The Weekly Sift

The saying “never get into a well with an American rope” is gaining currency. The impact will be long-lasting.

– Brett McGurk
former Special Presidential Envoy for the Global Coalition to Counter ISIL

This week’s featured posts are “Backstabbing the Kurds is Just Trump Being Trump” and “The Ukraine Story Runs Deeper Than We Thought“.

This week everybody was talking about the chaos in Syria

I covered the unsurprising nature of Trump’s faithlessness to the Syrian Kurds in one of the featured posts. Max Boot makes some of the same points, and then asks: “Are you happy now, Trump supporters? Is all this worth a corporate tax cut?”

Now let’s talk about what’s happening on the ground.

After being deserted by their American allies, the Kurds in northern Syria cut a deal with the Assad regime to protect them from the Turkish invasion.

Syrian state media said units from President Bashar al-Assad’s army were moving north to “confront Turkish aggression on Syrian territory”. Unconfirmed reports said the deal between the Kurds and the regime would be extended to apply to the whole of north-east Syria. …

The deal is likely to be a bitter end to five years of semi-autonomy for Kurdish groups in north-east Syria, forced by Ankara’s offensive on the area. Turkey’s Operation Peace Spring started on Wednesday after Donald Trump’s announcement that US forces would withdraw from the region.

The Russia-brokered deal gives Assad control over a large chunk of the country that had been independent, but it’s hard to blame the Kurds for making it. Assad wants to be their dictator, but Turkey might be planning an ethnic cleansing.

No one knows what happens next. Maybe Turkey and Syria will fight a war. Maybe there will be a quick ceasefire, brokered by Russia — with the US more or less irrelevant. Maybe we’ll get our 1000 troops out of Syria without losing any of them, or maybe we won’t.

One thing is certain: No one in the US government looked this far ahead. Trump certainly didn’t, and his decision to OK Turkey’s invasion surprised everybody else.

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As so often is the case when Trump does something that doesn’t seem to make sense, it will benefit Putin. Was that the plan, or just a happy accident?

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Initially, American troops were just pulling back to let Turkey establish a buffer zone, but now that the Kurds are with Assad, there’s no real role for the US any more. So Trump has announced that all American troops will leave Syria.

How they’ll get out is still an issue, but I’m sure the Pentagon will come up with something. Defense Secretary Esper said yesterday:

We have American forces likely caught between two opposing, advancing armies and it’s a very untenable situation. I spoke with the President last night, after discussions with the rest of the national security team, and he directed that we begin a deliberate withdrawal of forces from northern Syria.

This points out an issue that isn’t getting nearly enough coverage: We know that Trump made his decision to greenlight Turkey’s invasion during a phone call with Turkish President Erdoğan, and that the entire defense and diplomacy establishment was blindsided by it. This means that the experts weren’t consulted in the decision-making process, but Trump supporters can (with some justification) point to past US mistakes as evidence that expert-approved decisions aren’t always that great anyway.

But here’s the side of the story that’s getting missed: It isn’t just the decision-making process that got cut short, it was the planning process too. There’s a crisis going on, and the whole US government is out there with no plan. The troops don’t know how they’re pulling out. Nobody has thought about the inevitable refugee crisis. Our other allies in Syria (like France) don’t know what they’re supposed to do with their people. (And don’t think they won’t remember this the next time we ask them to join a coalition.) Our ambassadors to allied countries don’t know how to answer the questions they’re getting. Nobody seems to have thought about how to secure the ISIS prisoners the Kurds were holding. And so on.

The Washington Post reports:

“This is total chaos,” a senior administration official said at midday, speaking on the condition of anonymity about the confusing situation in Syria.

Although “the Turks gave guarantees to us” that U.S. forces would not be harmed, the official said, Syrian militias allied with them “are running up and down roads, ambushing and attacking vehicles,” putting American ­forces — as well as civilians — in danger even as they withdraw. The militias, known as the Free Syrian Army, “are crazy and not reliable.”

If you believe in Trump’s intuition — I don’t, but some people do — you might be comfortable with him ignoring the normal policy-making apparatus and just going with his gut. But there still needs to be an implementation process, or else your evacuation plan might just be to yell “Fire!” in a crowded theater.

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Here’s something somebody should have thought of in advance:

[O]ver the weekend, State and Energy Department officials were quietly reviewing plans for evacuating roughly 50 tactical nuclear weapons that the United States had long stored, under American control, at Incirlik Air Base in Turkey, about 250 miles from the Syrian border, according to two American officials.

Those weapons, one senior official said, were now essentially Erdogan’s hostages. To fly them out of Incirlik would be to mark the de facto end of the Turkish-American alliance. To keep them there, though, is to perpetuate a nuclear vulnerability that should have been eliminated years ago.

and impeachment

The NYT examines the public statements of Republican senators and finds 0 supporting an impeachment inquiry, 15 who have “expressed concerns or say they have questions”, and 38 who support Trump unequivocally.

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White House Counsel Pat Cipollone sent Congress a defiant letter, claiming the House’s impeachment inquiry is unconstitutional. (The Constitution is actually silent about the impeachment process, saying only that “The House of Representatives … shall have the sole Power of Impeachment.”) Consequently, the White House pledges to stonewall.

The WaPo annotates that letter. I’ll add an annotation of my own: If it’s up to the President to decide whether an impeachment process is legitimate or not, then we’ve already lost the separation of powers.

One major claim of the letter is that Trump should receive all the due-process privileges of a criminal defendant at a trial: The right to have lawyers present, cross-examine witnesses, call his own witnesses, present evidence, and so on. As the annotations point out, this is the wrong point in the process for that: An impeachment inquiry in the House is like a grand jury investigation, not like a trial. The people under investigation have no official role in a grand-jury investigation. But if the House passes articles of impeachment, then the Senate (presumably) will hold a trial where Trump will have all these due-process rights.

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In the Balkinization legal blog, Gerard Magliocca offers a novel interpretation of the White House counsel’s letter:

If an impeachment proceeding in the House can be unconstitutional as the President claims, then why can’t he say the same about the Senate trial? When the Senate trial begins … the President is bound to whine that he is being treated unfairly or that the Chief Justice is treating him unfairly. When, then, should he accept a guilty verdict from this “kangaroo court?” He can just say that the trial was unconstitutional and that he should remain in office. Maybe one object of the White House Counsel’s letter is to establish a predicate for that action.

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At one point this week, Trump hinted that he might cooperate “if the rules are fair“. I was amazed by the number of media outlets that took this statement seriously: When has Trump ever admitted that he was being treated fairly? (He thinks it’s not fair that he hasn’t gotten a Nobel Peace Prize yet.)  If the House calls witnesses who say things Trump doesn’t like, that will be unfair in his eyes, because he deserves to have people say only good things about him.

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From Ambassador Yovanovitch’s opening statement to the House Intelligence and Oversight Committees:

Today, we see the State Department attacked and hollowed out from within. State Department leadership, with Congress, needs to take action now to defend this great institution, and its thousands of loyal and effective employees. We need to rebuild diplomacy as the first resort to advance America’s interests and the frontline of America’s defense. I fear that not doing so will harm our nation’s interest, perhaps irreparably.

That harm will come not just through the inevitable and continuing resignation and loss of many of this nation’s most loyal and talented public servants. It also will come when those diplomats who soldier on and do their best to represent our nation face partners abroad who question whether the ambassador truly speaks for the President and can be counted upon as a reliable partner. The harm will come when private interests circumvent professional diplomats for their own gain, not the public good. The harm will come when bad actors in countries beyond Ukraine see how easy it is to use fiction and innuendo to manipulate our system. In such circumstances, the only interests that will be served are those of our strategic adversaries, like Russia, that spread chaos and attack the institutions and norms that the U.S. helped create and which we have benefited from for the last 75 years.

Yovanovitch’s testimony was important not just for what she said. (We don’t know most of what she said.) It was also important because it happened at all. The State Department tried to stop her from testifying, and she ignored them. All the other subpoenaed government officials have to look at that and re-examine their options.

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Next up: Trump’s former Russia advisor, Fiona Hill, who I believe is testifying right now behind closed doors. She left the administration just days before the Trump/Zelensky phone call, and is expected to describe the pressure to get rid of Yovanovitch, among other things.

Ms. Hill took her objections to the treatment of Ms. Yovanovitch, who was targeted by Mr. Giuliani and conservative media outlets, to John R. Bolton, then the national security adviser, as well as others. Mr. Bolton shared her concerns, according to the person, and was upset at Mr. Giuliani’s activities, which she viewed as essentially co-opting American foreign policy toward Ukraine.

Tomorrow: Gordon Sondland, the ambassador to the EU who somehow wound up overseeing much of the Ukraine scheme. No one is too sure what Sondland is going to say: He’s a Trump donor rather than a career foreign-service guy, but he may not be willing to go down with the ship.

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An appeals court says Trump’s accountants have to turn his tax returns over to the House Oversight Committee.

and the trade war

Friday afternoon, I felt like I was watching news reports from two different universes. CNBC was showing delayed video from the Oval Office, where President Trump was announcing a big trade deal with China. As I listened, though, the “deal” seemed more and more ephemeral: It’s a deal in principle, whose actual text isn’t worked out yet. Given how trade diplomacy goes, that could mean it all evaporates, the way that Trump’s agreement to denuclearize North Korea evaporated.

