taking back the Senate is a heavy lift (but we must try anyway), turning state houses blue will help the people who live there.
    posted by Rosie M. Banks at 8:58 AM on May 22, 2019 [39 favorites]


    Gov. Tony Evers plans to veto a slate of Republican bills aimed at further limiting access to abortions — a move that comes as abortion opponents nationwide eye an opportunity to give state Legislatures the ability to ban abortions.

    This is of course the best course of action, but we should remember that the secondary result from this is eventually going to be a circuit split that provides the path to the Supreme Court. Maybe not with this particular circuit, but the full-court press across the country by antichoice groups is going to predictably produce the split.
    posted by rhizome at 9:03 AM on May 22, 2019 [4 favorites]




    Tweet from: Rebecca Ballhaus
    Podium set up in the Rose Garden with statistics on the Mueller investigation.
    Statistics printed out on a nice sign, suitable for inclusion on TV.
    posted by ZeusHumms at 9:16 AM on May 22, 2019 [1 favorite]


    Trump Is Considering Deputizing the Military as a Civilian Police Force.

    From Slate: "According to a report in the Daily Caller last week, the Trump administration is considering invoking the Insurrection Act to give federal troops the power to detain and remove undocumented immigrants in the United States, acting essentially as Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. The White House, when asked about the option last week, refused to rule it out."

    Naturally, the Daily Caller's leak is anonymous: "According to multiple senior administration officials, the president intends to invoke the “tremendous powers” of the act to remove illegal immigrants from the country." The problem in assessing the reliability of this sourcing is that while Team Trump has used the outlet in the past to float policy ideas to its core supporters, there's no way to tell how seriously the internal discussions have gone or if this is simply the Daily Caller using their channel to Stephen Miller to compete with Breitbart for the froth-mouthed, swivel-eyed MAGA demographic.

    But calling your congressional reps to protest couldn't hurt—202-224-3121.
    posted by Doktor Zed at 9:36 AM on May 22, 2019 [4 favorites]


    Internal memo orders military to restrict information it shares with Congress (WaPo):
    Acting defense secretary Patrick Shanahan has mandated new restrictions on the way the Pentagon shares information with Congress about military operations around the world, a move that is straining ties with key Republican and Democratic lawmakers.
    [...]
    The memo was shared widely inside the Pentagon but was sent to key lawmakers only after inquiries by The Post. It outlines a half-dozen guidelines, including requirements that military officials and political appointees evaluate whether the request “contains sufficient information to demonstrate a relationship to the legislative function.” The memo urges Defense Department officials to provide a summary briefing rather than a requested plan or order itself.
    [...]
    In the new memo, Shanahan concentrates responsibility for evaluating congressional requests in the office of the undersecretary of defense for policy, which is typically led by a political appointee. Previously, officials across the Defense Department responded to requests on a more ad hoc basis, in keeping with what officials described as a “gentleman’s agreement” with lawmakers.
    posted by peeedro at 9:42 AM on May 22, 2019 [6 favorites]


    East Manitoba Regional Junior Kabaddi Champion '94: Trump just had an impromptu press conference where he complained about Democrats discussing "the I-word", while refusing to say the word himself. I don't think he meant "infrastructure".

    Trump abruptly ends infrastructure meeting with Democrats after Pelosi says he is ‘engaged in a coverup’ (John Wagner, Rachael Bade and Mike DeBonis for Washington Post, May 22, 2019)
    President Trump abruptly ended a meeting with Democratic leaders on Wednesday, saying he was unable to work with them on legislation following comments by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) that he was “engaged in a coverup.”

    Trump made an unscheduled appearance in the Rose Garden shortly afterward and in a meandering 10-minute address said he had left the meeting with Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) at which they were supposed to talk about working together on a $2 billion infrastructure plan.

    “Instead of walking in happily to a meeting, I walk in to look at people who said I was doing a coverup,” Trump said, adding that he can’t work on infrastructure “under these circumstances.”

    Pelosi made her comments earlier Wednesday morning after a closed-door meeting with House Democrats called to discuss ongoing investigations of Trump and his administration. Despite her accusation of a coverup, Pelosi and all but one of her six committee chairmen with investigative powers tamped down talk of impeachment proceedings during the meeting.

    Speaking to reporters shortly after Trump’s appearance in the Rose Garden, Pelosi and Schumer said they were taken aback by Trump’s behavior.

    “To watch what happened in the White House would make your jaw drop,” Schumer said.

    Pelosi said Democrats had been prepared to deliver a signature accomplishment to Trump at a time when the nation’s roads, bridges, airports and other infrastructure are ailing.

    “He just took a pass, and it just makes me wonder why he did,” Pelosi said. “In any event, I pray for the president of the United States, and I pray for the United States of America.”
    Decent spin from Pelosi and Schumer. Better if they were purusing impeachment, but this'll do. "I thought the President wanted a win, why would he walk away? He must not really care about the state of infrastructure in the country."
    posted by filthy light thief at 9:43 AM on May 22, 2019 [38 favorites]


    Nothing says "unplanned stormout" like walking directly to a podium with a sign on it.
    posted by diogenes at 10:04 AM on May 22, 2019 [60 favorites]


    We'll always have Infrastructure Week.
    posted by kirkaracha at 10:08 AM on May 22, 2019 [22 favorites]


    they were supposed to talk about working together on a $2 billion infrastructure plan

    Say what?
    posted by Mental Wimp at 10:15 AM on May 22, 2019 [2 favorites]


    Have the Democrats Blown the Trump-Russia Scandal? (David Corn, Mother Jones)

    The messy fight now underway centers largely on process matters... But these skirmishes... prevent much of the public from concentrating on the thing itself: what went on in 2016. And Trump certainly would rather tussle over obstruction than betrayal.

    Noise and manufactured controversy have swamped the fundamental tale of the Trump-Russia affair. And since gaining control of the House, Democrats have not remedied this.

    ... in all this scuffling, the main story has gotten lost. The reason for the wrangling has been subsumed by the wrangling itself.


    He then goes on to talk about how we need congressional hearings that tell the tale of the original treachery that is the heart of the matter. "A foreign adversary attacked an American election. The candidate who benefited played ball with that foe and provided cover for the attack."
    posted by diogenes at 10:20 AM on May 22, 2019 [18 favorites]


    Trump blows up White House meeting over nasty feud with Pelosi (Politico)
    Ahead of the meeting, Trump told Pelosi and Schumer he would not seriously consider an infrastructure bill until the Democrats passed his new North American trade deal. That suggested that Wednesday’s meeting would be fruitless anyway.

    “I’m not sure I would use the same tactics,” said Senate Majority Whip John Thune (R-S.D.) of Trump’s hardball approach on trade.
    posted by Little Dawn at 10:26 AM on May 22, 2019 [8 favorites]


    Vulnerable Democrats split as impeachment pressure mounts (Politico)
    Another Democrat on Judiciary, Rep. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell (D-Fla.), who is a GOP target, took a different tack, though she dodged questions about her support for launching an inquiry.

    Trump is "acting as an authoritarian leader, which I have seen many times in Latin America, and it is very dangerous,” Mucarsel-Powell said. “I want the people living in South Florida, people living in my community, to understand what is written in that report, and we can’t do that unless we have these hearings.”
    posted by Little Dawn at 10:30 AM on May 22, 2019 [9 favorites]


    > Trump told Pelosi and Schumer he would not seriously consider an infrastructure bill until the Democrats passed his new North American trade deal.

    What's the strategy here, I won't let you give me a massive win on infrastructure unless you also give me a win on trade policy? Now that's the kind of win-win negotiation I'd expect from a master of the art of the deal. Does he even understand the basic idea of ...

    > “I’m not sure I would use the same tactics,” said Senate Majority Whip John Thune (R-S.D.) of Trump’s hardball approach on trade.

    Yeah, the eye-rolling really comes through.
    posted by RedOrGreen at 10:31 AM on May 22, 2019 [6 favorites]


    they were supposed to talk about working together on a $2 billion infrastructure plan

    The WaPo has corrected that to $2 trillion.

    Nothing says "unplanned stormout" like walking directly to a podium with a sign on it.

    Team Trump was clearly prepping to blow up the infrastructure talks ahead of this morning's meeting.

    From today's Politico Playbook: R.I.P. Infrastructure
    Three weeks ago, Democrats left the White House optimistic, but realistic, about the chances of an infrastructure bill. Trump had agreed to spend $2 trillion on a massive infrastructure package -- aides said he was giddy about the high number -- and the two sides were to meet again to figure out how to pay for it. Trump, Democrats said, would come up with the funding scheme, and, indeed, policy staffers at the National Economic Council, Treasury and OMB started to work on various proposals.

    Well, this went about as well as any other infrastructure week. The White House is not going to present any plan to pay for rebuilding the nation’s roads and highways.

    Instead, the administration will ask Democrats to make the case for a $2 trillion package. The White House has identified roughly $1 trillion in spending cuts to pay for legislation -- about as realistic a plan as saying this newsletter will fly you to the moon if you say abracadabra.

    To really drive the nail in the coffin, Trump sent a letter to Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer on Tuesday saying they should pass the USMCA before turning to infrastructure. The letter
    While I can understand if Pelosi's unused to Trump's negotiating tactics, Schumer's had a ringside seat to Trump's business dealings in NYC. When his projects began to fail—which they reliably did—he'd always flip over the table, storm out, and threaten to burn everything down whenever it appeared he was on the losing end. It's baffling why Schumer thinks he can negotiate with Trump in good faith, especially when Trump's boxed in and under pressure.
    posted by Doktor Zed at 10:33 AM on May 22, 2019 [14 favorites]


    NYT: New York Passes Bill Giving Congress a Way to Get Trump’s State Tax Returns | Tax officials would be authorized to hand over his state returns to any one of three congressional committees, opening a new front in a heated battle.
    posted by Chrysostom at 10:34 AM on May 22, 2019 [39 favorites]


    Schumer's had a ringside seat to Trump's business dealings in NYC. When his projects began to fail—which they reliably did—he'd always flip over the table, storm out, and threaten to burn everything down whenever it appeared he was on the losing end.

    Trump Walks Out on Pelosi and Schumer After 3 Minutes (NYT)
    Mr. Schumer expressed shock at the outcome. “What happened in the White House would make your jaw drop,” he said.

    He suggested that the real reason Mr. Trump blew up the meeting was that he had not come up with a way to pay for such an enormous spending package and therefore was looking for other excuses. He said it did not make sense that investigations would cause such an eruption because they had met late last month to discuss infrastructure.

    “Hello! There were investigations going on three weeks ago when we met, and he still met with us,” Mr. Schumer said. “But now, when he was forced to say how he would pay for it, he ran away. And he came up with this preplanned excuse.”
    posted by Little Dawn at 10:42 AM on May 22, 2019 [28 favorites]


    I'm okay with Schumer and Pelosi giving Trump the chance to blow shit up and be the storm-out clown. If Pelosi was pulling this sort of self-own out of Trump every week I'd be way more inclined to cut her more slack, though I still think overt "no impeachment" talk is stupid when you can just shrug and we'll see where the investigations go instead. But this is absolutely the type of negotiation with Trump I want to see from them.
    posted by phearlez at 10:48 AM on May 22, 2019 [17 favorites]


    It's baffling why Schumer thinks he can negotiate with Trump in good faith, especially when Trump's boxed in and under pressure.

    If nothing else he and Pelosi can say they took the high ground and behaved appropriately.
    posted by ZeusHumms at 11:26 AM on May 22, 2019 [4 favorites]


    Trump’s gripe-filled news conference, annotated (WaPo)
    President Trump held a supposedly impromptu news conference Wednesday that nonetheless included a prepared placard on the lectern and handouts for reporters. [...] Below is the transcript of the news conference, with fact-checking, context and analysis.

    And instead of walking in happily into a meeting, I walk in to look at people that have just said that I was doing a coverup. I don't do coverups. You people know that probably better than anybody.
    Aaron Blake REPORTER, WASHINGTON POST: President Trump directed his personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, to arrange payoffs to two women who claimed affairs with him in order to keep them silent on the eve of the 2016 election. Those payments have been established as campaign finance violations. Trump also dictated his son, Donald Trump Jr.’s, initial misleading statement about the Trump Tower meeting. Those could both easily be called cover-ups, even if Trump hasn’t been charged with a crime.
    posted by Little Dawn at 11:27 AM on May 22, 2019 [33 favorites]


    He then goes on to talk about how we need congressional hearings that tell the tale of the original treachery that is the heart of the matter. "A foreign adversary attacked an American election. The candidate who benefited played ball with that foe and provided cover for the attack."

    I agree with this, but I think that summary version needs to have the words "Trump Tower Moscow" in it.

    The comments-section version of the story I tell these days is: "I cannot believe anyone actuallly thinks it's okay that Trump was secretly negotiating during the 2016 campaign to build a Trump Tower Moscow worth hundreds of millions of dollars, all while Russia was helping him win. If that's not illegal it should be. It's sure as hell impeachable, especially when you consider how hard Trump worked to obstruct the investigation that revealed it."

    I'm posting variations on that in as many comment sections as I can, and sharing these Mueller report memes on as many social media channels as I have access to.

    I tend to think the current public confusion has more to do with the "ceaseless and vigorous crusade of lies and spin to distract from the heart of the scandal" that Corn decides, and less to do with the process fights which are, I think, just the nature of congress.

    But I think all of us, congressional Democrats and regular Democrats, could be doing a better job drawing attention via whatever platforms we have to the heart of the scandal. Trump was not only "playing ball" with the Russian government as it worked to help him get elected, he was angling to build a tower in Moscow and give the penthouse suite to Putin himself.
    posted by OnceUponATime at 11:32 AM on May 22, 2019 [43 favorites]


    The NYT originally filed this in-depth story on Rusal's new jointly owned aluminium plant in Appalachia: Democrats Seek Review of Russian Investment in Kentucky

    Rachel Maddow: "Within five weeks of Mitch McConnell getting that call from David Vitter saying, Hey I've got an aluminum plant we're going to put in your home state! Thanks from Oleg! —Wendy Vitter's nomination got pulled off the trash heap by McConnell and now she is a federal judge. For life."

    Maddow went into detail on her show: Wife of Lobbyist for Russian Plant in KY Got Boost from McConnell

    Fun fact: Wendy Vitter's husband, former Louisiana Senator David, saw his political career collapse over a prostitution scandal.
    posted by Doktor Zed at 11:34 AM on May 22, 2019 [45 favorites]


    From CNBC: The redesign of the $20 bill featuring Harriet Tubman will no longer be unveiled in 2020, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said on Wednesday. The unveiling had been timed to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, which granted women the right to vote. Mnuchin said the design process has been delayed and no new imagery will be unveiled until 2028. ... President Donald Trump, months before he was elected, called the decision to put Tubman on the currency “pure political correctness” and proposed putting her portrait on the $2 bill.
    posted by Bella Donna at 11:50 AM on May 22, 2019 [21 favorites]


    WaPo, A conservative activist’s behind-the-scenes campaign to remake the nation’s courts: a deep dive into what Leonard Leo has been up to
    For two decades, Leo has been on a mission to turn back the clock to a time before the U.S. Supreme Court routinely expanded the government’s authority and endorsed new rights such as abortion and same-sex marriage. Now, as President Trump’s unofficial judicial adviser, he told the audience at the closed-door event in February that they had to mobilize in “very unprecedented ways” to help finish the job.

    “We’re going to have to understand that judicial confirmations these days are more like political campaigns,” Leo told the members of the Council for National Policy, according to a recording of the speech obtained by The Washington Post. “We’re going to have to be smart as a movement.”
    ...
    In January 2003, Leo called White House officials, including Kavanaugh, to object to a plan by Bush to weigh in on affirmative action. Bush was going to criticize the practice but praise racial diversity. Leo complained that praising diversity would “disgust any conservative who thinks that this is a matter of principle,” according to a previously unreported email by a White House official describing one of the calls.
    posted by zachlipton at 12:05 PM on May 22, 2019 [6 favorites]


    Warren’s ambitious agenda relies on a massive wealth tax that the rich may evade (Toluse Olorunnipa, WaPo)

    Click-baity headline, but there's this interesting bit buried in the article:
    A February Politico-Morning Consult poll found that 61 percent of voters supported the wealth tax, while 20 percent oppose it. Among Republicans, 50 percent supported it and 30 percent were opposed.
    Anybody know if those numbers have shifted since?
    posted by Johnny Wallflower at 12:51 PM on May 22, 2019 [8 favorites]


    Adam Klasfield (Courthouse News) has been live-tweeting a hearing on whether Trump et spawn can quash subpoenas to Deutsche Bank from the House of Representatives.

    Judge Ramos just ruled that the subpoenas stand and is reading his ruling.
    posted by pjenks at 12:53 PM on May 22, 2019 [51 favorites]


    From NBC News: After a dispute over comments by Rep. Lauren Underwood, D-Ill., about the death of migrant children at the southern border during a heated budget hearing on Wednesday, Republicans voted to remove her remarks from the record.

    "This is more than a question of resources," Underwood said during the House Homeland Security Committee hearing on the administration's budget request from acting Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan. "Congress has been more than willing to provide resources and to work with you, Mr. Secretary, to address the security and humanitarian concerns and, at this point, with five children dead and 5,000 separated from their families, this is intentional. It's a policy choice being made on purpose by this administration, and it's cruel and inhumane."

    McAleenan excoriated the freshman Illinois lawmaker for the comments, which she refused to walk back.

    posted by Bella Donna at 1:39 PM on May 22, 2019 [32 favorites]


    Good thing you can buy your own Harriet Tubman stamp - change all your $20s and give a middle finger to the Trump administration at the same time!!
    posted by aiglet at 1:42 PM on May 22, 2019 [18 favorites]


    Note that if you're wondering how Republicans, a minority on House committees, managed to strike her remarks it's because a lot of the Democrats weren't present for the vote. No idea whether that's the standard issue of people leaving once they are done with their questions or because they deliberately absented themselves to avoid a tough vote.
    posted by Justinian at 1:44 PM on May 22, 2019 [12 favorites]


    1: "Judge rejects Trump’s request to halt congressional subpoenas for his banking records."
    2: "Justice Dept. to turn over more Mueller materials to House panel."
    3: "N.Y. passes bill giving Congress access to Trump’s state tax data."
    4: "Trump abruptly ends meeting with Democrats after Pelosi says he is ‘engaged in a coverup’ – Trump’s gripe-filled news conference"

    Any one of those four would be banner news stories for the week, but in this timeline, it's just the Washington Post website on a Wednesday afternoon. Not even the top headline, which is about the Fentanyl crisis. And not a single "surely this" in sight.
    posted by RedOrGreen at 1:44 PM on May 22, 2019 [30 favorites]


    Trump’s Battles: Today’s State of Play (NYT)
    As Democrats weigh impeachment, Ms. Pelosi accused the president of “a cover-up.” Later, Mr. Trump abruptly ended a meeting — three minutes in — with her and Senator Chuck Schumer of New York. [...] The Justice Department has agreed to release to a House committee some intelligence materials related to the special counsel’s investigation. It’s a win for Mr. Schiff. [...] Also, New York State lawmakers gave their final approval to a bill that would clear a path for Congress to obtain President Trump’s state tax returns. [...]

    Newly released search warrants detailed Michael Cohen’s communications with an investor tied to Russia. Read on: The search warrants.
    For context: In Michael Cohen’s Rolodex, an Investor Tied to Russia Saw Pay Dirt
    posted by Little Dawn at 1:52 PM on May 22, 2019 [4 favorites]


    After the clash over her comments, the committee voted to strike Underwood's comments from the record. Nine Republicans voted to delete the remarks and seven Democrats voted against doing so; 10 Democrats were not present for the vote.

    because a lot of the Democrats weren't present for the vote.

    A LOT. The balance of that committee is 18/13. That's some fucking bullshit right there, though it's the inevitable result of these meetings being baloney theater for stunting rather than actual information gathering. Committee membership is here. Your D rep on the list? You have a better than 50% chance of needing to call them and ask them what the actual fuck. I'm almost dissappointed my rep isn't there because then at least I'd have someone to rage at.
    posted by phearlez at 1:56 PM on May 22, 2019 [16 favorites]




    Michael Avenatti charged with defrauding Stormy Daniels (AP)

    Michael Avenatti, the attorney who rocketed to fame through his representation of porn star Stormy Daniels in her battles with President Donald Trump, was charged Wednesday with ripping her off.

    Federal prosecutors in New York City say Avenatti used a doctored document to divert about $300,000 that Daniels was supposed to get from a book deal, then used the money for personal and business expenses. Only half of that money was paid back, prosecutors said.

    Daniels isn’t named in the court filing, but the details of the case, including the date her book was released, make it clear that she is the client involved.

    Avenatti denied the allegations on Twitter.
    posted by Iris Gambol at 2:00 PM on May 22, 2019 [8 favorites]


    My reaction to the Avenatti news.

    Lawtalkers... if Deutsche Bank actually does want to comply, as they indicate, can't they simply have all the documents ready and hand them over immediately following a ruling like today's ruling but before TrumpCo could file for an injunction pending appeal? Or is the idea that they want to comply, as they claim, just PR bullpuckey?
    posted by Justinian at 2:07 PM on May 22, 2019 [2 favorites]


    I'm not a law person, but I'm pretty sure Deutsche Bank wants to comply. They have the German courts and the entire EU system on their necks too, and last I heard, no one (in political power) over here supports money laundering and tax evasion.
    posted by mumimor at 2:17 PM on May 22, 2019 [7 favorites]


    Here are some interesting updates and hot-takes about Trump's Rose Garden performance:

    WSJ's Rebecca Bauhaus: "White House aides were told shortly before 11 today to ready the Rose Garden for a statement by Trump at 11:20—five minutes after the meeting with lawmakers on infrastructure was scheduled to begin." And her colleague Michael Bender: "White House sources say the "No collusion" sign that debuted today was printed weeks ago. Multiple officials said they don't know exactly why. But wouldn't it be fun if there's a secret box of Trumpism signs, waiting for the right Rose Garden moment?"

    ABC's John Santucci: "Senior administration sources @ABC News some aides close to President tried to stop him for marching to the Rose Garden for that event just now. Sources tell me & @KFaulders the president was mad from first thing this morning & comments by Speaker Pelosi pushed him over the edge"

    Former Nixon WH Counsel John Dean: "We are all witnessing Trump’s massive effort to cover up his criminal behavior. As POTUS he is incapable of accomplishing anything. Trump’s printed sign at his Rose Garden press session today shows this was pre-planned by the White House. Donald likes playing the victim."

    Princeton history prof. Kevin Kruse: "Anyone who worries that impeachment proceedings would let Trump play the victim should watch the tantrum he just had in the Rose Garden. Playing the victim is *not* a good look for him."

    Attorney Bradley Moss: "Wait, did Trump just say Junior called him *before* the Trump Tower meeting?" (w/video via Josh Marshall) And: "Seriously, this is why his lawyers were terrified of him testifying. It's difficult to know if he actually just admitted here that Don, Jr. called him *before* the Trump Tower meeting or if it's incoherent stream-of-consciousness rantings devoid of factual underpinning."
    posted by Doktor Zed at 2:36 PM on May 22, 2019 [43 favorites]


    Maria Butina is back, having stayed out of this thread for a whole 12 days (and mostly this pun was too good to pass on):

    CRIMEA RIVER.


    @CBSNews: Convicted Russian agent Maria Butina releases video from jail, asking for money to pay legal fees.

    posted by Exceptional_Hubris at 2:45 PM on May 22, 2019 [16 favorites]


    oh my God the printed sign. I thought it was some I don't know MAGA or POTUS or relatively anodyne thing and was like calm down Metafilter they just whipped out a regular POTUS sign. But NO COLLUSION. Imagine Nixon printing out "Not a Crook" and taping it to the podium. And why a sign? I mean, were they just like, you know what this shambling mess needs, a special sign.
    posted by angrycat at 3:09 PM on May 22, 2019 [53 favorites]


    it's bring-your-own-chyron week at the white house
    posted by Sublimity at 3:15 PM on May 22, 2019 [18 favorites]


    Butina's message is delivered entirely in Russian, presumably targeted at fellow Russians not American conservatives & NRA supporters trying to somehow "own the libs".
    posted by scalefree at 3:19 PM on May 22, 2019 [1 favorite]


    So, apropos of the news Avenatti is under yet more criminal scrutiny, I just want to point out how damaging what he's done is. People like him are why people like Stormy Daniels don't come out into the public spotlight more often. For the other 16? 20? 50? women who have a legitimate grievance against Donald Trump's sexual misconduct, this has got to be chilling.
    posted by Room 101 at 3:54 PM on May 22, 2019 [23 favorites]


    CBS reports another migrant child had died in US custody: A 10-year-old migrant girl died last year in government care, officials acknowledge
    The federal agency that oversees the care of unaccompanied migrant children acknowledged to CBS News on Wednesday that a 10-year-old girl from El Salvador died in its custody Sept. 29, 2018. The child's death had not been previously reported.

    She was the first of six migrant children to die in U.S. custody — or soon after being released — in the past eight months.

    Mark Weber, a spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, said in a statement to CBS News that the girl had a history of congenital heart defects. Weber said when she entered the care of an Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) facility in San Antonio, Texas, on March 4, 2018, she was in a "medically fragile" state.
    Is there any doubt that there are more deaths we haven’t been informed of yet?
    posted by Doktor Zed at 4:04 PM on May 22, 2019 [31 favorites]


    I just want to point out how damaging what he's done is. People like him are why people like Stormy Daniels don't come out into the public spotlight more often.

    Don't forget his incompetence and spotlight seeking acting to sabotage the opposition to Kavanaugh's appointment to the SC. People didn't like it being pointed out when it was happening but it should have been clear to anyone paying attention.
    posted by Justinian at 4:10 PM on May 22, 2019 [5 favorites]


    This is for the constitutional legal eagles...Is there any sort of obscure federal act/law that would (depending on who is reading it) allow Trump to have Pelosi, or any other legislator who draws his ire, arrested/detained? This is a serious question, in light of him apparently planning to activate the Insurrection Act. It feels like we are just a couple of big tantrums away from him declaring martial law or somesuch.
    posted by Thorzdad at 4:13 PM on May 22, 2019 [4 favorites]


    This is a serious question, in light of him apparently planning to activate the Insurrection Act.

    uh what now? source, please?
    posted by murphy slaw at 4:19 PM on May 22, 2019


    uh what now? source, please?

    As mentioned upthread...
    posted by Thorzdad at 4:24 PM on May 22, 2019 [5 favorites]


    NBC: Wells Fargo, TD Bank have already given Trump-related financial documents to Congress—The disclosures come as a federal judge ruled Wednesday that two other banks — Deutsche Bank and Capitol One — can give financial documents to Congress.
    A key congressional committee has already gained access to President Donald Trump’s dealings with two major financial institutions, two sources familiar with the House probe tell NBC News, as a court ruling Wednesday promised to open the door for even more records to be handed over.

    Wells Fargo and TD Bank are the two of nine institutions that have so far complied with subpoenas issued by the House Financial Services Committee demanding information about their dealings with the Trump Organization, according to the sources. The disclosures by these two banks haven’t been previously reported. Both TD Bank and Wells Fargo declined to comment for this story.

    Wells Fargo provided the committee with a few thousand documents and TD Bank handed the committee a handful of documents, according to a source who has seen them.[…]

    The documents that have been provided so far are a fraction of those requested by Waters, whose committee has also sent subpoenas to Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, Royal Bank of Canada and Toronto-Dominion Bank and JP Morgan Chase. The Royal Bank of Canada is in the process of complying with the subpoena, according to a source. The other banks have missed the subpoena deadline of May 6.
    In case Trump wasn’t on edge enough today…
    posted by Doktor Zed at 4:27 PM on May 22, 2019 [15 favorites]


    Is there any sort of obscure federal act/law that would (depending on who is reading it) allow Trump to have Pelosi, or any other legislator who draws his ire, arrested/detained?

    He doesn't need some obscure provision of law. He has Bill Barr to gin up whatever charges he wants against whoever he wants. They're already moving that direction with "investigate the investigators" and the Biden/Ukraine thing. He has a DOJ willing to do whatever he tells it to.
    posted by T.D. Strange at 4:33 PM on May 22, 2019 [8 favorites]




    WaPo, In China, a flourishing industry claims to sell access to President Trump
    One invitation promised a breakfast reception with the U.S. president. Another offered one-on-one photos with him. And a third claimed to “allow you to communicate with President Trump face to face and brief him on your business plans and demands.”

    The offers, promoted online to wealthy entrepreneurs in China in the form of official-looking invitations, are part of a sprawling cottage industry claiming to provide intimate access to Trump, sometimes at official Republican fundraisers and often for a hefty fee.

    Such solicitations, posted on Chinese social media and messaging apps, have cropped up in isolated instances since Trump took office. The Washington Post has reviewed eight that promise opportunities to interact with the president at U.S.-based events, suggesting that the practice is broader than previously known.
    posted by zachlipton at 5:16 PM on May 22, 2019 [8 favorites]


    NBC's Mark Murray covers Trump's lies and bullshit claims from his Rose Garden conference:
    Fact-checking Trump's Rose Garden comments from today.

    CLAIM: “I think most of you would agree, I'm the most transparent president probably in the history of this country.”
    FACTS: No tax returns, no Mueller sit-down, objecting to McGahn's House testimony

    CLAIM: “The whole thing with Russia was a hoax as it relates to the Trump administration and myself.”
    FACTS: Mueller's probe didn't establish conspiracy/coordination, but it *did* establish Russia interfered to help Trump -- and Trump camp welcomed the help

    CLAIM: “This is what happened: No collusion, no obstruction, no nothing.”
    FACTS: Mueller's report never exonerated Trump on obstruction of justice. “Accordingly, while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.”

    CLAIM: “We had an election [last night] for Fred Keller, a 50/50 shot and he won in a landslide."
    FACTS: Previous GOP congressman won 66% of the vote in this PA-12 district in 2018

    CLAIM: "The crime [regarding the Russia investigation] was committed on the other side.”
    FACTS: Guilty pleas and convictions for Manafort, Flynn, Gates, Cohen, Papadopoulos)

    CLAIM: “If someday a Democrat becomes president and you have a Republican House, they can impeach him for any reason, or her, any reason. We can't allow that to happen."
    FACTS: It last happened in 1998, with Bill Clinton.
    Also, ABC's Katharine Faulders notes: "Trump held up an ABC News graphic during the Rose Garden event today -- but notably did not hold up a second page of that graphic -- that details the numbers of indictments, guilty pleas and people sent to prison. Here's both pages"
    posted by Doktor Zed at 5:33 PM on May 22, 2019 [27 favorites]


    Chris Hayes
    Interesting: @KatieHill4CA, who's in a frontline swing district just told me calls to her office have flipped from being 2 to 1 *against* impeachment to being 3 or 4 to 1 *for*
    posted by chris24 at 5:44 PM on May 22, 2019 [53 favorites]


    Katie Hill also flipped her distinct.

    Loony Leftist Update: What has impressed me most is that they fundamentally care about actually getting things done, and not just engaging in symbolic politics. They realize that in order to achieve political gains, you have to have a political strategy, and you have to organize really damn well. Why I Love The DSA (Current Affairs)
    posted by The Whelk at 5:58 PM on May 22, 2019 [15 favorites]


    The World Famous: But nope, nobody seems to have noticed and they just all either repeat the President's lie or ignore it. Why? Ugh.

    I think one reason is that, compared to the report's findings on obstruction, the underlying issues for collusion/conspiracy are trickier to explain, certainly not in the form of a bumper-sticker retort. My sense is that, when considering various issues one at a time, it basically does make a determination of non-guilt on the matter of illegal conspiracy, while leaving open that some contacts or arrangements may have been deeply improper nonetheless. But the obstruction stuff is pretty cut-and-dried, with the conclusion basically being "If we could accuse him outright then we would, but we can't so we won't."
    posted by InTheYear2017 at 6:46 PM on May 22, 2019 [2 favorites]


    Barr should be prosecuted for perjury for knowingly making a false statement of material fact under oath. But nope, nobody seems to have noticed and they just all either repeat the President's lie or ignore it. Why?

    Because laws are for poors like us, not for rich white dudes.
    posted by kirkaracha at 6:58 PM on May 22, 2019 [15 favorites]


    "As an initial matter, this Office evaluated potentially criminal conduct that involved the collective action of multiple individuals not under the rubric of "collusion," but through the lens of conspiracy law."

    Let's do the time warp again: What Is Collusion? Is It Even a Crime? (Politico Magazine, July 12, 2017)
    ‘Collusion is the perfect word to cover such crimes’
    John W. Dean was Richard Nixon’s White House counsel. He served a four-month sentence for his role in Watergate.

    It was the fake legal analysis by Fox News in June—claiming that “collusion” with a foreign government violated no law—that prompted me to look. Surely Fox knows it fooled only fools. Collusion is the descriptive word the news media has settled on to cover many potential illegal actions by the Trump campaign, which could range from aiding and abetting (18 USC 2) to conspiracy per se (18 USC 371) to conspiring to violate several potentially applicable laws like: 18 USC 1030—fraud and related activity in connection with computers; 18 USC 1343—wire fraud; or 52 USC 30121—contributions and donations by foreign nationals. Also, 18 USC 2381—for, contrary to a widespread belief that there must be a declared war, the Justice Department as recently as 2006 indicted for “aid and comfort” to our enemies, the form of collusion better known as treason. Collusion is the perfect word to cover such crimes, pejorative and inclusive.
    Seems like only yesterday since we went... to pieces...
    posted by Little Dawn at 7:15 PM on May 22, 2019 [9 favorites]


    > If you're referring to Chuck Schumer, Senate minority leader

    Not to speak for T. D. Strange here but he's referring to Steny Hoyer, our House Majority leader.

    Specifically, @danabashcnn: House Majority @LeaderHoyer just told me : “Based on what we have seen to date, going forward on impeachment is not worthwhile at this point. Very frankly, there is an election in 18 months and the American people will make a judgement” (12:36 PM - 18 Apr 2019)
    Fun fact: Steny Hoyer has a primary challenger, Mckayla Wilkes, who's got an incredible campaign platform. Please consider donating to her, and if you're a DMV local, memail me and maybe we can all go canvass for her together.
    posted by galaxy rise at 7:16 PM on May 22, 2019 [14 favorites]


    My fellow megathread readers, today I called my congressional rep. She is a democrat but I wanted to add my voice to those calling for impeachment.
    The nice lady who answered the phone dutifully took down my opinion and then asked if there was anything else I was concerned about. I asked her if she really had time because did I ever. I gave her five more topics off the top of my head, particularly the border detainment.
    I was unprepared to have someone listen to my opinions.
    I then thanked her for her work and said it must be difficult.
    She said yes. The call before me was against impeachment. She intimated it was a rude call.
    posted by Gadgetenvy at 7:31 PM on May 22, 2019 [56 favorites]


    I know it’s become conventional wisdom that this President wants to be impeached, because it will aid him in his quest for eternal victimhood, and it would no doubt be the vote that launched a thousand fund-raising emails. But... he really did hold a press conference today, begging the Democratic House to stop investigating him so that he might grant them the gift of Infrastructure, as if McConnell would ever play ball... and he refused to even use the word impeachment, referring to it merely as “the I-word, can you believe that?”.

    Does anyone really believe Donald Trump has the discipline required to go on a stream of consciousness rant while carefully declining to utter the name of the thing he is seeking?

    Let us not ascribe to Trump’s game of seven-dimensional chess what can be ascribed to Trump’s game of tic-tac-toe. The man is terrified. He wants to use the power at his disposal to stop people investigating him, his family, and his current and former lackeys. He does not want to be impeached. Hard as it is to believe, his speed-running of the Nixon presidency is the work of a naive savant. He just wants to be powerful and to be loved and to be left alone by all the smarter and more decent people.
    posted by East Manitoba Regional Junior Kabaddi Champion '94 at 7:43 PM on May 22, 2019 [43 favorites]


    The dumbest thing about Hoyer's 18 month comment, and there are many dumb things, is that there's always an election 18 months away unless the last election was, like, yesterday. There are midterms or presidentials every 24 damn months.

    It's also an abdication of responsibility. "The American people can decide in the next election" could be used to excuse inaction on literally any front. President usurping Congress' power to declare war? Let the American people decide! President usurping the House's power of the purse? Let the American people decide!

    It's absurd. If his position is "the political blowback from a Senatorial non-conviction after impeachment in the House would be too steep and not worth the symbolic vote" then for god's sake say that. Don't feed me shit and then tell me it's a ham sandwich.
    posted by Justinian at 8:04 PM on May 22, 2019 [43 favorites]


    Yeah, that line of reasoning seems to establish a de facto elective dictatorship.
    posted by tivalasvegas at 8:07 PM on May 22, 2019 [15 favorites]


    yeah, and that's actually the original meaning of dictator right? A dude invested with sole and near absolute power but for a limited time.
    posted by Justinian at 8:11 PM on May 22, 2019 [6 favorites]


    Which House Democrats support impeachment? (WaPo)
    37 representatives, including one Republican, say they support opening an impeachment inquiry into whether President Trump committed “high crimes and misdemeanors.”
    But House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has so far resisted, worried that her party could face political jeopardy if Democratic House members attempt to impeach Trump as the 2020 elections near. However, she may not be able to hold that line forever. [...] There’s not really a magic number that pro-impeachers have to get to, but the more who back an impeachment investigation, the more likely it is to happen.

    Here are the House Democrats who support an impeachment inquiry and why, in alphabetical order. Fifteen joined the call this week, after former White House counsel Donald McGahn did not testify to Congress despite a subpoena compelling him to. [...] Did we miss someone? Let us know.
    Pelosi Pushes Go-Slow Strategy on Impeachment as She Goads Trump (NYT)
    But even Ms. Pelosi’s closest allies wonder how long she can hold the line against impeachment if the president continues to ignore the House’s demands. “This is a threat to the whole democratic system. It’s like being on the Titanic,” said Representative Elijah E. Cummings of Maryland, the chairman of the House Oversight and Reform Committee and a Pelosi supporter who has not ruled out supporting impeachment. [...]

    Representative Emanuel Cleaver II of Missouri, who weeks ago warned against impeachment because it would tear apart the country, said on Wednesday that each new provocation from Mr. Trump had moved him “inch by inch, yard by yard” in that direction. “I’m not there, but boy, I’m closer than I was,” he said, exiting Wednesday’s meeting. [...]

    The one thing that could quickly push Ms. Pelosi toward impeachment, people close to her said, would be a mass defection of new members. That has not happened yet, but several members of the class of 2018 said the speaker was mistaken if she assumed they would oppose impeachment to save their seats next year.

    “I ran on many issues, including checks and balances,” said Representative Tom Malinowski, a freshman Democrat from New Jersey. “People expect me to be a leader and do the right thing.” He said he would have more to say on impeachment in the coming days, but hinted he was close to supporting the effort to open a formal inquiry. “It’s not an issue that we can or should or will shy away from,” he said. “We have to figure out what the right thing is and do our duty. And if at the end of the day, we do our duty and the Senate doesn’t, then the shame will be on the other side.”
    posted by Little Dawn at 8:23 PM on May 22, 2019 [8 favorites]


    My sense is that, when considering various issues one at a time, it basically does make a determination of non-guilt on the matter of illegal conspiracy, while leaving open that some contacts or arrangements may have been deeply improper nonetheless.

    There was plenty of circumstantial evidence of conspiracy, but nothing conclusive. Of course, that could very well be because the obstruction worked...
    posted by xammerboy at 8:38 PM on May 22, 2019 [6 favorites]


    Proposed HUD rule would strip transgender protections at homeless shelters (Tracy Jan, WaPo)
    The Department of Housing and Urban Development on Wednesday proposed a new rule that would weaken Obama-era protections for homeless transgender people, allowing federally funded shelters to deny people admission on religious grounds or force transgender women to share bathrooms and sleeping quarters with men.

    The proposed rule comes one day after HUD Secretary Ben Carson assured members of Congress the agency had no plans to eliminate the 2012 Equal Access Rule, which barred federal housing discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity.

    When questioned by Rep. Jennifer Wexton (D-VA) on HUD’s treatment of transgender people, Carson said his responsibility is to “make sure everybody is treated fairly. ”

    He assured Wexton that HUD had no plans to alter the Equal Access protection, saying: "I’m not currently anticipating changing the rule. ”
    posted by Johnny Wallflower at 8:41 PM on May 22, 2019 [11 favorites]


    Joe Biden's Presidential Nostalgia Campaign Is Broken (Libby Watson, Splinter)
    If a Democratic president spends much of their time and effort pursuing only or mostly policies that can get some Republican support, things will not change enough to help the millions of Americans that need help. The scale of the policy changes that we need is too vast to pursue a Republican mollification strategy.

    Any solution to these problems that is worth passing, and that doesn’t simply kick the can down the road or carve out special protections for the industries that got us here, will not come with Republican support. Joe Biden should realize not just that most of his mates from the Senate are dead and gone, but that they were only ever his friends, and not a friend to the average people he’s supposed to be helping.

    He won’t, though, so vote for someone else.
    Emphasis mine.
    posted by ZeusHumms at 9:51 PM on May 22, 2019 [32 favorites]


    The Early Presidential Candidates Have Wasted Their Time—and Ours (Justin Charity, The Ringer)
    Beto O’Rourke is eager to relaunch his campaign. Amy Klobuchar and Kirsten Gillibrand have all but vanished. And has anyone heard from Cory Booker? An early and overeager bunch of Democrats have put the presidential race in sharp relief.
    posted by ZeusHumms at 9:55 PM on May 22, 2019 [2 favorites]


    I for one would be pretty depressed right now if the only candidates were a couple of white guys who were going to end their theoretical second terms aged 86 or 87. Maybe Democrats should try being cheerful that they have plenty of diverse candidates who, in comparison, make Donald Trump look like Donald Trump.
    posted by East Manitoba Regional Junior Kabaddi Champion '94 at 9:59 PM on May 22, 2019 [19 favorites]


    Trump wants to investigate the oranges of the investigation into his campaign. We already know it was the Australian ambassador to Great Britain tipping off the FBI about what a Trump campaign goon told him down the pub, that the Russians were going to provide them with Hillary dirt. This was Alexander Downer and George Papadopolous. Now you can hear both of their accounts of that night in a London wine bar, in an interview on Australian public radio.

    Their accounts differ, which doesn't surprise me much. What amuses me is that to this day, even after some jail time to think about the mistakes he made on that night, George is still oblivious to the power differential between himself and Alexander. Mr Downer was the opposition leader of the Australian government, then foreign minister for 11 years, including the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan and the 2003 invasion of Iraq. He's a silver-spoon dynastic political careerist. High Commisioner to Great Britain was his semi-retirement job. Whereas George is a James Bond cosplayer whose ego is too big to realise that's all he is.

    It's an understatement to say Downer isn't my flavour of politician, but I must give him credit for his actions on this occasion. He flatly states that it's his duty to report on threats to the democracy of Australia's allies. And he did.
    posted by adept256 at 10:53 PM on May 22, 2019 [31 favorites]


    Let us not ascribe to Trump’s game of seven-dimensional chess what can be ascribed to Trump’s game of tic-tac-toe. The man is terrified. He wants to use the power at his disposal to stop people investigating him, his family, and his current and former lackeys. He does not want to be impeached.

    I've felt this way for a long time. Moreover, there was a brief moment when it looked like the investigations and threat of impeachment was over, and Trump's response was to double down. The Democrats that participated in his investigation would be investigated themselves, and jailed for treason. Global tensions and threats of war immediately escalated. The tariff war immediately ramped up.

    Another common trope I think gets it wrong is that the Clinton impeachment backfired. Whatever you think of the result, Clinton's ability to govern was severely handicapped. Everything he did was seen through the filter of the investigation. Going to war, locking up your political opponents, conducting your own investigations are all things that are difficult to do while you yourself are under investigation.

    I fear a cleared Trump will not be easier to deal with. I think instead we would see Trump unleashed.
    posted by xammerboy at 11:07 PM on May 22, 2019 [18 favorites]


    I must say my favourite part in these interviews (paraphrased);

    George: 'I wasn't impressed with their wine list, so I ordered a gin and tonic'

    Alexander: 'They have 150 vintages in their cellar, but I just ordered what he was having'


    Seriously, this was his power move? 'I don't care for the wine, I'm accustomed to finer things'. Thinking this is going to work on one of the most privileged men in Australian politics. Again, oblivious to which league he is in.
    posted by adept256 at 11:21 PM on May 22, 2019 [12 favorites]


    This may come as a shock, but Trump's storm-out this morning was planned from the start and he never intended to have an actual meeting with Pelosi and Schumer.

    11:00 a.m. (all times Eastern): scheduled meeting between the president, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.

