Party Politics

Ohio's Mike Turner enunciated clearly the Republican attitude toward the investigation into alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election cycle when he said (transcript here)

And Mr. Comey, by your announcement today, I mean, there is now a cloud that undermines our system. There is a cloud that where we're sitting with Mr. Clapper who was obviously in a very important position to know, who stated to us that there is no evidence of conclusion, and you will not give us evidence or -- or -- or give us any -- any substantive evaluation of it. We now sit with this cloud...

If that wasn't clear enough, committee chairperson Devin Nunes wrapped up the hearing by urging the FBI director to give whatever evidence he has to "myself and  (ranking committee member) Mr. Schiff because you know, there is a big gray cloud that you have put over people who have very important work to do to lead this country."

Simple translation: Stop doing whatever you're doing, unless it's to tip an election from the Democrat to the Republican. "If Nunes would consider country before party," Dana Milbank realizes, "he’d recognize that the cloud isn’t over Trump’s White House; it’s over all of us."

But this is an affliction common in the Nunes-Turner party.  It was only nine or ten months ago that Donald Trump, in the view of Speaker Paul Ryan, had made "the textbook definition of a racist comment."  He went on to endorse Trump and now "came here (to Capitol Hill) and knocked the ball out of the park, he knocked the cover off the ball."

That is peanuts, though, compared to congressional Republicans denying a hearing to Judge Merrick Garland and Monday forming a human chain of bodies across a "human red carpet" for Neil Gorsuch to glide upon in the House Intelligence Committee hearing room.

Additionally, there is an international flavor to the choice of Republicans to put party over country. Politico Magazine reports that, led by Republican Chris Smith of New Jersey (co-chairperson of the Bipartisan Congressional Pro-Life Caucus) and Utah Senator Mike Lee,  several

conservative lawmakers have signed on to a volley of letters accusing (George) Soros of using his philanthropic spending to project his liberal sensibilities onto European politics. As Lee and other senators put it in a March 14 letter to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Soros’s Open Society Foundations are trying “to push a progressive agenda and invigorate the political left”....

The particular focus of the letters from Lee, Smith and their cohort is spending by Soros’s foundations in Macedonia, a former socialist republic in the throes of a two-year political crisis, and to a lesser extent in its neighbor to the west Albania. In the former Communist country, which has struggled with allegations of corruption, one letter expressed concerns that “Soros-backed organizations” are pushing reforms “ultimately aimed to give the Prime Minister and left-of-center government full control over judiciary power.”


The letters, which ask the State Department and the Government Accountability Office for information about U.S. foreign aid funding for Soros groups in the Balkans, came after lobbying from the right-wing party clinging to power in Macedonia, VMRO-DPMNE.

A career foreign service officer pushed back against the accusation and

said his role in the country, which has involved helping to mediate Macedonia’s political crisis, was neither unusual nor biased.

“We were invited and welcomed by the parties to [mediate],” Baily said in an interview with POLITICO. “Political crises have usually been resolved with a fairly significant involvement from Europe and the United States.”

According to the State Department, USAID provided just three grants to Foundation Open Society-Macedonia over the past 15 years, primarily for education initiatives involving the country’s ethnic Roma population. “Funding for Foundation Open Society-Macedonia for the Civil Society Project represents just 8 percent of our total assistance over the past five years,” said USAID Mission Director for Macedonia Jim Stein. “There’s a lot of exaggeration and distortion in that document.”

Nineteen-term congressman Smith is no useful idiot but is fully aware of the implications of his actions, and very likely that

Soros, who survived the Nazi occupation of his native Hungary and fled after World War II when it was under Soviet control, has been long a bête noir of the Kremlin, which sees his funding for civil society groups in former Soviet satellite states as part of a plot to install pro-Western governments.

For years, those complaints had generally fallen on deaf ears in Washington.

While Republicans have long regarded Soros as a mortal enemy when it comes to domestic politics (where he has spent tens of millions of dollars backing Democratic candidates and liberal causes), their politics were more aligned on the international stage. Soros’s efforts to boost democracy and root out corruption in former Eastern Bloc countries dovetailed with traditional Republican foreign policy objectives.