The video dragged on and on with no analysis from CNBC’s experts, so I flipped to MSNBC and CNN, neither of which was talking about it at all. On one channel it was breaking news worth interrupting regular coverage for a considerable length of time. On two others, it wasn’t worth mentioning.

So anyway, the markets seem unthrilled this morning. Here’s some analysis from The Street’s “Real Money” blog:

If Trump claims this to be a “substantial” deal … I am not sure if Trump has any adjectives to use if ever an actual deal were to be signed, [and] one wonders what a real deal would sound like. After all the fuss about the thirteenth round of U.S./China trade talks on October 9, all that came out was the U.S. has agreed to postpone an increase of tariffs from 25% to 30% on $250 billion worth of Chinese imported goods, and that China would purchase between $40 billion and $50 billion worth of U.S. agricultural products.

The hard pressing, game changing issues that Trump always beat his chest about, like Intellectual Property Theft and Technology Transfers, were not even discussed or finalized. The market cheered that tariffs were postponed, but let’s not forget 25% tariffs are still in place. There is no truce and China and U.S. companies are still being penalized. We all know how many times Trump has decided to throw a random curve ball at China days after any negotiation, only to shock the market once again.

and you also might be interested in …

So there’s another Democratic presidential debate tomorrow. It’s the first one since the Ukraine story broke and impeachment became an immediate possibility. It’s also the first one since Bernie Sanders’ heart attack, since Republicans started smearing Joe Biden on a daily basis, and since Elizabeth Warren started topping the polls.

With the way that Syria and impeachment have sucked up attention, I find myself looking at the other candidates in the race and asking, “Are you still running?” I can’t remember the last time I had a thought about Cory Booker or Amy Klobuchar.

I will warn Warren supporters not to get too carried away by the recent polls. To me, Biden’s candidacy in some ways resembles Mitt Romney’s in 2012. Several times during the primary campaign, some other candidate briefly passed Romney in the polls before falling back.

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Warren continues to be interesting. She was asked what she would to say to someone who believes marriage is between one man and one woman, and her answer went viral:

I’m going to assume it’s a guy who said that, and I will say, then just marry one woman. … Assuming you can find one.

Conservatives (like Marco Rubio) took offense, but it’s hard to feel sorry for them, given how mild that put-down was. They can dish out the hostility, but they’re such snowflakes when the slightest disapproval is turned back on them.

Warren also showed some mettle in going after Facebook. Facebook has allowed Trump to post anti-Biden ads that have been rejected by most networks because they make provably false claims about his “corruption” in Ukraine. Biden has protested, but Facebook replied that “when a politician speaks or makes an ad, we do not send it to third party fact checkers”.

Warren decided to take this one step farther than just a protest. Instead, she boomeranged their policy back at them, running an ad headlined:

Breaking news: Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook just endorsed Donald Trump for re-election

That claim isn’t true, and the text of the ad admitted as much. But then it got to the real point:

But what Zuckerberg *has* done is given Donald Trump free rein to lie on his platform — and then to pay Facebook gobs of money to push out their lies to American voters.

So Mark, how do you like when people use your platform to lie about you?

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There was another attempt to gin up an anti-Warren scandal. This time the claim is that she “lied” about being fired from her teaching job when she got pregnant. The evidence for this is that at different times she has emphasized different aspects of the story. The school district records just show that she quit.

If the goal was to smear Warren as a liar, it has backfired spectacularly. All over the country, women have spoken out to say yeah, this is how pregnancy discrimination works. There’s not a paper trail. There is plausible deniability, and there is the shame and fear that comes with losing a job. And back when Warren was pregnant, firing pregnant teachers was standard practice across the country – it was unusual to not be let go if you were having a baby.

There’s going to be a lot of this. I expect some new pseudo-scandal every week or two until Warren either becomes president or falls in the polls.

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Brexit is steaming toward another deadline. There’s an EU summit on Thursday and Friday. Saturday is Parliament’s deadline for Prime Minister Johnson to either submit the deal he has negotiated with with the EU, or to ask the EU for another extension. If neither a deal nor an extension is worked out, the UK crashes out of the EU without a deal on October 31.

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Poland had a chance to reverse its slide towards authoritarianism, but decided not to. It looks like the ruling Law and Justice Party increased its majority slightly. Yascha Mounk, author of The People vs. Democracy, comments:

As the example of many other populist governments, from nearby Hungary to faraway Venezuela, show, it is often in their second term in office that populist leaders manage to take full control, intimidating critics and eliminating rival power centers. In this election, the chances of the opposition were already somewhat restricted by a deeply hostile media environment. With the government now holding enough power to institute further anti-democratic reforms, it is likely that it will become ever harder for the opposition to do its work.

and let’s close with something bouncy

I know Sift closings are usually non-political, but I couldn’t resist this one. Here’s a bouncy song about impeachment from Jonathan Coulton and CBS All Access’ “The Good Fight”.

I have learned that if you are truthful, people respond, even if they don’t agree with you. We have to find our truth and not be afraid to be straight with people.

– Barack Obama (2005)
quoted in The Education of an Idealist by Samantha Power

This week’s featured post is “Answers to Impeachment Objections“. It covers arguments about impeachment. Developments in the impeachment story are covered below.

This week everybody was talking about impeachment

The action on impeachment is happening in the House Intelligence Committee chaired by Adam Schiff (who Trump is accusing of treason). The next step seems to be to interview the whistleblower behind closed doors, hopefully without revealing his or her identity. (Good luck with that. Trump stooge Devin Nunes will be in the room.)

I don’t believe a specific date for that hearing has been set yet, but Schiff promises it “very soon”.

The important thing to understand about the whistleblower complaint is that it is a roadmap for investigation. Trump wants to paint it as a he-said/she-said dispute between him and an anonymous person, but that’s not the point. The WB will be asked where he got his information, and then Schiff’s committee will seek testimony from those people and subpoena the supporting documents. By the time an article of impeachment is written, the support for it will probably barely mention the WB.

We’ve already seen this happen with the Ukraine phone call. The WB described the call very accurately, but that doesn’t really matter any more, because we have the White House transcript of it. Lawfare calls the conversation “self-impeaching”.

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The major revelation that still needs support is that the White House tried to hide the Ukraine transcript in a hyper-secure computer system meant for something else entirely. If true, this points to consciousness of wrongdoing, and raises the question of what other presidential transcripts may have been hidden away for similar reasons.

CBS has independently verified that “the transcript was moved to the computer system at the direction of National Security Council attorneys”. CNN has discovered that Trump’s calls with Vladimir Putin and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman were also removed from the usual record-keeping system, though it didn’t find out whether it was on the same system as the Ukraine call.

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It’s worth considering what these politically damaging calls imply: The foreign leaders on the other side have something to hold over Trump’s head. Imagine if one of Trump’s conversations with Putin is as damaging to him as the conversation with Zelensky. Putin can threaten to release that any time he wants. That gives him leverage over Trump.

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Trump asked Ukraine’s Zelensky for two “favors”, one about dirt on Biden, and then other about “Crowdstrike”. This concerns a conspiracy theory that comes from Russia, in which the real villain of the 2016 election mischief is Ukraine.

Trump’s original Homeland Security Adviser, Thomas Bossert, explains that Trump has been repeatedly briefed on the evidence that the Crowdstrike/Ukraine theory is bogus, but he can’t let go of it.

“It is completely debunked,” Mr. Bossert said of the Ukraine theory on ABC. Speaking with George Stephanopoulos, Mr. Bossert blamed Mr. Giuliani for filling the president’s head with misinformation. “I am deeply frustrated with what he and the legal team is doing and repeating that debunked theory to the president. It sticks in his mind when he hears it over and over again, and for clarity here, George, let me just again repeat that it has no validity.”

Bossert doesn’t draw this conclusion, but his version of events doesn’t make Trump sound like a very rational person.

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By my count, Trump tweeted 23 times yesterday about some conversation between Ed Henry and Mark Levin, claiming that Levin “mopped the floor” with Henry’s criticism of Trump. That’s a measure of how inhinged he has gotten, and hard he had to search to find something positive on the Sunday talk shows.

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Meanwhile on Fox News, Chris Wallace was interviewing the White House’s Prince of Darkness, Stephen Miller. Wallace teed up what should have been a perfect question for Miller, if there was the slightest validity to his message. “How specifically did the Bidens break the law in Ukraine?” He couldn’t give a straight answer.

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Somebody should tell Trump that witness intimidation is a crime. Thursday he told the US Mission to the UN that the White House officials who gave the whistleblower his information were “close to a spy”.

You know what we used to do in the old days when we were smart with spies and treason, right? We used to handle it a little differently than we do now.

In other words, he implied they should be executed. The House Intelligence Committee is going to want them to testify, and the President is threatening them with death.

No doubt if one of his violent followers does kill a witness, Trump will say that this was a joke. CNN’s David Gergen doesn’t see it that way.

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One minor detail of the Trump/Zelensky conversation gives support to the theory that Trump’s properties are avenues for foreign bribery. Zelensky makes sure to mention that he stayed at Trump Tower the last time he was in New York. It’s clear that he believes one way to butter up Trump is to point out that you’ve paid him money.

Whether or not it’s actually true that patrons of Trump properties get a better deal from the White House, it’s clear that’s what foreign leaders believe.

and Greta

Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg spoke to the UN last Monday. Her speech was short and you can read the transcript.

