The Weekly Sift

No Sift next week. The next new articles will appear December 23.

The question presented by the set of facts enumerated in this report may be as simple as that posed by the President and his chief of staff’s brazenness: is the remedy of impeachment warranted for a president who would use the power of his office to coerce foreign interference in a U.S. election, or is that now a mere perk of the office that Americans must simply “get over”?

– Adam Schiff,
preface to The Trump-Ukraine Impeachment Inquiry Report

This week’s featured posts are “Articles of Impeachment: Broad or Narrow?” and “The Illusions Underlying our Foreign Policy Discussions“.

This week everybody was talking about articles of impeachment

The Schiff quote above is the key question in this impeachment, and I would follow it with two other questions:

• If soliciting or coercing foreign interference is just what presidents do now, how will we ever again have a fair election?
• If Trump’s Ukraine extortion scheme was wrong but not impeachable, as some Republicans suggest, what is the proper response that will keep Trump (and future presidents) from continuing to commit such offenses?

Two major reports came out this week: The House Intelligence Committee summarized the findings of its hearings regarding Trump’s Ukraine scheme, and the House Judiciary Committee reported on “Constitutional Grounds for Presidential Impeachment“.

The Judiciary Committee heard from four legal scholars Wednesday, three called by the Democrats and one by the Republicans.

The Republican witness, Jonathan Turley (who you may have seen over the years on CNN), was also a witness during the Clinton impeachment hearings, where he said the exact opposite of what he’s saying now. In 1998, he saw the danger of letting things go:

If you decide that certain acts do not rise to impeachable offenses, you will expand the space for executive conduct.

In 2014, when Obama was president, Turley listed five “myths” about impeachment, one of which was:

An impeachable offense must involve a violation of criminal law.

Now, though,

I’m concerned about lowering impeachment standard to fit a paucity of evidence and an abundance of anger.

and he argues that the evidence against Trump doesn’t exactly fit the statutory elements for criminal bribery. (The other three witnesses said that it did.) So the need for a violation of criminal law isn’t a myth when a Republican is president.

Further hearings are happening as I write this, and I’m not trying to keep up.

Digby sums up the current anti-impeachment argument:

So basically the GOP position is that you can’t have an impeachment without examining all the relevant evidence and since Trump has denied all requests for that relevant evidence there can be no impeachment.

Fox News raises a point that I think they read entirely backwards.

While Democrats may use impeachment as an anti-Trump talking point on the campaign trail, candidates — including Sens. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass.; Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.; Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn.; Cory Booker, D-N.J., and Michael Bennet, D-Col. — could end up spending valuable days of the primary season torn between their campaigns and a Senate trial should Trump actually be impeached.

An impeachment trial at that stage of the game would put the senators at a disadvantage, while candidates such as South Bend, Ind. Mayor Pete Buttigieg, former Vice President Joe Biden and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg would be free to continue their efforts.

I think senators who are currently not polling in the top tier, like Booker or Klobuchar, could get far more traction out of a compelling pro-impeachment speech on the Senate floor than they could from a campaign event in Sioux City or Manchester. Conversely, who’s going to pay attention to Buttigieg or Bloomberg when there’s an impeachment trial on CNN?

BTW, I’m getting really tired of hearing pundits make the point that Democratic presidential candidates don’t talk much about impeachment in their campaign speeches. Why would they? One way or  the other, it should be all over before anyone votes in a primary. These candidates should be discussing their plans for 2021 and beyond, and leaving impeachment to Congress.

and the NATO summit

Trump came home early after a video of other NATO leaders laughing about him went viral. Biden capitalized with an ad about how the world is laughing at Trump, concluding with “We need a leader the world respects”.

The incident and Trump’s reaction gave me an idea that I hope catches on. Like a lot of people, I’ve been saying for a while that we need to be out on the streets holding pro-impeachment demonstrations. There should be a continuous impeachment vigil outside the White House.

But here’s the idea: It shouldn’t be an angry, chanting and sign-waving kind of demonstration. It should be comedy marathon. Every night, one or more of the country’s top comedians should be standing on a soap box outside the White House telling Trump jokes. Any time Trump opens a window in the White House, he should be able to hear people laughing.

and Confederate symbols

Nikki Haley told interviewer Glenn Beck that the Confederate flag represented “service, sacrifice, and heritage” until the Charleston church shooter Dylan Roof hijacked it for white supremacy. Former RNC Chair Michael Steele recalled “The black people who were terrorized & lynched in its name” and concluded that “Roof didn’t hijack the meaning of that flag, he inherited it.”

The Washington Post points out that

Confederate symbols have not always been a part of American or Southern life. Many of them disappeared after the Civil War. When they reappeared, it was not because of a newfound appreciation of Southern history. … These symbols were not widely used after the Civil War but were reintroduced in the middle of the 20th century by white Southerners to fight against civil rights for African Americans.

Wake Forest and Garner, North Carolina have cancelled their annual Christmas parades, for fear that the participation of pro-Confederate groups would lead to protests and counter-protests. Of course, each side blames the other for ruining a popular children’s event with politics. I sympathize with town officials, who were in a tough place legally: Banning particular points of view from a public parade is very tricky legally, as is banning protests of those views.

The University of North Carolina solved its “Silent Sam” problem, but not in a way that made anybody happy. Silent Sam is a statue of a Confederate soldier that stood at an entrance to the UNC campus for over a century until students tore it down last year.

The University settled a lawsuit filed by Sons of Confederate Veterans (who made a controversial claim to own the statue, based on the theory that removing the statue violated the conditions under which United Daughters of the Confederacy donated it to the University). The settlement agrees that SCV now owns Sam, and UNC is contributing $2.5 million to a fund to transport the statue and build it a new home.

The University’s legal position was complicated by a 2015 North Carolina law that prohibits removal of historical monuments from public property. The law was passed after the Charleston Church massacre led to calls to remove Confederate monuments.

UNC’s anti-racist groups are glad that Sam will not be coming back to intimidate black students as they enter campus, but are outraged that the University is contributing to a neo-Confederate group.

[Assistant professor William] Sturkey said he came to UNC in 2013 because he felt it was the best place in the country to study the history of the South. In recent years, he said, he has repeatedly asked the university to endow a professorship in the Department of History for a specialist in the history of slavery, in part to research the university’s own connections to slavery.

Each time, he said, he has been told UNC couldn’t afford to fund such an endowment, which Sturkey said would cost about half the amount that has been pledged to the Sons of Confederate Veterans through the Silent Sam settlement.

and you also might be interested in …

If you’re worried that the House can’t legislate because it’s so obsessed with impeachment, consider this: Friday it passed a law to restore the parts of the Voting Rights Act that the Supreme Court voided in 2013.

In the Shelby case, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote that Congress remained free to try to impose federal oversight on states where voting rights were at risk, but must do so based on contemporary data. The measure passed on Friday was an attempt to do just that.

Specifically, it would update the parameters used to determine which states and territories need to seek approval for electoral procedures, requiring public notice for voting changes and expanding access for Native American and Alaska Native voters.

Two points are worth noting:

• Protecting voting rights used to be a bipartisan issue, but no longer is. The previous extension of the Act, in 2006, passed the House 390-33 and the Senate 98-0. This time the VRA passed the House 228-187, with only one Republican voting for it.
• Like hundreds of other bills passed by what Trump calls “the do-nothing Democrats”, the VRA is expected to die in the Senate without being brought to a vote. So the point isn’t that Republicans have a different vision of how to protect voting rights, which McConnell & Company could write into a Senate version of the bill and send back to the House. Instead, Republicans in Congress are happy with the efforts of many red states to make it as hard as possible to vote, and want the federal government to leave them alone.

Waitman Wade Beorn explains why avoiding war crimes is a good idea. (Hard to believe that point needs defending, but under the current administration it does.) Using both his own combat experiences and examples from his training, he argues that “Abiding by the law of war has both ethical and pragmatic value.” He quotes his first squadron commander: “the laws of warfare are designed not only to protect civilians, but also to minimize the risk of moral injury to troops.”

“Moral injury” is an abstract way of saying that you don’t have to wake up at night seeing the faces of the family you massacred because you shot first and thought later.

Katie Hill, the California congresswoman who was pushed out of public life by a revenge-porn scandal, wrote a very moving account of how close she came to suicide, and why she didn’t do it.

This makes me wonder: Men who go through scandals seem to benefit from an unofficial statute of limitations. (Louis CK is on his comeback tour. Woody Allen is still making movies. Eliot Spitzer had a post-scandal media career and even ran for office again.) Could the same thing possibly work for victims of sex scandals?

I mean, after some interval, could Ms. Hill run for office again? Would the media respond to her revenge-porn pictures as old news? I hesitate to urge someone to display more courage than I would probably have, but someone someday should try this, just to raise the issue.

An important article in YES! magazine about a former white supremacist who works to help others deradicalize. She focuses not on the philosophical points of ideology, but on the emotional needs that white supremacy satisfies.

In every case she’s ever encountered, Martinez said, she’s been able to identify some type of unhealed trauma. Sometimes it’s extreme, as in the case of a young woman interviewed for this story who was repeatedly raped as a child by her grandfather—and then, once in the movement, raped again by a White nationalist boyfriend … Sometimes the trauma is less extreme, but there are always fundamental and unmet needs, Martinez says: the need to love and be loved, to speak and be heard, and to be a part of something greater than yourself. Deradicalization involves identifying the trauma, and finding new resources, behaviors and networks outside extremist groups to meet those needs.