    Shortly after 11: Sarah Sanders tells the staff to get the Rose Garden ready for an 11:20 a.m. news conference.

    About 11:15: After keeping Pelosi and Schumer waiting "for about 15 minutes," “[Trump] walks in, goes to the head of the table, not even his assigned seat, doesn’t sit, doesn’t shake anyone’s hand. Stands there and begins a lecture.”

    Trump storms out to his prepared news conference.

    Fun fact: Trump's lectern is nicknamed the “Blue Goose.”
    Pelosi, looking across the table at Mnuchin, described how presidents such as Thomas Jefferson and Franklin D. Roosevelt brought people to the White House to solve infrastructure problems, but Trump had chosen to walk out, these people said. Pelosi added that she had thought Trump was “looking for a way out.”

    Then, Conway asked Pelosi whether she had a response for the president.

    Pelosi replied that she would reply to the president, “not staff,” the people familiar with the meeting said.

    As people got up to leave, Conway said to Pelosi, “That’s really pro-woman of you,” they said.
    posted by kirkaracha at 11:39 PM on May 22, 2019 [38 favorites]


    OMG as if Kellyanne Conway has ever been pro-woman.

    Meanwhile, from The Atlantic: ...Trump’s nearly two and a half years in office have afforded him the time and opportunity to leave a distinct imprint on the courts—and potentially shape the consequential rulings that will come down. To date, with the help of McGahn and McConnell, Trump has appointed 107 judges to the federal courts. That includes 40 of the nation’s 179 appeals-court judgeships—a higher total than any president at a comparable point in his tenure since John F. Kennedy, according to Russell Wheeler, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution and an expert on the judicial system.

    When Trump took office in January 2017, 41 percent of active judges had been appointed by Republican presidents, and 50 percent by Democrats, Wheeler’s research shows. As of this month, the majorities had flipped: 51 percent had been appointed by Republican presidents, and 46 percent by Democrats. Even in cases where Trump replaced an outgoing Republican-appointed judge with a new one, he has been able to nudge the courts rightward. “You replace a slightly-to-the-right, middle-of-the-road judge with a firebrand, and that’s a different story,” Wheeler says.

    A common thread through some of Trump’s high-profile judicial appointments is an expansive vision of executive power—a position that jibes with his interests. In the fall of 2017, for example, the Senate confirmed the Trump nominee Joan Larsen for a seat on the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, based in Cincinnati. Larsen wrote an op-ed for The Detroit News in 2006 in which she defended then-President George W. Bush’s use of signing statements, through which he asserted the right to bypass a legal ban on torturing detainees, among other laws.

    posted by Bella Donna at 4:16 AM on May 23, 2019 [7 favorites]


    This may come as a shock, but Trump's storm-out this morning was planned from the start and he never intended to have an actual meeting with Pelosi and Schumer.

    Generally speaking, one doesn't come to an unplanned event with props for the tantrum thinly disguised as a press conference to justify the tantrum after the fact. The fact that he had -signs- to back up his tantrum was pretty much a dead giveaway that it was in no way spontaneous.
    posted by Archelaus at 4:29 AM on May 23, 2019 [10 favorites]


    Trump wants to investigate the oranges of the investigation into his campaign.

    It will go down in history as one of his bigliest achomlishments, I'm sure.
    posted by yoga at 4:59 AM on May 23, 2019 [6 favorites]


    From CNBC: The redesign of the $20 bill featuring Harriet Tubman will no longer be unveiled in 2020, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said on Wednesday.

    Watch the full exchange between Mnuchin & Rep Ayanna Pressley (D-MA7). It is quite remarkable.
    posted by scalefree at 5:00 AM on May 23, 2019 [6 favorites]


    It will go down in history as one of his bigliest achomlishments, I'm sure.

    DanEggenWPost Trump notes captured by @jabinbotsford:
    “They want to impeach me over acts that they did”
    “Dems have no achomlishments [sic]”
    https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/a-trump-twitter-style-diatribe--live-from-the-rose-garden/2019/05/22/11954982-7cad-11e9-8bb7-0fc796cf2ec0_story.html
    posted by scalefree at 5:04 AM on May 23, 2019 [9 favorites]


    Wow. So, just so, I'm not, going crazy here. The person who governs the greatest world power walked out to a bunch of cameras with a sheaf-full of Sharpie crazy person scrawl. That actually happened, right?
    posted by angrycat at 5:23 AM on May 23, 2019 [35 favorites]


    I'd somehow missed that 70% of Democrats want Congress to begin impeachment proceedings. And that was a month ago. I doubt that number is going down.
    posted by diogenes at 5:44 AM on May 23, 2019 [22 favorites]


    A common thread through some of Trump’s high-profile judicial appointments is an expansive vision of executive power—a position that jibes with his interests.

    I do not trust a single one of these assholes to maintain their "expansive vision" when a Democrat tries to wield executive power, especially if it means a single dollar might be checked from flowing upward for a single moment. They're hacks, selected for their demonstrated adherence to the overriding judicial principle of "Fuck it, let the rich people do what they want", and anything else will be trampled with any excuse they can find or manufacture in chambers.

    Every goddamn one of them should be removed. Pack the Supreme Court, have someone sue to overturn all actions of the illegitimate Trump presidency, and turf everyone sitting in a stolen seat.
    posted by Etrigan at 6:15 AM on May 23, 2019 [28 favorites]


    Wow. So, just so, I'm not, going crazy here. The person who governs the greatest world power walked out to a bunch of cameras with a sheaf-full of Sharpie crazy person scrawl. That actually happened, right?

    With multiple apparent errors, no less
    posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 7:00 AM on May 23, 2019 [8 favorites]


    Sahil Kapur (Bloomberg)
    Quinnipiac poll: 55% of Americans say the Supreme Court is "mainly motivated by politics" while 38% say it's "mainly motivated by the law."

    Republicans say 49-45% the law; Democrats say 63-29% (!) politics. CHART


    Christopher Kang (WeDemandJustice, ex-Obama Dep Counsel)
    Americans are seeing right through the partisan approach of the Roberts-Kavanaugh Court, which is why Democrats are increasing open to reforming the Supreme Court.

    The breakdown among Americans age 18-34 is astounding—71% say SCOTUS is mainly motivated by politics, only 25% say by the law.

    The generation most impacted by this unbalanced Court will demand structural reform to fix it.
    posted by chris24 at 7:02 AM on May 23, 2019 [36 favorites]


    OMG as if Kellyanne Conway has ever been pro-woman.

    "Kellyanne Conway: women who oppose Trump 'just have a problem with women in power'"

    3,000,000 more people--I assume including many women--voted to put a woman in power in 2016.
    posted by kirkaracha at 7:16 AM on May 23, 2019 [20 favorites]




    Another common trope I think gets it wrong is that the Clinton impeachment backfired.

    You might be right, xammerboy. I notice also, that after the impeachment Clinton's approval rating dropped 12 points (see year 6 of the 538 average here.) As well, an otherwise weak candidate in W. Bush was able to (sort of) beat Clinton's legacy in the next election.

    Sure, the Senate would probably vote to keep Trump. Similarly to Clinton, they would not hold Trump's own words against him in court, perhaps fearing for their own political futures. I wonder: in case of impeachment, how likely is it that Trump would have to testify under oath?
    posted by TreeRooster at 7:29 AM on May 23, 2019 [1 favorite]


    I'd somehow missed that 70% of Democrats want Congress to begin impeachment proceedings.

    Which means that Pelosi's comment that "the people just aren't there yet" is referring to the Republicans.

    From the "all Americans" view; the view that includes the magical centrist bipartisan Republicans who don't believe in incarcerating innocent children but do so anyway, don't belive in draconian anti-women's-health laws but support them anyway, etc. That's the voice she's waiting on to speak up that they demand impeachment.
    posted by petebest at 7:38 AM on May 23, 2019 [7 favorites]


    Bank CEO charged with trying to bribe Trump administration

    The very best people.


    Manafort's handywork, surely.
    posted by Exceptional_Hubris at 7:40 AM on May 23, 2019


    As well, an otherwise weak candidate in W. Bush was able to (sort of) beat Clinton's legacy in the next election.

    Al Gore ran as far away as he could from Clinton's legacy, which included a strong economy (there's a reason The Onion mocked George W. Bush's assuming the presidency with the the headline "Our Long National Nightmare of Peace and Prosperity is Finally Over*").

    Impeachment or no, Republicans will probably pretend they've never heard of Trump while embracing his racist, sexist, and overtly cruel rhetoric and policies -- much like they managed to avoid getting tagged with the stench of the miserable failure that was George W. Bush, despite doing everything to enable him. And I predict the so-called "liberal media" will play along.

    *By the way, that Onion story said "Bush swore to do "everything in [his] power" to undo the damage wrought by Clinton's two terms in office, including selling off the national parks to developers, going into massive debt to develop expensive and impractical weapons technologies, and passing sweeping budget cuts that drive the mentally ill out of hospitals and onto the street," which was meant as bitter satire but turned out to be an accurate prediction.
    posted by Gelatin at 7:40 AM on May 23, 2019 [30 favorites]


    Really, a lot of The Onion over the last two decades can be summed up as "...which was meant as bitter satire but turned out to be an accurate prediction."
    posted by zombieflanders at 7:52 AM on May 23, 2019 [54 favorites]


    So far it looks like Trump was willing to work on healthcare or infrastructure but his fellow Republicans won't let him. This doesn't give him a lot of room but to score a "win" in foreign policy or immigration. Trump's energy could probably have been corralled into something useful if any kind of true bi-partisanship was possible.

    The real story from yesterday is that Republicans have now turned Trump down on healthcare and infrastructure. Do Republicans stand for anything other than tax cuts for the rich? Where is the press on the real story here? Why continue to feed Americans the b.s. line that it's Democrats who must choose either investigations or legislation?
    posted by xammerboy at 7:55 AM on May 23, 2019 [16 favorites]


    achomlishments

    Seems like Trump wavered between "achievements" and "accomplishments" and we got a written equivalent of one of his verbal gaffes and yet more evidence of his mental deterioration.
    posted by carmicha at 8:08 AM on May 23, 2019 [7 favorites]


    So far it looks like Trump was willing to work on healthcare or infrastructure but his fellow Republicans won't let him.

    Because they know, as we all do, as everyone does, that the best possible result of Trump "working on" something is that he makes at least one promise that cannot be kept because of the laws of physics, economics, or society, then raises his hands in victory and leaves his underlings to sort out the (literally impossible) details.
    posted by Etrigan at 8:31 AM on May 23, 2019 [6 favorites]


    Clinton scandal fatigue definitely foundered Gore’s run (that and the election theft). Heck, for starters, without the miasma of Clintonian corruption Gore would have chosen a better Veep.
    posted by notyou at 8:35 AM on May 23, 2019 [8 favorites]


    What Dollar Stores Tell Us About Electoral Politics, Lara Putnam and Gabriel Perez-Putnam - "Here’s a better way to track hardship across space: SNAP-authorized dollar stores. There are over 30,000 dollar stores in the United States, and about two-thirds of them are authorized to accept Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program payments. Each SNAP-authorized dollar store location reflects a series of specific locational assessments: that rent here is low, low-income demand is high, and the number of folks on food stamps who will rely on this store for groceries will make up for the cost of stocking goods that meet USDA authorization criteria. It’s no surprise, then, that congressional districts with more SNAP-authorized dollar stores are less well off, with lower life expectancies, lower educational attainment rates, and lower median incomes."
    posted by the man of twists and turns at 8:51 AM on May 23, 2019 [24 favorites]


    Pelosi tells colleagues Trump is 'villainous' — and he wants to be impeached (NBC News)
    House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., told her Democratic colleagues Thursday that President Donald Trump “wants to be impeached” so that he can be vindicated by the Senate. Pelosi made the comments at a morning meeting, two Democratic aides told NBC News, who also said that Pelosi called Trump’s actions “villainous.” The aide said that Pelosi was implying that she will stick to her current plan to keep investigating the president and his administration without jumping to impeachment, but Pelosi didn’t explicitly say that in her remarks.
    White House denies Trump storming out of meeting was a stunt (Politico)
    The White House on Thursday denied that President Donald Trump's eruption one day earlier at a meeting with Democratic leaders was a pre-planned stunt, rebuffing lawmakers' accusations that the president was trying to bow out of serious infrastructure negotiations. [...]

    White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders on Thursday argued there were a number of reasons the infrastructure session was doomed, but she pressed the line that Democrats are unable to simultaneously legislate and investigate. [...] She also accused Democratic leaders of getting ahead of themselves in asking the White House to propose how it would pay for a multi-trillion dollar plan so early in the process, which was expected to take up the bulk of Wednesday's discussion. [...]

    Democrats on Thursday pushed back on Trump’s plans to wait out their oversight investigations and warned of broader consequences stemming from his refusal to cooperate. “Every president, without exception, has been subject to investigation of some sort, and most every president hated it and did everything they could to discourage it, but then went on about the business of the office,” Durbin said.

    He added: “If this president has said he is not going to be president, not going to use the office as he was given this opportunity by the American voters, until all investigations come to an end, I have news for him: In a transparent, accountable democracy, investigations never end. All of us, those on the Capitol side, those on the White House side have to accept the reality that a democracy requires investigations.”

    Hoyer doubled down Thursday on his use of the term “cover up,” telling MSNBC that Trump “is acting like a man cornered.” “He sees that the courts are not sustaining his cover-up, he's refusing to respond, he's ordering people not to testify, ordering departments not to turn over documents. I think he feels that things aren't going his way and this is his response. It looks to me like he feels cornered.”
    posted by Little Dawn at 8:56 AM on May 23, 2019 [26 favorites]


    I'd somehow missed that 70% of Democrats want Congress to begin impeachment proceedings.
    Which means that Pelosi's comment that "the people just aren't there yet" is referring to the Republicans.


    I'm frustrated with Pelosi's slow roll here too, but there are also people who identify as neither Democrat nor Republican, and it's possible (nay, likely) that the psychology of many of those people is alien to participants in politics threads here on the blue.

    On balance I still believe the messaging coming through the media from D house leadership isn't good enough -- to reach lower engagement voters I think it needs to be firm where it's now hesitant, consistent where it's now muddled, and confident where it's now defensive. It can even be all of those things without saying "TRUMP UR IMPEACHED NOW!!!1!!!" -- it could be: "The redacted Mueller report alone has already revealed impeachable offenses and encourage congress to hold Mr. Trump accountable. Other publicly available information has revealed that he's unfit for office in several ways. Impeachment is on the table. We are moving forward with all our constitutionally-prescribed options for fulfilling our duty to the country, and we'll move deliberately and check all the boxes so that when this is done, there's no question about the strength of the case we deliver to the Republicans in the Senate (whether they can put country above their party or not) and ultimately to the American people."

    Or as I said earlier -- the leadership is going to have to walk out on the edge and actually try to lead the middle somewhere. And "well, maybe impeachment, maybe self-impeachment, or maybe we just hold another election" is too many places to be somewhere.
    posted by wildblueyonder at 9:02 AM on May 23, 2019 [11 favorites]


    Sarah Huckabee Sanders on Thursday argued there were a number of reasons the infrastructure session was doomed, but she pressed the line that Democrats are unable to simultaneously legislate and investigate.

    That's catchy. Democrats should be saying it: "legislate and investigate. That's what we do."

    She also accused Democratic leaders of getting ahead of themselves in asking the White House to propose how it would pay for a multi-trillion dollar plan so early in the process

    Oh, that's rich, given that the first thing conservatives always say to any social policy proposal is "How are you going to pay for that?"

    SHS just admitted that the Democrats were the fiscal conservatives in the room in the infrastructure conversation.

    Not that anyone who pays attention to how Republicans "govern" when given the chance needed the nod.
    posted by wildblueyonder at 9:09 AM on May 23, 2019 [15 favorites]


    This isn't complicated. Trump committed impeachable offenses and Congress is duty-bound to impeach him. That doing so will fail to remove him is the fault of the senators who will vote against it, but doesn't change the fact that Congress is derelict in its duty right now.”
    posted by The Whelk at 9:16 AM on May 23, 2019 [31 favorites]


    Daily Beast, Rex Tillerson Secretly Meets With House Foreign Affairs Committee to Talk Trump

    More leaks about Tillerson's Capitol Hill testimony from the WaPo: Putin Out-Prepared Trump In Key Meeting, Rex Tillerson Told House Panel
    Former secretary of state Rex Tillerson told members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee that Russian President Vladimir Putin out-prepared President Trump during a key meeting in Germany, putting the U.S. leader at a disadvantage during their first series of tête-à-têtes.

    The U.S. side anticipated a shorter meeting for exchanging courtesies, but it ballooned into a globe-spanning two-hour-plus session involving deliberations on a variety of geopolitical issues, said committee aides, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss Tillerson’s seven-hour closed meeting with the committee.

    “We spent a lot of time in the conversation talking about how Putin seized every opportunity to push what he wanted,” a committee aide said. “There was a discrepancy in preparation, and it created an unequal footing.”
    Then there was this telling exchange about promoting American values:
    “Those American values — freedom, democracy, individual liberty and human dignity — are the North Star that guided every action I took at the State Department,” Tillerson said, according to a person in the room.

    Upon questioning, Tillerson clarified that although he and the president shared the same goal, they did not share the same “value system.”

    When asked to describe Trump’s values, Tillerson said, “I cannot,” the person said.
    And @realDonaldTrump protested this morning, "Rex Tillerson, a man who is “dumb as a rock” and totally ill prepared and ill equipped to be Secretary of State, made up a story (he got fired) that I was out-prepared by Vladimir Putin at a meeting in Hamburg, Germany. I don’t think Putin would agree. Look how the U.S. is doing!" Once again, Trump rejects an American's assessment in favor of Putin's…
    posted by Doktor Zed at 9:24 AM on May 23, 2019 [27 favorites]


    "Look how the U.S. is doing!"

    Trump Administration to Announce Farm Aid to Ease Pain of Trade War (NYT)
    A spokesperson from the Department of Agriculture said Wednesday that details on a new farming support program would be forthcoming shortly, but cautioned farmers to avoid changing their planting decisions until the details had been clarified. [...]

    “Farmers are becoming increasingly anxious over their future financial performance,” said James Mintert, the survey’s principal investigator and director of Purdue University’s Center for Commercial Agriculture.

    The administration handed out $12 billion in emergency relief for farmers last year, funded through the Commodity Credit Corporation, a program that helps shore up American farmers by buying their crops. The new round of aid could operate similarly, though details have not been released. But many farmers have complained that the past payments are too small to offset the cost of lost markets overseas, while others have objected to the idea of receiving government handouts.
    posted by Little Dawn at 9:32 AM on May 23, 2019 [7 favorites]


    Nevada! You continue to be awesome: Bill restoring ex-felon voting rights passes senate and heads to governor's desk:
    Legislation restoring voting rights to ex-felons who have completed their prison sentences was given final legislative approval Wednesday on a party line vote of the state Senate.

    The vote to send the legislation to Gov. Steve Sisolak’s desk was 13-8 with Republicans opposed.
    A bill that would have Nevada joining the National Popular Vote Compact is also headed to Governor Sisolak's desk. Cross your fingers!
    posted by Rosie M. Banks at 9:37 AM on May 23, 2019 [28 favorites]


    Surely someone smart with a public platform will point out that, if the storm-out was not a stunt, that means Trump is a wimpy little oversensitive baby who can call names but as soon as someone says even one mean thing about him, it sends him into such an emotional tailspin that he can't even do the most basic parts of his job for hours. The White House is playing right into that narrative, so please, somebody, run with that.

    Yeah, the weird thing is that, AFAICT, there is no good spin on this (presumably) premeditated action. It looks either like an act of consciously spiteful obstruction of the real work of government or a temper tantrum. They're embracing the second, which is even weirder, since the first at least plays well with their "own the libs" base.
    posted by jackbishop at 9:43 AM on May 23, 2019 [5 favorites]


    Pelosi replied that she would reply to the president, “not staff,” the people familiar with the meeting said.

    As people got up to leave, Conway said to Pelosi, “That’s really pro-woman of you,” they said.


    Update: @EamonJavers [video]: Kellyanne Conway on her exchange with Speaker Pelosi yesterday, says Pelosi is rich and acts that way: “She treats me like she treats her maid or her pilots.”

    She went on to say that the Speaker is “not very pro-woman. She’s pro-some women.”

    The Conway family disclosed assets of up to $39 million when she joined the administration, which was when they bought an $8 million home, in case you somehow had the idea that any of this could be sincere.
    posted by zachlipton at 9:46 AM on May 23, 2019 [38 favorites]


    Fun fact: Trump's lectern is nicknamed the “Blue Goose.”

    The Blue Goose is the big, rectangular lectern used at least since Reagan, it's bullet proof, very heavy, and travels with the president. The Falcon was used at the briefing yesterday, it debuted during the GW Bush presidency and has a tapered base and slimmer top. Sorry to be that guy.
    posted by peeedro at 9:47 AM on May 23, 2019 [52 favorites]


    I still believe the messaging coming through the media from D house leadership isn't good enough -- to reach lower engagement voters I think it needs to be firm where it's now hesitant, consistent where it's now muddled, and confident where it's now defensive.

    "The American people have a right to know what Trump is hiding. Shame on those Republican leaders who decided to help Trump with his cover up."
    posted by Gelatin at 9:51 AM on May 23, 2019 [5 favorites]


    Bank CEO charged with trying to bribe Trump administration

    What's extra interesting for me about this: the position they floated for this guy was Secretary of the Army, but ultimately he wasn't nominated.

    Several of the nominees for service secretary positions dropped out during or before confirmation hearings. At the time, I figured either 1) they realized they didn't want to be part of this shitshow for any number of obvious reasons, or 2) they didn't want stuff revealed by the vetting process, even though the Republican-controlled Senate clearly didn't give a fuck about anything they might find and would still confirm. Like whatever they were hiding was that bad.

    And now this has me thinking back to those other people who pulled out of the running.
    posted by scaryblackdeath at 9:53 AM on May 23, 2019 [8 favorites]


    Bill to allow more medical professionals to perform abortions is closer to passage
    The Maine Legislature took another step toward expanding access to abortion Tuesday, with the House of Representatives approving a bill that authorizes nurse practitioners and physician assistants to perform abortions.

    The 74-58 vote, largely along party lines with Republicans in opposition and Democrats in support, will now go to the state Senate, where Democrats also hold the majority, for a vote that will likely be taken later this week....

    Maine lawmakers moved to broaden access to abortion for the second time in one week even as states such as Kentucky, Ohio, Georgia and Alabama have approved some of the most restrictive abortion limits in years...Last week both houses of the Maine Legislature passed a bill that requires the state to fund abortion under its Medicaid program and obligates private insurers to include abortion among pregnancy-related benefits.
    A reminder that Maine bitterly suffered two terms of a Trump-loving governor who gained office both times due to spoiler third party candidates but now basks in the warmth of Democratic successor, Janet Mills.

    As Maine goes, so goes the nation.
    posted by TWinbrook8 at 9:54 AM on May 23, 2019 [27 favorites]


    Buttigieg accuses Trump of faking disability to avoid Vietnam draft (Guardian)
    Buttigieg, who took a seven-month leave of absence from his job as mayor of South Bend, Indiana, to serve in Afghanistan as a lieutenant in the navy reserve, said: “I have a pretty dim view of his decision to use his privileged status to fake a disability in order to avoid serving in Vietnam.”

    Speaking at a Washington Post event on Thursday, the 37-year-old continued: “I mean, if he were a conscientious objector, I’d admire that, but this is somebody who, I think it is fairly obvious to most of us, took advantage of the fact that he was a child of a multimillionaire in order to pretend to be disabled so that somebody could go to war in his place.

    “I know that dredges up old wounds from a complicated time during a complicated war, but I am also old enough to remember when conservatives talked about character as something that mattered in the presidency, and so I think it deserves to be talked about.” [...]

    Asked whether Trump should be impeached, a question currently dividing Democrats, Buttigieg replied: “As a young Democrat, I’ve learned to think cautiously before offering advice to Nancy Pelosi. But what I’ll say is that it’s very clear that the president deserves impeachment and the case for impeachment is being built each passing day by the White House. What we have now is a steady process of taking away any semblance of respect for the rule of law.” [...]

    Later, interviewer Robert Costa asked him: “Is President Trump a racist?” Buttigieg replied: “I think so. If you do racist things and say racist things, the question of whether that makes you a racist is almost academic. The problem with the president is that he does and says racist things and gives cover to other racists. “It’s not an accident that hate crimes rose disproportionately in places that his campaign visited … Without having to examine his heart, there’s no question that we have to respond to the racism that is emanating from this White House.”
    posted by Little Dawn at 9:55 AM on May 23, 2019 [59 favorites]


    This isn't complicated. Trump committed impeachable offenses and Congress is duty-bound to impeach him. That doing so will fail to remove him is the fault of the senators who will vote against it, but doesn't change the fact that Congress is derelict in its duty right now.

    More importantly for Pelosi's logic, the effect of a failure to convict in the Senate will be much smaller than the effect of the Mueller report's "exoneration." The latter definitely gave Trump a bump in the polls -- about a two-point spike in the 538 aggregate immediately following the report's release -- but that spike has now entirely dissipated over the ensuing month. Unlike the Mueller report though, the Senate vote will be entirely partisan and seen through a partisan lens even by the media, and I expect even fewer centrists will be swayed by it that were swayed by the Mueller report. So even if one is entirely mercenary in judging the advisability of an impeachment, whatever the upsides may be, the downsides -- a boost to Trump upon failure in the Senate -- have almost no support from the polling data.
    posted by chortly at 9:56 AM on May 23, 2019 [5 favorites]


    I've been waiting for someone to realize what happened with the kiddie tax. NYT, Low-Income College Students Are Being Taxed Like Trust-Fund Babies
    A little-noticed provision in President Trump’s sprawling new tax law is treating middle- and low-income college students as if they are trust-fund babies, taxing sizable financial aid packages at a rate first established 33 years ago to prevent wealthy parents from funneling money to their children to lower their tax burdens.

    Higher-education leaders are calling on Congress to fix the provision, which drastically raised the tax rate on so-called unearned income for children with assets and young adults in school. Students with large financial aid packages are finding their nontuition assistance for items such as room and board taxed by as much as 37 percent, even if their family income tax rates are much lower.

    The impact on full-time undergraduate and graduate students under the age of 24 went largely unnoticed until the waning weeks of tax season. But word is spreading. About 1.3 million undergraduate students and 15,000 graduate students have scholarships and grant aid that cover nontuition expenses.
    ...
    The so-called kiddie tax rate was established specifically to address generational transfers used by rich parents to lower their tax burdens, but in the name of tax-code simplification, the Republican tax law expanded its reach. It is now hitting tribal funds dispensed to Native American children and young adults, and the families of service members who died in combat, some of whom saw hefty tax bills for their children’s survivor benefits this past spring.
    Efforts to fix it are ongoing, though the issue as it applies to families of fallen soldiers has gotten more public attention.
    posted by zachlipton at 9:57 AM on May 23, 2019 [28 favorites]


    Quinnipiac's latest primary poll breaks down the results by how closely respondents say they're following the race. Over at 538, Nate Silver had this to say about their results:
    ... doing well with high-information voters is usually a bullish sign. These voters are more likely to judge the candidates on factors beyond name recognition, and so may be leading indicators for how other voters will view the race once they’ve acquired more information. Moreover, high-information voters are more likely to eventually turn out to vote.
    Among Democratic voters and Dem leaners who say they've been paying "a lot of attention" to the election, Biden gets 42%, Warren 15%, and Harris, Buttigieg and Sanders are roughly tied for third place with 9% each for Harris and Buttigieg and 8% for Sanders. Support for Biden is higher among this subset of voters than Democratic voters who've been following the race less closely. The difference between Sanders' support with this group of voters and people who say they haven't been following the race closely is dramatic.
    posted by nangar at 9:58 AM on May 23, 2019 [4 favorites]


    > a boost to Trump upon failure in the Senate

    I still don't get this. If we really have the support for impeachment that we are saying we have, I don't see any situation in which the proceedings and findings from that reduce the public sentiment - That would only happen if all we found from further discovery was proof that Trump was totally innocent of everything that we already know he has done.

    Assuming public support would only go up, if it's blocked in the Senate then, doesn't that give people a really good reason to show up and vote out the Senators who are up for election who voted against impeachment, with effects on the rest of the ballot as well?
    posted by MysticMCJ at 10:03 AM on May 23, 2019 [11 favorites]


    If we really have the support for impeachment that we are saying we have, I don't see any situation in which the proceedings and findings from that reduce the public sentiment - That would only happen if all we found from further discovery was proof that Trump was totally innocent of everything that we already know he has done.

    There does appear to be a small uncommitted segment in the middle who actually responds to current events -- see, again, the 2 point boost for Trump following the Mueller report. If these sorts of boosts were larger, longer-lasting, and less uncertain, I could definitely understand being wary of losing the vote in the Senate. But they aren't large, they don't last long, and we have an N of tiny to base our judgments on anyway, so it's all meaningless. And for the non-centrist partisans, I don't think anyone has any evidence whatsoever about whether such an event would boost Democratic or Republican turnout more.


    Thinking more broadly, my objections to Pelosi's strategy are similar to those who support Biden based on his "electability." In both cases, people are making pragmatic judgments based on empirical polling data and future predictions rather than policy and principle. Which is fine, we are all pragmatists in various ways. But when the data are so few and so uncertain -- the polling on impeachment effects, the predictions two years in advance based on primary polling -- it's really quite illogical and unpragmatic to make substantial bets on future outcomes based on such uncertain data. Yeah, if you have nothing else to go on and have to make a bet, you go with whatever has the most probable beneficial effect. But pragmatism is not the only criterion for decision-making. Where there are no principled differences between X and Y, it makes sense to choose based on pragmatic criteria, no matter how weak. But when there are no pragmatic differences between X and Y, it makes sense to choose based on other criteria. The pragmatic evidence for the effects of impeachment or electability is so weak, with such large uncertainty bars, that it is close to non-existent, particularly relative to the many other decision criteria that are quite clear and certain. Impeachment's effects may be unclear, but its moral and legal justifications are vividly clear. The electability of candidates may be unclear, but their policy and personal differences are vividly clear. When better to make principled decisions than when the pragmatic effects are highly uncertain or unknown? Even a pragmatist should sometimes conclude that, when they really do know almost nothing about the future effects of present actions, it may be best to put pragmatics aside and do the principled thing.
    posted by chortly at 10:14 AM on May 23, 2019 [9 favorites]


    Pelosi: Trump needs 'an intervention' after White House blow-up

    Trump Jr. on demands to testify again: 'It is all nonsense' (Politico)
    Trump Jr. recently received a subpoena from the GOP-led committee, causing an outcry from Republicans who lambasted the action as being in "bad form" and "wrong." Even President Donald Trump said he was “very surprised” to learn his eldest son had been subpoenaed by the Senate Intelligence Committee to testify as part of the panel's ongoing investigation into Russian election interference.
    posted by Little Dawn at 10:15 AM on May 23, 2019 [5 favorites]


    the support for impeachment that we are saying we have ... doesn't that give people a really good reason to show up and vote out the Senators who are up for election who voted against impeachment
    The number of Americans who said President Donald Trump should be impeached rose 5 percentage points to 45 percent since mid-April, while more than half said multiple congressional probes of Trump interfered with important government business, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Thursday.
    I'm going to guess that most of those 45% are Democrats, which means they are clustered big cities, and thus into number of congressional districts which is much less than 45% of the total number of congressional districts in the country (thanks gerrymandering!) and into a small number of states which have big cities in them, representing much less than 45% of the votes in the senate.
    posted by OnceUponATime at 10:17 AM on May 23, 2019 [8 favorites]


    There's a tendency, especially among conservatives, to observe a news story and then exclaim "Why isn't the media covering this? Why aren't people talking about it?"

    I'm a bit wary of when liberals do the same thing, our version being to regard a certain fact or piece of rhetoric as The Thing That Should Be On The Whole Public's Mind and then bemoan the incompetence of leaders who haven't, one way or another, willed a mass awareness of the desired framing. To be clear, the lack of Democratic unity is deeply frustrating to me, but there isn't any kind of lack of strong messages from individual Democrats. There's just no automatic megaphone for them.

    The reason an automatic-megaphone possibility seems so compelling is that Trump more or less has one, because not only is he vulgar, he's vulgar about things that a huge portion of the country has been hungering for years. That said, it should also be noted that his own tweets compete with each other to the point that there are probably many dozen absolutely bonkers/infuriating/terrifying things he's said that even I and others here remain unaware of.

    Regardless, a simple unifying reason that so many people, of all political stripes, think this way is the sheer gap between one's common sense and the national perspectives. So even though a definite majority of Americans support, say, vaccination, there's an incredible way-too-damn-high percentage that does not, and our minds naturally magnify that percentage until we think "Jesus, someone needs to do something! We just need to make people see reason, for crying out loud." (Magnifying it is valid because it's a major public health crisis! The error is in supposing the remedy is anything simple in the "Why don't they just" department, although in that case of that specific example, laws literally forcing people to vaccinate are a good step.) Trump support/opposition is in a similar boat. Most people oppose him! And impeachment hearings would only increase that.

    Buttigeig: if he were a conscientious objector, I’d admire that

    Wow! This feels like a kind of first, and I (in part as the child of a conscientious objector) really appreciate the distinction being drawn here. The "President Bone Spurs" stuff, though compelling, rubs me a bit the wrong way for that reason -- staying out of that war, where possible, is actually a perfectly sensible thing for any person to have done.

    chortly: Unlike the Mueller report though, the Senate vote will be entirely partisan and seen through a partisan lens even by the media, and I expect even fewer centrists will be swayed by it that were swayed by the Mueller report.

    I wish I had your faith! Actually, I agree if we're talking about pundits. I'm more wary about the headline-reading public, and I wonder what steps can or would be taken to ensure those headlines convey the reality.
    posted by InTheYear2017 at 10:19 AM on May 23, 2019 [9 favorites]


    While Pelosi offers fucking thoughts and prayers that Rs might grow a spine and a conscience and intervene, Amash is again making the case for impeachment Ds should be.

    Justin Amash
    Mueller’s report describes a consistent effort by the president to use his office to obstruct or otherwise corruptly impede the Russian election interference investigation because it put his interests at risk. The president has an obligation not to violate the public trust, including using official powers for corrupt purposes. For instance, presidents have the authority to nominate judges, but a president couldn’t select someone to nominate because they’d promised the president money. This principle extends to all the president’s powers, including the authority over federal investigations, federal officials, and pardons.

    President Trump had an incentive to undermine the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, which included investigating contacts between Russia and the Trump campaign. The investigation threatened to uncover information, including criminal activity, that could put Trump’s interests at risk. Ultimately, the investigation did uncover very unflattering information about the president, his family, his associates, his campaign, and his business. It also revealed criminal activities, some of which were committed by people in Trump’s orbit and, in the case of Michael Cohen’s campaign finance violation, on Trump’s behalf. The investigation began before the president was elected and inaugurated. After Trump assumed the powers of the presidency, Mueller’s report shows that he used those powers to try to obstruct and impede the investigation. Some excuse Trump’s conduct based on allegations of issues with the investigation, but no one disputes the appropriateness of investigating election interference, which included investigating contacts between the Trump campaign and people connected to the Russian government.

    Some examples in Mueller’s report of the president’s obstructing and impeding the investigation include:

    1. Trump asked the FBI director to stop investigating Michael Flynn, who had been his campaign adviser and national security adviser, and who had already committed a crime by lying to the FBI.

    2. After AG Sessions recused himself from the Russian investigation on the advice of DoJ ethics lawyers, Trump directly asked Sessions to reverse his recusal so that he could retain control over the investigation and help the president.

    3. Trump directed the White House counsel, Don McGahn, to have Special Counsel Mueller removed on the basis of pretextual conflicts of interest that Trump’s advisers had already told him were “ridiculous” and could not justify removing the special counsel.

    4. When that event was publicly reported, Trump asked that McGahn make a public statement and create a false internal record stating that Trump had not asked him to fire the special counsel, and suggested that McGahn would be fired if he did not comply.

    5. Trump asked Corey Lewandowski, his former campaign manager, to tell AG Sessions to limit the special counsel’s investigation only to future election interference. Trump said Lewandowski should tell Sessions he was fired if he would not meet with him.

    6. Trump used his pardon power to influence his associates, including Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen, not to fully cooperate with the investigation.

    Trump, through his own statements—such as complaining about people who "flip" and talk to investigators—and through communications between his personal counsel and Manafort/Cohen, gave the impression that they would be pardoned if they did not fully cooperate with investigators. Manafort ultimately breached an agreement to cooperate with investigators, and Cohen offered false testimony to Congress, including denying that the Trump Tower Moscow project had extended to June 2016 and that he and Trump had discussed traveling to Russia during the campaign. Both men have been convicted for offering false information, and Manafort’s lack of cooperation left open some significant questions, such as why exactly he provided an associate in Ukraine with campaign polling data, which he expected to be shared with a Russian oligarch.

    Some of the president’s actions were inherently corrupt. Other actions were corrupt—and therefore impeachable—because the president took them to serve his own interests. The president has authority to fire federal officials, direct his subordinates, and grant pardons, but he cannot do so for corrupt purposes; otherwise, he would always be allowed to shut down any investigation into himself or his associates, which would put him above the law.
    posted by chris24 at 10:20 AM on May 23, 2019 [50 favorites]


    How Much Political Experience Does It Take to Be Elected President
    You’ve never seen a House member elected president. Neither have your parents — nor, in all likelihood, their parents. The last time it happened, there were 38 states and electricity was a novelty.
    ...
    As for what Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York, the most recent addition to the candidate throng, is trying to do: Well, no one has ever done it. Never in American history has a sitting mayor been elected president, or even received a major party’s nomination. But three — Mr. de Blasio, Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Ind., and Wayne Messam of Miramar, Fla. — are running now.
    Ceterum autem censeo Trumpem esse delendam
    posted by kirkaracha at 10:20 AM on May 23, 2019 [5 favorites]


    Congress has plenty of ability to investigate the President, uncover crimes and criminals, and ratchet up the psychological and political pressure without engaging in a proper impeachment process and potentially giving Trump the vindication he craves. I think, like Trump, many of us see impeachment as the ultimate confrontation that will settle all scores, finally. But it’s a red herring; the world keeps spinning regardless. I think Pelosi is right to allow the current batch of investigations and court battles to continue to do their work, without creating an impeachment circus.
    posted by notyou at 10:23 AM on May 23, 2019 [5 favorites]


    Near as I can tell the D's have emphasized those same points that Amash has listed, again and again. They are still facing some political reality. Amash is doing America a service by stating these things out loud, presumably to an audience who are dead set not to listen to Democratic leadership. I say: keep going, Rep Amash, and build that case among your constituents.
    posted by Sublimity at 10:25 AM on May 23, 2019 [25 favorites]


    I would love to see an example where D leadership has made the impeachment case outlining Trump’s crimes.
    posted by chris24 at 10:35 AM on May 23, 2019 [6 favorites]


    Near as I can tell the D's have emphasized those same points that Amash has listed, again and again.

    I definitely missed the part where they said that Trump's "actions were corrupt—and therefore impeachable."
    posted by diogenes at 10:42 AM on May 23, 2019 [7 favorites]


    How narrowly do we define "leadership", and why is that the standard of comparison when Justin Amash is not an R leader?
    posted by InTheYear2017 at 10:42 AM on May 23, 2019 [6 favorites]




    "Look how the U.S. is doing!"

    Trump Gives Farmers $16 Billion in Aid Amid Prolonged China Trade War
    (NYT)
    Global markets tumbled as investors began coming to terms with the idea that President Trump’s trade war is here to stay. Benchmark indexes in China, Germany, France and the United States all dropped. American crude oil prices were down roughly 5 percent, amid growing concern that the ongoing trade war would start to drag on global economic demand. The yield on the 10-year Treasury note fell to its lowest level this year, in a sign investors were pricing in lower levels of growth and inflation.
    posted by Little Dawn at 10:44 AM on May 23, 2019 [5 favorites]


    made the impeachment case

    Amash isn't actually calling for impeachment. He is saying that Trump's crimes are impeachable, but that's something every Democrat already agrees with. You can find lots of Democrats who have laid out Trump's crimes. Adam Schiff is really good at it. But nearly every Democrat in Congress has a tweet or a speech that says something along the same lines.

    What Democrats are fighting over is not whether Trump deserves to be impeached. Everyone agrees he does. It's whether impeachment (followed by acquittal in the Senate) will help or hurt Trump in his quest to hold onto power. For Democrats, there is something to be said for the option of getting Trump out of office by beating him in an election -- that turns power over to a Democrat instead of Mike Pence.

    Amash, being a Republican, would rather have Mike Pence. For him, the strategic considerations which are holding Pelosi back are not an issue. He does not want to strengthen Democrats. He just wants Trump OUT of his party.

    I think Amash is one of the rare Republican politicians who argues in good faith and believes most of what he says. I am happy to have him speaking truth to power, and I think he's brave to do so. But his politics are not my politics. And Democratic leadership is allowed to have different goals than Justin Amash.
    posted by OnceUponATime at 10:44 AM on May 23, 2019 [26 favorites]


    I think these conversations are going to be hard to have if we lump together different groups. When we talk about "the D's" or "D leadership" there's going to be misunderstandings unless we clarify which faction of the Democrats we're talking about. The left newly-electeds, the red-state benefactors of the blue wave, the committee leadership, the Speaker and her inner circle, and the rest of the body all have different incentives acting on them and different perspectives.

    The committee chairs seem to be much more aggressive in posture against Trump than Pelosi. Are they "leadership"?
    posted by a snickering nuthatch at 10:44 AM on May 23, 2019 [5 favorites]


    How narrowly do we define "leadership"

    In my opinion, Democratic leadership is the Speaker of the House and the House Majority Leader.

    and why is that the standard of comparison when Justin Amash is not an R leader?

    Because it seems reasonable to expect Democratic Leadership to not be lagging behind any Republicans on this subject.
    posted by diogenes at 10:53 AM on May 23, 2019 [3 favorites]


    Amash isn't actually calling for impeachment. -- Amash, being a Republican, would rather have Mike Pence.

    I made both those statements in one comment, but they sound kind of contradictory. To clarify: I think he's not explicitly calling for impeachment because that's kind of crossing a line in the sand -- from pointing out a fact to advocating for an action which is hostile to his party. But I do still think he wants to see Trump impeached and removed, if that were possible.
    posted by OnceUponATime at 10:54 AM on May 23, 2019 [1 favorite]


    TPM, Pelosi Tips Her Hand On Democrats’ New Impeachment Strategy
    House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) tipped her hand to show the new Democratic strategy on dealing with impeachment Thursday, when she told reporters that the White House was “crying out” for Democrats to start the process.
    ...
    By portraying impeachment as something that Trump wants, it creates an easier position for Democrats to rally around, that they won’t simply play into his hands.
    Strategy, or excuse for inaction: you be the judge. (that was rhetorical, not an invitation for 100 comments back and forth)

    HuffPost, Matt Fuller, Nancy Pelosi Keeps Saying Trump’s Acts Are ‘Impeachable,’ But Doesn’t Want To Impeach
    House Speaker Nancy Pelosi believes President Donald Trump has committed crimes by obstructing justice, thinks his actions are impeachable, and is extremely hesitant to move forward. “Impeachment is a very divisive place to go in our country,” Pelosi told reporters Thursday during her weekly press conference. In perhaps Pelosi’s starkest terms yet, the California Democrat laid out how she views impeachment as a political matter rather than a constitutional duty.

    Pelosi once again said it was “in plain sight” that Trump had obstructed justice and may continue to be obstructing justice by ignoring congressional Democrats’ subpoenas. Special counsel Robert Mueller laid out 10 instances where Trump may have obstructed justice, including by ordering then-White House counsel Don McGahn to fire Mueller, and then instructing McGahn to lie about it.

    “Yes, these could be impeachable offenses, but I intend not to―” Pelosi said, cutting herself off.

    She then said there were three things Democrats wanted to convey. One, that Democrats are following the facts to get the truth to the American people. Two, that no one is above the law. And three, that the president is engaged in a cover-up.
    ...
    She expressed concern that impeachment would be divisive, but did caution that the current investigations Democrats are pursuing “may take us to a place that is unavoidable in terms of impeachment.”

