There’s an outrage-of-the-week, and there’s stuff happening of long-term significance. Which to focus on?
The outrage of this week is genuinely outrageous: A guy held one of the most sensitive jobs in the White House with only an interim security clearance, because the FBI wouldn’t clear him after learning that he was violent with his two previous wives and a subsequent girl friend. It looks like Don McGahn and John Kelly knew for months, did nothing, and watched Hope Hicks start going out with him. After the news broke, they defended him until the press got hold of a photo of his first wife with a black eye. Jennifer Rubin connects this with a long series of abuses and says, “The core mission of the GOP is now to defend abusers.”
The longer-term issue is the spending deal that ended another government shutdown. (It happened for a few hours in the middle of the night, so you might have missed it.) The deal is that Republicans get the defense-spending increases they want, Democrats get the domestic-spending increases they want, and the Dreamers are still left hanging. So we’ve cut taxes, raised spending, and now for the first time in history we face trillion-dollar deficits at a time when the economy is supposed to be humming nicely.
The deficit is one of those issues that the country (especially the Republican half) is bipolar about. Sometimes it’s a threat to the survival of our nation, and then other times it’s not worth serious concern. As a Democrat, it’s tempting to just flip the Republican script: be apocalyptic when they’re sanguine and sanguine when they’re apocalyptic. I’m trying to resist that temptation, so I won’t repeat the ridiculous stuff about the country going bankrupt that we heard so often when Obama was president. Still, though, there must be some reason not to run up a big national debt; otherwise the government could just make us all millionaires. What is it?
I’ll address that question — and provide ample evidence of Republican hypocrisy — in the featured post “Does the Exploding Federal Deficit Matter?” That should be out around 9 EST.
The weekly summary will take on the wife-beating outrage, and wonder what on Earth the Democrats are thinking about immigration and the Dreamers. I’ll also tell a few deportation stories that you should bookmark and share whenever some Trumpist starts talking about protecting the country from the “bad hombres”. I’ll also point to a fascinating study of how porn influences teen attitudes towards sex, mention a Scott Pruitt interview that would have been the outrage-of-the-week in saner times, say some calming words about the stock market plunge, and link to a few other things, before closing with an upbeat music video from New Zealand about people who build their own coffins. That should be up around 11.
The latest attacks on the FBI and Department of Justice serve no American interests – no party’s, no president’s, only Putin’s. The American people deserve to know all of the facts surrounding Russia’s ongoing efforts to subvert our democracy, which is why special counsel Mueller’s investigation must proceed unimpeded. Our nation’s elected officials, including the president, must stop looking at this investigation through the warped lens of politics and manufacturing partisan sideshows. If we continue to undermine our own rule of law, we are doing Putin’s job for him.
This week everybody was talking about the Nunes memo
The featured post goes into detail about the memo itself. But there are a number of articles about the larger effects, like “Why I Am Leaving the FBI” by counterterrorism expert Josh Campbell. The comments contain a lot of you-should-stand-and-fight messages, but they miss the point: FBI rules prevent agents from speaking out in public. If the problem is in the political arena, Campbell has to leave the FBI to work on it.
Another interesting perspective comes from former Illinois congressman and right-wing talk-radio host Joe Walsh: “Based on my experience working with him, nothing about the way he’s behaving now as chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence — overseeing part of the so-called Russia-Trump investigation — is particularly shocking. The Nunes I knew was a purely partisan animal. … With Nunes, I found it was all about politics, almost never about policy.”
As TPM’s Allegra Kirkland points out “the FBI isn’t a hotbed of Democratic partisans“. It makes sense that, say, career EPA officials would be Democrats, because protecting the environment is much more of Democratic value than a Republican one. But it defies logic that career FBI agents as a group would have a liberal bias, or that the FBI chain-of-command would be dominated by partisan Democrats.
Think about it: If you run into a college student who’s majoring in environmental studies and hoping to work at the EPA, she’s almost certainly a liberal. But if she’s majoring in law enforcement and hoping to work at the FBI, I don’t think you can say much about her politics. If anything, she’s probably more conservative than most Americans her age.
Tuesday seems like a long time ago, but Trump’s first State of the Union address was this week. By now we all realize that Teleprompter Trump and Campaign Rally Trump are two very different speakers. This was Teleprompter Trump. The numbers are pretty much all nonsense, like the claim that cutting the corporate tax will “increase average family income by more than $4,000”, but at least he didn’t call Mexicans rapists or invite the gallery to punch his opponents in the face.
As I predicted before he took office, he’s taking credit for a lot of Obama’s accomplishments. (“We are now an exporter of energy to the world.”) He continued to paint immigrants as criminals, making the MS-13 gang the face of immigration, and a reason to turn away refugee children. He made a lot of probably empty promises about infrastructure and new trade deals. He talked about “clean coal” as if those words actually meant something. I would examine the text more closely, but I’ve become skeptical of anything Trump says. Let’s see what actual proposals get made.
One passage does deserve attention, because it’s a very dangerous idea I suspect we’ll hear again:
I call on the Congress to empower every Cabinet Secretary with the authority to reward good workers — and to remove Federal employees who undermine the public trust or fail the American people.
That’s how the federal government worked in the 19th century, when it was a giant patronage machine similar to some of the big-city political machines. That’s why the Civil Service Act got passed in 1883.
I thought Joe Kennedy did a good job with his response to Trump’s speech. The Trump administration, he said, is turning America into a zero-sum game, where “in order for one to win, another must lose”.
As if the mechanic in Pittsburgh and the teacher in Tulsa and the day care worker in Birmingham are somehow bitter rivals, rather than mutual casualties of a system forcefully rigged for those at the top. As if the parent who lies awake terrified that their transgender son will be beaten and bullied at school is any more or less legitimate than the parent whose heart is shattered by a daughter in the grips of opioid addiction. So here is the answer Democrats offer tonight: we choose both. We fight for both.
That sounds like a theme Democrats can run on. It ties right in to the budget battles, where there’s never enough money for what ordinary Americans need, because we’ve already given it away in tax cuts for the rich.
The answers, according to the president’s speech: tightened immigration laws that will slow drug trafficking and getting “much tougher on drug dealers and pushers if we are going to succeed in stopping this scourge.” But the rhetoric omitted any mention of the actual solutions proposed by experts on the front lines of the crisis.
What’s left out?
Addiction to prescription drugs, which are made right here and trafficked through doctors and drug stores.
Funding for treatment programs.
Trump declared opioid addiction a “public health emergency” in October, but that in itself opened up only $57K in federal funding. Since then, he has not proposed any opioid program to Congress.
By coincidence, the day after Trump’s speech I was reading David Wong’s latest novel What the Hell Did I Just Read?, where I ran into this passage:
Marconi’s pipe was leaning against an ancient figurine that looked like some kind of Egyptian god, only it had an enormous, erect penis almost as big as its torso, the figure’s left hand wrapped around the shaft. … “It’s the Egyptian god Min, popular in the fourth century B.C., the god of fertility. It is believed that during the coronation of a new Pharaoh, he would be required to masturbate in front of the crowd, to demonstrate that he himself possessed the fertility powers of Min. If you have watched a State of the Union address, you will find that the ritual has not changed much.”
The description of Min turns out to be accurate, but Wong writes intentionally absurd novels, so I wouldn’t trust the claim about Pharaoh.
but we need to be telling stories about the cruelty of Trump’s immigration policies
Max Boot tells about Helen Huynh. She and her husband came here from Vietnam after the war, in which her husband fought on our side. They became citizens and had two daughters, who of course are citizens. She developed leukemia and needed a stem-cell transplant; her sister in Vietnam turned out to be a perfect match. But the sister’s visa application to come here for the procedure was rejected three times, and Huynh died a few days before Trump’s State of the Union.
Also take a look at the Dreamer Stories web site. The more we can get voters to look at the Dreamers as individuals, the harder it will be to deport them.
Judges keep knocking down voter suppression laws. This time it’s the disenfranchisement of felons in Florida. Under the current rules, anyone convicted of a felony (and many felonies are not such heinous crimes) has to serve the sentence and probation, wait five years (or seven for some offenses), and then begin an appeal process that ends up in front of “a panel of high-level government officials over which Florida’s governor has absolute veto authority.” According to Judge Mark Walker: “No standards guide the panel.”
In other words, the governor gets to choose which Floridians will be allowed to vote for his re-election. That conflict of interest is not just theoretical. The judge writes:
Plaintiffs identify several instances of former felons who professed political views amenable to the Board’s members who then received voting rights, while those who expressed contrary political views to the Board were denied those same rights. Applicants—as well as their character witnesses—have routinely invoked their conservative beliefs and values to their benefit.
The judge focused on the arbitrariness of the system of restoring voting rights to felons, and allowed the 5-7 year waiting period. He put off ordering a remedy until later this month.
But even without the political bias, such a system is wrong. It’s wrong on an individual basis, because after you’ve served your time, you should be allowed to re-enter society fully. But when you combine felon disenfranchisement with a justice system that is looking for black crime and far more likely to convict black law-breakers than white ones, you wind up with a significant disenfranchisement of the black community. (Walker notes that 1-in-5 of Florida’s black adults is disenfranchised.) Similarly, upper-class and middle-class voters accused of a felony are more likely to have good lawyers who can either get them off or plea-bargain to a misdemeanor. So a substantial class bias gets baked into the electorate as well.