But things may have started changing after Donald Trump’s stunning victory in a presidential campaign during which he emphasized nationalist themes. Politicians with nationalist constituencies in several former Eastern Bloc states have become increasingly aggressive in seeking international support for their crusade against Soros, and they seem to have found at least some takers in the GOP.

Politico adds

Russia is trying to exploit the crisis in Macedonia to sow distrust of the U.S. and pull the right-wing party into its orbit, regional analysts say. And the Republican lawmakers’ concern — that the U.S. is, in the words of Lee’s letter to Tillerson, “fomenting political unrest, disrespecting national sovereignty and civil society” — handed Moscow a major propaganda coup, they warn.

It may be that these Republicans are not pandering to Kremlin, but are interested only in obstructing boogeyman George Soros and whatever he sets out to do.   Still, when coupled with the GOP approach to the FBI/Russian investigation and the Garland/Gorsuch power play, a very ugly picture emerges.

Share |

Redemption To Come, Maybe

Not only Donald Trump but Wilbur, also, may be in more trouble than we thought.





Not Wilbur the architect seen above, of course, because he died last year at the age of 96.  Instead, Wilbur Ross' days may be numbered.  Bob Cesca noticed this curious exchange a couple of days ago on Fox News Sunday:

Chris Wallace: Is [there] any surveillance of people in Trump World, or do we think there was surveillance of other people like [Russian] Ambassador Kislyak, and that these folks who were talking with him were incidentally swept up in the conversation in the intercepts?

Nunes: Well, if you look at the folks that are working at the White House, uh, today that are involved in the Trump — in the Trump administration, I don’t think there’s any but one there that’s under any type of investigation or surveillance activities at all.

As Cesca notes, the target is not General Flynn, who no longer is in the Administration, and is not likely Rex Tillerson, despite his business interests in Russia. It more likely is

Wilbur Ross, Trump’s 89-year-old newly confirmed secretary of commerce. We know that Ross was previously the vice chairman and 1.6-percent shareholder in the Bank of Cyprus, a sleazy money laundering outfit used by Russian oligarchs to funnel untold billions in cash. One of those oligarchs who washed his fortune through the Bank of Cyprus is Dmitry Rybolovlev, the “King of Fertilizer” in Russia, who also happened to purchase a ridiculously expensive property in Florida from Trump at a massive $60 million profit for the current president — in fact, it was the most expensive single home sale in the history of the United States.

"This was lost in Monday's headlines," Cesca noted.  Nearly everything would be lost in the news that, as reported in Wired

FBI Director Comey stated for the first time that the agency he leads is investigating Russia-Trump ties. “I’ve been authorized by the Department of Justice to confirm that the FBI as part of our counterintelligence mission is investigating the Russian government’s efforts to interfere in the United States’ 2016 presidential election,” Comey told the House committee. “That includes investigating the nature of any links between individuals associated with the Trump campaign and the Russian government, and whether there was any coordination between the campaign and Russia’s efforts.”

But the significance of even that was downplayed, for

The timing of the investigation no doubt raise the hackles of Democrats, given that while the FBI kept the Trump campaign investigation secret for months, it made repeated public statements about an investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server—including a letter Comey himself wrote to Congress about the investigation a week before election day.





James Comey will conduct a fair and thorough investigation and plumb to the depths any possible violation, pundits seem to believe.   Left unsaid is that Donald Trump- who as President can fire the FBI director- owes James Comey.  If Trump has any concept of loyalty, he'll allow almost anything to come out of Comey's FBI because it's likely without Comey's unprofessional, even reprehensible, handling of the Clinton  investigation, Donald Trump would be back in Manhattan today scamming everyone he could.






Share |

More Than A Misunderstanding

"This article is kind of crazy," remarks a Slate commenter. He/she continues "While the author's arguments are all reasonable, what she's suggesting is that someone with Gorsuch's views, essentially, should be blackballed from the Supreme Court."

Not "blackballed," only viewed realistically.

