The Weekly Sift

The truth is it’s women — women are the victims in this situation. It doesn’t mean you’ve got to be feeling sorry for women, but women are the victims and that’s what we’re trying to fix. But Trump has managed to turn that, and he’s turned it with everybody. He goes: “The real victims in this story is not the kids in the cages, it’s you. It’s you who — they’re coming to take your place. The real victim isn’t the refugee from Syria, it’s you, who’s going to get blown up by a terrorist bomb.” … People felt, because of Trump, like they were losing their country. They felt like America was losing. And feeling is oftentimes more powerful than what is actually happening.

– Trevor Noah

This week’s featured post is “Are Men Victims Now?”

This week everybody was talking about Brett Kavanaugh

After much Sturm und Drang, Kavanaugh was confirmed to the Supreme Court Saturday by a 50-48 Senate vote. All Republicans voted Yes except Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, and all Democrats voted No except Joe Manchin of West Virginia. (The votes don’t add up to 100 because Murkowski made a deal with Montana Senator Steve Daines. Daines, a Yes vote, wanted to go to his daughter’s wedding, so Murkowski, a No vote, agreed to cover for him by voting Present. In other words, they preserved the two-vote margin that would have existed if Daines had stayed in Washington. I don’t hold the Present vote against Murkowski; it was a collegial thing to do.)

Most of the people I know are struggling to accept this. Some are angry, some are depressed, and a lot of us bounce through a range of emotions.

Now that the Senate has made such a travesty of its responsibility to seek the truth, the onus passes to us. The reason they’re not supposed to do stuff like this is that the voters will vote them out. Well, that’s what we need to do now. There’s an election in four weeks, and we all need to do whatever we can to sway it. Vote, of course, but also (to the extent that you’re able) volunteer, give money, convince your friends to vote, and do whatever else you can think of.

If Republicans can do this and not pay a price in elections, then they really have won.

A issue I’ve been talking about on this blog since I retrospectively declared it a major theme of 2013 is minority rule. Democrats have won the popular vote in 6 of the last 7 presidential elections, and yet Republicans have appointed 5 of the 9 Supreme Court justices. The GOP Senate “majority” that approved Kavanaugh represents fewer citizens that the Democratic “minority”. Gerrymandering in the House means that Democrats probably will have to win at least 7% more votes than Republicans if they want to take control.

Looking ahead, the Supreme Court will hear a number of cases that bear on the GOP’s ability to maintain its minority rule: gerrymandering cases, techniques to suppress voting blocs likely to support Democrats, and so on. You have to wonder how many of those decisions will be 5-4 to maintain Republican power at the expense of democracy.

Paul Waldman writes in The Washington Post:

When he ran for president, Donald Trump told his voters that they were the victims of a rigged system. Nurture your rage, he urged them, and strike a blow against that system by voting for me. In truth, he was the product of the rigged system, not its enemy.

The Senate hearing last week with Kavanaugh and his main accuser, Dr. Catherine Blasey Ford, was set up to offer a he-said/she-said choice, but it didn’t seem that 50/50 to me. Dr. Blasey Ford was forthright and honest about the limitations of her memory, while Judge Kavanaugh was evasive and refused to admit the most trivially embarrassing things, even if he had to insult our intelligence to deny them. (We all know what the “Beach Week Ralph Club” was: a list of boys who drank until they threw up during Beach Week. What’s the point of claiming otherwise?) A good analysis of his testimony is in the Current Affairs article “How We Know Kavanaugh is Lying“.

The most likely scenario, in my view, is that Kavanaugh did drink to excess in high school, and that he did attack Blasey Ford. But he doesn’t remember it because (1) he was drunk, (2) it was a long time ago, and (3) the attack was too brief and unsuccessful to be memorable from his point of view.

That hearing also provided a clear lesson in male privilege, especially with regard to the expression of anger. If Blasey Ford had seethed and exploded like Kavanaugh did, or if Diane Feinstein had blown her top like Lindsey Graham, both would have been written off as hysterical women, and the substance of what they had said would have been ignored.

Several observers, including retired Justice John Paul Stevens (damn, I hope I have that many of my marbles at age 98), thought that Kavanaugh expressed too much partisan bias in his testimony to be an effective judge. Stevens implied that Kavanaugh’s publicly displayed political bias ought to lead him to recuse himself from so many cases that he would only “do a part-time job” on the Supreme Court.

I suspect he won’t recuse himself, and will vote in the way his bias points. To me, Kavanaugh is more of a political operative than a judge. When the Court hears politically sensitive cases about, say, gerrymandering or voting rights or the Trump investigation, I expect Kavanaugh’s rulings to maximize Republican power. He will examine the facts and the law only to the extent necessary to reach his desired outcome. (Feel free to quote this back to me and gloat if I’m wrong.)

Republicans consistently argued for an innocent-until-proven-guilty standard, which I think is ridiculous. James Fallows critiques this better than I could:

Proof beyond reasonable doubt is the right standard for depriving someone of liberty. Bill Cosby’s jury was satisfied on those grounds, and O.J. Simpson’s was not. But that has never been the standard for choosing a university president, or a CEO, or a four-star general, or a future marriage partner, or a Nobel prize winner, or a lifetime federal judge. With all their differences, the standard for these decisions is supposed to be: is this the best person for the role?

When you understand that, the only conceivable excuse for voting Yes on Kavanaugh is if you believe whole-heartedly that Dr. Blasey Ford is lying (along with the other women who have accused Kavanaugh), and that any Trump-appointed judge would face similar false charges (although Neil Gorsuch did not). Otherwise, Republicans ought to be able to find some other conservative judge untainted by serious, plausible charges.

I thought this Bruce MacKinnon cartoon was raw but devastating:

I don’t see the political logic for Susan Collins’ Yes vote. And I’m not just thinking about the $3 million and counting that has been raised for whoever challenges her in 2020.

If current projections hold, the Democrats will take the House in November. So when the new Congress starts in January, Democrats will have the ability to conduct investigations. At that point, a real Kavanaugh investigation will take place. Quite likely it won’t produce enough evidence to remove a sitting justice. (Two-thirds of the Senate would have to agree. My guess is a real investigation will find numerous false statements to Congress, but Republicans will see them lacking sufficient significance to count as perjury. Sexual assault charges will become more credible, but not rise to the beyond-reasonable-doubt standard Republicans will insist on.)

But it will be clear that senators who voted for Kavanaugh weren’t interested in finding the truth. That information will be available for some devastating attack ads against Collins. She’ll also have to take responsibility for whatever decisions Kavanaugh makes in the next two years, and I strongly suspect there will be some that expose her reading of his record and character (“Despite the turbulent, bitter fight surrounding his nomination, my fervent hope is that Brett Kavanaugh will work to lessen the divisions in the Supreme Court so that we have far fewer 5-4 decisions and so that public confidence in our Judiciary and our highest court is restored.”) as the wishful thinking it is.

Collins’ speech announcing her decision was full of misrepresentations of the case against Kavanaugh, like this:

There are some who argue that given the current Special Counsel investigation, President Trump should not even be allowed to nominate a justice. That argument ignores our recent history. President Clinton, in 1993, nominated Justice Ginsburg after the Whitewater investigation was already underway. And she was confirmed 96-3. The next year, just three months after Independent Counsel Robert Fiske was named to lead the Whitewater investigation, President Clinton nominated Justice Breyer. He was confirmed 87-9.

Clinton was suspected of participating in a shady real-estate deal. Trump is suspected of gaining the presidency by conspiring with an enemy power. The similarity escapes me. If the worst suspicions about Trump are true, then Russia has reshaped our Supreme Court.

Maine voter and NYT contributor Jennifer Finney Boylan judges Collins in the light of the long tradition of maverick senators from Maine, from Margaret Chase Smith to Angus King. In contrast, Boylan finds Collins to be

the kind of centrist who wants to please everyone. For Ms. Collins, it’s often meant voting with the most right-wing members of her party, even while attempting to occupy some imaginary moral high ground. … In [voting to confirm Kavanaugh], she has proved herself, in the end, to stand for nothing.

I also don’t see the logic for Joe Manchin, but maybe he’ll prove me wrong. I think red-state Democratic senators were in a no-win situation: A No vote energizes their opposition, while a Yes vote demoralizes their supporters. So Heitkamp and McCaskill (no) and Manchin (yes) probably all suffer.

Trump tweet Friday morning:

The very rude elevator screamers are paid professionals only looking to make Senators look bad. Don’t fall for it! Also, look at all of the professionally made identical signs. Paid for by Soros and others. These are not signs made in the basement from love! #Troublemakers

The Washington Post fact-checkers gave this three Pinocchios. Trump and Chuck Grassley have decided to push an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that has worked for right-wing dictators like Putin in Russia and Orban in Hungary.

Some of the responses to the Senate hearing were hilarious. The Pulp Fiction mash-up stood out. (If you’re at work, keep the volume low.)