The point of her speech, as I read it, is to call the current generation of decision-makers to account for what it’s doing to her generation and generations to come. She puts a face on a nightmare that should haunt all of us: When people look back on us in 100 years, won’t they curse us for what we did and failed to do?

Almost more interesting that what Greta said herself were the unhinged responses she evoked from the Right. Dinesh D’Souza compared her role in the climate campaign to the Nazis’ use of “Nordic white girls with braids” in their propaganda. (Putting children in cages in border concentration camps doesn’t remind D’Souza of the Nazis, but Greta does.) Sebastian Gorka OTOH, was reminded the Communists rather than the Nazis:

This performance by @GretaThunberg is disturbingly redolent of a victim of a Maoist “re-education” camp. The adults who brainwashed this autist child should be brought up on child abuse charges.

Laura Ingraham referenced Stephen King’s horror story Children of the Corn, in which children kill adults. Because we grown-ups are the victims here.

Greta’s Asperger’s syndrome also drew fire on Fox News’ from Michael Knowles, who mischaracterized it as mental illness.

The climate hysteria movement is not about science. If it were about science it would be led by scientists rather than by politicians and a mentally ill Swedish child who is being exploited by her parents and by the international Left.

The absurdity here is nearly overwhelming. Scientists have been trying to warn the world about climate change for 30 years or more, but have not been listened to by people exactly like Michael Knowles. You can’t ignore the scientists for decades, and then criticize Greta for not being a scientist. The debate is not even about science any more, because the science has been long settled. It’s about morality now, about our selfishness and our ability to ignore our responsibility to future generations. That’s why a child’s jeremiad is so effective.

Justin Murphy brought sex into the discussion, because what else ever comes to mind when a 16-year-old girl is involved?

Not even being provocative but if you think Greta Thunberg has the maturity to guide global policy-making then you cannot object to Jeffrey Epstein paying 16-year-olds for sex.

Yep, if they’re old enough to have opinions about the hellish future we’re making for them, they’re old enough to be prostitutes. How can you argue with that logic?

and you also might be interested in …

Israel still doesn’t have a new government, nearly two weeks after an election gave 33 seats to the Blue and White Party, 31 to Likud, and scattered the rest among other parties. 61 votes are necessary to form a Knesset majority. Likud’s incumbent Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was given the first opportunity to form a government, but that doesn’t seem to be working out. If he gives back the mandate, Blue and White’s Benny Gantz will get a chance. If he fails as well, a third round of elections may be necessary.

In Sunday’s NYT, Micah Goodman summarized the problem like this: The two-state peace plan favored by the Left leaves Israelis feeling unsafe against attacks from the newly independent territories, which they imagine being similar to Gaza. The one-state plan favored by the Right (in which Israel annexes such large chunks of the occupied territories that a Palestinian state ceases to be feasible) produces a country without a clear ethnic majority (even though Israeli Jews would still dominate the electorate) like Lebanon.

Rejecting both views, Goodman calls for “shrinking the conflict” rather than trying to solve it. That seems to mean leaving things as they are while making the Israeli occupation less onerous to the Palestinians.

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Lately I’ve been seeing a lot of references in social media to a Salon article from June: “There is hard data that a centrist Democrat would be a losing candidate“. The article is by Keith Spencer, who states a provocative thesis:

the Democratic Party that is wantonly ignoring mounds of social science data that suggests that promoting centrist candidates is a bad, losing strategy when it comes to winning elections.

I feel an obligation to rebut this, not because the conclusion is necessarily wrong, but because it misrepresents the paper it relies on. The “mountains of data” Spencer refers to are in a paper by economist Thomas Piketty, who is famous for Capital in the 21st Century. The paper is called “Brahmin Left vs. Merchant Right“. It’s an academic paper that is a bit of a tough read, clocking in (with appendices) at 180 pages.

Unfortunately, if you actually read Piketty’s paper, it’s about something else entirely. Spencer’s Salon article looks like a pure flight of fancy. Let me tell you what the paper is actually about:

Piketty presents data to show that educational and economic elites used to be united in the conservative parties of class-based political systems. But in recent decades educational elites have turned left and economic elites have stayed right. So whereas the Left used to be centered in the working class and the Right in the upper class, now there’s an upper-class split, with the intellectual upper class leading the Left and the financial upper class leading the Right. That’s quite possibly why the working class feels neglected.

Piketty is trying to figure out whether that trend will stabilize, or whether there’s a longer transition going on that will reunify each class in a globalist/nativist split. In that vision, the upper class will coalesce in an internationalist party that champions immigration, free trade, and cross-cultural equality, while the working class will form a Trumpist party that is nativist, religious, and socially conservative.

Spencer makes much of one line in Piketty’s paper, which he misinterprets:

Without a strong and convincing egalitarian-internationalist platform, it is inherently difficult to unite low-education, low-income voters from all origins within the same party.

An egalitarian-internationalist platform would be one that convinces domestic lower-income classes that migration and globalization work in their favor rather than against them. Piketty does not suggest what such a platform would be, or even assert that such a platform is possible. (Maybe there is no way to make migration and globalization work for the domestic lower class.) He certainly doesn’t relate that platform to the current centrist/progressive split in the US Democratic Party.

The “hard data” is historical post-election polling from France, the UK, and the US that demonstrates the gradual separation of the financial elite from the educational elite. It’s doesn’t purport to have predictive value about the prospects centrist Democratic candidates.

and let’s close with some historical context on the climate

XKCD provides a response to the people who say “The climate is always changing.”

Dozens are killed every year on skateboards. Thousands injured. Hey Beto! Heck yes, we’re going to take your SKATEBOARD!

– Governor Mike Huckabee

My daughter didn’t hide in a fucking closet for 3 hours because someone was hunting and murdering her classmates with a skateboard. Asshole.

– Barry Schapiro, MD

This week’s featured post is “The Democratic Healthcare Debate“.

This week everybody was talking about the attack on Saudi Arabia

Until Saturday, many of us foolishly imagined that the US could monopolize weaponized-drone technology for a while longer. But both drones and the weapons someone might put on them are comparatively cheap, and the science of them is far simpler than, say, nukes. Proliferation is inevitable.

Saturday, drones attacked Saudi Arabia’s oil facilities, at least temporarily knocking out about half of its oil production, or about 5% of the world total. Oil prices spiked by about 20% Monday morning, but settled back to about a 10% gain.

Yemen’s Houthi rebels, who Saudi Arabia is fighting in the Yemeni civil war, claimed responsibility for the attack. The Houthis are allied with Iran, and are known to use drones. The maximum range of Houthi drones is just barely long enough to put the attacked oil fields within reach. Nonetheless, the US is blaming Iran for the attacks.

A day after Secretary of State Mike Pompeo blamed Iran for the attack on Saudi oil facilities and argued there is “no evidence the attacks came from Yemen,” a senior administration official briefed CNN on information to back up Pompeo’s claims. Pompeo did not provide evidence, but the official pointed to satellite imagery provided to CNN showing the oil facilities were struck from the northwest, suggesting an attack from Iraq or Iran, among other information.

Iranian forces have a presence in Iraq. Iran denies attacking the Saudis, either from its own territory or from Iraq. Max Boot sees no reason to believe Pompeo’s claims “given how often the administration has lied about even minor matters”, but independently assesses that the Houthis “lack the sophistication to carry out such a surgical strike without a lot of help from their allies in Tehran”.

President Trump is threatening a military response against Iran, pending verification from the Saudis that Iran was responsible. Tensions between the US and Iran have been elevated ever since Trump pulled the US out of the agreement to keep Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.

Matt Yglesias points out one of the problems Trump will have selling a war, if he decides to launch one: In addition to being president, “he also runs an opaque network of LLCs and does no financial disclosure, so we have no way of knowing how many cash payments he receives from the Saudi government.”

and the Democratic debate

[video, transcript]

This is the first debate that put all the major candidates on one stage. To me, that had the subtle effect of making single-digit candidates seem stronger. Amy Klobuchar, Cory Booker, and Beto O’Rourke all had moments that sounded presidential.

I’d be surprised if the debate changed much at the top of the polls: Biden continues not to be the sharpest tool in the box, but he had no disqualifying gaffes and none of the attacks wounded him much. I could imagine that Warren stole some support from Sanders, but the effect was probably small, if it happened at all. (A 538/Ipsos poll more or less matches my intuition.)

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I thought Castro’s “Are you forgetting what you said two minutes ago?” attack on Biden was unfair. The two of them were having a misunderstanding about the difference between “buying in” to Biden’s public option for healthcare and “opting in” rather than being enrolled automatically. Biden was clearly not forgetting what he had just said.

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Beto’s most controversial moment was the strong position he took on assault rifles: As he has stated before, he supports not just banning new sales, but a mandatory buy-back of existing weapons.

Hell, yes, we’re going to take your AR-15, your AK-47. We’re not going to allow it to be used against our fellow Americans anymore.

I’ve spent the week in the upper South (North Carolina and Tennessee), where I heard several people tremble at the audacity of that, as if assault-weapon supporters were the majority of the country. This analogy has been made by many people before me, but often Democrats sound like victims of domestic abuse who are afraid that someone will set off their abuser. We worry that Beto’s threat will rile up AR-15 owners, and ignore the people who might be inspired to vote by the thought that somebody is finally going to get serious about mass shootings.