Someone might argue that the system is fair, and blacks and poor people just commit more felonies. But I think that the burden of proof in that argument should be borne by the state.
No human languages or institutions have lasted for 10,000 years, so how do you make a warning symbol for something that will be dangerous that long? (Consider the skull-and-crossbones. You might intend it to say “poison”, but some future person might think “pirate treasure”.) What kind of warning will get people’s attention, but not make them curious? Vox and 99% Invisible explore those questions in this fascinating video.
It’s hard to parody the right-wing media’s hype of the memo written by House Intelligence Committee Chair Devin Nunes, which was released Friday. Sean Hannity says it constitutes
irrefutable proof of a coordinated conspiracy to abuse power by weaponizing and politicizing the powerful tools of intelligence by top-ranking Obama officials against the Trump campaign, against the Constitution, and against your Fourth Amendment rights. … It proves that the entire basis for the Russia investigation was based on lies that were bought and paid for by Hillary Clinton and her campaign. The Mueller investigation does need to be shut down and the people responsible, who we will name tonight, many need to go to jail.
If that’s what Trump and his defenders need this memo to be, they should never have released it, because as soon as people read it (at 1300 words, it’s about half the length of this article) they’ll see that it doesn’t do any of that. The idea of a shocking memo the Deep State won’t let you see is far more effective than the weak document they actually have.
Why the memo’s argument is weak. In brief, here are the problems with it:
The memo insinuates more than it actually says.
It is based on classified documents that can’t be checked by the press or the public.
A parallel memo written by Democrats who have seen the documents has not been released, and may never be.
The facts in the document have been cherry-picked from a larger collection of facts that may not support the memo’s claims.
Even if everything claimed in the memo is true, it’s not clear what difference it makes to the Mueller investigation. Nothing in the memo indicates that the Mueller investigation is fundamentally flawed or that its conclusions will not be valid, and certainly nothing justifies Hannity’s claim that “many need to go to jail”.
The fundamental argument of the memo — every point of which is suspect — is that in October, 2016, a FISA warrant to wiretap Carter Page, a foreign policy adviser who had already left the Trump campaign — was obtained under false pretenses. Here are the main points:
The Steele dossier, which was partially paid for by the Clinton campaign and the DNC, “formed an essential part” of the FBI’s application to a FISA court. You’d have to see the (still classified) application to know whether this is true. Democrats who have seen the application say it isn’t. People with experience in the FISA system say it’s unlikely: FISA-warrant applications are seldom based on a single source, and standard procedure would be for the FBI to try to verify Steele’s claims themselves rather than simply accept his report. (A piece of the memo that appears to be damning actually is not: “Deputy Director McCabe testified before the Committee in December 2017 that no surveillance warrant would have been sought from the FISC without the Steele dossier information.” If that information was independently verified by the FBI rather than simply trusted, the source is irrelevant. For example, police may not trust an anonymous tip, but if the details check out it may lead to action.) Cato Institute’s Julian Sanchez raises an interesting point: Precisely the falseness of Nunes’ claim might make it hard to refute in public. The application itself might have to stay classified because the other sources might be spies or wiretaps that the Russians don’t know about yet.
Neither the original judge, nor any of the three judges who approved 90-day renewals of the warrant, was told who paid Steele. However, they (or s/he; we don’t know whether the renewals went back to the same judge) were told that somebody paid Steele. Given what’s in the dossier, I doubt the judge was shocked to discover later that the somebody was one of Trump’s political opponents. (The Wall Street Journal reports that “the FISA application disclosed that Steele was paid by a law firm working for a major political party.” According to Glenn Simpson’s testimony to two congressional committees, Steele himself might not have known who commissioned his work. He could probably guess, but if so, so could the judge.) Also, FISA judges can ask questions; they don’t have to accept what is handed to them. So if a judge thought the identity of Steele’s ultimate client mattered, s/he could have asked.
Steele was a “less than reliable source”. Until he retired to form a private research firm, he headed the Russia desk at MI-6, the British equivalent of the CIA. Again, Steele’s reliability is only relevant if the FBI, and then the FISA court, simply took Steele’s word at face value, with no other probable cause to be suspicious of Page. We have no reason to believe that they did.
Steele was biased against Trump. The memo quotes (in bold type) a Justice Department official who talked to Steele weeks before the election, saying that Steele “was desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being president.” The Republican narrative claims that this bias caused him to fabricate evidence that Trump had been compromised by the Russians. However, as a UK citizen, it’s not clear why Steele would start his investigation with a passionate partisan bias against any American politician. The story makes much more sense if the cause-and-effect runs the other way: Steele (whose MI-6 career had centered on battling Russian intelligence) was desperate that Trump not become president because he had seen evidence that Trump was compromised by the Russians.
The existence of a parallel investigation of another Trump campaign person, George Papadopoulos, was used to justify the warrant, even though the FBI had no evidence that Page and Papadopoulos were working together. They don’t have to have been working together to make Papadopoulos relevant, because the connection could be on the Russian side. (Josh Marshall: “This strikes me as really obvious.”) The fact that Russian operatives were in touch with one Trump campaign adviser makes it more credible that they’d be in touch with another.
Unsupported assumptions. Now let’s look at the gap between these claims and Hannity’s. The memo doesn’t even claim to prove anything, it just “raises concerns”. (That’s a wiggle-phrase that will allow Nunes to back away later when this all amounts to nothing.) And to get from these “concerns” to an invalidation of the whole investigation, you have to make a further set of assumptions that the memo doesn’t support at all:
The Carter Page FISA warrant is at the root of the whole Mueller investigation. The Nunes memo itself says this isn’t true: “The Papadopoulos information triggered the opening of an FBI counterintelligence investigation in late July 2016”. In other words, the FBI had already been investigating possible collusion between the Russians and the Trump campaign for five months when it applied for the Page FISA warrant.
The information in the Steele dossier is false. The Nunes memo does not contain any evidence that undermines Steele’s claims. Much of what’s in the dossier remains unverified, but much of it has turned out to be true, and very little has been proven false.
If there is bias at the FBI then the Mueller investigation’s findings will be false. Ultimately, the output of the investigation will be a collection of evidence, expressed in indictments and/or a report to Congress. Whether the investigators were happy or sad as they found facts that were good or bad for Trump won’t matter. Referring to the Trump-criticizing texts that the FBI’s Peter Strzok and Lisa Page sent back and forth during the course of their office affair (cited by Nunes as demonstrating “a clear bias against Trump and in favor of Clinton”), former federal prosecutor Patrick Cotter commented: “I guess I’d ask how the existence or content of emails between two people at the FBI could possibly change any of the facts. What [former national security adviser Michael Flynn] said matters; the circumstances of his resignation matter; [attorney general Jeff] Sessions’ actions, the facts surrounding Comey’s firing and Mueller’s appointment; all those facts matter. What two people at the FBI not directly involved in any of these events said to each other does not matter.”
On that final point, flash back to the Starr investigation into President Clinton. Kenneth Starr was clearly a political enemy of Clinton; there was not even an appearance of impartiality. And yet, in the end the facts were the facts: The evidence showed that Clinton had an affair with Monica Lewinsky, and it didn’t show any wrongdoing regarding the original subject, the Whitewater deal.
The price of the memo. The Nunes memo gave Trump’s supporters a few days’ worth of talking points, but it damaged the long-term relationship between the intelligence services and Congress. To understand how, you need to appreciate a little history.
After Watergate, Congress began searching for ways to reassert its own power and limit the executive branch, which was seen to have been running out of control even before Nixon. One result was a report issued by the Church Committee into decades of CIA covert actions, which included coups and assassinations. The public outrage that followed led to an increased oversight process involving the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, which get far more information from the CIA, FBI, and other intelligence agencies than Congress previously had access to.
To make that system work, Congress had to overcome the deep skepticism that the intelligence services have about politicians, especially the belief that it is dangerous to share secrets with them, because they will leak those secrets for political advantage. So there are elaborate processes for protecting the secret information the intelligence committees receive.
As always in democratic governance, rules only work if they are surrounded by a penumbra of unwritten norms embodying the spirit behind the rules. In other words, there are things that “just aren’t done”, even if the rules would technically allow them.
The writing and release of the Nunes memo violated these norms. The technical rules were followed: The House Intelligence Committee voted (on party lines) to release the memo.
Under an obscure committee rule to make the classified memo public, which has never been invoked in the panel’s 40-plus-year history, the President now has five days following the vote to decide whether to allow the public release to move forward or object to it.
So the rules were followed. But the larger truth is that secrets shared with the House Intelligence Committee were revealed to the public in order for one party to gain a political advantage over the other. The FBI was made to look bad, and can’t defend itself without breaking the law and releasing even more classified information.
Not just the FBI but all the intelligence services saw this happen, and are drawing the appropriate lesson: The House Intelligence Committee is no longer trustworthy. If there’s some secret that really shouldn’t get out, it needs to be hidden from them.