So did Matt Damon’s SNL parody of Kavanaugh:

And Tom Toles added this cartoon

and where Trump’s money comes from

The New York Times published an enormous article detailing how Donald Trump got rich: Not by being the brilliant businessman he claims to be, but by inheriting his father’s empire while using illegal methods to dodge taxes.

If Congress were doing its job under the Constitution, this would be investigated. But Congress isn’t doing its job, and it won’t as long as Republicans remain in control. That’s why it’s so important for Democrats to win at least the House.

and a small sign that black lives actually might matter

The shooting of Laquan McDonald (which was captured on video) has resulted in a murder conviction for an on-duty Chicago cop. A white cop is going to prison for shooting a black teen-ager. In Chicago. This is huge. I know, it required overwhelming evidence and was only a second-degree murder conviction, but change has to start somewhere. Here’s the NYT’s description of the shooting:

After a truck driver reported that evening that someone was breaking into vehicles in a parking lot, police officers followed Laquan, who was carrying a three-inch pocketknife and refused to stop when they told him to. The pursuit — with Laquan walking down the street and officers on foot and in squad cars behind him — ended when Officer Van Dyke arrived in a car, stepped out and shot him repeatedly, even after his body was crumpled on the street.

The jury included only one black, but the 11 others also didn’t buy the usual police argument that the officer was just doing his job and feared for his life.

“It seemed kind of like he was finally giving the play after they had been rehearsing with him for weeks,” said one juror, a white woman, who noticed Officer Van Dyke “staring at us, trying to win our sympathy” when he testified. … “Police officers aren’t going to be as confident moving forward with taking their case to a jury, getting that heightened credibility just by being a police officer,” said Alan Tuerkheimer, a Chicago-based jury consultant. “That’s not a given anymore.”

Sadly, though, police are still more intent on defending their own than in winning back the public’s trust by getting bad cops off the street:

“This sham trial and shameful verdict is a message to every law enforcement officer in America that it’s not the perpetrator in front of you that you need to worry about, it’s the political operatives stabbing you in the back,” Chris Southwood, a state leader of the Illinois Fraternal Order of Police, said.

The case has already had political consequences. After the video was released,

The police superintendent was fired, the local prosecutor lost her re-election bid, and Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced shortly before the trial began that he would not seek re-election next year.

but I’m thinking about cyber attacks

The paragraphs in Bob Woodard’s Fear that I found most alarming got practically no coverage.

[Tom Bossert, Trump’s advisor for homeland security] knew the United States was already in a constant state of low-intensity cyber war with advanced foreign adversaries such as China, Russia, North Korea and Iran. These countries had the ability to shut down the power grid in United States cities, for example, and the only deterrent was to make clear that a massive cyber attack would not just be met with cyber-for-cyber symmetry.

The full force of the U.S. military, including nuclear weapons [my emphasis], would have to be a central part of the deterrent. Bossert liked to say, and he said it regularly, that the use of any element of national power would be justified. The United States had too much to lose in a high-consequence cyber attack. Bossert had repeated it so often that the president seemed to understand, but the import of this — nuclear weapons as a cyber deterrent — had not quite become part of the public debate.

No shit it hadn’t, and still hasn’t. The next time you read about some cyber vulnerability (and I’m about to tell you about one) you need to think about it as a place where a spark could set off nuclear war.

If we have a weakness that would require nuclear war as a response, you’d think we’d rapidly be trying to cover it, and that nuclear-war-type money — hundreds of billions, in other words — would be available. But no. The FY 2019 budget calls for $15 billion in cyber security, mostly focused on securing the federal government’s own systems. But power grids, the communication infrastructure, pipelines, and much of the financial system all lie in the private sector. Corporations definitely have their own reasons to want to stop hackers, but I don’t believe their motivation rises to avoiding-nuclear-war levels.

[Full disclosure: My wife, though mostly retired, still works in the computer-security industry. I doubt we would profit significantly from a big increase in cyber-security spending.]

China appears to have pulled off an amazing hack: The Chinese military built a microchip that surreptitiously got inserted onto motherboards built in Chinese factories for Supermicro, an American corporation whose

motherboards can be found in made-to-order server setups at banks, hedge funds, cloud computing providers, and web-hosting services, among other places. Supermicro has assembly facilities in California, the Netherlands, and Taiwan, but its motherboards—its core product—are nearly all manufactured by contractors in China.

… With more than 900 customers in 100 countries by 2015, Supermicro offered inroads to a bountiful collection of sensitive targets. “Think of Supermicro as the Microsoft of the hardware world,” says a former U.S. intelligence official who’s studied Supermicro and its business model. “Attacking Supermicro motherboards is like attacking Windows. It’s like attacking the whole world.”

… Since the implants were small, the amount of code they contained was small as well. But they were capable of doing two very important things: telling the device to communicate with one of several anonymous computers elsewhere on the internet that were loaded with more complex code; and preparing the device’s operating system to accept this new code.

About 30 companies appear to have been affected. Amazon and Apple are reported to have found the hack on their own. A certain amount of luck was involved.

and you also might be interested in …

The video of Trump climbing the stairs into Air Force One with paper stuck to his shoe is funny, but it points to a serious problem: Trump has surrounded himself with people who are afraid to tell him when he looks ridiculous. What else might they be willing to let him do, rather than burst his I-never-make-mistakes bubble?

In the wake of the revised NAFTA deal, now called USMCA, an NYT article by Neil Irwin claims to have found a strategy in the administration’s trade policies, which at times have looked almost random.

Now that the administration has shown it can get to yes with [Canada, Mexico, and South Korea], similarly patterned agreements with Europe and Japan are expected to come next. After revised deals with those allies are in place, the administration will most likely seek a concerted effort among them to isolate China and compel major changes to Chinese business and trade practices.

… A crucial question is whether the administration’s strategy of pummeling allies with attacks, threats and tariffs can yield not just revised trade agreements, but also the trust needed to undertake a concerted campaign against China.

A contrasting view comes from Robert Kagan in The Washington Post, who says we are “sleepwalking into war” with China. The problem is that Trump thinks only in terms of money, and doesn’t understand that “Trade, finance, diplomacy and military power are all aspects of comprehensive national power.”

Historically, however, economics and trade have always been an adjunct to geopolitics. Trade wars and economic competition were often precursors to real wars — Germany and Britain before World War I, for example, or the mercantilist competition among England, Spain and France in the 17th and 18th centuries.

… It’s not clear Trump administration officials quite see that their tough trade policies could lead down a path toward conflict. They are treating the trade dispute as a matter of punishing China for unfair trade practices and correcting imbalances. … It would be one thing if Trump’s trade policy were part of an overall geopolitical strategy to deal with a rising China, but it isn’t.

… In our current inward-looking myopia, we think about jobs and votes. The Chinese, as always, think about power. In case you didn’t recognize it, this is what sleepwalking into war looks like.

and let’s close with something symbolic

An 8-year-old girl found a pre-Viking sword in a lake in Sweden. If you have a good mythological imagination, you might muse on the timing. As patriarchy reasserts itself in North America …

It is upsetting to discuss sexual assault and its repercussions, yet I felt guilty and compelled as a citizen about the idea of not saying anything.

– Christine Blasey Ford

This week’s featured post is “10 Years After: the Post-Recovery Economy“.

This week everybody was talking about hurricanes

Early in the week, it was thought that Hurricane Florence might make landfall as Category 4 or even 5. But it spread out, slowed, and weakened, hitting North Carolina as Category 1. It’s now down to a tropical depression, but its cloud-field still covers a huge chunk of the Southeastern seaboard. Swansboro, NC has gotten over 30 inches of rain.

Meanwhile, Super Typhoon Mangkhut hit China’s Guangdong province (south of Hong Kong) yesterday.

The decision to evacuate towns and cities in southern China came as Hong Kong was left reeling by ferocious winds of up to 173 kilometers per hour (107 miles per hour) and gusts of up to 223 kph (138 mph).

Before getting to China, Mangkhut ravaged the Philippines, killing 54 people.

The series of huge storms we’ve seen in recent years is either an enormously improbable coincidence, or it’s evidence of global warming. But it’s not just that the administration doesn’t want to do anything about climate change, it’s actively been undoing what little Obama managed to get done.

In its latest retreat from federal action on climate change, the Trump administration on Tuesday proposed to lift rules on the leaking and uncontrolled release of the potent greenhouse gas methane from oil and natural gas operations.

Methane is such a potent greenhouse gas that (depending on your estimate of how much methane gets leaked between the well and the consumer), it might make natural gas less climate-friendly than coal. Environmental Defense Fund writes:

Whether natural gas has lower life cycle greenhouse gas emissions than coal and oil depends on the assumed leakage rate, the global warming potential of methane over different time frames, the energy conversion efficiency, and other factors. … Technologies are available to reduce much of the leaking methane, but deploying such technology would require new policies and investments.

In particular, government regulation is needed to make energy companies care about the methane they leak. Trump’s EPA is making sure they have no reason to care.