Too often, we think of people doing things because they believe things. Often it’s the reverse: They believe things that justify doing the things they feel compelled to do. If you are filled with fear, you find a paranoid worldview that justifies that fear. If you’re filled with anger, you adopt a worldview that justifies that anger. Such people don’t need to hear facts that debunk their beliefs; they need to learn healthier ways to deal with fear and anger.

The NYT reports that hundreds of Hong Kong protesters have fled to Taiwan, where their visas are renewable month-to-month. Meanwhile, the demonstrations continue: Hundreds of thousands of protesters were on the streets yesterday.

North Korea is back to testing rockets, in preparation for a “Christmas gift” for the US, which analysts suspect could be a satellite launch. Trump tweeted this response:

Kim Jong Un is too smart and has far too much to lose, everything actually, if he acts in a hostile way. He signed a strong Denuclearization Agreement with me in Singapore. He does not want to void his special relationship with the President of the United States

(Oval Office soundtrack: “Don’t Give Up on Us, Baby“.) I’ve been a skeptic about the Trump/Kim relationship from the beginning. It has always seemed like one of those movie-star romances that the PR departments liked to dream up back in Hollywood’s big-studio era.

The United Kingdom has an election Thursday. Boris Johnson hopes to get a majority behind his Brexit plan. Ben Judah writes in the Washington Post: “Russia has already won Britain’s election“.

There are (at least) two distinct kinds of bigotry. The most egregious is outright hate: Kill them all, send them back where they came from, and so on. Trump is insulated against being accused of this kind of anti-Semitism by his some-of-my-best-sons-in-law-are-Jewish defense.

The second kind of bigotry may not be overtly hostile, but it pushes the stereotypes that dehumanize the victimized group. That’s what Trump was doing when he spoke to the Israeli American Council Saturday.

A lot of you are in the real estate business, because I know you very well. You’re brutal killers, not nice people at all. But you have to vote for me — you have no choice. You’re not gonna vote for Pocahontas, I can tell you that. You’re not gonna vote for the wealth tax.

In other words, Jews are rich, ruthless businessmen who only care about money. Goebbels couldn’t have said it better.

The Bloomberg campaign will be a test of what money can do in presidential politics. A typical candidate raises enough money to compete in the early small states — Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada — hoping that strong showings there will bring in more contributions that allow the campaign to continue nationwide.

Bloomberg is spending near-limitless amounts of his own money, so the early-state strategy doesn’t apply.

Jim Brown makes a strong case for raising pensions for NFL players who played before the million-dollar-contract era. It would cost a very tiny percentage of the revenue the league generates today.

The minister of a Methodist church in California posts a lengthy annotation of the church’s nativity scene, which shows the Holy Family separated in cages, as they might well have been if New Testament Egypt had been like America today.

In the Claremont United Methodist Church nativity scene this Christmas, the Holy Family takes the place of the thousands of nameless families separated at our borders. Inside the church, you will see this same family reunited, the Holy Family together, in a nativity that joins the angels in singing “Glory to God in the highest and on earth peace and good will to all.”

I’m reminded of a stage production of The Odyssey I saw a few years ago: When Odysseus washes up on the island of the Phaeacians, he gets gets detained with all the illegal immigrants who have been streaming in since the fall of Troy.

and let’s close with a job well done

At Boise State, home of the famous blue football field, they’ve trained a dog to retrieve the tee after kickoffs.

This is America. This is the country I have served and defended, that all of my brothers have served. And here, right matters.

– Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman (11-19-2019)

[Gordon Sondland] was being involved in a domestic political errand. And we were being involved in national security foreign policy. And those two things had just diverged.

– Fiona Hill (11-21-2019)

This week’s featured post is “An Impeachment Hearing Wrap-Up“.

This week everybody was talking about the impeachment hearings

I’ve pulled my impeachment notes out into the featured post.

In a related matter, the Washington Post appears to have gotten an early look at the Justice Department Inspector General’s report on the origins of the Mueller investigation. It finds that one low-level FBI lawyer acted improperly, but that “political bias did not taint top officials running the FBI investigation into possible coordination between Russia and the Trump campaign in 2016”.

The lawyer, Kevin Clinesmith, altered a email that was used to support renewal of the FISA warrant to surveil the former Trump campaign aide Carter Page. But even without that email, the report concludes, the application had sufficient legal and factual basis.

An earlier IG report on the FBI’s handling of the Clinton email investigation found “no evidence that the conclusions by the prosecutors were affected by bias.”

The report generally rebuts accusations of a political conspiracy among senior law enforcement officials against the Trump campaign to favor Democrat Hillary Clinton while also knocking the bureau for procedural shortcomings in the FBI, the officials said.

Meanwhile, Attorney General Bill Barr is running a criminal investigation into much of the same material.

but the latest developments are making me paranoid

OK, the latest developments in the dig-up-dirt-on-Biden story are starting to make me paranoid. Unsavory people are suddenly providing evidence that helps the good guys, and telling stories that are tempting to believe. It feels like a trap.

In this morning’s NYT, Vladimir Putin’s favorite Ukrainian oligarch, Dmitry Firtash, is saying that Rudy Giuliani’s now-indicted associates (Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman) made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. (See Rachel Maddow’s recent book Blowout for a long write-up on Firtash.) Firtash was encouraged to hire two Trump-connected lawyers (Victoria Toensing and Joseph diGenova) who could help with his case in the US. (The US is trying to extradite him on bribery charges. He is currently living in Austria, where he is out on bail from local charges.) Part of the $1.2 million he paid them would finance the effort to find dirt on Biden in Ukraine.

Mr. Parnas’s lawyer, Joseph A. Bondy, confirmed that account and added that his client had met with Mr. Firtash at Mr. Giuliani’s direction and encouraged the oligarch to help in the hunt for compromising information [about the Bidens] “as part of any potential resolution to his extradition matter.”

… In the [NYT] interview, Mr. Firtash said he had no information about the Bidens and had not financed the search for it. “Without my will and desire,” he said, “I was sucked into this internal U.S. fight.”

The same article claims Giuliani’s people tried to pressure another Ukrainian oligarch with US legal problems (Ihor Kolomoisky). This one is anti-Russian and refused to cooperate. Firtash also denies cooperating with the get-Biden conspiracy, but …

After Ms. Toensing and Mr. diGenova came on board, confidential documents from Mr. Firtash’s case file began to find their way into articles by John Solomon, a conservative reporter whom Mr. Giuliani has acknowledged using to advance his claims about the Bidens. Mr. Solomon is also a client of Ms. Toensing.

Those documents are the ones Giuliani kept waving around on TV.

Lev Parnas has also been implicating Devin Nunes, the ranking Republican member of the House Intelligence Committee.

Maybe Firtash and Parnas are rats jumping off of a sinking ship, but I’m also reminded of the plot of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold [spoilers]. That classic John le Carré Cold War novel follows a British intelligence operation to frame an East German official, who had been getting too close to exposing the British spy in East German intelligence. At the same time, though, other Brits scatter bread crumbs that the Communists can follow to blow up the operation. After the operation is blown, the target’s East German critics look like tools of the West, and any future suspicion of him can be written off as part of the British conspiracy against him. The supposed target, of course, is the actual British spy, who has been protected by this convoluted operation that appeared to frame him.

Remember Putin’s KGB training, and apply that Cold War plot as a template: Wouldn’t it be marvelous for Trump if Democrats jumped on this new Firtash/Parnas information, which then turned out to be fabricated? That would feed Trump’s “hoax” and “witch hunt” narrative, and (in the public mind) invalidate much of the true evidence against him.

So I’m following the new developments in an isn’t-that-interesting way. But nobody should trust these people, or go out on a limb based on anything they say. Right now, Democrats are siding with patriots like Lt. Colonel Vindman. I’d hate to see a career criminal like Lev Parnas become the resistance’s new poster boy.

Meanwhile, the Democrats had a debate

My impression of the debate of ten Democratic presidential candidates on Wednesday was that nothing drastically changed. No top-tier candidate had a major gaffe. No lower-tier candidate had a breakout moment.

On a lesser scale, I thought Joe Biden looked old. He often stumbled over his words — not in a disturbing I-don’t-know-where-I-am way, but in an I’m-having-trouble-making-the-right-words-come-out way. For example, at one point he said he had been endorsed by the “only” African-American woman who had been elected to the Senate — apparently forgetting about Kamala Harris, who was standing right there — when he meant the “first” African-American woman, a correction he made immediately when challenged.

Watching Cory Booker, I wondered why he isn’t an top-tier candidate. But I’ve wondered that in previous debates too. His candidacy didn’t see a boost then, so it probably won’t now either.

No one was the focus of attack, which tells me that the candidates aren’t sure who the front-runner is. Biden is still comfortably ahead in national polls, but Pete Buttigieg (who is fourth nationally) has taken the lead in Iowa and New Hampshire. Elizabeth Warren, who briefly moved ahead of Biden nationally in early October, also sometimes looks like the front-runner. All three took a little flack, but the other candidates didn’t gang up in the way I would expect if one of them were considered the person to beat.