    “Or not,” Pelosi continued.
    posted by zachlipton at 10:58 AM on May 23, 2019 [4 favorites]


    He is saying that Trump's crimes are impeachable, but that's something every Democrat already agrees with

    Then Amash is just better at conveying it. Compare Amash's statement with "Based on what we have seen to date, going forward on impeachment is not worthwhile at this point. Very frankly, there is an election in 18 months and the American people will make a judgement." Who is more successfully conveying that they believe that Trump's crimes are impeachable and explaining why?
    posted by diogenes at 10:59 AM on May 23, 2019 [4 favorites]


    Alternatively, a counterpoint from Albert Burneko, who is spitting fire. The Big Idiot President Is Not Getting Himself Impeached On Purpose, C'mon
    None of this is a part of some scheme. There is never a scheme. He is not sandbagging. He is not playing four-dimensional chess. Donald Trump is not capable of four-dimensional chess. Put Donald Trump in a thumb war against a department-store mannequin and he will be lucky to escape with a draw. He will call it victory. What’s infinitely depressing is how many of his nominal political opponents will believe him.

    The weirdest, saddest, and most unhelpful people, maybe in all the world, are: boomer liberals (like the leadership of the Democratic party, for example) who look upon Donald Trump’s lifelong track record of failing at petty crook shit—doing petty crook shit and not only getting away with it but in many cases declaring his failure a great success, and then being rewarded with greater fame and stature in turn—and insist they are seeing the work of a mastermind, rather than the tides of American life and culture carrying yet another born-rich shit-for-brains white asshole past and above any and all demands and consequences. The idea of Trump is the sucker-ass belief in meritocracy, in hoary old Great Man bullshit, twisted into its most horrible gargoyle incarnation. He’s rich and famous, he’s the president of the country, and therefore it just simply must be the case that he has earned this station for himself, one way or another, via some expression of traits that make him equal to it. He has to be some kind of genius, even if it’s the evil kind. There is no way that a braying worthless dope, a man with no qualities of any kind to recommend him, could have ended up where Trump has ended up.
    ...
    That’s the thing being fought over, ultimately. The question of whether to impeach Donald Trump is, among other things, the question of how to defeat him. The question of how to defeat him is, among other things, the question of what he really is in the first place: Is he just Donald Trump The Illiterate Racist Sex Clown or is he the Republican Party or is he the deeper and more fundamental articles of American life and history? That, in turn, is the question of what kind of society this really is. Is it one in which vast material inequalities are mere flukes of circumstance, or is that situation the just allocation of reward, or is it the residue of systemic theft by a class of cruel moral dwarves, or what? Which is to say: When you credit Donald Trump, in the absence of absolutely any evidence, with possessing the Mephistophelian cunning to bring about his own impeachment, deliberately, for the purpose of bringing to fruition some long-simmering plot to consolidate his political support, you are finally saying that you agree with him.
    posted by zachlipton at 11:02 AM on May 23, 2019 [46 favorites]


    Another common trope I think gets it wrong is that the Clinton impeachment backfired. Whatever you think of the result, Clinton's ability to govern was severely handicapped. Everything he did was seen through the filter of the investigation. Going to war, locking up your political opponents, conducting your own investigations are all things that are difficult to do while you yourself are under investigation.

    One very weird part of that whole era was that Clinton's missile strike on a Sudanese chemical factory, Operation Infinite Reach, was viewed as widely viewed as a wagging the dog distraction play by left and right. The target? Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda.
    posted by srboisvert at 11:11 AM on May 23, 2019 [26 favorites]


    Said Pelosi: “I wish that his family or his administration or his staff would have an intervention for the good of the country.” [...]

    She expressed concern that impeachment would be divisive, but did caution that the current investigations Democrats are pursuing “may take us to a place that is unavoidable in terms of impeachment.”

    “Or not,” Pelosi continued.


    Shahid Buttar for US House CA-12
    posted by Rust Moranis at 11:12 AM on May 23, 2019 [3 favorites]


    From the Huffpost article:

    Pelosi theorized Thursday that Trump walked out of a meeting on infrastructure the day before because Democrats were “not on a path to impeachment.”

    What!?
    posted by diogenes at 11:14 AM on May 23, 2019 [2 favorites]


    Ceterum autem censeo Trumpem esse delendam

    I've taken to euphoniously bastardizing Cato the Elder thus:
    Mar-a-Lago Delenda Est!
    posted by Mental Wimp at 11:14 AM on May 23, 2019 [5 favorites]


    the Mephistophelian cunning to bring about his own impeachment

    It's not Mephistophelian cunning. He's just always spoiling for a fight. Especially one thinks he can win (thanks to a complicit Senate). He's a bully and he's in favor of an impeachment fight the way a bully is in favor of meeting behind the school after 3pm.

    I dunno you guys. I want him removed SO MUCH. But if he can't be removed (because of Republicans in the Senate), I just want Democrats to unite against him and beat his ass in an election. Fighting with each other is completely counterproductive. I'm feeling very "leave Nancy alone" today because geez, WHY are people attacking Nancy Pelosi instead of Trump and McConnell GEEZ it's so frustrating ugh okay sorry I'm just fed up with the whole thing today.
    posted by OnceUponATime at 11:17 AM on May 23, 2019 [29 favorites]


    One very weird part of that whole era was that Clinton's missile strike on a Sudanese chemical factory, Operation Infinite Reach, was viewed as widely viewed as a wagging the dog distraction play by left and right. The target? Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda.

    Anecdotal, but: basically everyone and their brother assumed the intervention in Kosovo was another wag-the-dog scheme. This despite the daily, unending saturation of news about horrors in the former Yugoslavia. Media went from years of "Why isn't anyone doing something?" to "Why are we doing anything, oh wait it must be a distraction." For myself, I always figured Kosovo was a matter of the CIA & the military making Clinton pay attention to something other than his scandal.

    Last year I met a woman who was part of all that as a CIA analyst. She had been in the room on the conversations that led to that intervention. Without any prompting on my part, she confirmed everything I always believed: he didn't want to get involved in Kosovo, Clinton was the one who was distracted by his scandals, and it was the military & intel establishment that made a real effort to focus him on it.
    posted by scaryblackdeath at 11:19 AM on May 23, 2019 [23 favorites]


    Amash isn't actually calling for impeachment.

    His tweets pretty explicitly call to open an impeachment inquiry. Literally every news report says he called for impeachment. I posted this earlier in the thread.

    Bo Erickson (CBS)
    Wow: @justinamash is NOT backing down. He is now talking to a school group on steps of the Capitol about why Trump impeachment proceedings should begin. “Really dangerous for our country” when ppl don’t tell the truth
    posted by chris24 at 11:21 AM on May 23, 2019 [7 favorites]


    There's a tendency, especially among conservatives, to observe a news story and then exclaim "Why isn't the media covering this? Why aren't people talking about it?"

    I'm a bit wary of when liberals do the same thing, our version being to regard a certain fact or piece of rhetoric as The Thing That Should Be On The Whole Public's Mind and then bemoan the incompetence of leaders who haven't, one way or another, willed a mass awareness of the desired framing.


    That's the thing, thought -- the media covers Trump's behavior every day, and then relentlessly refuses to observe the pattern that emerges from so many discrete data points.

    If the so-called "liberal media" won't do it, Democratic politicians need to step into the gap and say "Trump is desperately trying to hide something, he's been desperately trying to hide something since the election -- tax returns, anyone? -- and now Republican leaders are helping him with the cover-up."
    posted by Gelatin at 11:25 AM on May 23, 2019 [3 favorites]


    There was plenty of circumstantial evidence of conspiracy, but nothing conclusive. Of course, that could very well be because the obstruction worked...

    a finer, more succinct paraphrase of the entire mueller report i have not heard.
    posted by 20 year lurk at 11:28 AM on May 23, 2019 [4 favorites]


    Amash isn't actually calling for impeachment.

    "My own view is that Justin Amash has reached a different conclusion than I have." -Nancy Pelosi

    If Pelosi and Amash are in agreement that Trump's conduct is impeachable but doesn't warrant actual impeachment, which conclusion is Pelosi disagreeing with?
    posted by diogenes at 11:28 AM on May 23, 2019 [1 favorite]


    Amash doesn't see a downside to impeachment. Pelosi does. The downside is political costs for Democrats in swing districts, a prospect which does not bother Amash.
    posted by OnceUponATime at 11:32 AM on May 23, 2019 [11 favorites]


    WHY are people attacking Nancy Pelosi instead of Trump and McConnell

    Our elected representatives are answerable to the people. Leaders even more so. It is our democratic duty to raise our voices to express concern. If Pelosi can’t explain and justify her rationale better then she deserves to questioned. I doubt there’s been anyone who’s defended Pelosi more over the years of this thread than me. But she is not infallible, she is not unquestionable. And she is very quickly losing me on this issue. Vote counting, holding a caucus together, passing legislation? Great. Leading the party, which she effectively is until there’s a presumptive nominee? She’s never been the face and leader of the party before and she is showing so far that it might be a role she may not be as good at.
    posted by chris24 at 11:34 AM on May 23, 2019 [9 favorites]


    Noteworthy tweet from Ronald Klain:
    One important thing here: many pundits have been saying that if the House Dems fight Trump in court, Trump will simply be able to run out the clock. This ruling shows that the courts can act quickly, and are likely to do so.

    posted by East Manitoba Regional Junior Kabaddi Champion '94 at 11:37 AM on May 23, 2019 [13 favorites]


    Assuming that zero Republicans (including Amash) would actually vote for impeachment, then we can afford at most 17 Democratic defections. (That's a pretty nice cushion, mind -- thank you Blue Wave!) Any more and it fails in the House, and that will be much worse, in every possible way, than never trying.

    I definitely wish she articulated the situation better, but her reason for not pulling the trigger now could be as simple as not having the votes secured, and if that's currently the case, then it's good for her not to say so aloud.
    posted by InTheYear2017 at 11:38 AM on May 23, 2019 [12 favorites]


    "My own view is that Justin Amash has reached a different conclusion than I have." -Nancy Pelosi

    Nope. That was Mitt Romney.
    posted by Silune at 11:47 AM on May 23, 2019 [8 favorites]


    I kind of feel like Amash is the new McMullen for these threads, just without the cute nicknames.... I mean it's great that he is being strongly critical of Trump, but I think we are heaping way too much praise upon him, and it's completely silly to hold the literal one Republican official who is saying something at the same level as Pelosi or Hoyer - especially a self-proclaimed "libertarian" who is one of the single most conservative members of the house, one who is no longer against government control when it comes to things like abortion.

    Meanwhile, you have congresspeople like Maxine Waters who mentioned impeachment near daily: "My position on impeachment is what it has always been and that is the president of the United States of America needs to be impeached" is a pretty damned strong statement. That was two days ago. I suppose it just wasn't made today. She has been consistent on this, she holds more sway and influence than Amash, but we aren't talking about her for some reason....

    I totally get and feel the frustration with Pelosi and others here, and they are totally worthy of criticism. That doesn't mean that Amash is now some sort of heroic ally - The two of them are not comparable in any way other than both are part of the house of representatives. If we are elevating anyone, we should elevate the people who are actually aligned with our beliefs and back them -- like Waters -- and not Justin Fucking Amash, whose only issue with a hypothetical Gilead is that it would cost him more in taxes. Anything beyond "Oh, neat, even a Republican FINALLY is for impeachment" is giving him way way too much credit.
    posted by MysticMCJ at 11:54 AM on May 23, 2019 [32 favorites]


    Rumor has it Amash is angling to be a Libertarian challenger against Trump.
    posted by FireballForever at 11:57 AM on May 23, 2019 [3 favorites]


    her reason for not pulling the trigger now could be as simple as not having the votes secured

    She doesn't need them secured now. Impeachment proceedings against Nixon began on February 6, 1974. Those proceedings began after extensive investigation by Archibald Cox, so the situation's reasonably parallel in terms of how much investigation has already been done. Nonetheless, Articles of Impeachment were only introduced nearly 6 months later, after further investigation by Congress which turned over new, important evidence. The House had not yet voted on the Articles by the time Nixon resigned. "Proceedings" is a long way from actual impeachment, and those proceedings constitute investigation in their own right which can change the political landscape profoundly.

    (A contrasting argument would be that the impeachment "proceedings" of Clinton barely existed, consisting of only a few perfunctory hearings in November. But, well, that's the difference between a serious investigation of wideranging malfeasance, which we surely have the grist for here, and transparently political grandstanding, which was all they had then.)
    posted by jackbishop at 12:00 PM on May 23, 2019 [16 favorites]


    So I'll tell you why I'm down on Pelosi today, 'cause it's pretty straightforward from my perspective.

    We're in a time and place where white men (and not necessarily even particularly powerful ones) are getting away with some heinous and huge crimes with nothing more than slaps on the wrist at best.

    LOTS of them. Brock Turner, the entire Bundy clan and their allies at Malheur and the ranch, and that's just a -very- short list of a very long list of perps.

    So seeing yet another one get away with it on an epic scale, literally every day, while thumbing his nose at the very idea that he might ever be held accountable and doing his level best to help make the lives of the poor and downtrodden just that little bit worse every time he can... it doesn't sit well. It doesn't sit well at all.

    And okay, maybe it's not a fight they win, but... I'm not feeling good about betting on the election. I was counting on the -last- one to stop Trump, and that clearly didn't. What makes this next one the one where we suddenly win, where it's worth just letting him sit there another 18 months (and really, it's actually 21, until he would leave office, and that's on the generous assumption that his loss is a gimme). What makes it different?

    If we're not taking action, I want to feel like the other option's a gimme, and it doesn't feel like that to me.
    posted by Archelaus at 12:13 PM on May 23, 2019 [26 favorites]


    AP reports from Trumpland about impeachment and relection: Trump’s Campaign Centered On Fighting Democrats, Not Policy
    President Donald Trump dropped the pretense of working with congressional Democrats on Wednesday and sent a clear message that his re-election campaign will be centered on condemning overzealous investigations rather than advancing a robust domestic policy agenda.[…]

    White House aides believe that Pelosi cannot withstand the clamor from her rank-and-file to impeach Trump, and believe that when Democrats take that step, it will assure Trump’s re-election.[…]

    Even Democrats acknowledge that Trump has long excelled at playing the victim: As a candidate and president, he has railed against the “rigged” electoral system and the conspiratorial Deep State that he claims is trying to block him. He has sold his supporters on a belief that the system — secular society and the government — have worked to hold them down. The narrative of an overreaching Democratic Congress persecuting a president who has not been found guilty of any crime plays nicely into that, the Trump team believes.

    Still, Trump himself has expressed a leeriness of what he calls “the I-word.” He told confidants that he doesn’t like discussing impeachment, yet advisers have found that the president constantly talks about it, often veering there mid-conversation to express worry or frustration at the prospect.[…]

    Though Trump has worried that impeachment would be the first line of his political obituary, even though he was confident of being saved by the Senate, those around him think it may be the best thing that could happen to his re-election campaign.
    There's less Machiavellian plotting going on here than making a virtue of necessity here, though. Trump never had a "robust domestic policy agenda", just an incoherent batch of grievances that have blown up in his face (e.g. immigration, trade wars, "America First" neo-isolationism). His administration's only major success of filling federal judicial positions, now largely done with, is not the stuff of rousing stump speeches. Having nothing positive to campaign on, he has to pick a fight now 'cos the fight will otherwise pick him sooner or later.
    posted by Doktor Zed at 12:13 PM on May 23, 2019 [6 favorites]


    The Trump campaign is entirely a trolling operation. For instance: @davidmackau: Trump — who banned trans troops, is against LGBT employment protections, wants ppl to be able to turn away LGBT customers, & is denying citizenship to kids of US gay couples born out of wedlock — is selling LGBTQ for Trump shirts for Pride
    posted by zachlipton at 12:16 PM on May 23, 2019 [10 favorites]


    Nancy Pelosi calls for 'intervention' with 'villainous' Trump (BBC)
    The US House of Representatives' Democratic leader has questioned President Donald Trump's fitness for office, calling for an "intervention".
    posted by ZeusHumms at 12:18 PM on May 23, 2019 [3 favorites]


    Rumor has it Amash is angling to be a Libertarian challenger against Trump.


    I wholeheartedly endorse his candidacy as the nominee for the Libertarian ticket, and would like to know how I can help him get on the ballot here in Arizona.


    Also: Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Florida.
    posted by darkstar at 12:29 PM on May 23, 2019 [25 favorites]


    Nancy Pelosi calls for 'intervention' with 'villainous' Trump (BBC)

    Close, but not quite -- wrong "I" word, Pelosi.
    In a response to a question at her weekly press briefing, the House speaker said she was concerned for the wellbeing of the president "and the wellbeing of the United States of America".

    "I wish that his family or his administration or his staff would have an intervention for the good of the country."

    "Maybe he wants to take a leave of absence," she added.

    She even joked about the 25th Amendment, the US constitution's clause for removing a president, telling a reporter: "That's a good idea."
    Haha, good joke!

    In other news, Feds Say Chicago Banker Loaned Manafort Money In Hopes Of Trump Administration Job (Philip Ewing for NPR, May 23, 2019)
    Prosecutors unsealed bribery charges Thursday against a Chicago banker who made loans to Paul Manafort allegedly expecting they would help him get a top job in the Trump administration.

    A grand jury in Manhattan returned an indictment against Stephen Calk, chairman of Federal Savings Bank, in a case with strong echoes of the earlier ones made against Manafort, who has since been convicted and sentenced to prison.

    Bank employees testified last year in Manafort's case in federal court in Northern Virginia, where much of the story was first revealed. Some witnesses received immunity from prosecution because of the alleged illegal activity.

    Calk, who did not receive an immunity deal, was expected in federal court on Thursday in New York City.
    Summary: when Manafort was no longer making money for "political work for the government of Ukraine," he looked to get a cash loan to support his lifestyle. Calk was open to the idea, but wanted a place in the Trump administration.

    Because that's a solid life-goal for someone who wants to say out of jail.
    The posts Calk wanted included secretary of the Treasury, secretary of defense and secretary of the Army, according to prosecutors.

    Calk was able to get an interview with Trump's transition team in New York City in late 2016, after Trump added Calk to his economic advisory council that August.

    Members of the council included Steven Mnuchin, now secretary of the Treasury; Peter Navarro, now a top adviser on trade and manufacturing; Stephen Moore, whom Trump wanted to nominate to the board of the Federal Reserve, and others.
    Emphasis mine -- and it look like the bribe could have paid off, too.
    posted by filthy light thief at 12:34 PM on May 23, 2019 [10 favorites]


    “Elizabeth Warren called me!” is turning into a meme, Emily Stewart, Vox.
    posted by nangar at 12:44 PM on May 23, 2019 [8 favorites]


    Counterpoint: "stepping down due to health concerns" is Pelosi floating an excellent, face-saving maneuver to a highly suggestible moron.

    (Impeachment or no impeachment, I want the investigations to continue. Trump's endless machinations, sure, but also turn over the rocks covering the dealings of his Republican politician supporters. They're dirty, so let's put their seats in jeopardy. Every district in play, if the person holding it is a Republican.)

    (Of course he's going to campaign on personal attacks. That's been his m.o. for half a century. It's part of the reasoning behind giving so much attention to Biden -- that's a rich vein, and with a fellow aged white guy the optics of Trump's pugnaciousness are better for certain sets of eyes.)
    posted by Iris Gambol at 12:50 PM on May 23, 2019 [10 favorites]


    he puts so much stock in himself as a super-healthy, strong-n-powerful hunky alpha male

    True, but he also has that battery theory where he doesn't like to move around too much because if you expend energy in any way you run your battery down. He can just say, "Being POTUS involves way more walking around than just playing golf all the time. Who knew! No US president in the history of the nation has walked as much as Donald J. Trump. People are saying... Doctors. Doctors are saying, 'Mister Trump, sir, you must take a year to recharge.' You wouldn't believe how many doctors have told me that. Meanwhile Mike can do it. What do we have a vice president for if we're not going to use him? After a year I may be back or I may need to go hang out on the black sea or something, we'll see what happens."
    posted by Don Pepino at 1:17 PM on May 23, 2019 [15 favorites]


    Counterpoint: "stepping down due to health concerns" is Pelosi floating an excellent, face-saving maneuver to a highly suggestible moron.

    I think she's trying to inflame said moron. She's got his number, he knows it, and it drives him insane. She knows when he's hot under the collar he does and says stupid, self-destructive things. She wants him to show himself ever more clearly to the world, so that the decision to remove him is obvious even to most hardened Trumpists. They still won't admit it, but they won't fight as hard to prevent his removal, allowing the GOP Senate to cooperate in his removal.
    posted by Mental Wimp at 1:20 PM on May 23, 2019 [28 favorites]


    NYT, Assange Indicted Under Espionage Act, Raising First Amendment Issues
    Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks leader, has been indicted on 17 new counts of violating the Espionage Act for his role in publishing classified military and diplomatic documents in 2010, the Justice Department announced on Thursday — a novel case that raises profound First Amendment issues.

    The new charges were part of a superseding indictment obtained by the Trump administration that significantly expanded the legal case against Mr. Assange, who is already fighting extradition proceedings in London based on an earlier hacking-related count brought by federal prosecutors in Northern Virginia.
    Here's a copy of the indictment.

    @steve_vladeck: The superseding indictment just unsealed against Julian Assange is exactly what the first indictment wasn't: 17 of the 18 charges are for violating the Espionage Act, under which there's never previously been a successful prosecution of a third party (as opposed to the leaker). This is going to cause significant complications in the UK (there's a "political offense" exception to our extradition treaty), and on this side of the Atlantic, where the new charges would provoke a major test case of whether the First Amendment protects the right to publish. The issue isn't whether Assange is a "journalist"; this will be a major test case because the text of the _Espionage Act_ doesn't distinguish between what Assange allegedly did and what mainstream outlets sometimes do, even if the underlying facts/motives are radically different.
    posted by zachlipton at 1:25 PM on May 23, 2019 [11 favorites]


    Charging him under the Espionage Act for the act of publishing the material, as opposed to a conspiracy to obtain it in the first place, is extremely problematic. Even if Assange is scum.
    posted by Justinian at 1:33 PM on May 23, 2019 [34 favorites]


    "I wish that his family or his administration or his staff would have an intervention for the good of the country."

    "Maybe he wants to take a leave of absence," she added.


    Credit where it's due, Pelosi excels at offhand remarks that get under Trump's skin.

    Trump's been taking questions from the media during his scheduled remarks on behalf of America's farmers and ranchers—and it is a shitshow of grievances. Daniel Dale has highlights:
    —Trump takes a shot at Pelosi's intelligence, saying of his new NAFTA, "I don't think Nancy Pelosi understands the deal. It's too complicated. But it's not a complicated deal."
    —Trump, taking questions, continues about Pelosi, with no apparent basis: "She's a mess. Look, let's face it. She doesn't understand it. They sort of feel, she's disintegrating before their eyes. She does not understand it."
    —Trump then falsely claims Pelosi is holding up the new NAFTA even though "unions are in favour of it." He adds, "She's got to get up to snuff, learn the bill." Several big unions, and the AFL-CIO broadly, have been skeptical at best.
    —Trump keeps insulting Pelosi's mind, calling her "Crazy Nancy" and saying, "I'll tell you what, I've been watching her, and I have been watching her for a long period of time, she's not the same person. She's lost it."
    —Trump then says he doesn't think Pelosi even has the ability to understand the USMCA: "I don't think she's capable right now of understanding it. I think she's got a lot of problems."
    —Trump turns to Kellyanne Conway and then Mercedes Schlapp and then Larry Kudlow to attest to how calm and polite and not-mad he was to Pelosi yesterday.
    —Trump, minutes into a wild (though soft-voiced) rant, says of his behaviour yesterday: "I was extremely calm. Very much like I am right now."
    —Trump: "I'm an extremely stable genius."
    Dale drily notes, "You can't really fact-check this stuff, but there's really no indication that Nancy Pelosi has lost her mind."

    And then Trump uses the t-word, ABC's Karen Travers reports:
    Asked by @PeterAlexander who he is specifically accusing of treason, President Trump says:

    "A number of people. They have unsuccessfully tried to take down the wrong person. You look at Comey. If you look at McCabe. If you look at probably people higher than that."

    The president adds to that list Peter Strzok and Lisa Page.
    posted by Doktor Zed at 1:34 PM on May 23, 2019 [14 favorites]


    Trump is giving a really batshit (even by his standards) press conference. For example:

    @EliStokols: Trump just said that his visit to Japan is "the biggest thing" the country has had happen "in 200 years."

    He proceeded to call on his staffers one-by-one to have them describe his "temperament" as calm during the meeting he stormed out of yesterday. Here's a video of all of this; it's just seven minutes of sycophants. It reminds me a bit of Cohen's account of how Trump gets people to lie for him by just repeating the lie and expecting everyone to go along with it. This was supposed to be an event about trade and farming.

    @ddale8: Trump: "I'm an extremely stable genius."

    @SpeakerPelosi: When the “extremely stable genius” starts acting more presidential, I’ll be happy to work with him on infrastructure, trade and other issues.
    posted by zachlipton at 1:37 PM on May 23, 2019 [44 favorites]


    I think she's trying to inflame said moron. She's got his number, he knows it, and it drives him insane.

    She's managed to get someone's attention, Faked Pelosi videos, slowed to make her appear drunk, spread across social media (WaPo):
    Distorted videos of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), altered to make her sound as if she’s drunkenly slurring her words, are spreading rapidly across social media, highlighting how political disinformation that clouds public understanding can now spread at the speed of the Web.

    The video of Pelosi’s onstage speech Wednesday at a Center for American Progress event, in which she said President Trump’s refusal to cooperate with congressional investigations was tantamount to a “coverup," was subtly edited to make her voice sound garbled and warped. It was then circulated widely across Twitter, YouTube and Facebook.
    Here's an example with 1.7 million views.
    posted by peeedro at 1:38 PM on May 23, 2019 [17 favorites]


    Trump's been taking questions from the media during his scheduled remarks on behalf of America's farmers and ranchers—and it is a shitshow of grievances.

    Why Trump’s new $16B farmer bailout could hurt agriculture (Politico)
    President Donald Trump's snap decision to send billions of dollars in new aid to farmers could be bad for the farm economy and the federal budget. Many farmers are still deciding what to plant this spring and could be swayed toward crops that receive higher payouts from the aid package, such as soybeans. That would add to already record supplies and further depress prices that have been falling for five years. [...]

    Sen. Chuck Grassley, an Iowa Republican, told reporters Wednesday that the White House should have been more cautious about the timing of the announcement because farmers are still planting. “[W]e want farmers to make decisions on how many acres of corn and soybeans to plant based on the market and not something the government’s doing,” he said.

    “The timing couldn’t have been worse,” said Jonathan Coppess, an agricultural policy professor at the University of Illinois, and a former head of the USDA Farm Service Agency during the Obama administration. Rainfall in the Midwest has delayed planting, so many farmers can still switch up their crops. Even the prospect of another round of trade assistance could encourage them to plant more soybeans, Coppess said. "There is certainly enough experience at USDA to know that announcing payments during planting might well cause more problems," Coppess said. [...]

    Trump is using taxpayer money to help just one industry harmed by trade policy. Other industries reeling from the tariff battles, from car manufacturers to shoe retailers, are not expected to receive financial aid. Some farmers recognize the disparity, and stress that they would prefer to have open access to markets. "We prefer that over a check from the government," said Mark Watne, president of the North Dakota Farmers Union. "But right now, our own government is making our demand go down. We can't control that."
    posted by Little Dawn at 1:45 PM on May 23, 2019 [9 favorites]


    I wholeheartedly endorse his candidacy as the nominee for the Libertarian ticket, and would like to know how I can help him get on the ballot here in Arizona.

    Also: Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Florida.


    I'd guess you say that in full faith that the appeal of libertarianism lies almost strictly inside the set of reliable Republican voters. I'd caution people against being sure about that. I have acquaintances who identify libertarian more on the idea that it's another party they've heard of, the two party system is obviously the problem (both parties are the same, politicians are corrupt), and liberty / less "government interference" (there's adjective equivalence again!) sound nice.

    It would bug me less if they actually showed up to libertarian primaries (it'd be an education, that's for sure), but that's outside their range too, which means of course they can't walk themselves through why a third-party vote is almost always wasted or even a counterproductive spoiler in a general election.
    posted by wildblueyonder at 1:46 PM on May 23, 2019 [12 favorites]


    I'm with wby. Anything which makes the race something other than a referendum on Trump is a bad thing and helps Trump. Jill Stein: helps Trump. Howard Schultz: helps Trump. Justin Amash: helps Trump.
    posted by Justinian at 1:50 PM on May 23, 2019 [8 favorites]


    WSJ, House Passes Bill Making Big Changes to U.S. Retirement System (for some definitions of big anyway):
    The House of Representatives passed legislation that would bring substantial changes to the U.S. retirement system, making it easier for employers to offer 401(k)-type plans and include annuities, which guarantee an annual income, as options for workers.

    Backed by a bipartisan group of lawmakers including Rep. Richard Neal (D., Mass.), chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, the legislation would repeal the age cap for contributing to traditional individual retirement accounts, currently 70½. It would also increase the age to start taking required withdrawals from 401(k)s and IRAs to 72 from 70½.

    The House bill, known as the Setting Every Community Up for Retirement Enhancement, or Secure Act, passed with a vote of 417-3. A Senate GOP aide said the plan is for the Senate to vote on the House’s Secure Act, rather than its own version, and Sen. Rob Portman (R., Ohio), a Finance Committee member who is active on retirement policy, said the Senate should swiftly pass the House bill.
    ...
    Though commonly offered by traditional pension plans, annuities are not often used in 401(k) plans, in part because employers worry that if they pick an insurance company that ends up going bust, the 401(k) participants will sue the employer. The bill passed Thursday would encourage 401(k)-style plans to offer annuities by giving certain employers some protection from future liability if they choose an insurance company to administer the payments, and that insurer later fails to pay claims.

    By helping participants convert their balances into a steady lifetime income, annuities enable employers to incorporate a feature of the old-fashioned pension plan in the 401(k) that ensures participants won’t outlive their money. The bill would also allow workers whose employers stop offering annuities to transfer those contracts to an IRA and continue making contributions.
    The problem with that, as the Intercept notes, is that employers can offer annuities to their employees backed by shady operators that go broke, leaving workers without benefits and no consequences for the employer. The other drama with the bill was that Republicans were insisting on an amendment that allowed people to use 529 education savings accounts to pay for homeschooling expenses (thus giving a tax-advantaged path for homeschooling), but Democrats stripped that bit out.

    And while we're on the subject, a reminder about where we are: One-Quarter of Working Americans Have Zero Retirement Savings.
    posted by zachlipton at 2:16 PM on May 23, 2019 [10 favorites]


    I would love to see an example where D leadership has made the impeachment case outlining Trump’s crimes.

    They might be listening to you, or at least realizing that Amash is making their case better than they are. Politico, Dems ready Mueller strategy shift, in which Democrats are planning to try to return the focus to Trump's crimes rather than process fights over access to documents and witnesses.
    Democrats admit it: They need to shift their post-Mueller strategy.

    They’ve been so busy fighting technical battles over access to special counsel Robert Mueller’s report that they’ve barely had time to speak directly to Americans about its damning public findings of President Donald Trump’s conduct.
    ...
    After returning from a weeklong Memorial Day recess, Democrats envision a wave of hearings on the substance of Mueller’s report.

    The Intelligence Committee is exploring potential hearings on parts of Mueller’s report that chronicled a complex Russian plot to help elect Trump. The committee may soon revisit testimony from one Mueller witness — longtime Trump associate Felix Sater — who had been slated to appear in March. Sater was the chief negotiator of the Trump Tower Moscow project, which the committee is investigating.

    The Judiciary Committee, meanwhile, anticipates a renewed focus on the dozen examples of potential obstruction of justice that Mueller described in his report. The committee has been consumed over the past two months with fights for access to Mueller’s key witnesses — like former White House counsel Don McGahn, whom the White House has instructed to defy the committee’s subpoena for his testimony and related documents — as well as Mueller himself.
    @kyledcheney: Expect a significant press to highlight specific examples of obstruction, hearings with panels of former prosecutors to walk Americans through Trump’s alleged efforts to thwart the Mueller probe or intimidate witnesses.

    To which I say, "If it’s what you say, I love it." Just don't screw it up.
    posted by zachlipton at 2:24 PM on May 23, 2019 [20 favorites]


    TMP follows up on Trump's "treason" remarks: Trump Accuses Comey, McCabe, Strzok AND Page of Treason
    President Donald Trump accused former FBI officials James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, and Lisa Page of “treason” during a fiery press conference on Thursday.

    “They’re trying to take down the wrong person,” Trump said at an event that was supposed to highlight America’s farmers. “If you look at Comey, if you look at McCabe, if you look at people probably higher than that, if you look at Strzok, if you look at his lover, Lisa Page, his wonderful lover.”

    Trump repeatedly mentioned Strzok and Page’s “insurance policy” if Hillary Clinton didn’t win the 2016 election.

    “That’s treason,” Trump declared.

    The President also suggested treason was “happening right now” with the Democrats’ investigations, though Trump made sure to say “without the ‘treason’ word, I guess” as a disclaimer.

    “That’s what is happening now,” Trump said. “They don’t feel they can win the election, so they’re trying to do the thousand stabs.”
    Here's the video.

    On one hand, Trump's desperately throwing shit at the walls to see if anything sticks, deploying his message to his partisans in terms just vague enough for deniability (he was a lot more direct on Twitter last Friday). On the other, this is the current occupier of the Oval Office accusing a former FBI Director, a former FBI Deputy/Acting Director, and two former FBI Agents of a capital crime and intimated the same about the opposition political party.

    And mainstream journalists continue to bait him into making these shocking, dangerous assertions without treating them seriously, e.g. NBC: Trump Talks 'Crazy Nancy' Pelosi and Treason at Wild Press Conference
    posted by Doktor Zed at 2:31 PM on May 23, 2019 [14 favorites]


    “they’re trying to do the thousand stabs.”

    is this merely reminiscent of nazi “stab in the back” propaganda or is it a direct quote of something slightly less infamous
    posted by murphy slaw at 2:40 PM on May 23, 2019 [1 favorite]


    I think it's Trump trying to say "death of a thousand cuts" but he's stupid.
    posted by Justinian at 2:44 PM on May 23, 2019 [50 favorites]


    I caught that too. My guess is that he'd recently had a chat with Stephen Miller and the word stuck. That or he was looking at the twitter machine again.
    posted by tivalasvegas at 2:44 PM on May 23, 2019 [2 favorites]


    A New Way to Cover Trump’s Tweets (Jack Shafer, Politico Magazine)
    I would never call for the press blackout of Trump’s tweets. If he’s threatening war on Twitter, I want to hear about it. But as the 2020 campaign gets underway, and his flurry of distractions really kicks into gear, journalists need a new approach.

    [...] His tweets are distractions, head-fakes, trial balloons. His presidency has been one long political campaign, a series of threats and promises designed more to capture attention than get anything done. Reporters would be doing their readers a service if they began to regard most of them not as presidential statements, but as campaign ads. [...]

    What needs to happen, heading into 2020, is for the press to resume its role as the dog, not the tail. For years it was media organizations, not politicians, that used their judgment to decide what is news. As political scientist John Zaller writes, politicians and their staffs work hard to craft messages in hopes that journalists will cover them and bring them to the attention of a mass audience—all those rallies, fact-finding trips, TV appearances, photo-ops and news releases are just gestures designed to get coverage, and journalists usually have well-honed instincts for dismissing the vast majority that are meaningless. But Trump cracked the system, lobbing his incendiary messages over their heads to the competing mass medium of Twitter, and ending their gatekeeper status. They may no longer be gatekeepers in the same way, but they don’t have to be mindless amplifiers. (I’m looking at you CNN, a network seemingly built entirely around fanning anxiety over Trump’s latest Twitter feint.)

    The best authority on Trump’s tweets and how we should read them is probably Trump himself. In a Sunday interview with Fox News Channel’s Steve Hilton: “Twitter is really a typewriter for me,” Trump said. “It’s really not Twitter—it’s—Twitter goes on television, or if they have breaking news, I’ll tweet, I’ll say ‘Watch this—boom.’…If I put out a news release nobody’s even going to see it.”

    And then: “[A]s soon as it goes out, it goes on television, it goes on Facebook, it goes all over the place and it’s instant—it really is, to me it’s a modern way to communicate.”

    Trump’s tweets lose their allure the minute you remove them from their social media context and view them for what they are—news releases and pleas for attention and coverage delivered in a new container. They’re not news, they’re advertisement for himself. Let’s start treating them that way.
    posted by Little Dawn at 2:57 PM on May 23, 2019 [21 favorites]


    “they’re trying to do the thousand stabs.”

    is this merely reminiscent of nazi “stab in the back” propaganda or is it a direct quote of something slightly less infamous

    posted by murphy slaw at 2:40 PM on May 23 [+] [!]


    As usual, his disordered dementia-addled brain is mixing up several things, probably "death by a thousand cuts" and "Et tu, Brutus?"
    posted by Mental Wimp at 3:06 PM on May 23, 2019 [4 favorites]


    NYT, Trump Officials Prepare to Bypass Congress to Sell Weapons to Gulf Nations
    The Trump administration is preparing to circumvent Congress to allow the export to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates of billions of dollars worth of munitions that are now on hold, according to current and former American officials and legislators familiar with the plan.

    Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and other senior aides are pushing for the administration to invoke an emergency provision that would allow President Trump to prevent Congress from halting the sales, worth about $7 billion. The transactions, which include precision-guided munitions and combat aircraft, would infuriate lawmakers in both parties.

    They would also further inflame tensions between the United States and Iran, which views Saudi Arabia as its main rival and has been supporting the Houthi rebels in Yemen in their campaign against a Saudi-led military coalition that includes the United Arab Emirates.
    Rubio and Graham are concerned, but presumably plan to do nothing.
    posted by zachlipton at 3:28 PM on May 23, 2019 [10 favorites]


    Trump's sudden shift to "Pelosi is losing her mind" coinciding perfectly with a barrage of doctored videos of Pelosi is super creepy.
    posted by diogenes at 3:38 PM on May 23, 2019 [55 favorites]


    As it was with Hillary.

    While Pelosi's strategy may be "give him an aneurysm", that's not exactly a constitutionally-prescribed remedy.
    posted by holgate at 4:37 PM on May 23, 2019 [11 favorites]


    ‘He always brings them up’: Trump tries to steer border wall deal to North Dakota firm (Nick Miroff and Josh Dawsey, WaPo)
    President Trump has personally and repeatedly urged the head of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to award a border wall contract to a North Dakota construction firm whose top executive is a GOP donor and frequent guest on Fox News, according to four administration officials.

    In phone calls, White House meetings and conversations aboard Air Force One during the past several months, Trump has aggressively pushed Dickinson, N.D.-based Fisher Industries to Department of Homeland Security leaders and Lt. Gen. Todd Semonite, the commanding general of the Army Corps, according to the administration officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. The push for a specific company has alarmed military commanders and DHS officials.

    Semonite was summoned to the White House again Thursday, after the president’s aides told Pentagon officials — including Gen. Mark Milley, the commander of the U.S. Army — that the president wanted to discuss the border barrier. According to an administration official with knowledge of the Oval Office meeting, Trump immediately brought up Fisher, a company that sued the U.S. government last month after the Army Corps did not accept its bid to install barriers along the southern border, a contract potentially worth billions of dollars.
    Another would-have-scuttled-any-administration-in-the-before-times scandal.
    posted by Johnny Wallflower at 4:38 PM on May 23, 2019 [45 favorites]


    ‘He always brings them up’: Trump tries to steer border wall deal to North Dakota firm (Nick Miroff and Josh Dawsey, WaPo)

    Ok, but there's even more nonsense in here, such as these guys are already building a privately funded wall:
    Even as Trump pushes for his firm, Fisher already has started building a section of fencing in Sunland Park, N.M. We Build the Wall, a nonprofit organization that includes prominent conservatives who support the president — its associates and advisory board include former White House adviser Stephen K. Bannon, Blackwater USA founder Erik Prince, ex-congressman Tom Tancredo and former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach — has guided an effort to build portions of the border barrier on private land with private funds.
    I know this isn't the biggest problem here, but the organization is literally called "We Build the Wall?" Like the 2010 Anaïs Mitchell song that skewered the entire basis for the project years before Trump even started yelling about a wall?

    But this is just amazing Extremely Stable Genius behavior:
    Most recently, the president has insisted the structure be painted black and topped with pointed spikes, while grumbling to aides that Army Corps contracting process is holding back his ambitions. At the White House meeting Thursday, he said he doesn’t like the current design for the wall’s gates, suggesting that instead of the hydraulic sliding gate design, the Army Corps should consider an alternative, according to an administration official: “Why not French doors?” the president asked.

    Trump also dismissed concerns about cost increases and maintenance needs associated with applying paint to the structure, insisting the barrier should be black, the administration official said. He also wants the flat steel panels removed from the upper part of the fence, which he considers unsightly, preferring sharpened tips at the end of the steel bollards.
    posted by zachlipton at 4:42 PM on May 23, 2019 [16 favorites]


    At this point I feel like Trump proclaiming himself an "Extremely Stable Genius" at a rally is like the laziest retelling of "The Emperor's New Clothes" possibly ever. History repeats (or at least rhymes with) itself but it also apparently echoes children's stories now? I also don't see how you report on that with a straight face unless your are on seroquel or something?
    posted by some loser at 5:31 PM on May 23, 2019 [6 favorites]




    @JasonLeopold: Just in President Donald J. Trump directed the intelligence community to quickly and fully cooperate with the Attorney General’s investigation into surveillance activities during the 2016 Presidential election.

    Here's the memo (text version), which gives the AG the authority to declassify information, presumably so Barr can issue more misleading "summaries" whenever he wants.

    Note 3(c): "The authority in this memorandum shall terminate upon a vacancy in the office of Attorney General, unless expressly extended by the President." In other words, this is a one-time deal for Barr only and nobody else.
    posted by zachlipton at 5:43 PM on May 23, 2019 [19 favorites]


    You’ll be shocked to find out that Trump has tweeted a doctored Pelosi video. And made it his pinned tweet.
    posted by chris24 at 6:34 PM on May 23, 2019 [14 favorites]


    Facebook has been “investigating” the veracity of the video since this afternoon but hasn’t pulled it. It has 2 million views.

    Twitter hasn’t done anything and it’s been up 35 minutes.
    posted by chris24 at 6:43 PM on May 23, 2019 [31 favorites]


    the laziest retelling of "The Emperor's New Clothes" possibly ever
    He cared nothing about reviewing his soldiers, going to the theatre, or going for a ride in his carriage, except to show off his new clothes. He had a coat for every hour of the day, and instead of saying, as one might, about any other ruler, "The King's in council," here they always said. "The Emperor's in his dressing room."
    posted by RobotVoodooPower at 6:46 PM on May 23, 2019 [4 favorites]


    Art of the Deal’s real author Tony Schwartz, earlier this evening: “This is my experience of my time with Trump: Because he can't focus for more than a few minutes at a time, he is a man of spectacularly limited learning and great ignorance. He thinks at the complexity level of a very angry 12-year-old.”
    posted by Doktor Zed at 6:48 PM on May 23, 2019 [21 favorites]




    You’ll be shocked to find out that Trump has tweeted a doctored Pelosi video.

    And it isn't just the video. It's a clip from Fox News and they are pontificating about how the video shows that Pelosi is suffering mental decline. We've now got Fox News and the President actively engaging in a psyops campaign against his opponent.
    posted by diogenes at 7:22 PM on May 23, 2019 [56 favorites]


    Ad encouraging people to vote in the EU elections.

    This is what it looks like when the authorities actually want democratic participation.
    posted by tivalasvegas at 7:38 PM on May 23, 2019 [6 favorites]


    the laziest creepiest retelling of "The Emperor's New Clothes" possibly ever

    Trump and Pelosi Trade Barbs, Both Questioning the Other’s Fitness (NYT)
    The president then enlisted a series of aides — Kellyanne Conway, Mercedes Schlapp, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Larry Kudlow and Hogan Gidley — to bolster his contention that he was calm during his brief infrastructure meeting on Wednesday with Ms. Pelosi and other congressional Democratic leaders, a meeting that ended after three minutes.

    One by one, his aides acceded to his wishes and affirmed his characterization in a ritual rarely seen in democratic governments.

    “Very calm. No temper tantrum,” Ms. Conway said. “Very calm and very direct,” Ms. Schlapp added. “Mercedes is right. Kellyanne is right. You were calm,” Mr. Kudlow said. “Very calm,” Ms. Sanders said when prompted. “I’ve seen both. This was definitely not angry or ranting.”
    posted by Little Dawn at 7:41 PM on May 23, 2019 [8 favorites]


    We've now got Fox News and the President actively engaging in a psyops campaign against his opponent.

    TMP’s Josh Marshall flags this ongoing campaign: “I happened to flip on Lou Dobbs show a short while ago – just randomly turned it on. And there was Corey Lewandowski, one time Trump campaign manager and now outside advisor to the President clearly referencing this faked videos as real and discrediting. The news conclusively showing they were phonies came out in the afternoon. This is a few hours later.”