Florence is drawing attention back to the complete botch of the response to Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico last year. The NY Post reports:

Hundreds of thousands of water bottles meant for victims of Hurricane Maria are still sitting at a Puerto Rico airport — nearly a year after the deadly storm

Trump, of course, denies everything. The federal response to Maria was “one of the best jobs that’s ever been done with respect to what this is all about“. And the 3,000 excess deaths? Fake news, made up “by the Democrats in order to make me look as bad as possible“.

It’s important to realize just how not-normal this is. George W. Bush was known to spin and dissemble (that’s how he got the Iraq War started), but it’s impossible to imagine him claiming that Katrina only killed a few dozen people, and that stories about more than a thousand deaths were just Democratic inventions meant to make him look bad. Literally NO previous president has ever been this dishonest, or willing to insult the public intelligence to this degree.

Jennifer Rubin draws the inescapable conclusion:

Trump’s outburst should remind us of several troubling facts. First, whether he is lying (or is simply a victim of his own self-delusion that he is incapable of error) is beside the point. He’s not functioning as a president or any other officeholder should. He cannot comprehend facts, process them and take appropriate action. He is, in a word, non-functional.

… Republicans’ inability to check or challenge the president and their insistence on rubber-stamping his decisions while ignoring his outbursts pose more than a constitutional and moral challenge. They, too, are responsible for confirmed Cabinet officials who are incompetent or corrupt, for lack of serious governance, for failure to hold officials accountable, and for the suffering and deaths (e.g. separated families, dead Puerto Ricans) that come about by virtue of a president who is never forced to confront reality.

and Paul Manafort

On Friday, Trump’s former campaign manager pleaded guilty and accepted a plea deal that involves him cooperating with the Justice Department. He also will forfeit ill-gotten assets that might be worth as much as $46 million. That means that the Mueller investigation could making money for the government. I have been unable to track down where I heard this line, but it’s not mine: “Trump will be impeached, and Russia will pay for it.”

There’s a big guessing game going on concerning what Manafort might be able to testify about, but nobody outside the investigation really knows. Noah Bookbinder, Barry Berke and Norman Eisen  wrote in the NYT:

According to prosecutors, Mr. Manafort has already participated in a so-called proffer session, in which he described information that investigators deemed valuable. Mr. Manafort’s agreement will also require him to give further interviews without the presence of his own counsel, turn over documents and testify in other proceedings. His surrender is complete.

Even if you’re a die-hard MAGA-hatter, you have to be wondering where this stops. With Flynn, Cohen, and Manafort all cooperating, the only bigger fish to go after are in the Trump family.

and Brett Kavanaugh

Last week, my comment about the hearings on Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court was “nothing matters”. Was Kavanaugh’s paper trail being covered up? Did he lie under oath in previous confirmation hearings? Would he gut abortion rights and grant conservative Christians the special right to ignore discrimination laws? Was he so pro-business that he was anti-consumer and anti-worker? It didn’t matter. Even an anonymous accusation of sexual assault (which became publicly known on Wednesday and which Kavanaugh denied) wasn’t worth taking the time to investigate. The Republicans have the majority in the Senate and were determined to push Kavanaugh through as fast as possible.

But now, finally, a few Republican senators are asking to slow this train down. The difference is that the anonymous accuser came forward yesterday. She’s Christine Blasey Ford,

a professor at Palo Alto University who teaches in a consortium with Stanford University, training graduate students in clinical psychology. Her work has been widely published in academic journals.

At WaPo’s “The Fix”, Amber Phillips assesses:

As far as tracing decades-old sexual harassment allegations go, Ford’s story is remarkably credible. Ford is speaking on the record about her experience. She passed a polygraph test, the results of which The Post reviewed. She told other people about the alleged attack years before Kavanaugh was a Supreme Court nominee. She allowed her records from a therapy session about it to be reviewed by The Post. She says she didn’t want to come forward and decided to do so only after her story was leaked to news outlets.

Will the presence of an actual accuser, a woman willing to stand up and watch her life be shredded by right-wing media outlets (as it inevitably will be), make a difference? Maybe. Republican Senators Jeff Flake and Bob Corker have both called for Thursday’s vote in the Senate Judiciary Committee to be delayed. Flake’s view is particularly important here, since he is on the Judiciary Committee, and could be a swing vote against Kavanaugh if his doubts are not addressed. “We can’t vote until we hear more,” he said.

So what happens after Republican senators “hear more”, assuming they do? I can’t guess.

Jeet Heer:

I want a venn diagram of people willing to argue “Give Kavanaugh a break, he was only 17” and “Trayvon Martin got what he deserved.”

The accusations are about events that happened a long time ago, but Kavanaugh’s response to those accusations is happening now. We’ll see how that unfolds, and what it tells us about his character. Matt Yglesias:

There’s a good case for forgiving teenage misconduct but to receive forgiveness you have to seek it, not call the victim a liar and participate in a smear campaign against her.

Here’s the text of the letter Ford wrote to Senator Feinstein in July.

Other Kavanaugh issues: Kavanaugh’s previous Senate testimony under oath appears to not entirely correspond to the truth. But the legal scholars Vox consulted say the case falls short of criminal perjury.

Senator Kamala Harris showed a clip in which Kavanaugh appears to characterize contraceptives as “abortion-inducing drugs”, an extreme claim by religious-right groups that the science doesn’t support. If true, that would be disturbing, because a lot of court cases hang on whether or not a judge takes seriously some fantastic unscientific claim. But a longer version of the clip makes it clear that Kavanaugh was summarizing the position of one side of the case, not stating his own opinion. Politifact rated Harris’ charge false.

and you also might be interested in …

Thursday evening, dozens of fires broke out in the Boston suburbs of Lawrence, Andover, and North Andover. The cause hasn’t been officially identified, but the most likely speculation is that Columbia Gas overpressurized a gas main, resulting in multiple gas leaks.

The Trump administration is taking in many fewer refugees than the U.S. has in recent years. But one group’s numbers are up: white Evangelicals from the former Soviet Union.

Jonathan Chait’s take on Elizabeth Warren  is pretty similar to the one I gave a few weeks ago.

The Massachusetts senator has made a series of unusually early moves that, taken together, suggest a well-designed strategy to compete across the spectrum of the Democratic Party without risking her viability in a general election. … She is building a national profile to position herself to win a primary and a general election, without sacrificing one for the sake of the other.

Earlier this year, I often told people I had no idea at all who would win the Democratic nomination. In a potentially huge field, it is still impossible to predict the outcome with much confidence. But at this point, Warren’s early moves position her as a clear front-runner.

NRATV hit a new low last week: The September 7 edition of “Relentless”, hosted by Dana Loesch, closed by ridiculing the Thomas the Tank Engine TV show, which has made the trainyard more diverse by bringing in girl trains, including one from Kenya. Loesch rejected the idea that the trains had ever had races before, and showed this parody image, which presumably is how liberals saw the show before the new characters were introduced.

The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer explores the NRA’s perverse attitude towards police violence against blacks.

When armed black men are shot by the police, the NRA says nothing about the rights of gun owners; when unarmed black men are shot, its spokesperson says they should have been armed. … If innocent unarmed black men like [Botham] Jean are shot, it’s because they lack firearms; if innocent black men who are armed like [Fernando] Castile or [Alton] Sterling are shot, it’s because they had a gun. Heads, you’re dead, tails, you’re also dead.

He also notes that in recent years the NRA has become much more of an across-the-board right-wing organization, as the Thomas example above illustrates.

In recent years, the NRA has made frequent forays into culture-war disputes that have little to do with gun rights per se.

His explanation is that the NRA is primarily about selling guns, not defending gun-owners’ rights. (It’s funding comes primarily from gun manufacturers.) And its current why-you-should-be-armed message is a right-wing dystopian fantasy.

NRATV tells its viewers that they are under assault from liberals, black people, undocumented immigrants, and Muslims and that they might one day need to kill them—in self defense, of course. Like the president, the NRA has correctly divined that fomenting and exploiting white people’s fears and hatreds is an effective sales strategy. If marketing murder fantasies is what it takes to move the product, then so be it.

A Kansas woman who was born at home, rather than at a clinic or hospital, was denied a passport.

[S]he received a letter from the federal division of the U.S. Passport Agency out of Houston, TX, telling her the application was denied and required further documentation. … The letter stated, because her birth certificate was not issued at a institution or hospital, it was not considered proof enough of her citizenship.

She received a letter asking her to submit any number of the listed additional documents. “Border crossing card or green card for your parents issued prior to your birth? My parents were born in the United States….Early religious records? We don’t have any. Family Bible? They won’t accept a birth certificate but they will accept a family Bible?” Barbara said.

Eventually her senator intervened, and the passport came through.

If you live in Arizona (or are thinking of moving there), you should be aware that a young-Earth creationist was on the special committee that reviewed the state’s science curriculum standards on evolution. The outgoing Arizona Secretary of Education appointed Joseph Kezele, who teaches at Arizona Christian University and is president of the Arizona Origin Science Association.