I don’t recall anyone directly attacking the other top-tier candidate, Bernie Sanders. That may reflect Nicole Hemmer‘s point that “Pretty much everyone has made up their mind about him.” At the moment, the other candidates aren’t afraid of him winning, but they also see no point in pissing off his supporters.

Having the debate in Georgia moved more attentionto the black vote (hence Biden’s unfortunate claim). I thought Charles Blow‘s post-debate analysis made a lot of sense: In the Deep South particularly, the attitude of the black electorate is changing:

Those voters may be less excited by a national revolution because they are living through a very real revolution on the ground. They are feeling their power in cities and increasingly in statewide races. But in presidential elections, their voices are drowned out on the state level — other than Barack Obama winning North Carolina in 2008, no Democratic presidential candidate has carried my Deep South states since the 1990s.

As such, until that changes, voting in presidential elections can feel mostly symbolic for blacks in the South. The Democratic candidate won’t carry their state. If that person wins the presidency, it will be because of people in faraway places.

But during the primaries, those Southern black voters have a chance to make their voices heard, to reward loyalty and fidelity, to support the candidates they feel they know and to spurn those they feel they don’t.

Big plans mean less and can ring hollow. … Black people in the South are experiencing a surge of real power and the ability to enact real change. Democratic candidates have to talk to them like the people they are: strong and pushing, not weak and begging.

The main criticism of Buttigieg has been his lack of experience. I still believe what I said when John McCain tried to use that issue against Barack Obama in 2008:

The danger of making experience your central issue and claiming that your opponent is “not ready to lead” (but you are) is this: When you finally debate your “unqualified” opponent, the difference needs to be apparent. If the other guy looks equally well prepared, he wins.

Ditto here: The inexperience claim against Buttigieg will work only if he displays the classic flaws of inexperience, by saying or doing things that are hot-headed, naive, or immature in some other way. His lack of a traditional resume makes him vulnerable, but the attacks won’t stick unless he gives them something to stick to.

I believe something similar about the age issue for Biden, Sanders, and Warren. It’s a problem when Sanders has a heart attack or Biden looks confused, but so far Warren hasn’t given the age issue a hook to hang on.

On the other hand (and related to Charles Blow’s point), Buttigieg lacks history with major voting blocks, and that’s why his black support is currently undetectable in polls. I can imagine a Southern black voter saying “You’re here when you need us. Where were you when we needed you?” By contrast, Georgians remember Biden and Warren campaigning for Stacey Abrams in 2018, and Bernie Sanders endorsing her in the primary.

Timothy Egan puts his finger on a point that we’re all a little afraid to talk about. In a column where he envisions Biden beating Trump a year from now, he says:

Most Democrats came to see that it would do nothing for their cause to gain another million progressives on the coasts if they still lost 80,000 people in the old industrial heartland.

American democracy is flawed in some important and predictable ways, and that’s how Trump became president despite Hillary Clinton getting 2.8 million more votes.

It’s wrong that not all votes count the same, but they don’t. And it’s totally understandable that blue-state voters (and I am one now that I’ve moved to Massachusetts) resent the purple-state elitism of candidates like Biden, Buttigieg, and Klobuchar, whose main message is “I can appeal to the right voters.”

But that’s the real state of affairs in America today: There are right voters and wrong voters. Nobody wants to admit that or talk about it. But there it is.

That said, it shouldn’t become an excuse for making a fetish of white working class voters and ignoring people of color. The 2020 general election may well hinge on black turnout in Milwaukee, or the Hispanic vote in Arizona. The only recent Democratic presidential candidate to carry Indiana was Barack Obama, not some lunchpail-carrying white guy.

and Israel had some news

This week saw two significant developments regarding Israel: Thursday, Israel’s attorney general announced that Prime Minister Netanyahu would be indicted.  Monday, the Trump administration reversed previous US policy on the legality of Israeli settlements in the territories gained in the 1967 war.

The charges against Netanyahu reportedly will be bribery, fraud, and breach of trust. In the most serious charge, he traded regulatory favors to a news organization in exchange for favorable coverage. Under Israeli law, any government minister other than the prime minister has to resign when indicted, but the PM only has to resign if convicted.

Netanyahu is still PM, for now. Israel has now failed to form a new government despite holding two elections. In the most recent one, Netanyahu’s Likud Party finished a close second to Blue and White, led by Benny Gantz. But neither party had a majority in the Knesset, or could assemble a majority coalition of other parties. A third election will likely be held in a few months.

Netanyahu’s defensive rhetoric should sound familiar: The cases against him are all a “witch hunt”, and an “attempted coup”.

Secretary of State Pompeo announced a week ago that the United States no longer regards Israeli settlements on the West Bank of the Jordan as illegal, reversing a State Department legal opinion from 1978. Vox has a good article on the issue.

The case for claiming the settlements are illegal rests on the Fourth Geneva Convention, which says “the Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.”

Israel disputes the interpretation that it is an occupying power, claiming that the right of Jews to live in these territories is rooted in the League of Nations’ 1922 Mandate for Palestine.

In any case, it’s hard for me to see how this policy change promotes some ultimate vision of peace in the region, unless that vision involves either pushing Palestinians out of the territories entirely, or herding them into economically non-viable reservations, as the US did to its unwanted native population. East Jerusalem would be an example of a place where Palestinians are being slowly pushed out, and Gaza an example of them being penned in.

and you also might be interested in …

Hong Kong held district-council elections, the only real bit of democracy in their system. Usually, these elections revolve around mundane issues like traffic and parks and trash, because the administration that runs the city as a whole isn’t elected by the broad electorate.

But in the middle of the citywide crisis caused by pro-democracy demonstrations, the elections took on a symbolic meaning well beyond the legal duties of the offices being filled. And the result was a stunning endorsement of the demonstrators. Turnout was at record levels, and pro-democracy candidates got 80% of the council seats.

Secretary of the Navy Richard Spencer is the latest casualty in Trump’s defense of war criminals. Trump intervened in the case of Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher, who had been acquitted of premeditated murder in the stabbing death of a 12-year-old ISIS prisoner, but was “convicted of bringing discredit to the armed services after posing next to a dead ISIS fighter’s body, which is against regulations.” Trump reversed Gallagher’s demotion, but the Navy still intended to hold a disciplinary hearing that could take away Gallagher’s SEAL trident.

This angered Trump, who tweeted about it. Sunday Defense Secretary Esper fired Spencer, claiming that Spencer had gone around him in attempting to negotiate directly with the White House.

Spencer released a letter acknowledging his firing, and shooting back.

The rule of law is what sets us apart from our adversaries. Good order and discipline is what has enabled our victory against foreign tyranny time and again. … Unfortunately, it has become apparent that in this respect, I no longer share the same understanding with the Commander in Chief who appointed me.

Trump’s betrayal of America’s Kurdish allies and attempt to play games with military support for Ukraine is rocking US alliances around the world. The Washington Post discusses the impact on South Korea, where Trump wants to quintuple the contributions the Koreans make towards the cost of maintaining US troops there.

The Post offers the orthodox foreign-policy argument that “a forward defense position in Asia pays for itself, in security”. I could imagine a reasonable debate about that point, not just in Asia but in all countries where American troops or American commitments are supposedly helping keep the peace: When are we heading off problems that would otherwise cause us bigger trouble later, and when are we getting drawn into conflicts we could safely ignore?

But that conversation should involve some alternate theory of American security, a Trump Doctrine that has much more detail than “America First”, and is much broader than a case-by-case debate about whether NATO or South Korea or Israel is taking advantage of us.

Sadly, though, no one in the Trump administration (least of all Trump himself) thinks on a grand-strategy level, or is capable of leading the kind of national discussion we need if we’re going to make a fundamental change in our foreign policy.

Fracking wastewater spills in North Dakota have resulted in rivers with high levels of radioactive contamination and heavy metals.

The NFL scheduled a behind-closed doors workout for blacklisted quarterback Colin Kaepernick, ostensibly so that scouts from various teams could see if his skills have diminished during his involuntary three-year exile from the league. The Nation’s David Zirin reports:

Roger Goodell and the NFL tried to bend Kaepernick to their will this week. They scheduled him for a tryout with only three days’ notice. They insisted he come to Atlanta and work with a coach not of his choosing at the Falcons’ headquarters. They told him that it would be on a Saturday, when coaches and top scouts are busy either preparing for Sunday games or analyzing college contests. They did not tell him who the receivers he would work with would be. They wanted him to sign a “non-standard injury waiver” that would have prevented Kaepernick from suing the league for collusion in the future. Most egregiously, they insisted that the workout not be open to the press. Roger Goodell wanted all the positive public relations for “ending the collusion” against Kaepernick and none of the transparency.

Kaepernick wasn’t having it.

He showed up in Atlanta and refused to work out at the Falcons facility under the watchful eye of an NFL chosen coach. He instead went to a high school an hour away with his own receivers. He kept it open to the press, several of whom live-streamed the workout over social media, preventing the NFL from spinning the event as if he no longer had the goods.

… Now that the spectacle in Atlanta is over, we are actually back where we started. Everyone knows that Kaepernick has the ability to play. Everyone knows that he is only being kept out for political and PR reasons. The question will be whether there is one team that is willing to put their team’s success over their political prejudices. This is where we have been for three years, and this is where we remain.