The country will pay a price for this, maybe not this week or next, but down the road.
Will it work? The point of the memo wasn’t to convince reasonable people, because it clearly won’t do that. The memo is not intended to be read, it’s intended to exist, so that claims (like Hannity’s) can be made about it. Trump immediately asserted that the memo “vindicated” him and his often repeated contention that the Mueller investigation is a “witch hunt”. “The FBI,” he tweeted, “became a tool of anti-Trump political actors.” Don Jr. called it “sweet revenge”.
But that’s such obvious BS that even Rep. Trey Gowdy, who led the eighth investigation into Benghazi and so should know a witch hunt when he sees one, isn’t buying it.
There is a Russia investigation without a dossier. So to the extent the memo deals with the dossier and the FISA process, the dossier has nothing to do with the meeting at Trump Tower. The dossier has nothing to do with an email sent by Cambridge Analytica. The dossier really has nothing to do with George Papadopoulos’ meeting in Great Britain. It also doesn’t have anything to do with obstruction of justice.
Another Republican, Senator John McCain issued this statement:
The latest attacks on the FBI and Department of Justice serve no American interests – no party’s, no president’s, only Putin’s. The American people deserve to know all of the facts surrounding Russia’s ongoing efforts to subvert our democracy, which is why Special Counsel Mueller’s investigation must proceed unimpeded. Our nation’s elected officials, including the president, must stop looking at this investigation through the warped lens of politics and manufacturing partisan sideshows. If we continue to undermine our own rule of law, we are doing Putin’s job for him.
The point of the memo is that Trump supporters can say, “The Nunes memo proved …” If you’re not the kind of American who is willing or able to read the memo and assess its claims, that assertion is as convincing as anybody else’s assertion.
In the parallel political universe Dave Neiwert calls “alt America”, Trump is trying to take the government back for the American people, and so is being persecuted by the Deep State. The FBI, the Department of Justice, and even the people Trump himself has appointed to run those institutions, can’t be trusted. The Nunes memo fits right into that world, and will become one of the building blocks of its case.
Rosenstein. The Trump appointee the memo seems to be pointed at is Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who appointed Mueller after Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself from matters having to do with Russia and the Trump campaign. Rosenstein is overseeing the Mueller investigation, and has whole-heartedly supported the integrity of the investigation in testimony to Congress. If Trump wants to fire Mueller, the order has to pass through Rosenstein.
The Nunes memo doesn’t really accuse Rosenstein of anything, but his name comes up twice: He signed off on one of the FISA warrant applications against Carter Page, and he is mentioned as having worked closely with Bruce Ohr, who was Steele’s contact in the Justice Department. That, apparently, is enough to make him part of the Deep State cabal that needs to be purged. Right-wing media is full of demands that Rosenstein be fired.
Firing Rosenstein, of course, would put Trump one step closer to firing Mueller, or possibly just reining in his investigation or hamstringing it. Three authors at Politico described this plan as “a Saturday Night Massacre in slow motion“. Firing Mueller at this point would invite a response: Republicans in Congress have said it would “be the end of the Trump presidency“, and legions of demonstrators are poised to take to the streets within hours of an announcement of Mueller’s firing.
But what about Rod Rosenstein? What if Rosenstein is replaced by someone who gradually turns the screws until a legitimate investigation is impossible? Where is the tripwire on that path?
If the Trump base is convinced that Rosenstein (in spite of being chosen by Trump) is part of the anti-Trump Deep State cabal, and if Trump can be seen to be giving into their demands by firing Rosenstein, maybe Republicans in Congress make tut-tutting noises, but do nothing. Maybe demonstrators will be harder to galvanize behind a Trump appointee like Rosenstein.
It is a situation that anyone who has studied fascist takeovers in other countries will recognize. Again and again, opponents of the regime are faced with the question: Is this the hill we have to defend? Is the Point of No Return here, or somewhere else?
Sometimes you have to reach for the bright shiny object, even though you know you’re being manipulated into doing it. Good job, manipulators; you win this round.
So this week I’m writing about the Nunes memo, the attempt by Trump’s supporters in Congress to muddy the waters of the Mueller investigation and cast doubt on the integrity of the FBI. There is very little new information in the memo, it doesn’t prove its own claims, and the larger claims being made about it by Trump and his court pundits are completely unsupported. Worse, it damages the long-term relationship between Congress and the intelligence services, which has worked pretty well since it was set up in the post-Watergate era.
In a better world, everyone would ignore this memo. It’s an obvious political stunt that does nothing to help us get to the bottom of the Trump/Russia mystery. Nothing in it deserves your attention.
Still you need to know about it, the way you need to know that the Brooklyn Bridge is actually not for sale and Nigerian princes actually don’t need your help. Claims are going to be made, quite possibly in your presence by people you know, and it would be good if you understood what they’re about.
With that in mind, the featured post this week is “The Nunes Memo: It’s ridiculous and it damages the country, but it might work.” That should be out around 10 EST. It will be followed around noon by the weekly summary, which discusses the State of the Union address (yes, that was this week), immigration, voter suppression, the Super Bowl and its commercials, and a few other things, before closing with a video of a backyard obstacle course.
To save Jesus from those claiming to be his heirs, we must wrench him from the hands of those who use him as a façade from which to hide their phobias — their fear of blacks, their fear of the undocumented, their fear of Muslims, their fear of everything queer.
This week everybody was talking about the end of the shutdown
One of the featured posts discusses this in more detail. One additional thing about the related immigration debate: Something you often hear European-Americans say is: “I’m not against immigrants. I just think they should come in the right way, like my ancestors did.”
Three points on that: First, when my German ancestors came to America in the 1840s and 1850s, there was no wrong way, because there were no rules. America didn’t start limiting immigration until the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. From the beginning, it’s always been about race.
Second, immigrating to this country legally, i.e., becoming a legal permanent resident, isn’t the simple thing that “why don’t they just …” statements imply. People come here without a green card because they see no chance of getting one, not because they want to flaunt our laws. MTV’s Franchesca Ramsey explains:
Finally, Trump’s latest proposal (which further tightens legal immigration) will just make this worse. So the statement boils down to “Why don’t they do something we’re not going to let them do?”
and the Mueller investigation
Thursday, The New York Times reported that Trump ordered the Justice Department to fire Special Counsel Robert Mueller last June, after it became clear Mueller was investigating Trump for obstruction of justice. Reportedly, White House Counsel Don McGahn threatened to resign rather than deliver the message to Justice, and Trump backed down.
For what it’s worth, Trump called the report “fake news” and “a typical New York Times fake story”. Joe Scarborough’s response to Sean Hannity’s attempt to first deny and then distract from this story is hilarious.
Ty Cobb, the White House lawyer leading the response to the investigation, said Mr. Trump was speaking hurriedly and intended only to say that he was willing to meet.
If anybody expects to see Trump under oath without (or even with) an order from the Supreme Court, let me remind you of all the times he has said he would release his tax returns. All this just underlines the Jay Rosen quote I mentioned last week, about the pointlessness of interviewing Trump:
In an interview situation, [Trump is] just saying what — at the moment — makes him feel like the best, the biggest, the greatest, the brightest, the richest, the most potent. He’s just saying whatever comes to his mind as the most spectacular boast he can think of. It doesn’t necessarily mean anything about his policies.
Speaking of interviewing Trump, Matt Yglesias comes to a similar conclusion about an interview Trump did with CNBC’s Joe Kernen:
Listening to him talk is interesting from an entertainment perspective (he did once host a popular television show), but it conveys no information about the world, the American government, or the Trump administration’s policies. If Kernen wanted to help his viewers understand what’s going on, he’d have been better off interviewing someone else.
Trump is also trying to get the Justice Department to release a memo written by Rep. Devin Nunes. It seems to be a summary of the conspiracy-theory view of the Mueller investigation. It’s based on classified information, and career DoJ people think its release would be “extremely reckless”.
He has also recently said things that make it look like he doesn’t understand what obstruction of justice means.
On Wednesday, speaking briefly to reporters, Trump defended his actions in the probe as “fighting back” against unfair allegations. “Oh, well, ‘Did he fight back?’ ” Trump said. “You fight back, ‘Oh, it’s obstruction.’ ”
If you’re the president of the United States and the Justice Department is investigating you, using your official powers to “fight back” is exactly what obstruction of justice means. It’s illegal for good reason.
but I to push back on Trump’s claims about his first year
I can’t bring myself to watch the State of the Union address tomorrow night, but I’ll probably read the transcript. No doubt it will be full of claims about how the economy is growing and creating jobs.
The truth is that Obama left Trump an economy trending in the right direction, and it has continued to do so. The GDP growth graph looks like this:
This is about what I would expect, because the Trump tax cut has yet to take effect, and there has been no Trump budget — everything is still running on continuing resolutions based on Obama’s last budget. If there’s a boom next year, that might belong to Trump.
If congressional districts weren’t gerrymandered, what should they look like? 538 looks at the different things you might want to optimize, and the maps they lead to.
A video made by the War Department in 1947 is going around on social media. Its message — that we shouldn’t let rabble-rousers turn us against Americans who look different than we do — still resonates. “Remember when you hear this kind of talk: Somebody is going to get something out of it, and it isn’t going to be you.”