In June, 2013 Judge Neil Gorsuch of the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit issied a concurring opinion supporting Hobby Lobby in a case pertaining to the Religious Freedom Restoration Act and the Free Exercise Clause (video below from 6/23).   Dahlia Lithwick cogently explains

It’s not just the great deference Gorsuch shows religious adherents that is worrisome. He also believes that the views of religious adherents are beyond factual debate. Again in the Hobby Lobby case, he wrote that companies must pay for “drugs or devices that can have the effect of destroying a fertilized human egg.” That claim is simply false, even with regard to Plan B. It is a religious conclusion, not a medical or legal one. Whether that view is his or he simply declines to probe whether the religious conclusion is accurate, the effect is the same: He has written into a legal opinion a religious “fact” not supported by medical science. 







Far from being narrow-minded, Lithwick is being generous, for Judge Gorsuch had written

All of us face the problem of complicity. All of us must answer for ourselves whether and to what degree we are willing to be involved in the wrongdoing of others. For some, religion provides an essential source of guidance both about what constitutes wrongful conduct and the degree to which those who assist others in committing wrongful conduct themselves bear moral culpability. The Green family members are among those who seek guidance from their faith on these questions. Understanding that is the key to understanding this case. 

As the Greens explain their complaint, the ACA’s mandate requires them to violate their religious faith by forcing them to lend an impermissible degree of assistance to conduct their religion teaches to be gravely wrong. No one before us disputes that the mandate compels Hobby Lobby and Mardel to underwrite payments for drugs or devices that can have the effect of destroying a fertilized human egg. No one disputes that the Greens’ religion teaches them that the use of such drugs or devices is gravely wrong.

"No one disputes" the claim that contraceptive drugs and devices destroy a fertilized human egg, claims Neil Gorsuch. That destructive impact is either his own view or one which he blithely accepts out of naivete or convenience. The Judge is either grossly ignorant or grossly negligent given that, as this pro-reproductive rights site argues

Implantation is what sets in motion all the signs that pregnancy has begun. On this one point, science, medicine and the law agree: implantation is the moment at which pregnancy starts. The only dissenting group is the pro-life movement, which dismisses this definition. It, instead, would like pregnancy to start at the unknowable moment the sperm fertilizes an egg. Once sperm meets egg, any effort to prevent the egg from implanting in the womb is considered an abortion by the pro-life movement. This is one of the arguments they offer up as justification for the campaigns to keep women from using birth control. Their claim is that most birth control methods prevent fertilized eggs from implanting in the womb, which to them, though not to science, is an abortion. But even that is not true. There is no evidence that birth control methods actually do what pro-life groups claim.

"No one disputes" now appears to be Gorsuch Shorthand for "most dispute."   But this is not an issue of abortion, nor even entirely of reproductive rights. It suggests that a prospective Supreme Court Justice fails to respect the concept of the wall of separation between church and state.   Lithwick concludes

Gorsuch’s defenders point to the fact that he has been an equal-opportunity defender of religious liberties, including in cases that involve plaintiffs from minority faiths. And this is precisely the point. Gorsuch’s own faith is not at issue here. At a Supreme Court confirmation hearing, we should not be talking about the beliefs a nominee may hold in his heart. Instead, we need to focus on whether his accommodation of the beliefs of others overmasters not just scientific fact and neutral civil rights laws, but also the interests and values of people of different faiths and those who reject religion altogether.







Share |

China Not Impressed

He has to be kidding.

Not Jacob Shapiro, director of analysis at Geopolitical Futures, who remarked on February 15 "there's enough inconsistencies in this report that it makes me raise an eyebrow."  During the presidential campaign, Donald Trump pledged to get tough on mainland China by declaring it a currency manipulator and imposing a 40 per cent tariff on goods it exports to this country. Therefore, Shapiro was referring to a report in The Wall Street Journal that, according to CNBC

the White House is instead considering a proposal that would change what it means to be a currency manipulator. The new definition, as reported by the Journal, would make it possible for Trump to avoid singling out — and angering — a country whose economy is fundamentally intertwined with the United States.

"It shows that either Trump can't label China a currency manipulator, or doesn't want to," said Jacob Shapiro, director of analysis at Geopolitical Futures, an online publication that analyzes and forecasts the course of global events.

Shapiro's eyebrows are very perceptive. The failure of the President to take action against Big China, however, may not be hard to understand, for a few weeks later we read the President has been

granted preliminary approval for 38 new Trump trademarks, paving the way for Donald Trump and his family to potentially develop a host of branded businesses from hotels to insurance to bodyguard and escort services, public documents show. 