In a Republican debate, it would be no surprise at all to hear some candidate take extreme positions far more unpopular than Beto’s, say, that abortion should be criminalized, or that all 11 million undocumented immigrants should be rounded up and deported. No one worries that they will set off liberals; setting off liberals is considered a virtue in a Republican, not a vice.

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In the discussion of mass incarceration, Biden’s statement that “no one should be in jail for a non-violent crime” is just wrong. Consider Bernie Madoff, for example. For that matter, Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen never pointed a gun at anybody, but instead fulfilled the Godfather adage “A lawyer with his briefcase can steal more than a hundred men with guns.” And if Trump obstructed justice — as the Mueller Report strongly indicates — he should go to jail.

It’s true that too many Americans are in jail, many of them for things that aren’t all that serious. But violent/non-violent is the wrong place to draw the line. More non-violent white-collar criminals should be in jail, but far fewer non-violent drug users.

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Interesting poll from YouGov: They ran a ranked-choice poll, in which people listed their second, third, and fourth choices. Interestingly, Warren beat Biden in the ultimate face-off, even though Biden held a 33%-29% lead in the first round.

The poll suggests that Biden might be vulnerable in the later primaries, as the field starts to narrow. At the same time, though, we shouldn’t read too much into it for a number of reasons:

• It’s just one poll, and different polls have diverged from each other quite a bit so far.
• No state other than Maine currently does ranked-choice voting, so the poll doesn’t directly mimic any major primary.
• Ranked-choice polling is in its infancy, so we don’t know yet how well it predicts people’s actual second and third choices. I might support Candidate A and imagine that B is my second choice, but if A drops out I might suddenly see the charms of C.

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Another interesting polling quirk about Warren: She polls far better among people who care a lot about politics than among less involved people. This is true particularly in comparison to Bernie, who leads her substantially among those who are alienated from politics.

There are two obvious ways to interpret this: Either it’s a real division in the progressive electorate that will continue through the primaries, or support for Bernie over Warren depends largely on name recognition; as people get more information, they drift from Bernie to Warren.

Nate Silver favors the later interpretation, describing the political junkies who back Warren as “early adopters”.

and John Bolton

John Bolton, Mr. Walrus Moustache himself, is out as Trump’s national security advisor. Fired, quit — it depends on who you talk to. Incompatible differences. (It would be ironic if Bolton gets his long-desired war with Iran only after leaving the administration.)

Here’s a sign of the times: I agree with the Washington Post’s negative assessment of Bolton’s tenure as NSA (“chaos, dysfunction, and no meaningful accomplishments”), and yet I worry that he’s gone. I’m struggling to come up with an example of Trump getting rid of an official and replacing him with someone better. (OK: his second NSA, H. R. McMaster, was better than his first, Michael Flynn, who was being paid by foreign countries and should be going to jail soon. We can only hope that Trump NSAs are like Star Trek movies, where the even-numbered ones are superior.)

John Gans comments in the NYT:

Mr. Bolton’s singular achievement was to dismantle a foreign-policymaking structure that had until then kept the president from running foreign policy by the seat of his pants. Mr. Bolton persuaded Mr. Trump he didn’t need the National Security Council to make decisions; it is no surprise that the president eventually felt confident deciding he did not need a national security adviser, either. Whether Mr. Trump names a replacement for Mr. Bolton does not matter: No one is going to convince the president he needs a system now, let alone the one that existed for 70 years.

The underlying problem here is that Trump doesn’t really want a national security advisor, and doesn’t respect the expertise that the National Security Council represents. The official role of the NSA is to chair the NSC. The job entails listening to the government’s top military and intelligence people, summarizing their diverse points of view fairly, and presenting that summary to the President. (The WaPo’s version: “to oversee a disciplined policymaking process that includes the State Department, the Pentagon and intelligence agencies”.) The ideal NSA is often described as an “honest broker” pulling together the collective wisdom of the country’s foreign policy establishment.

Trump doesn’t want any of that. He has no interest in a “disciplined policymaking process”. He doesn’t care what the national-security experts have to say about what is going on in the world and what the US should do about it. He wants to be told that the world is exactly the way he thinks it is, and that his instincts for handling it are brilliant. Bolton was a terrible NSA, but at least he would occasionally disagree with Trump or tell him things he didn’t want to hear.

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Ezra Klein sees the upside:

the best thing about Donald Trump is that he seems instinctually skeptical of going to war. His hiring of Bolton was a strike against that. His firing of Bolton is a rare bright spot in his presidency.

While Amanda Marcotte is balancing her negativism:

We need a German word for the confused emotions of seeing someone get what they deserve, while also hating the person who dished it out.

And Daniel Summers replies:

Let’s just hope there’s enough pox for both houses.

and you also might be interested in …

These days the really badass people in American politics are Democratic women. It started two years ago with fighter-pilot Amy McGrath, who is currently running for the Senate against Mitch McConnell.

And now Valerie Plame is raising the bar.

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NYT reporters Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly didn’t drop the Brett Kavanaugh investigation after his confirmation vote. Yesterday the Times published an excerpt from their upcoming book The Education of Brett Kavanaugh. The excerpt concerns the accusation that didn’t get investigated, that “a freshman named Brett Kavanaugh pulled down his pants and thrust his penis at” Debbie Ramirez during a Yale party. If the NYT paywall has you stymied, Vox summarizes.

Josh Marshall heard the same thing I did in Kavanaugh’s testimony to the Judiciary Committee: He obviously lied about minor incidents mentioned in his high school yearbook.

There was no ambiguity. He was being scrutinized for a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court and he was perfectly willing to lie under oath. The conduct was less egregious than the assault allegations. But the unambiguous evidence of willful and malicious deception was clarifying.

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North Carolina is one of several states where gerrymandering maintains an entrenched Republican majority in the legislature against the will of the voters.

North Carolina has been one of the most gerrymandered states in the nation, both in congressional districts and state legislative ones. Democratic state legislators won a majority of the popular vote in 2018 but Republicans held control of both chambers.

Wednesday, the state’s Republican legislators found a new way to spit in the face of democracy. The legislature is currently in a budget battle with Democratic Governor Roy Cooper (who did get more votes than his opponent).

Since late June, the state has been stuck in a legislative impasse; Cooper vetoed a two-year budget bill, arguing it underpaid teachers, awarded unnecessary giveaways to corporations and failed to include a Medicaid expansion.

Republicans previously had a veto-proof majority in the legislature, but their 2018 loss at the ballot box at least clipped that part of their power. Wednesday, however, they came up with a new trick: After telling Democrats that no votes would be held on the September 11 anniversary, they waited for Democrats to attend a commemoration ceremony and then voted to override Cooper’s veto.

The veto override still has to pass the Senate, where it will need either one Democratic vote or some new trick.

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Michelle Goldberg reviews the sequel to Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. She notes the difference between a dystopia envisioned in the 1980s and the kind of dystopia we’re moving towards today: We used to worry about tyrannies that tightly controlled information, and hoped that the truth would set us free. Today the truth sits in a garbage heap of misinformation. It’s free for the taking, if you could only recognize it.

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Speaking of how tyranny works today …

Mr. Trump is openly hinting that CNN should be sold off in an effort to modify its coverage to something more of his liking. This is an increasingly common tactic among authoritarian leaders: no need to shutter a TV station, just find a friendly businessman or oligarch to buy it. Ask President Vladimir Putin of Russia, Viktor Orban of Hungary or Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey how it is done.

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More came out about #SharpieGate and the political pressure that produced that embarrassing Trump-over-science statement from NOAA. The NYT reported that

The Secretary of Commerce threatened to fire top employees at the federal scientific agency responsible for weather forecasts last Friday after the agency’s Birmingham office contradicted President Trump’s claim that Hurricane Dorian might hit Alabama, according to three people familiar with the discussion.

According to the Washington Post, the impetus came straight from Trump:

President Trump told his staff that the nation’s leading weather forecasting agency needed to correct a statement that contradicted a tweet the president had sent wrongly claiming that Hurricane Dorian threatened Alabama, senior administration officials said.

That led White House acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney to call Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross to tell him to fix the issue, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk publicly about the issue.

This is not unusual. Trump regularly instructs government employees to cover up his mistakes or manufacture evidence for his lies.

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Of all Trump’s crimes and abuses, I think it’s corruption that will ultimately bring him down. About the report from last week that US military planes have increasingly been using the obscure Scottish airport nearest Trump’s Turnberry resort (something he claimed to know nothing about):

documents obtained from Scottish government agencies show that the Trump Organization, and Mr. Trump himself, played a direct role in setting up an arrangement between the Turnberry resort and officials at Glasgow Prestwick Airport.

The government records, released through Scottish Freedom of Information law, show that the Trump organization, starting in 2014, entered a partnership with the airport to try to increase private and commercial air traffic to the region.

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Mike Pence’s political action committee has spent $224K at Trump properties. His brother, Rep. Greg Pence, has spent $45K. The Daily Beast reports:

The spending by the Pence brothers reflects a broader trend taking place throughout the Republican Party, where officials are doling out campaign cash to properties and businesses associated with the president.

A decade ago, the major grift in conservative politics was to accumulate a list of gullible donors so that you could sell them miracle drugs the government has suppressed, or preparations for the coming collapse of civilization, or get-rich-quick multi-level marketing schemes. But it’s all more organized and much simpler now: Contribute money so that we can give it to Trump.