Mother Jones chronicles the rise and fall of ECOT, the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow, an Ohio charter school that made its founder rich, cost taxpayers millions, produced poor results, and now has collapsed, leaving many of its students in the lurch.
Multiple warning signs got ignored, because ECOT fit the Republican privatization ideal so well that it got tangled up in the partisan politics of the Ohio legislature. Former Democratic Governor Ted Strickland explains:
“I don’t think all political contributions are efforts to do something nefarious,” Strickland told me. “But in this case, I think it was so obvious that these schools were so bad and were failing and had such lax oversight. I cannot give the Republican Legislature the benefit of the doubt and say that they did not know.
“When you have a situation where public moneys are used to enrich individuals,” he added, “who then in turn support the politicians that support the policies that enrich them—it may not be illegal, but I think that fits the definition of corruption.”
Statewide, ECOT got “more than $1 billion in public funding, much of it diverted from better performing Ohio schools … at least 15 percent of that money—about $150 million—was paid to [founder William] Lager’s private companies”.
Yesterday [January 18], after 17 years of operation, the school came to a spectacular end. … Despite years of critics raising similar concerns, the school’s demise happened quickly, after two Ohio Department of Education reviews from 2016 and 2017 found that ECOT had overbilled taxpayers by $80 million for thousands of students it couldn’t show were meeting the department’s enrollment standards. As a result, last summer the state ordered the school to begin paying back almost $4 million per month in school funds, which ECOT claimed it was unable to do.
David Roberts writes about the role of climate change in our national strategy: It’s been taken out of the new version of the National Security Strategy, but the Pentagon continues to take it seriously in a lot of ways.
James Stavridis, a retired Navy admiral now serving as dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, succinctly lays out the reasons the military can’t ignore climate change in this piece. Scarcity of water and other resources will drive dislocation and conflict, he writes. Coastal Naval bases are in danger of being inundated by rising seas; the Arctic is melting and opening new areas of geopolitical conflict; the rising cost of climate impacts will squeeze the military budget; and responding to severe weather events will reduce military readiness.
However, the military can’t make up for climate denial in the rest of the government, because the military’s focus (appropriately, Roberts says) is to respond to climate change, not prevent it. And that could lead to this dystopian future:
As things get worse, those who can afford to protect themselves — move their military bases, build sea walls and desalination plants, claim newly navigable land in the Arctic — will pull farther and farther away from those who can’t (the global poor, who did so little to cause the problem). The US might come out on top in a more violent, chaotic world, but in the end, we do not stand apart. We will sink with it.
Dr. Larry Nassar got sentenced to 40-175 years in prison for molesting young women and girls who came to him for treatment. He’s 54 and already has a 60-year sentence to serve, so he’s never getting out.
In addition to Nassar himself, two institutions are in trouble for enabling Nassar and ignoring his accusers: USA Gymnastics and my alma mater, Michigan State, where Nassar was on the faculty.
The report states students told investigators that Michigan State athletes “have a reputation for engaging in sexual harassment and sexual assault and not being punished for it, because athletes are held in such high regard at the university.” It also states that athletes received more training on sexual harassment and sexual assault than other students but noted possible mixed messages. It cites a program called “Branded a Spartan” about upholding the Spartan name. Some male athletes told investigators that “making a report about sexual assault might tarnish the Spartan brand,” and at least one said he might not report an incident involving a fellow athlete to the Title IX office, according to the report.
For a little over a month, Taco Bell has been trolling conspiracy theorists with its “Belluminati” ad campaign, like this commercial:
And guess what? It’s working. The Vigilant Citizen blog says this is “the Illuminati flaunting in plain sight”. The Unseen Encyclopedia warns that “the jokes on you … it’s always hidden in plain sight”.
And now Taco Bell is upping ante with this “Web of Fries” movie trailer.
Leaving the subject of Taco Bell, let’s talk about dietary fiber. Everybody knows it’s good for you, but nobody is sure exactly what it does for you. Now there’s an interesting theory that seems to prove out in mice: It’s good for the bacteria in your intestines.
and let’s close with something amazing
Somehow, my scientific education never covered the Leidenfrost Effect, which causes drops of water to float on a vapor layer above a metal surface heated to 500 degrees or so, and sometimes to climb up and over tiny grooves that can be formed into a ladder of sorts. It’s fun to watch.
A few hours after last week’s Sift posted, a compromise ending the 3-day government shutdown, at least temporarily, passed the Senate. By evening President Trump had signed it, and federal employees returned to work Tuesday morning.
Here’s what was agreed to:
A continuing resolution maintained previous spending levels for another three weeks, until February 8.
The Children’s Health Insurance Program was reauthorized for another six years.
Three taxes that were part of the Affordable Care Act got delayed for a year: on medical devices, on so-called “Cadillac” health insurance plans, and a general tax on health insurance plans. The expected increase in the deficit is $31 billion.
On the left, many angrily charged that the Democrats had “caved”, and that the Dreamers had been betrayed or abandoned. I don’t see it that way. For the most part I agree with Ezra Klein’s view: that if no larger agreement can be reached in the meantime, Democrats will be in a somewhat better position on February 8 than they were last Monday:
if Democrats do need to shut down the government in three weeks, they’ll do so with the Children’s Health Insurance Program funded for six years, rather than seeing it weaponized against them. That’s a big deal, both substantively and politically.
McConnell’s promise may or may not amount to much in itself, but I think it matters in the public perception. If some kind of DACA compromise can pass the Senate, the House can still kill it, but that will have a price.
What matters in a shutdown. The American public doesn’t like government shutdowns. Government workers and contractors don’t like not getting paid. People who depend on government services don’t like doing without them. Families don’t like being turned away at national parks.
For the two major political parties, it’s not even a zero-sum game; it’s a negative-sum game. A common knee-jerk reaction to a shutdown is to blame both parties and lose a little more faith in American democracy. (In a parliamentary system, failure to fund the government would result in new elections.) The only political justification for causing a shutdown is if you believe that the blame will overwhelmingly be charged to the other party. If that’s true, then it tends to snowball: More and more of the public doesn’t understand why the party that is losing the shutdown doesn’t give in.
How this one was playing out. At the outset, there was good reason to blame the Republicans: They control all three power centers, after all.
What’s more, the main issue on the Democratic side is a popular one: Hardly anybody wants to see the Dreamers deported, which could start happening in March, thanks to Trump’s executive order reversing Obama’s DACA executive order.
The problem is that support for the Dreamers among the general public is shallow. Lots of people sympathize, but not that many are willing to make sacrifices. Worse, Republicans had cynically held CHIP back as a bargaining chip rather than reauthorizing it back in September. No one was really against CHIP, but Ryan and McConnell saw it as something they use in precisely a situation like the one we just had.
So if the shutdown continued, the messaging war looked like it might turn around to favor the Republicans: Democrats were blocking a deal that included CHIP because it didn’t include DACA, so they were hurting kids to help illegal immigrants.
Schumer could see that snowball starting to roll, particularly in red and purple states where Democratic senators have to run for re-election in November, so he got out quickly, before any of the vulnerable Democratic senators felt like they had to defect.
Standing up for something. Schumer’s critics say that the Democrats should have made a stand. The problem with making a stand on a shutdown is that a shutdown doesn’t end in some natural way. Democratic stands on ObamaCare and the Republican tax cut ended: one in victory and the other in defeat. They are issues to take to the voters in 2018.
But a shutdown doesn’t end until somebody gives in, and if the other side is happier with their position than you are with yours, they’re not going to be the ones. So the question becomes: How far are you willing to take this? What if it gets to be March and the Dreamers start getting deported anyway? What if it gets to be June and nobody can go to Yellowstone? What if it’s November and voters are going to the polls? How far?
The endgame, in that scenario, is that Democratic senators defect one-by-one until the Republicans can pass what they want. Schumer didn’t want that.
The next showdown. Instead, he maneuvered, hoping to reach February 8 with a position that would be easier to defend. I think he succeeded at that: CHIP will be off the table. McConnell either will or won’t have allowed a vote on a DACA compromise. If he doesn’t, that’s another simple argument the public can understand: We tried to bargain in good faith, and the other side wouldn’t.
The ideal scenario for Schumer is that a DACA compromise passes the Senate before February 8, hopefully by a wide margin. (In 2013, the Senate passed an immigration bill 68-32.) It’s not clear that McConnell would be against this.
The fate of all immigration compromises is in the House, where they would also pass if they could get to the floor, but the Republican leadership blocks them. That sets up a shutdown demand that I think Democrats can sell: Ryan doesn’t have to support the Senate’s DACA compromise, he just has to let the House vote on it. Let my people vote!
An additional point is that the longer the DACA negotiations stay on the front pages, the more the Republicans undermine their own most popular arguments. What Trump wants in exchange for DACA isn’t just border security, but a sharp reduction in legal immigration, and a shift towards more white immigrants. That supports the Democrats’ main point: The whole issue isn’t about legality, it’s about race. It’s about Making America White Again.