He advocates for a literal interpretation of the history presented in the Bible, and claimed that all land animals, including humans and dinosaurs, were created on the sixth day when God created the universe. Adolescent dinosaurs were present on Noah’s Ark because adult dinosaurs would have been too big, Kezele said. “Plenty of space on the Ark for dinosaurs – no problem,” Kezele said.

and let’s close with something to make people look twice

Imagine flying this radio-controlled version of Snoopy’s dog house around your neighborhood.

So much of our politics, our public life, our public discourse can seem small and mean and petty, trafficking in bombast and insult and phony controversies and manufactured outrage. It’s a politics that pretends to be brave and tough, but in fact is born of fear. John called on us to be bigger than that. He called on us to be better than that.

– President Barack Obama, eulogy for John McCain
9-1-2018

To the face of those in authority, John McCain would insist: We are better than this. America is better than this.

President George W. Bush, eulogy for John McCain
9-1-2018

This week’s featured post is “John McCain Shot Liberty Valance“.

This week everybody was talking about John McCain

Last week, pundits were announcing the worst week of the Trump presidency, as the legal dominoes started to fall more swiftly. But I wonder if Trump actually disliked this week more, because so much of it wasn’t about him. Instead, it was about one of the few elected Republicans who didn’t kowtow to him, Senator John McCain.

From his funeral in Arizona on Thursday to his burial at the Annapolis Naval Cemetery on Sunday, the national focus was on the memory of McCain. And what most people seemed to remember was that he was nothing like Donald Trump.

The featured post uses the classic Western The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance to discuss the phenomenon of a man whose life gets mixed up (and partially lost) in the myth we need to tell about him.

Many of the eulogies of McCain were seen as indirect attacks on Trump, because they praised McCain virtues that contrast so strongly with Trump vices. Humorist Andy Borowitz took the indirect-attack angle one step further: “Obama’s Barrage of Complete Sentences Seen as Brutal Attack on Trump“.

and revoking Hispanics’ US citizenship

Over the last year or so, a lot of different stories have revolved around a central theme: The Trump administration wants to use any excuse it can muster to get non-whites out of the country.

• The most visible of those efforts has been the zero-tolerance policy on migrants crossing the southern border, which has had the effect of voiding the US’s commitments under treaties and international law to give reasonable consideration to pleas for asylum.
• In May, the administration revoked the temporary protected status granted to 57,000 Hondurans in 1998 after Hurricane Mitch. (The hurricane, of course, is long gone. But the question remains: Is it safe for those people to go home?) All in all, about 400,000 people from a variety of countries have lost their permission to live in this country.
• A program that offered citizenship to immigrants who had skills needed by the military hasn’t been eliminated, but it has become much harder to complete the process. According to Military Times: “The bottom line is that far more than 40 may soon be weeded out – and it’s possible that the majority of the remaining 1,000 or so participants in the Military Accessions Vital to National Interest, or MAVNI, program will be let go before they can be cleared for duty.”
• Spouses of H-1B visa holders are being denied work permits.
• A “denaturalization task force” has been formed to re-examine immigrants who have already been granted citizenship. “The creation of the task force itself is undoing the naturalization of the more than twenty million naturalized citizens in the American population by taking away their assumption of permanence,” wrote author Masha Gessen in a widely circulated New Yorker column. “All of them — all of us — are second-class citizens now.”

This week produced a new entry in this series: Because there have been cases in which midwives working in Texas near the Mexican border have provided fake Texas birth certificates for babies actually born in Mexico, the administration is regarding everyone delivered by a midwife in that area as suspect.

In some cases, passport applicants with official U.S. birth certificates are being jailed in immigration detention centers and entered into deportation proceedings. In others, they are stuck in Mexico, their passports suddenly revoked when they tried to reenter the United States. As the Trump administration attempts to reduce both legal and illegal immigration, the government’s treatment of passport applicants in South Texas shows how U.S. citizens are increasingly being swept up by immigration enforcement agencies.

Given the demographics of the area and who uses midwives, just about everybody affected is Hispanic.

Eugene Robinson:

If the government had specific evidence that an individual’s birth certificate was falsified, then we could have a debate about the right thing to do. But this administration is assuming that a person of a certain ethnicity, recorded as being born in a certain part of the country and meeting other unspecified criteria, is de facto not a citizen — and has the burden of proving otherwise.

Oh, and those kids the Trump administration took away from their parents at the border? 500 of them are still in government custody. We can’t forget about them just because no new events keep them in the headlines.

and the Catholic Church

The clergy sexual abuse story has now turned into a political football within the Catholic hierarchy. Last week, Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò published a letter calling on Pope Francis to resign. It would be one thing if this looked like an honest call for a house-cleaning. But it seems to be a power move by conservatives in the hierarchy to get rid of a liberal pope and (simultaneously) blame the issue on homosexuality rather than abuse of power.

and the midterm elections in November

Both Florida and Georgia will have fascinating governor’s races that pit black progressives against right-wing whites with a history of dog-whistling about race.

We’ve known since July about Stacey Abrams against Brian Kemp in Georgia. Abrams is a black woman testing the theory that Democrats can do better with a clear progressive message that motivates its core voters than by shifting to the center to compete for moderates. Kemp was endorsed by Trump and has ads featuring guns, chain saws, and a get-tough attitude towards undocumented immigrants.

Now in Florida we’ve got black Tallahassee mayor Andrew Gillum against another Trumpist, Congressman Ron DeSantis. Things might get kind of dicey there.

Speaking to Fox News on Wednesday morning, the representative said Florida voters should not “monkey it up” and vote for what he called Gillum’s “socialist agenda.” DeSantis’ campaign denied the comment had any racial intent.

Again we’ve got the Trump base against an effort to give Democrats — especially poor and minority voters who often stay home — something exciting to vote for.

Whether or not DeSantis himself keeps dog-whistling, race is going to be an issue. A neo-Nazi group is already robo-calling against Gillum.

538 adds the right amount of skepticism to the poll showing Beto O’Rourke within one point of Ted Cruz in Texas. Specifically: Stranger things have happened, but they usually don’t. Lots of polls have the race within single digits, but none show Beto with a lead. So he has a real shot, especially this far out from election day, but it’s still an uphill struggle.

Trump is promising to campaign for Cruz. But when he gets to Texas he may see a few billboards like this:

and NAFTA

A sad symptom of the times: Monday, when Trump announced a major new trade deal with Mexico (“an incredible deal for both parties” and “maybe the largest trade deal ever made”), my first thought was: “I wonder if anything actually happened.”

I mean, Trump announced the denuclearization of North Korea, too, and that meant nothing at all. It’s weird. I’ve often disliked, disapproved of, or disagreed with American presidents. But I’ve never been so inclined to discount presidential announcements as meaningless. If Trump announced that we were bombing Pyongyang, I’d think: “I wonder if the Pentagon knows about this.” And I wouldn’t believe it until somebody there had confirmed it.

Vox shares my skepticism:

The countries involved are closer to achieving Trump’s dream of a changed NAFTA that mostly helps America, but still not that close — which means the president may be celebrating too early. “There is still a long road ahead,” says [Christopher Wilson, a NAFTA expert at the Wilson Center].

Trump also announced a deadline of Friday for Canada to join the so-called agreement. But Friday passed and the negotiations continue.

Many people speculate that Trump is looking for an excuse to pull the plug on NAFTA. Republicans in Congress are mostly against that idea, but it’s not clear what can be done. Under NAFTA rules, the president can give Mexico and Canada six months notice.

A sidebar to this story is the off-the-record comment Trump made to reporters from Bloomberg, that somehow found its way into the Toronto Star:

Trump made his controversial statements in an Oval Office interview with Bloomberg News on Thursday. He said, “off the record,” that he is not making any compromises at all with Canada — and that he could not say this publicly because “it’s going to be so insulting they’re not going to be able to make a deal.”

Trump immediately blamed the Bloomberg reporters for breaking his confidence, but the reporter who broke the story says that’s not true.

I’d said I wasn’t going to say anything about my source for the quotes Trump made off the record to Bloomberg. However, I don’t want to be party to the president’s smearing of excellent, ethical journalists. So I can say this: none of the Bloomberg interviewers was my source.

The NYT’s Maggie Haberman raises the possibility that Trump had it leaked himself.

but let’s not forget about Puerto Rico

The latest estimates are that nearly 3,000 people died in Puerto Rico from the effects of Hurricane Maria last year. The federal government’s disaster-relief effort was its own kind of disaster, and the Trump administration has really paid no price for that. (This is one of the many events that you might think would call for congressional hearings. But Republicans’ attitude towards the Russian investigation has expanded to cover all areas of government: If Trump did something wrong, they don’t want to know.)

Vox makes the connection between this mistreatment and Puerto Rico’s lack of statehood, which it is seeking.