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And while we’re talking about conservative grift, consider Jerry Falwell Jr.

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The general insanity of open carry laws was demonstrated a week ago Saturday when a man with an assault weapon strolled through the popular farmer’s market in Alexandria, Virginia. This was a “freedom walk” organized by Right to Bear Arms Richmond.

I’ve been to that farmer’s market. It’s a bring-your-kids-and-dogs kind of event that is wholesome, upbeat … and would make an ideal site for a mass shooting, if you’re into that kind of thing. I’m sure the guy flashing his weapon felt very free, and that everyone else felt much less free. You have to wonder how many people saw the “freedom walker” and just went home.

Alexandria police were informed by R2BA-R ahead of time, and received complaints during the event, but there was nothing they could do. By Virginia law, such people aren’t doing anything wrong until they start shooting.

If you’re a prospective mass shooter these days, you don’t have to do so much of your own scouting and planning. Second Amendment activists will do it for you.

and let’s close with something natural

It’s easy to take a great nature photograph. Just go to a beautiful place and look up.

At its best, the practice of politics is about taking steps that support people in daily life — or tearing down obstacles that get in their way. Much of the confusion and complication of ideological battles might be washed away if we held our focus on the lives that will be made better, or worse, by political decisions, rather than on the theoretical elegance of the policies or the character of the politicians themselves.

– Pete Buttigieg, Shortest Way Home

There is no featured post this week. But I’m trying out a new format for an extra-long weekly summary: a topic list at the top.

1. Cruelty, short-sightedness, and corruption. One week’s worth of administration activity.

2. Hurricane Dorian. Category 5 storms don’t seem all that rare any more.

3. More shootings. The wait-three-weeks strategy for avoiding action on gun control won’t work unless we can go three weeks without a shooting.

4. Brexit. Boris Johnson is setting the UK up for a no-deal Brexit, and Parliament will have a hard time stopping him.

5. James Comey. The FBI inspector general’s report is too boring to read, so anybody can say whatever they want about it.

6. A court ruling. An appeals court ruling on legislative prayer is yet another example of the fundamental flaw of originalism.

7. Other short notes. Hong Kong, trade war, Mayor Pete’s book. Democratic debate on the 12th.

8. A heart-warming closing. A dolphin asks a diver for help.

This week everybody was talking about cruelty, short-sightedness, and corruption

Some weeks, it seems like the Trump administration is trying to do as much damage as possible in its remaining two years. Here are some examples from just this week:

• The EPA wants to allow more methane leaks at wells and pipelines. Methane is such a potent greenhouse gas that if too much leaks into the atmosphere during the production and transportation processes, natural gas can be worse for the climate than coal. The EPA’s move to roll back anti-methane-leak regulations undermines the strategy of using natural gas as a better-but-not-perfect bridge fuel while we develop more climate-friendly sources. That’s why even industry giants like Shell, Exxon, and BP support the Obama regulations the EPA wants to abandon.
• Alaska’s Tongass National Forest may soon be open for logging. It’s one of the last wild places on Earth, and about 40% of the West Coast’s wild salmon spawns there.
• Sick immigrants are being sent home to die. Every year, about 1000 immigrants facing deportation orders ask to stay in the US because they’re receiving medical care that isn’t available in their home countries. Many of them are children and many of the conditions are life-threatening. The Trump administration is canceling this “deferred action” program and has sent letters giving sick people 33 days to leave the country.
• Not all children of Americans serving overseas will be citizens. Usually, when American parents have a child while they’re out of the country, that child is automatically a US citizen. The law makes an exception for Americans who had lived in the US less than five years before they left the country, but there’s always been an exception to the exception: If the reason you left the US was for the military or other government service, your kid is a citizen. But that exception-to-the-exception is being rolled back. “Who possibly thought this was a good idea?” asks an immigration lawyer.
• Attorney General Barr is kicking back to the President. Barr has booked the Trump International Hotel in D.C. for a 200-person holiday party that he will pay for personally, at a cost upwards of $30K. (Barr’s Justice Department is also defending Trump against lawsuits claiming that foreign spending at the hotel is an unconstitutional emolument.) Kickbacks are a classic form of corruption: The political boss doles out jobs and contracts from the public treasury, and the people who get them give a chunk of the money back to the Boss. This is Tammany Hall stuff.
• Trump is steering the next G7 to his struggling resort. Another classic form of corruption is for a public official to steer public contracts towards his allies in the business community. When the Boss owns the business himself, it eliminates the middleman. The US is scheduled to host the 2020 G7 meeting, and holding it at the Trump Doral Resort has many advantages — for Trump. It will draw a lot of foreign money (i.e. unconstitutional emoluments) to his property, give it lots of free publicity, and increase its prestige. Whatever advantages it has for the US or the G7 are much less clear.
• Building the wall is more important than obeying the law. Reportedly, Trump has told his underlings to get his border wall built before the 2020 elections, and ignore laws that protect the environment and defend private property. He says he will pardon them. The White House did not deny that he said this, but claimed that he was joking.

Stay tuned. I’m sure there will be new outrages next week.

and a hurricane

As usual, I’m not going to try to compete with CNN and the Weather Channel on hurricane coverage. Dorian hit the Bahamas as a category-5 storm last night. The current prediction has it heading up Florida’s Atlantic coast towards Georgia and the Carolinas. Where or whether it will make landfall in the US is still uncertain.

This is the fourth consecutive year with a category-5 Atlantic hurricane.

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Former Canadian Prime Minister Kim Campbell aroused a furor with a since-deleted tweet rooting for Dorian to hit Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach. (Dorian has turned north since then.) I generally disapprove of wishing harm on people, but I see her point here: Trump is so self-centered that nothing less than a personal loss will make him take climate change seriously.

and more shootings

Studies have shown that the public clamor to do something about gun violence tends to die down about three weeks after some horrific shooting. So that’s been the gun lobby’s strategy: stall for three weeks until public attention moves on.

But now we’re running into the limits of that strategy: It only works if the country can go longer than three weeks between shootings. Saturday’s mass shooting in Texas (on the highway connecting Midland and Odessa) came four weeks after the August 3 mass shooting in El Paso and August 4 mass shooting in Dayton. Those two were about a week after the Gilroy Garlic Festival shooting.

The Texas shooting knocked Friday night’s high-school shooting in Alabama out of the news. At least six teens were shot at a football game, but nobody died.

Will something happen this time? Governor Gregg Abbott says “I’m tired of the dying of the people of the state of Texas. The status quo is unacceptable.” But does that mean he’ll actually do anything? (Texas actually loosened its gun laws, effective yesterday.) Promising action that never arrives — as Trump did after Dayton/El Paso — has become part of the delay-three-weeks playbook.

Congress returns from recess next week. Two very reasonable background-check bills have passed the House already, but Mitch McConnell has blocked any vote on them. There has been talk about a red-flag law or the renewal of the assault weapon ban that lapsed during the Bush administration. But will anything happen?

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A California workplace has an expert come in to instruct the staff on what to do if there’s an active shooter. The expert is Kayley, a girl who has had to learn all this in school.

and the countdown to a no-deal Brexit

One extreme (but very unlikely) solution to the Brexit problem is the Celtic Union shown on the map: England could go its own way while Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and Cornwall stay in the EU.

An only slightly less radical path is the one Prime Minister Boris Johnson (a.k.a. the Trump of England) is maneuvering towards: The UK busts out of the EU on October 31 with no deal.

The sticking point in getting a deal with the EU is what to do with Northern Ireland: The whole point of Brexit (at least in the minds of its major supporters) is to have hard borders, so that the UK can reclaim control over the people and products that come into the country from  other EU nations. But the soft border between Ireland and Northern Ireland is at the center of the Good Friday Accords that ended the Troubles in Northern Ireland.

The EU has taken a hard line against a hard Irish border, because it feels an obligation to represent the interests of the country that is staying in the union: Ireland.

Johnson and his fellow Brexiteers have a very nuanced counter-offer: Fuck the Irish.

OK, that’s an exaggeration. Johnson is currently saying the exact opposite  — that there won’t immediately be new border checks in Northern Ireland. But he won’t say what there will be, and ultimately there’s no way to achieve his Brexit goals without a border that checks passports and collects tariffs. So the real message is more like: “Trust us. We wouldn’t fuck the Irish, would we?” Like the American Trump, though, Johnson is not particularly trustworthy.

The previous Tory government of Theresa May spent three years trying to deny the intractability of this problem. So May finally recognized her predicament and got out the only way she could: by resigning. Her successor has a different way out: Don’t let Parliament get in the way, so that a no-deal Brexit can just happen on October 31 whether Parliament likes it or not. The Economist describes the situation like this:

This week opposition parties agreed that, when the Commons returned on September 3rd, they would try to hijack its agenda to pass a law calling for another extension of the Brexit deadline. But a day later Mr Johnson trumped them by announcing a long suspension of Parliament, from September 11th to October 14th, when a Queen’s Speech will start a new session. … At almost five weeks, it will be Parliament’s longest suspension before a Queen’s Speech since 1945.

That leaves two weeks for Parliament to do something to avert a no-deal Brexit. But that’s the rub: It would have to do something: revoke the UK’s request to leave the EU, form a new government … . And that’s been the problem from the beginning: Brexit has always been just a vague idea; as soon as you zero in on an actual scenario, support goes away.