The NFL has found a place for numerous wife-beaters, child abusers, sexual assaulters, and felons of other varieties. But what Kaepernick did — respectfully kneeling during the national anthem to protest police brutality against people of color — is apparently unforgivable.

It’s the kind of story that happens all the time, but doesn’t usually make the New York Times: a local hardware store is closing. This one is on Ninth Avenue in Manhattan and is owned and operated by Russian immigrant Naum Feygin. Like many such stores it’s a victim of online competition and high rents.

We tell ourselves this shift in the economy is all about efficiency, but the reporter claims not.

[Mr. Feygin’s hardware store] is cheaper and faster than ordering from Amazon and offers expert advice that reduces the risk of buying the wrong thing. It is all too easy on Amazon, for example, to buy halogen bulbs that don’t fit your lamp base; Mr. Feygin has spared me many such headaches. And the store’s small size [600 square feet] is a virtue: Unlike at Home Depot, you can be in and out in 10 minutes.

… Competition from Amazon and a rent increase might seem like distinct phenomena, but they are two sides of the same coin. Both reflect the transformative consolidation and centralization of the American economy since the 1990s, which have made the economy less open to individual entrepreneurship. Amazon represents the increasing monopolization of retail; the high rents are a symptom of the enormous concentration of wealth in a handful of coastal cities like New York, San Francisco and Washington.

Both phenomena contribute to the same regrettable outcome: In today’s economy, returns on investment have shifted away from the individuals like Mr. Feygin who take personal risks. Instead, wealth is being routed to large middlemen, national monopolies, property owners and shareholders.

Feygin once hoped his son would take over the business, but his son is more in tune with the era: He works for a hedge fund

and let’s close with something that sounds like a tall tale

The Greek historian Herodotus was famous for believing outrageous stories told to him on his travels. (My favorite explains the Persian king’s massive tribute from India with a story about ants the size of dogs who dig up golden anthills. Apparently that was easier for his audience to swallow than the sheer size of India.) Marco Polo was similarly gullible at times, though some of his most outrageous stories about the Far East turned out to be true. (He claimed that some cities in China were too large for the surrounding forests to provide enough wood for fuel, so the Chinese had learned to “burn rocks”. He was talking about coal.)

So anyway, this story sounds like a traveler’s tall tale, but  it seems to be true: In the Nepalese Himalayas lives a species of honeybees that are more than an inch long. They build nests five feet across under cliffs and on rock faces. A nest can contain well over 100 pounds of honey. And here’s the best part: Because the bees feast on poisonous plants, the honey is hallucinogenic.

That makes it worth taking outrageous risks to acquire, as the Gurung “honey hunter” tribe has done since time out of mind.

As we drove past the rows of white grave markers, in the gravity of the moment, I had a deep sense of the importance of the presidency and a love of our country. In that moment, I also thought of all the attacks we’d already suffered as a family, and about all the sacrifices we’d have to make to help my father succeed – voluntarily giving up a huge chunk of our business and all international deals to avoid the appearance that we were ‘profiting off of the office.’ … Frankly, it was a big sacrifice, costing us millions and millions of dollars annually. Of course, we didn’t get any credit whatsoever from the mainstream media, which now does not surprise me at all.

– Donald Trump Jr.
Triggered: How the Left Thrives on Hate and Wants to Silence Us

As Christ died to make men holy, let men die to make us rich.

– Mark Twain, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic, Updated” (1900)

There is no featured post this week, but plenty of news to process.

This week everybody was talking about the off-year elections

Going into Tuesday night, every pundit had two narratives ready.

• The anti-Trump blue wave of 2018 is still rolling.
• Impeachment has rallied the Trump base and turned moderates away from Democrats.

The results picked out the first story: Democrat Andy Beshear won the Kentucky governorship over the incumbent Matt Bevin. Democrats took control of both houses of the Virginia legislature. And while Republicans held on to the governorship in Mississippi, the margin (52%-47%) was hardly encouraging for Republicans, given that Trump won the state in 2016 58%-40%.

The deeper story was that both sides were energized. 1.4 million votes were cast in the Kentucky race, compared to less than a million in 2015. Bevin got nearly 200K more votes than in 2015, when he won by a comfortable margin; it just wasn’t enough.

Also, the two parties’ geographical bases of support are shifting. 538 summarizes:

Rural areas got redder, and urban and suburban ones got bluer — and not only in Virginia. Even for centrist Democrats like Mississippi gubernatorial candidate Jim Hood, the old, pre-Trump Democratic coalition has been replaced by one that increasingly relies on suburban voters to make up for losses among rural whites.

The Kentucky race didn’t settle the Democrats’ progressive/moderate argument about how to win elections. Progressives argue that you win by energizing the base to get a big turnout, while moderates say you shouldn’t turn off the changing suburban voters, who could easily go back to voting Republican or just stay home.

Beshear’s performance Tuesday, like Doug Jones’ win in Alabama in 2017, showed that Democrats can win in red states if they do both. Beshear got a huge turnout in urban Democratic strongholds, but he also won the suburbs.

It also helps if your opponent is toxic, as Bevin and Roy Moore both were. Even as Beshear was beating Bevin, Republicans were winning the other statewide offices. It’s not clear what that says about Amy McGrath’s chances of beating Mitch McConnell next year.

Bevin has refused to concede, citing unspecified “irregularities” that could account for Beshear’s 5,000-vote margin. That has led to speculation that he could get the Republican legislature to overturn the election.

Think what a huge step towards might-makes-right that would be. Republicans have moved in this direction before: North Carolina’s and Wisconsin’s gerrymandered Republican legislatures both tried to diminish the power of the governorship after a Democrat won the office. But no state has simply refused to let the voters elect a Democrat.

Fortunately, it appears that Kentucky’s Republican legislators aren’t interested in that kind of power grab — particularly for Bevin, whom many of them didn’t like anyway. The Week reports:

“The best thing to do, the right thing to do, is for Gov. Bevin to concede the election today so we can move on,” Rep. Jason Nemes (R) told the Herald Leader. “There’s nothing wrong with checking the math,” added Rep. Adam Koenig (R), but “unless there is a mountain of clear, unambiguous evidence, then he should let it go.”

Kentucky could be a preview of the national situation a year from now: If Trump loses, he almost certainly will blame his loss on fraud, whether any evidence supports that conclusion or not. (That’s how he has explained Clinton’s 2.8 million vote margin in the 2016 popular vote.) Then the question will be what levers he can push to hold onto office, and whether other elected Republicans or Trump-appointed judges will support him if he does.

and impeachment

If you’re not watching Chris Hayes on Friday nights, you’re missing out. Hayes has been doing his show in front of a live audience on Fridays, and the format works really well. This Friday’s opening piece was Hayes’ response to Trump’s “read the transcript” mantra, which Hayes and I both believe he is putting forward cynically. Trump knows that his voters will not in fact read the transcript, but will conclude that he wouldn’t invite them to read it if his claim that it is “perfect” weren’t true. (One way to tell Trump’s supporters are not reading the transcript is that only 40% of Republicans say that Trump mentioned the Bidens in the call, when anyone who has read the transcript would know that he did.)

Hayes says “Yes, read the transcript”, and walks the audience through what the transcript says.

Public impeachment hearings will start Wednesday, when the House Intelligence Committee will hear testimony from Bill Taylor and George Kent. Ambassador Marie Yovanovich, whose dismissal is a key part of the story, will testify Friday.

This week the committee also released transcripts of several of the closed-door depositions: Colonel Vindman, Fiona Hill, George Kent, Bill Taylor, Gordon Sondland, Kurt Volker. The depositions were each hours long and altogether the transcripts run over 2500 pages. I haven’t attempted to read them, and will wait for public hearings to pick out the highlights.

In the meantime, it’s important to remember the sequence of events:

Friday night on CNN, David Gergen said the exact words I’d been thinking: Trump’s defense is basically a “Catch-22” that plays hearsay off against executive privilege: If a witness in the impeachment probe didn’t talk to Trump face-to-face, then his or her knowledge of the Ukraine extortion plot can be written off as hearsay. But people who did talk with Trump face-to-face can’t testify because of executive privilege.

In particular, all the testimony released so far points to three people: Mick Mulvaney, Mike Pompeo, and Rudy Giuliani. Each claimed to speak for Trump and was very explicit in detailing (in front of witnesses who have testified under oath) the plot’s quid-pro-quo: releasing the money Congress had appropriated to defend Ukraine from Russian aggression in exchange for investigations into Biden and into the Ukraine-framed-Russia conspiracy theory of 2016 election interference.

It is hard to imagine any or all of these men cooking up the extortion plot without Trump’s approval, but they are the ones who had the most direct contact with the President. So the obvious thing to do is ask them: Were you free-lancing or were you following the President’s orders? But Trump won’t let them testify because of executive privilege.

In my mind, the whole notion of reasonable doubt goes out the window when the defendant creates the doubt by withholding evidence and blocking testimony.

Lindsey Graham is trying out the next line of Trump defense, which is to simply refuse to think about the evidence of his crimes: “I’ve written the whole process off,” he said. “I think this is a bunch of B.S.”

The Republican strategy for the public hearings seems to be to turn them into a circus. Among the witnesses they want are Hunter Biden and the whistleblower, as well as a DNC staffer who is supposedly involved in the 2016 Ukrainian interference conspiracy theory, and Nellie Ohr, who had something to do with the Steele dossier.