That a sitting US president would expect no political consequences from showing zero empathy toward the deaths of so many American citizens crystallizes the fact that Puerto Rico’s status as a US territory is more than a civil rights issue — it’s a human rights issue.

More than 3 million US citizens live in Puerto Rico with fewer constitutional rights than anyone living in one of the 50 states. Americans on the island can’t vote for president in the general election or elect a voting member of Congress. But the federal government’s response to Hurricane Maria has shown that the problem is even uglier than that: Puerto Rico’s status as a US territory, which is rooted in racist legal rulings, has created a class of citizens whose lives are valued less, and whose deaths can be ignored by America’s most powerful leaders.

and you also might be interested in …

Tom Tomorrow:

With all the talk of a “blue wave” in November, it’s worth remembering that it won’t happen by itself. If anyone you know hasn’t registered to vote, or is thinking about not voting, remind them of this scenario (from Matt Ygelsias):

Really worth emphasizing that there’s a good (~25%) chance Republicans hold the House, gain a senate seat or two, replace McCain/Flake/Corker with Trump loyalists, Mueller gets fired, Manafort gets pardoned, and then that’s game over — the coverup worked.

Nate Silver’s 538 quotes similar odds: a 28% chance that Republicans hold the House. If that happens, the People will not have held Congress responsible for not holding Trump responsible for anything he’s done. The door will be wide open to anything he wants to do in the future.

If you’re thinking far ahead, here’s the betting on who the Democrats will nominate in 2020. Kamala Harris is the front-runner, but not by a convincing margin. A ticket that pays $1 if she’s nominated is going for 22 cents. Other notables: Elizabeth Warren at 16 cents, Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden at 15 cents. I still think Somebody You’ve Never Heard Of has a good shot.

Compare this to January, 2015 (the closest to a 4-years-ago parallel I could find), when Hillary Clinton’s nomination shares were at 75 cents.

Having not been invited to speak at McCain’s funeral, Trump held a rally in Indiana Thursday instead. It included this howler:

They want to raid Medicare to pay for socialism.

Medicare, of course, is socialism. (If you don’t believe me, believe Ronald Reagan, who predicted Medicare would lead to a socialist dictatorship.) The centerpiece of the Democratic Socialist agenda is to extend Medicare to everyone.

I guess Chuck Grassley has given up on Ivanka or John Kelly or anybody else keeping Trump in line. He’s handing the job to God.

Trump blocked a 1.9% pay raise for federal workers, citing the budget deficit that his recent corporate tax cut made much worse:

We must maintain efforts to put our nation on a fiscally sustainable course, and federal agency budgets cannot sustain such increases.

A few observations:

• 1.9% isn’t a huge raise.
• During the Great Recession, federal workers’ pay was frozen. They haven’t made up that ground yet.
• Conservatives like to paint federal workers as “bureaucrats” and “paper-pushers”, but they do a lot of useful and necessary stuff. For example: the doctors and nurses at the VA, the disaster-relief folks at FEMA, air-traffic controllers at the FAA, and the Secret Service agents Trump is relying on to protect his life. Think about NASA, the CDC, the FBI, and all the people working to keep mercury out of your water and E coli out of your vegetables. They’re federal employees.

This is a “first they came for …” situation. “Bureaucrats” are not popular, so they’re the first ones to be sacrificed on the altar of Tax Cuts. After the election, though, Republicans are going to be trying to fill the tax-cut budget hole by cutting more popular stuff like Social Security and Medicare. (That’s what “entitlement reform” means.) That’s not a partisan charge against them, it’s what they’ve been saying for months.

and let’s close with something bigger

I know it doesn’t make any sense to close with an opening, but it’s hard to find anything bigger than Neil Patrick Harris’ opening to the 2013 Tony Awards.

Mr. Trump’s claims of no collusion are, in a word, hogwash. The only questions that remain are whether the collusion that took place constituted criminally liable conspiracy, whether obstruction of justice occurred to cover up any collusion or conspiracy, and how many members of “Trump Incorporated” attempted to defraud the government by laundering and concealing the movement of money into their pockets.

– former CIA Director John Brennan (8-16-2018)

This week’s featured post is “The Drift Towards Autocracy Continues“.

This week everybody was talking about security clearances

In the featured post, I discuss Trump’s revoking of John Brennan’s clearance as one more example of his autocratic tendencies: He thinks presidential powers aren’t tethered to any presidential responsibilities, and are just his to use as he pleases.

Something else worth mentioning is that when Rob Porter was facing credible accusations of beating his ex-wives, Sarah Sanders claimed that the White House had nothing to do with security clearances.

and Aretha Franklin

a.k.a. the Queen of Soul, who died Thursday at the age of 76. In tribute, I offer this clip from The Blues Brothers.

and the continuing sabotage of ObamaCare

Wednesday, HHS Secretary Alex Azar had a WaPo column that makes it sound like Trump’s latest effort to sabotage ObamaCare is a great thing for middle-class Americans.

Americans will once again be able to buy what is known as short-term, limited-duration insurance for up to a year, assuming their state allows it. These plans are free from most Obamacare regulations, allowing them to cost between 50 and 80 percent less.

In other words, they’re junk insurance. Suppose you buy such a policy for a year. If you break your leg, fine, you’re covered. If you get cancer, though, you’re covered until the end of the policy, and which point the company wants nothing more to do with you. Or if your leg-break is complicated, requiring a series of surgeries and some rehab that lasts longer than the policy, forget about it.

In the meantime, these short-term junk policies will appeal to healthy people who don’t expect to get sick. Drawing them out of the risk pool will raise rates for people who want real insurance.

The proper goal of American health policy should be simple: If you need care, you will get it, and you won’t be forced into bankruptcy. This is a step away from that goal, not toward it.

and Trump administration epistemology

“Truth,” Rudy Giuliani told us this week, “isn’t truth.”

“This is going to become a bad meme,” Chuck Todd presciently warned.

Now is a good time to remind everybody of the concept of the “reverse cargo cult”. Hans Howe explains:

In a regular cargo cult, you have people who see an airstrip, and the cargo drops, so they build one out of straw, hoping for the same outcome. They don’t know the difference between a straw airstrip and a real one, they just want the cargo.

In a reverse cargo cult, you have people who see an airstrip, and the cargo drops, so they build one out of straw. But there’s a twist:

When they build the straw airstrip, it isn’t because they are hoping for the same outcome. They know the difference, and know that because their airstrip is made of straw, it certainly won’t yield any cargo, but it serves another purpose. They don’t lie to the rubes and tell them that an airstrip made of straw will bring them cargo. That’s an easy lie to dismantle. Instead, what they do is make it clear that the airstrip is made of straw, and doesn’t work, but then tell you that the other guy’s airstrip doesn’t work either. They tell you that no airstrips yield cargo. The whole idea of cargo is a lie, and those fools, with their fancy airstrip made out of wood, concrete, and metal is just as wasteful and silly as one made of straw.

In Putin’s Russia, democracy is the cargo and elections are the airstrips. Russian elections are bogus, but that just proves that all elections are bogus. The US and all those other countries don’t really have democracy either.

In Trump’s America, truth is the cargo, and public statements are the airstrips. There’s no point claiming any more that Trump tells the truth; it’s just too obvious that he doesn’t. If he testifies to Mueller, of course he will lie. But that just proves that everyone lies, and no statements contain truth.

So it’s totally unreasonable to put Trump under oath and expect truth, because there is no truth.

but you might wonder what’s going on with Turkey

In addition to all the other trade wars Trump is fighting, we now have one with Turkey. Trade with Turkey is too small to make much difference in terms of jobs or the trade deficit, but Evangelicals have made a cause out of an American pastor the Turkish government has arrested. The result is an economic crisis in Turkey that could spill over into European banks or other emerging market countries.

and you also might be interested in …

We’re waiting for a verdict in the Manafort trial. I’m concerned that it’s taking so long; the evidence seems pretty clear. Vox’ Emily Stewart just thinks the jury is being methodical: There are a lot of charges.

Meanwhile, Trump has been doing his best to influence the jury, which has not been sequestered. Any Trump supporters on the jury must know what their marching orders are: not guilty.

Rick Perlstein explains the history of “voter fraud” as an argument for discouraging minority voters.

James Corden’s musical version of the hoped-for Mueller report says that Trump is the “law defying, truth denying, dirty lying, Russian spying, absolutely horrifying worst”.

Dinesh D’Souza’s new propaganda movie is bound to restart the bogus talking point that the Democrats are the real racist party. (Somehow, Nazis and white supremacists never seem to get that memo, and keep supporting Trump.) If you find yourself in an argument about this, I already collected the research you’ll need a few years ago in “A Short History of White Racism in the Two-Party System“.

The even-shorter version is that the Democrats were the white-racist party at least until FDR. By 1948, racists had began to feel unwelcome among the Democrats, which is why Strom Thurmond ran for president against Truman as a Dixiecrat. Between then and 1980, racists had no clear home in either party, and kept flirting with the idea of running their own candidates, like George Wallace in 1968.