    And @realDonaldTrump quote-tweeted an earlier segment of Lou Dobbs’s show attacking Pelosi, with Fox News pundit Gregg Jarrett claiming Pelosi was having trouble speaking (Mediate).

    So, to recap today, Trump publicly accused a former FBI director of treason, authorized his attorney general to conduct independent internal investigations, and engaged in a falsified digital propaganda op against a political opponent.
    posted by Doktor Zed at 7:56 PM on May 23, 2019 [45 favorites]


    Uh, besides the trolling and the giggles, where does the Pelosi doctored video thing go? Is there some Congressional arcana that mimics the 25th amendment but for the Speaker?

    Fricking clownshow.
    posted by notyou at 8:05 PM on May 23, 2019 [2 favorites]


    Also, the WaPo’s Aaron Blake spotted this: “.@RudyGiuliani has apparently deleted this tweet in which he shared an obviously slowed down video of Nancy Pelosi”

    And Russia Today is running the headline “Confused Pelosi Says Trump Needs ‘Intervention’ But Calls for ‘Common Ground’ with President” to an article about her press conference today (its slant was like something out of the old Pravda, but they only went as far as criticizing her negotiating positions as inconsistent).

    This feels like a preview of the media-propaganda campaigns for 2020.
    posted by Doktor Zed at 8:10 PM on May 23, 2019 [21 favorites]


    The New Charges Against Julian Assange Are Unprecedented. Press Freedom Groups Say They're A Threat To All Journalists: Legal experts say the new indictment against Assange is the first time the Justice Department has used the Espionage Act to charge a third party — not the government leaker — with publishing classified information.

    I know we had a whole thread on this, but isn't what Assange did a bit different from other journalists? Can I go over to my neighbor's house, take their mail, and then publish it on the internet?
    posted by xammerboy at 8:11 PM on May 23, 2019 [1 favorite]


    No, but he's not (only) being charged with conspiring to steal the documents, he's being charged with the mere fact of publication. Secondly your neighbor's mail has no legitimate public interest but we'll leave that aside.
    posted by Justinian at 8:17 PM on May 23, 2019 [9 favorites]


    We’re going to see a lot more of these sorts of altered videos coming through for 2020. This is an evolution of the “Hillary is too ill to lead” propaganda from 2016, which Gateway Pundit, Assange, and Russian intelligence pushed.
    posted by gucci mane at 8:18 PM on May 23, 2019 [15 favorites]


    > Can I go over to my neighbor's house, take their mail, and then publish it on the internet?

    No, but the illegal part is the taking of the mail. If you were to then pass it on to a journalist (anonymously, in a brown paper bag) and they hadn't solicited the theft, and they published it, then you have still committed a crime, but they were OK.

    So the tricky part was, Asange was being accused of soliciting the theft. Now, he's being charged with the publication, which is the same thing that the reputable press does, and is formally protected.

    Or at least, it was protected back when the Pentagon papers were litigated (and some legal experts will hopefully straighten out my inaccuracies here).

    Now, though, with the Blackout Bart / Gorsuch court, who knows.

    > besides the trolling and the giggles, where does the Pelosi doctored video thing go?

    This is 100% in service of Trump's mirror - if I have dementia, I will accuse you of having dementia, and why are you so defensive about it, hmm?
    posted by RedOrGreen at 8:19 PM on May 23, 2019 [11 favorites]


    Uh, besides the trolling and the giggles, where does the Pelosi doctored video thing go? Is there some Congressional arcana that mimics the 25th amendment but for the Speaker?

    It goes on Trump's paper-thin ego. It's salve for his narcissism that got badly burned yesterday, along with yet another in the series of absurd displays by his court assuring the Emperor of how lovely his clothes are.
    posted by scalefree at 8:19 PM on May 23, 2019 [3 favorites]


    besides the trolling and the giggles, where does the Pelosi doctored video thing go?

    The target audience will remember it as an example of why they have to support the various Republicans they're voting for in 2020 because the Democrats are too corrupt to remove someone as obviously corrupt as the ailing Pelosi. People like my parents fell hook, line, and sinker for the Hillary is too ill thing.
    posted by Candleman at 8:21 PM on May 23, 2019 [8 favorites]


    Pelosi v Trump: how a 'stable genius' president met his match (Ed Pilkington, Guardian)
    It has been almost four years since Donald Trump launched his presidential campaign from the gilded escalator of Trump Tower. In that time he has come to be feared by Democrats and Republicans alike for his personal attacks that always seem to supremely rile his opponents.

    Now he has finally met his match.

    Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic speaker of the House, has spent the past 48 hours doing to Trump what he has done to so many others. She lifted up his skin, got under it, and began scratching furiously.

    Asked at her weekly news conference on Thursday whether she was concerned about the president’s well-being, she replied: “I am,” adding she was also concerned about “the well-being of the United States of America”.

    And then she delivered the coup de grace: “I wish that his family or his administration or staff would have an intervention for the good of the country. Maybe he wants to take a leave of absence.”

    Coming on top of the previous day’s goading, in which Trump angrily flounced out of a White House meeting with her after Pelosi had accused him of being “engaged in a coverup”, the House speaker’s call for an intervention appeared to hit its mark.
    "Flounced," ha!
    posted by Johnny Wallflower at 8:34 PM on May 23, 2019 [15 favorites]


    It goes where people who are predisposed to take Trump on faith will believe it is true, and cling to "oh, it was edited together but it's all HER" as proof that everything but their sources are FAKE NEWS.

    Corrections are on Page D-24, if they are ever printed at all.
    posted by delfin at 8:35 PM on May 23, 2019 [5 favorites]


    Just to clarify, there are a couple Pelosi videos making the rounds. As best I can tell, and as reported by Drew Harwell, the "doctored" video (slowed down to make her look bad) has been spreading online, and was tweeted and later deleted by Giuliani. There's a different 30 second video, where the speed hasn't been manipulated, but where a 21 minute press conference has been edited down to tiny and repeated clips of stammers of the sort anybody makes when speaking, and that's the one that aired on Lou Dobbs and was tweeted by Trump.

    As far as I'm aware: two videos, one misleading because it's been slowed and distorted, and another misleading because it's been edited down to nothingness.

    There's also an important detail in the story about the memo granting Barr authority to declassify intelligence. NYT, Trump Gives Attorney General Sweeping Power in Review of 2016 Campaign Inquiry
    One official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss classified matters, said previously that Mr. Barr wanted to know more about what foreign assets the C.I.A. had in Russia in 2016 and what those informants were telling the agency about how President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia sought to meddle in the 2016 election.
    The CIA's informants are obviously not something they want to reveal, and it's pretty frightening that Barr wants to know about them.
    posted by zachlipton at 8:35 PM on May 23, 2019 [29 favorites]


    Scooter Libby's pardon signaled that there, of course, will be no consequences to outing CIA.
    posted by fluttering hellfire at 8:38 PM on May 23, 2019 [11 favorites]


    If edited video is now fair game, the people who made Dick is a Killer will have Trump singing Sicko Mode by the end of next week.
    posted by delfin at 8:41 PM on May 23, 2019 [1 favorite]


    MSNBC’s Sam Stein: “Nadler making some Mueller news on MSNBC. Says Mueller "wants to testify in private.” Asked why, “I don't know why.” Says Mueller "is willing to make an opening statement and there would be "a transcript.” Suggest Mueller is worried about it being a "political spectacle"” (w/video via Maddow Blog)

    (Also, could someone please create a new Hyucking Hyuck MeTa? I ran across a video of Don McGahn caught doing something gross in the background of the Kavanaugh hearings that’s probably not appropriate fare for the megathread. Unfortunately I used up my MeTa quota for this week.)
    posted by Doktor Zed at 8:41 PM on May 23, 2019 [3 favorites]


    Trigger warning [graphic, naked imperial language]:

    Manipulated and indisputably faked videos of the Speaker of the House are held by the Unclothed Emperor, his retinue, and their propaganda tentacles to be real and legitimate, while the actual, real video of "...[g]rab 'em by the pussy" is dismissed as lockerroom talk and fades away as if never seen by America's (lying) Eyes.

    You can fool some of the people all of the time. You can fool all of the people some of the time. Even in the land of the willfully blind, you cannot fool all of the people all of the time. Slowly, so agonizingly slowly, ever twirling towards freedom we remain.
    posted by riverlife at 8:46 PM on May 23, 2019 [7 favorites]


    Reacting to a survey of American Jews, Matt Brooks, the Republican Jewish Coalition’s executive director, said the news was good for Trump.

    And why would he say that this poll, showing 23% voting intention for Trump vs 67% for a “generic Democrat” is good news? Because he believes “the Jewish numbers for Trump are a floor and generic Dem numbers are a ceiling”. In other words, at least it can't get any worse.
    posted by Joe in Australia at 8:58 PM on May 23, 2019 [2 favorites]


    (A new Hyucking Hyuck MeTa is in the queue, Doktor Zed)
    posted by Johnny Wallflower at 9:10 PM on May 23, 2019 [1 favorite]


    Mod note: New Hyucking Hyuck thread is go on metatalk, for all your politics riffing and humor stuff. Thanks to JW for the nudge and for being flexible; I ended up tossing my own up just for formatting preference reasons.
    posted by cortex (staff) at 9:56 PM on May 23, 2019 [4 favorites]


    >>Charging him under the Espionage Act for the act of publishing the material, as opposed to a conspiracy to obtain it in the first place, is extremely problematic.

    Well, erm, having actually read the entire indictment (anyone? anyone?) he very, very clearly is NOT being charged for publishing the material but rather for being a very active accomplice in obtaining the material, actively and specifically encouraging more material to be obtained, and actively working and cooperating with Manning to search for and break into classified systems to obtain more material.

    Their is no specific "publisher" exception to the Espionage Act. There is simply the fact that the crime is working actively to take the classified material and transfer it to the third party who is not authorized to have it. If you are simply the third party then you are not part of the crime. That is traditionally exactly where journalists stand.

    Frankly, if a New York Times reporter were ACTIVELY working with someone to help them break into classified systems, ACTIVELY helping to encourage and direct their search, and even ACTIVELY helping to crack passwords and otherwise breach classified systems, then by all the gods the NYT reporter should be charged and convicted as well. That is just straight-up espionage.

    The "publisher" exception is based completely on the fact that the publisher is a neutral third part who simply receives the information but was not actively working to obtain it.

    Here are just a few choice quotes from the indictment:
    C. ASSANGE Encouraged Manning to Continue Her Theft of Classified Documents and Agreed to Help Her Crack a Password Hash to a Military Computer.

    14. During large portions of the same time period (between November 2009, when Manning first became interested in WikiLeaks, through her arrest on or about May 27, 2010), Manning was in direct contact with ASSANGE, who encouraged Manning to steal classified documents from the United States and unlawfully disclose that information to WikiLeaks.

    15. In furtherance of this scheme, ASSANGE agreed to assist Manning in cracking a password hash stored on United States Department of Defense computers connected to the Secret Internet Protocol Network, a United States government network used for classified documents and communications, as designated according to Executive Order No. 13526 or its predecessor orders.
    It goes on with several more pages of this type of stuff. Assange was very clearly actively helping and aiding Manning in obtaining the classified information.

    The fact the Assange also published the information is a fact established in the indictment. It is part of the crime, because the crime consists of (1) actively working to obtain the classified information and aiding and abetting the efforts to received it, and (2) then also transferring it to unauthorized people.

    If you only do (2), as any ethical reporter would, then you are scot free.

    if you do both (1) and (2), as Assange did, then you are opening yourself up wide to prosecution and you takes your lumps if you get them.
    posted by flug at 10:43 PM on May 23, 2019 [22 favorites]


    The Washington Post has a story up about Elizabeth Warren's past legal work and some twitter lawyers stepped in to provide some of the missing context for it. In short, it is common for law professors to continue practicing law, it in no way hampered her teaching, her practice was fully in line with her principles, and the amount she charged was a pittance compared to what she could have commanded with her reputation and expertise.
    posted by a snickering nuthatch at 10:56 PM on May 23, 2019 [28 favorites]


    Re:assange. Yeah, shitty human does shitty things. Still, I would jury-nullify the fuck outta the espionage charges. 'Collateral Murder' was uncovered by these two amateurs. Now - because of them - we can imagine how much more serious stuff is hidden deeper - stuff that shows abuse of classification to hide war crimes and embarrassments.

    You gotta be thinking, that's not the only video of horrifying activity.

    Assange shouldn't get a medal, but he shouldn't get 'life' either.
    posted by j_curiouser at 11:45 PM on May 23, 2019 [4 favorites]


    Well, erm, having actually read the entire indictment (anyone? anyone?) he very, very clearly is NOT being charged for publishing the material but rather for being a very active accomplice in obtaining the material, actively and specifically encouraging more material to be obtained, and actively working and cooperating with Manning to search for and break into classified systems to obtain more material.

    Sooooo....it would seem that this appears as quite the parallel with at least a few facets of the Trump-Russia 2016 issues? I haven't seen this fly across my Twitters, but while I don't know the nuances that would cause these to be completely unrelated once examined in detail, I don't think it's a leap to see them as congruent.
    posted by rhizome at 11:51 PM on May 23, 2019 [3 favorites]


    I think there's a strong sense among many that the Espionage Act has no legitimate purpose, or at least has never been used for one, and that's why even a lot of people happy to see Assange charged with something that relates to the cyber-intrusion are not pleased about it being drudged up out of the waters. It's too dangerous a weapon, basically.
    posted by InTheYear2017 at 2:59 AM on May 24, 2019 [5 favorites]


    BBC: Theresa May resigns.
    posted by Rykey at 4:13 AM on May 24, 2019 [21 favorites]


    The Washington Post has a story up about Elizabeth Warren's past legal work...

    You’ll be shocked to discover that Maggie Haberman tweeted this story and when someone pointed out that it wasn’t anything remotely scandalous despite the framing, she got just a bit defensive.

    Maggie Haberman
    Replying to @JordanMeehan
    You realize that sometimes when people run for President that stories get written about their backgrounds? And it doesn’t imply a scandal, but actually is about informing people? And that this isn’t the first cycle where that’s happened?

    - - -

    Trust us Maggie, we know it’s not the first time the press has focused on bullshit and framed it in a way to gin up a faux-scandal.

    In case you thought the press had learned anything.
    posted by chris24 at 4:27 AM on May 24, 2019 [40 favorites]


    Is he just Donald Trump The Illiterate Racist Sex Clown or is he the Republican Party or is he the deeper and more fundamental articles of American life and history?

    These options are not mutually exclusive.
    posted by clawsoon at 5:07 AM on May 24, 2019 [13 favorites]


    In case you thought the press had learned anything.

    Whew looks like I dodged a bullet there. But in Happy Friday Everyone news, New York Magazine has an article called Slowly and Persistently, Elizabeth Warren Is on the Rise in which it describes her as "solidly in third place" and offers some rationale as to how she can make a successful run.

    You can add to that her enormous credibility among Democrats nationally when it comes to policy chops, which she has enhanced significantly during the early stages of the campaign, and the opportunity she may have to excel during this summer’s first two rounds of candidate debates. Her favorability ratings in her own party are solid; she’s at 57/16 in the Morning Consult tracking poll, with some room for growth. 28 percent of Democrats say either they’ve never heard of her or don’t know enough about her to form an opinion, as opposed to only 8 percent with no opinion of Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders.

    She would rhetorically fling Trump out of the ring in a debate and he SO deserves it. Go Liz Go!
    posted by petebest at 5:36 AM on May 24, 2019 [25 favorites]


    She would rhetorically fling Trump out of the ring in a debate and he SO deserves it. Go Liz Go!

    Sure. In an actual debate, he's no match. Remember, though, for Trump, a debate is really a game of "who can throw the most revolting insults?" As much as I hate to say it, Trump wins that particular "debate" in a walk.
    posted by Thorzdad at 6:20 AM on May 24, 2019 [10 favorites]


    [Guardian]
    Facebook refuses to delete fake Pelosi video spread by Trump supporters.

    Facebook says it will continue to host a video of Nancy Pelosi that has been edited to give the impression that the Democratic House Speaker is drunk or unwell
    posted by stonepharisee at 6:32 AM on May 24, 2019 [25 favorites]


    FB will instead:
    Despite the apparently malicious intent of the video’s creator, Facebook has said it will only downgrade its visibility in users’ newsfeeds and attach a link to a third-party fact checking site pointing out that the clip is misleading. As a result, although it is less likely to be seen by accident, the doctored video will continue to rack up views. Facebook only took the action following inquiries from the Washington Post, which first reported the story.
    posted by notyou at 6:46 AM on May 24, 2019 [12 favorites]


    Sure. In an actual debate, he's no match. Remember, though, for Trump, a debate is really a game of "who can throw the most revolting insults?" As much as I hate to say it, Trump wins that particular "debate" in a walk.
    There must be some sane way of dealing with this, and there should be someone doing the research for it, regardless of who wins the nomination. I heard a clip from a debate with a local Trump copycat, who shouted something insanely insulting (racist and politically obscene as well as untrue) at his opponent. The moderater asked the opponent to answer, and he said, to the moderator: you invited us to the kindergarten, now you be the teacher. The audience howled with laughter. I didn't get who the guy was, but it was genius.
    To me it's interesting right now that the people who are best at this regarding Trump are the women, Pelosi, Warren and Harris. But as I wrote above, any candidate should have intensive training, maybe with stand-up comedians, before the presidential debates.
    posted by mumimor at 6:47 AM on May 24, 2019 [12 favorites]


    Not to abuse the edit window: I think the important thing is to make people laugh. Neither Trump nor his base can handle being laughed at.
    posted by mumimor at 6:48 AM on May 24, 2019 [21 favorites]




    maybe when you’re trying to i impugn someone’s mental fitness you shouldn’t tweet like you’re having a stroke, rudes
    posted by murphy slaw at 7:11 AM on May 24, 2019 [33 favorites]


    I could see it as Giuliani making fun of the video, or possibly his posting of the video. Maybe? I don't know what he was going for here (which makes it a poor dig no matter what), but I'm leaning on the side of "Trying to make a point incoherently" rather than "Suffering from intoxication or other debilitating condition."

    But, as we say, this timeline puts everything in doubt.
    posted by Lord Chancellor at 7:15 AM on May 24, 2019


    As much as I hate to say it, Trump wins that particular "debate" in a walk.

    It was certainly a shattering realization for those of us with any shred of expectation that Republicans would argue in good faith. Now that we're a couple years past that, I like to think Warren would rhetorically shiv him with a fierceness that HRC was probably coached to avoid.

    How many of us wanted her to reply with something akin to "Shut the f up Donald"? I think Warren might actually do something like that. That would be awesome.

    We wanted the debates to at least show Turmp at his worst (and they did) but to little or no effect on his base or the corporate news and that's the lesson learned: The Corporate News will run with whatever crazy-ass bullshit you can get away with and if it happens to be true and punctures those in power - well, they might still run with it. It's a given that they'll bothesides everything to the extreme so Project Leftward Overton is a Go, and Warren has the ability to do it. In contrast, as we've noted a few times, Biden does not.
    posted by petebest at 7:24 AM on May 24, 2019 [17 favorites]


    If there's a female candidate, expect Trump to engineer the debates so he can loom over them like a stalker again. In his mind it's enough to plant a seed of BIG TALL SILENT MAN vs SHORT MOUTHY OLD WOMAN. He's assuming we're apes and after 2016 I'm afraid he was right about 30% of people.
    posted by benzenedream at 7:39 AM on May 24, 2019 [11 favorites]


    “He just took a pass, and it just makes me wonder why he did,” Pelosi said. “In any event, I pray for the president of the United States, and I pray for the United States of America.”

    Don Jr.: “I don’t think the party of infanticide is exactly praying for anyone. That’s not what they do. We get that. It’s just a constant attack on American values, on Democracy.”

    Maybe if we're just a little more civil to them they'll reach across the aisle.
    posted by Rust Moranis at 7:44 AM on May 24, 2019 [32 favorites]


    If there's a female candidate, expect Trump to engineer the debates so he can loom over them like a stalker again.
    Correct, and thus in training for said debates, Alec Baldwin or whomever they get, should do the same thing in debate practice, and they should research and practice over and over and over and over the best Edith Bunker/Dr. Ruth Westheimer/RBG/bonobo matriarch/insert small-and-old-but-nevertheless-beloved-female-figure verbal and body-language responses to this mindbendingly enraging idiotic shit Trump trots out.

    BIG TALL SILENT MAN
    I feel like one of these four doesn't belong in the set.
    posted by Don Pepino at 7:52 AM on May 24, 2019 [8 favorites]


    If there's a female candidate, expect Trump to engineer the debates so he can loom over them like a stalker again

    I've wondered more than once what would have happened if during that debate, Clinton had taken a couple of quick steps backward and "inadvertently" stomped on Individual 1's foot, or elbowed him in his big fat gut.

    I-1's stalker move struck me at the time as being so irregular, creepy and over the top so as to demand some sort of in-kind response. I know it's something that would never, ever actually happen, but I think defending her physical space against encroachment by an admitted sexual assaulter could have been spun as a positive.
    posted by Nat "King" Cole Porter Wagoner at 7:57 AM on May 24, 2019 [13 favorites]


    House Representative Makes the Case for Impeachment

    Mueller’s report describes a consistent effort by the president to use his office to obstruct or otherwise corruptly impede the Russian election interference investigation because it put his interests at risk.

    The president has an obligation not to violate the public trust, including using official powers for corrupt purposes. For instance, presidents have the authority to nominate judges, but a president couldn’t select someone to nominate because they’d promised the president money.
    This principle extends to all the president’s powers, including the authority over federal investigations, federal officials, and pardons.

    President Trump had an incentive to undermine the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, which included investigating contacts between Russia and the Trump campaign.
    The investigation threatened to uncover information, including criminal activity, that could put Trump’s interests at risk. Ultimately, the investigation did uncover very unflattering information about the president, his family, his associates, his campaign, and his business.

    It also revealed criminal activities, some of which were committed by people in Trump’s orbit and, in the case of Michael Cohen’s campaign finance violation, on Trump’s behalf.

    The investigation began before the president was elected and inaugurated. After Trump assumed the powers of the presidency, Mueller’s report shows that he used those powers to try to obstruct and impede the investigation.


    The Case for Impeachment was made by Republican Representative Justin Amash.

    So.
    posted by petebest at 8:28 AM on May 24, 2019 [8 favorites]


    28 percent of Democrats say either they’ve never heard of her or don’t know enough about her to form an opinion

    This is utterly amazing to me and gives me real hope for Warren’s chances as the nomination process progresses. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised by anything these days, but it blows my mind that 28% of Democrats don’t know about Elizabeth Warren or know too little about her to form an opinion, especially when that figure among registered Republicans is presumably much lower. Look, I know anyone reading a catchall US politics thread on Metafilter is going to be considerably more engaged than most US registered voters, and I’m revealing my own biases and privilege, but the lack of name recognition of arguably the most famous sitting US Democratic Senator within her own party shocks me.

    On a more positive note, she’s tough, she’s smart, she’s fearless, and I have great confidence that she can favorably impress the majority of these folks. I fervently hope she gets the chance to do so, and soon, and that this group of Democrats have the chance to listen and learn and take advantage of that opportunity.
    posted by cheapskatebay at 8:30 AM on May 24, 2019 [13 favorites]


    The only question stem needed for a Warren/Trump debate is "What is your plan for _____"
    posted by archimago at 8:43 AM on May 24, 2019 [4 favorites]


    “Very calm. No temper tantrum,” Ms. Conway said.
    “Very calm and very direct,” Ms. Schlapp added.
    “Very calm,” Ms. Sanders said when prompted.
    Well, that sounds completely spontaneous and unscripted. “Donald Trump is the calmest, bravest, warmest, most stable genius I've ever known in my life. ”
    posted by kirkaracha at 8:45 AM on May 24, 2019 [32 favorites]


    This is utterly amazing to me and gives me real hope for Warren’s chances as the nomination process progresses. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised by anything these days, but it blows my mind that 28% of Democrats don’t know about Elizabeth Warren or know too little about her to form an opinion, especially when that figure among registered Republicans is presumably much lower. Look, I know anyone reading a catchall US politics thread on Metafilter is going to be considerably more engaged than most US registered voters, and I’m revealing my own biases and privilege, but the lack of name recognition of arguably the most famous sitting US Democratic Senator within her own party shocks me.

    I don't think it's possible to overstate how much a space like this or Politics Twitter is not representative of America as a whole. Most people just aren't aware of this stuff.

    That's not to say that "Metafilter/Twitter isn't Real America" - we're real people, too. But it's pretty easy to fall into the Pauline Kael Fallacy.
    posted by Chrysostom at 8:52 AM on May 24, 2019 [19 favorites]


    Since the CIA's assets in Russia really have little to do with Trump's defense against Mueller/conspiracy, is there any other way to look at it than Trump/Barr burning our spies there to help Putin?
    posted by chris24 at 8:52 AM on May 24, 2019 [22 favorites]


    In the conversation on impeachment, one argument that I see often is that it would grant new strength to House investigations. From Lawfare a couple days ago: What Powers Does a Formal Impeachment Inquiry Give the House?

    My takeaway is that there may be a sense in which it's true there would be more powers, but not as a result of anything as ironclad as a law, just self-determined House committee procedures that have changed every time impeachment was attempted, have changed in the years since the last one, and would undoubtedly change again anyway. (For example, would this House committee choose, as had happened for both Dick and Bill, to grant Donald procedural rights, including the right of his counsel to cross-examine witnesses? Assuming that's actually optional, I would really hope not!)

    There's also the possibility that formal impeachment would take wind from the sails of the White House's assertions that this or that subpoena has "no legitimate legislative purpose", but I'm especially doubtful. Nothing stops them from asserting the same thing again, either by declaring that (e.g) taxes are irrelevant to the charges on the table, or by simply saying it's not a legitimate impeachment because the president refuses to recognize the accusations as anything but false. Barr has already blatently used that argument -- it's not the same when it's a false accusation -- as a defense to obstruction! Plus, I see no evidence that courts are actually being swayed by the "no legitimate purpose" line thus far. What I see is a lot of foot-dragging that happens just because it can, and I fail to see how the label "impeachment" halts any of the foot-dragging.

    Basically, I'm in agreement with this Twitter thread from an account called the Palmer Report, which says "Opening an impeachment does not cause the evidence and witnesses you seek to instantly fall in your lap. Trump would still fight all of that in court. Some have argued that an inquiry would give Dems a stronger legal position. But the law is already 100% on their side." [Emphasis mine.]
    posted by InTheYear2017 at 8:57 AM on May 24, 2019 [5 favorites]


    It's either a pretext for burning intelligence assets that Trump's co-conspirators don't want us to have, or exactly what it looks like -- President Brain Worms demanding that DOJ produce “evidence” that the Russia investigation was a hatchet job based on lies and/or political animus, and them selectively releasing documents or sentences out of context in order to please him.
    posted by Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish at 8:58 AM on May 24, 2019 [4 favorites]


    "I'm not a crook." Richard Nixon, crook, November 1973

    "I don't do cover-ups." Donald Trump, cover-upper, May 2019
    posted by kirkaracha at 9:06 AM on May 24, 2019 [20 favorites]


    That's not to say that "Metafilter/Twitter isn't Real America" - we're real people, too. But it's pretty easy to fall into the Pauline Kael Fallacy.

    Obviously I know what that is, but just in case anyone else wasn't aware:

    “I can’t believe Nixon won. I don’t know anyone who voted for him.”

    Of possible interest, that article also notes the actual quote was, "I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don’t know. They’re outside my ken. But sometimes when I’m in a theater I can feel them."

    It's a useful quote and concept but it seems to assume a non-gerrymandered-to-hell, non-polling-stations-closed, non-registrations-tossed, non-absentee-ballots-tossed, fair election. I do not assume that.
    posted by petebest at 9:17 AM on May 24, 2019 [8 favorites]


    Perebeast, I completely agree, and as a non-American observer of your election processes, I can’t help thinking that the Democratic party are behaving as if they’re in the previous universe, filled with checks and balances, and that simply is not the case
    posted by Wilder at 9:28 AM on May 24, 2019 [11 favorites]


    this insight in a recent emptywheel piece strikes me as some quality potential own-petardism:
    But it’s also worth looking at the abundant evidence that Trump wasn’t joking about his request that Russians find Hillary’s emails, particularly now that, with the superseding Julian Assange indictment, Trump’s DOJ considers the theft of documents in response to someone wishing they’ll be stolen tantamount to complicity in that theft.
    think the second part would more potently read "...DOJ considers solicitation of the theft of documents that are subsequently stolen tantamount to complicity in that theft," tho.
    posted by 20 year lurk at 9:30 AM on May 24, 2019 [10 favorites]


    but it blows my mind that 28% of Democrats don’t know about Elizabeth Warren or know too little about her to form an opinion

    I don't think it's possible to overstate how much a space like this or Politics Twitter is not representative of America as a whole. Most people just aren't aware of this stuff.

    I honestly think people do care and are interested in how they're being represented but mostly they're fucking tired. They're tired from being over-worked, underpaid, and seeing their interests not represented by politicians who are more concerned with their stock options and securing their seat in whatever particular office they're holding on to.

    We only have so much bandwidth to give at the end of a work day and while I realize it's super important to pay attention to the decisions that are being made that impact every day citizens, I understand the need to just zone out in a video game or watch some mind-numbing television because living in 2019 is just fucking exhausting.
    posted by Fizz at 9:46 AM on May 24, 2019 [20 favorites]


    Remember how Trump first involved himself in Eddie Gallagher's case after watching an interview with Rep. Rep. Ralph Norman (R-SC) on Fox & Friends (MoJo)?

    CNN: Lawyer for Navy SEAL accused of war crimes also works for Trump Organization
    An attorney for Navy SEAL chief Edward "Eddie" Gallagher also represents the Trump Organization, CNN has learned[.…] Trump Organization lawyer Marc Mukasey started working on the case in recent months, according to sources familiar with the situation.

    Former NYPD Commissioner Bernard Kerik, a former business partner of Trump ally and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, also is helping with Gallagher's case. Kerik, who once served three years in federal prison for charges including tax fraud and lying to officials, was nominated as homeland security secretary by President George W. Bush but withdrew from consideration due to potential tax violations. He has regularly appeared on Fox News as a surrogate for the President.[…]

    Kerik has been working with Gallagher's lawyers for "two to three months" as a strategist and investigator, one of the sources familiar with the situation said.
    And another of Gallagher’s defense team used to represent Fox & Friends host Pete Hegseth, who, we now know, lobbied on behalf of Gallagher to Trump in front of the cameras and behind the scenes.

    It’s a small Trumpworld after all…
    posted by Doktor Zed at 9:56 AM on May 24, 2019 [13 favorites]


    CBS’s Mark Knoller updates on Trump’s potential pardons: “Pres Trump says he hasn't made any decisions on granting pardons to military personnel charged with crimes. Says he may wait until after the soldiers are tried before deciding on executive clemency.”
    posted by Doktor Zed at 10:05 AM on May 24, 2019


    think the second part would more potently read "...DOJ considers solicitation of the theft of documents that are subsequently stolen tantamount to complicity in that theft," tho.

    "Russia, if you're listening..."
    posted by dirigibleman at 10:07 AM on May 24, 2019 [3 favorites]


    "Russia, if you're listening..."

    Barr’s Newfound Power Could Prompt Clash Between Justice Dept. and C.I.A. (NYT)
    The concern about the source, who is believed to be still alive, is one of several issues raised by Mr. Trump’s decision to use the intelligence to pursue his political enemies. It has also prompted fears from former national security officials and Democratic lawmakers that other sources or methods of intelligence gathering — among the government’s most closely held secrets — could be made public, not because of leaks to the news media that the administration denounces, but because the president has determined it suits his political purposes.
    posted by Little Dawn at 10:10 AM on May 24, 2019 [9 favorites]


    Re: Mueller not wanting to testify publicly, I believe his honest intention of not serving any political agenda (probably because he knows how damning his televised testimony would be if he told the truth). He's the most by-the-book person at all costs; he will never break the rules and probably doesn't even bend them. Above all, whatever you think about him he wants to serve his country first, and he likely despises Trump et al for their contempt of law.

    But here's the problem, Mr. Mueller: we are continually in unprecedentedly DANGEROUS waters, which every day rise closer to the end of law as we know it. (This not hyperbole). I get it, you so badly don't want to be seen as partisan. You wanted to do just do your job, color within the lines (which revealed outrageously criminal and amoral activity) and be done with it. However, you've seen how your report has been handled the new AG. You have seen and continue to see justice obstructed in real time. This, right here, is the last tweet by you-know-fucking-who:

    "I don’t know why the Radical Left Democrats want Bob Mueller to testify when he just issued a 40 Million Dollar Report that states, loud & clear & for all to hear, No Collusion and No Obstruction (how do you Obstruct a NO crime?)"

    Sir, your report and its conclusions have just been boldly lied about by the President, on one of the loudest megaphones on this planet. You don't want to be a part of this fight, you are a man of "character" who just wants to be above the fray. But you don't have a choice anymore. If you respect this country, if you really want to serve it, you must do what's necessary. Put yourself on the line. You were literally just called out, "Bob"- DON'T LET THIS MAN INTIMIDATE YOU.

    You can influence the public narrative in a manner no one else can. You didn't want this, but you already ARE a political figure. Your reputation has taken on a fictitious larger-than-life presence over the last 2 years; if anything not publicly testifying is denying you the chance to defend yourself and the work done by your team.

    If you testify behind closed doors, assure yourself of this: your testimony and transcript releases will be squashed to the fullest extent possible by the Executive branch. Maybe you've got something to say that will be pretty revealing; it will be redacted, suppressed, for as long as possible. So that when/if it ever does get out, it will be muted, just as the rest of your report has been so far.

    (I promise when I started writing this, it wasn't a personal appeal to Robert Muller, and I apologize for the length). There just comes a time when principle, morality, and public/private life intersect in ways that doesn't make everything possible at once. You probably didn't see your service to your country culminating with explosive public testimony, but here we are. If you believe in this country, do everything you can to defend it. (And clearly, you're not even being asked to do anything remotely illegal or unethical, most would argue the opposite.) You are being asked to put a lot on your line, and yes, you risk being seen as "political" (blah). But from where I've sitting, if you believe if everything you've done, you don't have a choice.

    We unfortunately live in a time where truth has been made objective and partisan. You may think you remain principled by avoiding an international television spectacle, but your voice will be silenced if you allow others to mute it. The public wants to hear from you directly, please don't deprive us of this badly needed opportunity.
    posted by andruwjones26 at 10:12 AM on May 24, 2019 [34 favorites]


    he will never break the rules and probably doesn't even bend them

    If House Judiciary subpoenas him and asks him to testify publicly, how would he be bending any rules if he does so?
    posted by diogenes at 10:40 AM on May 24, 2019 [4 favorites]




    Mueller envisions himself correctly as a man of great rectitude and apolitical and he doesn't want to participate in anything that he might regard as a political spectacle."

    What am I to learn from this and from the Comey debacle? The FBI thinks it is more important they appear neutral than to give the public the truth. This is the opposite of courage or patriotism. When your decisions are driven by political considerations, you are the one being political.
    posted by xammerboy at 10:53 AM on May 24, 2019 [19 favorites]


    I think defending her physical space against encroachment by an admitted sexual assaulter could have been spun as a positive.

    If Orangina tries that again with a woman candidate, she should quickly glance back at him and remark as an aside, "Well, looks like I've got a creepy stalker," and then continue with her point.
    posted by Mental Wimp at 10:56 AM on May 24, 2019 [6 favorites]


    The FBI thinks it is more important they appear neutral than to give the public the truth.

    I'm pretty sure Mueller considers his report to be delivering the truth, and that it stands on its own. He probably also believes in the system and that eventually the right thing will happen. You can't be in justice and be in a hurry.
    posted by Bovine Love at 10:57 AM on May 24, 2019 [3 favorites]


    Well, whaddya know. When Dems start saying impeachment is needed, voters listen.

    Eli Yokley (Morning Consult):
    All this uptalk in impeachment talk from Democrats on Capitol Hill this week is matched by Democratic voters: -- 39% said it should be a "top priority" at the beginning of this Congress, 53% said so this week.
    posted by chris24 at 11:10 AM on May 24, 2019 [31 favorites]


    Bovine Love: He probably also believes in the system and that eventually the right thing will happen.

    I think he definitely believes that he believes it. I also think he's simply conflict-averse like so many of us are, and in this environment that leads to bending over backwards again and again for the demands of conservatives, who have mastered the arts of working the ref and complaining to the manager.

    And thanks to the more virulent forms of that, the reality of the actual state of justice administration is too painful to fathom. I doubt Mueller has some kind of concrete vision whereby the Senate actually weighs the facts and determines Trump's guilt. He just tells himself that he thinks he does, that he believes the Watergate principles remain in effect today. Or, even if they don't, how is that his responsibility to amend? After all, reason the layers of his mind between conscious and subconscious, he's got to sleep somehow.
    posted by InTheYear2017 at 11:19 AM on May 24, 2019 [2 favorites]


    Barr’s Newfound Power Could Prompt Clash Between Justice Dept. and C.I.A. (NYT)

    Any and all state secrets: fine to reveal if it helps get Trump off the hook. Transparency!

    Tax returns and financial records: a bridge too far. Witch hunt!
    posted by Mental Wimp at 11:24 AM on May 24, 2019 [23 favorites]


    I keep hearing "the culture within the FBI means that they think this that or the other," "the Justice Department works this or that way" from luminaries like Comey and the million various experts on various enclaves within government, and it's always said in this complacent way, like people's dedication to whatever branch of government they're in supersedes other concerns and that's natural and noble and all to the good. They're always all: "there's no finer group of men and women than the men and women of the [FBI Justice Department Marine Corps Senate], and therefore I make the supreme sacrifice for my enduring love of this fantastic institution yadda yadda yadda."

    But no! Lookit, you swore to protect the CONSTITUTION of the UNITED STATES. You make sacrifices and do work for the country and the constitution, not the culture of your smaller institution within the country. It's probably easier to feel emotionally connected to what you've got a personal stake in. It's easier to love and want to protect Bob, Linda, and Travis back at the home office because you know what fantastic people they are, but protecting your sector is not your greater mission, your mission is the nation, not your little enclave within it.
    posted by Don Pepino at 11:28 AM on May 24, 2019 [25 favorites]


    Reminder: Deep State Spygate was too much bullshit for Trey BENGHAZI!!! Gowdy.

    Joshua Holland:
    5/30/18:

    "Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., who was briefed last week by intelligence officials, says he is 'even more convinced that the FBI did exactly what my fellow citizens would want them to do.'”

    TREY GOWDY!
    posted by chris24 at 11:38 AM on May 24, 2019 [25 favorites]


    You make sacrifices and do work for the country and the constitution, not the culture of your smaller institution within the country.

    You want to avoid making the FBI look political? I get that, I really do, because that was the whole point of having the FBI do a politically neutral investigation. The whole rationale was to come to a politically unbiased conclusion.

    You don't want to testify? Funny that, because you guaranteed through your inability to come to conclusion that that had to happen. We don't want to do this either, so why do we need you to publicly testify? So that that the public understands our process is not politically biased.

    The whole point of your testifying Bob, is to make this process, less, not more political, less, not more, divisive and you have made that harder every step of the way. And calling your public testimony on your investigation a political spectacle? That's a political statement that throws congress under the bus for having to drag you in front of the country to force you to do your job.
    posted by xammerboy at 11:43 AM on May 24, 2019 [11 favorites]


    Joshua Holland:
    5/30/18:

    "Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., who was briefed last week by intelligence officials, says he is 'even more convinced that the FBI did exactly what my fellow citizens would want them to do.'”

    TREY GOWDY!


    Yeah Gowdy said that in May of 2018, but what's he saying in 2019? \sorry, Fox video link.
    posted by HyperBlue at 11:50 AM on May 24, 2019


    protecting your sector is not your greater mission, your mission is the nation, not your little enclave within it.

    I think there's the sense that one of the things Putin wants to accomplish is the destruction of confidence in institutions, of confidence in experts, of knowable truth. There's not a particular lie that Putin wants us all to believe. He just wants us to believe that there are many theories, and who can know what's true? That fog is paralyzing. It causes infighting and ultimately makes people give up on trying to solve problems. It's the "merchants of doubt" methodology. It's why Putin's state media outlets offer people 10 different theories about who shot down that Malaysia airlines flight instead of just one lie. It's why Putin had the soldiers he sent into Crimea take all the insignia off their uniforms instead of just having them wear false uniforms and march with a false flag -- having no insignia means there's not just a single lie to debunk about who they are, but a hundred different lies.

    And its true that once facts become politicized they are no longer treated as facts. They become theories up for debate, subject to doubt. That's happened with climate change, it's in the process of happening with vaccines, it's happened with all kinds of economic data. If it happens with evidence of crimes then you get political prosecutions and jailing of dissidents.

    And I think when you hear DOJ people say they are committed to the culture of the DOJ, this is what they actually mean. They don't want to be accused of being political because then half the country won't believe anything they say. (Think -- how much do you trust anything Ken Starr says?) The evidence they cite in court will cease to have meaning. The rule of law can't really function in such an environment.

    So I think it actually is the whole country, and not just their friends in the DOJ, who are protected by the culture of the DOJ. I think Mueller is working really hard to avoid being perceived as the mirror image of Ken Starr. And I think that's good, because once he is perceived that way, his report will have no power. The facts he found will become just conspiracy theories. His investigation will have no meaning. It will all just evaporate into the fog. And then we'll be helpless.
    posted by OnceUponATime at 11:51 AM on May 24, 2019 [15 favorites]


    Mueller envisions himself correctly as a man of great rectitude and apolitical and he doesn't want to participate in anything that he might regard as a political spectacle."

    Mueller is a registered Republican. If he wanted to be apolitical and a man of great rectitude he would not make and maintain the overtly partisan move of registering for a particular party.
    posted by srboisvert at 11:53 AM on May 24, 2019 [11 favorites]


    I still wish he'd testify publicly, though. I wonder if he would do some kind of public statement giving answers to written questions -- to prevent congressional grandstanding.
    posted by OnceUponATime at 11:54 AM on May 24, 2019


    Politico: Lone Republican blocks disaster aid package on House floor
    Rep. Chip Roy became the man who delayed $19.1 billion in disaster aid to communities throughout the country on Friday.

    House leaders had planned to pass a multibillion-dollar disaster assistance measure, H.R. 2157 (116), by unanimous consent, but the Texas Republican objected on the floor.

    Roy took issue with passing the measure without a roll call vote. He also complained that the legislation lacks offsets to prevent it from driving up the deficit and that congressional leaders left off billions of dollars in emergency funding President Donald Trump seeks for handling the inflow of immigrants at the U.S.-Mexico border.
    Pelosi issued a statement: “House Republicans’ last-minute sabotage of an overwhelmingly bipartisan disaster relief bill is an act of staggering political cynicism. Countless American families hit by devastating natural disasters across the country will now be denied the relief they urgently need” (via CNN’s Jim Acosta, w/full statement)
    posted by Doktor Zed at 12:02 PM on May 24, 2019 [31 favorites]


    I think Mueller is working really hard to avoid being perceived as the mirror image of Ken Starr.

    There is no "being perceived." There are specific groups and individuals who perceive things. Among the US public, the right sees him, and will always see him, as a Ken Starr. The left sees him as an upholder of the law, albeit one with regrettably narrow scruples. And the center -- that tiny 10% -- sees him as a mix of these things in their usual perpetually-muddled way. Nothing Mueller does is going to change any of this, except for the one other constituency that everyone actually seems to care most about -- the DC media and a few elite centrist, mainly Democratic leaders. They are the only ones that seem to sway in the winds in response to such minutiae as how closed a Congressional committee's doors are. There is nothing in the law, precedent, morality, or existing norms that would require a closed-door session, and no major effect on public opinion is remotely likely given that the entire grand reveal of the report only swayed public opinion by two points for three weeks. All that's left is (1) the opinion of the punditry, and (2) duty to the law, norms, transparency, and morality. Choosing to serve (1) instead of (2) is craven at best, a pro-Republican maneuver at worst.
    posted by chortly at 12:05 PM on May 24, 2019 [8 favorites]




    Crooked: The Guardrails Have Failed

    posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 12:06 PM on May 24 [+] [!]


    I can only hope that for each misleading revelation of IC evidence Barr puts forth the IC responds with countervailing leaks to provide further context. If they allow Trump and Barr to get away with these Cheney-like shenanigans, it will be the death of them.
    posted by Mental Wimp at 12:10 PM on May 24, 2019 [1 favorite]


    Among the US public, the right sees him, and will always see him, as a Ken Starr.