Even if a permanent solution isn’t reached — that’s the current conventional wisdom, which could change — a deal that prevents deportation temporarily and leaves the ultimate verdict to the 2018 voters is not the worst outcome.
Conclusion. In short, I think Schumer abandoned a losing position in order to set up one with more possibilities. I’m withholding judgment until I see how this plays out.
From John the Baptist and Herod to Jerry Falwell Jr. and Trump is a very long fall.
In general, it’s been hard to raise much excitement over the Stormy Daniels story. OK, Trump had an affair with a porn star while his wife was home with a new baby. Ten years later, as the election approached, his lawyer paid six figures to hush her up. (And if you believe a Steve Bannon quote in Fire and Fury, she’s not the only one.) Assume all that is true: Does it change your opinion of Donald Trump?
If you swear by that that is not, you are not forsworn: no more was this knight swearing by his honour, for he never had any.
Trump can’t lose his reputation for moral uprightness or even basic decency, because he never had one. The American public is well beyond being shocked by any new revelation about his character. A similar scandal about Obama would have been earth-shaking. But Trump? Not so much.
So if you want to get a story out of the Daniels incident, you need to widen your scope somehow, like ask where the money to pay her off came from, or look at somebody who still has a reputation to lose.
I think that’s why so much of the public outrage has shifted its focus from Trump himself to the self-styled moral leaders who defend him and the pitiful defenses they have mustered. The truly shocking thing about the Daniels story is the way that so many Christian leaders have been willing not just to debase themselves, but to spend down the moral capital of Christianity itself in order to protect the man they put in the White House.
Franklin Graham, in a single interview, said both that “our country has a sin problem” and that Trump buying the silence of a porn star is not a big deal because the president isn’t expected to be “the pastor of this nation”. Robert Jeffress has been notably silent about the Daniels payoff, after defending Trump’s “shithole countries” comment two weeks ago: “I’m grateful we have a president like Donald Trump who … has the courage to protect the well-being of our nation.”
But the prize goes to Jerry Falwell Jr., who defended Trump by debasing the words of Jesus himself. CNN’s Erin Burnett had connected Stormy Daniels to the many women whose stories flesh out Trump’s boastful confession on the Access Hollywood tape, and then asked Falwell how many times Trump has to offend
before you say “This is a person who lacks character”?
In response, Falwell falsely claimed that Trump had “apologized” and “asked forgiveness” for his past wrongdoing. (If you’ve repented, you stop calling your accusers liars.) Then he asserted that Trump is “not the same person now that he was back then”. (The Daniels payoff happened in 2016.) Then he capped his defense with this argument, which I’m sure Christian philanderers all over America are filing for future use:
Jesus said that if you lust after a woman in your heart, it’s the same as committing adultery. You’re just as bad as the person who has, and that’s why our whole faith is based around the idea that we’re all equally bad, we’re all sinners.
As I’m sure Falwell must know, the context of the Jesus quote was to call his followers to a higher standard, not the lower one Falwell is offering. What Jesus is saying in this part of the Sermon on the Mount is: Don’t just restrain yourself from murder, root out the anger and hatred in your heart. Don’t just avoid adultery, stop indulging your adulterous fantasies. Don’t just love your friends, love your enemies too.
But Falwell has turned Jesus’ message upside-down. Now it’s a blanket excuse for anybody to do anything, because everybody else is just as bad. If the thought of cheating on your wife with a porn star is already as bad as the deed, then why not just go ahead and do it? And if we’re all equally guilty anyway, then what basis does any pastor have to tell his flock to do or not do anything?
I’ve never been to Falwell’s church, but I guarantee you this is not a message he has ever preached from a pulpit. This is a special gospel that applies only to powerful men he has allied himself with, and whose approval he desires.
The truth-to-power tradition. But the Bible doesn’t offer a special gospel for the powerful; it points in the opposite direction. Moses doesn’t approach Pharaoh with praise and flattery, he announces plainly: “Let my people go.” The Prophet Nathan doesn’t offer King David a mulligan, he accuses David to his face and proclaims God’s judgment:
You had Uriah the Hittite killed in battle. You took his wife as your wife. You used the Ammonites to kill him. So warfare will never leave your house.
Elijah doesn’t go to King Ahab and say, “Hey, don’t sweat it, everybody worships a false god now and then.” His message was unequivocal.
I have not troubled Israel, but you have, and your father’s house, because you have abandoned the commandments of the Lord and followed the Baals.
And finally, John the Baptist, at the cost of his own head, tells King Herod that it was wrong to take his brother’s wife. Like Falwell, he could have said, “You know, everybody has imagined doing the same thing, and that’s just as bad.” Maybe that would have gotten him an appointment to Herod’s But he didn’t.
Nowhere in the Bible does a prophet say: “Maybe if I soft-pedal God’s message so that it fits what the King wants to hear, he’ll keep me around and I’ll be able to get godly judges appointed. Wouldn’t that do more good in the long run?”
But that’s precisely what today’s Christian leaders do, or at least the white evangelical ones.
“Just shut up.” I’m not the only one who has noticed this. I think former RNC Chair Michael Steele spoke for a lot of people when he requested that leaders like Perkins and Falwell “shut the hell up”.
I have very simple admonition: just shut the hell up and don’t preach to me about anything ever again. After telling me who to love, what to believe, what to do and what not to do, and now you sit back and the prostitutes don’t matter, the grabbing the you-know-what doesn’t matter, the outright behavior and lies don’t matter — just shut up! They have no voice of authority anymore for me.
Steele is coming out of a political worldview, but you can also hear the sorrow in his voice. This isn’t just about Republicans and Democrats any more, it’s about Christianity, a religion that he cares about.
Remonstrance. It’s also about Christianity for John Pavlovitz, the former youth pastor of a conservative megachurch in Charlotte and current youth pastor of the more liberal North Raleigh Community Church (whose web site says “We believe Christianity is worth saving“). On his blog Stuff That Needs To Be Said Pavlovitz posted “White Evangelicals, This Is Why People Are Through With You“. He argues that worldly power and white identity politics have replaced Jesus as the center of the white evangelical message:
They see your hypocrisy, your inconsistency, your incredibly selective mercy, and your thinly veiled supremacy.
He points to evangelical leaders’ demonization of President Obama, “a man faithfully married for 26 years; a doting father and husband without a hint of moral scandal or the slightest whiff of infidelity”.
They watched you deny his personal faith convictions, argue his birthplace, and assail his character—all without cause or evidence.They saw you brandish Scriptures to malign him and use the laziest of racial stereotypes in criticizing him.
But with Trump, everything is different.
With him, you suddenly find religion. With him, you’re now willing to offer full absolution. With him, all is forgiven without repentance or admission. With him you’re suddenly able to see some invisible, deeply buried heart. With him, sin has become unimportant, compassion no longer a requirement. With him, you see only Providence.
And why?
They see that all you’re really interested in doing, is making a God in your own ivory image and demanding that the world bow down to it.They recognize this all about white, Republican Jesus—not dark-skinned Jesus of Nazareth.
Not just one incident. Christians who want to hang on to Jesus and his message have been writing similar remonstrances to their white evangelical brethren for some while now. In November, when white Evangelicals stood by Roy Moore in spite of multiple credible accusations of his predatory behavior, and in spite of (or maybe because of) his long history of anti-gay bigotry and putting Christian partisanship above the rule of law, Miguel De La Torre responded with “The death of Christianity in the U.S.“.
To save Jesus from those claiming to be his heirs, we must wrench him from the hands of those who use him as a façade from which to hide their phobias — their fear of blacks, their fear of the undocumented, their fear of Muslims, their fear of everything queer.
Evangelicalism has ceased to be a faith perspective rooted on Jesus the Christ and has become a political movement whose beliefs repudiate all Jesus advocated.
De La Torre’s article looks further back, to “Evangelicalism’s unholy marriage to the Prosperity Gospel” and those who “remained silent or actually supported Charlottesville goose steppers because they protect their white privilege with the doublespeak of preserving heritage”, as well as Christian leaders’ support for Trump in the 2016 election. “The Evangelicals’ Jesus is Satanic” he writes, and concludes by urging the followers of this perversion of Christianity to “get saved”.
Trump’s election was the occasion for mournful remonstrances like “Life After Evangelicalism” by Rachel Held Evans. Evans, who has taken refuge in the Episcopal Church after finding the conservative Christianity of her youth unsustainable, wrote to those Evangelicals for whom the election was a wake-up call.
There’s an op-ed out every minute urging the bewildered to get out of their bubbles and get to know some Trump supporters, but you don’t need to do that, do you?
These are the people you worship with each week, the people whose kids hang out with your kids, the people who brought you a chicken casserole when you had surgery, the people you call with good news, the people you’re now wishing you’d spoken with more bluntly, more honestly.
They aren’t strangers to you, are they? But suddenly, you are a stranger among them.
And she offers them hope that Christianity itself isn’t dead yet, even if their own Christian community has abandoned or marginalized them.