Trump’s lawyers in China applied for the marks in April 2016, as Trump railed against China at campaign rallies, accusing it of currency manipulation and stealing US jobs. Critics maintain that Trump’s swelling portfolio of China trademarks raises serious conflict of interest questions.

Like father, like son (in-law). New York Magazine reports

A Beijing-based investment firm with close ties to the Chinese government is giving a “sweetheart deal” to the real-estate company owned by Jared Kushner’s family for a stake in the firm’s flagship property at 666 Fifth Ave., Bloomberg reported Monday.

The $4 billion deal calls for Kushner Companies, where Trump’s son-in-law and adviser was CEO until January, to receive $400 million in cash and have its mortgage in the mixed-use building slashed by about 80 percent.

The transaction’s critics tell Bloomberg that the terms of the deal are “unusually favorable.” The concern, as explained by Larry Noble of the Campaign Legal Center, is that Anbang Insurance Group is trying to curry favor with Kushner and, by extension, President Trump.

A Kushner Companies spokesman told Bloomberg that there’s no worry over conflict of interest because Jared sold his ownership in 666 Fifth Ave. to family members. But as Noble, who calls this a “sweetheart deal,” told Bloomberg, “A classic way you influence people is by financially helping their family.”

Matthew Sanderson, a D.C. lawyer and Republican, told the Times earlier this year that there’s nothing legally improper about the deal but it has the “strong appearance that a foreign entity is using Mr. Kushner’s business to try to influence U.S. policy.”

Early on St. Patrick's Day, President Trump tweeted "North Korea is behaving very badly. They have been 'playing' the United States for years. China has done little to help."

It would be more understandable if he were joking, about China and about Pyongyang needing a time-out.  While claiming the USA has been played by North Korea, the President seems unaware that China, having bestowed its beneficence upon the Trump family, would hold the cards in whatever poker game it wants to play with the USA. Viewing his country as primarily an investment vehicle, Trump is having trouble adjusting to the idea that he's no longer an owner or corporate CEO.

Donald Trump is proceeding rationally to maximize his family's weath, even to the extent of indirectly dealing with a foreign intelligence group.  Given his interests, when at a press conference he declares "we're a very powerful company- country," his only mistake is in the correction.











Share |

Trust Or Accuse

Early on St. Patrick's Day (and not "St. Patty's Day;" Patrick was a man), Charlie Pierce would write (asterisk his)

This is an administration that is putting the country (and the world) in a very difficult position. The only people in it that seem to know what they're doing are the ones that have been put in place to demolish things on purpose. The rest of them demolish things by accident.

Angela Merkel dropped by on Friday to chat with the president*. Run for your life, Angela. We'll get back to you when and if things settle down.

If this seemed a little alarmist, it turned out to be unrealistically reassuring, for

Near the end of his meticulously formal, utterly impersonal news conference with Chancellor Angela Merkel, President Trump finally sought a sliver of common ground with his guest: They both, he said, had been wiretapped by former President Barack Obama.

Ms. Merkel did a barely perceptible double take, busying herself by shuffling her notes. She smiled thinly and said nothing, as if she had resolved not to get drawn into Mr. Trump’s political dramas.

It was like that throughout Mr. Trump’s first meeting with Ms. Merkel on Friday, an awkward encounter that was the most closely watched of his young presidency and took on an outsize symbolism: the great disrupter confronts the last defender of the liberal world order.

Worlds apart in style and policy, Mr. Trump and Ms. Merkel made a show of working together, as they stood side by side in the East Room of the White House. But they could not disguise the gulf that separates them on trade, immigration and a host of other thorny issues.

I don't believe Angela Merkel would be pleased at being associated with anything "liberal," but as the the de facto leader of the Free World by default, a little discomfort must be tolerated.

The Obama Administration never admitted that the C.I.A. had spied- probably without the President's approval- on the German Chancellor, but when the report of the wiretap appeared in October 2015, Merkel responded "We need trust,... Spying among friends is never acceptable...."

"As far as wiretapping," Trump quipped at the news conference, "I guess by this past administration, at least we have something in common, perhaps." And now the leader of the Free World has been reminded of an unpleasant incident she and Obama probably had agreed to put behind them.