David Allen Green writes in the WaPo:

What will linger either way is the deep sense of wrongness, of the government attempting to unfairly (if not unlawfully) game the constitution so as to prevent legitimate checks and balances. This will not end well, whatever happens.

Basically, Johnson’s maneuver takes a we-made-a-mistake situation and turns it into a somebody-screwed-us situation.

What’s so bad about no deal? The UK is an island nation, so naturally a lot of necessities are imported. Roughly half of the UK’s foreign trade is with the EU. No one is proposing to cut off that trade, but suddenly it will have to find new legal channels. Businesses in the EU will still want to export to the UK (and vice versa), but they won’t know how to do it while new standards and practices are worked out. Ports and crossings that were designed for an open border will suddenly have to start checking passports and collecting tariffs, which will lead to considerable delays.

Likely problems were listed in a government document that leaked a few weeks ago.

In addition to the immediate chaos, a number of political consequences are likely within the UK: Scotland decided against independence in 2014, but Scots also voted overwhelmingly to remain in the EU. So the independence issue will rise again, particularly if a chaotic no-deal Brexit happens without Scottish MPs having a chance to vote against it.

And then there’s Northern Ireland, where the Troubles are already starting to rumble again.

and James Comey

The FBI Inspector General released its report on James Comey’s handling of the memos documenting his interactions with President Trump. I’ll warn you: This is a mind-numbingly boring document. And that’s unfortunate, because it means that most people will rely on someone else to read it for them. That, in turn, means that most people will only hear the spin allowed into their usual news bubbles.

(Something similar happened with regard to the State Department inspector general’s report about Hillary Clinton’s emails, as I reported at the time.)

Let me summarize the general shape of story here, which I think everyone agrees on: While he was FBI director, Comey wrote memos after meetings with President Trump. At the time, he had classification authority over those memos, all but two of which he decided were entirely unclassified. The ones that he judged to include classified information, he handled correctly.

Just before Comey was to testify before Congress (i.e., after he was fired), a group at the FBI reviewed the then-unclassified memos and decided that six words of one and a paragraph of another should be classified at the lowest level, Confidential. The newly classified parts were moments when President Trump had been talking about foreign countries and leaders, and the FBI group reasoned that revealing those statements might cause embarrassment to the US, because some of the countries or leaders might feel slighted. [My opinion: This is a judgment call people might legitimately disagree on, and in any case, it isn’t a big deal.]

After leaving the FBI, Comey kept the memos he believed to be unclassified. He gave one to a friend in order to get its contents leaked to the media. (The newly classified parts weren’t leaked, but the friend saw the six classified words: names of countries.) He also gave his lawyers copies of the memos he retained, so they also saw the newly classified information. In any case, none of the classified information got out.

We found no evidence that Comey or his attorneys released any of the classified information contained in any of the Memos to members of the media.

Comey treated the retained memos as personal property rather than as government property that should be returned to the FBI. The IG finds fault with him for this, because Comey wrote the memos while he was FBI Director, and they concerned conversations he wouldn’t have had if he weren’t FBI Director.

That’s the whole story told in the report.

So what should we make of this? I suspect the IG is technically correct about the ownership of the memos. But let’s consider just how minor a technicality this is: Suppose Comey had returned the memos when he left the FBI (as the IG said he should), and then (as a private citizen) had gone to his computer and written down his memories of his conversations with Trump as best he could remember them at that time, leaving out any statements that might be classified. That document would be his personal property — similar to the my-days-in-the-White-House memoirs that get published all the time. Even if it contained all the unclassified information that was in the FBI memos, showing it to his lawyers or leaking it to the media would be unobjectionable.

Anyway, this is the situation that Rep. Peter King (R-NY) described on Fox News (in a clip Trump retweeted) as:

One of the most disgraceful examples of an abuse of power by a government official…when you read this report…this is a systematic effort to go after Candidate Trump, President Elect-Trump, and President Trump….you could virtually call this an attempted coup.

He can say stuff like this in complete confidence that the people listening to him won’t read the report, which says nothing of the kind. Meanwhile, Josh Marshall makes the opposite case: Comey was a whistleblower, not a leaker:

Comey was not simply within his rights but had an affirmative obligation to bring this information to light. Critically, he had no reason to believe that the others in the existing chain of command weren’t compromised by Trump’s corruption and efforts to end the investigation. Indeed, what we have subsequently learned gives every reason to believe they were compromised. The only reason this isn’t obvious is that we’ve had Trump’s denials, lying and gaslighting in our collective heads for the last two plus years.

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Full disclosure: There’s a “Comey is my homey” t-shirt, which I suppose I could wear without too much exaggeration. We were at the University of Chicago at the same time: I finished my Ph.D. in math in 1984, and he got his law degree in 1985. I don’t remember running into him.

but I paid attention to a court ruling

A federal appeals court overturned a lower court ruling and OK’d the practice of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, which bars non-theists from acting as “guest chaplains” and leading the opening prayer.

Granted, this is not the most important thing that happened these last two weeks. Atheism, humanism, and the various forms of religion-without-God will carry on in Pennsylvania, and it’s not even that big a blow to the separation of church and state (though it doesn’t help). But I bring it up as an additional example of something I discussed in my recent Second Amendment article: how the world can change out from under a practice or text, so that it is honestly not clear how best to carry forward some legal tradition.

The strongest argument for why opening prayers are not themselves banned by the First Amendment (as a government “establishment of religion”) goes back to the First Congress. The appeals court majority opinion (written by Judge Thomas Ambro) says:

Twice the Supreme Court has drawn on early congressional practice to uphold legislative prayer. It emphasized that Congress approved the draft of the First Amendment in the same week it established paid congressional chaplains to provide opening prayers.

However, the First Congress did not write down and vote on a policy that applied to all times and places. So it’s left to us to interpret the arguments they were having and extrapolate from them. One thing they didn’t do was insist that the opening prayer satisfy some particular orthodoxy. Ambro summarizes:

[O]ne might wonder whether a religious minister can accommodate the spiritual needs of a “secular agnostic” member of the Pennsylvania House. Or, for that matter, can a Catholic priest in the U.S. Senate accommodate the spiritual needs of Chuck Schumer, or a Jewish rabbi those of Mitt Romney? These questions are as old as the Republic, but they have been settled since the Founding. In the Continental Congress, John Jay and John Rutledge opposed legislative prayer on the theory that the delegates were “so divided in religious sentiments” that they “could not join in the same act of worship.” The two future Chief Justices could not see what an Episcopalian minister could possibly offer a Presbyterian or Congregationalist lawmaker. Their view lost out, however, when Samuel Adams countered that “he was no bigot” and would gladly “hear a prayer from a gentleman of piety and virtue,” no matter his denomination.

So we are left with the question of how far such ecumenism should stretch. In the First Congress, a Christian minister of any denomination could count as “a gentleman of piety and virtue”, and that was as far as the principle needed to go. (Congress wouldn’t have its first Jewish members until 1845, and I’m not sure when a woman first offered the opening prayer.) But how far should this traditional acceptance of pluralism stretch today, when religious diversity is so much greater?

Judge Ambro extends acceptance to all theists — and to Buddhists, for reasons that don’t entirely make sense — but no further.

Legislative prayer has historically served many purposes, both secular and religious. Because only theistic prayer can achieve them all, the historical tradition supports the House’s choice to restrict prayer to theistic invocations.

Judge Felipe Restrepo, on the other hand, is horrified that his colleague has just ruled on what prayer is and what purposes it serves, “which, in my view, are precisely the type of questions that the Establishment Clause forbids the government—including courts—from answering”. His dissenting opinion interprets the opening-prayer tradition differently:

Purposeful exclusion of adherents of certain religions or persons who hold certain religious beliefs has never been countenanced in the history of legislative prayer in the United States, and, therefore, viewed in the proper context, the Pennsylvania House’s guest-chaplain policy does not fit “within the tradition long followed in Congress and the state legislatures” because it purposefully excludes persons from serving as guest chaplains solely on the basis of their religions and religious beliefs.

I’m not attempting to resolve the judges’ disagreement — a job for the Supreme Court — but only to call attention to a more general point, which is the fundamental flaw at the heart of originalism: We can hope to understand what previous generations thought about their world. But when the world changes, we can’t hold a séance and ask how they want us to respond to our world.

and you also might be interested in …

Chinese police are getting increasingly violent against the Hong Kong protests. But the large-scale demonstrations have been going on for 12 weeks and show no signs of stopping. Vox has a good what-is-this-about article.

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The NYT’s Roger Cohen seems to be making a pro-Trump point in “Trump Has China Policy About Right“, but he’s actually saying the same thing I’ve been saying: China is our main global competitor, it has been playing by it’s own rules, and it’s high time we confronted them about that. But at the same time, Trump is doing this in a very stupid way: chaotically and without allies.

Cohen’s assessment of “about right” involves grossly lowering his standards, as so many pundits do when they assess Trump. Trump “flails” and is “erratic”. His attempt to order American businesses out of China is “a trademark Trump grotesquerie”. Somehow that adds up to “about right”.

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The next Democratic presidential debates are set for September 12, and stricter requirements have brought the roster down to 10 candidates, who will all be on stage at the same time: Biden, Booker, Buttigieg, Castro, Harris, Klobuchar, O’Rourke, Sanders, Warren, and Yang.