    But they don't, you know. I consider it a really good thing that the dominant story on the right is "Mueller exonerated Trump" and not the "Witch hunt/18 angry Democrats" thing Trump keeps saying. In that sense Barr is doing us a little bit of a favor (out of his own residual ties to DOJ culture or what? I don't know). Because Barr's "exonerated" lie preserves Mueller's credibility, but Trump's "angry Democrat" lie destroys it.

    It's great when I start debating with comment section conservatives and I'm able to rebut their "Mueller exonerated Trump" talking points with actual quotes from the Mueller report. I think it does make them stop and think. Often they drop out of the comment section at that point.
    posted by OnceUponATime at 12:14 PM on May 24, 2019 [6 favorites]


    Mueller envisions himself correctly as a man of great rectitude and apolitical and he doesn't want to participate in anything that he might regard as a political spectacle."
    What am I to learn from this and from the Comey debacle? The FBI thinks it is more important they appear neutral than to give the public the truth. This is the opposite of courage or patriotism. When your decisions are driven by political considerations, you are the one being political.



    Everyone who thinks of themselves as apolitical or non-partisan is really ill-prepared for this moment. When the bulk of a political party is complicit in attacks on rule of law and even truth itself, defending those things becomes a political act.

    I think this breaks the compass of conscientious, principled people, because if one of your principles *is* that principled == apolitical, then you feel like you're being unprincipled if defending other principles becomes a political question.
    posted by wildblueyonder at 12:21 PM on May 24, 2019 [18 favorites]


    it strikes this reader as decidedly odd that the "Agency Cooperation with Attorney General's Review of Intelligence Activities Relating to the 2016 Presidential Campaigns" directive should be issued by the office of the press secretary. surely the white house has a more appropriate office for giving instructions to the "heads of elements of the intelligence community."
    posted by 20 year lurk at 12:23 PM on May 24, 2019 [11 favorites]


    > Among the US public, the right sees him, and will always see him, as a Ken Starr.

    But they don't, you know. I consider it a really good thing that the dominant story on the right is "Mueller exonerated Trump" and not the "Witch hunt/18 angry Democrats" thing Trump keeps saying.


    Good point. I suppose if Mueller does suddenly come out as a raging anti-Trumper in the mode of Starr, the narrative on the right would flip. But until then, it's true, he perhaps does have an incentive to preserve his reputation among the right as the honorable exonerator of Trump as opposed to his dishonorable persecutor. More broadly, though, it's one more piece of evidence that, like Comey before him, Mueller is mainly being guided by his reputation exclusively among the center-right.
    posted by chortly at 12:29 PM on May 24, 2019 [2 favorites]


    I'm pretty sure Mueller considers his report to be delivering the truth, and that it stands on its own. He probably also believes in the system and that eventually the right thing will happen. You can't be in justice and be in a hurry.

    While I believe he should testify, I expect he's concerned for the FBI as well as, if not more than, his personal reputation. If Mueller upsets Trump, the upper ranks could quickly be filled with Barr-like flunkies, hounding everyone who doesn't obey the groupthink orders from above.
    posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 12:32 PM on May 24, 2019 [2 favorites]


    If Trump's folklore equivalent is the fairy tale of The Emperor's New Clothes, surely Mueller's is the parable of The Blind Men and the Elephant.
    posted by Nerd of the North at 12:40 PM on May 24, 2019 [7 favorites]


    Trump is a weak POTUS, part XXVII
    I continue to believe Donald Trump is as weak president in danger of a failed one-term presidency. I subscribe to the general Neustadt argument on presidential power, and I’ve written about it plenty before: on Trump’s general Neustadtian weakness, his trouble managing the White House, his cheerleader role in congressional agenda-setting and legislation, and a host of tweetstorms about his various poor moves that have sapped his power.

    Now, all presidents are powerful in an absolute sense, but we differentiate them by their ability to influence public policy outcomes. Presidents compete with lots of other actors in the government—elected members of Congress, appointed administration officials, civil servants, White House staffers—for influence over legislation and executive branch administration. Ultimately, a president’s success or failure rests on their ability to persuade others that the costs of opposing him are too high.

    And, in this sense, Trump just looks supremely weak in DC. He can’t get the GOP to do anything legislatively that is on his agenda but not theirs. He constantly complains about his own cabinet officials, who appear to ignore him regularly. When he finally puts the hammer down and fires them, they often don’t go quietly, and his supposed allies blast him. Private sector “allies” loudly walk away from him the minute he crosses them. And he can’t even stop the record-setting departures and the legendary-level leaks at his own White House, where power-hungry staffers engage in endless intrigue, precisely because they know it is so easy to manipulate the president if you can get the face time.
    posted by kirkaracha at 12:49 PM on May 24, 2019 [7 favorites]


    > Trump is a weak POTUS
    Trump's accomplishments as executive have been minimal, it's true, and virtually all destructive (both in the sense of having negative consequences but also in the sense of repealing or removing structures or legislation that were previously in place, rather than implementing new policy-driven initiatives.) But the executive is only one branch of our government and his and his collaborators' effects on the judicial and legislative branches will long outlive his time in office.
    posted by Nerd of the North at 1:16 PM on May 24, 2019 [11 favorites]


    U.S. Supreme Court blocks redrawing of Ohio, Michigan electoral maps

    The Supreme Court on Friday blocked lower court rulings ordering Republican legislators in Michigan and Ohio to redraw U.S. congressional maps ahead of the 2020 elections, dealing a blow to Democrats who had argued that the electoral districts were intended to unlawfully diminish their political clout.

    Preventing democracy is a primary function of the US government, second only to maintaining and profiting from the empire.
    posted by Rust Moranis at 1:17 PM on May 24, 2019 [11 favorites]


    They stayed the maps because they're ruling on gerrymandering cases shortly. The stays themselves were not unexpected.
    posted by Chrysostom at 1:23 PM on May 24, 2019 [25 favorites]


    Is there any reason for Mueller not to simply retire and testify as a civilian? I can’t imagine any legitimate use that the FBI would have for him in light of the baggage that comes with his current predicament.
    posted by a box and a stick and a string and a bear at 1:30 PM on May 24, 2019 [2 favorites]


    Hot damn! DNI Dan Coats has a backbone. [Highlight mine]

    DNI Feels Need To Express Confidence In Barr’s Secret-Keeping Skills
    Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats said that he is “confident” Attorney General Bill Barr will “protect” classified info while the intelligence community cooperates with him, in a Friday statement addressing Trump’s decision to allow Barr to publicize intelligence relating to the start of the Russia probe.
    Coats also said that the intelligence community will “continue” to share “apolitical intelligence” with the rest of the government.
    The statement comes one day after the President issued an order to the CIA and the rest of the country’s intelligence agencies to cooperate with Justice Department investigations examining the origins of the Trump-Russia investigation.
    posted by scalefree at 1:42 PM on May 24, 2019 [4 favorites]


    First poll of the NC-09 special out from JMC [538 pollster rating: C+ / R +1.0 lean]:
    Bishop [R] 46
    McCready [D] 42
    [MoE ±5.2%]

    Cook race rating: Toss-up.
    posted by Chrysostom at 2:09 PM on May 24, 2019 [2 favorites]




    From Mother Jones: The most famous ad of the 2012 presidential race featured an Indiana paper mill worker who described building a wooden stage upon which, a few days later, executives from Mitt Romney’s firm would announce they were shutting down the plant. The ad was created by a Priorities USA Action, a super-PAC backing Barack Obama whose ads succeeded not only by portraying Romney as a heartless capitalist, but also by targeting voters in key swing states before Romney had his own operation up and running. Beginning six months before the election, these ads gave many voters their first sense of who Romney was, an image he was unable to shake.

    Eight years later, Democrats’ goal is once again to define their opponent early and set the terms of the election against President Donald Trump. Except this time, the main battleground is not TV but digital advertising. And some Democratic digital consultants fear that Trump is already beating them to it.

    “My worry is that my colleagues in the Democratic Party and funders are going to invest heavily in things that will be operational once we have a nominee, and the campaign is being defined right now, today,” says Ben Coffey Clark, a founding partner at the Democratic digital advertising firm Bully Pulpit Interactive. ...

    Democrats have watched with alarm as the Trump campaign puts millions of dollars into digital advertising campaigns. ... As of last month, nearly a third of the campaign’s Facebook spending was going to five 2020 battleground states: Florida, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Texas, and Ohio.

    While the candidates battle it out in the primary, “the Democratic Party as a whole needs to tell a bigger picture about why the Democratic Party will make regular people’s lives better, and how Trump has failed them, and what the choice coming up means in their lives,” says Clark, adding, “A huge chunk of that is going to have to be on Facebook.”

    posted by Bella Donna at 2:14 PM on May 24, 2019 [9 favorites]


    WaPo, Trump to place Ken Cuccinelli at the head of the country’s legal immigration system
    President Trump plans to install Ken Cuccinelli as the new director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, placing the conservative activist and former Virginia attorney general at the head of the agency the runs the country’s legal immigration system, administration officials said Friday.

    L. Francis Cissna, the agency’s current director, has told staff he will leave his post at the end of the month.

    The move extends the purge of senior leadership at the Department of Homeland Security, replacing Cissna, a Senate-confirmed agency head with deep expertise on immigration law, with Cuccinelli, a conservative firebrand disliked by senior GOP figures, including Senate leader Mitch McConnell.

    Trump senior adviser Stephen Miller has been agitating for Cissna’s removal for months, and he has repeatedly railed about Cissna to the president, saying he is not in favor of the Trump administration’s agenda and has slow-walked some of its biggest initiatives — while not writing enough regulations.
    posted by zachlipton at 2:32 PM on May 24, 2019 [8 favorites]


    President Trump plans to install Ken Cuccinelli as the new director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services,

    It is worth noting that Ken Cuccinelli was one of the major “Cruz Crew” heads at the 2016 conventions, and also that Cruz ultimately endorsed Trump. This seems like a payoff - either for help in 2016, or future anticipated aid in 2020.
    posted by corb at 2:39 PM on May 24, 2019 [4 favorites]


    I'm with Nate Silver on the dumbality of the random-draw for the Democratic debates. It seems to me that the DNC got so burned by allegations of rigging the last primary for Clinton that they significantly overreacted. In fact I'm now seeing some people say that the random draw is an attempt to rig the primary for Biden by keeping him from having to debate Bernie and Warren.

    I'm not exactly sure how that works unless the second part is that it won't be a random draw but a fix. It's gonna be super lit if Sanders and Warren are on one night and Biden is on the other night for both debates. Super lit.

    Though honestly the real problem is that it's impossible to have a meaningful debate involving 20+ people.
    posted by Justinian at 2:40 PM on May 24, 2019 [6 favorites]


    Politico, Trump administration rolls back health care protections for LGBTQ patients
    The Trump administration today proposed to scrap an Obama-era policy that prohibited health care providers from discriminating against transgender patients, in its latest rollback of federal protections for transgender people.

    The health department's proposed rule, a rewrite of an Obamacare regulation that bars health care discrimination based on sex, would also strike down protections for LGBTQ patients.
    ...
    However, the Trump proposal eliminates similar nondiscrimination protections for LGBTQ patients that weren't blocked by the court. The proposal also reaffirms the rights of health care workers to deny care based on a religious or moral objection, strengthening rules issued earlier this month by Trump's health department.

    "They're adding explicit religious exemptions and completely eliminating prior protections for LGBTQ people," said Katie Keith, a Georgetown University law professor.
    posted by zachlipton at 2:43 PM on May 24, 2019 [6 favorites]


    That WaPo story on Cuccinelli is unclear to me -- Cissna is described as "a Senate-confirmed agency head," so will Cuccinelli need to be confirmed by the Senate? Because the article also notes that Cuccinelli is disliked by Senate GOP leaders (including the Majority Leader).
    posted by notyou at 2:44 PM on May 24, 2019 [1 favorite]


    Echelon Insights has a Dem primary poll out. Two interesting aspects. First, they broke out the results for people with a verified primary voting history (which of course means they are much more likely to vote in this one) and, second, they didn't just poll the field but also head-to-heads among the top Dems. Biden leads the field among people with a verified primary voting history 41-14 over Sanders with nobody else in double digits. In the head to heads Biden dominates with leads of 36, 43, 48, and 47 against Sanders, Harris, Buttigieg, and Warren respectively.

    Echelon is a real polling firm but it was founded by two Republican pols. So take that as you will.
    posted by Justinian at 2:46 PM on May 24, 2019 [2 favorites]


    By the way, we're roughly one month away from the debates. So the season is upon us and may god have mercy on our souls.
    posted by Justinian at 2:52 PM on May 24, 2019 [39 favorites]


    Is that what we're calling backbone, these days?

    It's a directive from the President so he can't just flat out deny it. But he's using wording that says he'll decide what's fair & what's foul, not just hand everything over willy nilly & let Barr burn CIA operatives in Russia.
    posted by scalefree at 3:17 PM on May 24, 2019 [5 favorites]


    From the Crooked "Guardrails" article:

    It’s been two months since Mueller completed his report, and in working desperately to keep Congress off the path to impeachment, Nadler has managed to secure testimony from zero witnesses about it. (By contrast, former FBI Director James Comey appeared on Capitol Hill to testify two days after he concluded the Clinton-email investigation.)

    We're doing it wrong.
    posted by petebest at 3:19 PM on May 24, 2019 [22 favorites]


    > Cissna is described as "a Senate-confirmed agency head," so will Cuccinelli need to be confirmed by the Senate? Because the article also notes that Cuccinelli is disliked by Senate GOP leaders (including the Majority Leader).

    I think the plan is for him to be yet another "Acting" agency head. The wannabe-dictator likes it better when his underlings are directly beholden to him, rather than independent, Senate-confirmed, long-term appointees.

    "Apprentice-White House edition" must continue! Have you seen the ratings?
    posted by RedOrGreen at 3:30 PM on May 24, 2019 [1 favorite]


    Bernie Sanders might still be cheap, but he’s sure not poor

    Oh hey, it's actual antisemitic tropes. Good job, Politico!
    posted by Rust Moranis at 3:43 PM on May 24, 2019 [12 favorites]


    I, Nancy Pelosi, wish someone would do something about Trump (Alexandra Petri, WaPo)
    Something in our president is deeply broken. It pains me to look on, helpless, as he flails and burbles in the Oval Office. To watch him chewing listlessly on the Fabergé egg of this republic, throwing cherished norms to the ground just to hear the noise they make when they shatter — oh, it is agony to behold, and I, Nancy Pelosi, wish someone could exercise some oversight over him.

    I am praying that maybe somebody, perhaps constitutionally empowered to wield equal power as a branch of government, might take some action, or even start the process of inquiring into taking some kind of action, to restrain his excesses. If only our system were set up in that way, and there were such a body, and the leaders of that body were not insensible to the wishes of me. Alas! […]

    If someone could check him and force him to comply with congressional inquiries, that would be incredible. If only that power existed! Sure, it might be “divisive.” If you remove a drunk man from behind the wheel of a school bus, it is divisive — the schoolchildren are happy, but on the other hand, the man will be upset. But I am not sure why we are worried about upsetting him. Why would “divisive” be the standard we are holding ourselves to? Any act of political courage that has ever happened, ever, has been divisive, including but not limited to the Declaration of Independence and the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments. And, of course, whatever they did to Andrew Johnson. There’s a word. It’s on the tip of my tongue.

    If only there were someone who could put a check on this man, constitutionally.
    posted by Johnny Wallflower at 4:42 PM on May 24, 2019 [32 favorites]


    Half the Democratic field is polling not under 1% but under 0.05%. Including:

    Inslee
    Gabbard
    Bullock
    Hickenlooper
    Moulton
    Ryan
    Swalwell
    Delaney
    and Marianne Williamson who even I just had to look up.

    None of these people belong on a debate stage, and it’s a complete joke that they’re treated in any way seriously. We’ve gone from an utterly broken primary process...to somehow a more broken primary process. And all the while Trump is pouring millions into Facebook ads.
    posted by T.D. Strange at 5:12 PM on May 24, 2019 [32 favorites]


    I would disagree with regard to Inslee and Gillibrand, who are not joke candidates and who have good platforms; they've unfortunately failed to catch fire for what I think are rather silly reasons - Inslee because he was a relative unknown governor who isn't really a ball of fire (but I do love his climate policies), and Gillibrand because she's a meanie killjoy feminist unjustly blamed for a Popular Guy's downfall.

    Bullock on down to Delaney are just one parade of mediocre white guy after another who would do better strengthening the Democratic party in their own states (like Andrew Gillum is doing in Florida) or running for Senate. Williamson - I guess she figures that President is an entry-level job, after all?
    posted by Rosie M. Banks at 5:19 PM on May 24, 2019 [7 favorites]


    Politico, Natasha Bertrand, Trump puts DOJ on crash course with intelligence agencies
    President Donald Trump’s declassification order Thursday night has set up a showdown between his own Justice Department and the intelligence community that could trigger resignations and threaten the CIA’s ability to conduct its core business — managing secret intelligence and sources.

    Trump’s order directed intelligence agencies to fully comply with Attorney General William Barr’s look at “surveillance activities” during the 2016 election — a probe that Trump’s allies see as a necessary check on government overreach but that critics lambaste as an attempt to create the impression of scandal. Numerous former intelligence officials called the move “unprecedented,” saying it grants the attorney general sweeping powers over the nation’s secrets, subverts the intelligence community and raises troubling legal questions.
    ...
    “I can’t remember a time when a non-IC officer was given declassification authority over intelligence information,” said Michael Morell, the former acting director of the CIA under Obama.

    The result, Morell added, is a loss of faith in the U.S. intelligence system. “It is yet another step that will raise questions among our allies and partners about whether to share sensitive intelligence with us,” he said.
    posted by zachlipton at 5:33 PM on May 24, 2019 [12 favorites]


    The media isn’t decide anything, that’s actual voters respond to a Tim Ryan candidacy with “lol who”. Make the cutoff polling at 3% and “has hired literally one person on the ground in Iowa”. All of the people above are not running real campaigns. They’re taking advantage of idiotic debate entry rules. There’s only about 6-8 actual contenders with functioning field operations, and the sooner the stunt candidates and people who wrongly interpreted Trump winning with 100% name ID and a slaverish base of white resentment chomping for his entry as “I can win too with 0%, look at Trump!” get out the better for everyone.
    posted by T.D. Strange at 6:04 PM on May 24, 2019 [8 favorites]


    a few days ago Doctor Zed posted links to the then newly-released transcripts of michael cohen's testimony before the house permanent select committee on intelligence, feb. 28 and march 6, 2019, with some mefites providing excerpts from feb. 28. i have completed that and begun the second volume, where a couple things jumped out.

    you'll all recall discussion over the past couple years of a "joint defense agreement" among campaign-affiliated subjects of special counsel investigation. on p.10, mr. cohen testifies
    A: I...spent a tremendous amount of time [ed. note: b/w 2/28 and 3/6] looking for a copy of the joint defense agreement, and the harder I looked the less I was able to locate anything showing that that document was actually written. Then I learned that it was not written, it was a verbal joint defense agreement.

    ...

    Q: Did you learn anything more about the nature and extent of this verbal joint defense agreement?

    A: Everyone was going to work together for the common purpose of staying on message.

    Q: Was there an agreement as to who would pay for legal bills in connection with that joint defense agreement?

    ...

    A: The Trump Organization or Mr. Trump.
    (cohen has testified repeatedly that his former attorneys from mcdermott will & emery withdrew as his counsel when those parties declined to pay legal fees.)
    Q: Now, just remind us who again were the members of that joint defense agreement?

    A: Steve Ryan, representing myself. You had Jay Sekulow, representing the President. You had Abbe Lowell, representing Jared and Ivanka. You had Alan Garten, who was representing The Trump Organization, as well as Alan Futerfas. There might be others, but that's the ones that I recall.
    it is worth noting that manafort and corsi are described in press as parties to a JDA, and there is speculation that stone is included, despite his evident denials.

    a verbal joint defense agreement (purporting to pledge payment of legal fees by a party known to disavow his written commitments) for proceedings lasting longer than a year, does not seem credible, or advisable.

    anyway, this is all foundation for discussion of parties to that agreement editing cohen's draft statement to congress. in that discussion, it arises (p.22) that cohen is informed by his mwe counsel that "felix" would like some changes.
    Q: Who is Felix referenced in this email?

    A: Felix Sater. [ed note: you'll recall sater as one of the parties with whom cohen was in discussion about the moscow development project]

    ...

    Q: Were you aware at the time that Felix Sater was going to receive a copy...?

    A: [maybe it was sater's attorney that received/commented]

    Q: Was it your understanding that Felix Sater was included in the joint defense agreement?

    A: Felix Sater was not included in the joint defense agreement. ...To the best of my knowledge.

    Q: But here we have Felix Sater ... weighing in on the written statement that you are submitting to the committee about the Trump Tower Moscow. Is that right?

    A: That is correct.
    the surrounding transcript persuasively evinces jda parties' efforts to edit that statement, including falsehoods, i should think vitiating (fraud/crime) any privilege around at least those jda discussions of cohen's proposed testimony.

    all the joint defense agreements i have ever seen have been written (of course i wouldn't see the verbal ones, but this is the first i've heard of a verbal jda). anybody else have a sense of how viable such an arrangement is? how unusual?
    posted by 20 year lurk at 6:07 PM on May 24, 2019 [15 favorites]


    Half the Democratic field is polling not under 1% but under 0.05%. Including:

    Inslee
    Gabbard
    Bullock
    Hickenlooper
    Moulton
    Ryan
    Swalwell
    Delaney
    and Marianne Williamson who even I just had to look up.


    Hickenlooper and Bullock would have decent chances of winning senate seats in their states. But hey, polling under .05% is so much more rewarding than taking the senate and actually being able to pass the Democratic agenda.
    posted by chris24 at 6:20 PM on May 24, 2019 [44 favorites]


    Q: Did you learn anything more about the nature and extent of this verbal joint defense agreement?

    A: Everyone was going to work together for the common purpose of staying on message.
    AAAHHHHHHH. As a lawyer who's pretty much constantly party to one JDA or another, that's not how any of this shit works. AT ALL. First and foremost, you have to have a joint legal interest between the parties for the JDA to even be valid in the first place. A joint "business" interest is not enough. For example, if you have two companies who are considering merging and want to form a JDA to freely discuss a lawsuit against one of them (but not the other), even that is probably not a sufficient joint legal interest to form a valid JDA (depending on the precise facts).

    It's certainly not enough to have a joint "staying on message" interest (??!?!?!). I mean, given that they're going to be discussing illegal conduct, some of it probably ongoing, that's tantamount to saying "we entered this JDA so we could keep our conspiring secret." JFC!

    That said, a JDA just expands the attorney-client privilege among counsel for co-parties; these guys are a bunch of morons who leak like sieves anyway so maybe this is just part of the big everything that doesn't matter anymore. Still, goddamn.
    anybody else have a sense of how viable such an arrangement is? how unusual?
    It's super fuckin' unsual. To the point where I'd consider it essentially malpractice to manage a client's case this way.
    posted by Joey Buttafoucault at 6:24 PM on May 24, 2019 [39 favorites]


    Worth noting that the low bar debate rules apply to only the first couple of debates. The DNC hasn't published rules for later ones yet, but indications are that they'll be considerably tighter and designed to winnow the field.
    posted by Chrysostom at 6:54 PM on May 24, 2019 [4 favorites]


    Bloomberg, U.S. Federal Judge Blocks Portions of Trump's Wall Plan
    A judge stopped short of barring President Donald Trump from diverting billions of dollars in the federal budget to pay for his promised border wall, but ruled that plans to build sections of the barrier can’t go forward without his review.

    The injunction specifically prohibits the administration from starting work at two sites where contracts have been awarded, in Arizona and Texas. Parties have been asked to appear again before U.S. District Judge Haywood Gilliam in Oakland, California, on June 5 to argue the merits for a more comprehensive injunction and a possible trial, according to the judge’s order.

    Central to the Justice Department’s argument was the idea that since Congress had not explicitly told Trump not to divert the funds from the 2019 budget, he was entitled to use his presidential powers to reallocate the money he needs to build sections of the wall. Judge Gilliam rejected the argument.
    Turns out that asking for forgiveness rather than permission is not how the federal budget works.

    Here's the judge's ruling, since nobody can be bothered to link it in their articles.
    posted by zachlipton at 7:15 PM on May 24, 2019 [25 favorites]


    Cissna is described as "a Senate-confirmed agency head," so will Cuccinelli need to be confirmed by the Senate? Because the article also notes that Cuccinelli is disliked by Senate GOP leaders (including the Majority Leader).

    The Times has a new story making it clear that Cuccinelli is not getting confirmed ("And people close to the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, who has been a target of Mr. Cuccinelli’s in the past, said that the former attorney general’s chances of being confirmed were close to zero").

    They're using Cuccinelli to force out Cissna, because Miller wants to, and will let him take the acting role for a while before parking him somewhere else at DHS. Having effective people in place who are capable of doing their jobs is naturally not a consideration here.
    posted by zachlipton at 7:32 PM on May 24, 2019 [11 favorites]


    Inslee because he was a relative unknown governor who isn't really a ball of fire (but I do love his climate policies)

    David Roberts has written about Inslee's plan. He lurves it and fantasizes about other candidates just admitting that it's the best.
    posted by a snickering nuthatch at 7:49 PM on May 24, 2019 [4 favorites]


    >It’s been two months since Mueller completed his report, and in working desperately to keep Congress off the path to impeachment, Nadler has managed to secure testimony from zero witnesses about it. (By contrast, former FBI Director James Comey appeared on Capitol Hill to testify two days after he concluded the Clinton-email investigation.)

    >We're doing it wrong.


    I think you may be neglecting the fact that Comey was a Republican working for the Republicans. He was delighted at the opportunity to strut his sanctimonious ass in front of his Republicans in congress when the Republicans called him to testify. And the president at the time was not obstructing justice by claiming executive privilege over every witness that congress called for testimony.

    So. Things are different.
    posted by JackFlash at 10:18 PM on May 24, 2019 [19 favorites]


    In twitter, this move is being interpreted rather horrifically. The 5 eyes are dead.
    posted by hugbucket at 4:36 AM on May 25, 2019 [1 favorite]


    Sorry, the twitter link in question.
    posted by hugbucket at 4:44 AM on May 25, 2019 [3 favorites]


    The obvious expectation is that whatever Barr & Trump find out about the CIA's Russian contacts goes straight to Putin and a bunch of people wind up mysteriously dead. But if it's that obvious, wouldn't the CIA just feed disinformation to Trump and Barr? Give them a bunch of false leads, and when Putin acts on that information he shows his hand?
    posted by wabbittwax at 4:48 AM on May 25, 2019 [6 favorites]


    wabbittwax: But if it's that obvious, wouldn't the CIA just feed disinformation to Trump and Barr?

    You're suggesting disobedience bordering on a coup, not unlike the common supposition that if Trump orders an obviously-unwarrented nuclear strike, the Secretary of Defense will simply refuse his assent, when legally he is required to comply. I don't know if there's any precedent for American intelligence delivering what it knows to be outright falsehoods to the president.

    Now, spinning reality into whatever they want the president to believe, sure, that's an age-old story. And indeed, the Coats statement suggests that's at least where this might start.
    posted by InTheYear2017 at 5:55 AM on May 25, 2019 [1 favorite]


    I don't know if there's any precedent for American intelligence delivering what it knows to be outright falsehoods to the president.

    See: Bush, Iraq, WMDS, Saddam Hussein, Cheney, Powell, etc. I guess it depends on when the presidency has ordered some falsehoods off the tasting menu, and when it has explicitly made them a diet restriction.
    posted by Harry Caul at 6:03 AM on May 25, 2019 [4 favorites]


    Harry Caul: See: Bush, Iraq, WMDS, Saddam Hussein, Cheney, Powell, etc.

    I'm still filing that under "spin" unless there's something I don't know. "Iraq has WMDs" was a lie built on truths, e.g look at this grainy photo or whatever. I see a difference between that and "Let's tell the president that John Smith was a source when we know he was not, and we know this 100% because he works for us, so we're not even lying to ourselves here".
    posted by InTheYear2017 at 6:13 AM on May 25, 2019 [1 favorite]


    Since the President is compromised by Russia, anything the intelligence orgs do to counter that is justified by their missions. He's an enemy , domestic. Period.
    posted by mikelieman at 6:23 AM on May 25, 2019 [16 favorites]


    Mueller, She Wrote released the first part of their overview of the Report, out of what they expect to be twelve to thirteen parts in total.
    posted by XMLicious at 6:38 AM on May 25, 2019 [5 favorites]


    Politico reports on the Trump-Russia scandal lawfare front: Intelligence Scholar Sues Cambridge Academic, U.S. News Outlets Over Reports On Flynn Links
    A Russian-born British scholar is suing an alleged FBI informant and four news outlets for allegedly defaming her by linking her to Russian efforts to influence President Donald Trump's 2016 campaign.

    Svetlana Lokhova filed the suit Thursday in federal court in Alexandria, Va., seeking more than $25 million in damages from longtime University of Cambridge academic Stefan Halper as well as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post and MSNBC.[…]

    “Stefan Halper is a ratf----- and a spy, who embroiled an innocent woman in a conspiracy to undo the 2016 Presidential election and topple the President of the United States of America,” Lokhova alleges in the 66-page complaint.
    The lawyer behind this sideshow is Steven Biss, whom megathread reader will recognize as Devin Nunes's attorney in his lawsuit against Twitter, Liz Mair, Devin Nunes's Cow and Devin Nunes's Mom. While Biss is obviously the equivalent of an ambulance chaser in the Trump-Russia scandal, all these nuisance cases have a potential chilling effect.
    posted by Doktor Zed at 6:42 AM on May 25, 2019 [7 favorites]


    And not even The Gang of Six, or the Majestic Eight or whatever the f* they're called has seen the unredacted report yet, right? Cause that's great. I'm sure Barr wouldn't redact anything improperly.
    posted by petebest at 6:43 AM on May 25, 2019 [1 favorite]


    (CW: Injured children.) From CNN: These doctors risked their careers to expose the dangers children face in immigrant family detention. Allen and McPherson say they documented their concerns numerous times in reports filed with the Department of Homeland Security during the Obama administration, and felt like the people in power were listening. But they say two things prompted them to speak more publicly about the matter after Trump took office: the spike in family separations at the border and moves to increase family detention rather than scale it back. ... In their letter to Congress last year, the doctors detailed particularly troubling cases that they said represent systemic problems that would only get worse if family detention expands:

    • Significant weight loss in children that went largely unnoticed by the facility medical staff, including a 16-month-old baby who lost nearly a third of his body weight over 10 days during a diarrheal disease but was never given IV fluids or sent to an emergency room.
    • A 27-day-old baby who had a seizure from bleeding inside his skull that was missed by the facility on arrival.
    • Numerous children who suffered severe finger injuries while confined in a facility that was designed as a medium-security prison for adults.

    ... "These are shattered fingers, significant lacerations -- probably some of the injuries disfiguring. And you start to think about how they're happening. And they're these heavy, spring-loaded doors in a facility that was constructed to have adult males ... and the light bulb goes on that this is a complete disaster," he says. "Because they're using cells, but they paint them pretty colors and they now call them dorm rooms. But it's got the same door."

    Once the problem was pointed out, he says, officials were still slow to correct it -- something that Allen says was "very discouraging to see." "Somewhere out there there's kids walking around with disfigured fingers for the rest of their life," he says, "because no one could really get their act together to fix that problem."

    "This is not a story about people in these facilities not caring about children. ... It is about good people trying to keep children safe in an environment that's very dangerous to them by design, if not intent. And they've been asked to execute deeply flawed and I would even say mean-spirited policies, and to do so in such a way that minimizes harms to children," Allen says. "It's an impossible task." And no amount of effort can truly fix the problems, he says, describing any attempts to improve conditions in family detention as "Band-Aid solutions" that are doomed to fail. "Even if you could pour money and resources into properly staffing these facilities and giving them programming," Allen says, "the simple act of detaining and indefinite detention ... is irreparably harmful to children."

    posted by Bella Donna at 7:21 AM on May 25, 2019 [51 favorites]


    The thing about Elizabeth Warren practicing law while also professoring... I don't even understand in the slightest how this is supposed to be a scandal. Academics who have expertise and skills that nonacademics want to pay money for often consult as a side gig. Why wouldn't they? I mean this doesn't even seem specific to law, to me.
    posted by eirias at 10:14 AM on May 25, 2019 [17 favorites]


    The thing about Elizabeth Warren practicing law while also professoring... I don't even understand in the slightest how this is supposed to be a scandal. Academics who have expertise and skills that nonacademics want to pay money for often consult as a side gig. Why wouldn't they? I mean this doesn't even seem specific to law, to me.

    It's in the same nothingburger category of "Butter emails...Butter speaking fees" to make a woman politician, especially one who is putting the fear of God into Wall Street, look """scandalous""" and """unethical""" to the low-information crowd.

    Having failed to make any headway with "Butter DNA test..." Maggie "MAGA" Haberman and other courtier pundits are trying to see if "Butter Earnings" will stick. Clouds-n-Shadows!
    posted by Rosie M. Banks at 10:33 AM on May 25, 2019 [18 favorites]


    It’s such an underhanded ploy, they had to go with the “WOMAN MAKES MONEY” charge cause the actual findings are - she used her legal consulting to further social and political causes she supports?

    Sanders and Warren terrify the ruling class so much they twist themselves into these knots.
    posted by The Whelk at 10:33 AM on May 25, 2019 [31 favorites]


    Reminds me of that research project from 2016 that showed exposing men to the mere idea of making less money than their spouse made them significantly more likely to support Trump over Clinton specifically (with no comparable change vs. Sanders).
    posted by Rhaomi at 11:23 AM on May 25, 2019 [7 favorites]


    arren practicing law while also professoring... I don't even understand in the slightest how this is supposed to be a scandal.

    See, Real Americans inherit $500 million from their father's estate and pay 0 taxes through criminal avoidance schemes.
    posted by T.D. Strange at 11:38 AM on May 25, 2019 [13 favorites]


    WaPo: The Surreal Life of George Papadopoulos

    Papadopoulus and wife have relocated to LA, made a friend of Tom Arnold, and find themselves the featured guests at all the best parties.
    posted by notyou at 12:26 PM on May 25, 2019 [3 favorites]


    It’s such an underhanded ploy, they had to go with the “WOMAN MAKES MONEY” charge

    And when the fuckers got too much shit for this bullshit headline and framing, they changed it to the number of cases is "previously undisclosed" and suspect.

    Elie Mystal:
    The @washingtonpost stealth edited the @ewarren headline:
    Yesterday: "While teaching, Elizabeth Warren worked on more than 50 legal matters, charging as much as $675 an hour"
    Today: While teaching, Warren worked on about 60 legal matters, far more than she’d previously disclosed
    posted by chris24 at 12:33 PM on May 25, 2019 [10 favorites]


    You can tell they're trying to find something to stick to her, not reporting newsworthy information.

    "Democracy Dies in Darkness".
    posted by T.D. Strange at 12:37 PM on May 25, 2019 [19 favorites]


    Previously, from the NYT:
    The most prominent of the C.I.A.’s sources of intelligence on Russia’s election interference was a person close to Mr. Putin who provided information about his involvement, former officials have said. The source turned over evidence for one of the last major intelligence conclusions that President Barack Obama made public before leaving office: that Mr. Putin himself was behind the Russia hack.

    Long nurtured by the C.I.A., the source rose to a position that enabled the informant to provide key information in 2016 about the Russian leadership’s role in the interference campaign, the officials said.
    Today, from the NYT: Trump’s Targeting of Intelligence Agencies Gains a Harder Edge
    Former officials said if Mr. Trump was intent on calling out individual intelligence officers as he has with the F.B.I., Ms. Haspel would face an outcry. “What the leadership should do is say, ‘I am vouching for the information. If there is a problem, the problem is with me,’” said John Sipher, a former C.I.A. officer. If Ms. Haspel shares the identities of C.I.A. informants outside the agency and the information leaks, he warned, she will lose credibility within the C.I.A.

    Mr. Schiff predicted that both Mr. Coats and Ms. Haspel would defend the integrity of their agencies against any attacks by the White House or give up their posts like former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis. “If it gets to a point they are asked to do things that are unlawful or jeopardize the men and women that work within the I.C., they should speak out,” he said, “and, if necessary, follow the example of Secretary Mattis.”
    The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.
    posted by Little Dawn at 1:20 PM on May 25, 2019 [7 favorites]


    The @washingtonpost stealth edited the @ewarren headline:

    The Washington Post runs headlines through an A/B test while the URL stays unchanged between the time when the story goes live and goes to physical print (previously). So it's shitty, but it's not some nefarious asshole in the editor's suite trying to smear Warren, it's that the online economy maximizes for intrigue, outrage, and clickbait in headlines.

    I don't think the headline changed because "the fuckers got too much shit", it's because their fucking bosses have decided that reader engagement metrics are more important that good journalistic practices and have handed decisions off to a machine.

    If you want to be mad at the WaPo's coverage, compare this:
    Warren’s legal consulting work has received little scrutiny over the course of her political career, and the new list may offer her opponents fresh avenues for attack.
    to this from the AP's coverage:
    The disclosure comes as the Republican Party continues to try to tie Warren to the moneyed clients she represented, a tactic unsuccessfully employed by [Senator Scott] Brown in 2012. As Warren climbs in the polls of the 2020 presidential field on a platform of challenging big business, her past work on behalf of some major businesses involved in bankruptcy proceedings could become newly attractive to Republicans seeking to undercut her momentum.
    The AP makes it clear this is old news that republicans are trying to make hay out of. The WaPo story falls victim to the Crooked Hillary problem where reporters, apparently born yesterday, rediscover discredited, decades-old republican attacks and reprint them as if they are valid.
    posted by peeedro at 1:27 PM on May 25, 2019 [40 favorites]


    If Ms. Haspel shares the identities of C.I.A. informants outside the agency and the information leaks, he warned, she will lose credibility within the C.I.A.

    Mr. Schiff predicted that both Mr. Coats and Ms. Haspel would defend the integrity of their agencies against any attacks by the White House or give up their posts like former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis. “If it gets to a point they are asked to do things that are unlawful or jeopardize the men and women that work within the I.C., they should speak out,” he said, “and, if necessary, follow the example of Secretary Mattis.”
    If your plan depends on Gina "Destruction of Evidence" Haspel's commitment to her credibility, integrity, or to the rule of law you probably need a new plan.
    posted by Nerd of the North at 1:39 PM on May 25, 2019 [18 favorites]


    Trump Administration To Close Two Northwest Forest Service Job Training Centers

    It's okay, it's not like they helped at-risk youth.

    "The CCC job centers offer programs in vocational fields like forestry and renewable resources, hospitality and construction. They offer no-cost vocational training targeting low-income, at-risk youth. The programs include room and board and some paid on-the-job training opportunities."

    Oh. Okay, it's not like some random cronies are going to benefit.

    "The remaining 16 centers, which include Angell CCC in Yachats, Oregon, and Wolf Creek CCC in Glide, Oregon, will no longer be operated by the Forest Service. They will be taken over by private or 'partnership' contracts overseen by the U.S. Department of Labor."

    I mean, at least this isn't going to affect many people.

    "Nationally, all the Job Corps CCCs will stop accepting students and begin laying off or out-placing staff, according to an email from the acting head of the National Job Corps Association. The layoffs will affect about 1,100 Forest Service employees, the email stated, and will be completed by the end of September."

    Okay, fine. It's not like they were doing anything actually worthwhile.

    "He said that over the past three years the Forest Service job centers in Oregon have trained more than 900 students who worked nearly 120,000 hours on wildfires."

    *throws hands up in air, walks away into smoldering forest, never to be seen again*
    posted by vverse23 at 1:49 PM on May 25, 2019 [52 favorites]


    “What the leadership should do is say, ‘[Ms. Haspel is] vouching for the information. If there is a problem, the problem is with [her],’” said John Sipher, a former C.I.A. officer.

    We have to take the word of someone who's already broken international law by torturing prisoners of war and unlawfully covering it up when ordered? No thanks.
    posted by xammerboy at 1:52 PM on May 25, 2019 [7 favorites]




    The layoffs will affect about 1,100 Forest Service employees, the email stated, and will be completed by the end of September."

    According to the WaPo's coverage, ending this program "will result in the largest layoffs of civil servants since the military’s base realignment and closures of 2010 and 2011, federal personnel expert said." The cuts are concentrated in red states and rural areas.
    posted by peeedro at 2:05 PM on May 25, 2019 [6 favorites]


    Mike Pence tells West Point grads they are going to war: ‘It will happen’ — maybe even ‘in this hemisphere’

    Ah, preparing for the old adage that presidents in war time always get re elected.
    posted by hugbucket at 2:07 PM on May 25, 2019 [2 favorites]


    Mike Pence tells West Point grads they are going to war: ‘It will happen’ — maybe even ‘in this hemisphere’

    Pence, like all chickenhawks, thinks that anyone in a uniform really digs war and is just spoiling to get out there and shoot some Commie Muslim Terrorists.
    posted by Etrigan at 2:20 PM on May 25, 2019 [28 favorites]


    WaPo: The Surreal Life of George Papadopoulos

    Papadopoulus and wife have relocated to LA, made a friend of Tom Arnold, and find themselves the featured guests at all the best parties.


    It's a bit late to comment this, but: this is a badly researched vanity piece and I regret reading it. It's a shame on the WaPo that they published it. The bit on Mifsud is particularly inept, and since the relationship between Mifsud, Papadopoulos and Papadopoulos' wife is at the very core of the case, WaPo's "reporting" is misleading and scandalously bad.
    posted by mumimor at 2:57 PM on May 25, 2019 [9 favorites]


    The source turned over evidence for one of the last major intelligence conclusions that President Barack Obama made public before leaving office: that Mr. Putin himself was behind the Russia hack. Long nurtured by the C.I.A., the source rose to a position that enabled the informant to provide key information in 2016 about the Russian leadership’s role in the interference campaign, the officials said.

    ‘The president's insane’: book by CNN's Jim Acosta charts Trump war on press (Guardian)
    In The Enemy of the People, CNN chief White House correspondent Jim Acosta writes that after an early confrontation, close Trump aide Hope Hicks called him to say the president wanted him to know he was “very professional today”.

    “He said, ‘Jim gets it’,” Hicks is quoted as saying. Trump, Acosta writes, had just called the reporter “fake news” and “very fake news” after being asked about Russian election interference at a press conference in February 2017.

    “When he called us ‘fake news’,” Acosta writes, “it was, in his mind, an act.”

    [...] At the start of Trump’s presidency, the White House was frustrated by anonymously sourced stories and what it saw as the antagonistic stance of mainstream outlets from CNN and NBC to the Washington Post and the New York Times. Because Republicans controlled Congress and Trump needed an enemy that could be presented as dangerous and effective, Acosta writes, the president decided to attack the media.

    [...] True to the style of Washington political reporting often complained about by Trump, Acosta mostly uses unnamed sources, many of whom are said to have spoken over social drinks. They are often blunt in their assessment of their boss. A “senior White House official” tells Acosta: “The president’s insane.” A “former White House national security official” says staffers were not sure the president had not been “compromised” by Russia.
    posted by Little Dawn at 2:57 PM on May 25, 2019 [12 favorites]


    An account of being on Air Force One with the president “it’s like being held captive”

    I mean, we know it, but again I cannot underline that all the president does is watch TV and get upset about TV while blasting the TV Channel that tells him what to say. It is the most American possible situation that it feels inevitable : the TV-run State.
    posted by The Whelk at 3:25 PM on May 25, 2019 [19 favorites]


    Trump Staff Dreads Traveling Overseas With Toddler President

    Trump won’t stop watching television
    Trump won’t go to sleep
    Trump does not like the TV in other countries
    Trump also does not like the food in foreign countries
    Trump does not like it when people are talking about non-Trump subjects
    The good news is that, if you can arrange to let Trump have his favorite food, his favorite television stations, and surround him with people who will talk incessantly about how much they love Trump, then the visit will be fine, until you get back to the plane and Trump starts to get upset at cable news again.
    posted by kirkaracha at 3:28 PM on May 25, 2019 [27 favorites]


    This probably deserves its own FPP, but I don't know enough about what it is: In Baltimore and Beyond, a Stolen N.S.A. Tool Wreaks Havoc. It does seem to be an example of the Trump administrations incompetence -- or something worse.
    Since 2017, when the N.S.A. lost control of the tool, EternalBlue, it has been picked up by state hackers in North Korea, Russia and, more recently, China, to cut a path of destruction around the world, leaving billions of dollars in damage. But over the past year, the cyberweapon has boomeranged back and is now showing up in the N.S.A.’s own backyard.

