Category: Trump

Week 91 in Trump

Posted on October 22, 2018 in Politics, Trump

I heard something interesting on Marketplace. It turns out it doesn’t matter whether we cut funding for food assistance, or SNAP, like some in Congress want. Because of our trade war, many farmers lost the buyers for their crops. So part of the government bailout for farmers is going toward purchasing those crops, which will then be donated to food assistance programs like food banks, shelters, and so on. The charities currently don’t have enough resources to store all that food, and they estimate it’ll cost around $300 million to take care of it all. They say they’ll get it done, but what really just happened is that the U.S. lost all that income from those crops, the government is trying to cut taxpayer payments to SNAP, but the government did pay taxpayer money directly to the farmers who lost their buyers, and then turned around and gave that food right back to the needy. Talk about going around in circles.

Here’s what else happened last week in politics…

Russia:

  1. In the DOJ’s first case around Russian meddling in our elections, federal prosecutors charge a Russian woman, Elena Khusyaynova, with fraud against the U.S. She managed the finances for an operation funded by the Concord group that ran a social media disinformation campaign. This campaign wasn’t tilted toward either political side; it’s aim was to spread disinformation and increase divisiveness.
  2. This campaign spread misinformation about immigration, gun control, the NFL protests, LGBTQ and racial issues, the Confederate flag, and much more.
  3. Putin says that U.S. influence across the globe is almost over, and that he’s been more able to push Russian influence with Trump as president.
  4. Russian trolls have stepped up their spending on disinformation campaigns in 2018.
  5. Mueller will likely issue his findings in the Russia investigation after the midterm elections, specifically around whether Trump’s campaign coordinated in any way with the Russians and whether Trump obstructed justice during the investigation.
  6. It’s up to Rod Rosenstein, who’s defended Mueller’s investigation, to decide whether the results will become public.
  7. Remember when we kept hearing about SARs (suspicious activity reports)? A senior employee at the Treasury Department is charged with leaking those reports related to Paul Manafort’s financial activity, along with SARs for other subjects of the Mueller investigation.
  8. A federal judge refuses Paul Manafort’s request to wear a suit to his sentencing hearing. He shows up in a wheelchair.

Legal Fallout:

  1. Michael Cohen has met with both New York state and federal law enforcement about the Trump Organization and their charity.

Courts/Justice:

  1. A federal judge orders the Department of Education to implement regulations to protect students who were defrauded by for-profit colleges. The regulations help them get their federal student loans forgiven. Betsy DeVos has been delaying the regulations while the department rewrote rules around loans, but a different judge already called those rewrites capricious and arbitrary.

Healthcare:

  1. Along party lines, the Senate votes down a repeal of Trump’s expansion of short-term insurance plans that do not have to comply with ACA guidelines. So now we’ll have cheaper plans available for the short-term, but they won’t have to cover anything required by the ACA.
  2. Mitch McConnell suggests that Republicans will try again next year to repeal the ACA, but no word yet what they’d replace it with.

International:

  1. Reports are that the U.S. intelligence community knew that the Saudis planned to kidnap Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi and possibly harm him. This information had been spread across all relevant government agencies, yet Trump pretended to know nothing about this for days.
  2. Turkey says they have audio tapes of the killing, and Trump requests the tapes to be released to U.S. intelligence. As far as I know, this hasn’t yet happened.
  3. Early in the week, Trumps says he’ll send Mike Pompeo to meet with Saudi King Salman over the killing of Jamal Khashoggi. Trump also says the king firmly denies involvement, and he suggests rogue killers could be responsible.
  4. And then Trump tells the Associated Press that blaming Saudi Arabia without evidence is like blaming Kavanaugh without evidence. Just another case of “guilty until proven innocent.”
  5. Pompeo has a friendly meeting with the Saudi prince who says they’ll perform a thorough and transparent investigation into the killing.
  6. The day Pompeo arrives, the Saudi government transfers $100 million to the U.S. to help stabilize things in Syria.
  7. Trump is also concerned about a $110 million arms deal with Saudi Arabia, and he doesn’t want the Khashoggi affair to get in the way of it.
  8. Treasury Secretary Mnuchin joins many other foreign officials in saying they won’t attend what’s been called “Davos in the Desert.” It’s an economic investment conference in Saudi Arabia.
  9. Jared Kushner, who is a close friend of the Saudi prince, is involved with the Trump administration response to the killing.
  10. The ranking members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Bob Corker (R) and Bob Melendez (D) send a letter to Trump triggering the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act. The administration must now investigate the killing.
  11. The Saudi government prepares us for their admission that Khashoggi didn’t leave the consulate in Turkey and is indeed dead, but they say it was an interrogation that went wrong. And then they say that a fight broke out (which I guess somehow required the 15-man security team to kill Khashoggi and then dismember him with the bone saw that they conveniently had thought to bring with them ahead of time by the doctor they conveniently had the forethought to invite along).
  12. So the Saudi’s have gone from:
    • Khashoggi left the consulate alive, to
    • He is probably dead but we didn’t kill him, to
    • We’ll investigate this fully, to
    • He was killed by our security team but it was his fault because he started a fistfight (against 15 security guys, uh-huh), but
    • The Saudi prince knew nothing of this plan.
  1. U.S. intelligence says evidence points to the Saudi prince being involved, but it’s circumstantial right now.
  2. This comes at a critical time for the administration because we need Saudi Arabian oil to make the sanctions against Iran work.
  3. Saudi Arabia has apprehended several suspects. Four suspects are linked to the Saudi prince’s security detail.
  4. And is this always going to be their comeback? Republican lawmakers and pundits begin smearing Khashoggi to dampen criticism of Trump’s handling of the situation. They bring up his ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and say he’s a friend of terrorists and “not a good guy.”
  5. Trump says we have an investigation on the ground in Turkey, but U.S. officials are unaware of any such effort.
  6. While Trump appears to be defending Saudi Arabia publicly, privately he has doubts they’re telling the truth.
  7. Germany halts all weapons deals with Saudi Arabia until further notice.
  8. The UN warns that Yemen is facing its worst famine in history because Saudi Arabia continues to launch airstrikes against them. We’re looking at over 12 million people facing starvation, which will only add to the global refugee crisis. Yemen is trapped in the middle of a proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia.
  9. The Taliban wipes out all of the top leadership in Kandahar Province in an assassination strike.
  10. Trump says the U.S. will withdraw from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, a Cold War arms control agreement with Russia. Trump says that Russia is violating the treaty and that it prevents us from developing weapons to combat China’s new weaponry.
  11. Mikhail Gorbachev, one of the treaty’s signers, says this decision is reckless and “not the work of a great mind.”
  12. Trump suspends yet another military exercise with South Korea. It seems they’re trying to further nuclear negotiations with North Korea.

Family Separation:

  1. The U.S. still has 245 children in custody who were separated from their parents. The parents of 175 of them were deported, and, of those, 125 have chosen to remain in the U.S. and request asylum. That leaves 50 kids with deported parents, and another 70 who haven’t been reunited.

Travel Ban/Immigration/Discrimination:

  1. Trump threatens to cancel aid to Honduras if they don’t stop the caravan of migrants headed our way. Because cutting off a lifeline for the country will really make people want to stay there, right?
  2. He also threatens to send the U.S. military to the border to meet the migrants, and then threatens to throw out the renegotiated NAFTA if Mexico let’s them through.
  3. The Trump administration looks at redefining gender so that people can only be defined by their biological sex at birth based on genitalia. I wonder what they think they’ll do for those born intersex? At any rate, it’s pretty easy to make the argument that transgender people are the most targeted group under this administration. Right up there with black and brown asylum seekers.

Climate/EPA:

  1. Trump visits the aftermath of Hurricane Michael in Florida and Georgia. The death toll from the storm is up to 36. FEMA is still on the ground helping the hardest hit areas, but certain areas are pulling back on food and water in an effort to get back to a sense of normalcy. Some areas still don’t have electricity, though.
  2. Climate change is expected to dramatically increase the price of beer this century because drought will affect our ability to grow barley.
  3. Trump says at a Cabinet meeting that California better get its act together to fight forest fires, or he’ll stop giving the state federal funding for either fire prevention programs or disaster relief (it’s hard to tell which he’s referring to).
  4. Trump says he has a natural instinct for science, which is how he knows climate change isn’t manmade. Like many who deny manmade climate change, he says the climate goes back and forth, and back and forth. He also says that even scientists are divided on it, which really isn’t true.
  5. Trump claims to be an environmentalist despite rescinding regulations designed to protect the environment.

Budget/Economy:

  1. Another department store bites the dust when Sears declares bankruptcy. Trump says it’s been mismanaged for years; Trump’s Treasury secretary Steve Mnuchin was on the company’s board from 2005 to 2016.
  2. Interesting tidbit: Sears CEO Eddie Lampert is an Ayn Rand follower, and has been trying to run the company under the principles she espoused.
  3. The numbers are in for the end of Trump’s first full fiscal year. The federal deficit expanded to $779 billion, which is up 17% from last year when it was $667 billion. (OK. That last digit is actually a 6, but I can’t bring myself to type the devil numbers. Ask me about the sump pump incident.) The deficit as a percent of GDP also rose. Taxes received from businesses dropped by 31% from the previous year, while taxes received from individuals rose 6%.
  4. So the deficit increased by $113 billion, and federal income from corporations went down by about $92 billion.
  5. This is the largest deficit since 2012, when we were still recovering from the Great Recession.
  6. Spending only increased by 3%, but still Mick Mulvaney claims the reason for the large deficit is out-of-control spending.
  7. Mitch McConnell says the increased deficit isn’t because of the Republican tax bill, but it’s because of Medicare, Medicaid, and social security (all of which are supposed to come out of a separate fund, by the way). The tax bill is predicted to add nearly $1 trillion to the debt next year. So basically after passing a $1.5 trillion tax cut and increasing the budget for the DoD, he says the only thing we can do is cut assistance to the needy and senior citizens. Also, since McConnell became majority leader nearly four years ago, the deficit has increased 77%.
  8. In contrast, the Treasury Department says deficit growth is because of the of the tax cuts, bipartisan spending increases, and rising interest payments.
  9. In response to the news, Trump announces he’ll ask each of his cabinet members to cut the budget for their respective agency by 5%.
  10. On the plus side, job openings hit a record high in August.
  11. Looking back over the year, big banks did the best as a result of the GOP tax reform. They saw the most profit of any other industry.
  12. Volvo says it might move some of their current U.S. manufacturing operations to China.
  13. China has been importing around 330,000 barrels per day of U.S. crude oil. Those imports were down to 0 in August.
  14. Mitch McConnell says he won’t bring the renegotiated NAFTA deal to a vote until next year.
  15. China criticizes the U.S. decision to withdraw from the Universal Postal Union, especially with the trade wars going on. Trumps says the UPU, which is 144 years old, makes it easier for Chinese nationals to ship illicit drugs to the U.S.