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As you might guess from the quote at the top, I read Pete Buttigieg’s autobiography Shortest Way Home this week. If you enjoy listening to Mayor Pete talk (I do), you’ll enjoy his book. It’s engaging, thoughtful, and at times funny.

One funny moment is when he’s filling out paperwork for the Navy Reserve. Buttigieg asks an officer for advice on the question “Are you considered a key employee in your civilian workplace?” The officer explains that it’s for first-responders and the like. Pete still doesn’t know how to answer. “Who do you work for?” the officer asks. Pete says he works for the city. “Can anyone else do your job?” Not exactly, Pete answers. “So what are you, the mayor or something?”

It turns out that no, from the Navy’s point of view the mayor is not a “key employee”.

Later, a different officer asks Pete how his employer is handling his deployment, and Pete says they’ve been wonderful about it. The officer says there’s an award he can put them in for. When he finds out Pete works for local government, the officer says that’s perfect, because politicians love getting awards like that.

I also enjoyed watching him mix together his various worlds of experience: bringing his management consultant background into city government, observing like a mayor the Kabul government’s successes and failures in providing local services under difficult conditions, and so on. (One unstated theme of the book is that for a young guy, he’s done a lot of different things.)

One amusing example is when he brings the military concept of “training age” into dating. If you’ve just start to learn about something, your “training age” is young, even if your physical age is much older. Well, Pete took a long time admitting he was gay, and then even longer before he came out publicly. So when he starts to date (after 30), he admits that with respect to dating, his training age is “practically zero”.

and let’s close with something heart-warming

It’s always chancy to imagine what another species is thinking, but in this video it sure looks like a dolphin comes to a diver for help, patiently and trustfully endures having a hook removed from its flesh and fishing line untangled from its flipper, and then swims off.

The American people are ill-served when our leaders put forward unfounded allegations of voter fraud. To put it in terms that a former casino operator should understand: There comes a time when you need to lay your cards on the table or fold.

– FEC Chair Ellen Weintraub

This week’s featured post is “How Should We Rewrite the Second Amendment?”

This week everybody was talking about a change in immigration policy

If the courts don’t block the proposed change in immigration rules, people who come here with nothing — as a lot of the ancestors of current Americans did — will have trouble getting in, trouble staying, and trouble becoming citizens.

Monday, acting US Citizenship and Immigration Services Director Ken Cuccinelli announced the change:

Our rule generally prevents aliens, who are likely to become a public charge, from coming to the United States or remaining here and getting a green card. … Under the rule, a public charge is now defined as an individual who receives one or more designated public benefits for more than 12 months in the aggregate within any 36-month period. … Once this rule is implemented and effective on October 15th, USCIS Career Immigration Services Officers — what we call ISOs — will generally consider an alien’s current and past receipt of the designated public benefits while in the United States as a negative factor when examining applications.

CNN gives some context:

Under current regulations put in place in 1996, the term “public charge” is defined as someone who is “primarily dependent” on government assistance, meaning it supplies more than half their income. But it only counted cash benefits, such as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families or Supplemental Security Income from Social Security. …

[Advocates for immigrants] said [the new rule] would penalize even hard-working immigrants who only need a small bit of temporary assistance from the government.

The Washington Post elaborates:

[The new criteria] will skew the process in favor of the highly skilled, high-income immigrants President Trump covets. Since its first days, the Trump administration has been seeking ways to weed out immigrants the president sees as undesirable, including those who might draw on taxpayer-funded benefits.

Wealth, education, age and English-language skills will take on greater importance in the process of obtaining a green card, which is the main hurdle in the path to full U.S. citizenship.

WaPo’s Eugene Robinson creates a hypothetical example:

Say you’re an immigrant from Mexico who came here legally to join family members who are already permanent residents or citizens. Say you’re working a full-time minimum-wage job, plus odd jobs nights and weekends. You are a productive member of society. You are paying payroll taxes, sales taxes, vehicle registration fees and other government levies. Still, as hard as you work, you can’t make ends meet.

You may be legally entitled to health care through Medicaid. You may be entitled to food assistance through the SNAP program, formerly known as food stamps. You may be entitled to housing assistance. But according to the new Trump administration rule — set to take effect in two months — if you use any of these programs, you might forfeit the opportunity to ever obtain a green card making you a permanent resident. That means you also forfeit the chance of ever becoming a citizen.

And Max Boot makes it personal:

I am certain that my family — my grandmother, mother and myself — had a credit score of zero when we arrived in 1976. There were no credit cards in the Soviet Union, and we didn’t have any money. We survived initially on handouts from the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS), whose help to more recent arrivals triggered the ire of the alleged Pittsburgh synagogue gunman. Luckily, my mother already spoke English, so she soon found a job. But my grandmother spoke only Russian and she was already retired. She got by with help from my family and her Supplemental Security Income and Medicare benefits. My family is far from rich, but we have been productive and repaid in taxes many times over the benefits my grandmother received — just as we repaid the aid from HIAS.

But if Trump had been in office then, I wonder whether my grandmother would have been barred entry or deported back to the U.S.S.R., where she had no one to take care of her? For that matter, I wonder whether any of us would have been allowed to come here given our unconscionable lack of a credit rating?

Here’s a factor anyone should be able to appreciate: In this era of super-bugs, when antibiotics are starting to lose their effectiveness, we shouldn’t be making people afraid to see a doctor. The most likely place for a really nasty plague to get started is among a group of people who either can’t afford healthcare or avoid it for some other reason. So discouraging people from signing up for Medicaid is a bad idea for all of us.

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During an interview Tuesday morning with NPR’s Rachel Martin, Cuccinelli rewrote the inscription on the Statue of Liberty.

MARTIN: Would you also agree that Emma Lazarus’ words etched on the Statue of Liberty – give me your tired, your poor – are also part of the American ethos?

CUCCINELLI: They certainly are – give me your tired and your poor who can stand on their own two feet and who will not become a public charge. That plaque was put on the Statue of Liberty at almost the same time as the first public charge law was passed – very interesting timing.

Clarifying Tuesday evening to CNN’s Erin Burnett, Cuccinelli said that Lazarus’ poem had European immigrants in mind.

Of course that poem was referring back to people coming from Europe where they had class-based societies, where people were considered wretched if they weren’t in the right class, and it was written one year after the first federal public charge rule was written.

At best, he was denying that the poem’s “give me … your poor” refers to people who lack money, rather than just those who weren’t born into the aristocracy. At worst, he was dog-whistling to white supremacists. (Among white supremacists who are trying to sound respectable, “European” has become a less obviously racist way of saying “white”.)

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Trevor Noah has figured out the true target of Trump’s hard line on immigration: He wants to deport Melania.

and two members of Congress who won’t be going to Israel

Vice summarizes:

• First, [Rep. Rashida] Tlaib and her colleague in the House, Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar were scheduled to visit Israel. They’re both supporters of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, which promotes boycotting Israel in protest of its human rights abuses against Palestinians.
• But after some prodding from President Donald Trump, Israel barred the lawmakers from entering the country on Thursday. “It would show great weakness if Israel allowed Rep. Omar and Rep.Tlaib to visit,” the president tweeted.
• The move sparked widespread outrage. Even the American Israel Public Affairs Committee was upset with the decision.
• Friday morning, Israel said it would allow Tlaib to enter the country for a humanitarian visit so long as she didn’t promote protests during the trip. “This could be my last opportunity to see her,” Tlaib wrote of her grandmother in a letter. “I will respect any restrictions and will not promote boycotts against Israel during my visit.”

But after thinking about it, Tlaib changed her mind:

When I won, it gave the Palestinian people hope that someone will finally speak the truth about the inhumane conditions. I can’t allow the State of Israel to take away that light by humiliating me & use my love for my sity to bow down to their oppressive & racist policies.

So then the deal was off and she isn’t going.

Always classy, Trump closed with this gratuitous insult:

The only real winner here is Tlaib’s grandmother. She doesn’t have to see her now!

He probably thought he had gotten the last word, but he didn’t reckon with Tlaib’s grandmother:

Ninety-year-old Muftia Tlaib, sitting in her garden in the village of Beit Ur Al-Fauqa, was not impressed. “Trump tells me I should be happy Rashida is not coming,” she said. “May God ruin him.”

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The issue here is a bit bigger than Tlaib, her grandmother, Trump, and Netanyahu. Thomas Friedman comments:

Trump — with the knowing help of Israel’s current prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu — is doing something no American president and Israeli prime minister have done before: They’re making support for Israel a wedge issue in American politics.

Few things are more dangerous to Israel’s long-term interests than its becoming a partisan matter in America, which is Israel’s vital political, military and economic backer in the world.

and the inverted yield curve

In general, the longer you want to borrow someone’s money, the higher the interest rate they will charge you. This seems as if it ought to be a natural law. After all, the two main common-sense justifications for charging interest are

• the borrower gets to consume now while the lender delays his or her consumption,
• and the lender is taking the risk that the borrower may not repay, or that by the time repayment happens, the currency the loan is measured in might have lost value.

Both of those considerations get weightier with time: The longer I have to delay my consumption the more I want to get paid for it, and the more time that passes before repayment, the more things can happen to interfere with it.