Nixon’s Southern Strategy in 1968 began inviting racists into the Republican Party, and Ronald Reagan sealed the deal in 1980 when he launched his post-convention campaign with a dog-whistle-laden speech in Philadelphia, Mississippi, not far from the site of the Mississippi Burning murders. Since then, the GOP has been the preferred party for white racists.

But the article needs this update: The Republican Party of 2012 still kept its racists in the closet and signaled to them with dog whistles. But in the Trump Era, racists have taken a central position in the party’s base.

PBS’ “Hot Mess” series about climate change has some clear, non-intimidating introductory videos that might get through to people still in denial about the problem. Here’s one:

Meanwhile, the Trump administration wants to let states set their own regulations for CO2 emissions from power plants. States that produce a lot of coal presumably will have lax standards, as if the rest of the planet were unaffected by their decisions.

The regulations look like a big win for the companies that used to employ William L. Wehrum, who is now the top air-pollution official at the EPA. #DrainTheSwamp

Pennsylvania’s attorney general released a grand jury report on clergy sex abuse.

Over a period of 70 years, Roman Catholic priests in Pennsylvania sexually abused thousands of children while bishops ran a systemic cover-up campaign, according to the state attorney general.

If you wonder where the “abolish ICE” sentiment comes from, read this story: ICE agents arrest a man at a gas station, leaving his wife to drive herself to the hospital to have their baby. Would it be so hard for ICE to drive the couple to the hospital, to sit with the man until his family is safe, and THEN to arrest him?

The problem with ICE is a pervasive lack of human decency. “Illegals” have been dehumanized to the point that the humane and compassionate responses that we owe to all human beings can be withheld from them. (If you want to see examples of this kind of dehumanization, read the comments on the article.)

You know where this story fits? In a flashback where a terrorist explains why he owes no compassion to his victims. “The day I was born …” he begins.

Much news-network time was taken up this week by speculation on whether or not there’s a tape where Trump says the n-word. Count me among the people who don’t see what difference it would make. If you don’t already know that Trump is a racist, I don’t know why an n-word tape would change your mind. I mean, we already have a tape of him confessing to sexually assaulting women, but his supporters still don’t believe the women who accuse him.

Elizabeth Warren’s Accountable Capitalism Act is an attempt to change the rules corporations work under. There’s a lot going on here that I need more time to unpack.

Tracey Ullman has been playing with the notion of Melania being a Russian robot for a while now. In this episode, the bot needs a reboot.

So Kris Kobach is now the Republican nominee for governor of Kansas. There are few politicians I have less respect for. His signature issue, voter fraud, which he has been riding for years, is bogus, and he has to know it’s bogus.

He chaired a presidential commission tasked with finding evidence of such fraud, and he didn’t find it. The commission disbanded without issuing a report. But he’s still talking about voter fraud as if it were a well established fact.

Denmark’s response to Fox Business Network’s hit piece is awesome. Just about every aspect of Denmark that FBN’s Trish Regan attacked is actually something that Denmark does better than the US.

Apparently the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum is in financial trouble, which is a huge shame. I realize that most of you have no occasion to pass through Springfield, Illinois. But I do, since it’s on the road to my home town, so I’ve toured the museum. It’s a very worthwhile afternoon, and if the museum were on the Mall in D.C., I think everyone would go there.

I get where NY Gov. Andrew Cuomo was coming from when he responded to Trump’s MAGA slogan by saying that America “was never that great”. In other words, if you pick any particular date for “again” to refer to, something pretty awful was happening in America: slavery or Native American genocide or civil war or child labor or the Great Depression or second-class citizenship for women or Jim Crow or Japanese internment or whatever. There is no magic moment that we should want to roll the clock back to.

But I wish he hadn’t put it the way he did, because it’s also true that there has always been something great about America. Even as it was winking at slavery, the Constitution institutionalized rights for white men in a way that could eventually extend to others. Even as America was cramming the Irish, Italians, and Jews into squalid urban ghettos, it was also letting them build a base for breaking out of those ghettos. It promoted science and invention. It created an engine for producing wealth on a previously unheard-of scale, and eventually let that wealth spread out into a large middle class. With its allies, it defended the world from Nazism and held Soviet Communism in check until it fell of its own weight. All superpowers have a degree of arrogance, but compared to historical norms, I believe we have ruled our sphere of influence with a comparatively light hand.

So I find plenty to be proud of in American history, even if there is no Golden Age I would want to return to. My greatest worry is that if we follow Russia, Hungary, and Poland down the authoritarian/nationalist path, we may someday have cause to look back on the Obama years that way. No one would have said so at the time, but that’s how Golden Ages typically are.

and let’s close with a baby otter

Otters may have evolved to swim, but that doesn’t mean they take to water naturally. Mom has to drag the young ones in and force them under.

NO SIFT NEXT WEEK. The next new articles will appear on August 13.

It’s all working out. Just remember: What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.

– Donald Trump (7-24-2018)

The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.

George Orwell, 1984

There’s no featured post this week.

This week everybody was still talking about Helsinki

because we still don’t know what Trump and Putin agreed to in their private two-hour meeting. And by “we”, I apparently also mean the rest of the US government.

Wednesday, Secretary of State Pompeo testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. [3-hour C-SPAN video and transcripts here.] Whenever he was asked what Trump may have promised Putin, he instead told the committee what American policy was and claimed it had not changed. USA Today summarized:

no matter how often they asked – and they asked again and again – Pompeo dodged. “Presidents are entitled to have private meetings,” he said. Pompeo did say that U.S. policy toward Russia has not changed as a result of the meeting and that “no commitment” was made to ease U.S. sanctions. Beyond that, details of the secret meeting remain mostly secret.

I did not watch the entire hearing, but the clips I have watched did not convince me that Secretary Pompeo himself knows what Trump and Putin discussed. Certainly CENTCOM Commander General Joseph Votel (who is responsible for US military operations in Syria as well as Iraq and Afghanistan) doesn’t know. CNN reported:

“The Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation is ready for practical implementation of the agreements reached between Russian President Vladimir Putin and US President Donald Trump in the sphere of international security achieved at the Helsinki summit,” Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov, a Russian military spokesman, said in a statement Tuesday. The Russian military “is ready to intensify contacts with the US colleagues in the General Staff and other available channels to discuss the extension of the START treaty, cooperation in Syria, as well as other issues of ensuring military security,” Konashenkov said.

That “cooperation in Syria” would be with Votel, but he  knew nothing about it when ABC interviewed him.

Votel stressed he has not received any guidance from the White House about the Helsinki talks and had only seen press reports about the proposed joint plan to return Syrian refugees. … Cooperation between [US and Russian] militaries to help return the Syrian refugees is not possible under current law. Since 2014, the U.S. military has been prohibited from cooperating with their Russian counterparts in any capacity after Congress passed legislation prompted by Russia’s annexation of Crimea.

… “I’ve watched some of the things that Russia has done,” said Votel. “It does give me some pause here. These are not things that give me great confidence that just by stepping over into the next level of coordination that things are going to be fine,” he added. “It’s Russia. Let’s not forget that.”

Secretary of Defense Mattis also seemed to be in the dark:

We will not be doing anything additional until the secretary of state and the president have further figured out at what point we are going to start work alongside our allies with Russia in the future. That has not happened yet.

Votel’s ABC interview earned him a condemnation from the Russian Ministry of Defense.

With his statements, General Votel not only discredited the official position of his supreme commander-in-chief, but also exacerbated the illegality under international law and US law of the military presence of American servicemen in Syria,

Any other White House would slap that back, maybe by publicly telling the Russian Defense Ministry to worry about its own generals rather than ours. But not this White House. I can only imagine how demoralizing it must be to doubt your own understanding of your orders, and then to be left hanging by your president. All the American troops serving in Syria must be wondering whether they (or their commander) understand their current mission.

and families still separated

The administration missed its court-ordered deadline to reunite the migrant families it tore apart. It claimed it made the deadline, but only by reclassifying all the families it wasn’t reuniting as “ineligible”. The government is still holding 711 children, 431 of them because their parents have already been deported. It seems to regard deported parents as somebody else’s problem.

For some of the other children, the adult they crossed the border with wasn’t a parent, and the government refuses to turn kids over to grandparents or aunts or other relatives, even if those were the caretakers they were taken away from. Some other parents failed a criminal background check, which might mean something as simple as that they disturbed the peace 20 years ago. (In general, rather than restore the family it wrecked, the government seems to be using the same standards it would apply to prospective foster parents.) Others “voluntarily” gave up their right to get their children back, though the ACLU disputes this:

In some cases, the parents said the forms were not explained to them and that they felt pressured to sign. Some were not provided translation in their native languages and had no idea what they had signed. One said he was told that signing the form was the only way to prevent his daughter from being sent back to Guatemala.