Imagine if a best friend reminded your Facebook contacts that your previous best friend had once enjoyed a torrid love affair with your wife. No one had admitted anything, life had gone on calmly, and now he reignites the issue. Patience, Madame Chancellor.

Trump's smart-ass comment may not have been his worst wiretapping remark. The President did not retract his claim of collusion between the United Kingdom and President Obama, nor did he deftly bat away the question. Rather

President Donald Trump defiantly refused to back down Friday from his explosive claim that Barack Obama wiretapped his phones, and sidestepped any blame for the White House decision to highlight an unverified report that Britain helped carry out the alleged surveillance.







Evidently, the British are not amused, though whether any less pleased than Merkel with the man who occupies the seat once most responsible for upholding the trans-Atlantic alliance is questionable. "Trust needs to be rebuilt," remarked Merkel upon hearing of the alleged wiretapping a year ago October. Publicly charging an ex-President with spying on one ally, and trying to implicate another ally in in another episode was not a good start.






Share |

Food Insecurity. And Privatization.

The  budget proposal from the Trump Administration has generated considerable and justified opposition, even outrage, because of the evidently harsh and heartless reductions to worthwhile programs. Elimination of Meals on Wheels, which is funded by the Community Development Block Grant program, has been a particular flash point. Wiping out the Appalachian Regional Commission is particularly ironic, given Trump's overwhelming support among down-market whites in that area. And ripping out the heart of  programs which aid people while jacking up the Pentagon only makes it more obscene.

But other cuts are even more insidious because of what they portend. President Trump

is proposing to shift oversight of the U.S. air traffic control from the federal government to an independent group, according to budget documents released on Thursday.

Trump, who called the U.S. air traffic control system "obsolete" in a meeting with airline executives last month, is proposing $16.2 billion for the Department of Transportation's discretionary budget for fiscal year 2018, a reduction of 13 percent.

Some Transportation Department budget items are paid through the highway gas tax fund.
The document says Trump's plan "initiates a multi-year reauthorization proposal to shift the air traffic control function of the Federal Aviation Administration to an independent, non-governmental organization."

Charlie Pierce notes that this privatization scheme constitutes

finishing the work that Reagan started in 1981, and adapting the system to a philosophy that has worked so very well in the prison system and in education. Speaking of which, the Department of Education is taking a 13.5 percent cut, but there's going to be $1.4 billion shifted over into various charter and voucher schemes that have proven worthless in practice, but that warm the heart of Betsy DeVos, our anti-public-education Secretary of Education. Pell Grants also take a whack.

Privatization of essential functions has reared its ugly, inefficent head in education, prisons, and now- if the GOP gets its way- the skies may become as dangerous as, well, our water.   Donald Cohen, founder and executive director of In the Public Interest, writes that the Pittsburgh

water utility was laying off employees in an effort to cut costs. By the end of the year, half of the staff responsible for testing water throughout the 100,000-customer system was let go. The cuts would prove to be catastrophic. Six months later, lead levels in tap water in thousands of homes soared. The professor who had helped expose Flint, Michigan’s lead crisis took notice, “The levels in Pittsburgh are comparable to those reported in Flint.”

The cities also share something else, involvement by the same for-profit water corporation. Pittsburgh’s layoffs happened under the watch of French corporation Veolia, who was hired to help the city’s utility save money. Veolia also oversaw a change to a cheaper chemical additive that likely caused the eventual spike in lead levels. In Flint, Veolia served a similar consulting role and failed to detect high levels of lead in the city’s water, deeming it safe. 

"High levels of lead exposure," Kevin Drum noted in February of 2016, "are associated with aggressivity, impulsivity, ADHD, and lower IQ." Two months later, researchers published a paper demonstrating that homicide rates in American cities from 1921 through 1936 closely correlated with the likelihood that the jurisdiction had installed lead water pipes in the late 19th century.  As Drum (crediting graphic below to researcher Rick Nevin) already had summarized

We now have studies at the international level, the national level, the state level, the city level, and even the individual level. Groups of children have been followed from the womb to adulthood, and higher childhood blood lead levels are consistently associated with higher adult arrest rates for violent crimes. All of these studies tell the same story: Gasoline lead is responsible for a good share of the rise and fall of violent crime over the past half century.