If you have one particular borrower — the US government, say — who owes money on a bunch of different time scales, you can plot out a “yield curve”: the interest rate on bonds that come due in 1 year, in 2 years, 10 years, 30 years, and so on. Given the discussion above, you’d expect the yield curve to slope upwards: longer maturities correspond to higher interest rates. And most of the time that’s true.

Wednesday, though, the interest rate on the 10-year US bond fell below the 2-year rate for the first time since 2007. That created an “inverted yield curve”, i.e., one that slopes downward, not upward.

For investors, an inverted yield curve is like birds migrating in the wrong direction or the jungle going silent at a time when it usually chatters: It’s a sign that something is seriously wrong. (You might take a clue from the “since 2007” above. The economy got pretty ugly in 2008.) So the inversion touched off a fast 800-point loss in the Dow Jones average.

The panic is partly superstitious and partly legitimate. (Superstition matters in the stock market because traders are always trying to guess what other traders might do. So while of course I’m not superstitious myself, those other traders …) Here’s the legitimate part: Think about why some investor might be willing to accept a lower interest rate on a 10-year loan than a 2-year loan. And the answer is: He’s worried that when the 2-year loan comes due, interest rates might be lower than they are now.

Imagine, for example, that you could earn 2% on a 2-year loan but only 1.5% on a 10-year. (The actual inversion is much smaller than this, but I’m trying to keep the numbers simple.) So you invest $1,000 at 2% and get $20 per year in interest rather than the $15 you’d get on the 10-year loan. But then at the end of two years, you get your $1,000 back, and now an 8-year loan will only get you 1%. Then you’d say, “Damn, I wish I’d taken the 1.5%, because then I’d get $15 a year for the next eight years rather than $10.”

So an inverted yield curve reflects the market’s expectation that interest rates are likely to go down. Falling interest rates, in turn, mainly happen during recessions. (In December, 2008, short-term interest rates in the US were .25%.) So the inverted yield curve is predicting a recession.

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The inverted yield curve is happening at the same time as another anomalous event: European government bonds are paying negative interest rates. Irish Times reports:

[O]ddities now abound. Danish lender Jyske Bank last week issued a 10-year mortgage bond at an interest rate of -0.5 per cent, meaning homeowners are being paid to borrow. Meanwhile, Swiss bank UBS is planning to charge its super-rich clients for holding on to cash.

So a lot of stock traders are just plain spooked, and I can’t say I blame them.

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Another source of anxiety: Germany may already be in recession. A recession is usually defined as two consecutive quarters of negative growth. Germany has reported one.

But here’s an interesting spin on that: Countries where the workforce is shrinking (Germany is one), can simultaneously have a shrinking GDP and rising (or stable) incomes for individuals. Is it really fair to call that a recession? As populations stabilize in more and more countries, perhaps our targets for economic growth need to be adjusted.

That point is particularly significant for the United States. If Trump gets his way and immigration goes way down, but the birth rate stays low, GDP growth targets in the 3-4% range become unreasonable.

and Trump supporters

From the WaPo article “‘He gets it.’ Evangelicals aren’t turned off by Trump’s first term“:

While they cheer Trump’s many efforts to chip away at LGBT rights, they are much more concerned with protecting their own right to maintain their opposition. They want to be able to teach their values without interference — some churchgoers fretted about school textbooks that refer to transgender identities without condemnation and about gay couples showing up in TV commercials every time they try to watch a show with their children.

This attitude explains a lot: Conservative Christians have pushed their boundaries out so far that it’s impossible for other people to live their lives without “interfering” with them. The old adage was: “Your freedom to swing your fist ends at my nose.” But Evangelicals don’t look at things that way. In order to be “free”, they have to control the textbooks the rest of us use and the TV the rest of us watch.

It’s a kind of freedom that not everybody can have. Just them.

Another long thoughtful WaPo article about evangelical Trump supporters concluded with this:

Is there a way to reverse hostilities between the two cultures in a way that might provoke a truce? It is hard to see. Is it even possible to return to a style of evangelical politics that favored “family values” candidates and a Billy Graham-like engagement with the world, all with an eye toward revival and persuasion? It is hard to imagine.

Or was a truly evangelical politics — with an eye toward cultural transformation — less effective than the defensive evangelical politics of today, which seems focused on achieving protective accommodations against a broader, more liberal national culture? Was the former always destined to collapse into the latter? And will the evangelical politics of the post-Bush era continue to favor the rise of figures such as Trump, who are willing to dispense with any hint of personal Christian virtue while promising to pause the decline of evangelical fortunes — whatever it takes? And if hostilities can’t be reduced and a detente can’t be reached, are the evangelicals who foretell the apocalypse really wrong?

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A number of articles talk about how tired Trump supporters are of being called racists. The Atlantic quotes a 50-year-old woman at a Trump rally in Cincinnati:

“I’m sick to death of it. I have 13 grandchildren—13,” she continued. “Four of them are biracial, black and white; another two of them are black and white; and another two of them are Singapore and white. You think I’m a racist? I go and I give them kids kisses like nobody’s business.”

This is a response I’ve run into fairly often in reading interviews: I can’t be racist because I have non-whites in my family (just like Trump can’t be anti-Semitic because of Jared and Ivanka). It’s an amped-up version of the some-of-my-best-friends-are-Jewish line that people would use when I was young.

I’m not sure why anyone thinks this is a get-out-of-racism-free card. The fact that you can make exceptions for people who are very close to you doesn’t mean that you don’t have prejudices. The essence of being close to someone is that you see that person as an individual, rather than as an example of a type. Your bigotry against the type may be completely untouched by your love for the individual.

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A few facts about Trump’s speech to Shell petrochemical workers at a new plastics plant near Pittsburgh on Tuesday:

• It was an official presidential event, with Trump’s expenses paid by taxpayers, even though he gave a campaign speech. He ran down Democrats in general and “Pocahontas” [Elizabeth Warren] and “Sleepy Joe” [Biden] in particular. He told the union workers to vote their leaders out if they didn’t support his re-election. That sort of campaigning at taxpayer expense is illegal. “In a free and open democracy, the government doesn’t use taxpayer resources to keep itself in power,” [Jordan] Libowitz [of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington] told Vox. “That’s what authoritarian dictatorships do.”
• He lied about how well he’s doing in the polls, and “joked” about calling off the 2020 elections and going on to serve a 3rd and 4th term.
• He falsely took credit for the new plastics plant’s existence. The commitment to build it was made during the Obama administration.
• CNN’s David Dale listed a number of other false or bizarre claims.
• Esquire’s Jack Holmes claims one of the lies — that he’s responsible for the Veteran’s Choice program Obama signed into law in 2014 — was told for the 80th time.
• The workers would have lost that week’s overtime pay if they hadn’t attended, and they were instructed not to protest.

Elaborating a bit on the first point, official events are things like ribbon-cuttings. Past presidents have used them in a general image-building sort of way: They give upbeat remarks about how well the country is doing, lay out their vision for the future, make generically patriotic remarks, and so on. If they stray into campaigning — asking for support, running down their opponents, etc. — their campaign or political party is supposed to reimburse the government for the trip’s expenses. Trump hasn’t done that.

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A subsequent Trump rally in Manchester had its own batch of lies, including the claim that he would have won New Hampshire in 2016 if not for voter fraud. This drew a response from Federal Election Commission Chair Ellen Weintraub, who wrote the president a letter.

Trump has made these claims before, and Weintraub has asked him to give his evidence to the FEC so that the alleged fraud can be investigated. But Trump has never responded, and has never provided any evidence in any forum.

The American people are ill-served when our leaders put forward unfounded allegations of voter fraud. To put it in terms that a former casino operator should understand: There comes a time when you need to lay your cards on the table or fold.

but I wrote about guns

The featured post is my attempt to rewrite the Second Amendment, and to explain why we need to rewrite it.

Meanwhile, various Democratic candidates put out their own gun plans: Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, Pete Buttigieg, and others. It remains to be seen what (if anything) the Senate will vote on when the congressional recess ends after Labor Day.

and you also might be interested in …

The New York City medical examiner has officially concluded that Jeffrey Epstein hanged himself. So of course all conspiracy theories immediately dried up (in some alternate universe).

Anyway, however he died, here’s hoping a full investigation tells the story of what he did, who helped him do it, and who went along for the ride. Democrats, Republicans — I don’t care.

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A prison worker drove a truck into a crowd of Never Again Action protesters outside a private prison where ICE is holding immigrants. The crowd then surrounded the truck until prison guards pepper-sprayed them. The driver wasn’t arrested, but did later resign.

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According to NOAA, July was the hottest month ever.

Nine of the 10 hottest Julys have occurred since 2005—with the last five years ranking as the five hottest. Last month was also the 43rd consecutive July and 415th consecutive month with above-average global temperatures.

Think about that: It’s been 34 years since the Earth has had a cool month.

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The United Methodist denomination may split over LGBTQ issues.

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Here’s how big a propaganda victory Kim Jong Un believes he got from his meetings with Trump: He put their picture on a postage stamp.

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I refuse to waste my attention on Trump’s fantasy of buying Greenland. I liked Amy Klobuchar’s tweet:

The difference between Donald Trump and Greenland? Greenland is not for sale.

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Trump has taken a stand as an anti-anti-fascist.

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and let’s close with something portentous

Brexit is written in the clouds:

I want to point out what this portent signifies: The way for Britain to leave the EU is without Northern Ireland.