    It is not just in Baltimore. Security experts say EternalBlue attacks have reached a high, and cybercriminals are zeroing in on vulnerable American towns and cities, from Pennsylvania to Texas, paralyzing local governments and driving up costs.
    The N.S.A. connection to the attacks on American cities has not been previously reported, in part because the agency has refused to discuss or even acknowledge the loss of its cyberweapon, dumped online in April 2017 by a still-unidentified group calling itself the Shadow Brokers. Years later, the agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation still do not know whether the Shadow Brokers are foreign spies or disgruntled insiders.
    posted by mumimor at 4:45 PM on May 25, 2019 [33 favorites]


    NYT: Trump’s Targeting of Intelligence Agencies Gains a Harder Edge

    And if there were any doubt as to the target audience of Trump's precipitous move, TPM reports Trumpworld's reactions: ‘The Kraken Has Been Unleashed’: Trump Loyalists Ecstatic Over His Barr Order, e.g.:

    • “The Kraken has been unleashed. […] We will find out who began the biggest political scandal in American history and where the responsibility lies.”—Seb Gorka, trying to sound like Bond villain in an Instagram video

    • “In March or April of next year, James Comey, Andy McCabe, Strzok and Page will be on trial for the crimes they committed against the Fourth Amendment and against this President, and we can’t wait.”—Corey Lewandoski, looking forward to kangaroo courts on CNN

    MEGATHREAD HOUSEKEEPING: There's a new draft for the next USPolitics FPP on the MeFi wiki for people to collaborate and contribute.
    posted by Doktor Zed at 5:22 PM on May 25, 2019 [16 favorites]


    Did Congress read the Mueller report? More than a quarter of these key lawmakers won’t say.
    By Scott Clement, Emily Guskin and Kevin Uhrmacher, WaPo
    Rep. Justin Amash broke ranks with fellow Republicans when he said special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s report shows that President Trump took actions that “meet the threshold for impeachment,” arguing that the stark partisan divide over the findings was because “few members of Congress have read the report.”

    While it’s common for politicians to draw very different conclusions from the same set of facts, the Michigan congressman’s suggestion in several tweetstorms this past week is bolder — that most lawmakers simply ignored Mueller’s report.
    posted by mumimor at 5:34 PM on May 25, 2019 [7 favorites]


    From the "Traveling with Trump" article:

    After he discovered to his displeasure on an early foreign trip that his beloved Fox News was not available in his foreign hotel, the White House Communications Agency arranged for a streaming service that would allow him to keep up with his favorite programs. He typically asks for multiple televisions in his room, depending on the size of the space, one source said.

    Putting up multiple tv's and demanding Fox. "He doesn't sleep." He talks talks talks talks talks all day and all night. If he's not on something, his biochemistry must make an amazing analog.
    posted by petebest at 6:07 PM on May 25, 2019 [15 favorites]


    House Seeks Signs Of ‘Illicit Funds’ In Trump Records

    Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) said that the House Financial Services Committee she chairs will seek evidence of money laundering and other “illicit funds” in Donald Trump’s subpoenaed Deutsche Bank records, the HuffPost reports.

    Said Waters: “We are absolutely concerned about money laundering.”

    Yessssss.

    Bonus: Ex-GOP Lawmaker Calls for Trump’s Impeachment

    Former Rep. Tom Coleman (R-MO) called for the impeachment of President Trump, who he said is an “illegitimate president,” CNN reports.

    Said Coleman: “I’m calling for impeachment now because the Mueller report is out, and in it special counsel Robert Mueller describes 10 obstruction of justice charges that he could not bring because of a Department of Justice rule and regulation that says you can’t indict a sitting president — that’s (reason) number one.”

    He added: “Number two, I believe this is an illegitimate President because he welcomed help and influence from the Russians in his campaign. For example, his campaign chairman Paul Manafort met with a Russian intelligence asset in New York and shared with him their polling information and a strategy on how to win the Midwestern states.”

    posted by petebest at 6:13 PM on May 25, 2019 [43 favorites]


    I drove past the airbase here in Tucson earlier today. There's a big Border Patrol facility on the north end of the base and lots and lots of empty field behind it. There's now a whole bunch of tents up in the field and more going up. Dammit.
    posted by azpenguin at 8:30 PM on May 25, 2019 [27 favorites]


    “When he called us ‘fake news’,” Acosta writes, “it was, in his mind, an act.”

    Has anyone else noticed that Trump's investigation of the investigation is just a diversionary tactic meant to distract people from the fact that his fellow Republicans won't work with him? They won't let him do any work on healthcare or infrastructure or anything really that doesn't include cutting the rich's taxes, destroying social programs, or military conquest. Trump's sole contribution was proving that the race card was still a winning hand, but otherwise he's been a puppet desperately trying convince his base he's a real boy.
    posted by xammerboy at 9:35 PM on May 25, 2019 [8 favorites]




    They won't let him do any work on healthcare or infrastructure or anything really that doesn't include cutting the rich's taxes, destroying social programs, or military conquest.

    Except for whatever damage he can inflict by fiat (tweet). i.e. the Transgender ban in the military which apparently came out of nowhere via tweet and is now being implemented. Not that Republicans would be against such a ban, of course not, but that they don't mind if he engages in some extracurricular nation-destroying.

    From Turmp's perspective he's really only interested in headlines. And whatever obeisance his immediate circle of sycophants and billionaire rubberneckers must pay. So long as he's on the TV box acting tough and he can gossip with Hopey, he's all good, Republican agenda be damned. (Where the GOP agenda supports his tough-guy routine, i.e. immigration, he's all-in, but it's not due to any deeply held belief because he doesn't have any that aren't about him.)

    I think it's that last part that's so gob-smackingly obvious to all of us, yet that goes almost completely unsaid by corporate news or the Turmp voters, that it creates this gaslighting effect.
    posted by petebest at 5:09 AM on May 26, 2019 [12 favorites]


    So we all know there's an inappropriate Trump tweet for every occasion, something he said months or years ago that makes what he's saying or doing now extremely awkward. But it wasn't until just now that I truly believed there's an inappropriate Trump tweet for EVERY occasion. Ladies & gentlemen, I give you the most inappropriate Trump tweet EVER.

    @realDonaldTrump
    Does President Obama ever discuss the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor while he's in Japan? Thousands of American lives lost. #MDW
    posted by scalefree at 8:10 AM on May 26, 2019 [16 favorites]


    Marcy Wheeler eviscerates MAGA Haberman's latest attempt to rehabilitate her source:
    On top of being a constitutionally offensive story, that Hope Hicks story is also factually wrong. https://nyti.ms/2I329XZ When Trump "encouraged" his aides to "cooperate," he was having his personal lawyer edit their statements so they'd be false.

    And by "cooperated with the congressional investigations," you mean," refused to talk about what she did at the White House. Somewhere in here a journalist might point out how ridiculous Trump's posture is. Somewhere in here a journalist might inform her readers what executive privilege actually covers. Here the NYT's journalist negotiates a compromise for her client based on ... nothing. See if you can identify what NYT's journalist left out from this passage, claiming that poor Hope was just a witness to a madman. If you answered, 'Oh my goodness! In a bid to make Hope look totally innocent, Maggie left out the bit where Hope suggested they were going to withhold evidence," you would have better command of the Mueller Report than the NYT's journalist. Remember, in precisely the period where Hope Hick suggested withholding that email, Alan Garten was mysteriously failing to turn over 3 emails on Trump Tower Moscow that would have made it clear Cohen was lying.

    Here's another thing Maggie left out: This lie about Carter Page from Hope is important bc it puts her later lie abt not ties to Russia in different light. Another big Maggie left out: Hope being present at a meeting where the June 9 meeting was discussed ahead of time. She *didn't recall* it. Perhaps the NYT could tell readers that Hicks offered proof that Trump's recent insane tweets are false, bc he was stewing over Obama's warning about Mike Flynn? Nah--just put up a pretty picture. Here are two instances where Hope Hicks tried to suppress evidence of Trump's obstruction. Finally, here's Hicks passing on the President's efforts to get Flynn to stay quiet.

    The irony here is that this is a story by a journalist about a woman who played an utterly central role in lying to the press, over and over and over, and who on multiple occasions was working harder at the cover-up than even her boss. Okay. It's not ironic at all. It is a journalist doing an unbelievably favorable piece on a former source who played a central role in routinely lying to the American people.

    Forgot to mention something: that second instance where Hope tried to clean up something Trump said? One of the journalists who (Hope appears to have known) would have been willing to do that was Maggie Haberman.
    posted by T.D. Strange at 8:15 AM on May 26, 2019 [64 favorites]


    Jeffries says he believes Trump obstructed justice (Politico)
    Democratic Caucus Chairman Hakeem Jeffries said Sunday morning that there’s reason to believe President Donald Trump committed obstruction of justice. “Well, I certainly think there’s reason to believe that there was obstruction of justice,” the New York Democrat told NBC’s Chuck Todd on “Meet the Press.” “The Mueller report laid out 10 different instances that we need to look into separately as part of our investigation as to what may have taken place.” [...] “And it certainly appears to be the case that the so-called attorney general intentionally misrepresented the conclusions of the Mueller report as part of an effort to fool the American people,” Jeffries said. “We won’t let that stand either.”
    But then:
    Jeffries added that “the only way to proceed is to make sure that politics don’t dictate a decision to impeach or politics don’t dictate a decision not to impeach” — and that Congress’ focus should remain on the “For the People” agenda and working on issues that matter to the American public, like lowering health care costs.
    Why would the so-called 'American public' care about obstruction of justice if their elected representatives continue to insist that they don't?
    posted by Little Dawn at 9:16 AM on May 26, 2019 [4 favorites]


    Tlaib: House Democrats are ‘moving toward’ impeachment (Politico)
    Rep. Rashida Tlaib said Sunday morning that House Democrats are “moving toward” a consensus that it’s time to weigh impeachment as an option.

    The Michigan Democrat, who has been one of the most vocal advocates for impeachment, said that the impeachment debate should be about holding President Donald Trump accountable, not about what it means for the 2020 election.

    “This is not about the 2020 election,” she told NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “It’s about doing what’s right now for our country. This is going to be a precedent that we set when we don’t hold this president accountable to the rule of the law and to the United States Constitution.”

    Tlaib added that she and her colleagues aren’t able to pass important and necessary reforms when “the president of the United States continues to lie to the American people, continues to not follow through on subpoenas and give us the information that we need.” [...]

    “Understand, again, it goes hand in hand. And I think the American people understand that, that we can’t do our job if the president thinks he’s above the law, thinks that he cannot abide by what the United States Congress is passing through and asking and demanding of him.”
    posted by Little Dawn at 9:21 AM on May 26, 2019 [26 favorites]


    This probably deserves its own FPP, but I don't know enough about what it is: In Baltimore and Beyond, a Stolen N.S.A. Tool Wreaks Havoc. It does seem to be an example of the Trump administrations incompetence -- or something worse.

    I don't think you can fairly pin that on Trump. Not even on Barron who is in charge of the cyber. The NSA has been losing 'cyberweapons' for quite some time now. Basically every time they use one of their homegrown malware weapons it becomes a publically available weapon. NSA tools are basically always boomerangs that the NSA throws at a single target and then the rest of the world gets to catch the return damage forever (or until all systems are patched - which never happens IRL).
    posted by srboisvert at 2:33 PM on May 26, 2019 [11 favorites]


    Rashida Tlaib, quoted by Aubree Eliza Weaver in Politico, quoted by Little Dawn: “This is not about the 2020 election,” she told NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “It’s about doing what’s right now for our country. This is going to be a precedent that we set when we don’t hold this president accountable to the rule of the law and to the United States Constitution.”

    I've made it clear how I disagree with this. Impeaching because "We have to hold the president accountable to the rule of law" is like saying "This farm's charter says we close the barn door every night, and by God I'm going to follow that rule regardless of any horse that may have left." Closing doors is a real, concrete action... except when not and it's just so much theater.

    However, it would obviously be a huge mistake for any Democrat to express my view and say outright "We are impeaching, and it's more in order to win 2020 by wresting the narrative from Trump's grasp than it is because of pure principles". (Like I said before, pure principles with no regard for political fallout tell us to vote third-party). If you say that aloud, you break the spell. And this is why I support the "It has to look reluctant" approach (when it comes to the leadership at the very top) even though that's also stupid theatrics.

    Tlaib is exactly the right person to be saying what she's saying, and I suspect/hope she's right that the momentum is happening. I couldn't begin to predict the future but I see more reason for optimism on this specific front than not.
    posted by InTheYear2017 at 3:00 PM on May 26, 2019 [9 favorites]


    To borrow your analogy, I think it's a lot closer to saying "This farm's charter says we close the barn door every night, but if we don't ever get around to closing it on any night, what good's having the charter at all?"
    posted by Rykey at 3:28 PM on May 26, 2019 [12 favorites]


    They can alter any video to make Pelosi look drunk. But they can't alter any video to make Trump look sane
    posted by growabrain at 3:44 PM on May 26, 2019 [51 favorites]


    Here's a rare spot of sunshine for us...

    Trump's tweets are losing their potency
    President Trump's tweets don't pack the punch they did at the outset of his presidency. His Twitter interaction rate — a measure of the impact given how much he tweets and how many people follow him — has tumbled precipitously, according to data from CrowdTangle.
    Why it matters: It's a sign that his strongest communication tool may be losing its effectiveness and that the novelty has worn off.
    Trump's interaction rate has fallen from 0.55% in the month he was elected to 0.32% in June 2017 — and down to 0.16% this month through May 25. (The metric measures retweets and likes per tweet divided by the size of his following.)
    posted by scalefree at 4:19 PM on May 26, 2019 [33 favorites]


    UK European Elections: 99% counted.
    Remain parties: 40.4%
    Hard Brexit parties: 34.9%
    Conservatives/Labour: 23.2%


    UKip got destroyed, losing all of its MEPs in the European Parliament. Much of that support has likely gone to the Brexit Party, which came top of the polls in England and Wales, picking up 28 MEPs. Guardian has live updates and context.
    posted by SecretAgentSockpuppet at 7:29 PM on May 26, 2019 [5 favorites]


    There's an active European Parliament elections thread.
    posted by Chrysostom at 7:43 PM on May 26, 2019 [5 favorites]


    Japan made Trump his own Sumo cup and let him present it.

    This is like if we made up a new boxing title above the heavyweight belt called the Putin Belt and invited Putin to present it. Or renamed the Lombardi Trophy the Putin Trophy. Or the Stanley Cup the Putin Cup.

    Hard to find a country that's bent over harder for Trump than Japan.
    posted by T.D. Strange at 8:48 PM on May 26, 2019 [5 favorites]


    This is like if we made up a new boxing title above the heavyweight belt called the Putin Belt and invited Putin to present it. Or renamed the Lombardi Trophy the Putin Trophy. Or the Stanley Cup the Putin Cup.

    Don't think we don't see you laying the groundwork to link back here and say "called it" when one of these comes to pass.
    posted by contraption at 8:53 PM on May 26, 2019 [16 favorites]


    yeah, that is top 10 shade for the past century. when i heard the other day he was going to give an eponymous "US PRESIDENTS PRIZE" in Japan, for sumo, my respect for Abe grew three sizes. seriously, Trump's on the global stage forcing everybody to go through this pantomime for a thing that means something to only one person. IN THE WORLD. no maga chuds are (checks Google) making Trump Award t-shirts, it is never going to be presented by any other president, there isn't going to be any Franklin Mint miniatures. it's going to have the cachet of a football signed by OJ.
    posted by rhizome at 9:35 PM on May 26, 2019 [4 favorites]


    Japan made Trump his own Sumo cup and let him present it.

    For some strange reason I don't understand, this isn't quite as ridiculous as it sounds. Jacques Chirac already did it nearly 20 years ago.

    Now, Japan also did give Trump his own special red platform to stand on, which does appear to be uniquely calculated to cater to his ego.
    posted by zachlipton at 9:39 PM on May 26, 2019 [2 favorites]


    Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez reacts to the inherent sexism of NYT’s soft-focus Hope Hicks subpoena article:
    What gets me is news breaks that this woman is weighing committing a crime before Congress &it’s getting framed by the NYT as some Lifetime drama called “Hope’s Choice.”

    This is a fmr admin official considering participating in a coverup led by the President.

    Treat her equally.
    Former SDNY federal prosecutor Mimi Roach adds of the Hicks’s “existential question” of compliance: “Prosecutors tell witness every day to comply with subpoenas & testify even if they’re worried about retribution from gangs, organized crime & in their professions, because it’s the law & the right thing to do. McGhan, Hicks, Donaldson need to do the same.”
    posted by Doktor Zed at 2:54 AM on May 27, 2019 [40 favorites]


    Trump's tweets are losing their potency

    Slate posted this on Facebook captioned "the new normal is very weird":

    The President Implied the Former Director of the FBI Should Be Executed for Treason and Everyone Was Like, “Ha Ha, Classic”
    On Thursday in the Oval Office, an NBC reporter noted to Trump that treason is punishable by death and then asked him who he felt, specifically, had committed treason in the course of the Russia investigation. The president responded by naming four FBI officials—former director James Comey, former deputy director Andrew McCabe, and former agents Peter Strzok and Lisa Page—who’d been involved in the case.

    And that was it! Twitter was briefly incredulous, a few articles were posted, but for the most part it was not considered really newsworthy that the POTUS had casually tossed out the idea of executing the FBI’s previous leadership team. Democratic leaders in the House and Senate didn’t comment on it; it’s not even mentioned right now on the New York Times homepage; you have to scroll way down to the bottom of CNN.com to find it.
    My reaction thank goodness, finally!

    He feeds off our outrage. He loves the attention we give him when he says horrible things and then a hundred news orgs amplify and repeat it for him because they feel obligated to report on it. We we finally figuring Trump out? Can we just... dismiss him?
    posted by OnceUponATime at 4:47 AM on May 27, 2019 [22 favorites]


    Can we have a rule that every headline about Trump in a legit news source needs to contain the phrase "losing … potency"? Because if he gets it, it will drive him crazy.
    posted by Cocodrillo at 4:54 AM on May 27, 2019 [21 favorites]


    Can we just... dismiss him?

    Much as I wish otherwise, as long as Trump's occupying the Oval Office, no, never completely. His constant ranting about "treason", for instance, risks rendering the term into background noise and impedes rationally discussing his fundamentally disloyal encouragement of Russian electoral interference. (He also instinctively tests which of hyperbolic bullshit receives the greatest reaction.) Moreover, it feeds into not only his base's unquenchable rage, but also his political loyalists' rhetorical strategies.

    Yesterday on ABC's This Week, Liz Cheney said: "We had people that are at the highest levels of our law enforcement […] saying that they were going to stop a duly elected president of the United States. […] That sounds an awful lot like a coup and it could well be treason." (w/video) ABC, of course, did a crap job framing the conversation and then let her statement go insufficiently challenged. Naturally, the rightwing noise machine has picked up her statement and is amplifying it for all its worth. It's like watching gangrene spread.

    Lakoff's "truth sandwich" tactic is a better way of covering Trump than either simply reiterating his inflammatory assertions and lies or merely ignoring them: "Journalists could engage in what I’ve called “truth sandwiches,” which means that you first tell the truth; then you point out what the lie is and how it diverges from the truth. Then you repeat the truth and tell the consequences of the difference between the truth and the lie. If the media did this consistently, it would matter. It would be more difficult for Trump to lie."
    posted by Doktor Zed at 5:43 AM on May 27, 2019 [51 favorites]


    Trump HUD Official: ‘I Honestly Don’t Care’ If I’m Breaking Federal Law (Huffington Post) The quote isn't some kind of stretch between "Official says they don't care about X" and "X happens to be illegal but official would prefer you don't know that". Nope, it's 100% her intended message.

    Lynne Patton of Housing and Urban Development posted on Facebook regarding a tweet she had made before: “It may be a Hatch Act violation. It may not be. Either way, I honestly don't care anymore.” She's been following up on twitter with gif after gif to convey this attitude; presumably there's a legal defense available to people who are, y'know, just trolling to rile up the libs.
    posted by InTheYear2017 at 8:58 AM on May 27, 2019 [23 favorites]


    I'm curious if Trump's handlers deliberately arranged for him to be out of the country on Memorial Day to keep him from criticizing soldiers for dying in a Memorial Day speech.
    posted by srboisvert at 9:12 AM on May 27, 2019 [17 favorites]


    Trump’s allies insist he is winning in feud with Pelosi. Her backers say she showed up the president.
    While Pelosi has employed a strategy of trying to make Trump appear childish, she actually has told colleagues she thinks he’s unworthy of such a comparison. When a Democrat compared Trump to a fifth-grader, Pelosi responded that such a remark was an insult to fifth-graders, according to an individual who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the conversation.

    “Don’t say that. Children are wonderful!” said the mother of five and grandmother of nine.
    posted by kirkaracha at 11:55 AM on May 27, 2019 [12 favorites]




    A legal defense isn’t necessary for crimes which the regime would never prosecute in the first place. Under Barr’s watch, no Republican need fear violating the Hatch Act.

    Mm, sure, but it gets riskier as regime change approaches (if you think it might change).

    U.S. Office of Special Counsel:
    Q:Is there a statute of limitations or a deadline for filing a PPP complaint at OSC?

    A:No. You can file a PPP complaint at any time. However, it may be difficult to investigate a complaint if there has been a significant lapse of time between an alleged violation and an employee's decision to file with OSC. Witnesses may have left federal employment or may not remember events with clarity, and documents may have been destroyed as part of normal records management procedures. Thus, we encourage you to file your complaint promptly. ​​​
    posted by ctmf at 12:22 PM on May 27, 2019 [1 favorite]


    Unfortunately, the OSC prosecutes cases with the MSPB, which doesn't have a quorum. All 3 members are awaiting Senate confirmation.
    posted by ctmf at 12:35 PM on May 27, 2019 [4 favorites]


    Rep. Hunter on War-Crimes Suspect Gallagher: I’m Guilty of Same ‘Bad Thing’:
    Rep. Duncan D. Hunter told a Ramona audience Saturday that he’s guilty of the same behavior that led to Navy SEAL Chief Eddie Gallagher being charged with war crimes — posing with a dead combatant.

    “Eddie did one bad thing that I’m guilty of too — taking a picture of the body and saying something stupid,” Hunter said at a border-issues forum with his father, former Rep. Duncan L. Hunter.

    The younger Hunter, a Marine veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, said he’s taken pictures “just like that when I was overseas” — although he didn’t text or post images to social media. “But a lot of my peers … have done the exact same thing.”
    The Defense Department's Law of War Manual says, "The respectful treatment of the dead is one of the oldest rules in the law of war," and explicitly prohibits posing for photographs with dead bodies. Happy Memorial Day!
    posted by peeedro at 3:23 PM on May 27, 2019 [42 favorites]


    Did Duncan Hunter stab the body in the neck three times and once in the chest while they were still alive?
    posted by rhizome at 3:33 PM on May 27, 2019 [6 favorites]


    Gallagher is also accused of sniping a random teenage girl in the stomach, which I guess doesn't count as malfeasance in Hunter's eyes.
    posted by Rust Moranis at 3:39 PM on May 27, 2019 [10 favorites]


    Now, Japan also did give Trump his own special red platform to stand on, which does appear to be uniquely calculated to cater to his ego.

    And now his ego appears to be a global security risk: Trump finds himself increasingly alone on North Korea (Politico)
    [...] the president on Monday, at the end of his short trip to Japan to meet the new emperor, insisted that he was not “personally” bothered by the tests and was “very happy with the way it’s going” in his efforts to engage North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. Notably, Trump said he did not think the tests violated the U.N. resolution. “My people think it could have been a violation,” Trump said. “I view it differently.”

    It was a striking break that revealed Trump’s desire to retain a talking point he has long used at rallies — that he’s responsible for pulling America back from the brink of nuclear war with North Korea. It’s a stance that has been increasingly difficult to maintain as talks between Washington and Pyongyang appear to have broken down after two summits between the two countries’ leaders. It's also that Trump sees the issue almost singularly through the lens of his personal relationship with Kim.

    [...] On Monday, Abe praised Trump for breaking “the shell of distrust” with Kim and announced that he, too, would hold a summit with the North Korean leader. But even after saying the U.S. and Japan were “the same” on North Korea, he reiterated that North Korea had violated a U.N. Security Council resolution. “It is of great regret,” he said.

    The divergent remarks followed a Trump tweet on Sunday that appeared to brush back his own national security adviser. “North Korea fired off some small weapons, which disturbed some of my people, and others, but not me. I have confidence that Chairman Kim will keep his promise to me,” the tweet read. The tweet came shortly after Bolton had confirmed for the first time that the administration had “no doubt” the missile tests violated international resolutions.
    posted by Little Dawn at 4:18 PM on May 27, 2019 [5 favorites]


    Disguising Hate: How Radical Evangelicals Spread Anti-Islamic Vitriol on Facebook (Alex Kasprak, Snopes)
    A coordinated network of evangelical Christian Facebook pages publishing overtly Islamophobic, conspiratorial content paints extreme, divisive right-wing rhetoric as having broad American support but is actually tied to one individual, a Snopes investigation reveals.

    These pages claim that Islam is “not a religion,” that Muslims are violent and duplicitous, and that Islamic refugee resettlement is “cultural destruction and subjugation.” Just hours after the April 2019 Notre Dame spire collapse in a catastrophic fire, this network went into overdrive sowing doubt about the possible role Muslims had in its collapse. Multiple pages within this network have stated that their purpose is “message boosting & targeting.” Ten of the pages within the network explicitly support U.S. President Donald Trump in their titles and belong to an umbrella organization that “[speaks] up for a Trump-Pence agenda.” A post shared on several of those pages implores readers to “like our page and let’s roll 2020!”

    These pages, however, are steeped in fantastical notions of “globalist” conspiracies linking Islam, Socialism, and multi-billionaire philanthropist and Democratic Party supporter George Soros to the decline of Western civilization. Some of these pages also claim that survivors of the Parkland High School massacre in the U.S., for instance, are on a Soros-funded “Leftist-Islamist payroll.” In at least one case, these pages have either received financial support from, or been exploited by, a high-profile GOP donor who served as a fundraiser and campaign board member for 2016 GOP presidential candidate Ben Carson.

    Though the actual authorship of the posts within these pages is opaque, their titles imply diverse representation from a broad swath of American demographic groups, including “Jews & Christians for America” and “Blacks for Trump.” In reality, however, the pages in this network are all connected to evangelical activist Kelly Monroe Kullberg. But she is neither black nor Jewish, and her views appear to represent an extreme subset of the broader evangelical movement in America. Though we do not know for sure what individual or individuals created each of these pages, or if Kullberg, her family members, or various “interns” write their posts, all of them appear now to be tied financially to Kullberg or to organizations she has created. As far as we have been able to ascertain, Facebook has no problem with the existence of this coordinated network, which we will refer to here as the “Kullberg network.”
    posted by Johnny Wallflower at 4:44 PM on May 27, 2019 [23 favorites]


    Fun fact about researching Nazis on Facebook?

    Facebook sorts "like" pages according to when something was liked.

    So you can literally look and see their progression from liking Fox to liking Breitbart/@benshapiro to liking pages associated with nazis & the extreme right.


    An excellent thread detailing one person going through the Fox News->Brietbart-> Neo Nazi pipeline, it’s super common, very documentable, and exactly the point of these outlets. Facebook is a radicalization machine and the neonazis know it. That’s how a center right vet with a let’s all jog together attitude turns into a Qanon huffing white nationalist. It takes about three years.

    Also this:
    “White folks, as @baazilla said in their comment, pay attention to your white friends & fam.

    If someone is slipping, do some of the least glamorous but most useful work allies can do: set them straight.

    You don't want them in this rabbithole.

    It is very deep and very dark.”

    What can you do about it?
    posted by The Whelk at 5:06 PM on May 27, 2019 [63 favorites]


    Barak Ravid, of Israel's Channel 13 news, writing in Axios: Trump Publicly Intervenes In Israeli Crisis to Help Netanyahu

    "In an unprecedented move, President Trump publicly intervened in the domestic political crisis in Israel and backed Prime Minister Netanyahu's efforts to form a coalition 48 hours before the deadline for putting together a new government. […] Netanyahu thanked Trump for his tweet and said: "Trump is right – we still have a lot of work to do." Netanyahu's comments made the impression he asked Trump to tweet in order to use it in his domestic political crisis."

    Haaretz: Trump Tweet About Netanyahu's Coalition Negotiations 'Unprecedented,' Former Officials Say
    posted by Doktor Zed at 6:30 PM on May 27, 2019 [6 favorites]


    Senate GOP Vows to Quickly Quash Impeachment (TheHill)

    “GOP senators say that if the House passes articles of impeachment against President Trump they will quickly quash them in the Senate, where Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has broad authority to set the parameters of a trial,” The Hill reports.

    “While McConnell is required to act on articles of impeachment, which require 67 votes — or a two-thirds majority — to convict the president, he and his Republican colleagues have the power to set the rules and ensure the briefest of trials.”


    Well shucks I guess we just pack it in for a couple of years eh.

    OR expand the inquiry to McConnell.
    posted by petebest at 6:30 PM on May 27, 2019 [35 favorites]


    Republican colleagues have the power to set the rules and ensure the briefest of trials.

    Interesting. Usually one would mount a strong rebuttal defense, or even try to change or spin the narrative, but not this time and that's telling. It suggests they think the charges are too legit to spin and completely toxic.
    posted by xammerboy at 6:56 PM on May 27, 2019 [26 favorites]


    It suggests they think the charges are too legit to spin and completely toxic.

    Exactly. This is just another attempt to dissuade Ds from opening an impeachment inquiry because they know the evidence will be damning and they’re trying to head off ever having to hold that trial and make that vote.
    posted by chris24 at 7:01 PM on May 27, 2019 [17 favorites]


    OR expand the inquiry to McConnell.

    I really wish we could indict Mitch for 2016 election interference somehow. He may have been playing by the rules, but was still working to undermine them. Some media framed his hostage-taking of the open SCOTUS seat as a gamble on the election, but looking back, I think it was actually more interference on the election, used to drive up GOP turnout.

    I guess as a defense he would say the open seat drives up turnout on both sides, but entire swaths of the GOP are social conservative single issue voters who want SCOTUS to overturn Roe- those were the folks "holding their nose" while voting for Trump, who would have probably stayed home if the SCOTUS seat were off the table. The left were already fairly supportive of Clinton, and the SCOTUS seat was much less of a factor on election day.

    It may be easier to investigate McConnell's ties to oligarch donors and his refusal to back Obama's Russia warnings, but I think the SCOTUS seat move was much more damaging.
    posted by p3t3 at 7:25 PM on May 27, 2019 [13 favorites]


    Texas Democrats have successfully blocked the nomination of David Whitley as Secretary of State, leading to his resignation. While holding the role in an acting capacity, Whitley spearheaded the botched voter purge initiative.
    posted by Chrysostom at 7:50 PM on May 27, 2019 [39 favorites]


    From the "there are no secondthird acts in American life" department: Candace Owens, formerly best known for starting an anti-bullying initiative which was hated on all sides until she became a Useful Idiot for Gamergate, and more recently having failed upwards into the leadership of the Young FascistsTurning Point USA, where she praised Hitler, resigned that position several weeks ago citing, among other upcoming projects, an exciting new opportunity to start a hashtag campaign to get black people to leave the Democratic Party.
    posted by jackbishop at 8:09 PM on May 27, 2019 [2 favorites]


    This is more than a bit disturbing. It's a clearcut violation of UCMJ done wholesale.

    @vmsalama
    Airmen onboard the USS WASP wearing patches on their jumpsuits that read “Make Aircrew Great Again.” The patches include an image in the center in the likeness of President Trump.
    [images]
    posted by scalefree at 9:36 PM on May 27, 2019 [23 favorites]


    Maciej Ceglowski (aka @pinboard), who spearheaded a ton of small-donor fundraising for progressive candidates in 2018, is also a cyber-security geek. Here he passes on some of what he learned trying to secure congressional campaigns.
    Practical campaign security is a wood chipper for your hopes and dreams. It sits at the intersection of 19 kinds of status quo, each more odious than the last. You have to accept the fact that computers are broken, software is terrible, campaign finance is evil, the political parties are inept, the DCCC exists, politics is full of parasites, tech companies are run by arrogant man-children, and so on.
    posted by suelac at 9:42 PM on May 27, 2019 [34 favorites]


    “GOP senators say that if the House passes articles of impeachment against President Trump they will quickly quash them..."

    Isn't that straight-up admission they're not interested in hearing evidence or seeking justice, they're pre-excusing him no matter what?
    posted by ctmf at 10:05 PM on May 27, 2019 [12 favorites]


    I mean, can you impeach a senator for willful and brazen dereliction of duty?
    posted by ctmf at 10:06 PM on May 27, 2019 [4 favorites]


    Is that rhetorical? No, you can't. Or rather it's called the next election.

    Note that virtually all of the Republican senators in question will easily win re-election.
    posted by Justinian at 10:10 PM on May 27, 2019 [1 favorite]


    I mean, can you impeach a senator for willful and brazen dereliction of duty?

    Congressmen cannot be impeached but they can be expelled by a 2/3 vote of their members. The last expulsion from the Senate was during the Civil War for supporting the rebellion. The last from the House was Rep. Jim Traficant of Ohio in 2002 for a variety of financial crimes including bribery & tax evasion.
    posted by scalefree at 10:27 PM on May 27, 2019 [8 favorites]


    Maciej Ceglowski (aka @pinboard), who spearheaded a ton of small-donor fundraising for progressive candidates in 2018, is also a cyber-security geek. Here he passes on some of what he learned trying to secure congressional campaigns.

    Some friends of mine were involved in this. They did what they could.
    posted by scalefree at 10:44 PM on May 27, 2019 [10 favorites]


    I mean, can you impeach a senator for willful and brazen dereliction of duty?

    Probably not, but it's been done and was actually the very first impeachment (for planning to invade Florida). The Senate wound up expelling William Blount, then conducted the impeachment trial after. They decided he wasn't an impeachable official, though whether that was because he was a Senator or whether that was because he had already been expelled wasn't made clear. Long story short, technically yes, but probably no.

    Anyway, expelling a member takes the same 2/3 majority as convicting someone in an impeachment trial, and doesn't make the Senate feel like they're taking orders from the House, so is the more likely (not actually likely at all) scenario.
    posted by Huffy Puffy at 5:19 AM on May 28, 2019 [3 favorites]


    Wow that article on campaign security was like a hilarious punch in the face.

    Any training that involves email should budget time for people to go through password recovery, because someone will inevitably forget their password. Also some handy advice to phishers: people who can't remember their Gmail password will sequentially try all of their passwords until one works.

    *massages eyebrows*
    posted by petebest at 5:27 AM on May 28, 2019 [16 favorites]


    More:

    Attempts to work with the DNC and DCCC. The national party was so unhelpful that in the end I had to treat them as part of the threat model. Particularly vexing was their addiction to sending email attachments.

    To cite one small example: on August 22, the DNC had a phishing scare, where they mistook a vulnerability assessment for an actual attack. The next day, DCCC Executive Director Dan Sena sent an email to all campaings with the subject line "Reminder About Cybersecurity". That email included three attachments, including a file evocatively titled "2—20170712—Falcon.docx".

    I can't think of a more efficient way to compromise every campaign in the country than blasting security alerts with dodgy attachments from the DCCC email account.

    The DCCC sent out attachments constantly. It drove me nuts. And I was never able to get a meeting with anyone there to slug it out.

    posted by petebest at 5:33 AM on May 28, 2019 [15 favorites]


    Isn't that straight-up admission they're not interested in hearing evidence or seeking justice, they're pre-excusing him no matter what?

    Yes. So? What can you do about it? Vote out Mitch McConnell? Nope, that's not possible, and he knows it. He knows you know he knows it, and it makes him happy every single night when he goes to bed. McConnell realized there's no check on the Senate other than "norms", and all of those are dead now. Only power, and he has all of it.

    The Senate is absolutely unfixable.
    posted by T.D. Strange at 5:39 AM on May 28, 2019 [22 favorites]


    Democrats need to get past impeachment jitters. It's not 1998 and Trump is no Clinton. (Kevin Kruse, USA Today
    As House Democrats consider impeaching President Donald Trump, some have looked to the 1998 impeachment of President Bill Clinton for guidance. In truth, however, there are few similarities between the two cases.
    Twitter's favorite historian tries to talk some sense into the Dems.
    posted by Johnny Wallflower at 5:48 AM on May 28, 2019 [24 favorites]


    From Perry Bacon at FiveThirtyEight: What Republicans and Democrats are doing in the states where they have total power:
    The 14 states — which are home to about 112 million people — that are totally controlled by Democrats are pushing forward an agenda of, among other things, hiking the minimum wage significantly above the federal $7.25 per hour, banning (for minors) therapy that is designed to “convert” gay and lesbian people from homosexuality (this treatment is widely condemned by medical experts) and mandating that the Electoral College votes in states go to whichever candidate wins the national popular vote...

    ...The 22 GOP-totally-controlled states — which are home to about 136 million people — have tried to eliminate restrictions on gun rights, stop cities from becoming “sanctuaries” for undocumented immigrants and weaken the Boycott, Divest and Sanctions movement that targets the Israeli government for how it treats Palestinians.
    Want nice things: Get out and vote in your local and state elections. Vote in a Democratic trifecta. Watch your state bloom!
    posted by Rosie M. Banks at 6:19 AM on May 28, 2019 [24 favorites]


    Want nice things: Get out and vote in your local and state elections. Vote in a Democratic trifecta. Watch your state bloom!

    Unfortunately even this isn't enough! In Oregon, where Democrats have a super-majority in the state senate, Republicans decided that voting on a corporate tax bill wasn't something they wanted to do and literally went into hiding so they could prevent a quorum and stop any votes from happening. Democratic leaders finally gave in and in return for holding a vote on that funding bill they agreed to table a gun control bill and a mandatory vaccination bill. If these assholes decide they don't want to play ball, there's really nothing we can do about it.
    posted by OverlappingElvis at 7:04 AM on May 28, 2019 [13 favorites]


    If these assholes decide they don't want to play ball, there's really nothing we can do about it.

    If the quorum rule is not in the Constitution and only in the Oregon legislature's self-governing rules...fucking change it and pass your agenda anyway. Play the same game.
    posted by T.D. Strange at 7:09 AM on May 28, 2019 [33 favorites]


    Mueller drew up obstruction indictment against Trump, Michael Wolff book claims
    A new book from Fire and Fury author Michael Wolff says special counsel Robert Mueller drew up a three-count obstruction of justice indictment against Donald Trump before deciding to shelve it – an explosive claim which a spokesman for Mueller flatly denied.

    The stunning revelation is contained in Siege: Trump Under Fire, which will be published a week from now, on 4 June. It is the sequel to Fire and Fury, Wolff’s bestseller on the first year of the Trump presidency which was published in 2018.

    The Guardian obtained a copy of Siege and viewed the documents concerned.

    In an author’s note, Wolff states that his findings on the Mueller investigation are “based on internal documents given to me by sources close to the Office of the Special Counsel”.

    But Peter Carr, a spokesman for Mueller, told the Guardian: “The documents that you’ve described do not exist.”

    Questions over the provenance of the documents will only add to controversy and debate around the launch of Wolff’s eagerly awaited new book.
    posted by kirkaracha at 7:10 AM on May 28, 2019 [6 favorites]


    If the quorum rule is not in the Constitution and only in the Oregon legislature's self-governing rules...fucking change it and pass your agenda anyway. Play the same game.

    It is in the rules, but unfortunately those rules require a quorum to vote to change them.
    posted by OverlappingElvis at 7:15 AM on May 28, 2019 [1 favorite]


    Quorums are always in the constitution, otherwise they’re meaningless:
    Section 12. Quorum; failure to effect organization. Two thirds of each house shall constitute a quorum to do business, but a smaller number may meet; adjourn from day to day, and compel the attendance of absent members. A quorum being in attendance, if either house fail to effect an organization within the first five days thereafter, the members of the house so failing shall be entitled to no compensation from the end of the said five days until an organization shall have been effected.—”
    posted by Huffy Puffy at 7:24 AM on May 28, 2019 [4 favorites]


    and compel the attendance of absent members

    There's your answer.
    posted by Faint of Butt at 7:27 AM on May 28, 2019 [6 favorites]


    Kushner in Mideast to drum up support for peace plan (AP) "The Palestinians have already rejected the peace plan and have urged Arab nations to avoid the conference." Russia and China to boycott U.S.-led Bahrain conference (Axios) "The Russian and Chinese decision is a big achievement for the Palestinians, although it is mainly driven by Russian and Chinese tensions with the U.S. rather than by Palestinian interests. [...] "The Chinese ambassador to the Palestinians said today in Ramallah that there is a bilateral Russian-Chinese agreement not to participate in the Bahrain conference. He stressed China supports the establishment of an independent state of Palestine within the 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as its capital." Palestinian president says Trump peace plan "will go to hell" (Axios) "Abbas's harsh language against the peace plan and his lobbying against the Bahrain conference show the deep crisis in U.S.-Palestinian relations, which are probably broken beyond repair as long as Trump or Abbas are in office."
    posted by Little Dawn at 7:29 AM on May 28, 2019 [3 favorites]


    There's your answer.

    Just to be clear, the lawmakers who went into hiding were presumed to be out of state or on tribal land where Oregon State Police do not have jurisdiction.
    posted by OverlappingElvis at 7:29 AM on May 28, 2019 [3 favorites]




    A new book from Fire and Fury author Michael Wolff says special counsel Robert Mueller drew up a three-count obstruction of justice indictment against Donald Trump before deciding to shelve it – an explosive claim which a spokesman for Mueller flatly denied.

    The stunning revelation is contained in Siege: Trump Under Fire, which will be published a week from now, on 4 June. It is the sequel to Fire and Fury, Wolff’s bestseller on the first year of the Trump presidency which was published in 2018.


    ARGH.

    Wolff's last book had two chapters named after Steve Bannon. The rest of the book was largely told from Bannon's perspective as well.

    In its account of the 2016 campaign, it focused heavily on Trump's incompetence, and was completely dismissive of the role of Russia.

    I came to think of it as Bannon's effort to lay out a defense of Trump, the "too stupid to collude" defense. Anti-Trump people ate it up because it was so unflattering, but it's ultimately an exculpatory argument. (And it's close to the "useful idiot" conclusion that Mueller more or less spelled out in the report, so in some sense it was a successful argument. Though Mueller, of course, considered only whether conduct violated our inadequate and narrowly written election laws, and Bannon's defense is broader, claiming that Trump just had no clue what the Russians were up to in general. This is not true. Trump knew about "Russia and its governments' support" knew who the hackers were, knew what WikiLeaks was going to do, and if none of that is illegal, it is still disloyal to the United States.)

    I fully expect this new book to be more of Bannon's propaganda put into Wolff's mouth, and crafted to be eaten up by the anti-Trump movement in the same way. Let's try NOT to fall for it.
    posted by OnceUponATime at 7:37 AM on May 28, 2019 [8 favorites]


    Texas is calling from the way-back machine. (Also apparently this happens in Indiana all the time.)
    posted by Huffy Puffy at 7:41 AM on May 28, 2019 [5 favorites]


    Let's not forget the Texas Eleven.
    posted by adamg at 7:41 AM on May 28, 2019 [3 favorites]


    Supreme Court won't review abortion law signed by Pence (Politico)
    The Supreme Court Tuesday declined to take up a case challenging an Indiana law barring abortions based on a fetus' sex, race or disability, allowing a lower court's ruling against the law to stand. [...] The 7th Circuit Court of Appeals last year ruled that the law restricting when and why an abortion could be performed, which Vice President Mike Pence signed in 2016 when he was the state's governor, violated the privacy rights of women.
    Supreme Court Sidesteps Abortion Question in Ruling on Indiana Law (NYT)
    The Supreme Court on Tuesday upheld an Indiana state law that required fetal remains to buried or cremated. But it sidestepped a larger abortion question, turning down an effort to reinstate the law’s strict abortion limits. The court’s decision, issued without briefing on the merits or oral arguments, was unsigned and just three pages long. It stressed that its decision upholding the part of the law concerning the disposal of fetal remains “does not implicate our cases applying the undue burden test to abortion regulations.” Indiana, the court said, has a “legitimate interest in proper disposal of fetal remains,” quoting an earlier decision. [...]