The good news is that Jesus is already on the margins. Jesus is already present among the very people and places our president-elect despises as weak. When we stand in solidarity with the despised and the suffering, Jesus stands with us. We don’t have to abandon Jesus to abandon the unholy marriage between Donald Trump and the white American Church. In these troubled times, a prophetic resistance will certainly emerge, made up of clergy, activists, artists, humorists, liturgists, parents, teachers, and volunteers committed to partnering with and defending “the least of these.” I found my faith again in the margins—through the Gay Christian Network, for example, and among fellow doubters and dreamers who limp from their wrestling with God
A long time coming. A great religion can’t be corrupted overnight. To those who have been following more closely, evangelical abandonment of the Sermon on the Mount in favor of white identity politics is old news. Michele Goldberg relates some of the history, beginning with Jerry Falwell Sr.’s pro-segregation sermons in the 1950s. (I would have gone back further, to the Christian defense of slavery. That’s what put the “Southern” in Southern Baptists.)
“When God has drawn a line of distinction, we should not attempt to cross that line,” he wrote, warning that integration “will destroy our race eventually.” In 1967, Falwell founded the Lynchburg Christian Academy — later Liberty Christian Academy — as a private school for white students.
In the 1980 election, Falwell’s Moral Majority supported America’s first divorced president, Ronald Reagan, largely erasing the previous stigma of divorce. [2] Goldberg quotes historian Randall Balmer:
Up until 1980, anybody who was divorced, let alone divorced and remarried, very likely would have been kicked out of evangelical congregations.
Bending its “family values” to accommodate Trump, she says, is nothing new.
Trump has simply revealed the movement’s priorities. It values the preservation of traditional racial and sexual hierarchies over fuzzier notions of wholesomeness.
“I’ve resisted throughout my career the notion that evangelicals are racist, I really have,” Balmer told me. “But I think the 2016 election demonstrated that the religious right was circling back to the founding principles of the movement. What happened in 2016 is that the religious right dropped all pretense that theirs was a movement about family values.”
She concludes:
it seems absurd to ask secular people to respect the religious right’s beliefs about sex and marriage — and thus tolerate a degree of anti-gay discrimination — while the movement’s leaders treat their own sexual standards as flexible and conditional. Christian conservatives may believe strongly in their own righteousness. But from the outside, it looks as if their movement was never really about morality at all.
The price. For Americans who grew up before the advent of the Moral Majority, or before evangelical leaders became so nakedly partisan, Christianity largely retains an aura of wholesomeness and goodwill. But for younger Americans, this is vanishing. The 538 blog produced this graphic from data collected by the Public Religion Research Institute. Among Americans above 65, 26% consider themselves white Evangelical Protestants, nearly 80% identify with some form of Christianity, and only 12% say they are unaffiliated with any religion. But for those 18-29, 38% are unaffiliated, 53% are Christians of some sort, and only 8% are white Evangelical Protestants.
In 1987, 23% of white Evangelical Protestants were over 65, while almost as many, 20%, were 18-29. But by 2016, the 65-and-older cohort was dominating the 18-29s, 30%-11%. The Barna Group finds that among those born since 1999, 13% identify as atheists, compared to 6% in the general population.
In the prologue of her latest book, Rachel Held Evans recalls an attempt to explain younger people’s disenchantment:
Millennials aren’t looking for a hipper Christianity, I said. We’re looking for a truer Christianity, a more authentic Christianity.
Authentic can be a hard word to define, but I can tell you very quickly what authentic Christianity isn’t: a set of soundbites that prop up a morally bankrupt president because of the favors he promises to Christian leaders and institutions.
The price of the corrupt bargain made by Perkins, Graham, Jeffress, and Falwell — what they have traded for their White House access and Neil Gorsuch’s Supreme Court seat — is the destruction of the Christian brand. Say “Christian” to a young adult, and the word-association you’re likely to get back is “hypocritical” or “judgmental”.
Columnist Michael Gerson (a never-Trump Republican) sums up:
When presented with the binary choice of Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump, I can understand a certain amount of anguish. But that is not a reason to become sycophants, cheerleaders and enablers. Politics sometimes presents difficult choices. But that is not an excuse to be the most easily manipulated group in American politics.
The problem, however, runs deeper. Trump’s court evangelicals have become active participants in the moral deregulation of our political life. Never mind whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is right, whatever is of good repute. Some evangelicals are busy erasing bright lines and destroying moral landmarks. In the process, they are associating evangelicalism with bigotry, selfishness and deception. They are playing a grubby political game for the highest of stakes: the reputation of their faith.
Christians like Evans, De La Torre, and Pavlovitz may be working hard to undo the damage the Trump toadies have done to the Christian brand. But it will be an uphill battle. For more and more Americans — especially young Americans — the word Christian itself is stained. Describing an idea, an institution, a speaker, or a political position as Christian no longer evokes a open, accepting attitude in American listeners. Quite the opposite, it puts more and more of us on edge; it signals that something dodgy is about to be presented, something that justifies existing oppressions, something self-serving, self-righteous, and quite likely hateful.
White Evangelicals would like to attribute this stain to the slanders of a hostile secular culture. But outsiders could never manage such a feat. The stain comes from the leaders that so many Christians have chosen to follow.
[1] At the time of Rowe v Wade, abortion was actually a debatable issue among evangelical theologians. Only after a political anti-abortion movement started to take off did opposition to abortion become a cornerstone of Evangelicalism. The religion did not lead the politics, it followed.
[2] Those who claim that the Religious Right holds true to traditional Christian principles will often cite its opposition to abortion and gay rights, as if these issues had been central to Christianity in any other era. Both abortion and homosexuality existed in Jesus’ time, and yet you will search the gospels in vain to find any mention of them; he appears not to have been all that concerned about them. Certainly he does not condemn either in terms that are nearly so direct and unequivocal as what he says about divorce in Matthew 19:
Whoever divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another, commits adultery.
It is currently beyond the pale for Evangelical churches to accept non-celibate gays and lesbians, ostensibly because they persist in their sin without repentance. But divorced-and-remarried couples are equally persistent in what Jesus described as adultery, and they are welcome.
As with Trump and Reagan, standards are infinitely flexible if a church likes you, but strict and literal if it doesn’t. The Bible has nothing to do with this.
The big story this week was the end of the government shutdown and the negotiations on DACA and other issues to keep another shutdown from happening in early February. I’ll cover that in an article called “The Shutdown, DACA, and Immigration: Where We Are”. Unlike a lot of folks, I’m OK with how the Democrats have been handling this.
But before that comes out, I’m going to post a longer article on something less urgent, but possibly more important in the long run. The real story of the Stormy Daniels incident turns out not to be Trump. (Sure, he allegedly had an affair with a porn star and paid her off to keep it quiet before the election. That would be a huge scandal for any other president, but does it really change your opinion of Trump?) It’s all the self-styled defenders of family values who came forward to make excuses for him, sometimes not just debasing themselves, but prostituting the words of Jesus to defend their own King Herod. For many Christian writers and bloggers, that has brought to a head a complaint that has been brewing for some while. I’ll discuss that in “Trump’s Evangelical Toadies are Destroying the Christian Brand”.
That post is just about done, so it should be out between 8 and 9 EST. I’ll peg the shutdown article for 10 or 11, and the weekly summary — Larry Nassar, a predictable charter school disaster in Ohio, the Pentagon’s role in climate change policy, Taco Bell’s poke at conspiracy theorists, a disturbingly timely War Department video from 1947, and some other stuff, before closing with an amazing video about scientists making water do tricks — for noon or so.
“Troubles” are the things that bother people in their lives, that they talk about at night over the kitchen table, the things that they are actively worried about. “Issues” is what the political system does to run elections. … When Issues don’t speak to Troubles, and Troubles don’t connect to Issues, you have a crisis in democracy.
This week everybody was talking about a government shutdown
First, the simple facts: The shutdown became official at midnight Saturday morning. The Friday-night vote that made it final was 50-49 in the Senate. (John McCain, who is battling cancer, was the senator not voting.) The funding proposal fell well short of the 60 votes it needed to pass.
A continuing resolution to fund the government for four weeks had passed the House, but the 50 votes in the Senate were not enough to break a filibuster. The votes in both houses were mostly along party lines. In the House, Republicans voted 224-11 for the CR, and Democrats 186-6 against. In the Senate, Republicans voted for it 45-5 and Democrats against 44-5. The senators crossing party lines were five Democrats (Donnelly, Jones, Heitkamp, Manchin, McCaskill) and five Republicans (Flake, Graham, Lee, McConnell, Paul — I suspect there’s some procedural reason why McConnell voted against it once he knew it wasn’t going to pass).
The two main sticking points in the negotiations leading up to the shutdown were preventing the deportation of the Dreamers and health insurance for children. (The CHIP program expired at the end of September. The states have kept it going anyway, but some will start running out of money soon.) The CR that failed funded CHIP for six years, but did nothing about the Dreamers, who will lose legal status in March because Trump killed President Obama’s DACA program.
It is bizarre that these are the issues Congress is stuck on, because both are popular with the voters, and would pass if they came to the floor as individual measures. Probably the only reason CHIP wasn’t reauthorized a long time ago was precisely so that Republicans could use it as a bargaining chip now. (In other words: We want to do the right thing, but only if we get something for it.) Paul Ryan is grandstanding about CHIP now, but Dylan Matthews points out all the opportunities he had to handle this problem without making it part of a shutdown vote. (In particular: Why isn’t CHIP an entitlement like Medicare, rather than a program that comes up for a vote every few years?)