The Washington Post describes the bureaucratic failures that have made reunification so hard, even for “eligible” families. The short version is that the government has no official designation for Children We Kidnapped, so the kids have been classified differently by each organization that gets hold of them, often lumping them in with children who arrived at the border without parents.

Customs and Border Protection databases had categories for “family units,” and “unaccompanied alien children” who arrive without parents. They did not have a distinct classification for more than 2,600 children who had been taken from their families and placed in government shelters.

So agents came up with a new term: “deleted family units.”

But when they sent that information to the refugee office at the Department of Health and Human Services, which was told to facilitate the reunifications, the office’s database did not have a column for families with that designation.

“Deleted family units” lines up with this week’s Orwellian theme. Here’s what deleted family units look like:

Apparently, the government is making no effort to find or contact the deported parents.

Government lawyers, according to the Times, will not allow parents to return to the U.S. to claim their children, but they have also stipulated that parents must be found and vetted before their children can go back home. And yet they are doing nothing, at present, to ensure that those parents can be found—or vetted.

The judge who ordered reunification is not happy about these shenanigans, but has not yet held the government in contempt. (Personally, I would like to see Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen jailed until the last child is returned. I think she’d soon discover that this situation is simpler and more urgent than she had previously thought.) The case resumes Friday.

It’s hard to come to any other conclusion than that the Trump administration is intentionally trying to cause as much pain as possible, to punish Mexicans and Central Americans for trying to come here (even legally, as applicants for asylum). It’s important for Americans to wrap their minds around the sheer malevolence here: Our government kidnapped these children from their parents, and is dragging its feet as the courts try to make it give the children back.

This has gone way beyond politics or policy debates: It’s capital-E Evil.

Meanwhile, the administration continues to come up with ways to make legal immigrants understand how unwelcome they are: It is about to rescind a program that allows spouses of H-1B visa-holders to work in this country. According to The Guardian, “Many are high-skilled workers who sacrificed their careers when their spouses were offered the chance to pursue a career in the US.” Can’t have that, can we?

After seeming to accept McConnell and Ryan’s strategy for next year’s appropriation bills on Wednesday, by Sunday Trump was back to threatening a government shutdown this fall unless Democrats capitulate on everything having to do with immigration, including funding the wall that he is still failing to get Mexico to pay for.

and trade

Trump’s meeting with European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker was weirdly reminiscent of the Singapore summit with Kim Jong Un. Here’s the pattern:

1. Trump ramps up tensions and creates a crisis atmosphere.
2. He meets with a foreign leader and agrees on a vague statement of principles whose details are left to be worked out by future negotiations.
3. He declares victory: The crisis has been solved to the advantage of the United States.

After his meeting with Kim, Trump tweeted:

everybody can now feel much safer than the day I took office. There is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea.

After talking to Juncker, he tweeted:

A breakthrough has been quickly made that nobody thought possible!

And then he announced in Iowa:

We just opened up Europe for you farmers. You have just gotten yourself one big market.

In each case, though, he has made an agreement to negotiate rather than an agreement on substantial issues. The Economist described what came out of the meeting as a “truce” in which Trump backed down from the tariffs he had been about to impose on European cars and Europe held back on its retaliatory tariffs.

The two sides agreed to work together towards “zero tariffs, zero non-tariff barriers and zero subsidies on non-auto industrial goods.” Trade barriers in services, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, medical products and soyabeans are on the chopping block, too. Pundits were quick to point out that Mr Trump had, in fact, secured talks to negotiate something that looks remarkably similar to the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, an accord put on ice when he became president. Such a deal might be possible, but it is a lot more remote than Mr Trump’s jubilation suggests.

In other words, Trump might have gotten back to where Obama was when he left office.

In their joint press conference, Trump made Europe’s commitments sound very immediate and definite:

And the European Union is going to start, almost immediately, to buy a lot of soybeans — they’re a tremendous market — buy a lot of soybeans from our farmers in the Midwest, primarily. … The European Union wants to import more liquefied natural gas — LNG — from the United States, and they’re going to be a very, very big buyer.

But Juncker sounded less definite:

We’ve decided to strengthen our cooperation on energy. The EU will build more terminals to import liquefied natural gas from the U.S. This is also a message for others. We agreed to establish a dialogue on standards. As far as agriculture is concerned, the European Union can import more soybeans from the U.S., and it will be done.

Building terminals takes years, and how much LNG Europe buys then depends on market forces. (By the time it arrives in Europe, American gas that has been fracked, liquefied, and shipped in refrigerated tankers is far more expensive than Russian gas that arrives by pipeline.) Also, 93% of American soybeans are genetically modified. The EU recently allowed the sale of some GMO soybeans, but products made from them must be strictly labeled and consumers may avoid them. So Juncker’s “more” may not be much more.

Meanwhile, the administration will provide $12 billion in subsidies to farmers who continue to be hurt by his trade war. In spite of this week’s focus on Europe, the main damage has been in trade with China, which is now buying record quantities of soybeans and wheat from Russia. #MRGA

Friday morning, the US got the first tangible benefit of the North Korea negotiations: The North Koreans delivered what are believed to be the remains of 55 Americans who died in the Korean War. (On June 23, Trump falsely claimed that the remains of 200 Americans had already been returned.)

and the economy

The numbers are out on second-quarter (April through June) GDP, and at first glance they look really good: The economy grew at an annualized rate of 4.1%.

As you can see from the graph, 4.1% growth is better than most quarters, but not unprecedented. (It was higher for two consecutive quarters in 2014, when I don’t recall anybody talking about how fabulous the Obama economy was.)

If you want a more detailed analysis, I recommend what Jared Bernstein wrote in The Washington Post. A few important points from him:

• Year-over-year growth, i.e., how much bigger the economy is than it was a year ago, adjusted for inflation, is 2.8%, which is good but not extraordinary.
• Growth in the second quarter was boosted by one-time factors, like businesses trying to import or export before tariffs kick in.
• The effects of the Trump tax cut are showing up, but not where they’re supposed to: The economy is getting a push from the sheer size of the federal deficit, but not so much from the business investment that the tax cut was supposed to ignite.
• Wages are still not keeping pace with overall growth.

Paul Krugman offers a somewhat wonkier explanation of the same phenomena: Capacity utilization went up from an already-high level, which is what you’d expect from a deficit-fueled expansion. That’s not sustainable: Sustainable growth expands the economy’s capacity by investing in new capacity. That was what the big corporate tax cut was supposed to do, but so far isn’t doing.

About those tax cuts: It turns out that when you slash corporate tax rates, revenue goes down and deficits go up! Who would have guessed?

Also, the data is still sketchy, but wages might be going down. Weren’t they supposed to go up as the corporate windfall trickled down to employees? Maybe corporate executives figured out that they could just keep the money for themselves and their shareholders.

Trump may deny it (and his son might outright lie about it), but Obama left him an economy that was humming along pretty well. Steve Benen talks jobs:

Consider this quote from the president’s remarks earlier today: “Everywhere we look, we are seeing the effects of the American economic miracle. We have added 3.7 million new jobs since the election, a number that is unthinkable if you go back to the campaign. Nobody would have said it. Nobody would have even in an optimistic way projected it.”

Reality isn’t that complicated. In the 17 full months since Trump took office — February 2017 to June 2018 — the U.S. economy created 3.22 million jobs. What’s wrong with that? Nothing. It’s a perfectly good number. But it’s not a “miracle.” In the 17 full months before Trump took office — September 2015 to January 2017 — the U.S. economy created 3.54 million jobs.

and Trump’s multiplying legal problems

For months there’s been speculation about whether Trump’s long-time fixer Michael Cohen was going to flip and testify against him. No one knows yet what federal investigators (from the U. S. Attorney’s office of the Southern District of New York, not from Bob Mueller) have on Cohen that would make him want to deal. But when they got a federal judge to sign off on a wide-ranging search warrant for Cohen’s office, home, and hotel room, they had to convince the judge that evidence of some particular crime was likely to be found in those places.

We still don’t know what crime they alleged, or if the search produced evidence of it. But federal searches of lawyer’s offices are rare, and this one was likely to (and did) lead to a hail of political criticism from the President and his supporters. So it’s reasonable to assume that the feds already had the makings of a good case against Cohen when they knocked on his door.

Since then, both sides seem to have been waiting to see what developed. It took weeks for the court to decide what of the material seized from Cohen (most of it, as it turned out) was free from lawyer/client privilege and so available for investigators’ inspection. And since we’re talking about millions of documents, it has taken more weeks for SDNY to figure out what it has. Until actual charges are on the table, it’s still premature for Cohen and federal prosecutors to discuss trading what Cohen knows about Donald Trump for leniency in his own case.

Recently, though, stuff Cohen knows has been leaking out. (It’s not clear from whom or why. Prosecutors would want to keep their case secret for as long as they can. If Cohen is doing it, he’s hurting his trade value as a witness. But why would Trump’s people leak information that reflects badly on him? Rachel Maddow proposes that the Trump side wants to degrade Cohen’s value, and also to get a head start on spinning the bad news for the President’s base. That seems strange, but all the explanations seem strange.)