Elections:

  1. DHS reports an increase in the number of cyber attacks attempted on U.S. election databases, and they don’t know who’s behind it. Yay for safe and secure elections.
  2. Georgia uses amateur handwriting analysis to determine the authenticity of voter registrations and ballots.
  3. Officials in Gwinnett County Georgia have rejected around a third of the absentee ballots cast so far. Over half of those thrown out were from African Americans or Asian Americans. On top of that, officials didn’t notify the voters whose ballots were rejected as required by law. Instead, these voters found out from CNN. Gwinnett is the most diverse and populous county in Georgia.
  4. So far Georgia has purged about 8% of the voters on their rolls.
  5. Officials in Jefferson County Georgia make a group of senior citizens get off the bus that was taking them to vote early. The Senior center was worried that it was a partisan event because a Democrat helped organize the event with a non-partisan voting advocacy group.
  6. U.S. intelligence and law enforcement voice concern about ongoing attempts to interfere with our elections by Russia, China, and Iran—both in the midterms and the 2020 presidential race. But still they’ve seen no signs of them being able to interfere with our actual votes.

Miscellaneous:

  1. Elizabeth Warren announces the results of her DNA test, which show she has Native American ancestry going back 6-10 generations. Trump mocks her; Lindsey Graham mocks her; Fox mocks her. WTH? Who even cares? Why is this a thing?
  2. Also, cue the amateur scientists who estimate that this makes her 1/64 to 1/1024 Native American. Except that’s not how genetics works and for some reason it took days for anyone to talk to an actual geneticist and correct the record. She could have far more than 1/64 Native American DNA or far less than 1/1024.
  3. Trump calls her a complete and total fraud. He refuses to give $1 million to a charity of her choice, even though he said he would if she got a DNA test and it showed Native American heritage. Also, donating the million was his idea, not hers.
  4. Even though Warren says she doesn’t claim tribal affiliation, the chairman of the Cherokee Nation criticizes her use of a DNA test to find out if she does have Native American heritage.
  5. A group of free-press advocates sues Trump to block him from using his office to retaliate against the press. They say that Trump’s threats and use of regulations and enforcement powers for this purpose are unconstitutional.
  6. Trump again praises Montana Republican Representative Greg Gianforte for assaulting a Guardian journalist before his special election last year. “Anybody who can do that kind of body slam, he’s my kind of guy.”
  7. The Trump administration abruptly replaces the acting Inspector General for the Department of the Interior. This is the person who will handle all the current investigations into Ryan Zinke’s potential ethical lapses and she has no investigative experience. But that turns out to be OK, because she resigns shortly thereafter.
  8. The previous Inspector General just released findings that Zinke tried to get around or change policies to justify trips with his wife that were paid for by the taxpayers, including a trip to Turkey.
  9. Don McGahn leaves his post as White House Counsel. He was going to leave later in the fall, but Trump already announced his replacement, Patrick Cipollone. Cipollone was a DOJ lawyer under Bush Sr.
  10. Remember the fire in a Trump Tower condo earlier this year where the guy died? The Trump Organization sues his estate for $90,000 in unpaid maintenance fees.

Polls:

  1. Apparently forgetting the uproar over Obama locking Fox out of one press event, 44% of Republicans think Trump should be able to shut down news agencies for “bad behavior.”
  2. 49% of Trump voters think men face a lot of discrimination in American. In fact, they think men face more discrimination than LGBTQ folks (41%), African-Americans (38%), and women (30%). Cray.
  3. Only 25% of Americans think Kavanaugh told the truth in his hearings. 35% approve of his confirmation and 43% disapprove.

Highlights From Trump’s 60 Minutes Interview

Posted on October 16, 2018 in Trump

On Sunday, 10/14/18, Trump gave an interview to 60 Minute’s Lesley Stahl. I was going to include the highlights in my weekly news recap, but the recap was getting too long as it was, and is this really news? Here are the highlights:

  1. When talking about whether he really needed to mock Christine Blasey Ford, he says he thinks he treated Blasey Ford with respect. Remember that he had his whole crowd laughing and jeering at her, and she did say that the one thing that is stuck in her memory is how her attackers laughed about it.
  2. When Stahl pushed Trump on whether he said Blasey Ford lied, Trump says “I’m not gonna get into it because we won. It doesn’t matter. We won.” Then he goes on to say that “we won – have you seen the polls?”
  3. Stahl pushes him on climate change after he says he doesn’t think it’s a hoax (in 2016, it was a Chinese hoax, remember?). But he still won’t give in to science.
  4. Trump says he wouldn’t take the potential arms sale to Saudi Arabia off the table if we find out they were behind the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Because we won it. Everyone else wanted it, and we won it.
  5. Trumps says the day before he came into office, we were going to war with North Korea. Just an FYI, we weren’t.
  6. Trump says the EU was formed to take advantage of the U.S. on trade. Wow. We’re not the center of everybody’s universe. He also calls them hostile. Our allies.
  7. Trump refuses to say that NATO has helped keep the peace for 70 years. He also says that General Mattis never told him that the reason for NATO and our alliances is to prevent World War III. He goes on to say that he knows more than Mattis about this.
  8. Trump agrees that Russia meddled in our elections, but says China did, too.
  9. Trump refuses to pledge to not interfere with or shut down Mueller’s investigation.
  10. When Stahl asks him if there’s anything he’s said that he regrets, he says his only regret is that the press treats him so badly.
  11. He refuses to say that family separation was a bad idea and deflects blame to Obama. He also won’t say whether or not he’ll start it up again. Just FYI, this wasn’t done under Obama’s administration.
  12. Trump blames the country’s divisiveness on Obama, and says he sees the country uniting. Huh? When asked why he doesn’t try to bring us together and heal the nation, he says that Hillary made a really nasty comment.
  13. And finally, because it’s all about winning, Trump says, “Lesley, it’s okay. In the meantime, I’m president–and you’re not.”

Week 89 in Trump

Posted on October 8, 2018 in Politics, Trump

One of these voted their conscience; two of them pretended to.

I’m so tired. I’m so tired of the Kavanaugh nomination sucking up all the air in the room and igniting everyone’s emotions. I’ve never seen people on both sides so emotionally vested in getting their way on a Supreme Court Nomination. It’s possibly because there’s more at stake right now, and none of our leaders made any effort to quiet down the vitriol. Voters from both sides ended up feeling unheard. Victims ended up feeling unheard. What was really painful was to have friends share their sex abuse stories with me, which was made all the more painful by friends who dismiss the claims of victims. It’s time to take a step back, regroup, and look at what we really believe in. Can we continue to let boys be boys while slut shaming the women those boys take advantage of? I just don’t think that’s gonna fly anymore.

Anyway, I’ll get off my soapbox. Here’s what happened last week in politics…

Missed from Last Week:

  1. Here’s a sad statement of the current politics of partisanship. When Jeff Flake was asked if he could’ve requested an FBI investigation and delay in Kavanaugh’s hearing if he was running again, he said “Of course not!”
  2. In case you were wondering if there’s any traction on making Trump’s tax returns or financial statements public, last week 21 Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee voted against releasing any of that information. That’s OK, because this week the New York Times beat them to the punch. More later.

Russia:

  1. Before the 2016 elections, several Republican Trump critics were victims of attempted hacking by Russian operatives. The FBI now says that the scope of that investigation has become greater than just computer intrusion, and they refer the case to Robert Mueller’s team.
  2. The DOJ indicts seven members of the Russian military, charging that they hacked into drug tests for Olympic athletes and leaked the information. This seems to have been in retaliation for all the investigations into Russian doping that resulted in several Russian athletes being unable to compete.
  3. Paul Manafort starts meeting with Mueller’s team as part of his plea agreement.
  4. Randy Credico, who was Roger Stone’s middleman between him and Julian Assange, says he’ll plead the fifth in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
  5. Two money laundering experts from Mueller’s team have left and gone back to their regular practices. Mueller team now has 13 staffers.
  6. Russian trolls and Russian TV have been supporting the Kavanaugh confirmation.

Legal Fallout:

  1. The Wall Street Journal reports that Trump told Michael Cohen to get a restraining order to prevent Stormy Daniels from talking to the press. Trump told Cohen to coordinate this with his son, Eric, who then asked a Trump Organization lawyer to draw up the papers.
  2. The New York Times publishes a lengthy article detailing the alleged methods, both legal and not so much, that the Trump family used to avoid paying hundreds of millions in taxes. Note: I haven’t read the full article yet, and I know there are some sketchy loopholes that blur the lines between legal and illegal tax avoidance.
  3. Here are some claims in the article:
    • Trump’s father gave him today’s equivalent of $413 million over the decades. Only a big deal because Trump says he’s a self-made billionaire, having only received $1 million in startup money from his father.
    • The Trumps transferred over $1 billion to their children, and paid a tax rate of about 5% on that.
    • Trump started earning $20,000 a year from his father’s company at age 3 in 1950.
    • After college, he received around $200,000 per year. This increased to about $2.5 million a year in his 40s. (Note: The NYT converted the numbers to today’s dollars; I converted them back for a little reality check. So these are approximations.)
    • Fred Trump also lent Donald Trump $60.7 million, most of which was never paid back. Fred bailed Donald out of a few potential bankruptcies, including making an illegal loan under New Jersey gaming laws. Fred provided the collateral for bank loans to Donald when he got into financial trouble.
    • When Fred Trump was ailing, Donald Trump tried to get him to change his will and to make him sole executor of the estate. At this point, it seems Fred no longer trusted Trump not to bankrupt the company and refused the changes.
    • The Trump children created a shell company to siphon money from Fred Trump’s estate into their own estates to avoid taxes. Family companies for managing family estates are not unusual, and they come with their own legal tax loopholes. But this company used questionable tactics like padded invoices to justify expenditures.
    • The family created a grantor-retained annuity trust, or GRAT, to transfer assets. Also completely legal, but in this case they severely undervalued the assets that were transferred in order to avoid taxes.
  1. After publication of the above article, New York Tax Department considers opening an investigation into the allegations. Even if the statute of limitations has expired, civil fines can still be levied for uncollected taxes.
  2. A lawyer for Trump says there was no “fraud or tax evasion” and that any actions taken were on the advice of financial professionals.
  3. Fun fact: If you’re wondering what led to the New York Times’ report, the story opened up when a reporter came across a filing from Maryanne Trump Barry, Trump’s sister. When she was being confirmed by the Senate to her judgeship, she included a document in her filing that showed a $1 million dollar contribution from what turned out to be a shell company.