For weeks, optimists have expected a DACA-like program to be part of a deal that included tighter immigration rules and more funding for border security, possibly even allowing Trump to claim that he had succeeded in getting money (from Congress and not from Mexico) to build his wall. The White House meeting that dissolved into the shithole-countries debacle was about precisely such a bipartisan deal that Senators Graham and Durbin had worked out. Since then, the main obstacle to a deal has been that Mitch McConnell didn’t want to get stuck championing something that Trump wouldn’t sign. All week he had been dropping ever-more-pointed hints that Trump should tell McConnell what he wants.
“I’m looking for something that President Trump supports, and he has not yet indicated what measure he is willing to sign,” McConnell said. “As soon as we figure out what he is for, then I would be convinced that we were not just spinning our wheels.”
Consequently: Nothing about DACA was in the deal voted on Friday night.
So here we are: Nobody really wants a government shutdown. Almost nobody wants children to lose health insurance. Only the most radical anti-immigration minority in Congress (and Stephen Miller in the White House) wants to deport the Dreamers. And yet, these are the things we’re fighting about.
There’s currently a vote scheduled in the Senate later today. This could all resolve quickly, or not.
In general, nobody-wins situations like this happen because each side has its own view of how the disaster will play out. (Labor strikes are similar: Each side thinks the other will have to fold first, so they push to the crisis.) So a large part of how this comes out depends on how the public reacts. Republicans clearly think the public will frame the issue as the Democrats standing up for illegal immigrants over the American people. (Part of that is code, as I’ve explained before: The “American people” are white Christians.) Democrats think that the Republicans in charge of everything will bear the blame, and also have the argument that they’re just trying to get Trump to do something he has often claimed he wants to do anyway. If one side is wrong, that side will eventually have to give in.
and a lie about immigrants and terrorism
That’s the subject of the featured post, “Lies, Damned Lies, and Trump Administration Terrorism Statistics“. To their collective shame, Homeland Security and the Department of Justice assembled a report to back up a lie Trump told to Congress: “The vast majority of individuals convicted of terrorism and terrorism-related offenses since 9/11 came here from outside of our country.” The report is a textbook lesson on how to abuse statistics.
While we’re talking immigration, this meme has been going around:
and the Trump/Russia connection
This still looks speculative to me, but a bombshell story from McClatchy claimed that the FBI is investigating whether money from a Russian oligarch was funneled through the National Rifle Association to help elect Trump.
Investigating, of course, doesn’t always mean that they’ve found anything, or even that there’s anything to find. The purely factual part of the story is that the NRA spent way more money supporting Trump ($30 million) than they have on Romney or previous Republican presidential candidates. The NRA/Russia link is supposed to be “Alexander Torshin, the deputy governor of Russia’s central bank who is known for his close relationships with both Russian President Vladimir Putin and the NRA.” It’s illegal to use foreign money to influence a U.S. election, so if this pans out, it’s a crime.
My usual test for stories like this is whether I’d believe them if the parties were flipped. If I had heard that the FBI was investigating whether Chinese money had flowed through the Sierra Club to help Hillary Clinton, would I believe there was fire under that smoke? At this point, probably not. I plan to wait and see.
Another transcript related to the Steele dossier came out this week: Glenn Simpson, a co-founder of Fusion GPS, the research firm that hired Christopher Steele to investigate Trump’s relationship with Russia and Russian oligarchs, testified before the House Intelligence Committee in November. The committee released that transcript, with a few redactions, Thursday.
I haven’t completed reading either this transcript or the comparable one from the Senate Judiciary Committee, but Simpson seems impressive in what I’ve read of both. His investigation sounds nothing like the conspiracy theories Republicans are spreading about it. And he tells a coherent Trump/Russia narrative that may not be proven yet, but does fit a lot of the known facts: During a period when the Trump Organization wasn’t considered credit-worthy, a lot of suspicious Russian money flowed into Trump projects in a way that looks like money laundering. This was the beginning of a Trump/Russia relationship that blossomed during the campaign, resulting in a significant effort by Russian intelligence to get Trump elected.
Simpson does a good job of stating what he knows and not overstating it. Like this:
“Evidence”, I think, is a strong word. I think we saw patterns of buying and selling that we thought were suggestive of money laundering. … You know, fast turnover deals and deals where there seemed to have been efforts to disguise the identity of the buyer.
Fusion GPS couldn’t get “evidence” because they didn’t have subpoena power to get bank records. But congressional committees do. Rep. Adam Schiff asked who they should subpoena, and Simpson laid it out:
I would go for the clearing banks in New York that cleared the transactions, you know. And there’s—again, it’s these sort of intermediary entities that have no real interest in protecting the information, and all you have to do is ask for it and they just sort of produced by rote. So we’ve done a lot of money laundering investigations where we go to the trust companies and the clearing entities. And so, you know, all dollar transactions are generally cleared through New York. So, you know, the main thing you have to do is identify the banks that were used.
Atlantic’s David Graham followed up by asking Schiff whether the committee will follow this course. It’s not happening, Schiff told him “because Republican members are not interested”.
One of the arguments about the Democratic message for 2018 is whether or not they should come out for Trump’s impeachment. I hope they don’t go that far, because the hard evidence isn’t there yet. (Evidence is a strong word.) Instead, I would argue that the public needs Democrats to take over Congress so that we can find out what happened. Republicans are blocking investigations, and Democrats will go wherever the facts lead. Maybe that will be impeachment and maybe it won’t. We need to know the facts before we can say, and we’ll never know them if Republicans stay in control.
and the end of Trump’s first year
I was hoping to do my own wrap-up this week, but the article didn’t come together, so I’ll push it off to next week. One of the things I plan to do is examine whether, going into this administration, I was afraid of the right things. In particular, I’ll look back at “The Trump Administration: What I’m Watching For“, which I wrote two weeks after the election.
In particular, I said was watching to see if Trump would be doing any of these seven things.
taking credit for Obama’s accomplishments
taking credit for averting dangers that never existed
profiteering
changing the electorate
winking at right-wing paramilitary groups
subverting government agencies for political advantage
The pending rule would establish a new Conscience and Religious Freedom Division of the HHS civil rights office that would conduct compliance reviews, audits and other enforcement actions to ensure that health care providers are allowing workers to opt out of procedures when they have religious or moral objections.
The new office “would be empowered to further shield these workers and punish organizations that don’t allow them to express their religious and moral objections”.
Since it’s impossible to make allowance for everything that someone might claim is part of their religion — what if a Jehovah’s Witness EMT doesn’t want to participate in blood transfusions? what if a pharmacist has a religious objection to insulin manufactured through genetic engineering? or to any drug whose testing process involved killing animals? — there is literally no way to implement such a policy without favoring some religions over others. In practice, the moral objections of Baptists and Catholics will be seen as serious and reasonable, while those of less popular religions will get consideration only to the extent that popular religions share them. The moral objections of atheists will be ignored completely, since they’re not “religious”.
In short, having a religion (especially a popular one) gets you special rights.
In any other administration, it would be a major scandal if the president paid off a porn star not to talk about their affair. For Trump, it barely registers. I look at religious-right Trump supporters like Rev. Robert Jeffress and wonder what they’d be saying if The Wall Street Journal had written the exact same story about Obama.
BTW: I think it’s a low blow to point out the resemblance between Stormy Daniels and Ivanka. Probably they both look like a younger version of Ivanka’s mom, who Trump marrried. There’s a quote in Daniels’ article in In Touch that can be spun in an incestuous way, but it’s not obvious Trump meant it like that, even assuming he actually said it.
I never put a lot of stock in the Trump-has-dementia narrative, and to the extent I ever did, I’m going to stop talking about it. To me it’s like the Bush-is-stupid narrative that popped up so often during W’s administration. Bush was not stupid, he just had no interest in most of the topics we expect presidents to stay on top of. Probably if you talked to him about baseball, you’d be surprised how much he knows.
I suspect something similar about Trump: He has an unfocused mind, like a lot of people do. It’s hard for him to dig deeply into any subject, and the only topic that really interests him is himself. He indulges in wishful thinking, and refuses to let facts or expert opinions change his mind. These are all serious deficiencies in a president, but there’s no reason to think they point to a medical problem. His faults get more pronounced as he gets older, but that also is not unusual. Your uncle who was cantankerous at 50 is probably even more cantankerous at 70; that’s not a sign of insanity, it’s just how people age.
Earlier this month, Josh Marshall got this issue right: The important thing is what Trump does, not why.
All the diagnosis of a mental illness could tell us is that Trump might be prone to act in ways that we literally see him acting in every day: impulsive, erratic, driven by petty aggressions and paranoia, showing poor impulsive control, an inability to moderate self-destructive behavior.
There’s no need to argue about hidden causes when the effects are more important and so plain to see.
This interview with psychiatrist Allen Frances is well worth reading. He discusses both Trump (who he describes as bad rather than mad) and the people who support him. He advocates more political action from the public, rather than hoping that some cabal within the administration will use a psychological diagnosis to invoke the 25th amendment.