Last week we got a tape in which Cohen and Trump discuss acquiring Karen McDougal’s story (of her affair with Trump) from The National Enquirer (so that they can make sure it doesn’t come out before the election). Personally, I was revolted by how this tape drove more significant news out of the headlines, so I didn’t cover it here last week, though I’m sure you heard about it. (It’s weird that evidence that the President lied about both his affair with a Playboy model and about paying her off isn’t significant to me any more — anything remotely similar would have sunk Obama — but that’s where we are. We know Trump has illicit sexual affairs and lies about them. We know he pays women to keep quiet. Nothing new.)

But this week we got a claim which, if true, is devastating:

Michael Cohen is reportedly ready to tell prosecutors that Donald Trump was aware of a June 2016 meeting between top campaign officials and Russians at Trump Tower before it occurred.

Not only would that mean that Don Jr. lied to Congress, but it could implicate the President himself. Fortune quotes a former federal prosecutor:

If Trump knew in advance that the Russians had stolen information, and understood its importance, that puts him at risk, in legal jeopardy, of being part of the conspiracy that the Russians have been charged with to defraud the U.S.

Of course, then, that leads to a who-do-you-believe question. So everybody in TrumpWorld is now trying to denigrate Cohen. Rudy Giuliani (who in May had called Cohen “an honest, honorable lawyer”) now says Cohen has “lied all his life”.

There’s something almost humorous here: After previously telling us the opposite, Trump’s lawyer is now telling us that Trump hires lawyers who lie a lot. So what do you believe after hearing that? It’s like the famous Cretan paradox from freshman logic class.

Paul Manafort’s trial starts tomorrow.

Wednesday, a federal judge in Maryland ruled on what the Constitution means by “emoluments”, and took an expansive view:

The text of both (Foreign and Domestic Emoluments) Clauses strongly indicates that the broader meaning of ’emolument’ advanced by Plaintiffs was meant to apply. As Plaintiffs point out, the Foreign Clause bans, without Congressional approval, ‘any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.’ Use of such expansive modifiers significantly undermines the President’s argument that this Clause was meant to prohibit only payment for official services rendered in an employment-type relationship.

Consequently, a lawsuit can go forward, charging that the Trump International Hotel (which many foreign officials stay at, hoping to curry favor with the President), violates the Emoluments Clause.

One of the striking things about the Trump/Cohen tape released last week is how Sopranos-like the conversation sounds, with Cohen using euphemisms like “our friend David” and making other oblique references. But one person is mentioned by name: Allen Weisselberg the longtime CFO of the Trump Organization. Now Weisselberg is facing a subpoena.

There’s now an official effort in the House to impeach Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, which would be a step towards shutting down the Mueller investigation. It doesn’t seem likely to go anywhere at this point, but it is an indication of just how far off the rails House Republicans have gone, and why it is important for the country that Democrats win the House in November. The center of the effort is the so-called Freedom Caucus, which maybe should change its name to the Autocracy Caucus, as its main purpose seems to be to raise the President above the law.

You can find the 7-page Articles of Impeachment here. Briefly, the five articles amount to this:

• Rosenstein is derelict is his duties because he hasn’t appointed a special counsel to investigate the investigation of Trump, and hasn’t recused himself from the investigation of (falsely) alleged improprieties in the FISA warrant against Carter Page.
• He has refused to provide the House Intelligence Committee all the documents they have requested for their own investigation of the investigators (which they almost certainly would then turn over to people in the White House who might be subjects of that investigation).
• He redacted too much information from the documents he did provide (which makes them mostly useless to Trump as he tries to obstruct the Mueller investigation).
• He hasn’t provided an unredacted classified memo detailing the full authorization of the Mueller investigation.
• He oversaw FISA surveillance of members of the Trump campaign (which was authorized by four Republican-appointed judges).

These actions constitute “high crimes and misdemeanors”, though the articles do not tell us exactly which laws they break.

After Speaker Ryan refused to get on board with this effort, the sponsors went to Plan B: hold Rosenstein in contempt of Congress

Actions of Congress like this are not themselves actionable in court (and shouldn’t be). But it’s plainly part of a conspiracy to obstruct justice. Fred Wertheimer and Norman Eisen wrote:

Every House Republican will face a momentous choice — perhaps the vote of their careers. They will have to decide if they stand for the rule of law or if they support a cover-up to prevent the American people from knowing whether President Trump’s campaign participated in Russia’s illegal attack on our elections and our democracy.

An idea I’ve seen several times on social media recently: When you go to vote in November, remember that D stands for Democrat and R stands for Russia.

More and more, Trump supporters are preparing themselves to stand by their man, even it turns out that he lied about everything and conspired with the Russians. Rep. Darrell Issa is already saying that’s just politics:

Well, if he’s proven to have not told the whole truth about the fact that campaigns look for dirt and that if someone offers it you listen to them, nobody is going to be surprised. There are some things in politics that you just take for granted.

and the environment

There are a lot of heat waves and wildfires going on right now. And while the media is covering those events, it isn’t connecting them to the larger story of global warming. New York Magazine’s David Wallace-Wells reflects on that in “How Did the End of the World Become Old News?”

In other words, it has been a month of historic, even unprecedented, climate horrors. But you may not have noticed, if you are anything but the most discriminating consumer of news. The major networks aired 127 segments on the unprecedented July heat wave, Media Matters usefully tabulated, and only one so much as mentioned climate change.

He challenges the widely held view that climate change is “a ratings killer”.

When you think about it, this would be a very strange choice for a producer or an editor concerned about boring or losing his or her audience — it would mean leaving aside the far more dramatic story of the total transformation of the planet’s climate system, and the immediate and all-encompassing threat posed by climate change to the way we live on Earth, to tell the pretty mundane story of some really hot days in the region.

Instead, Wallace-Wells believes that media outlets are self-censoring for fear of bad-faith right-wing charges of “media bias”.

Los Angeles Water and Power wants to add a backwards pumping system to Hoover Dam. That would allow it to act as a giant battery to even out the surges of wind and solar power. When it’s windy and sunny, sustainable electricity could be used to pump water back into Lake Mead. When it’s not, the dam could generate more power by releasing more water.

Like everything connected with dams, there are environmental issues to assess and work out, and somebody will have to get the pro-fossil-fuel federal government on board. But it’s an interesting proposal.

Ocean Cleanup has tested a smaller version of its design. It’s essentially a big broom to sweep up plastic from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The first system is supposed to launch in September. Here’s how it’s supposed to work:

and you also might be interested in …

ThinkProgress reports:

Fox & Friends on Tuesday featured an interview with Daily Caller associate editor Virginia Kruta about her experience attending an Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez rally in St. Louis that could have been mistaken for satire.

Democratic Socialist Occasio-Cortez went deep into Trump country (i.e., Kansas) to hold a rally that was well attended and enthusiastic. It demonstrated that while socialists may not be the majority in the rural heartland, socialist ideas still appeal to a large number of people.

Kruta went to the rally and was horrified by how non-horrifying it was.

Kruta told hosts that both Ocasio-Cortez and the Democratic candidate for whom she was stumping, Cori Bush, “talk about things that everybody wants, especially if you’re a parent — they talk about education for your kids, health care for your kids. Things that you want. … If you’re not really paying attention to how they’re going to pay for it, or the rest of that, it’s easy to fall into that trap and say, ‘my kids deserve this, and maybe the government should be responsible for helping me with that.’”

Yes, even good Christian white middle-American parents could be seduced into thinking that their kids deserve healthcare and education, or that people who work full-time should make enough to live on. That’s how insidious the Socialist Menace is.

The NYT:

Israel’s 1948 Declaration of Independence … ensured “complete equality of social and political rights” for “all its inhabitants” no matter their religion, race or sex.

But a new “basic law” (the Israeli equivalent of a constitutional amendment) defines Israel as “the nation-state of the Jewish people”. Critics see this as a move away from democracy.

Max Fisher writes:

Growing numbers see their country as facing a choice between being Jewish first or democratic first. And for many on the political right, the choice is identity first.

I’ve focused on Fisher’s response because of my resolution to treat Israel as I would any other country, rather than judging it by unique standards, either higher or lower than the ones that would apply anywhere. Fisher points out that Israel is simply facing a sharper version of a conflict that many nations (including the United States) are struggling with:

when a majority demographic group believes it could become a minority, members of that group often become less supportive of democracy, preferring a strong ruler and harsh social controls

David Frum has pointed out something similar happening here:

If conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy.

I’m puzzling over why anybody would read Sean Spicer’s new book. I stopped watching his briefings because I wasn’t getting any trustworthy information from him. Similarly, if I found something interesting in his book, could I believe it?

and let’s close with something funny but not funny

Weird questions people ask gay couples.