Courts/Justice:

  1. Tom Cotton says they’re opening an investigation into Dianne Feinstein’s handling of Christine Blasey Ford’s letter and into Blasey Ford’s lawyers. Mitch McConnell echoes the call for investigation.
  2. Harvard cancels the classes taught by Kavanaugh. Then we hear that he withdrew from teaching, so I’m not sure exactly how that all shook out. Students were circulating a petition against him teaching there.
  3. McConnell says they’ll vote this week on Kavanaugh’s confirmation no matter the results of the investigation, and they do.
  4. At the opening of the FBI investigation into accusations against Kavanaugh, Trump tweets that the FBI can interview anybody they want, but at the time of the tweet, the FBI was still under the limits reported last week (with limits on who they can talk to and which allegations they can investigate). It sounds like Trump did want to give FBI free reign, but White House counsel said that would be disastrous.
    • The FBI didn’t interview either Blasey Ford or Kavanaugh.
    • Several accusers and witnesses request that the FBI interview them and try to get information to the FBI, including texts sent before some accusations came out. None of these are included in the investigation.
    • The above referenced text messages show that Kavanaugh was contacting classmates asking them to deny Ramirez’s accusations before those accusations were made public.
  1. Lindsey Graham tells Trump that if Kavanaugh’s nomination fails, he should renominate him.
  2. Two ethics complaints against Kavanaugh come before the DC District Court, which ironically is overseen by blocked Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland. The complaints center around perjury (filed prior to his testimony about sexual misconduct) and partisanship (filed after that testimony).
  3. The DC Court has already forwarded more than a dozen complaints against Kavanaugh to Justice Roberts on the Supreme Court. The DC Court had already dismissed some of the complaints as frivolous, forwarding only those thought to have substance.
  4. It turns out the ABA had questions about Kavanaugh in his 2006 confirmation hearings as well. They downgraded his rating from “well qualified” to just “qualified,” which is still positive. Their change was based on evaluations of Kavanaugh’s temperament, where he was called “unprepared” and “sanctimonious,” and where his ability to be balanced and fair was questioned.
  5. Kavanaugh’s testimony this week even turned some of his long-time friends and colleagues (both Republican and Democrat) against his nomination.
  6. Trump mocks Christine Blasey Ford IN A CAMPAIGN RALLY. I don’t know what’s worse, the way he mocked her or the way the crowd cheered and then yelled “Lock her up!” At any rate, Trump lied about what Blasey Ford could and could not remember, and the crowd ate it up.
  7. Both Jeff Flake and Susan Collins denounce Trump for mocking Blasey Ford.
  8. The GOP accuses Democrats of using and dumping Blasey Ford. Meanwhile, Republicans have been following Trump’s lead by discrediting and mocking her.
  9. Sarah Huckabee Sanders defends Trump in a press briefing the next day, saying that he was only stating the facts.
  10. And then Trump mocks Al Franken for folding like a wet rag when accused of grabbing several women’s butts. This is how Trump feels about people who take responsibility.
  11. 2,400 law professors sign a letter outlining why Kavanaugh shouldn’t be confirmed.
  12. Former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens says Kavanaugh shouldn’t be confirmed. Stevens first supported Kavanaugh, but changed his mind after Kavanaugh’s partisan statements during his testimony this week.
  13. The National Council of Churches calls on Kavanaugh to withdraw.
  14. Senator Ben Sasse (R-Nebraska) says Trump should’ve nominated someone else, gave an impassioned speech about the #MeToo movement and sexual assault, and then voted to confirm Kavanaugh.
  15. Kavanaugh writes an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal apologizing for his behavior in front of the Senate. He claims he was overcome, even though he read a planned opening statement.
  16. Senators are allowed to view the FBI reports in a sealed room, one at a time and then in groups.
  17. Chuck Grassley releases an executive summary of the FBI report (though I don’t know who wrote the summary). The summary says their interviews provided no corroborating evidence, but Republicans start saying that the interviews refuted Blasey Ford’s account. Tip: Not corroborating something is not the same as refuting it.
  18. Eight Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee ask Chuck Grassley to correct the record when he says that there was no sign of any inappropriate sexual behavior or alcohol abuse in any of the six FBI reports on him. Those Democrats say that information is not accurate. But we’ll never know unless the information becomes public.
  19. Republicans say the FBI report was thorough; Democrats say it was incomplete.
  20. Emotions continue to escalate (I didn’t think they could get much higher than the previous week), and both pro- and anti-Kavanaugh protests pop up across the country. Hundreds of anti-Kavanaugh protestors are arrested in DC. My favorite protest is the kegger they throw outside of Mitch McConnell’s office. I like beer.
  21. Susan Collins and Joe Manchin, who are two of the key votes, say they’ll vote to confirm Kavanaugh. Heidi Heitkamp says she’ll vote no, and Jeff Flake, despite all his reservations, votes yes.
  22. The ABA’s Standing Committee on the Federal Judiciary revisits it’s evaluation of Kavanaugh’s rating based on his temperamental testimony this week.
  23. Trump threatens Alaskan Senator Lisa Murkowski’s re-election chances, saying that she’ll never recover from her “no” vote (which was actually a “present” vote). Trumps adds that he’s very popular in Alaska.
  24. Trump says it’s a scary time for men and boys right now because of all these accusations. I guess it’s a scary time if you have something to hide.
  25. And after all that turmoil, Brett Kavanaugh is confirmed to the Supreme Court by the narrowest margin for a Supreme Court Justice in over 130 years. The vote was 50-48. If Manchin would’ve voted no, Mike Pence would’ve come in to cast the deciding vote.
  26. There’s already an effort to drum up support to impeach Kavanaugh, so now’s a good time to remind everyone how hard that is. Even if it gets through the House, it would never pass the threshold in the Senate.
  27. And just a reminder, Blasey Ford still has been unable to return to her home due to threats. Remind me again why victims don’t come forward?

Healthcare:

  1. The EPA proposes loosening restrictions on radiation. Their announcement includes assessments from scientific outliers who say a little radiation could be good for human health. Even though very small amounts of radiation are known to cause cancer.

International:

  1. Mike Pompeo announces that the U.S. is ending the Treaty of Amity, a 1955 treaty with Iran, after the UN tries to use the treaty as a basis for ordering the U.S. to ease up on sanctions for humanitarian goods.
  2. John Bolton later says that the U.S. will also pull out of a dispute resolution protocol from the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations. He bases this move on a challenge from the Palestinian Authority of our decision to move our Israel embassy to Jerusalem.
  3. Mike Pence gives a speech at the Hudson institute designed to move American public sentiment against China and to support the idea that they’re trying to meddle in our elections using economics because they don’t like Trump and want a different American president.
  4. The U.S. accuses Russia of building a missile system that could launch nuclear weapons to Europe and Alaska. The development of such a system was banned under a Cold War treaty.

Legislation/Congress:

  1. California has now passed over 1,000 new laws this year, including several aimed at recovering some of the regulations Trump has dissolved at the federal level around issues like net neutrality, energy and climate, gun control, and #MeToo.

Family Separation:

  1. An investigation by the Inspector General of the DHS finds that they never had a centralized database to track the immigrant families that they separated earlier this year. Instead, they were using spreadsheets that they compiled manually from emailed Word documents. That sure explains why they were unable to find family members in their computer system.

Travel Ban/Immigration/Discrimination:

  1. The Trump administration begins denying visas to same-sex partners of foreign diplomats, saying they must be married in order to receive a visa. Some of these diplomats come from countries where gay marriage is illegal, so they’re unable to get married.
  2. Federal prosecutors charge and arrest four members of the California-based Rise Above Movement for their intent to incite a riot and commit violence at the white supremacist rallies in Charlottesville last year. This group is small but violent, calling themselves an alt-right fight club.
  3. Federal inspectors at the Adelanto detention center in San Bernardino County, CA, find dismal conditions. They find 15 nooses made out of bed sheets hanging in cells, and they find health and dental care severely lacking. Adelanto is part of the GEO Group, a private, for-profit prison company.
  4. I’ve talked before about steps taken by the Trump administration to end Temporary Protected Status for immigrants from Sudan, Haiti, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras, and Nigeria. This week, a federal judge grants a preliminary injunction that blocks any deportations for now. TPS protections will continue while a legal case is decided, giving temporary relief to over 300,000 people who were threatened with deportation.
  5. Even though Congress placed a hold on the funds, the Trump administration moved forward with plans to give Mexico $20 million to deport immigrants so they can’t make it to our borders. Despite the hold, Trump transferred the funds anyway. Mexico says they never approved of this plan.

Climate/EPA:

  1. A federal court holds that the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument is in compliance with the law. Obama created the massive monument off of the New England coast in the Atlantic Ocean.
  2. Denmark says they’ll ban the sale of new fossil-fueled cars by 2030.
  3. California allocates $800 million to be able to store energy generated by solar panels to have more electricity available from solar in the nighttime hours.
  4. The EPA rewrites its rules about what scientific studies can be used in making public health policy against the wishes of its scientific advisors. Proprietary information can no longer be used, which will exclude findings from patients participating in private-sector studies.
  5. William Nordhaus and Paul Romer win the Nobel Prize for Economics. Nordhaus has been working in climate change’s effects on economy since the 1970s, and his model is widely used to show the relationship between the climate and the economy.
  6. A UN report on climate change expects an increase in global temperatures of 2.7 degrees F much sooner than previously thought. This would intensify sea level rise, droughts, wildfires, and poverty. They call for a 45% reduction of greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 and for halting them by 2050. Trump has said he’ll increase greenhouse gas emissions, though we’re already halfway to that 2.7 degree rise.

Budget/Economy:

  1. Amazon announces that they’ll start paying all of their employees at least $15 per hour.
  2. It turns out that most of the changes to NAFTA were already included in TPP. Trump and Republicans in Congress have repeatedly denounced those trade deals as two of the worst deals ever, but they’re calling the USMCA, basically a mashup of the NAFTA and TPP, one of the best deals ever. The dairy concessions from Canada are probably the biggest difference.
    • That means we could’ve pretty much gotten the same deal without alienating many of our trading partners and without giving China the extra trading power they obtained from the hole we left behind by cancelling the TPP.
  1. Unemployment hits record lows at 3.7%.
  2. The U.S. trade deficit expanded to 6.4% in August. Despite all the tariffs, the deficit was $53.2 billion, the highest level in six months.

Miscellaneous:

  1. Wikipedia says its authors shouldn’t use Breitbart and InfoWars as news sources on its pages. They call Breitbart unreliable, and say InfoWars is a “conspiracy theorist and fake news website.”
  2. In a press conference, Trump tells a female reporter “I know you’re not thinking. You never do,” while a group of men behind him chuckle and smirk.
  3. In the official White House transcript of the event, they change the word “thinking” to “thanking.” Mm-hmm…
  4. The Pentagon screening facility finds two envelopes suspected of contain ricin, and the Secret Service says that another suspicious envelope was addressed to Trump. A man was arrested in Utah in relation to the envelopes.
  5. The death toll in Indonesia from the earthquake and resulting tsunami reaches 2,000. Thousands are still missing.
  6. Trump falls back on that old tired narrative, claiming that Kavanaugh protestors are being paid by Soros. To which I say “Where’s my damn check, George ?”