Other than the whistleblower, none of these people have any light to shine on the question before the committee: whether or not President Trump abused the power of his office to extort partisan political help out of the Ukrainian government. It’s totally crazy that Hunter Biden and Nellie Ohr should have to testify, but not Mulvaney or Pompeo.

The focus on the whistleblower is also misguided and wrong. Exposing his identity strikes at the heart of the whistleblower protection laws. The main purpose of exposing him would be to intimidate other government officials who might blow the whistle on Trump’s crimes. At this point, the claims in the whistleblower complaint have been substantiated by testimony under oath from other officials, so it’s not clear what the whistleblower could add.

Here’s an analogy: Somebody pulls the fire alarm in a big office building. The building is evacuated, the fire department comes, and a real fire is discovered and put out. Afterward, investigators look at how the fire started, how it spread, and what can be done to prevent similar fires in the future. But a second set of investigators cares nothing about those questions. Instead, their efforts are focused on figuring out who pulled the alarm.

Committee Chair Adam Schiff has veto power over witnesses, and is going to use it:

This inquiry is not, and will not serve … as a vehicle to undertake the same sham investigations into the Bidens or 2016 that the President pressed Ukraine to conduct for his personal political benefit, or to facilitate the President’s effort to threaten, intimidate, and retaliate against the whistleblower who courageously raised the initial alarm

Schiff’s refusal will lead to a new round of process complaints from Republicans. The Devin Nunes letter listing witnesses already complains “You directed witnesses called by Democrats not to answer Republican questions.” I believe he is referring to questions intended to identify the whistleblower.

Steve Benen makes essentially the same argument I made a few weeks ago: Removing Trump can’t wait for the next election, because the whole issue here is that Trump will abuse his power in order to cheat in that election.

When this is all over, there needs to be legislation codifying a bunch of stuff that was taken for granted in all previous administrations: about Congress’ oversight powers, the responsibility of members of the executive branch to testify, and so forth. In addition, there needs to be a streamlined process for courts to adjudicate disputes over these issues, so that a president can’t simply use the courts to delay, as Trump is doing.

but what about censure?

The WaPo’s conservative columnist Marc Thiessen proposes that Democrats try to censure Trump instead of impeach him. (A censure resolution would be a moral condemnation, but would not result in removal from office or any other substantive penalties. Moreover, a House censure resolution could be ignored by the Senate.)

Thiessen argues that since the Senate is not going to remove Trump from office anyway, impeachment is really just a fancy kind of censure, and he offers the possibility that a censure resolution might gain Republican support:

A bipartisan censure vote would ultimately be more damaging to Trump than impeachment along party lines. The impeachment inquiry is energizing Trump voters, who believe Democrats are trying to invalidate their votes by removing Trump from office. Censure would take away that argument. It would be dispiriting to Trump’s base, especially if some Republicans joined Democrats in voting to rebuke the president. Trump would be furious at a bipartisan vote of censure.

That may sound reasonable, but we’ve seen this game before. When the Affordable Care Act was being debated, “moderate” Republicans would often hint that they might support it if it were watered down: if the public option were removed (it eventually was), or if it also included conservative features like tort reform (it never did). However, those Republican moderates never made a genuine counter-proposal, i.e., “Here’s an amended version of the ACA that I would vote for.” In the end, none of them did vote for the ACA, but we were left with the myth that somehow Democrats had been unreasonable and had passed up genuine compromise opportunities.

I fear the same thing here: Democrats retreat to censure in an effort to get Republican votes, and Republicans still don’t vote for it.

Here’s how I think the process should work: Democrats believe that Trump’s crimes are impeachable and that removal from office is the appropriate response, so that’s what they should propose. If Republicans believe the proper response is censure, they should propose that. In other words, if Republicans want to compose a censure resolution, introduce it (with a list of sponsors) in either the House or Senate, and try to persuade Democrats to vote for it instead of impeachment, they should go right ahead. But absent some legitimate counter-proposal from Republicans — one they would advocate in public and not just hint at — Democrats should continue doing what they believe is right.

If a Republican censure resolution existed, then its pluses and minuses could be discussed: Is the wording strong enough? Could it pass overwhelmingly? Would the Senate pass it too? Would such a public condemnation deter Trump and future presidents from committing similar crimes in the future? And so on. But until some number of Republicans in Congress are willing to clearly say, “Here is how we want to condemn the President’s actions”, there’s nothing to talk about.

and other Trump-related news

A New York state judge ruled that Trump must pay $2 million to a consortium of non-profits to resolve a lawsuit charging him with misusing the Trump Foundation for personal gain. The judge’s ruling sharply criticized the January, 2016 event Trump scheduled to conflict with the Republican debate he was boycotting. The event was billed as a Trump Foundation fund-raiser for veterans’ groups, but the Foundation allowed the Trump campaign to distribute the money in campaign events.

Mr. Trump’s fiduciary duty breaches included allowing his campaign to orchestrate the Fundraiser, allowing his campaign, instead of the Foundation, to direct distribution of the Funds, and using the Fundraiser and distribution of the Funds to further Mr. Trump’s political campaign.

Trump isn’t pursuing an appeal.

It marked an extraordinary moment: The president of the United States acknowledged in a court filing that he had failed to follow basic laws about how charities should be governed. Previously, Trump had insisted the charity was run properly and the suit was a partisan sham.

This scandal points to the same character flaw we see in the Ukraine scandal and throughout the Trump administration: He is incapable of distinguishing between himself and the roles he has taken on. He sees whatever power he has as his own, to do with as he likes, rather than as part of a role that includes responsibilities and restrictions.

The $2 million reminds me of the $25 million he had to pay to settle his Trump University fraud. Defrauding donors, defrauding students … what’s a guy gotta do to go to jail around here?

The Roger Stone trial started, which means that we might finally find out what all those redactions in the Mueller Report were about. Mother Jones summarizes the government’s case against Stone, and Rolling Stone discusses Steve Bannon’s testimony. And there’s this Dylan-parody meme.

Beppe Severgnini gives a European perspective on Trump’s decision to abandon America’s Kurdish allies. Another wave of Syrian refugees will result, he fears, and Europe (not America) will have to deal with them. “[W]e felt betrayed. No warning, no consultation. Trust has been shattered.”

The anonymous Trump official who wrote a controversial op-ed a year ago has a book coming out a week from tomorrow. It’s called A Warning, and to a large extent it contradicts the message of last year’s op-ed. That article assured the public that the administration was full of people who would control Trump’s venal or insane impulses, and thwart his ability to do illegal or destructive things.

This book — if the excerpts we’ve seen so far are typical — argues that those people (the “Steady State”, the author calls them) are failing, and that things will get much worse if the voters give Trump a second term.

Nikki Haley’s book With All Due Respect is coming out tomorrow. In it, she tells of Rex Tillerson and John Kelly confiding in her that they were intentionally undermining the president in order to “save the country”. Maybe one of them is Anonymous.

You may have heard that the Trump campaign is so desperate for black supporters that it has begun photoshopping its hats onto black people. Snopes tones that accusation down a little: The fake photo doesn’t come from the official Trump campaign, but does appear in an advertisement for the hat on the Conservative News Daily web site. The hat is not an official piece of Trump-campaign merchandise and is being marketed by someone else.

So the photo is an attempt to scam conservatives, who are often targeted for scams (and have been for years) because of their well-known gullibility. But it’s not an official Trump scam.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery: The founder of Students for Trump just pleaded guilty to a $46K fraud scheme. The 23-year-old posed as a lawyer with 15 years experience, and charged for online legal advice.

and Mike Bloomberg (and the Democratic presidential race)

I have two contradictory opinions about the number of candidates in the race for the Democratic nomination. On one hand, I want everybody who thinks they have the right message or ability or experience to run. I don’t want any Democratic voters looking at somebody on the sidelines and thinking “If only …”. A lot of Democrats did that with Hillary Clinton in 2004 and Elizabeth Warren in 2016. Let’s not do it again.

On the other hand, I’m tired of seeing ten or more candidates on the debate stage, or still running even though they can’t meet the debate-stage requirements. John Delaney, Steve Bullock, Tulsi Gabbard, and a bunch of other people whose names I can’t even think of right now — aren’t you just wasting everybody’s time, including your own?

So anyway, it looks like we might be getting a new entry: Mike Bloomberg. And part of me says: Why not? He served three terms as mayor of New York City, which has a bigger population than most states (way more than Steve Bullock’s Montana). He’s at least ten times richer than Trump, and got there by starting new businesses rather than being a scam artist. He’s got a national profile for gun control and some other issues. Why not?

But I’m very skeptical that he’s going to shake up the race. The beltway narrative is that he’ll compete with Joe Biden for the moderate vote, but I think that’s a misperception of Biden’s support, which is not fundamentally ideological. Biden represents a return to normalcy. The elect-Biden fantasy is that then the adults will be back in charge, the Twitter circus will be over, and we can pretend this whole Trump thing never happened. Bloomberg doesn’t offer that same comfort.

Also, the Biden moderate-lane narrative, the one that has him challenged not just by Bloomberg, but also by Mayor Pete and maybe Amy Klobuchar, ignores the racial component of Biden’s appeal. At the moment, here’s the most likely scenario: Warren, Sanders, or Buttigieg wins in Iowa, Warren or Sanders wins in New Hampshire, and then the black voters of South Carolina save Biden’s bacon by coming through for him. Then we head into the big-state primaries with two or three viable candidates: Biden, the Iowa winner, and the New Hampshire winner.