One 2015 study from Mexico’s National Institute of Statistics and Geography reveals that a stunning91.2 percent of Americans in the country don’t have their papers in order.
One my favorite news-media observers is Jay Rosen from NYU. His summary of how the news media has responded to Trump’s first year is the first half of this episode of the Recode podcast. He was interviewed on Recode last year, and made a number of observations that other news people eventually came around to — like that there was really no point in interviewing Kellyanne Conway, since it was impossible either for the journalist or the readers/viewers to pull any trustworthy information out of the mass of disinformation you would get from her.
In this interview, he talks about the press’s loyalty to “rituals” that no longer serve a purpose in the Trump era. The press continues to fight for access to the White House “because that’s what the White House press corps does”. But even scoring the ultimate access — an interview with the President himself — does practically nothing to keep readers/viewers informed.
The whole purpose of interviewing a sitting president is that you can find out about their thinking, you can illuminate their policy choices, you can dig a little deeper into what they plan to do. That assumes that the president has policy ideas.
In an interview situation, [Trump is] just saying what — at the moment — makes him feel like the best, the biggest, the greatest, the brightest, the richest, the most potent. He’s just saying whatever comes to his mind as the most spectacular boast he can think of. It doesn’t necessarily mean anything about his policies.
He criticized the press for continuing to project normality onto Trump, for example, by talking about his “foreign policy” as if there were such a thing.
One of the more interesting parts of the interview was when the interviewer (Peter Kafka) brought up Rosen’s previous statements that the press should “listen” to the American people more. Kafka related it to the various articles we have seen in which reporters go interview Trump voters in rural areas they don’t usually cover. Rosen agreed that some good journalism came out of that effort, but said it wasn’t what he had meant. He backed up to talk about a distinction (attributed to sociologist C. Wright Mills) between “troubles” and “issues”.
“Troubles” are the things that bother people in their lives, that they talk about at night over the kitchen table, the things that they are actively worried about. “Issues” is what the political system does to run elections and win coalitions. And his point is that when Issues don’t speak to Troubles, and Troubles don’t connect to Issues, you have a crisis in democracy.
So my point was not that journalists should just go out and listen to the Trump voters because they got the election wrong. It was that if journalists could somehow listen to people’s Troubles in a new and more potent way, then they would be in a position to represent those people better than the political system does when it fashions them into Issues. Now that’s a deeper and more ambitious project than “Let’s check in with Trump voters in Pennsylvania and West Virginia to see if they still support Donald Trump.”
I think we saw a lot of that kind of parachuting into Trump Country, which is sort of an anthropological — or some people said “zoological” — exercise. We saw a lot of that. But what I was talking about was trying to kind of recover authority by understanding the Troubles that led to the results that we saw in 2016.
and let’s close with something adorable
The world’s smallest cat lives in Sri Lanka and when fully grown, weighs about a kilogram.
If you define your categories just right, you can create the illusion that Trump’s Muslim ban has something to do with terrorism, and justify an irrational fear of immigrants.
Last February, President Trump told a lie to a joint session of Congress:
According to data provided by the Department of Justice, the vast majority of individuals convicted of terrorism and terrorism-related offenses since 9/11 came here from outside of our country.
He used this claim to justify his executive order to keep people from seven (later reduced to six) Muslim countries out the United States.
Tuesday, the Departments of Homeland Security and Justice published a report to back up Trump’s lie. The Lawfare blog explains how you have to manipulate the data to support Trump’s claim and his executive order:
Substitute “international terrorism” for “terrorism”, so that you can ignore all the instances of domestic terrorism, where most of the perpetrators are native-born. When Wade Michael Page killed six people at a Sikh Temple in Wisconsin, for example, that would probably have been classified as domestic terrorism (if Page hadn’t short-circuited the legal process by killing himself). Dylann Roof’s shooting of nine at a black church in Charleston wasn’t classified as terrorism at all; it was a hate crime. Nobody knows what to call the Las Vegas shooting, but if shooter had been from Yemen it would of course count as “international terrorism”. The report considered only federal convictions, but according to another Lawfare analysis: “Other crimes that could easily fall under the domestic-terrorism umbrella are charged at the state level, making them even more difficult to track.”
Include nearly 100 foreign-born terrorists who didn’t come here, but were extradited here so that we could prosecute them. Imagine that we hadn’t killed Osama Bin Laden, but instead had brought him to New York and convicted him of conspiring in the 9-11 attacks. The HS/DoJ report would then count him as a foreign-born convicted terrorist. In addition to such foreign conspirators whose role in terrorism didn’t involve entering the U.S., our terrorism laws also cover attacks against American citizens on foreign soil, where American border security isn’t relevant in any way at all. So if Ahmed Abu Khattala is convicted of participating in the Benghazi attack, he will count as a foreign-born convicted terrorist also.
Fudge the difference between foreign countries in general and the ones mentioned in the travel ban. Even if you accept HS/DoJ’s skewed set of categories, the resulting analysis doesn’t support Trump’s executive order. Lawfare says: “The six listed countries are not among those with the greatest representation on the list of terrorism-related convictions from 2001 to 2015. Only one — Somalia — is even in the top five, and it ranks fifth.” For example, Saudi Arabia (not on Trump’s list) accounted for 15 of the 19 9-11 hijackers. None of the other four came from listed countries.
So what would happen if you did an honest analysis of the foreign-born role in American terrorism? Lawfare’s Nora Ellingsen and Lisa Daniels found some of the flaws in the data too difficult to overcome (like the domestic terrorists charged under hate-crime and other non-terrorism laws), but ignoring those problems (which they admitted would still make their numbers too high), they made an attempt back in April.
So what would the numbers look like if we excluded extradited subjects while including all of these domestic terrorists—the approach that seems to us the unbiased way to express the real rate at which foreign-born, as opposed to domestic-born, people are committing terrorist or terrorism-related crimes?
If we clean up the data to account for the issues described above, instead of accounting for between 63 and 71 percent of terrorism convictions, foreign-born persons would likely account for only 18 to 21 percent of terrorism convictions.
Quartz pointed to another problem: Both the HS/DoJ report and its clean-up by Lawfare count not just acts of terrorist violence, but also “terrorism-related” crimes that could be just about anything.
[T]he vague term “terrorism-related charges” inflates numbers by including not just people who broke laws “directly related to international terrorism,” but others who were convicted of totally unrelated offenses, such as fraud or illegal immigration in the course of a terrorism-related investigation. … One example of how this can happen is the case of three Middle-Eastern grocers who were convicted for stealing boxes of Kellogg’s cereal in 2000 — but remained on the list of terrorism-related cases because the Federal Bureau of Investigation questioned them after a source inaccurately tipped agents that the three men had tried to buy a rocket-propelled grenade.
Another problem in the data: Maybe the Feds find so many “terrorism-related offenses” among people born in Muslim-majority countries because that’s where they’re looking. For example, the HS/DoJ report tells about Uzair Paracha, a Pakistani convicted of “providing material support to al Qaeda”. He was never connected to any actual act of terrorism, but was convicted of helping somebody whose hazy plans “to attack gasoline stations” never got specific enough to carry out. (The plot to bring him back into the U.S. failed, but exactly what he would have done if he got here is unclear.) The somebody “discussed” giving Paracha and his father $200K in exchange for their help, but the money never actually changed hands, and maybe never existed in the first place.
I have to wonder: If the Feds went after domestic terrorist groups with equal vigor, if they put all known white supremacists under constant surveillance and interpreted every big-talker’s violent fantasy as a “plot” that turned all his listeners into “conspirators”, how many additional terrorism-related convictions could they add to their total? (Dear FBI: In bars, I have materially aided plots against the Koch brothers by buying the next round. None of us had any weapons or knew exactly where the Kochs live, but if stuff like doesn’t matter, we’re guilty.)
In short, the numbers in the report really have nothing to do with the terrorist tendencies of immigrants or refugees, and say nothing about whether we need to change the way we let foreigners enter the United States. They’re just artifacts of the way the terms are defined. They do not at all support the White House’s subsequent claim that “Our current immigration system jeopardizes American security.”
And finally, the Cato Institute’s Alex Nowrasteh puts the whole foreign-born terrorism problem in context:
[Between 1975 and 2015], the chance of an American being murdered by a foreign-born terrorist was 1 in 3,609,709 a year. The chance of an American being killed in a terrorist attack committed by a refugee was 1 in 3.64 billion a year. The annual chance of being murdered by somebody other than a foreign-born terrorist was 252.9 times greater than the chance of dying in a terrorist attack committed by a foreign-born terrorist.
So if the Trump travel ban isn’t about terrorism, what is it about? Nativism.
What picks those countries out is that their residents are largely non-white Muslims, and (unlike Saudi Arabia, which is a much larger source of both terrorists and material support for terrorism) the Trump Organization has no business interests there. If you think of America as a white Christian nation, and worry that it’s losing that identity, then you don’t want people coming here from Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria or Yemen.
If you’re also against letting in brown-skinned Spanish-speakers from Mexico or Central America, you’re happy to lump them in with the “foreign-born” as well. That’s all that’s going on here.
The Weekly Sift 