Polls:

  1. Worldwide, 7 in 10 people have no confidence in Trump. Angela Merkel, Emmanuel Macron, Xi Jinping, and even Vladimir Putin all received higher confidence ratings.
  2. 37% of Americans have confidence in the Supreme Court, down from 60% in the 80s.
  3. This Quinnipiac poll on support for Kavanaugh’s confirmation is hard to distill, so here’s a link to the results, broken down by demographics. It’s pretty interesting.
  4. 41% of Americans oppose Kavanaugh’s nomination, with 33% supporting it.
  5. 45% of Americans believe Blasey Ford; 33% believe Kavanaugh.
  6. 56% of Republicans would still consider voting for a candidate accused of sexual harassment; 81% of Democrats say they’d definitely not.

Week 88 in Trump

Posted on October 2, 2018 in Politics, Trump

This has been an ugly and uncomfortable couple of weeks. With Ford’s triggering testimony, Kavanaugh and Lindsey Graham screaming and crying, and additional accusers trying to come forward, it’s been exhausting. I’m not even taking sides about who is telling the truth here, but the way this was handled was atrocious.

Here’s why every accusation needs to be taken seriously. Every 98 seconds, someone is sexually assaulted in America. That’s 881 times a day. 321,795 times a year. How many of those are reported? How many aren’t reported for years or decades?

For every 1,000 sexual assaults:

  • 310 are reported to the police
  • 57 of those lead to an arrest
  • 11 of those are referred to prosecutors
  • 7 of those lead to a felony conviction
  • Which leads to just 6 out of 1,000 rapists going to jail.
  • So for all those 321,795 assaults, just under 2,000 of the perpetrators pay for their crime.

 

Is it any wonder victims don’t come forward? How does a real man handle a situation like Kavanaugh’s? He mans up, admits his mistake, and learns from it. Cue Cory Booker.

And here’s what happened last week in politics…

Russia:

  1. Sam Patten takes a plea deal in Mueller’s investigation, pleading guilty to funneling Russian money into Trump’s inaugural fund. He also pleads guilty to failing to register as a foreign agent for his lobbying work for a pro-Russia Ukrainian oligarch.
  2. Before the Kavanaugh vote got delayed, Trump and Rod Rosenstein were supposed to meet on Thursday to discuss Rosenstein’s employment situation. Once it becomes clear the vote won’t happen, that meeting is postponed.
  3. Emails show that Roger Stone tried to contact Julian Assange of Wikileaks during the 2016 campaign.
  4. The House Intelligence Committee votes to release transcripts of over 50 interviews done during their investigation into Russian meddling into our elections. Intelligence agencies will redact these documents before releasing them.
  5. House Democrats plan to force a vote on whether to protect Mueller’s investigation by adding an amendment to a tax-related bill.

Legal Fallout:

  1. A court rules to advance a case filed by 200 Democrats against Trump for alleged violations of the emoluments clause.

Courts/Justice:

  1. Kavanaugh and his wife appear on a Fox News interview to defend his integrity. He claims that he wasn’t a drinker in high school and that he was a virgin all through school and many years after. He says he didn’t even come close to having sex. These things are refuted by his classmates and his calendar.
  2. Four of Kavanaugh’s Yale classmate sign a statement disputing the account of Deborah Ramirez, Kavanaugh’s second accuser. However, two of those former students subsequently asked to have their names removed from that statement.
  3. Trump defends Kavanaugh, saying that Ramirez was drunk and “all messed up” so her allegations can’t be trusted.
  4. Michael Avenatti’s client, Julie Swetnick, signs an affidavit saying she witnessed Kavanaugh and his friend Mark Judge spiking punch at parties to get women drunk and take advantage of them. She says they also drugged women, and that Kavanaugh was overly aggressive with and verbally abusive to women.
  5. Swetnick also recalls an incident where she was taken advantage of by several drunken high school boys at a party where she says Kavanaugh was in attendance. She doesn’t say Kavanaugh participated.
  6. Kavanaugh says (under oath) that he doesn’t know who Swetnick is, and that she’s lying.
  7. There are additional anonymous accusations, but they’re impossible to corroborate.
  8. Amidst the additional accusations, Mitch McConnell says the votes will happen by the end of the week.
  9. Over 100 Yale law students walk out of classes and have a sit-in in support of Blasey Ford.
  10. Protests at the hearings in D.C. have been a daily thing, with hundreds of protestors being arrested. Even female members of the House stand in silent protest in the back of the committee room.
  11. Attorneys for Blasey Ford send affidavits to the Senate from four people who say that Ford talked to them about her accusations against Kavanaugh before Trump nominated him to SCOTUS. Some say she told them about it long before.
  12. Blasey Ford agrees to testify to the Judiciary Committee on Thursday, with Kavanaugh testifying afterward.
  13. Two men come forward individually to claim that they, not Kavanaugh, are guilty of the assault. GOP Senators dismiss their claims.
  14. Susan Collins questions why the Judiciary Committee hasn’t subpoenaed Mark Judge.
  15. Republicans on the committee hire a female lawyer who prosecutes sex crimes to question Blasey Ford. The original plan was to have her question Kavanaugh as well, but after Kavanaugh’s passionate and emotional opening, Republican Senators start asking their own questions.
  16. Lindsey Graham and Kavanaugh both scream at Democrats on the committee, accusing them of being behind Blasey Ford’s allegations and saying this is a coordinated smear campaign.
  17. Kavanaugh references the calendars he kept in 1982 as proof that he wasn’t at the party. In his Fox News interview, he said he didn’t drink in school, but his calendar was marked with dates with his buddies to drink beer.
  18. In their testimony, Blasey Ford says she’s 100% sure that Kavanaugh attacked her and Kavanaugh says he’s 100% sure he didn’t. So there we are.
  19. Blasey Ford did answer all questions she could and was fairly respectful to the committee; Kavanaugh didn’t answer all the questions directly and was fairly combative and angry.
  20. The committee plans to vote on Brett Kavanaugh the day after Blasey Ford and he both testify.
  21. Here’s what the oldest of the white men on the committee think about victims of assault:
    • When a women tells Lindsey Graham that she was raped, he walks by and says “I’m sorry, tell the cops.”
    • Orrin Hatch says Ford is an attractive witness, pleasing. Like that’s got anything to do with this.
    • I looked for anything similar from Patrick Leahy, the Democrat’s old white man, but all I could find is that he calls her testimony compelling.
  1. Add Jeff Flake to the list of people getting death threats. In talking about it, he says “The toxic political culture that we have created has infected everything, and we’ve done little to stop. Winning at all costs is too high a cost.” Too right.
    • And speaking of Flake, hours before the vote to move Kavanaugh out of committee, Flake is confronted in an elevator by two victims of sexual assault. The confrontation is intense, as these women opened up about their stories, and Flake is visibly shaken. 
Later in the committee room, Flake taps Democratic Senator Chris Coons on the shoulder and the two go outside for a long talk.
    • That’s when Flake agrees to vote Kavanaugh out of committee under the condition that Mitch McConnell must promise to delay the floor vote for a week so the FBI can investigate. Lisa Murkowski also calls for a full investigation. Four Republican governors join the call for a delay in order to investigate: John Kasich (OH), Larry Hogan (MD), Phil Scott (VT), and Charlie Baker (MA).
  1. Some of the Democratic members of the Judiciary Committee walk out in protest before the vote.
  2. The committee votes along party lines to move Kavanaugh’s confirmation vote to the Senate floor. While at the same time…
    • The ABA, which originally gave Kavanaugh the highest ratings, calls for a delay in the Senate confirmation vote until the FBI can complete their investigation.
    • The Yale Law School Dean who endorsed Kavanaugh this summer calls for a full investigation.
    • The ACLU, which typically stays neutral on Supreme Court nominees, comes out against Kavanaugh’s confirmation.
    • The Jesuit Review pulls their endorsement of Kavanaugh (Kavanaugh had a Jesuit education at Georgetown Prep).
  1. Kavanaugh’s friend Mark Judge says he’ll cooperate fully with the FBI investigation. Judge’s ex-girlfriend also wants to talk to the FBI about her claim that Judge told her that he once joined a group of guys in taking turn having sex with a drunk woman.
  2. Democratic Senator Jeff Merkley seeks an injunction to stop a full vote on Kavanaugh due to the “unprecedented obstruction of the Senate’s advice and consent obligation.”
  3. Jeff Flake says that if Kavanaugh lied to the Senate, his confirmation is over. But we already know he lied about mostly little things and about some big things, for starters:
    • I got into Yale on my own (he didn’t).
    • I didn’t drink in high school (he did).
    • OK I did drink but it was legal (it wasn’t).
    • Holton-Arms girls didn’t hang out with us (they did).
    • Ford’s witnesses refuted her testimony (they didn’t)
    • I didn’t know about Ramirez’s allegations before the story came out (texts show he did).
    • I didn’t work on certain judge nominations (emails show he did).
    • I was unaware of any spying on Democrats under Bush (emails show he was).
  1. A Yale classmate of Kavanaugh’s writes an op-ed in the New York Times saying that Kavanaugh mischaracterized his behavior in school and that he drank, drank a lot, and was a mean drunk. The classmate also says that Kavanaugh started a bar fight that landed one of their friends in jail.
  2. Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee say they have had a hard time getting responses from Kavanaugh’s accusers, but recent emails show that a Republican aide refused calls from Deborah Ramirez and her lawyers.
  3. President George W. Bush starts calling up GOP Senators to urge them to confirm Kavanaugh.
  4. Texts show that Kavanaugh was working behind the scenes to convince his college friends defend him and not corroborate Ramirez’ accusations before she even brought them up, possibly as early as July. Kavanaugh has accused Ramirez of talking to classmates before the story broke, when it seems to have actually been him doing the talking.
  5. One of those friends gave the information to “Brett’s team” and to the Republicans on the Judiciary Committee. Another friend has been trying to get the texts to the FBI. One friend says that Kavanaugh reached out to her, worried that Deborah’s accusations would come out.
  6. The texts also show that Kavanaugh lied when he said the first he’d heard of this was when the story broke on September 30.
  7. In other SCOTUS news, a case coming before the Supreme Court could decide whether someone can be tried for the same thing at both the state and federal level. The precedent case, Gamble v. United States, says that they can; but the new case could change that. The outcome of this case could change Mueller’s strategy, since he might not have the promise of a state case against witnesses in the Russia investigation if Trump pardons them.
  8. After Blasey Ford’s testimony, calls to the National Sexual Assault Hotline were up over 200%.