The black vote is what saved Hillary Clinton’s candidacy after Sanders’ New Hampshire wipe-out in 2016, and so far it’s lining up the same way for Biden. An Economist/YouGov poll that is otherwise quite favorable to Warren — she trails Biden 26%-25% — shows Biden getting 47% of the black vote, with Warren at 17% and Sanders at 14%. Kamala Harris is at 7%, Julian Castro 5%, and Cory Booker 3%. Buttigieg and Klobuchar clock in at zero.

Bloomberg is Mayor Stop-and-Frisk. He’s going nowhere with blacks. If there were a sudden boomlet for Harris or Booker, that would threaten Biden’s path to victory way more than Bloomberg does. But so far I see no sign of it.

After I wrote the previous note, the first Bloomberg-inclusive polls came out, showing him with single-digits of support.

Exactly why Biden has so much black support is an interesting question in its own right. Generalizations about large demographic groups should never be taken too seriously, since there will usually be gobs and gobs of exceptions. But let me toss out this theory: In general, the black electorate is wary and pragmatic. Falling in love with a candidate is seen as a luxury privileged people have. Blacks (especially older blacks) are used to the idea that the candidate they would fall in love with probably has no chance. They also distrust bright new faces and big promises, because they’ve seen their people get conned again and again. So they look for a candidate who can win and has a longstanding relationship with them. Right now, that’s Biden.

That can change. In the 2008 cycle, blacks were wary of supporting Barrack Obama against their longstanding ally Hillary Clinton. Eventually they did support him in a big way, but only after Obama’s performance in Iowa proved that white people would vote for him too. They loved Obama, but they weren’t going to do a charge-of-the-light-brigade for him, just like they’re not doing one now for Harris or Booker.

Elizabeth Warren has made an interesting tactical decision: She’s not going tit-for-tat against all the other candidates who are attacking her and her healthcare plan.

Warren aides said they’re not adopting a pacifist posture; they expect that some attacks will require a response. Rather, they say they’re adapting to the modern media environment where responding to everything can distract from more important tasks and muddle their message.

It’s too soon to tell whether this works, but I understand the impulse behind it: Next fall, Trump wants the national debate to be a food fight rather than a discussion of where the country is going or should go. The Democratic nominee will have to figure out how to deal with his constant name-calling and lies without just getting into a shouting match. The approach that worked against gentlemanly candidates like George Bush the First or Mitt Romney may play into Trump’s hands.

meanwhile, it’s Veterans’ Day

It used to be Armistice Day, marking the 11/11/1918 end of the shooting in World War I, then known only as “the Great War”.

Veterans’ Day, like Memorial Day on the other side of the calendar, can be a tricky holiday for liberals to celebrate. We have opposed many of our country’s recent wars. (And not-so-recent wars. Twain’s “Battle Hymn” protested the war in the Philippines. The Christmas carol “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear” lamented the Mexican-American War of 1848.) We would like to see a less militarized country and culture. We think our government overspends on weapons and puts too many of our soldiers in danger overseas. Too often, national security is used as an excuse for restricting citizens’ rights and increasing government surveillance.

None of that, though, should turn us against the individual men and women who have stepped up to accept the risks of defending our country and its allies, and who have fulfilled their commitments honorably, often at dire cost to themselves and their families. If you’re not a pacifist (and I’m not) you’re consciously or unconsciously counting on someone to train for war and be ready to meet violence with violence. Particularly if we don’t take on that job ourselves (and I haven’t), we owe some gratitude to the people who do.

The soldier is the most visible symbol of militarism, but we must be careful not to let symbolism blind us to soldiers’ humanity. Soldiers didn’t send themselves to Vietnam or Iraq; our leaders sent them there. Soldiers don’t steal their pay or their equipment from schools and poor families who need help; it is politicians who set those priorities and distribute the nation’s resources. (Many soldiers come from those poor families, and see military service as the only viable ticket out of poverty for themselves and their children.) Again and again, voters have endorsed those choices.

The members of our armed forces have put their lives in the hands of our nation’s leaders, and ultimately in our hands. Veterans’ Day is a time to remember the costs of military service, and to rededicate ourselves to making sure that the nation does not abuse the trust that these men and women have placed in it.

and you also might be interested in …

Deciding which streaming TV services you want has gotten complicated over the past few years, and is about to get significantly more complicated. The Washington Post breaks it down.

Finally, the future I was promised is starting to arrive: an all-electric air taxi.

and let’s close with something stunning

SkyPixel has a contest for the best aerial photographs. The Verge has picked its favorites, including this image of Hong Kong that has been warped to make the sky a small circle of light surrounded by skyscrapers.

No Sift next week. The next new posts will appear on November 4.

I have had the privilege and the honor of working with a lot of presidents. And I didn’t always agree with them. But I always believed that they were men of principle, that they were trying to do what was right by the country. They didn’t always get it right, but they were trying to do what was right. I don’t see that in this president.

– retired Admiral William H. McRaven
former commander of the U.S. Special Forces Operations Command
10-17-2019

This week’s featured posts are “A Liberal View of Intervention” and “The Leader or the Law?“.

This week everybody was talking about impeachment

One of the featured posts looks at Trump’s defense strategy, which I see as a pure power play: Forget the law, forget the facts, forget the Constitution — are you with me or against me?

This week’s testimony to the impeachment inquiry didn’t have a standout moment, but a parade of foreign-service officers put a lot of detail into the picture: Trump didn’t just get a wild idea during a phone call and say something he shouldn’t. There was a months-long program to pressure Ukraine to investigate Democrats, and a clear intention to withhold military aid until they did. Anybody who wasn’t down with that program (like recalled Ambassador Marie Yovanovich) was pushed out.

On Fox News, John Yoo made the absurd point that the framers of the Constitution “would never have wanted an impeachment within a year of an election”. I’ve discussed this objection before, but Eric Columbus sums up the counter-argument very succinctly.

Any caution about not impeaching too close to an election makes no sense where the impeachable conduct is aimed at subverting that election.

Also worth pointing out: Andrew Johnson’s impeachment trial before the Senate was in March of 1868, only eight months before a presidential election.

Thursday, retired Admiral William McRaven, famous as the architect of the Bin Laden raid, wrote an op-ed in the New York Times called “Our Republic is under Attack from the President“.

We are not the most powerful nation in the world because of our aircraft carriers, our economy, or our seat at the United Nations Security Council. We are the most powerful nation in the world because we try to be the good guys. We are the most powerful nation in the world because our ideals of universal freedom and equality have been backed up by our belief that we were champions of justice, the protectors of the less fortunate. … President Trump seems to believe that these qualities are unimportant or show weakness. He is wrong. These are the virtues that have sustained this nation for the past 243 years. … And if this president doesn’t understand their importance, if this president doesn’t demonstrate the leadership that America needs, both domestically and abroad, then it is time for a new person in the Oval Office — Republican, Democrat or independent — the sooner, the better. The fate of our Republic depends upon it.

But if you are a Fox News viewer, you probably don’t know about this. Friday and Sunday mornings I searched for “McRaven” on the Fox News web site and turned up no articles since September 20.

More reason to believe that you’ll strike corruption in TrumpWorld anywhere you drill: Months ago, Michael Cohen claimed that Trump manipulated reports on the value of his properties, estimating high when he was looking for loans and low when he was paying taxes. This week, a new Pro Publica report fleshed that out.

For instance, Trump told the lender that he took in twice as much rent from one building as he reported to tax authorities during the same year, 2017. … A dozen real estate professionals told ProPublica they saw no clear explanation for multiple inconsistencies in the documents. The discrepancies are “versions of fraud,” said Nancy Wallace, a professor of finance and real estate at the Haas School of Business at the University of California-Berkeley. “This kind of stuff is not OK.”

This is how they found out:

ProPublica obtained the property tax documents using New York’s Freedom of Information Law. The documents were public because Trump appealed his property tax bill for the buildings every year for nine years in a row, the extent of the available records. We compared the tax records with loan records that became public when Trump’s lender, Ladder Capital, sold the debt on his properties as part of mortgage-backed securities.

Josh Marshall raises another corruption question: When you see how much trouble Trump was willing to go to to get illicit favors out of Ukraine, you have to wonder what he has gotten from far more pliable countries like the monarchies of the Persian Gulf.

Trump’s willingness has always been a given. That of crooked oligarchies looking for advantage is equally so. The question has been the acquiescence, if not necessarily the connivance, of high level advisors. That is clear now too.

In other words, there is every reason to think, the very strong likelihood that Donald Trump’s corruption and lawlessness has already infected relationships with numerous countries abroad. It’s now just a matter of finding out the details.

Wednesday afternoon at Trump’s press conference with Italian President Mattarella, the translator’s face expressed how a lot of us feel when we listen to him.

and Syria

In one of the featured posts, I take a step back and seek some consistency in my own positions. I oppose Trump’s running out on the Kurds. But I also want to limit America’s military interventions. How do those fit together?

Along the way, I look at the situation of the Kurds, and Mitch McConnell’s restatement of the post-World-War-II, pro-intervention foreign policy consensus.