    In 1992, in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the Supreme Court ruled that states may not prohibit abortions or place substantial obstacles in the way of women seeking them before fetal viability. Judge William J. Bauer, writing for the majority on the Seventh Circuit, said that ruling doomed the law’s restrictions. “These provisions are far greater than a substantial obstacle; they are absolute prohibitions on abortions prior to viability, which the Supreme Court has clearly held cannot be imposed by the state,” he wrote in the decision issued by the appeals panel.
    posted by Little Dawn at 7:41 AM on May 28, 2019 [5 favorites]


    Texas dems also holed up in OK back in 2003 to avoid a vote. There are other examples.
    (And conversely in some states the Governor can’t be gone too long if the opposition holds the legislature and the Lieutenant Governorship.)

    This is an unfortunately traditional form of political fuckery but not especially Republican.
    posted by snuffleupagus at 7:42 AM on May 28, 2019 [14 favorites]


    Take it from a Marxist roofer, you never hear about the negative consequences of hoarded wealth, why can we question everything but the economy? ABOLISH WEALTH by Means TV
    posted by The Whelk at 8:03 AM on May 28, 2019 [11 favorites]


    Hot on the heels of Missouri's 8-week abortion ban:

    Missouri's last abortion clinic says it may lose its license this week (CBS)
    The last remaining abortion clinic in Missouri says it expects to be shut down this week, effectively ending legal abortion in the state.

    In a statement to be released later Tuesday, Planned Parenthood said Missouri's health department is "refusing to renew" its annual license to provide abortion in the state. If the license is not renewed by May 31, Missouri would become the first state without a functioning abortion clinic since 1973 when Roe v. Wade was decided.
    posted by bassooner at 8:23 AM on May 28, 2019 [17 favorites]


    The very stable genius is redesigning aircraft carriers now.
    posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 8:55 AM on May 28, 2019 [3 favorites]


    Today’s abortion decision involves an atrocious concurrence from Thomas where he basically regurgitates every conservative Facebook rant about Margaret Sanger founding Planned Parenthood because she wanted to selectively abort black children, so that’s delightful.
    posted by Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish at 8:57 AM on May 28, 2019 [12 favorites]


    Trump Administration Hardens Its Attack on Climate Science (Coral Davenport and Mark Landler, NYTimes)
    ... after two years spent unraveling the policies of his predecessors, Mr. Trump and his political appointees are launching a new assault.

    ... in what could be Mr. Trump’s most consequential action yet, his administration will seek to undermine the very science on which climate change policy rests.
    The Trump administration takes climate denial to new heights (Paul Waldman, WaPo OpEd)
    So while the Trump administration is doing everything it can to prevent any reduction in carbon emissions, it is simultaneously trying to stop government scientists from explaining what will happen if we don’t reduce carbon emissions. That is simply mind-boggling.
    Waldman suggests this is a consequence of Trump attracting staffers who are either corrupt and/or extremist idealogues.
    posted by ZeusHumms at 9:11 AM on May 28, 2019 [20 favorites]


    Amid censorship fears, Trump campaign 'checking out' alternative social network (Politico)

    To my surprise, it's not Gab.
    Parler is the french word for “Speak,” and is pronounced “par-lay.” But as its user base has grown, [founder John] Matze has seen that Americans tend to pronounce the word phonetically, as in “parlor,” evoking the room in a house where friends might sit down to chat.

    ....

    Matze said the site had about 100,000 users in total. Twitter, by comparison, claims 326 million.

    ....

    Even by the standards of free speech Twitter alternatives, Parler is small. Another platform, Gab, founded in 2016, claims a million users. “Parler is a ghost town,” said Gab’s founder Andrew Torba.
    posted by box at 9:23 AM on May 28, 2019 [3 favorites]




    Only a slight paraphrase.

    @atrupar
    REPORTER: Does it give you pause to side w/a brutal dictator instead of w/a fellow American, former VP Biden?
    TRUMP: Well, Kim Jong Un made a statement that Biden is a low IQ individual. He probably is. I think I agree with him on that.
    R: So no?
    T: continues bashing Biden
    [video]
    posted by scalefree at 9:29 AM on May 28, 2019 [17 favorites]


    So while the Trump administration is doing everything it can to prevent any reduction in carbon emissions, it is simultaneously trying to stop government scientists from explaining what will happen if we don’t reduce carbon emissions.


    In Europe, the growing anger at lack of progress on climate change has triggered the sort of middle-class political activism that can put serious pressure on a system. If I were a politician looking to energise new tranches of voter demographics to the point that they actually do something, I'd making a very great deal of noise about this...
    posted by Devonian at 9:30 AM on May 28, 2019 [23 favorites]


    Who had "Two minute hate for enemies of the State at baseball games" on their prediction cards? Step up, step up...

    WaPo: Ocasio-Cortez featured among America’s ‘enemies of freedom’ in baseball team’s Memorial Day video
    Among the “enemies of freedom” portrayed in a Memorial Day tribute video at a minor league baseball game: North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, former Cuban president Fidel Castro and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.). The video, shown between games of the Fresno Grizzlies’ doubleheader Monday, displayed President Ronald Reagan’s first inaugural address on top of patriotic photos and images honoring veterans. ... “As for the enemies of freedom, those who are potential adversaries, they will be reminded that peace is the highest aspiration of the American people,” Reagan said as a photo of Ocasio-Cortez flashed across the screen between photos of dictators.
    Response by @FresnoGrizzlies (in the form of an image embedded in a tweet - but this is literally minor league, so) blames "misleading and offensive editing" on "a pre-produced video from outside our front office".

    At least they followed up with an actual apology:
    @FresnoGrizzlies:We're embarrassed we allowed this video to play without seeing it in its entirety first. We unconditionally apologize to Rep. Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) in addition to our fans, community and those we hurt. It was a mistake and we will ensure that nothing like it ever happens again.

    But clearly, whoever produced it thought it was just fine for a minor league baseball game. The creeping normalization of Fascism continues.
    posted by RedOrGreen at 9:45 AM on May 28, 2019 [55 favorites]


    If you watch that video, the "enemies of freedom" shown are antifa, Kim Jong-un, AOC, Fidel Castro, antifa, and antifa. Subtle.
    posted by peeedro at 9:48 AM on May 28, 2019 [21 favorites]


    Surely not in Devin Nunes home district . . . [looks up an actual map and it appears to not be in CA-22]
    posted by Exceptional_Hubris at 9:53 AM on May 28, 2019 [1 favorite]


    MO has a governor's race in 2020. Mike Parson was not elected. He is only governor because of Eric Greitens dick. MO Dems need to get it together and get a viable candidate against him.
    posted by fluttering hellfire at 10:14 AM on May 28, 2019 [6 favorites]


    peeedro: If you watch that video yt , the "enemies of freedom" shown are antifa, Kim Jong-un, AOC, Fidel Castro, antifa, and antifa. Subtle.

    Since when is Kim Jong-un an enemy of freedom? I have it on good authority that he is, quote, "honorable", that he provides prisoners such as Otto Warmbier with "excellent" treatment, and of course (for all you Freedom Caucus folks who only care about markets) that he certainly isn't interfering with the "great economic potential" of North Korea. Just a swell guy all around, like Erdogan or bin Salman or Putin. But I don't remember who said all that, so it was probably antifa.
    posted by InTheYear2017 at 10:16 AM on May 28, 2019 [12 favorites]


    Since when is Kim Jong-un an enemy of freedom?

    Hey, you can't expect Crazy Video Editor Guy to keep up with every crazy thing that POTUS says.
    posted by diogenes at 10:24 AM on May 28, 2019 [2 favorites]


    WSJ: Transportation Secretary Still Owns Stock She Pledged to Divest—Elaine Chao’s shares in Vulcan Materials don’t pose conflict, official says
    Shares of the company, Vulcan Materials Co. , the country’s largest supplier of the crushed stone, sand and gravel used in road-paving and building, have risen nearly 13% since April 2018, the month in which Ms. Chao said she would be cashed out of the stock, netting her a more than $40,000 gain, corporate and government filings show.

    The shares, now worth nearly $400,000, were paid out to Ms. Chao in April 2018, as deferred compensation for the roughly two years she served on Vulcan’s board of directors before being confirmed as secretary of transportation, the company said.

    Ms. Chao’s 2017 ethics agreement, which she signed before her confirmation, said she would receive a cash payout in April 2018 in exchange for the deferred share units she earned while serving on the board, effectively severing her financial ties to the company.
    Chao, disqualified herself from participating in matters involving Vulcan rather than selling her stock, as past DOT secretaries have done.
    posted by Doktor Zed at 10:33 AM on May 28, 2019 [17 favorites]


    Attempts to work with the DNC and DCCC. The national party was so unhelpful that in the end I had to treat them as part of the threat model. Particularly vexing was their addiction to sending email attachments.

    We're doing speech therapy for our youngest and it involves the County. They use this Microsoft 365 thing and when they sent their initial assessment they did NOT send it as an attachment because security! Woo! Instead they sent an email that looked like this:
    This message was sent from Arlington County Government’s Secure Email Messaging System in order to protect the privacy of your information. For best results please download the message.html file and open from the downloaded location. For assistance with opening the Encrypted Email please contact the agency that sent the encrypted message to you. Note: Mobile devices such as iPhone and Android devices are not recommended when trying to open an encrypted email.
    To view your message
    Save and open the attachment (message.html), and follow the instructions.
    Sign in using the following email address: [my email address redacted]
    To which my reaction was you have got to be fucking kidding me. Here's an attachment, go open it, really? Having worked in security and being a developer I decided I was competent to open the file in a text editor and see whether it seemed benign, but what does the average person getting county services know to do?

    Once you open it you get a choice of log in (which you need a Microsoft account or a school/work Office 365 account for) or one-time password which expires in 15 minutes... that they email you.

    This sorta kinda works for certain risk mitigation, but at the cost of asking you to open an attachment then it just emails you this code the same way they emailed you the attachment. Meaning they could have just emailed you something, for all intents and purposes, without encouraging risky computing hygene. You get this expiring code thing but if someone has penetrated your email account they get to download the document and keep it.

    The state of my industry it super depressing.
    posted by phearlez at 10:46 AM on May 28, 2019 [10 favorites]


    Some potential good news on the abortion front. It looks like the worse the restrictions get- the more the public supports abortion rights.
    posted by Homo neanderthalensis at 10:49 AM on May 28, 2019 [10 favorites]


    > Missouri's last abortion clinic says it may lose its license this week (CBS)
    Planned Parenthood filed a lawsuit requesting a restraining order against the state, hoping to restore the license and avoid service disruption. A circuit court judge will hear arguments on Wednesday.
    A lack of clinics is an "undue burden," so the outlook for victory in court is as good as it can be, especially given the recent Supreme Court court ruling on the Indiana abortion law. It may bear repeating that lawyers and reproductive justice advocates are trying to get the word out that presenting the news as if there is not active resistance immediately happening to challenge and stop these attempts to restrict access to abortion creates a risk of harming women who lack the privilege to understand the current status of the law. We need the context now more than ever, but it doesn't mean that our rights are not in grave danger.
    posted by Little Dawn at 10:55 AM on May 28, 2019 [17 favorites]




    WSJ: Transportation Secretary Still Owns Stock She Pledged to Divest—Elaine Chao’s shares in Vulcan Materials don’t pose conflict, official says

    Dear Congress: Start investigating Mitch and his family (Chao is his wife). He'll return the favor when he can, so don't let professional courtesy stop you.
    posted by benzenedream at 11:17 AM on May 28, 2019 [26 favorites]


    Supreme Court won't hear case on transgender school bathroom policy (Politico)
    The Supreme Court's decision leaves standing the U.S. 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals unanimous ruling last year that the Pennsylvania school district can continue allowing transgender students to use bathrooms that align with their gender identity. [...]

    The ACLU tweeted: “Our client Aidan was accepted as the boy he is — this should be every student’s experience. This is a victory for trans students and educators nationwide."
    posted by Little Dawn at 11:20 AM on May 28, 2019 [14 favorites]


    Chao, disqualified herself from participating in matters involving Vulcan rather than selling her stock, as past DOT secretaries have done.

    I...think recusal is fine? It may not be a perfect firewall, but it's a standard mechanism.
    posted by rhizome at 11:25 AM on May 28, 2019 [3 favorites]


    Except Chao's still violating her original ethics agreement to cash out of her stock in a company that does significant business with the department she oversees. Though Vulcan is demurring about how they handle this, in any other administration she'd be seen as out of compliance and have to resign.
    posted by Doktor Zed at 11:33 AM on May 28, 2019 [12 favorites]


    How was your weekend?
    A private group says it's started building its own border wall using millions donated in GoFundMe campaign (CNN)
    We Build the Wall, a group founded by a triple amputee Air Force veteran, said in a series of social media posts Monday it had started construction on private property in New Mexico. The announcement comes months after the group began its GoFundMe campaign to raise private donations for a border wall, and days after a federal judge blocked President Donald Trump from tapping into billions in Defense Department funds for his administration's wall construction efforts. [...]

    Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, who chairs We Build the Wall's advisory board, told CNN on Monday that the stretch of private wall connects two 21-mile sections of existing fencing. [...]

    CNN was not able to confirm independently that the new wall connects the two portions of border fencing constructed by the federal government.
    This is Brian Kolfage's group, and according to Daniel Garcia Salinas, the director of Museo Casa de Adobe (on the other side of the border), construction was swift: Garcia said that when he had left the museum Friday afternoon there was no fencing there. By Saturday morning, he said, portions of new wall had been constructed. "They moved very quickly," he said. Accounts vary whether this new section is half a mile or a mile in length.

    Also from the article, "The ongoing campaign has raked in more than $20 million in donations on GoFundMe," with over 300,000 contributors. The group is eyeing sites in California and Texas for further wall-building opportunities.

    More details / history of this group at Splinter News: "Right-Wing Grifters Are Building the Border Wall."
    posted by Iris Gambol at 11:35 AM on May 28, 2019 [4 favorites]


    I...think recusal is fine? It may not be a perfect firewall, but it's a standard mechanism.

    The problem is twofold. First, she specifically agreed to divest and then didn't. That's a big problem in itself, as well as an indication that she believes she'll be able to make a substantially larger profit from these holdings than from basically any other investment she could make.

    Second, Vulcan is "the country’s largest supplier of the crushed stone, sand and gravel used in road-paving and building". How can the Secretary of Transportation effectively recuse herself from matters involving road-paving and building, including matters that would reduce the market for road-paving and building (e.g. passenger rail)? She obviously cannot. Either she would be hamstrung in her job or the recusal would be meaningless.
    posted by jedicus at 11:35 AM on May 28, 2019 [36 favorites]


    > Chao, disqualified herself from participating in matters involving Vulcan rather than selling her stock, as past DOT secretaries have done.
    I...think recusal is fine? It may not be a perfect firewall, but it's a standard mechanism.
    Maybe that used to be sufficient (though I even have doubts about that..) but I emphatically do not trust any member of this administration not to make it clear through deniable signalling what decision outcome they expect from the underlings to whom any such decision would be delegated.

    We have already seen enough to know that the current DOJ cannot be trusted to pursue remedies against abuses from insiders and the Senate has signaled a willingness to stonewall oversight as well -- does anybody here seriously think that Mitch McConnell will not act to protect a cabinet secretary who is also his wife? It very much matters that the law be enforced consistently and predictably and that high-ranking office holders be held to the ethical standards that are required of their offices.
    posted by Nerd of the North at 11:38 AM on May 28, 2019 [5 favorites]


    Brian Kolfage is a scam artist, and people are starting to realize that. Check out Where Did Brian Kolfage's $20 Million for a Border Wall Go? and A group raised more than $20 million to ‘build the wall.’ Now its supporters want answers.
    posted by Melismata at 11:42 AM on May 28, 2019 [4 favorites]


    phearlez The state of my industry it super depressing.

    Yeah, I'm down to criticize the DCC, but I think the emphasis on file attachments was a bad choice for the criticism.

    Sadly yes, that weird hard to understand and use garbage you cited is the theoretical industry best practice, and that's a problem going all the way back to the fact that when you get right down to it email sucks, is fundamentally broken, and should have been replaced a **LONG** time ago. For a first effort it was pretty awful, as an ongoing bit of our information infrastructure it's unforgivable.

    Really the objection shouldn't have been "they use attachments" but "they use email".

    People want/need to send messages and files in a convenient and fairly straightforward way. We also need some security on that. Email offers none of that. It fails horribly on file attachments much bigger than 10MB, because it was designed on the idea of people getting tiny, ASCII only, messages that passed through email servers and were purged from those servers the instant the mail got to the end user.

    We have problems with people having "large" inboxes, where "large" means "over 50,000 emails" and again, that's only a problem because our email system was designed around little telegram sized emails that got read once and then deleted. Which is not even slightly the way people actually want to use email. Most people in the corporate world want to use email as a permanent record of their communications.

    This XKCD cartoon was published in 2011, eight years ago, and transferring files is still an essentially impossible task for many/most users.

    So yes, the DCC uses email and attachments. Because they're still stuck with the bad idea of using email at all.

    There are alternatives, the fact that they aren't using them shows either ignorance or laziness. Heck, even just using Skype For Business would be better for the DCC than using email. There's a whole raft of alternative, secure, communication technology out there. And yes, they need a secured, vetted, email account for outside communication, but even DCC volunteers should be getting a secure invite to the DCC com system and be told that all official DCC communications will **ONLY** be through their secured system and not via email.
    posted by sotonohito at 11:43 AM on May 28, 2019 [7 favorites]


    Interesting analysis of the 2018 midterms. As DailyKos puts it:
    Conventional wisdom suggests that the Democrats swept back into control of the House of Representatives by winning the suburbs by pushing turnout from people who don’t usually vote in midterms. A new analysis from Yair Ghitza of Catalist suggests that, indeed, 2018 midterm turnout looked more like the race and age composition of a presidential election, but it also suggests that the biggest overperformances were in rural areas, more so than the suburbs, and that persuading swing voters had a proportionately bigger impact on Democratic gains than turning out irregular voters.
    posted by Chrysostom at 11:54 AM on May 28, 2019 [13 favorites]


    Boy do I not want to turn this into a derail about IT security or email but.. the rules for what is reasonable behavior are different when you know that you are and will continue to be the target of an advanced persistent attacker with nation-state level resources. The myriad ways in which email sucks are kind of beside the point when you have that kind of threat looming over you.
    posted by Nerd of the North at 12:17 PM on May 28, 2019 [13 favorites]


    I...think recusal is fine? It may not be a perfect firewall, but it's a standard mechanism.

    It's really not okay. She's the Transportation Secretary and she's heavily invested in a construction company? It's like being the Secretary of Defense and being heavily invested in Black Water or something. The potential for corruption and bias is overwhelming. It may not be illegal, but that's really to the United States' shame. In a lot of countries, this kind of investment in an industry you oversee is illegal for painfully obvious reasons.
    posted by xammerboy at 12:18 PM on May 28, 2019 [11 favorites]


    This month's game by GOP House is one by one obstruction apparently.
    Disaster aid stalls again in House after second Republican objects WaPost

    "Massie joins Rep. Chip Roy (R-Tex.), who was the lone representative to object Friday when House leaders made their first attempt at passing the measure. Massie and Roy both said they objected because of the impact of the aid in increasing the national debt, and because lawmakers left out the funding President Trump had requested for operations along the U.S.-Mexico border."
    posted by Harry Caul at 12:21 PM on May 28, 2019 [11 favorites]


    It's like being the Secretary of Defense and being heavily invested in Black Water or something

    *cough* Boeing *cough*
    posted by peeedro at 12:24 PM on May 28, 2019 [12 favorites]


    Get excited, because it's time for CRS report R45736: The Economic Effects of the 2017 Tax Revision: Preliminary Observations

    Here's the quick summary of what the tax cuts did:
    • Little, “if any,” effect on GDP
    • Growth is paying for about 5% of the lost revenue from the tax cuts
    • Very little wage growth
    • Skepticism that the tax cuts are even boosting capital investment
    And of course: “While evidence does indicate significant repurchases of shares, either from tax cuts or repatriated revenues, relatively little was directed to paying worker bonuses, which had been announced by some firms...There is no indication of a surge in wages in 2018 either compared to history or relative to GDP growth...ordinary workers had very little growth in wage rates."

    But the instant Democrats are in a position to do any governing, it will be used as the reason for the largest screaming fit over the deficit we've ever heard, so mission accomplished.
    posted by zachlipton at 12:40 PM on May 28, 2019 [29 favorites]


    Senate GOP Vows to Quickly Quash Impeachment (TheHill)

    Let's see how the Turtle feels after 6 weeks of impeachment hearing in the house in which Trump's crimes and the crimes of his aides and kin are aired repetitively for the cameras and the nightly news.
    posted by Mental Wimp at 12:45 PM on May 28, 2019 [15 favorites]


    Justin Amash continued speaking out on the Mueller report, focusing today on Attorney General Barr's efforts to deliberately misrepresent the investigation: twitter or threadreader.
    posted by peeedro at 12:54 PM on May 28, 2019 [19 favorites]


    Let's see how the Turtle feels after 6 weeks of impeachment hearing in the house in which Trump's crimes and the crimes of his aides and kin are aired repetitively for the cameras and the nightly news.

    If the past has shown us anything, it's that McConnell will feel perfectly fine and do it anyway.
    posted by delicious-luncheon at 1:23 PM on May 28, 2019 [16 favorites]


    Amash will also be holding a town hall meeting tonight in Grand Rapids were he will address it directly with his constituents.
    posted by chris24 at 1:24 PM on May 28, 2019 [9 favorites]


    Note that Debbie Dingell, Michigan rep for the region including Ann Arbor (so dem stronghold), has been one of the clearest anti-impeachment voices in the Democratic Party.

    I hope somebody primaries her out. I never voted for her because I left the district before she ran, but I voted for her husband who held the seat before her. And maybe some Ann Arbor folk voted for her father-in-law who held the seat before her husband— that seat has been in Dingell hands since 1933.

    Time for a primary.
    posted by nat at 1:47 PM on May 28, 2019 [12 favorites]


    phearlez: The state of my industry it super depressing.

    Yeah, I'm down to criticize the DCC, but I think the emphasis on file attachments was a bad choice for the criticism.


    Did you read his actual article? Because the section about the attachments wasn't that all attachments are necessarily bad, it specifically called out sending messages where the actual content was something someone put in a Word doc and attached to the email. Not a spreadsheet, or a camera ready proof for an ad. Some other text that they could have easily put into an actual email. They create a culture of bad security behavior in the service of nothing. In his example they did it in a message about security problems.

    My industry is 9 kinds of fucked and should make better choices but that doesn't blanket excuse the people who ought to care about their own security from making bad choices.
    posted by phearlez at 1:48 PM on May 28, 2019 [9 favorites]


    Bloomberg, Mulvaney Tightens Grip on Labor Chief After Trump Allies Grumble
    President Donald Trump‘s acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, has seized power over the Labor Department’s rulemaking process out of frustration with the pace of deregulation under Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta, according to current and former department officials and other people who communicate with the administration.
    ...
    This has led to an acceleration of previously languishing rules on overtime pay, job training, and workplace safety that businesses have sought during the first two years of Trump’s administration. The White House intervention also signals more contentious regulations—such as rules to bolster union oversight or restrict workers from taking medical leave—could now be in the pipeline at a department that appears less likely to embody its secretary’s risk-averse style for the remainder of Trump’s presidency.

    “Acosta wasn’t really interested in getting those rules done until Mick Mulvaney started taking over, and then everything started moving at the department because Mulvaney doesn’t mess around,” a former Trump administration official said, referring to deregulatory actions across DOL. “When Mulvaney took over, they started scrambling to try to make up for lost time.”
    Just how many parts of the government does Mulvaney plan to personally run?
    posted by zachlipton at 1:48 PM on May 28, 2019 [9 favorites]


    Trump Undercuts John Bolton

    “President Trump publicly undercut John Bolton, his national security adviser, on Iran and North Korea in recent days, raising questions about the administration’s policy and personnel in the middle of confrontations with both long-term American adversaries,” the New York Times reports.

    “The president’s remarks appeared to lay bare a rift with his national security adviser, who is known for his bare-knuckled approach to foreign policy. In private, Mr. Trump has made fun of Mr. Bolton’s reputation for hawkishness, joking that the adviser would get him into war.”


    Ho ho ha ha ha eeehhh too funny Donny. STFU.
    posted by petebest at 1:58 PM on May 28, 2019 [2 favorites]


    Bwahaha...

    WaPo, James Comey: "James Comey: No ‘treason.’ No coup. Just lies — and dumb lies at that."
    In late July, when we were hard at work trying to understand the scope of the [Russian election interference] effort, we learned that one of Trump’s foreign policy advisers knew about the Russian effort seven weeks before we did.
    ...
    If there was nothing to it, we didn’t want to smear Americans. If there was something to it, we didn’t want to let corrupt Americans know we were on to them. So, we kept it secret. That’s how the FBI approaches all counterintelligence cases.

    And there’s the first problem with Trump’s whole “treason” narrative. If we were “deep state” Clinton loyalists bent on stopping him, why would we keep it secret? Why wouldn’t the much-maligned FBI supervisor Peter Strzok — the alleged kingpin of the “treasonous” plot to stop Trump — tell anyone?
    ...
    We investigated to see whether it was true that Americans associated with the campaign had taken the Russians up on any offer of help. By late October, the investigators thought they had probable cause to get a federal court order to conduct electronic surveillance of a former Trump campaign adviser named Carter Page. Page was no longer with the campaign, but there was reason to believe he was acting as an agent of the Russian government. We asked a federal judge for permission to surveil him and then we did it, all without revealing our work, despite the fact that it was late October and a leak would have been very harmful to candidate Trump. Worst deep-state conspiracy ever.
    posted by OnceUponATime at 2:59 PM on May 28, 2019 [16 favorites]


    This has always been the problem with the "Steele Dossier" narrative too, BTW. It was not published until after the election. If it was a smear intended to get Clinton elected, why would they possibly keep it secret until after the election? None of Trump's conspiracy theories make any damn sense.
    posted by OnceUponATime at 3:02 PM on May 28, 2019 [12 favorites]


    Oh, I have to quote the next bit too...
    But wait, the conspiracy idea gets dumber. On Oct. 28, after agonizing deliberation over two terrible options, I concluded I had no choice but to inform Congress that we had reopened the Clinton email investigation. I judged that hiding that fact — after having told Congress repeatedly and under oath that the case was finished — would be worse than telling Congress the truth. It was a decision William Barr praised and Hillary Clinton blamed for her loss 11 days later. Strzok, alleged architect of the treasonous plot to stop Trump, drafted the letter I sent Congress.
    Even Trump originally justified Comey's firing by saying he'd been unfair to Clinton. Yet now Comey is supposed to have been working to help get Clinton elected? Funny way to go about it.

    Comey must feel kind of justified in bending over backwards to prove he was NOT a Clinton loyalist, at this point, sadly.

    But it seems to have done him no good at all, since he is now being accused of capital crimes by the sitting president instead of just facing hostile questioning on Capitol Hill.
    posted by OnceUponATime at 3:08 PM on May 28, 2019 [20 favorites]


    We investigated to see whether it was true that Americans associated with the campaign had taken the Russians up on any offer of help...

    And you don’t even need all the contacts in the Mueller Report to know they did.
    British-born Goldstone adds in the exchange of 3 June 2016: “This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr Trump.”

    Seventeen minutes later, Trump Jr welcomes this with the reply: “If it’s what you say, I love it, especially later in the summer.”
    posted by chris24 at 3:09 PM on May 28, 2019 [7 favorites]


    > Chao, disqualified herself from participating in matters involving Vulcan rather than selling her stock, as past DOT secretaries have done.
    I...think recusal is fine? It may not be a perfect firewall, but it's a standard mechanism.


    Let's see if the Republicans call for the release of all her emails and text messages and call for the appointment of a special independent investigator to investigated the recusal like the Trumpists have done with Kim Foxx in the Jussie Smollett case.
    posted by srboisvert at 3:23 PM on May 28, 2019 [3 favorites]


    My favorite part of the Trump coup conspiracies is there were two investigations into both campaigns...and Comey only revealed the one against Clinton. He actively concealed the entire investigation into Trump, including from Obama. If it was some sort of conspiracy against Trump, it was the worst executed conspiracy in history.
    posted by T.D. Strange at 3:54 PM on May 28, 2019 [20 favorites]


    God, I remember hearing an interview with a young woman on NPR, about why she voted for Trump. She said "how could I vote for a candidate who was actively under investigation by the FBI?"
    Well, now you know how.
    posted by uosuaq at 4:00 PM on May 28, 2019 [30 favorites]


    > Chao, disqualified herself from participating in matters involving Vulcan rather than selling her stock, as past DOT secretaries have done.

    What's crazy it is is $400,000 in stock. Just sell it and buy a broad-based mutual fund or whatever. No matter how fantabulous Vulcan's stock is going to perform, it's not going to cost you more than a couple of grand a year at most. Probably more like $0 in reality. Then when you're out of office, buy the Vulcan stock back if you think it's so all-fired great.

    It's just so . . . petty. "No one's enforcing the rules now, so I'll just go ahead and ignore them . . . "
    posted by flug at 4:35 PM on May 28, 2019 [17 favorites]


    > MO has a governor's race in 2020. Mike Parson was not elected. He is only governor because of Eric Greitens dick. MO Dems need to get it together

    Whelp, that's the moment in that sentence when I burst out into uncontrollable laughter . . .

    I'll predict right now that Parson wins 60% of the statewide vote in Missouri in 2020. If the Dems manage to field any kind of reasonable candidate at all, it could possibly drop as low as 55%, but not any lower.
    posted by flug at 4:37 PM on May 28, 2019 [1 favorite]


    While Maggie Haberman's NYT colleagues are mounting a concerted defense of her on Twitter in the wake of her Hope Hicks puff piece, the Intercept's Peter Maass looks into a possible backscratching deal:
    The NYT is being criticized for its gentle portrait of Hope Hicks facing an existential crisis on complying with a congressional subpoena. While working on a profile of Lachlan Murdoch recently, I came across a comment from Murdoch that might explain the NYT's kindness to Hicks.

    At a conference in November, Lachlan Murdoch was asked about hiring Hope Hicks as Fox Corp.'s comms chief. Murdoch said that as part of his due diligence, an advisor contacted "many people" at the NYT to ask about Hicks, and they "universally said she was a fantastic choice."

    Murdoch was speaking at the DealBook conference in 2018: "I had an advisor of mine call people she would have worked with and universally, and I should mention that many people from the New York Times, universally said she was a fantastic choice."

    Murdoch did not say who the "many people at the New York Times" were, but it would seem he was referring to reporters who would have been in touch with Hicks while she was a top communications adviser to President Trump. It would seem they liked her quite a bit. {emphasis added}
    Hicks seems to have gotten off easy in part because she's less contemptuously abrasive than Sarah Huckabee Sanders and less overtly Machiavellian than Kellyanne Conway, but there should never be any question that she went "off the record" with the worst of them in the service of Trump and her own reputation.
    posted by Doktor Zed at 5:34 PM on May 28, 2019 [17 favorites]


    Isn’t Haberman’s mom PR person for the Kushners?

    Gosh it’s almost like the upper class all know each other.
    posted by The Whelk at 6:06 PM on May 28, 2019 [32 favorites]


    I just wanted to note that Justin Amash seems to have done something the Democratic establishment has been assuring us is impossible -- make the case for impeachment to the public and get a positive reception.
    posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 6:11 PM on May 28, 2019 [20 favorites]


    Sure, but Amash doesn't have to find 67 votes in the Senate. I don't agree with Pelosi's position but it's not an absurd, irrational one.
    posted by Justinian at 6:14 PM on May 28, 2019 [7 favorites]


    In reversal from 2016, McConnell says he would fill a potential Supreme Court vacancy in 2020
    (CNN)Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Tuesday if a Supreme Court vacancy occurs during next year's presidential election, he would work to confirm a nominee appointed by President Donald Trump.
    That's a move that is in sharp contrast to his decision to block President Barack Obama's nominee to the high court following the death of Justice Antonin Scalia in February 2016.
    At the time, he cited the right of the voters in the presidential election to decide whether a Democrat or a Republican would fill that opening, a move that infuriated Democrats.
    Speaking at a Paducah Chamber of Commerce luncheon in Kentucky, McConnell was asked by an attendee, "Should a Supreme Court justice die next year, what will your position be on filling that spot?"
    The leader took a long sip of what appeared to be iced tea before announcing with a smile, "Oh, we'd fill it," triggering loud laughter from the audience.
    posted by scalefree at 6:23 PM on May 28, 2019 [10 favorites]


    ‘My Rudy’: Trump’s lawyer wants to be the campaign’s No. 1 hatchet man
    Giuliani plans to meet with the president and his campaign in the coming weeks to discuss pivoting to a new role.
    Get ready for more Rudy.
    Done sparring with Robert Mueller, Donald Trump’s personal attorney is training his attacks on the president’s potential 2020 campaign rivals. Giuliani plans to meet with the president and his campaign in the coming weeks to discuss pivoting to this new role, which he expects will also include making policy and political connections for the reelection effort.
    “We’ll see where they have holes and where they need help,” Giuliani told Politico. “I’m available to do a lot of it.”
    Giuliani has long served as an all-purpose attack dog for Trump — with mixed results. The president and some of his top aides have occasionally cringed at the lawyer’s frequently off-script messaging and rambling TV appearances that can spark unexpected news cycles. “Handling Rudy’s f—-ups takes more than one man,” a White House staffer told POLITICO in January.
    But, while people around Trump say Giuliani’s freelancing can be problematic, they’re also willing to look the other way if it helps the president win reelection. After all, Giuliani is a name brand and gets credit from the president’s base for helping Trump survive the Mueller investigation. What’s more, Giuliani is one of the few Trump peers with national political and legal experience, someone who has known the president for decades. He can even provide a calming presence — Giuliani said the president sometimes calls him “My Rudy” — to the famously un-calm president.
    posted by scalefree at 6:26 PM on May 28, 2019


    Sure, but Amash doesn't have to find 67 votes in the Senate. I don't agree with Pelosi's position but it's not an absurd, irrational one.

    He has to get re-elected in a Republican district and got a standing ovation from his constituents after explaining his impeachment decision, making his position principled and surprisingly popular.

    And Pelosi doesn’t have to find 67 votes in the Senate. Her job is 218 in the House and to uphold the constitution.
    posted by chris24 at 6:50 PM on May 28, 2019 [54 favorites]


    Heh. Heh heh.

    Trump Dossier Author Won’t Cooperate With Federal Prosecutor Investigating Origins of Russia Probe: Report
    Christopher Steele, the former British spy who wrote a dossier alleging links between President Donald Trump and Russia, will reportedly not answer questions from U.S. Attorney John Durham, who was assigned by Attorney General William Barr to investigate the origins of the probe into Russian election interference. A source told Reuters that Steele will not cooperate with Durham’s review. Steele was hired in 2016 by Fusion GPS—a private investigations firm—to compile the dossier on behalf of “lawyers representing the Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.” Steele has reportedly cooperated with the U.S. government in the past, including working with the FBI on corruption within the FIFA soccer organization.
    posted by scalefree at 7:03 PM on May 28, 2019 [12 favorites]


    Isn’t Haberman’s mom PR person for the Kushners?

    Gosh it’s almost like the upper class all know each other.


    From an Elle Magazine profile in 2017:
    The 1980s and '90s New York in which Haberman was raised is the same milieu in which Trump began his crusade to sand down his Queens edges and gild the Manhattan skyline. Haberman's father, Clyde, is a Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times reporter, and her mother, Nancy, is a publicity powerhouse at Rubenstein—a communications firm founded by Howard Rubenstein, whose famous spinning prowess Trump availed himself of during various of his divorce and business contretemps. (Nancy worked on projects for Trump's business but says she never met him.) [...]

    None of this is to say that the Habermans and Trumps were showing up at the same dinner parties, but Manhattan can be a provincial place, among a certain inside crowd.
    posted by Little Dawn at 7:07 PM on May 28, 2019 [2 favorites]


    In reversal from 2016, McConnell says he would fill a potential Supreme Court vacancy in 2020

    It gets worse. McConnell admits (via his spokesperson) that this is a nakedly partisan policy:
    "David Popp, a spokesman for McConnell, said the difference between now and three years ago, when McConnell famously blocked Judge Merrick Garland's ascension to the Supreme Court, is that at that time the White House was controlled by Democrat and the Senate by a Republican. This time, both are controlled by the GOP."
    Mitch McConnell is an evil man.
    posted by jedicus at 7:36 PM on May 28, 2019 [45 favorites]


    No better way to say it. He is evil.
    posted by litlnemo at 7:42 PM on May 28, 2019 [6 favorites]


    The Problem Is That Mitch McConnell Doesn't Give a Fuck About Ethics, Morality, or Law While Democrats Do
    You can't understand the Devil until the Devil shows you his works. Oh, you may think you grasp what the Devil is capable of; you think it's all just monstrous acts of sharp object sodomy and the extravagant, cruel lies the Devil uses to justify his devilish fuckery. But what most people don't understand until they see the Devil in action is that it's far, far worse when the Devil abandons lies and gives you the truth. Then you look in the face of an honest Devil and you are utterly lost because you knew what was true. You just didn't think the Devil would grin so broadly when he told it to you.
    The reason that Democrats seem so hapless in the face of Republican savagery is that Democrats don't grasp the depth of the moral and ethical void in the center of the GOP. They keep telling themselves that Lucifer was once an angel and he can be one again, ignoring that Lucifer doesn't fuckin' want to go back to boring ol' Heaven. They cling to this pathetic hope like a log in a flood, except they ignore the snake on the log that has no problem biting them to death.
    posted by scalefree at 7:55 PM on May 28, 2019 [48 favorites]




    Amash Gets Standing Ovation at Town Hall Meeting

    Rep. Justin Amash (R-MI) received a standing ovation Tuesday evening at his first public event since becoming the first Republican to call for President Trump’s impeachment, The Hill reports.

    At a town hall in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Amash criticized House Republican leadership, including Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), whom he called the “so-called leader.”

    “I read the Mueller report. I’m sure he didn’t read it,” Amash said of McCarthy. “He resorted to ad hominem attacks; that’s the kind of ‘leadership’ we now have in Congress.”


    To be fair, those Republicans don't have to worry about courting the magical Trump-voting Democratic centrists. So they're just all Waaah look at us doing the right thing accidentally!
    posted by petebest at 8:10 PM on May 28, 2019 [10 favorites]


    "the difference between now and three years ago...is that at that time the White House was controlled by Democrat and the Senate by a Republican"

    Wait, I thought blocking a Supreme Court nomination was "about a principle, not a person."
    The American people are perfectly capable of having their say on this issue, so let's give them a voice. Let's let the American people decide. The Senate will appropriately revisit the matter when it considers the qualifications of the nominee the next president nominates, whoever that might be.
    Looks like McConnell's done following the "Biden Rule."
    “The next justice could fundamentally alter the direction of the Supreme Court and have a profound impact on our country, so of course the American people should have a say in the court’s direction," he said.

    "The Senate will continue to observe the 'Biden Rule' so the American people have a voice in this momentous decision. The American people may well elect a president who decides to nominate Judge Garland for Senate consideration. The next president may also nominate somebody very different. Either way, our view is this: Give the people a voice in filling this vacancy."
    posted by kirkaracha at 9:32 PM on May 28, 2019 [7 favorites]


    Isn’t Haberman’s mom PR person for the Kushners?

    That's interesting but not massively relevant. The problem is that she's showing her work as an access journalist -- trading favours with favoured sources -- and all her peers know it, but that's a Guild Secret that can't be acknowledged.

    (She didn't even link to the Hicks puff-piece from her own Twitter account, though she linked out today to her co-bylined piece on Bolton. Instead, she outsourced it to a generic NYT account. It's almost as if she knew what the function of that piece was -- an empty beat-sweetener -- and wasn't willing to take full ownership of it.)
    posted by holgate at 9:40 PM on May 28, 2019 [7 favorites]


    Of course McConnell will stab you in the back (or front, or side, or procedural vote) the minute it is advantageous. The Kavanaugh hearings proved that curb stomping assault victims is just fine to secure a partisan court. Just like Trump they're deathly afraid someone will bring them to account for their crimes; corrupting the DOJ, FBI and finally the Supreme Court will ensure they are never brought to justice.
    posted by benzenedream at 10:09 PM on May 28, 2019 [6 favorites]


    So this is really gross & full of lies, not surprising given the author. Normally I'd never consider posting it here but it's in the WaPo so it has heightened visibility & so we need to know what's in it to be able to counter it.

    Opinion: The searing, self-destructive disdain of the left by Hugh Hewitt
    President Trump has an ace in the hole for the 2020 election: The media elite cannot keep their contempt for Trump voters under wraps.
    On Sunday, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd penned a sentence that perfectly encapsulates this disdain for fellow citizens.
    “Mitch McConnell, Barr and almost everyone else in the G.O.P.,” Dowd opined, “have made themselves numb to [Trump’s] abhorrent actions because of self-interest.”
    There you have it: In Dowd’s world — and Dowd is one of the tribunes of the Manhattan-Beltway media elite — almost every person who supports Trump today does so because of self-interest. Read “self-interest” as “greed” or a “lust for power or position,” or however you care to read it. By Dowd’s assessment, no one can possibly support Trump without being corrupt.
    Ignored is the fact that Trump has delivered on his crucial pledges concerning the judiciary and defense spending. Trump has put 100-plus judges on the federal bench, including two on the Supreme Court, 41 on federal circuit courts (with two more confirmations pending), and dozens and dozens on federal trial courtss. He’s strongly supported dramatic increases in defense spending.
    The roaring economy, and the tax cuts and deregulation that power it, speaks for itself. But for Dowd and her colleagues in New York, Washington, Los Angeles and Silicon Valley, none of this record matters. To support Trump is to be morally flawed. Let’s face it, most of the media thinks most of Trump supporters are stupid or evil. Incredibly, secular elites have appointed themselves judges of moral character.
    posted by scalefree at 11:49 PM on May 28, 2019 [3 favorites]


    Of Course Trump Hates Maggie Haberman. Why Does the Left?
    The progressive loathing of Haberman draws some of its force from the mistaken belief that straight news reporters should stand up to the president and call him out for his unfitness to hold office. Some people who believe this fail to grasp the distinction between news gathering and opinion journalism. Others believe Trump’s unique authoritarianism and unfitness for office gives straight reporters a special duty to slip the shackles of objectivity. One thing they might consider, as they direct this frustration against Haberman, is that we know as much as we do about Trump’s authoritarianism and unfitness for office because of her reporting.
    posted by kirkaracha at 12:07 AM on May 29, 2019 [5 favorites]


    Ray Walston, Luck Dragon: I just wanted to note that Justin Amash seems to have done something the Democratic establishment has been assuring us is impossible -- make the case for impeachment to the public and get a positive reception.

    She doesn't think there's literally no constituency for it anywhere within the nation; she thinks the national constituency isn't there. I think she's very wrong about that, in part because the trend of polls makes it very clear the country is ready to be lead in the right direction, and she needs to do more to make that happen.

    chris24: Her job is 218 in the House and to uphold the constitution.

    If -- big if that I don't think is actually true -- impeachment would be a 2020 liability for Democrats, then pursuing it would be yet another example, in the iterated prisoner's dilemma that is modern politics, of the D side nobly and naively taking the "cooperate" option (albeit in cooperation with principles rather than with Republicans) while the R side takes "defect". That's why I'm a tad surprised by the way the issue gets framed. Is there a Constitutional duty to impeach? Absolutely. There's also one to advise and consent, but if by some strange winds we have a Democratic Senate under a Republican president, I really hope they ignore that duty and don't seat a single one of his nominees.

    (In the mid-to-long run, that kind of hardball is necessary to save the Constitution anyway; unless the fever breaks, we're at most three future Republican administrations and/or justices away from a Roy-Moore-approved determination that all amendments after the 10th aren't valid. And that's also why they see hardball as necessary to save the Constitution as they envision it.)

    Another reason I hammer this is that I really want to see as thorough and drawn-out a proceeding as possible... even though you could argue that the maximally correct/Constitutional/principled path would be a five-minute affair because it's so thunderingly obvious that the president is implicated in high crimes and misdemeanors. And, supposing that impeachment hearings do begin at some point, I worry about a contingent of people saying "Screw the optics! What, another day, week, month of talk, talk, talk? How much evidence do these credulous Dems need -- vote to impeach him now!"
    posted by InTheYear2017 at 3:05 AM on May 29, 2019 [1 favorite]


    so we need to know what's in it to be able to counter it.

    We don't, really: Hewitt is a self-serving hack and a moral fraud who gets a pass because he looks vaguely professorial, and his own trajectory over the past four years shows a nihilistic cynicism to match McConnell's. The response is "well, you're obviously corrupt and self-interested, Hugh, and you know it."
    posted by holgate at 4:37 AM on May 29, 2019 [20 favorites]


    Ignored is the fact that Trump has delivered on his crucial pledges concerning the judiciary and defense spending.