Healthcare:

  1. Arkansas has a test program running to analyze the effects of work requirements on Medicaid. The Trump administration says those requirements will lift people out of poverty, but in the first month alone, 4,300 people were kicked off the program.
  2. The House and Senate both pass a bill that lets pharmacists tell customers whether it would be cheaper for them to pay out of pocket for medications instead of using insurance. How is it that they couldn’t before?
  3. It turns out insurance companies overshot their mark in 2017, raising their premiums too high. Premiums will likely go down some for the next enrollment period.

International:

  1. Trump discovers that his rally talking points don’t work on an international audience. His claim that no administration has done as much as his has done in two years plays well to his base here in America, but when he uses it in his opening speech at the UN, the world laughs at him. Trump always said the world laughed at Obama; now the world has laughed at Trump IRL.
  2. Trump later claims that they were laughing with him, not at him.
  3. When he repeats his claim that Germany will be totally dependent on Russian energy, the German delegation laughs at him. Of note, Germany has an ambitious program to transition to renewable energy sources.
  4. He says that he’s wiped out ISIS in Syria, but the Pentagon says there are still many threats and still much to do there.
  5. At the UN meeting, French President Macron slams Trump’s protectionist policies, criticizing Trump’s policies on Iran, climate change, the UN, migration, Mideast peace, and more. He lauds the continuation of the Paris accord, and suggests that we shouldn’t do business with countries that don’t comply.
  6. Even though Trump vilifies Iran, all other signatories to the Iran deal reaffirm their commitment to the agreement.
  7. Trump praises North Korea and Kim Jong Un, a complete about-face from what he said about him one year ago in this very venue. He says when he and Kim met, they fell in love.
  8. Trump says he declined a meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau that Canada says they never asked for.

Legislation/Congress:

  1. California follows Florida’s lead and signs into law new age restrictions on buying guns. The law also bans gun ownership for domestic abusers and for some people with a history of certain mental illnesses. The law increases training requirements for concealed carry permits and also includes red-flag restraining orders, which allow police officers to remove somebody’s weapons if they are deemed a danger.
  2. California signs net neutrality into law, reinstating the FEC’s previous rules under Obama. The Justice Department immediately threatens to sue.

Family Separation:

  1. DHS moves hundreds of detained immigrant children to a tent city in Texas due to overcrowding. Changes to immigration rules under Sessions have resulted in exponentially higher rates of detention, and they didn’t anticipate it well enough to be prepared for this. These are mostly children that they think will be released shortly.

Travel Ban/Immigration/Discrimination:

  1. An appeals court vacates a previous ruling that would have denied immigrant children the right to a court-appointed attorney regardless of whether they are seeking asylum.
  2. PayPal ends it’s dealings with InfoWars, Alex Jones‘ platform for conspiracy theories and hate speech.
  3. Trump announces a new policy that prevents non-citizen immigrants who use public benefits from obtaining green cards. These people must now choose between assistance they need right now and trying for a green card that will let them work legally at some point in the future. While this isn’t supposed to affect people with green cards who want to become citizens, many are afraid that using public benefits will count against them in their citizenship requests.
  4. A black female state legislator in Vermont resigns over ongoing racial harassment.
  5. Mike Pence legitimizes hate against the LGBTQ community by speaking at the Values Voter Summit.
  6. Trump backs down from his promise to shut the government down if he doesn’t get funding for his border wall, now promising to keep the government open.
  7. Representative Keith Ellison (D-MN) asks the House Ethics Committee to investigate claims by his ex, Karen Monahan, that he abused her.

Climate/EPA:

  1. A federal judge blocks the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service from removing endangered species protections for grizzly bears around Yellowstone National Park.
  2. The Trump administration predicts a rise in global temperatures of 7 degrees F (or 4 degrees C) by the end of the century. Instead of seeing this as a call to take action, they say the planet’s fate is sealed and there’s nothing we can do about it. Even though scientists know what we can do about it…
  3. A recent study shows that warming waters in the Antarctic are caused by human activity.
  4. The Northern Indiana Public Service Company announces a plan to close down all of their coal power plants and replace them with wind and solar within a decade.
  5. The EPA plans to eliminate the Office of the Science Advisor. This is a senior post that advises the agency about the scientific research on which health and environmental regulations are based. Their mission is to ensure that the agency’s policies are based on the highest quality research.

Budget/Economy:

  1. Trump finalizes his first bilateral trade deal. The deal with South Korea is not much changed from the agreement negotiated under Obama. It does open the South Korean market to more U.S. automobiles and excludes South Korea from steel tariffs. No U.S. automaker has come close to the existing caps, so this isn’t likely to give much of a bump to the auto industry.
  2. Jerome Powell, Chairman of the Federal Reserve, says businesses are increasingly concerned about the trade wars. They say there have been supply chain disruptions and increased costs as a result.
  3. Trump has said he’s turned the economy of West Virginia around, even though the state is one of two whose poverty rate has risen in the past year
  4. Canada and the U.S. agree to new terms for NAFTA. Mexico and the U.S. agreed on terms about a month ago. The new deal leaves much of the old deal in place.
  5. The Canada compromise includes giving the U.S. a slightly bigger dairy market, a slightly higher threshold below which goods can come from Canada duty-free, and protections from certain automotive tariffs for Canada. The biggest changes in the deal favors automakers in North America over Mexico.
  6. The updated deal will be called USMCA (United States, Mexico and Canada Agreement), because, you know, NAFTA was “one of the worst deals” in history (as was the Paris agreement, the Iran deal, TPP, and so on and so on).
  7. The House passes a tax bill that will make the previous tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy permanent. The bill would increase the deficit over 10 years by $631 billion, on top of the $1.5 trillion of the previous tax cut.
  8. The SEC orders Elon Musk to step down as the chairman of the board at Tesla, and forbids him from serving on the board for 3 years. They also fine him $20 million. He’s still the CEO though.
  9. Farmers say that Trump’s aide package won’t make up for the losses they’re seeing because of tariffs.

Elections:

  1. Trump holds a campaign rally in Las Vegas, where he again brings up his electoral college win, Hillary Clinton, and Obama. He paints Democrats as evil and laughs at their reaction to his election. But this could be any of his rally speeches.
  2. Candidates for Senate must file their financial reports electronically, which will make donor information publicly available more quickly.
  3. Ted Cruz got heckled out of a restaurant in D.C. by people protesting Kavanaugh. In response, Cruz’s opponent in the race for his Senate seat tweets that this is not cool and there needs to be some respect.
  4. Trump tells the UN that China is interfering in our 2018 midterm elections because they don’t want him to win (because he’s the first president to shake up trade). They’re interfering by targeting their tariffs strategically apparently.

Miscellaneous:

  1. A 7.5 earthquake and resulting tsunami hits Indonesia, killing more than 800 people.
  2. Raj Shah, the White House deputy press secretary, will leave his position after Kavanaugh’s confirmation vote.
  3. Representative Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) pawns himself off as a California farmer, and while his family did farm in the Central Valley for decades, they’ve since moved their farm operations to Iowa. AND sources say they employ undocumented workers (as does nearly every large farm in the area).

Polls:

  1. 52% of voters want Democrats to control Congress and 40% want Republicans to. With gerrymandering, though, it could still fall in the Republicans favor.

Week 87 in Trump

Posted on September 28, 2018 in Politics, Trump

High School yearbook photos of Christine Blasey Ford, left, and Brett Kavanaugh.

This is a really late post for the week ending 9/23/18. There was a lot of he-said/she-said, and the longer I let this post go, the harder it was to distill the facts around the Kavanaugh case. It also got harder to motivate myself as I watched not only old white men tear women down, but also white women. It devolved into a week of blaming the woman—the 80s are calling, they want their sexism back (sigh). We don’t know at this point the veracity of the accusations, but the first accuser told her therapist about it 6 years ago, and alluded to it to a friend previous to that. It doesn’t seem likely she’s been plotting Kavanaugh’s demise for that long.

Here’s what happened last week in politics…

Russia:

  1. Trump declassifies the documents around Carter Page’s FISA warrant and Bruce Ohr’s contacts with Christopher Steele. He also orders the release of James Comey’s text messages about the Russia investigation, notes from DOJ officials, and unredacted text messages from Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, and Andrew McCabe.
  2. In releasing the documents, Trump calls the FBI a “cancer in our country.” He also says he hasn’t read the documents (so why’s he so eager to release them?).
  3. By the end of the week, Trump takes it back in a tweet, saying that the inspector general of the DOJ will perform a review of the documents. Apparently, some people told him that releasing the documents would negatively impact the Russia investigation, and others said that it could be harmful to the people gathering intelligence for us and to their processes. According to Trump, he’s been listening to people he trusts and they told him to release the information. Who might those be? In his own words, Sean Hannity, Janine Pirro, and Lou Dobbs.
  4. Paul Manafort’s plea deal includes wording that could limit the impact of a presidential pardon should Trump decide to pardon him.
  5. Since Maria Butina’s arrest, Russian government officials have visited her six times and have communicated several times with the State Department about her.
  6. Trump again claims that intelligence used the Steele Dossier to get the FISA warrant for Carter Page, but it turns out that, at the time the FISA warrant was requested, the dossier was being held in the FBI’s New York field office in their organized crime unit. At the same time, intelligence agents in D.C. were already in the midst of investigating Russia’s meddling in our 2016 elections and were not aware of the dossier’s claims.
  7. Michael Cohen has already met with Mueller’s team several times to discuss the Russia investigation.
  8. Mueller is investigating $3.3 million in financial transactions between two of the people who organized the Trump Tower meeting in 2016.
  9. After first refusing to do so, the U.S. certifies a Russian plane under the Open Skies Treaty, allowing it to do a surveillance flight over the U.S. The treaty allows member states to fly unarmed planes over each other’s territories to foster “mutual understanding and confidence.”
  10. We learn that Russian diplomats at one point tried to smuggle Julian Assange out of the Ecuador embassy in London so he could escape the U.K. They planned to take him out in a diplomatic vehicle and then get him to another county that wouldn’t extradite him to the U.S.
  11. John Dowd helped pay Paul Manafort’s and Rick Gate’s legal fees while he was leading Trump’s legal team.