Lapdog Lindsey Graham is back in his kennel. He now thinks Trump’s Syria policy can lead to “some historic solutions in Syria that have eluded us for years”. Whatever he said last week has gone down the memory hole.

Wednesday, Trump was supposed to present his Syria policy to a bipartisan collection of skeptical leaders from Congress, where the House had just voted to condemn it 354-60. The meeting quickly fell apart, with Democratic leaders walking out to report Trump’s “meltdown” into shouting insults at Nancy Pelosi.

Trump countered by claiming Pelosi had a meltdown — sort of like in the 2016 debate when Trump cleverly responded to Clinton’s accusation that he was Putin’s puppet by saying “No. You’re the puppet.” (Trump must have been a hell of a debater in second grade.)

Trump decided to back up his case by posting this historic picture, which otherwise we would never have seen.

Apparently Trump believed that it made Pelosi look “unhinged”. But just about everyone else thinks it makes her look badass. Pelosi herself is using the picture as her Twitter cover photo. If you look closely at the men (they’re all men) on Trump’s side of the table, most of them look ashamed, particularly General Mark Milley, chair of the Joint Chiefs, who sits to Trump’s right.

After Trump is finally gone, however that happens, somebody should turn this image into a oil painting and hang it in the Capitol.

BTW, this example points to a factor that makes me hopeful about removing Trump from office, despite the obstacles: Trump has bamboozled himself, as propagandists often do, and that will cause him to make mistakes — like imagining that this photo is a good look for him and a bad look for Pelosi.

I have treated with skepticism all Republican or conservative voices who have denounced Trump, wondering if they will nonetheless find some excuse to vote to re-elect him in 2020. Many of them knew what Trump was in 2016. (But her emails!)

Anyway, David Brooks is saying no to that, at least for now. He’s rooting for a moderate Democrat to win the nomination, but eventually comes around to this conclusion:

And yet, if it comes to Trump vs. Warren in a general election, the only plausible choice is to support Warren. … Politics is downstream from morality and culture. Warren represents a policy wrong turn, in my view, but policies can be argued about and reversed. Trump represents a much more important and fundamental threat — to the norms, values, standards and soul of this country.

He leaned the same way in his last column before the 2016 election.

Many of us disagree strongly with many Clinton policies. But any sensible person can distinguish between an effective operating officer and a whirling disaster who is only about himself.

But in that column he didn’t come out and say explicitly that he would vote for Hillary, or that other conservatives should.

and the Democratic debate

I’m ashamed to admit how little attention I’ve given this. It’s startling how the action in American politics has shifted to Congress and the courts recently, and away from the campaign trail.

You can watch the whole thing starting here.

and Brexit

For a moment it looked like this might all work out. Thursday, Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced that he had reached a Brexit deal with the EU. The deal is complicated, but essentially leaves Northern Ireland running by EU rules on trade.

In practice, that meant that, rather than putting a border on the island of Ireland, Britain would have to put one in the Irish Sea, and impose regulatory and customs checks for items passing from Britain into Northern Ireland.

Johnson’s allies representing Northern Ireland might not like that, but it was the best he could do.

Parliament was supposed to vote on the deal Saturday, but then things got interesting: Parliament decided to put off a final vote on the Brexit deal until after it passed all the implementing legislation. The point of that, as I get it, was to make sure that no last-minute stunt could throw the country into a no-deal Brexit on October 31.

Anyway, that meant that an October 18 deadline passed, requiring Johnson to request an extension from the EU. He did, but also told them he didn’t mean it. It’s not clear what they’re going to do about it. The BBC has a flow chart that explains all the possibilities.

and you also might be interested in …

Elijah Cummings died Thursday. He was 68 and had been in poor health for some time.

The State Department’s official investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email server concluded in September and its unclassified report was released this week.

While there were some instances of classified information being inappropriately introduced into an unclassified system in furtherance of expedience, by and large, ‘the individuals interviewed were aware of security policies and did their best to implement them in their operations. … There was no persuasive evidence of systemic, deliberate mishandling of classified information. [italics added]

Well, I’m glad nobody made a big deal out it, then. [BTW, I will take credit now for having gotten this issue right at the time in “About Those Emails“.]

The details of Trump’s “tremendous” trade deal with China are already starting to unravel. The markets apparently don’t take seriously Trump’s claim that the Chinese have agreed to buy $40 or $50 billion of American agricultural products. The price of soybeans hasn’t budged.

It’s bad enough that US immigration officials are continuing to separate children from their parents. But it turns out that in some cases the separation may be permanent: Some states are letting Americans adopt children whose parents have been deported.

An important addition to the abortion discussion is “I Had a Late-Term Abortion. I Am Not a Monster.” by Lyndsay Werking-Yip in Saturday’s New York Times.

I ended my child’s life. At 23 weeks and six days into my pregnancy, I had a “late term” abortion. When people ask, “How could you?” I reply that allowing her to live would have been a fate worse than death. Her diagnosis was not fatal, not incompatible with the bare mechanics of a living body. But it was incompatible with a fulfilling life. … I know I made the best choice for my child. I do not regret it, and I will not hide it.

It is important to tell the stories of actual late-term abortions, because they almost never match the vicious portraits painted by the anti-abortion movement. More typically, late-term abortions are morally serious decisions made with great care and anguish.

The point of Werking-Yip’s essay isn’t that of course you would have done the same thing, but that you probably have no idea what it’s like to face such a decision.

You might swear up and down that you could never make the choice I did, but you never know for sure until the time comes.

What makes the abortion question so difficult to discuss is that it’s actually two questions:

• What should be done?
• Who should decide what to do?

Pro-life advocates focus on the first question, and their answer is that abortions should not be done, no matter the circumstances. Having come to that conclusion, they want the government to decide once and for all: no abortions.

Pro-choice advocates focus on the second question, and say that pregnant women should decide what happens to their pregnancies, in consultation with the people they trust and rely on: spouses, families, friends, doctors, religious advisors. They reject a one-size-fits-all government decision.

That’s why the two sides talk past each other: They’re answering different questions.

A Sandy Hook father won a defamation suit against an author whose book claims the father faked his son’s death as part of a government plot to impose gun control. The jury awarded him $450,000. Similar defamation suits against Alex Jones are still pending.

Responding to Attorney General Barr’s speech blaming all societal problems on secularism, never-Trump Republican columnist Jennifer Rubin lists the issues that she never wants to hear Trump Republicans lecture about again:

• moral values. “If one spends years tolerating, supporting and defending a president whose character is lower than any president in modern memory, one loses the right to wag his finger.”
• the rule of law. “As with morality, no more Federalist Society lectures on limited government and constitutional conservatism, please.”
• foreign policy. “I never want to hear that Republicans are the strong-on-defense and pro-democracy party. Ever.”
• deficits.

Years ago, Nike ran an ad campaign for Air Jordans with the slogan “It’s got to be the shoes.” It was intentionally ridiculous, because anyone could see that the difference between Michael Jordan and the rest of us wasn’t his shoes. But Nike’s new running shoes have people raising that issue seriously, and oversight organizations are wondering whether they should be banned from competitions.

and let’s close with puppies

I’m guessing we could all use some puppies about now.

I hear this, too, from my Republican Senate colleagues. There is a belief that there is a group in every corner of the government that is out to get Trump. There really are morally centered people who find him deeply distasteful, and it is required of them to raise questions of corruption if they see it. The Trump Administration sees that as a conspiracy.

– Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT)

This week’s featured post is “More Answers to Impeachment Objections“.

This week everybody was still talking about impeachment

I focused on that in the featured post. Other new developments are that a second whistleblower is emerging. I suspect we’re about to see a flood: If you’re not objecting to what Trump did, then you’re part of the cover-up.

It’s not immediately related to impeachment, but a federal judge just turned down Trump’s attempt to block a grand jury from subpoenaing his tax returns. The judge said Trump’s claim that a president has “”absolute immunity from criminal process of any kind” is “an overreach of executive power”.

I think we’re going to find out just how partisan this Supreme Court is. The law is clear, but what they’re going to rule isn’t.

Secretary of State Pompeo has not complied with a subpoena from the House.

Something I’ve been wrestling with for months is when a bad president should be impeached and when the voters should just refuse to re-elect him. Nancy Pelosi has come to more-or-less the same conclusion I have: Elections are the way to correct bad policies or to reprimand a president’s character.

If you think he’s a coward on protecting children from gun violence, and you think he’s cruel for not protecting ‘dreamers,’ if you think he is in denial on climate change, take that up in the election. That has nothing to do with what we are doing here. If you think his vocabulary and his behavior and his immorality and his indecency are personally offensive, take it up in the election.

Impeachment, on the other hand, is for abuses of power that endanger the Republic, especially the ones that damage the integrity of the election itself.

No Republicans in Congress have shown real spine yet, but some of them are creating space where a spine might go someday. Mitt Romney is the most obvious. He thinks that it’s “wrong and appalling” for Trump to ask the Chinese to investigate Joe Biden, but he hasn’t said that anything should be done about it. Likewise Susan Collins and Ben Sasse.