    His pledge to end the US role as “policeman of the world” by spending a crapload more on “policing” capabilities? With the empty “policeman” rhetoric also serving as justification to help Russia do things like dissolve NATO, which so many of these people who were just honored on Memorial Day had to fight a world war to create. All while we're borrowing money from future Americans to fund the defense spending and to give tax money away to the corporations receiving the defense spending and all the other wealthy people. Nah, no corrupt self-interest going on there.
    posted by XMLicious at 4:59 AM on May 29, 2019 [3 favorites]


    She doesn't think there's literally no constituency for it anywhere within the nation; she thinks the national constituency isn't there.

    Just for the record, Grand Rapids, the main city in Justin Amash’s district, has had a Republican Representative for 97 of the last 100 years. If a Republican is getting standing ovations for impeachment of another Republican in Gerald Ford’s hometown, then anyone who thinks there isn’t a national constituency for impeachment doesn’t belong in a position of national power.
    posted by Etrigan at 4:59 AM on May 29, 2019 [59 favorites]



    Of Course Trump Hates Maggie Haberman. Why Does the Left?


    John Whitehouse (Media Matters):
    low key thing that's a big cause of the maggie haberman freak out is that the Times *chose* to eliminate the public editor position. what happened since was entirely foreseeable.

    https://www.vox.com/2017/5/31/15719278/public-editor-liz-spayd-new-york-times

    https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2017/05/31/new-york-times-failing-its-readers-eliminating-public-editor/216720

    take this. what we've learned since is what happens to this outrage without someone there to focus it into something constructive. it's not great for anyone!

    https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/bensmith/newsfeed-sulliview

    the other thing is that the times sold subscriptions at the beginning of the trump era on the idea that the paper would be, as @MattGertz noted, "an opponent to Trumpian 'alternative facts'"

    the audience is gonna hold you to that!

    https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2017/05/01/ny-times-sold-subscriptions-opposing-alternative-facts-then-it-published-bret-stephens/216224
    posted by T.D. Strange at 5:06 AM on May 29, 2019 [11 favorites]


    Of Course Trump Hates Maggie Haberman. Why Does the Left?

    The idea that Trump hates Haberman is so absurd it makes my eye twitch. He is one of her sources, she doesn't even filter or fact check what his office feeds her.
    posted by armacy at 5:07 AM on May 29, 2019 [35 favorites]


    One thing they might consider, as they direct this frustration against Haberman, is that we know as much as we do about Trump’s authoritarianism and unfitness for office because of her reporting.

    Wait, what? Her reporting has not been particularly deep or effective at exposing anything. She's the main vector for the administration's policy of floating horrible things to the public so that it legitimizes or obscures other horrible things that other, more scrupulous reporters then have to dig harder to find and push harder to report.
    posted by zombieflanders at 5:47 AM on May 29, 2019 [23 favorites]


    That Hugh Hewitt leads with "Ignored is the fact that Trump has delivered on his crucial pledges concerning the judiciary and defense spending" is significant. If that's where you have to go to defend Trump's record, that's a problem. Good luck running on either of those accomplishments. Your average voter doesn't give a shit about the judiciary, and increasing defense spending is the bare minimum expected of a Republican president. Unless things change, there really aren't that many signature achievements for Trump to run on - he's messed up on trade, NK negotiations are a dud, infrastructure is a joke. The economy and immigration are his best assets, and on the economy his signature tax cuts had virtually no positive impact.

    This isn't to say any of that matters to your average Trump voter or that he won't win reelection, but there is a lot of room for Democrats to make hay about his failures.
    posted by schoolgirl report at 6:00 AM on May 29, 2019 [12 favorites]


    DNC puts out the tightened qualifying requirements for the 3rd debate in September:
    1st 2 debates: 65k individual donors OR 1% in three polls

    3rd debate: 130k individual donors AND 2% in four polls
    posted by Chrysostom at 6:09 AM on May 29, 2019 [8 favorites]


    Further to that: only nine candidates would meet even the polling requirement (Biden, Sanders, Warren, Harris, Buttigieg, O’Rourke, Klobuchar, Booker and Castro), and the donors requirement might narrow it further.
    posted by Chrysostom at 6:21 AM on May 29, 2019 [11 favorites]


    @SharonLNYT Mueller statement at 11. Wondering if this means he has decided not to testify.

    Apparently he'll be actually speaking to the press, without a Q&A.
    posted by pjenks at 6:41 AM on May 29, 2019 [7 favorites]


    Here's the DoJ announcement on Mueller's statement. Note that Mueller will not be taking questions. (I'd really like to know why the NYT's Sharon LaFraniere and the Daily Beast's Sam Stein are speculating he won't testify.)

    NBC's Peter Alexander: "A senior White House official tells me the WH was *not* caught off guard by the announcement that Mueller would make a statement today. Not clear whether they know what he will say." (Well obviously Barr tipped off the White House, but I suppose we have to stick with the journalistic fiction of objectivity.)

    The livestreams are here: https://www.justice.gov/live and https://www.ustream.tv/doj
    posted by Doktor Zed at 6:50 AM on May 29, 2019 [4 favorites]


    So if Mueller is just going to pop out to say that the reporting about the new Wolff book is wrong, Nadler or somebody needs to subpoena him immediately
    posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 7:07 AM on May 29, 2019 [7 favorites]


    Hugh Hewett just made a full Op Ed length article out of the bog standard Trump cultist wannabe snappy comeback anytime a leftist or liberal expresses anything but fawning admiration and praise for Trump voters. You've all seen it dozens of times before I'm sure.

    "This is why Trump won!"

    Point out that Trump is enacting white supremacist policy? "This is why Trump won!"

    Point out that Trump said Nazis were very fine people? "This is why Trump won!"

    The fact that Hewett made a full length article out of that one sentence is pathetic, but what's really weird is people talking as if it was anything but an extended puffed up /pol/ meme. I mean, seriously, I saw that line literally the day after the election. This is nothing new or insightful.
    posted by sotonohito at 7:08 AM on May 29, 2019 [9 favorites]


    I assume that, like Comey, he is upset By the "treason" allegations. I expect he will re-iterate his conclusions and make it clear that he had no political agenda.
    posted by OnceUponATime at 7:09 AM on May 29, 2019 [3 favorites]


    I assume that, like Comey, he is upset By the "treason" allegations. I expect he will re-iterate his conclusions and make it clear that he had no political agenda.

    I like your optimism! But re-iterating his conclusions would be helpful and good news, and I know better than to expect that.
    posted by diogenes at 7:14 AM on May 29, 2019 [15 favorites]


    Weren't there a couple of loose ends he was waiting to play out in the courts? He could just be stating that his investigation is officially concluded.
    posted by mikepop at 7:16 AM on May 29, 2019 [2 favorites]


    This is a big deal. For a lot of people in this country, this is the first time they will hear Mueller speak at all. Certainly the first time they will hear him speak about the investigation. What he says will impact public perception, and be seized on by the media and both parties for serious spin.

    I am not optimistic about this. If he, as I expect, comes out and basically verbalizes the same quasi-complicated 'conclusions' from the written report and tries to paint himself and the SCO as apolitical, this will be very bad. A robotic, dense drawing of boundaries and scope regarding the investigation is going to go over like a lead balloon with the left and will be a gift to the fascists.

    In an ideal world, Mueller would come out with an actual position on obstruction of justice and actually recommend legal recourse. That's....not gonna happen, I think. This will probably just be a CYA and an explanation for why he won't testify. I dunno. I guess we will see in 25 minutes. I hope I'm wrong as hell.
    posted by lazaruslong at 7:37 AM on May 29, 2019 [18 favorites]


    If he, as I expect, comes out and basically verbalizes the same quasi-complicated 'conclusions' from the written report and tries to paint himself and the SCO as apolitical, this will be very bad.

    I see it differently. If he takes side an acts political, we are lost. Because he (and the justice department, and the rule of law, and like... the concept of "facts") will lose all credibility with 40% of the country. We will be headed for violence. I know, I know, you will all say that we're already there. But I can easily imagine how it could get MUCH worse.

    What I want from Mueller is for him to come out and build MORE credibility. I'm not sure how he can do that, really, but I hope he has figured out a way. And then I want people to read the damn report.
    posted by OnceUponATime at 7:48 AM on May 29, 2019 [2 favorites]


    If he says that "No collusion, no obstruction" is an obvious mischaracterization of his report, but doesn't name names, is that political?
    posted by InTheYear2017 at 7:56 AM on May 29, 2019


    I hear ya, but I mean....he's already lost that cred with the fascists. He's Highly Conflicted Mueller and the 12 Angry Dems etc etc.

    Mueller continuing to try and thread the apolitcal needle is a This Is Fine strategy. He's political, he doesn't have a choice in the matter. His credibility with a minority of the country is garbage now and forever. Trying to climb out of that will never, ever work for him. Forget it, Bob, it's crazytown.
    posted by lazaruslong at 7:56 AM on May 29, 2019 [11 favorites]


    OnceUponATime: If he takes side an acts political,

    It's not political to call a crime a crime. They've all taken an oath to support and defend the Constitution. This is the oath.
    posted by bluecore at 7:57 AM on May 29, 2019 [13 favorites]


    Because he (and the justice department, and the rule of law, and like... the concept of "facts") will lose all credibility with 40% of the country.

    That ship has sailed. Those people will consider Mueller credible to the extent that they can keep spinning his statements as exonerating to Trump, and the moment that changes they will turn on him. There is no combination of magic incantations and norm-adherence that will bring them back, they are lost.
    posted by contraption at 7:58 AM on May 29, 2019 [20 favorites]


    Mueller: would not say anything to Congress that he hasn't already said in the report. It's his testimony.
    posted by kirkaracha at 8:11 AM on May 29, 2019 [1 favorite]


    Welp. I guess I called that play pretty accurately.
    posted by lazaruslong at 8:12 AM on May 29, 2019 [6 favorites]


    Mueller: does not expect to speak publicly on this topic again, will take no questions. Begins and ends by saying, yes, there was election interference.
    posted by box at 8:12 AM on May 29, 2019 [4 favorites]


    I heard him say the President committed a crime and it's up to Congress to impeach him. Not in those words...
    posted by petebest at 8:13 AM on May 29, 2019 [19 favorites]


    Welp. I guess I called that play pretty accurately.

    He also gave cover to Bill Barr. If he thinks Barr has been behaving appropriately, he's an idiot.
    posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 8:13 AM on May 29, 2019 [9 favorites]


    Also Mueller: If he had confidence the president had not committed an obstruction crime, he would have said so.
    posted by Exceptional_Hubris at 8:13 AM on May 29, 2019 [8 favorites]


    I lost the video near the end but the audio continued.
    Did he say there was OBSTRUCTION?
    posted by Gadgetenvy at 8:14 AM on May 29, 2019


    I was super happy to hear him say out loud the part about how he would have said so if he believed it was clear that the president did NOT commit a crime, but he could not say so.

    Also that the constitution provides means other than prosecution for rebuke of wrongdoing by the president. Every literate personal heard that reference to impeachment.

    Also he is a private citizen now and can be subpoena'd. At no point did he say he would not testify if subpoena'd. He said such testimony would not go beyond what was contained in the report.
    posted by OnceUponATime at 8:14 AM on May 29, 2019 [10 favorites]


    @emptywheel: Shorter Mueller: That was an impeachment referral, damnit, now act on it.
    posted by tonycpsu at 8:14 AM on May 29, 2019 [34 favorites]


    As I've said before, Mueller's claim that it would be unfair to allege that the President committed a crime, because the President would be unable to defend himself in court, is incorrect. This is because the only thing preventing the President being tried in court is DoJ policy, which can be overridden by the President's order. The President has the same right to trial as everyone else, if he chooses to take it. (He will not.)
    posted by East Manitoba Regional Junior Kabaddi Champion '94 at 8:15 AM on May 29, 2019 [8 favorites]


    I don't give a damn what he just said. Subpoena him and question him all day long. Either he clarifies his report and clearly says impeachment is the remedy, or he sits there and his final moment of public life is a reminder of how badly he failed his country. Probably both.

    Really, really angry at him for covering for his buddy Barr and not standing up for the Justice officials that Trump is calling traitors.
    posted by martin q blank at 8:15 AM on May 29, 2019 [32 favorites]


    I heard it through the Justin Amash translator feature: the president crimed and its all in my report, so do something about it.
    posted by Exceptional_Hubris at 8:15 AM on May 29, 2019 [11 favorites]


    Mueller pointedly avoided using the word impeachment (referencing something to the effect of "some process other than a criminal trial for addressing wrongdoing by the President") and said he had no reason to suspect anything other than good faith from Barr regarding Barr's decision to release the report when and how he did.

    So that's that. It's entirely on House Democrats (plus Amash I guess) to pick up the ball from here. We'll get nothing further from Mueller.

    I heard him say the President committed a crime and it's up to Congress to impeach him. Not in those words...

    And that's precisely the problem. Without Mueller even mentioning the word, it's much harder to present impeachment as the obvious next step. Instead it's far too easy to paint impeachment as a "do over". Which is not to say it shouldn't be done. It absolutely should be, and soon. But goddamn do I wish he had at least used the word instead of pointedly dancing around it.
    posted by jedicus at 8:16 AM on May 29, 2019 [11 favorites]


    I'm glad that Mueller framed his statement to emphasize that if he could exonerate the President, he would have done so. No neutral observer could watch that statement and not believe that the President likely committed obstruction of justice.
    posted by East Manitoba Regional Junior Kabaddi Champion '94 at 8:16 AM on May 29, 2019 [12 favorites]


    He concluded by drawing attention again to the attacks on our election and said it deserved the attention of every American. He's right. We all need to return the focus to that, I think.
    posted by OnceUponATime at 8:17 AM on May 29, 2019 [7 favorites]


    If he takes side an acts political, we are lost. Because he (and the justice department, and the rule of law, and like... the concept of "facts") will lose all credibility with 40% of the country.

    Mueller, the Justice Department, the rule of law, and the concept of "facts" have already lost credibility with movement conservatives the minute they say anything the 27% crazification factor crowd and the Fox News cultists don't want to hear.
    posted by Gelatin at 8:21 AM on May 29, 2019 [10 favorites]


    The "if we had confidence that the president did not commit a crime, we would have said so" is really the best we get, I expect.
    posted by bcd at 8:25 AM on May 29, 2019 [10 favorites]


    Mueller: would not say anything to Congress that he hasn't already said in the report. It's his testimony.

    He damn well knows that's not his choice, but it seems fine to me. Subpoena him and let him read the report aloud verbatim if he insists. Then act on it.
    posted by zachlipton at 8:25 AM on May 29, 2019 [6 favorites]


    I could only read the closed-captioning, so I missed the nuance, but from the words alone I thought it sounded very strongly like Mueller was saying:

  • DOJ Policy is not to indict a sitting president (he actually said it was unconstitutional to do so which - bullshit but anyway)
  • They were never going to indict no matter what they found (great kthx for mentioning that)
  • Please everyone read Volume II, it's kind of the important one
  • If the President did nothing wrong, we'd have said so ... *cough*impeach*cough*
  • peace out, we done, I'm not going to be a show pony for anyone through testifying

    Which -overall, pretty good I thought. I mean - it was squarely a "Seriously he obstructed, but I can't indict him. So ... Y'know .... right? Y'KNOW ... WINK WINK Congress"

  • posted by petebest at 8:25 AM on May 29, 2019 [7 favorites]


    Mueller: does not expect to speak publicly on this topic again, will take no questions. Begins and ends by saying, yes, there was election interference.

    Note that that very statement is as damaging to Trump's political position, and his ego, as any of the many crimes Mueller documented and prosecuted, because it calls Trump's legitimacy as president into question

    If Russian interference stole the election, then Trump is not a legitimate president, and as such, none of his judicial pics are legitimate, either.
    posted by Gelatin at 8:25 AM on May 29, 2019 [29 favorites]


    Really, really angry at him for covering for his buddy Barr and not standing up for the Justice officials that Trump is calling traitors.

    He praised Barr for "largely" releasing the report, because Mueller says he wrote it choosing his words carefully. Otherwise his statement was a rebuke of everything Barr has said. In part 1, there was not enough evidence to charge the Trump campaign with a criminal conspiracy, not Barr's no collusion talk. In Part 2, Mueller couldn't charge the president with obstruction because of regulations, not Barr's exoneration talk.

    Basically, Mueller's statement would have been greatly improved with a couple of well-timed instances of, "wink, wink, nudge, nudge."
    posted by peeedro at 8:26 AM on May 29, 2019 [10 favorites]


    he actually said it was unconstitutional to do so

    Wasn't he saying that the policy is that it's unconstitutional?
    posted by XMLicious at 8:31 AM on May 29, 2019 [2 favorites]


    > Subpoena him and let him read the report aloud verbatim if he insists.
    > He praised Barr for "largely" releasing the report

    Right, if his testimony is his report, subpoena him and have him read it out loud. Including the redacted parts.
    People seem to forget that we *still* haven't seen the full report!
    posted by RedOrGreen at 8:32 AM on May 29, 2019 [16 favorites]


    Yes, I was assuming he meant the full report, not Barr’s redacted version.
    posted by hydropsyche at 8:35 AM on May 29, 2019


    I really wish he had said HRC's name instead of "the Russians were trying to hurt a presidential candidate" because now the R's can use that soundbite to claim it was Trump they were hurting. Subpoena him to clear that up.
    posted by RobotVoodooPower at 8:35 AM on May 29, 2019 [9 favorites]


    @frankthorp: NEW @RepJerryNadler stmt: "Given that Special Counsel Mueller was unable to pursue criminal charges against the President, it falls to Congress to respond to the crimes, lies and other wrongdoing of President Trump – and we will do so."

    Here's the full text of the statement, which doesn't elaborate on details.

    Ok, sounds good. How? And if I can get a follow-up, when?
    posted by zachlipton at 8:37 AM on May 29, 2019 [36 favorites]


    Wasn't he saying that the policy is that it's unconstitutional?

    No, Mueller's words: "The opinion says that the constitution requires a process other than the criminal justice system to formally accuse the sitting president of wrongdoing."
    posted by peeedro at 8:38 AM on May 29, 2019 [12 favorites]


    Huh r/TheMueller just went private
    posted by The Whelk at 8:39 AM on May 29, 2019 [4 favorites]


    Justin Amash (@justinamash) The ball is in our court, Congress. https://t.co/idpQo1xItH (via)
    posted by Little Dawn at 8:40 AM on May 29, 2019 [12 favorites]


    Giving this statement acknowledges that [Americans | Republicans | DC reporters] aren't exactly report-readers. Saying that the report is the testimony while giving a statement about the report essentially means he either needs to testify on camera in very basic terms to pull the content of the report from the text, or the Dems need to compel testimony from the people cited, read out the relevant passages of the report, and ask "is that true?"

    That is: just fucking start impeachment hearings.

    (Also: people read the Starr report for the salacious bits and only the salacious bits.)
    posted by holgate at 8:41 AM on May 29, 2019 [5 favorites]


    (This also resets the clock for House Dems after a month of dithering.)
    posted by holgate at 8:45 AM on May 29, 2019 [4 favorites]


    @realDonaldTrump: Nothing changes from the Mueller Report. There was insufficient evidence and therefore, in our Country, a person is innocent. The case is closed! Thank you.

    @lachlan: From "total exoneration" to "insufficient evidence"

    In reality, of course, Mueller didn't say "insufficient evidence" either. He said: "If we had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so. We did not, however, make a determination as to whether the president did commit a crime" and cited the flimflam DOJ made up during the Nixon Administration that the president can't be indicted.
    posted by zachlipton at 8:47 AM on May 29, 2019 [30 favorites]


    Watched Mueller again:
    First time around I missed that Mueller is resigning.
    Russian interference, hacking, and damage to Clinton campaign.
    Will not comment on guilt or innocence of a private Russian entity.
    Also investigated attempts to obstruct the investigation.
    Rehash the report from the special councl’s office.
    1st volume: the Russian attempts to interfere in the election and the Trump’s campaign response to that. -conclusion was insufficient evidence to charge a broader conspiracy.
    2nd voulme: investigating obstruction of justice investigation involving the president. -if the office of the special concil had confidence that the president clearly did NOT commit a crime they would have said so. They did not have that evidence to determine that the president committed a crime.
    Mueller then repeats the DOJ policy about not charging the president with a federal crime. (Even double secret probation charging! ;)
    Then he states the “process other than the criminal justice system” should be used for handling a criminal president.
    Blah, blah unfair to accuse someone who couldn’t have their day in court.
    The office of the special counsel’s final word.
    Then mueller covers Barr’s ass about the release of parts of the report.
    If he testifies to Congress it will be the report and no more.
    The issue of the underlying information being released to congress is being decided in a process that does not involve the Special Counsel’s office.
    Mueller does not believe it is appropriate to speak publicly further about the investigation.
    He then thanks those involved in helping with the investigation.
    He closes with the statement that there were “multiple systematic efforts to interfere in our election and that allegation deserves the attention of every American.”
    -that is where my video cut out earlier and I misinterpreted what he said.
    The end.
    posted by Gadgetenvy at 8:49 AM on May 29, 2019 [9 favorites]


    Trump also believes Mueller is a partisan hack.

    But I don't think he is. I think that statement he just gave is the statement someone who is is NOT a partisan hack, for either party, would give.
    posted by OnceUponATime at 8:56 AM on May 29, 2019 [6 favorites]


    @danpfeiffer (Pod Save America guy and former Senior Advisor for Obama)

    I am very sympathetic to the political concerns of the House Leadership and the consultant class, but it’s becoming clear that dodging an impeachment inquiry would be a grave moral, constitutional, and political mistake.
    posted by diogenes at 8:57 AM on May 29, 2019 [30 favorites]


    @CoryBooker: Robert Mueller’s statement makes it clear: Congress has a legal and moral obligation to begin impeachment proceedings immediately. I’ve been asking for Mueller’s testimony—today he made his views clear.

    @AlxThomp: Mueller statement will likely cause many 2020 candidates (especially the senators) to reconsider their position on impeachment. Booker becomes to first to change his position.

    @NickRiccardi: Also combined w new DNC debate rules which create a huge incentive to make bigger and bigger splashes w small dollar donors
    posted by zachlipton at 8:57 AM on May 29, 2019 [20 favorites]


    I really wish he had said HRC's name instead of "the Russians were trying to hurt a presidential candidate" because now the R's can use that soundbite to claim it was Trump they were hurting. Subpoena him to clear that up.

    I wish instead he had said Russian military intelligence interfered in our election to help elect Trump, because for a certain percentage of our population anything that hurts Clinton is good, and they're grateful to whomever does it.
    posted by bluecore at 9:02 AM on May 29, 2019 [8 favorites]


    2nd voulme: investigating obstruction of justice investigation involving the president. -if the office of the special concil had confidence that the president clearly did NOT commit a crime they would have said so. They did not have that evidence to determine that the president committed a crime.

    I'm going to disagree with your summary here. Mueller says, "if we had had confidence that the President clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so." He then goes on to say why he could not charge the president with a crime, because of Justice policy and the constitution.

    Here’s a full transcript of Robert Mueller’s remarks
    posted by peeedro at 9:03 AM on May 29, 2019 [8 favorites]


    I dont think this is a change of opinion, so it may still be true that Booker is the first 2020 contender to change their views as a result, but Julian Castro beat him by 5 mins with what i consider to be a very good response:

    Mueller made clear this morning that his investigation now lays at the feet of Congress. No one is above the law—Congress should begin an impeachment inquiry.
    posted by Exceptional_Hubris at 9:03 AM on May 29, 2019 [6 favorites]


    Booker: Robert Mueller’s statement makes it clear: Congress has a legal and moral obligation to begin impeachment proceedings immediately. I’ve been asking for Mueller’s testimony—today he made his views clear.

    Castro: Mueller made clear this morning that his investigation now lays at the feet of Congress.

    This is progress, but it's frustrating that Mueller apparently had to say it on TV for them to understand it. He said the exact same thing in his report. I guess that's yet more evidence that we need televised hearings. People (including Senators and presidential candidates) aren't good with written words. They need it on the TV.
    posted by diogenes at 9:05 AM on May 29, 2019 [16 favorites]


    Mueller Gonna Mueller
    What I find hard to square is that Mueller is kicking the obstruction of justice case to Congress for consideration of impeachment but is refusing to testify to Congress about it. That’s a disconnect that became even sharper during his statement.
    posted by kirkaracha at 9:12 AM on May 29, 2019 [21 favorites]


    Meanwhile, in other politics

    “Sanders’s plan for giving workers at major corporations an ownership stake in their firms is by far the most “socialist” policy he has ever endorsed as a national politician. The idea is, in essence, a scaled-down version of the late Swedish economist Rudolf Meidner’s plan for gradually socializing ownership of industry by requiring employers to funnel a fixed percentage of their annual profits into collectively owned, trade-union-managed “wage-earner funds.”
    posted by The Whelk at 9:13 AM on May 29, 2019 [13 favorites]


    This is progress, but it's frustrating that Mueller apparently had to say it on TV for them to understand it. He said the exact same thing in his report.

    The Daily Show twitter account nails it
    posted by Roommate at 9:15 AM on May 29, 2019 [13 favorites]


    I dont think this is a change of opinion, so it may still be true that Booker is the first 2020 contender to change their views as a result ...

    Elizabeth Warren probably won't be changing her opinion on impeachment.
    posted by adamg at 9:17 AM on May 29, 2019 [29 favorites]


    Mueller Gonna Mueller

    For a guy whose brand is his straight-shootery and plain spokeness, he sure requires a lot of interpretation and decoding
    posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 9:21 AM on May 29, 2019 [21 favorites]


    @kpolantz: NEW FROM COURT TODAY: Andrew Miller, an associate of Roger Stone, has agreed to testify to a grand jury used by Mueller at 9:30 am this Friday, his attorney and Mueller prosecutor Aaron Zelinsky said at a hearing today. This was minutes after Mueller made his public statement.

    Miller had been fighting this, so I'm curious what prompted the change of heart (perhaps the impending threat of jail?) and even more curious where all this is going. There's an awful lot we still don't know, and an awful lot we don't know specifically because the obstruction was effective, which may well mean a lot more shoes left to drop.
    posted by zachlipton at 9:22 AM on May 29, 2019 [12 favorites]


    it's frustrating that Mueller apparently had to say it on TV for them to understand it

    But it's reassuring that Mueller seems to have understood exactly that and that he then came out and (as was said above) reset the clock for Nancy Pelosi and the House.

    I disagree with all of the criticism of Mueller above. This statement was very clear and was not something Mueller was required to do. He is trying his best to help us here, but he's right: his job is now done.
    posted by pjenks at 9:23 AM on May 29, 2019 [16 favorites]


    This is progress, but it's frustrating that Mueller apparently had to say it on TV for them to understand it. He said the exact same thing in his report. I guess that's yet more evidence that we need televised hearings. People (including Senators and presidential candidates) aren't good with written words. They need it on the TV.

    Having the Watergate hearings on TV turned support around on Nixon's impeachment. And it's worth remembering that Nixon never was impeached -- it's just that the evidence in the public domain mounted to the point that even Republicans could not oppose it.

    Which is why, in addition to instituting impeachment hearings, Democrats need to condemn the likely Republican cover-up in the Senate. "Evidence of Trump's guilt piles up each day, but senate Republicans make clear that isn't enough to make them do their Constitutional and patriotic duty."
    posted by Gelatin at 9:24 AM on May 29, 2019 [26 favorites]




    What I find hard to square is that Mueller is kicking the obstruction of justice case to Congress for consideration of impeachment but is refusing to testify to Congress about it. That’s a disconnect that became even sharper during his statement.

    He just told us why he doesn't think he needs to testify, they put it all in the report. Everything he could possibly say in testimony is already in the report, everything his team discovered is in the report. He doesn't think he needs to testify because everything he knows, everything he might say is already written down. He spent two-goddamn-YEARS recording his testimony so there is nothing left to add, it's what he's been building towards this whole time. He's not "kicking the obstruction of justice case" he was never going to prosecute that case. That would be like saying the detectives on some criminal case kicked the case to the DA for prosecution. Of course they did! That's how the system is supposed to work!

    But he still needs to testify because most American's apparently can't be asked to read the thing. So, fine, call him in and have him read the report on CSPAN.

    It'll be like one of those meetings that gets called when the situation has already been resolved through e-mails so the response to every question is a frustrated, "As I said in my e-mail...." Mueller's testimony will be the same thing, "As we stated in the report..."
    posted by VTX at 9:35 AM on May 29, 2019 [21 favorites]




    “me: investigating obstruction of justice investigation involving the president. -if the office of the special concil had confidence that the president clearly did NOT commit a crime they would have said so. They did not have that evidence to determine that the president committed a crime.

    I'm going to disagree with your summary here. Mueller says, "if we had had confidence that the President clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so." He then goes on to say why he could not charge the president with a crime, because of Justice policy and the constitution.”

    Yes, peeedro, I think I edited a Word got out of that sentence at some point, thanks.

    It should read: “investigating obstruction of justice investigation involving the president. -if the office of the special concil had confidence that the president clearly did NOT commit a crime they would have said so. They did not have that evidence to determine that the president HAD committed a crime.
    posted by Gadgetenvy at 9:39 AM on May 29, 2019 [1 favorite]


    It’s Shrodinger’s crime.
    Pres is/is not guilty!
    posted by Gadgetenvy at 9:44 AM on May 29, 2019 [1 favorite]


    If obstruction of justice required proof of an underlying crime, then destroying evidence would get you out of trouble every single time! That's why obstruction is illegal! Scream this in the face of anyone who says the words "underlying crime"!!
    posted by theodolite at 9:46 AM on May 29, 2019 [18 favorites]


    Does Mueller’s resignation have any effect on his testimony? He’s not part of the executive branch/DOJ any more, so he’s out of that reporting structure and is just a private citizen; on the other hand he no longer has access to evidence or DOJ files.
    posted by Huffy Puffy at 9:49 AM on May 29, 2019 [1 favorite]


    It’s Shrodinger’s crime.
    Pres is/is not guilty!


    It's not though. If the cat were alive, they would have said so. If the cat were dead, they couldn't say so even though all of the evidence gathered can only lead to the conclusion that the cat is dead as they're not allowed by DoJ policy. But what they can do is gather all the evidence on both sides and provide it to the people that can say the cat is dead because the evidence inevitably points to the cat being dead.

    In other words, the cat is definitely dead but we can't say so. Here is a report of everything you need to prove the cat is dead and tell everyone about it please do something about this dead cat.
    posted by VTX at 9:52 AM on May 29, 2019 [54 favorites]


    VTX, I hope you are right and Congress gets off their collective asses.
    posted by Gadgetenvy at 9:56 AM on May 29, 2019 [2 favorites]


    We're now more than an hour since Mueller's presser. Trump's out there shaping the narrative.

    I really hope people understand that Mueller's statement was not a surprise to the Trump White House. Given that Barr originally gave advance notice to them when Mueller wrapped up his report, there's no reasonable expectation that he wouldn't have told them about Mueller's statement as soon as he'd learned about it.

    That said, Pelosi's immediate response is pretty anodyne. MSNBC's Sam Stein: "Pelosi makes no news in her statement on Mueller. Doesn’t even come close to hinting at a more aggressive posture. Merely says Congress “will continue to investigate and legislate to protect our elections and secure our democracy”."
    posted by Doktor Zed at 10:10 AM on May 29, 2019 [5 favorites]


    "if we had had confidence that the President clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so."

    This is why I am more than willing to be pissed at Mueller over today's performance. You can do-si-do all you want around this bullshit that DoJ won't charge a sitting president so you can't condemn them because they have no avenue to prove themselves innocent[1][2][3], but when you state that you would have said they didn't crime if you thought they didn't crime and leave it at that, you're saying they committed a crime. Shit, I'd love to see someone get sued for defamation per se and try to get a dismissal by threading this particular needle. I'd wager a buck they'd get smacked down hard.

    So this supposed fairness you're engaging in by not saying something that can be fought in court? You're not doing it. You're standing up as the head of a multi-year investigation and stating a conclusion. Oh no but I said it in pig latin is fucking bullshit.

    I can't know in this man's heart but it's hard for me to believe someone can dance this dance and not know exactly what they're doing. Why he'd choose to put his thumb on the scale this way I dunno - personal career interest? Partisan leanings? Fear of MAGA targeting? - but I've got very little faith left that it's a pure question of belief in justice.

    [1] As stated above, DoJ can change their policy or the President could tell them to do it if s/he really wants a day in court
    [2] Our justice system doesn't speak on innocent as that's not a criminal case outcome; you get to be decided guilty or not guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Nobody gets a verdict of innocent.
    [3] Please explain to me how this fits in with when DoJ deals with a case dismissed without prejudice and doesn't refile. I'll wait.
    posted by phearlez at 10:12 AM on May 29, 2019 [9 favorites]


    Not going to link to it, because I don’t want to even give him Twitter views, but here’s Gingrich, verbatim:

    “Muller tried today to have iut boith ways. If he thought President Trumpo was guilty of something he should have said he was guilty of something. Ken Starr used the word guilty 11 times on 11 different counts in his report on President Clinton. If not guilty Trump is innocent.”

    Looks like he and Giuliani share a social media specialist.
    posted by young_simba at 10:12 AM on May 29, 2019 [3 favorites]


    NYT: McConnell Says Republicans Would Fill a Supreme Court Vacancy in 2020, Drawing Claims of Hypocrisy

    The last time a Republican-led Senate confirmed a nominee put forth by a Democratic president was 1895, when it confirmed Rufus W. Peckham after he was nominated by Grover Cleveland. Since then, Democratic-controlled Senates have approved 13 nominees by Republican presidents.

    Mitch is just doing his job as a Republican. Ascribing particular evil to him alone, like blaming Trump himself for political division and ethnonationalism, is to ignore the pervasive and consistent patterns of conservative behavior that led to this point.
    posted by Rust Moranis at 10:14 AM on May 29, 2019 [9 favorites]


    Also he is a private citizen now and can be subpoena'd.

    I'd like a lawyer to chime in and correct me, but it's something I've wondered about for about a month now. At various times, they've said this person or that, who has since separated from the Trump administration, can't testify/be subpoenaed. I had the same thought: does it matter, if they are a private citizen?

    My assumption is that, since the scope of the subpoena would cover their actions working for the executive branch, executive privilege could be invoked. Since Mueller's report was prepared under the umbrella of the DOJ, that applies.

    If Congress subpoenaed Mueller to testify about NASA, I suppose they could. Had they hired him to act as a congressional investigator, they could. They could subpoena me to testify about the Mueller report, since I'm a private citizen who did not work in the executive branch under Trump (not that I could add insight).

    And that's precisely the problem. Without Mueller even mentioning the word, it's much harder to present impeachment as the obvious next step. Instead it's far too easy to paint impeachment as a "do over".

    Unlike, well, any lawyer employed by Trump, Mueller is thorough and deliberate. I think anything he does that steps outside of his charter, or DOJ norms, would be cited as bias. Hell--the things he has done have been described as partisan.

    It might be satisfying for him to say, straight up, there was a crime committed or Trump should be impeached. However, I think he's wise enough to realize his best move is to subtlety and overtly present the facts, and let the appropriate bodies take action.

    I wish instead he had said Russian military intelligence interfered in our election to help elect Trump, because for a certain percentage of our population anything that hurts Clinton is good, and they're grateful to whomever does it.

    There was one newscast I saw where folks literally said it's good that Russia interfered with our election and overrode the will of the majority of Americans in order to keep Clinton out. They have moral certainty that their way of doing this is so correct that anything that helps them win, legal or illegal, fair or unfair, is justified. I just don't get it.

    ----

    There are a few key things I think should be taken away from all of this:

    First, the Russians used social media and cyber attacks on our election. Regardless of any actions by Trump, this should be taken as seriously as any other attack on our country, and yes, I'm including September 11. A foreign power subverted our election, in effect exerting control over our country. The Founding Fathers didn't want this--one of the reasons you have to be a citizen from birth to be president (a point I believe Trump himself tried to educate us on). The Commander in Chief, if he considers himself a patriot, needs to strongly guard against this, regardless of the outcome to him personally.

    Second, I had been skeptical of impeachment for a number of reasons, the biggest being that, unless there is a clear smoking gun and the country is on board, it may become just the thing you do when your party controls congress and the other the executive. However, my mind is changing, and I'm seeing this:
    • Right now (May 29 at 12:52 PM EDT), there is no indication the senate would remove Trump from office or rebuke him in any fashion. Some senators may cross over the line in the coming days, but I see no reason for that fundamental fact to change absent something else.
    • A failed impeachment attempt may well give Trump ammunition to claim legitimacy, as well as be a potent weapon on the campaign trail. On one hand, at this point, I think he sees that, anyway, as do his supporters. I'm not sure holding off at this point matters.
    • At this point, we have considerable evidence of wrongdoing. For congress to be a check on the executive, the threat of impeachment when the case is this clear needs to be real.
    • Congress will need the powers of an impeachment inquiry to really dig beyond what Mueller did, and bring more of his findings to light.
    • It will be critical for the Democrats to highlight why this led to impeachment when, say, Benghazi or Hillary's e-mails did not. Trump and his supporters already decry this investigation as a waste, forgetting about the time and money spent for nothing.
    I favor impeachment at this point, but the House needs to ensure the case is as clear as possible, pull in as many GOP patriots (rather than partisans) that they can, and be clear about why this rose to that standard. Otherwise, we risk impeachment being a tit for tat.
    Finally, we are in a very sad state of affairs. It has been written many times that the checks and balances worked into the constitution assume that there are men of honor who will act on them; not a case where one party will use every crack and loophole created to gain and maintain power.
    The Electoral College, the ability to confirm justices or not, emergency declarations, etc., were all thing that were imperfect hacks to work around various problems (which may or may not be there today). It assumed it would be used by people with good intentions for our country. I may not have live every president before Trump, and know these lines were skirted at times. But the current GOP (Trump, McConnell, etc.) are simply using these as fig leaves to straight up invalidate the majority in this country.
    posted by MrGuilt at 10:15 AM on May 29, 2019 [7 favorites]


    In reality, of course, Mueller didn't say "insufficient evidence" either. He said: "If we had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so.

    @realDonaldTrump: Nothing changes from the Mueller Report. There was insufficient evidence and therefore, in our Country, a person is innocent. The case is closed! Thank you.

    See, this is the problem. This is why his statement leaves me angry. He did what lawyers do: He spoke like a damn lawyer, big long rambling sentences full of qualifiers and jargon. And that once again leaves it open to Trump and his mob to re-state however they want.

    I get that he's not going to sit down in front of the cameras and say, "well, yes, the president obstructed justice and should be impeached." But don't tell me Kamala Harris (or Katie Porter or Angus King or any of the lawmakers who have shown some actual questioning skills) couldn't get a clearer statement out of him.

    And even if they fail, fine. I want him to be grilled. I want to see if he can hold up for for 11 hours of questioning as did the woman who should be president right now if not for the Russian interference that Mueller just certified.

    And now I'm off to the dentist, which will actually be more enjoyable than listening to that statement.
    posted by martin q blank at 10:16 AM on May 29, 2019 [22 favorites]


    If I understand correctly, Mueller hasn't said he won't respond to a subpoena, just that he's said everything he'd say if that happened.

    Virtually everything he's counched in careful terms would be capable of being used, even given the above, in this form.

    Inquisitor: Mr Mueller, you said that if you hadn't found evidence of crime, you'd have said so. Is that right?
    Mueller: It is.
    Inquisitor: So you did find evidence of crime?
    Mueller: I did.

    Which in the hands of a skilled practitioner could turn any subpoena hearing into a substantial coup de théâtre without Mueller having to change anything.

    Meanwhile, I can report that the BBC is running the story as Mueller says that 45 crimed but he couldn't push the button, and that this is a substantial development.
    posted by Devonian at 10:17 AM on May 29, 2019 [23 favorites]


    Mueller:
    “We chose those words carefully and the work speaks for itself. The report is my testimony. I would not provide information beyond that which is already public in any appearance before Congress.”
    Take a step back. What does this statement actually mean? It means that Mueller would prefer not to provide testimony beyond what is in the report. Last I checked, people didn’t have the right to choose to ignore a Congressional subpoena and the requirement to tell the whole truth, excepting some privilege such as the right to avoid self-incrimination, which is clearly not present.

    After today, Robert Mueller is a private citizen. He is, from all available evidence, law-abiding. He is going to testify in any way that the House of Representatives requires him to.
    posted by East Manitoba Regional Junior Kabaddi Champion '94 at 10:19 AM on May 29, 2019 [9 favorites]


    Meanwhile, I can report that the BBC is running the story as Mueller says that 45 crimed but he couldn't push the button, and that this is a substantial development.

    The Apple News alert went with: "Robert Mueller says his office can't charge a sitting president with a crime but declines to clear Trump of wrongdoing."
    posted by Exceptional_Hubris at 10:24 AM on May 29, 2019 [7 favorites]




    I thought it was pretty fantastic, considering Mueller was definitely going to thank the DOJ and Barr (by association) etc. as that is pro forma. If you haven't read it, read it.

    * He expressly stated in several places that Russian military hacked Clinton's systems in order to throw the election.
    * He said, as clearly as he felt was appropriate to do, Congress must act to impeach. He's not going to jump on the lectern and scream it, or if he was - he did. That was it.
    * He explicitly said Trump was NOT CLEARED of wrongdoing. Wasn't Not Guilty. Didn't Uncrime. We really can't blame Mueller that he didn't speak in reddit memes. He said it as clearly as possible, in person, with his own words: WE COULDN'T CHARGE HIM. CONGRESS SHOULD.

    He's speaking as a professional FBI director would. In a normal world. That world is now gone, thanks in no small part to the crimes he investigated.

    I don't know what else we could expect him to say, given the report itself. I do think he should be subpoena'd to fill in some of the gray areas where he can. Let's remember that he's got millions of pages of evidence (or, the DOJ does, now. Until they 'accidentally' shred it) and now would be a great time to get him to comment on those. Presumably privately, although with transcript.
    posted by petebest at 10:26 AM on May 29, 2019 [21 favorites]


    The Whelk: "Huh r/TheMueller just went private"

    FYI the sub you're probably thinking of is /r/the_mueller, which is currently alive and well.
    posted by Rhaomi at 10:27 AM on May 29, 2019 [4 favorites]


    >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

    Surely some revelation is at hand;

    NEW US POLITICS MEGATHREAD!!!!!!

    >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
    posted by Little Dawn at 10:30 AM on May 29, 2019 [22 favorites]


    >> Meanwhile, I can report that the BBC is running the story as Mueller says that 45 crimed but he couldn't push the button, and that this is a substantial development.

    > The Apple News alert went with: "Robert Mueller says his office can't charge a sitting president with a crime but declines to clear Trump of wrongdoing."

    Both the NYT and the Washington Post are going with similar variations on that theme:

    NYT: Mueller, in First Comments on Russia Inquiry, Declines to Clear Trump
    Robert S. Mueller III characterized for the first time his investigation of whether President Trump obstructed justice, saying “if we had had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so.”


    WaPo: Mueller: Accusing Trump of a crime ‘not an option’ under Justice guidance
    Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, in his first public remarks since completing the Russia probe, said, “If we had had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so.”


    If "did not not commit a crime" becomes the standard takeaway, that's more than I'd hoped for from this dog-and-pony show.
    posted by RedOrGreen at 10:32 AM on May 29, 2019 [11 favorites]


    Yay, milk and cookies!
    posted by ZeusHumms at 10:32 AM on May 29, 2019 [1 favorite]


    Not that this hasn't been said above (and many times before), but just to put it in strictly logical terms: the contrapositive of a logical statement is equivalent to the statement, i.e.,
    "If p then q" is the same as "If not q then not p"
    So when Mueller says (today):
    "... if we had had confidence that the President clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so."
    he could have said instead
    We did not say we had confidence the President clearly did not commit a crime, so we do not have confidence that he didn't.
    posted by pjenks at 10:34 AM on May 29, 2019 [5 favorites]


    🍪🍪🥛
    posted by petebest at 10:35 AM on May 29, 2019 [6 favorites]


    NEW THREAD OVER THERE
    NEW
    THREAD

    NEW
    THREAD
    NEW
    THREAD

    NEW
    THREAD


    NEW
    THREAD


    NEW
    THREAD


    NEW
    THREAD



    NEW
    THREAD
    posted by lalochezia at 10:57 AM on May 29, 2019 [7 favorites]


    🍶🍪🍪🍪
    posted by Too-Ticky at 12:54 AM on May 30, 2019 [4 favorites]


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