Courts/Justice:

  1. Trump rains some of his harshest criticism yet on Jeff Sessions, saying it’s so sad he doesn’t have an AG.
  2. A few Senators, including Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), want to delay Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation vote to give his accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, a chance to testify.
  3. Blasey Ford receives death threats, and is forced to move her family out of their home for their safety. Their children are staying somewhere separate from them for security reasons. She was doxxed and impersonated online.
  4. And then Kavanaugh and his wife receive death threats and vicious voice mails and emails.
  5. Senators Dianne Feinstein and Susan Collins have also been receiving death threats.
  6. Several men in the Senate blame Blasey Ford for not coming out with her accusations earlier. How many more experts can explain why victims of sexual attacks don’t come forward?
  7. Lawyers for Ford request a nonpartisan FBI investigation into her accusations against Kavanaugh before she testifies to the committee. She says she’s fully willing to cooperate with the FBI. Her lawyers say that based on what Republicans on the committee have already said publicly about Ford, they’ve already made up their mind and can’t perform an objective investigation.
  8. Mitch McConnell calls for the judiciary committee to rush this through, and Republicans on the committee push a vote all week. Actually, McConnell says “ram” it through. Poor choice of words in this type of case.
  9. McConnell also indicates he doesn’t care to get to the truth of this. He says that no matter what happens, Kavanaugh will be seated on the Supreme Court bench.
  10. Ben Carson says that socialists are behind all the accusations against Kavanaugh.
  11. Republicans on the judiciary committee want Kavanaugh and his accuser to testify on Monday in the same place at the same time. Grassley scheduled this without consulting Blasey Ford on her availability or willingness.
  12. Blasey Ford is willing to talk to the committee, but not in a hearing. She has security concerns and thinks setting a Monday date will rush the investigation. Republicans on the committee continue to push her to appear.
  13. Mark Judge, who was allegedly in the room when the alleged attack happened, refuses to testify. Judge is the author of “Wasted: Tales of a GenX Drunk” where he talks about his high school days of drinking and debauchery, his alcoholism, and his subsequent recovery. He mentions someone named Bart O’Kavanaugh as a fellow drunk.
  14. A close friend and advisor to Kavanaugh, Ed Whelan, lays out a series of tweets suggesting he found evidence that would exonerate Kavanaugh and shame Senator Dianne Feinstein.
  15. Whelan then tries to throw the blame on a different classmate, who is now a middle school teacher. Jesus. Let’s just throw the victim under the bus along with some random classmate. He later apologizes for it and deletes the tweets, but friends say he spent a few days coming up with the idea. That’s plenty of time to think about what you’re doing.
  16. Trump has been uncharacteristically reserved about the accusations, but is now defending Kavanaugh and discrediting the victim.
  17. In 2015, Kavanaugh said in a speech that they had a saying, “What happens at Georgetown Prep, stays at Georgetown Prep.” And then he added “I think that’s been a good thing for all of us!” Seems possible.
  18. Chuck Grassley officially delays the committee vote on moving Kavanaugh’s nomination forward.
  19. Blasey Ford says she’s willing to talk to the judiciary committee as long as they provide fair and safe terms. Her team of lawyers express a strong desire to the committee that they have an FBI investigation first.
  20. Chuck Grassley schedules hearings on her accusations for Monday and gives her a deadline of 10:00 on Friday to confirm that she’ll be there. Otherwise, they’ll go forward with their vote. After some tense wrangling on Friday and Saturday, Blasey Ford agrees to testify on Thursday. A few Republican Senators say that her testimony will not change their vote, so there’s nothing that will change their minds.
  21. Kavanaugh agrees to turn over his calendars from 1982 to prove that he didn’t have the party marked on them. A) Who keeps a calendar from 35 years ago? and B) What kind of teen puts an illicit party in their calendar?
  22. Trump says that investigating allegations like this is not really the FBI’s thing. But it’s exactly their thing, and several officials say it’s common for the FBI to do this. They did it for Anita Hill.
  23. A former classmate of Blasey Ford’s posts on Facebook that she heard about the assault at the time, and then deletes the post and says she won’t say any more about it.
  24. Lawyers for one of her witnesses draft a letter saying the witness wasn’t there, but the witness says they drafted it without her informing them.
  25. In response to the letter signed by 65 women attesting to Kavanaugh’s character, over 300 people who grew up in Ford’s and Kavanaugh’s childhood neighborhoods sign a letter supporting Ford. Nearly 1,000 former students from Holton-Arms sign a similar letter.
  26. Trump joins Republican legislators in questioning Blasey Ford’s credibility. White House officials have said they’ve been struggling to prevent Trump from criticizing her, but “you have no idea” how hard it is.
  27. McConnell calls Trump to tell him that his tweets are not helpful.
  28. A second accuser comes forward to say that Kavanaugh waved his penis in her face at a college party while she was drunk.
  29. The White House and Kavanaugh say she, too, is lying.
  30. And then Michael Avenatti, Stormy Daniels’ lawyer, tweets that he has another accuser, warns Kavanaugh to be careful what he says, and gives a list of questions the Senate committee should be asking.
  31. The percent of voters who oppose Kavanaugh’s confirmation increases over the week, while the percent who support it decreases to the low 30s.
  32. Six Senate Democrats request a court order to compel the National Archives and Records Administration to turn over Kavanaugh’s records.
  33. In other justice news, there was lots of Rod Rosenstein drama this week. First we hear that Rosenstein suggested secretly recording conversations with Trump. Then we hear he resigned. Then we hear it’s because Trump was going to fire him. And then we hear that none of this is true. And then Rosenstein went to the White House expecting to resign, but somehow it didn’t happen. The DOJ drafted an announcement of his departure naming his successor, and then THAT didn’t happen. Oh, and in the middle of all this, Republicans in Congress renewed efforts to impeach him.

Healthcare:

  1. An Illinois law that will expand Medicaid and state-run health insurance to cover abortions was challenged by anti-abortion groups. A lower court dismissed the case, and this week, the appellate court upholds that dismissal.

International:

  1. Kim Jong Un meets with South Korea’s Moon Jai-in in Pyongyang to continue their talks. The two countries have agreed to an era of “no war.”
  2. Even though North Korea said they’d denuclearize and that they destroyed their primary test site, U.S. officials say they have proof that North Korea is secretly continuing its nuclear program. Hopefully not the same kind of proof that led to the Iraq war.
  3. On the other hand, North Korea says they’ll only do these things if they get concessions from the U.S., concessions that aren’t very likely to happen.
  4. Kim Jong Un wants Mike Pompeo to come back for meetings, and also wants to have another summit with Trump. There hasn’t been any progress in the negotiations between the U.S. and South Korea since June.
  5. Poland wants to develop a U.S. military base in their country to deter Russian occupation.
  6. Trump suggests to Josep Borrell, Spain’s Foreign Minister, that they should build a wall across the Sahara to mitigate the migration crisis in Europe. Spanish diplomats say that there are considerable differences between their situation and ours, but Trump doesn’t think the Sahara is bigger than our border. It is. By about 50%. And it goes through several countries.
  7. A report from the State Department says that global terrorism is down 23%. They also point the finger at Iran for being the biggest state sponsor of terrorism.
  8. The EU rejects Britain’s proposal for the Brexit process. Britain is trying to drive a wedge between EU nations in order to get approval.
  9. The stock market is at record highs and unemployment is at 48-year lows, and yet the wealth gap keeps growing. Upper income households are increasing their income at a higher rate than middle and lower income households. Probably because the top 10% owns about 84% of the wealth of the stock market.
  10. Real earnings are about the same now for the typical American household as they were before the Great Recession.
  11. Fourteen countries that are trading partners with the U.S. have either filed a complaint against us with the World Trade Organization or have joined an existing complaint.
  12. An attack on a military parade in Iran kills 25 and injures at least 70. Iran blames Arab states for the attack. The Ahvaz National Resistance (an Arab opposition group in Iran) claims responsibility.
  13. Mike Pompeo is working to build back up the State Department, and has doubled the number of promotion opportunities for high-level diplomats.
  14. Trump places sanction on the Chinese military for purchasing military equipment from Russia.

Legislation/Congress:

  1. A Republican lawmaker in Pennsylvania proposes a law that would prevent teachers from talking about politics in school. They’d be unable to discuss legislation, regulations, executive orders, or even court cases involving government. Because why would kids need to know anything about government?

Family Separation:

  1. Why do we still have children in immigration detention centers when they could be released to sponsors? Because 41 undocumented immigrants who did come forward to care for a child were arrested by ICE. ICE is using this as an opportunity to review the people who come forward and to arrest more undocumented immigrants. No undocumented relatives will step up anymore, leaving us with over 100 children in detention at a cost of almost $80,000 a day. Or almost $560,000 a week. Or almost $17 million a month.

Travel Ban/Immigration/Discrimination:

  1. More information surfaces about where the administration will get the additional money needed to fund the increased ICE costs due to the high number of detainees. It’s not unusual to move money around within a department, but these funds are coming from HIV programs, Head Start, the CDC, Medicare and Medicaid operations, mother and child health programs, the National Cancer Institute, and the National Institutes of Health.
  2. A Supreme Court decision last June threw a wrench into Trump’s decoration machine. The court threw out a case against an undocumented worker because immigration agents left his court date blank on his notice to appear. Apparently, this is a routine thing; and now tens of thousands of court cases could be thrown out or delayed.
  3. Trump reduces the number of refugees the U.S. can accept in 2019 even further, down to 30,000. He reduced it to 45,000 in 2017, down from Obama’s level of 110,000. Compare this to the EU’s acceptance of 538,000 refugees in 2017. The EU’s population is less than 2 times ours, and they accepted 12 times as many refugees as we did.
  4. Trump asks the Supreme Court to block a federal court order demanding that he release emails and documents about his decision to ban transgender people from the military.
  5. A district court allows a case against Trump‘s policy to discharge all HIV-positive service members. Both the motion to block the policy and the complaint that the policy is discriminatory can move forward in the courts.
  6. All border wall prototypes fail CBP tests, with all being breachable and one nearly collapsing.
  7. An email shows that Army Reserve lawyers were asked to review immigrant recruit records for any signs of past criminal activity. The reason given in the emails is that ‘[Immigrant recruits] are currently suing the federal government claiming they were wrongfully discharged from the Army.’ Days later the Army reversed their decision to expel dozens of immigrant recruits. Dozens of dismissals had already been overturned.
  8. Jeff Sessions announces new guidelines that limit immigration judges‘ ability to dismiss deportation cases.

Climate/EPA:

  1. Hurricane Florence continues to devastate North Carolina with flooding. So far, over 3.4 million chickens and turkeys are dead, and at least 5,000 pigs are.
  2. Trump officially reverses Obama’s methane limit regulations on oil and gas wells. Cue the lawsuits.

Budget/Economy:

  1. Trump places tariffs of 10% on $200 billion worth of Chinese goods. So China imposes tariffs on $60 billion of U.S. goods. So Trump threatens to impose tariffs on all remaining Chinese goods. We got ourselves a trade war.
  2. Jack Ma, found of Alibaba, reverses his plans to create 1 million jobs in the U.S., citing the trade conflict as the reason.
  3. The Senate passes a short-term spending bill to avoid a government shutdown. The bill, which avoids the fight over funding for a wall on our southern border, takes us through December 7th.
  4. About 20 of the 70 highest paid HUD employees have no housing policy experience. Sixteen them worked on either Trump’s campaign or Ben Carson’s, or they have family ties to them.
  5. The deficit for the 11 months ending in August surpasses CBO estimates rising to $898 billion (note: the fiscal year ends in September). Federal spending rose 7%, while revenue only rose 1%. The deficit for the same period the year before was $224 billion lower. For comparison, the deficit for the entire fiscal year 2016 was $350 billion lower.
  6. The U.S. and Mexico are prepared to move forward on their NAFTA agreement without Canada if they don’t meet the October 1 deadline. This comes from a White House official, and we’ve heard this threat before.