Trump has been tweeting that Romney should be “impeached”, apparently not realizing that impeachment is not a thing for senators. There’s also no way for voters to recall a senator. (New presidents really ought to get an introductory lecture on the Constitution.)

and Trump’s Ukraine conspiracy theory

Trump’s attempt to get bogus Biden corruption investigations going is getting all the attention, but he’s been asking for another investigation as well: into Ukraine’s role in 2016. (BTW: I don’t think Trump cares that the investigations of Biden won’t find anything. Clinton was never found to have done anything wrong during Benghazi, but the investigations helped create a fog of uncertainty around her. It would be enough to have a bunch of headlines saying “Ukraine opens investigation into Biden corruption charges”.)

You seldom see the Ukraine theory spelled out in detail, because it is in fact a long series of conspiracy theories rolled into one: The DNC computers were never hacked by Russia, but instead DNC staffer Seth Rich leaked the emails and was murdered for it. Then Ukraine and the Clinton campaign conspired to fake the evidence of Russian hacking, and all the US intelligence services (and a number of foreign intelligence services as well) were either fooled by this evidence or were in on the plot. All the predicates of the Mueller investigation were planted or manipulated in some way. Ukraine also framed Paul Manafort, and Mueller tried to use that frame to pressure Manafort to invent evidence against Trump and Russia.

It goes on.

What Trump seems to be hoping for out of the investigations is wiggle room that will allow him to pardon Paul Manafort and relax the sanctions against Russia.

If you want to get more fully read in to this cesspool of speculation and invention, here are some links.
Trump, Giuliani, and Manafort: The Ukraine Scheme

How a Fringe Theory about Ukraine Took Root in the White House

and abortion

In 2015, the Supreme Court threw out a Texas law that required doctors performing abortions to have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital. (When you state it like that, the provision sounds reasonable, but the point is that it’s easy to pressure hospitals to deny such privileges. That’s a roundabout way to keep abortion clinics out of a region.) Now Louisiana has a similar law. In the ordinary practice of law, courts would just apply the Texas ruling to Louisiana and that would be that.

Instead, the Court is going to hear the Louisiana case this term. Nothing has changed in the law, but the vacancy created when Justice Scalia died has been filled by Justice Gorsuch (and not Merrick Garland), while Justice Kennedy has been replaced by Justice Kavanaugh. So the Court may have changed its mind, and “activist judges” may be ready to ignore precedent. Roe v Wade may be in trouble.

People in Maine need to remember: We have Susan Collins to thank for Justice Kavanaugh.

and the Democrats

The Trump-Ukraine scandal is taking up all the attention the public has for politics, which is a problem for Democratic presidential candidates, particularly the ones who are trailing in the polls and need a break-out moment.

The whole thing is unfairly bad for Biden, simply because Trump keeps smearing him. The mainstream news outlets have been pretty good about reminding the public that there is no evidence for Trump’s claims, but the simple repetition is bound to take a toll. After 2016, a lot of Democrats are understandably skittish about nominating a candidate whose rectitude we will need to defend.

The problem is: that’s everybody. Biden isn’t being smeared because there’s something uniquely slimy about him. He’s being smeared because he’s the candidate Trump is most afraid of. If the Democrats nominate someone else, that person will face smears too. No one is so perfect that Trump can’t lie about him or her.

Elizabeth Warren’s recent rise in the polls has brought a smear her way as well. The same guy who tried to gin up false sexual harassment claims against Robert Mueller now says that Warren had sex with a 24-year-old Marine.

Warren responded with humor, tweeting a double entendre connecting her University of Houston degree to a slang term for older women who date younger men. (“Go Cougars!“) In general, her fans laughed with her in a you-go-girl way.

In 2016, a lot of Bernie Sanders fans objected when I wrote that Bernie had never been targeted by the right-wing smear machine, but this is the kind of thing I meant. Right-wingers may refer to Bernie as a crazy Socialist, but he hasn’t faced some complete invention. And Warren hasn’t faced her last one yet, either. No one is so perfect that Trump can’t lie about them.

Sanders had a heart attack Tuesday night. He spent two and a half days in the hospital, had stents inserted into a blocked coronary artery, and says he’s “feeling so much better” and is eager to “get back to work”.

Lots of men have heart attacks and go on to have many more productive years, but this incident is not good for Sanders’ campaign. It feeds the argument that he is too old for the presidency, and comes at a time when his rival for the progressive vote, Elizabeth Warren, is starting to break out in the polls.

Sanders plans to participate in the debate a week from tomorrow.

The NYT ran a piece yesterday on Kamala Harris’ changing strategy — namely, deciding to contest Iowa rather than focusing on later primaries in South Carolina and then California.

But in my view, Harris’ problems run deeper than how she deploys her campaign assets: I don’t know a clear one-line summary of why she’s running in the first place. Biden represents a return to the path America was on before Trump. Sanders and Warren have a bold progressive agenda. Buttigieg is the non-Washington outsider with Midwestern common sense. But what is Harris?

I’m reminded of Marco Rubio in 2016. Demographically, he was exactly what the Republican Party needed: a young, handsome, conservative Latino. But there was never a convincing story about what a Rubio presidency would mean for the country.

but I read a book this week

Samantha Power turns out to be an engaging writer. Her autobiography The Education of an Idealist combines policy with interesting characters — some in her family, some in the Obama administration, and some in the UN.

The main philosophical theme that runs through the book is the relationship between power and principle. You can do a lot of good in the world if you manage to get into the room where decisions are being made. But if you compromise too many of your principles to stay in a position of power, you become just another cog in the system of global injustice.

Early in Power’s career, she’s a free-lance journalist covering the genocide in Bosnia at considerable personal risk. She resents the government officials she sees zipping by in their armored limos, who could do so much to end this genocide if they just would. The whole point of her journalism was to make Bosnia harder for officials to ignore.

Years later, she’s in the Obama administration when Assad is killing large numbers of his own Syrian people, creating the refugee crisis that then destabilized much of Europe. Obama isn’t doing as much to stop Assad as she wants. What to do?

The book doesn’t provide an easy answer, and she isn’t smug that she got the balance right.

The book also has a lot of sparkling personal stories. During Obama’s 2008 campaign, she met and then married Cass Sunstein, who is famous in his own right. During Obama’s first term, the two of them are like West Wing characters — working long days, eating takeout in their offices, and so on.

In Obama’s second term, Sunstein goes back to teaching and Power becomes UN Ambassador. That means her official residence is now the huge, posh penthouse apartment of the Waldorf Astoria, with its full staff of servants. There are many amusing culture-shock stories, since neither Power nor Sunstein had ever lived that way before.

My favorite is when she finds herself on a ladder, collecting the ping-pong balls that have accumulated in the chandelier of the apartment’s Great Room, where an official event is going to be held soon. The balls got there because she had been pitching them to her eight-year-old son, who hit them with a whiffle bat. She thinks: “Somehow I can’t see Adlai Stevenson doing this.”

and you also might be interested in …

According to a new book by University of California Professors Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman

For the first time on record, the 400 wealthiest Americans last year paid a lower total tax rate — spanning federal, state and local taxes — than any other income group, according to newly released data.

It didn’t used to be like this.

The overall tax rate on the richest 400 households last year was only 23 percent, meaning that their combined tax payments equaled less than one quarter of their total income. This overall rate was 70 percent in 1950 and 47 percent in 1980.

We appear to be turning on an ally: the Kurds in northern Syria. Turkey has been warning that it plans to send troops into northern Syria, and now Trump is pulling back American troops who otherwise would be in the way.

In a major shift in United States military policy in Syria, the White House said on Sunday that President Trump had given his endorsement for a Turkish military operation that would sweep away American-backed Kurdish forces near the border in Syria.

Turkey reportedly plans to establish a buffer zone in Syria, and repatriate Syrian refugees into it.

The Kurds have been major allies in the battle against ISIS, and are holding a number of ISIS prisoners. What will happen to them is anyone’s guess.

Brett McGurk, who was the special presidential envoy for the coalition to defeat the ISIS until he resigned last December shortly after Defense Secretary Jim Mattis resigned in protest over Trump’s decision (slightly relaxed since) to withdraw all US troops from Syria, said:

This looks to be another reckless decision made without deliberation or consultation following a call with a foreign leader. The White House statement bears no relation to facts on the ground. If implemented, it will significantly increase risk to our personnel, as well as hasten ISIS’s resurgence.

Having just read the Power book, I worry about genocide. The Syrian refugees that Turkey settles in their buffer zone will be people that no one cares about. What will happen to them?

Rep. Chris Collins (R-NY) resigned from Congress prior to pleading guilty in an insider-trading case. He was the first member of Congress to endorse Trump’s candidacy. And he took at least one page from Trump’s book, denouncing the charges against him (to which he now pleads guilty) as “fake news“.

North Korea says the Trump administration has been misleading the public about their nuclear negotiations, which have broken down.

Meanwhile, missile tests have resumed. North Korea recently tested a submarine-launched ballistic missile.

About a hundred people have died in anti-government protests in Iraq.

The protests began last Tuesday, starting small and driven by social media with calls for an end to corruption and a new commitment to kick-start Iraq’s moribund economy. The gatherings have mushroomed into large demonstrations of thousands calling for the downfall of the government in an intentional echo of the 2011 Arab Spring protests that brought down leaders in several Middle East countries.

Remember how much grief Obama took for not doing more to back democracy protesters in Iran? Trump has agreed to say nothing about the Hong Kong protests to keep trade talks with China moving.

and let’s close with something portentous

Let’s hope there’s some symbolic significance in this collection of falling dominoes.