Crime rates fell a couple of decades after lead was taken out of gasoline (especially in the big cities, which had the highest concntration of automobiles) and will rise after lead is reintroduced as a short-term cost-cutting measure in cities whose water systems have been conquered by privatization.

In a similar manner, airplane accidents have dropped dramatically over the decades, a trend likely to be reversed if the transportation scheme, a solution in search of a problem, in this budget is adopted.  It is not, of course, the only problem with this horrendous budget but demonstrates one of the prime objectives of this President and his Party, one which sacrifices  American citizens for the profits of the well-heeled.

Share |

Somehow, Still Naive

On February 27, The Hill reports

Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-N.J.) offered a resolution that would have directed the House to request 10 years of Trump’s tax returns, have the House Ways and Means Committee review them in a closed session and then vote to send the information in the returns to the full House.

Every Republican voted against the measure, save Walter Jones of North Carolina and Mark Sanford of South Carolina, who voted "present."  House Minority Leader Pelosi thereupon responded

 “Our security and our democracy have been endangered by Russia’s clear influence on the Trump Administration. The American people deserve the truth about Russia’s personal, political and financial grip on President Trump.  If there’s nothing there, then what are Republicans afraid of?"

Putting party over country is nothing new for congressional Republicans. The Affordable Care Act, similar to the health care reform first proposed by the Heritage Foundation and enacted by Governor Romney in Massachusetts, garnered zero (0) GOP votes in the House of Representatives and the Senate.   In the following seven years of the Obama presidency, congressional Republicans voted over 60 times to gut Obamacare.

Now that the GOP is in complete control of two branches of the American government and aim to overturn the Affordable Care Act, Speaker Ryan has led the chant heard around the Capital: Obamacare is in a "death spiral," a phrase he dishonestly used three times in an interview yesterday afternoon with CNN's Jake Tapper.

It's not in any death spiral but thanks to Republicans, it may soon be.   Moments after taking office, President issued an executive order recommending government departments "waive, defer, grant exemptions from, or delay the implementation of provisions" of the Affordable Care Act.

Rumor has it that Vice President Joe Biden was present at both the creation of the Affordable Care Act and efforts by the Obama Administration to preserve and protect it against a Republican Party striving to return more Americans to the vagaries of insurance companies and others.

He was there in body and spirit, but his memory is short. The Huffington Post notes

Former Vice President Joe Biden has received three separate awards for his bipartisanship and civility in the past year, — one each from the Bipartisan Policy Center, the University of Notre Dame and Allegheny College. 

It’s not that he doesn’t appreciate the accolades. He just finds them a bit odd. 

“I thought that’s what we’re supposed to be,” Biden said during a speech Wednesday at Research!America’s 21st annual Advocacy Awards.

“The idea that Notre Dame would say, ‘Joe Biden and John Boehner, they actually get along so we should give them an award?’” Biden continued, referring to the Republican former House speaker. “There’s something really wrong with what we’ve allowed to have happen here.” 

There is no "we," Joe.  The President who in his inaugural address two months ago declared "When America is united, America is totally unstoppable" on Wednesday held a rally in which he

railed against a judge's order blocking his immigration restrictions on Wednesday, saying the ruling made America "look weak" — and drew chants from supporters of "lock her up!" when he attacked his defeated rival.

Campaigning in Tennessee more than four months after winning the presidency, Trump continued to attack Hillary Clinton. While reading a legal code that the president said backed his authority to enact the travel ban, Trump interrupted himself to say that "fortunately" the former secretary of state was not in the White House.

"The law and Constitution give the president the power to suspend immigration when he deems - or she, or she. Fortunately, it will not be Hillary," he said.

The set-up had its desired effect as

Chants of "Lock her up!" reverberated through the auditorium at the mention of Clinton. Trump walked from the podium and surveyed the crowd as they continued to chant — something that became a hallmark of his campaign






When ex-President Obama gives an adoring crowd the "thumbs-up" signal as it yells "Lock him (Trump) up" former Vice President Biden can plausibly denounce "what we've allowed to happen here."  Not before.






Share |