Elections:

  1. Trump does Florida’s GOP gubernatorial candidate, Ron DeSantis, no favors when he berates him for disagreeing with Trump on the number of casualties from Hurricane Maria.
  2. As for DeSantis, he can’t get away from being associated with racism. One of his campaign allies tweets about Obama, “FUCK THE MUSLIM NIGGER.”
  3. A federal judge denies a motion to make Georgia change their voting system from an electronic system to a paper-ballot system. The judge says it would cause too much chaos, but that Georgia must do something to shore up its electoral security.
  4. At least two prominent Republican politicians in Kansas (including the current governor) throw their support behind the Democratic candidate for governor, Laura Kelly. Kelly is running against voter-fraud evangelist Kris Kobach.
  5. The Supreme Court refuses to stay a lower courts decision that certain non-profits must release donor information. This could throw a wrench in some groups’ plans for political ads and campaigns.

Miscellaneous:

  1. A homeless man kills a pro female golfer, who was also an immigrant from Spain, while she’s out golfing by herself. Why do I mention this? Because conservative news politicized the killing of Mollie Tibbetts by an immigrant; and while they reported on this killing, they didn’t politicize it in any way.
  2. Well, this took an unexpected turn. Cody Wilson, the guy who put instructions for printing untraceable 3-D guns on the internet is charged with the sexual assault of a minor. He’s arrested after a short stint hiding out in Taiwan. Turns out he’s also a racist who started a racist, hate-speech site called Hatreon.
  3. Trumps wants outgoing Republican Representative Darrell Issa to head the U.S. Trade and Development Agency. Issa’s history of holding endless investigations into Obama administration officials might get in the way of a confirmation in the Senate.
  4. There are three mass shootings within 24 hours of each other. There were injuries but no deaths except the shooters in the Wisconsin and Pennsylvania shootings. In Maryland, the shooter killed four including herself, and injured three others. Female mass shooters are extremely rare.
  5. An employee at a New York daycare stabs five people, including two newborns and an infant. All are in critical but stable condition. The daycare appears to be unlicensed.

Polls:

  1. 40% of evangelicals with favorable views of Trump say there is nothing he could do that would change their minds about him.
  2. 75% of evangelicals say they support Trump.

Week 86 in Trump

Posted on September 17, 2018 in Politics, Trump

Hurricane Florence hits the East Coast hard this week. I’m not blaming the victim, but North Carolina probably could’ve been more prepared for the flooding. In 2012, they didn’t like a scientific study outlining the predicted sea level rise for their coasts. So their state legislature passed a law that says “no rule, policy, or planning guideline that defines a rate of sea-level change for regulatory purposes shall be adopted.” Sea levels in some areas of the East Coast have been rising about an inch a year, and climate scientists predict that hurricanes will continue to become stronger with more rain. Coastal areas have no choice but to develop climate change mitigation policies, because even if we completely halt greenhouse gas emissions, the climate will continue to heat up for a while.

Here’s what else happened this week in politics…

Missed from Last Week:

  1. Atlanta mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms ended the city’s ties with ICE. The city will no longer hold detainees in city jails, but will help support families that were separated and then reunited.

Russia:

  1. Trump is expected to declassify documents around the FISA warrant against Carter Page and around Bruce Ohr’s contact with Christopher Steele. He thinks doing this will taint Mueller’s investigation, but he should tread cautiously. When they’ve leaked supporting documents in the past, it’s only bolstered Mueller’s case.
  2. The lawyers for the DNC lawsuit against Russian operatives say that Joseph Mifsud has gone missing. Mifsud is the Maltese professor who told George Papadopoulos that Russians had dirt on Hillary.
  3. After being found guilty on eight counts in his first trial, Paul Manafort agrees to a plea deal with Mueller in his second court case. He pleads guilty to cheating the IRS out of $15 million and to lying to cover it up.
  4. Manafort had been charged with six additional crimes, which could still be brought up later at the state level. He did admit in his plea deal to committing every crime he was charged of, including those that resulted in a hung jury in the first trial.
  5. The plea agreement also describes Manafort’s lobbying activities for the Ukraine. In the process of trying to sway government and public support for specific Ukraine politicians, he planted “some stink” on political opponents, smeared Obama cabinet members, and got a foreign official to deliver a message directly to Obama.
  6. Manafort admits to manipulating the American government and media to make millions for himself.
  7. As part of the plea deal, the government will confiscate $47 million in real estate, financial accounts, and insurance policies.
  8. Manafort is now a cooperating witness in Mueller’s investigation and has already been talking.
  9. A Russian activist and member of the punk protest group Pussy Riot is hospitalized and appears to have been poisoned.
  10. Every Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee votes down Democrats’ request for all documents and recordings related to Trump’s summit with Putin. Even our top intelligence official Dan Coates says he doesn’t know what was said in that summit.
  11. A batch of newly released text message between Peter Strzok and Lisa Page show them discussing how to shape media perception with all the leaks that were going on during their investigations. The texts also show they used authorized means (the FBI National Press Office) to correct misinformation.

Courts/Justice:

  1. A federal court rules that Betsy DeVos must implement Obama-era student loan forgiveness rules. The rules protect students who’ve been defrauded by colleges that don’t deliver on their promises. DeVos has delayed putting those rules into effect with the hope that she could eliminate the rules.
  2. The hearing for Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh hits another snag when Dianne Feinstein refers an allegation of sexual abuse against Kavanaugh to the FBI. The alleged abuse happened when he was in high school.
    • The victim wanted to remain anonymous, but comes forward once rumors start to spread. Members of the political right mock and threaten her, including Donald Trump Jr.
    • Notes from the victim’s therapist back up her allegation, and she’s taken a polygraph test.
  1. In response, Republicans release a letter signed by 65 women Kavanaugh knew in high school saying that he always treated them with the utmost respect. That was pretty quick work to find all those women, so we can only assume they saw this coming.
  2. The Senate Judiciary Committee delays their vote on Kavanaugh for a week.
  3. The Government Accountability Office releases a report saying that the DOJ isn’t prosecuting people who lie on their background checks in order to illegally buy guns. In the same period that the DOJ prosecuted 12 cases, Pennsylvania alone prosecuted 472.

Healthcare:

  1. Lawyers begin their arguments in a lawsuit brought by 20 mostly conservative states to completely scrap the ACA. The lawsuit was brought after Congress ended the individual mandate, and would put an end to protections for people with pre-existing conditions.
  2. The Urban Institute estimates that 17 million people will lose their insurance if the lawsuit succeeds. Almost half of all non-elderly Americans have a pre-existing condition.
  3. Patient groups sue the Trump administration over it’s expansion of short-term insurance policies. These insurance policies do not have to comply with the ACA’s protections for pre-existing conditions, preventive care, out-of-pocket limits, and so on.
  4. From 2010 to 2016, the number of uninsured Americans dropped by about half. It’s remained steady since then, with slight rises.

International:

  1. The Trump administration closes the Palestinian Liberation Organization’s mission office in DC. They say it’s because Palestine isn’t negotiating peace with Israel right now.
  2. John Bolton threatens that the U.S. will retaliate if the ICC acts on threats to prosecute Americans in Afghanistan for war crimes.
  3. Remember those weird brain injuries suffered by U.S. diplomats and personnel in Cuba and China? Intelligence officials now suspect that Russia is behind them.
  4. Trump cancels a planned visit to Ireland due to “scheduling conflicts.” But the announcement was made after there were mass protests against Trump‘s climate policies.
  5. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has begun rebuilding the State Department, which was decimated under Rex Tillerson. Pompeo is trying to bring back ex-diplomats and build up his ranks again.

Family Separation:

  1. Jeff Sessions defends his zero-tolerance policy toward asylum seekers as not only legitimate, but also moral and decent. Over 400 children separated at the border are still without their parents. And I wonder if he’s seen any of the videos of the children and parents describing their harrowing experience.

Travel Ban/Immigration/Discrimination:

  1. Sessions blames the number of asylum seekers at our southern border on Obama-era policies, ignoring the growing violence in the countries of origin.
  2. We learn that the Trump administration diverted $200 million from other DHS agencies to ICE to support ICE’s cost overruns due to housing and transporting such a high number of immigrant detainees. This includes $10 million from FEMA just before Hurricane Florence hit the East Coast. The cost of separating families isn’t just emotional; it’s hitting us all in the pocketbook.
  3. Congress has repeatedly warned Trump about ICE’s overspending and lack of financial discipline.
  4. And then ICE asks Congress for an extra $1 billion in funding so they can ramp up deportations.
  5. The U.S. is now detaining the highest number of immigrant children ever recorded, with a total of 12,800 children. This is 10,000 more than May 2017. (Note that these are mostly minors who crossed the border alone and were not separated from the parents.)
  6. Christian refugees are getting caught up in Trump’s efforts to stifle immigration to the U.S. The number of Christian refugees allowed into the U.S. is down 40% from last year.
  7. Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ) tells a group of students that it might be better to be raised in an orphanage than by LGBTQ parents.
  8. The Department of Education vacates a 2014 decision under Obama and reopens a seven-year-old investigation into whether Rutgers University allowed a hostile environment for Jewish students.
  9. The cartoon “Thomas & Friends” introduces two new female characters, one of whom is African. So NRA’s Dana Loesch thinks that’s ridiculous, and shows images of the Thomas trains dressed up in KKK robes. IDK why she’s getting so worked up over a kids’ show.

Climate/EPA:

  1. After an independent study finds that there were over 3,000 deaths in Puerto Rico following Hurricane Maria, Trump says those numbers are a lie and that Democrats are just trying to make him look bad.
  2. Hurricane Florence leaves 23 dead (so far) in North Carolina. Florence drops record rainfalls, up to 40 inches in some areas. At the same time, a typhoon leaves 100s dead in southeast Asia.
  3. Ocean Cleanup, a non-profit founded by a 24-year-old, deploys a 2000-foot floating boom designed to round up plastic debris in the Pacific Ocean. This is a test run to see if the boom performs as expected. Their aim is to clean up half of the Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch in five years. That means collecting around 44,000 tons of debris while minimizing the accidental trapping of marine life.
  4. The EPA proposes weakening Obama-era requirements for monitoring and fixing methane leaks. This is on top of the Department of the Interior working to repeal Obama’s limits on methane emissions for oil drilling.
  5. The previous head of the EPA, Scott Pruitt, is in talks with Alliance Resource Partners CEO Joseph W. Craft about becoming a consultant. Alliance Resource Partners is a coal mining company.

Budget/Economy:

  1. Ford cancels production of the Focus Active in China due to Trump’s tariffs, and then defies Trump when he urges them to move production to the U.S. They say it’s not cost-effective enough.
  2. Trump’s task force on analyzing the USPS delivers their report, but sources say Trump won’t make it public until after the election. I don’t know why.
  3. The GOP is creating their second tax cut bill, which would make some of the cuts from the last tax bill permanent. The CBO says that change alone will add $1.9 trillion to the deficit over 10 years. The Tax Policy Center says that the bill will add an additional $3.15 trillion in the decade after that.
  4. Marco Rubio says the latest GOP tax plan would necessitate cuts to Medicare and Social Security.
  5. The Tax Policy Center finds that the tax law gives far larger tax breaks to the richest among us (averaging $40,000 per year) instead of the middle class (averaging $980 per year).
  6. The plan is not likely to pass the Senate with the required 60 votes.
  7. Trump decides to impose his threatened tariffs on $200 billion in Chinese goods. More than 1,000 products will be affected, including appliances, furniture, toys, and more. The effects should hit just in time for holiday shopping.
  8. This week marks the 10-year anniversary of the start of the Great Recession. We are inundated with analyses of what happened and how we handled it.
    • Most analysts seem to think it won’t happen again thanks to financial reforms that were put in place, like Dodd-Frank and Base III.
    • The biggest risks are the rollbacks of parts of Dodd-Frank, debt levels in emerging markets, and cyber threats.
  1. House and Senate negotiators come to a funding agreement that should avoid a shutdown at the end of the month. The agreement includes restrictions on Trump’s plans for reorganizing the government (his 32 proposals issued in June). This is the first time Congress has formally blocked those changes.
  2. The amount of money that companies have repatriated to the U.S. as a result of the tax cuts is a mere fraction of what Trump predicted. He said companies would bring back over $4 trillion, and close to $5 trillion. But so far they’ve only brought back $143 billion with $37 billion more planned. Two-thirds of the returned money came from Cisco and Gilead Sciences.
  3. Median household income grew for the third straight year, with most of the benefit going to white Americans and men.

Elections:

  1. Obama is back on the campaign trail, and Trump reacts by tweeting out a bunch of misstatements about the economy and jobs. He then has his chief economic advisor, Kevin Hassett, do a press conference to defend him. Hassett uses some misleading charts to back up Trump’s assertions. You can easily chart economic data using the Federal Reserve Economic Data site. (Note: This is not to say that Trump doesn’t deserve any credit for the economy; just pointing out that Obama deserves it, too).
  2. George W. Bush is out on the campaign trail too, stumping for Republican candidates. This has to be the first time two former presidents are out campaigning.
  3. Florida Representative Ron DeSantis resigns from Congress to campaign full time in his run for Governor.
  4. Trump signs an executive order authorizing sanctions against any foreign country, business, or person who tries to interfere in our elections.
  5. An audio recording surfaces that shows the NRA might have violated campaign laws by giving Montana Senator Jon Tester’s opponent advance notice of their funding efforts to defeat Tester. The NRA cannot coordinate ad buys with a federal campaign.
  6. A judge rules that the Americans for Prosperity Foundation must release the names of their donors to the California Secretary of State per California law.
  7. 75% of the dark money spent in recent U.S. elections came from just 15 companies, and those same 15 companies are funding the 2018 elections as well. This is a direct result of the Citizens United decision. The two largest funders by far are the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Crossroads GPS. Here they are, along with their political leanings and funding, where available.
    • 45Committee: right, largely funded by Sheldon Adelson
    • 60 Plus Association: right, partly funded by the Kochs
    • American Action Network: right
    • Americans for Job Security: right
    • Americans for Prosperity: right, Charles and David Koch
    • Americans for Tax Reform: right, run by Grover Norquist
    • American Future Fund: right, once part of the Koch network but got kicked out
    • Crossroads GPS: right, founded by Karl Rove with large contributions from Steve Wynn and Sheldon Adelson
    • National Rifle Association: mostly right, funded by gun owners and manufacturers
    • U.S. Chamber of Commerce: typically right, funded by businesses
    • National Association of Realtors: mix of right and left, funded by realtors
    • League of Conservation Voters: typically left, focused on environment
    • Planned Parenthood Action Fund: typically left, focused on family planning and reproductive health issues
    • VoteVets Action Fund: left, funded by multiple sources
    • Patriot Majority USA: left

Miscellaneous:

  1. The DHS inspector general is investigating whether FEMA administrator Brock Long misused government vehicles. On the scandal scale, this seems pretty minor.
  2. Facebook allows a right-wing magazine, the Weekly Standard, to fact check articles (along with non-partisan organizations like Snopes and Politifact, but no left-learning ones). The first thing the Weekly Standard did was censor a negative story about Brett Kavanaugh and redirect readers to their own site.
  3. Trump achieves the dubious honor of telling over 5,000 lies or misleading statements since taking office.
  4. Retired Admiral Bill McRaven resigns from the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Board. McRaven has criticized Trump for revoking John Brennan’s security clearance.
  5. It looks like Facebook’s efforts to crack down on trolls, bots, and false news stories is working. They’re reporting lower user engagement with such posts. The downside is that they all seem to be moving over to Twitter, where engagement is higher.
  6. FEMA says it will test a new “Presidential Alert” system that would let Trump send personal text alerts to most U.S. cell phones.
  7. The president’s first tweet on the morning of the 18th anniversary of 9/11 is him defending himself in the Russia investigation and attacking the FBI. But a few hours later he tweets, “17 years since September 11th!” Getting off Air Force One on his way to honor the victims of Flight 93, he pumps his fists in the air.

Week 85 in Trump

Posted on September 10, 2018 in Politics, Trump

This week we learned that during Trump rallies they fluff up the crowd standing behind Trump before the rally, they make sure that the crowd will be enthusiastic, and they make people wear MAGA hats. And if you don’t comply they kick you out in the middle of the rally. Thank you, plaid shirt guy.

Here’s what else happened this week…

Russia:

  1. Giuliani says that the White House won’t let the final Mueller report be publicized after he is finished with his investigation.
  2. George Papadopoulos takes his plea agreement and gets sentenced to 14 days in jail, a $9,500 fee, and community service. His lawyer says that Trump hindered the investigation far more than Papadopoulos ever did.
  3. Papadopoulos says in a TV interview that members of the Trump campaign not only knew that he was working to set up meetings with Putin, but that they were supportive of those efforts.
  4. Protests break out across Russia over a proposed pension revamping that includes raising the retirement age. The protests are organized by opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s supporters.
  5. Trump’s criticism of our law officials now extends to Christopher Wray, director of the FBI.
  6. From recent interviews and subpoenas, it looks like the Mueller investigation is now focussing on Roger Stone.
  7. Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, who has previously denied Russian meddling in our elections, calls out Putin for meddling in our elections.
  8. The U.K formally charges two Russian agents with the poisoning of a former Russian spy in England.
  9. Federal prosecutors say their accusations against Maria Butina of exchanging sex for influence was mistaken and was based on joke texts between her and a friend.
  10. If you’re keeping track, here are the Russia investigation stats:
    • 35 people or organizations indicted
    • 191 criminal counts
    • 1 conviction
    • 6 guilty pleas
    • 2 prison sentences

Legal Fallout:

  1. Pursuant to Michael Cohen’s guilty plea, the New York attorney general opens an investigation into the Trump Organization and whether anyone there violated campaign finance laws. The organization’s CFO is already cooperating with investigations.

Courts/Justice:

  1. Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings for the Supreme Court begin, though Democrats on the judiciary committee try to postpone the hearing after receiving a dump of 42,000 documents the night before.
  2. Democrats are also trying to get a delay over questions about Trump’s legal issues. Committee chair Chuck Grassley refuses to hear Democrats’ arguments.
  3. Democrats are also complaining about transparency, since the documents released on Kavanaugh’s time in the White House were redacted by his former deputy, then by the Trump White House, and yet again by Grassley.
  4. Republicans say Democrats are obstructing the confirmation and also say they’ve released more records for Kavanaugh than for any other nominee. It’s reported that only 7% of Kavanaugh’s White House records have been released compared to the 99% that were released for Elena Kagan’s hearing.
  5. The hearings opened with protests and heckling from those opposed to placing Kavanaugh on the bench. Police arrest 22 protestors for being disruptive.
  6. In his opening statement, Kavanaugh calls Merrick Garland superb. He also said this about Garland while the Senate was refusing to even meet with him: Garland is “supremely qualified by the objective characteristics of experience, temperament, writing ability, scholarly ability for the Supreme Court.” This drives home the point that McConnell had no reason other than partisanship and hatred for Obama for not holding hearings for Merrick Garland.
  7. Of note, Kavanaugh has a very low approval rating from the American people for a Supreme Court nominee. It’s only at 37%, lower than Trump‘s.
  8. The Congressional Black Caucus, along with civil rights leaders, say Kavanaugh would threaten human rights if he’s confirmed. They point to the racist voter ID laws he’s voted to uphold. I point to the young immigrant for whom he voted to refuse a legal abortion.
  9. Leaked emails show that Kavanaugh:
    • Has questioned whether Roe v. Wade is settled law;
    • Has been critical of affirmative action and supportive of racial profiling;
    • Appears to have lied in a previous confirmation hearing about whether he knew about Bush’s warrantless surveillance program;
    • Lied multiple times in his confirmation hearings about whether he had received stolen documents outlining Democratic strategy at one point (documents show that not only did he receive the documents, but that he had an actual mole in Democratic circles who was providing them);
    • Lied about being involved with Charles PIckering’s nomination to an appeals court; and
    • Lied in a previous hearing about interviewing William Pryor, who was another judicial nominee.
  1. In his hearing, Kavanaugh refers to birth control pills “abortion inducing drugs.” This is from a case he presided over, and it’s not clear whether he’s quoting the plaintiffs here or if he actually thinks that’s what they are.
  2. The DOJ says that Jeff Sessions will meet with state attorneys general over whether social media platforms are suppressing conservative views. This follows a Senate hearing with Facebook and Twitter. A House committee is also holding a hearing on this alleged bias.

International:

  1. This isn’t political news, but it’s big news. The world’s largest anthropological museum burns down in Brazil, destroying millions of archeological and natural artifacts. Some of these artifacts were the only things that remained of lost cultures.
  2. Trump fills the Western Hemisphere Affairs office at the National Security Council with Cuban hard-liners. The latest addition, Mauricio Claver-Carone, is a pro-embargo activist, and is also dedicated to promoted human rights and democracy in Cuba.
  3. Later this month, Trump will preside over the UN Security Council. He’s already stirring up controversy by saying he’ll focus solely on Iran.
  4. And once again, fears of a far-right, anti-immigrant, protectionist, white nationalist take over in a European country are greatly exaggerated. Elections in Sweden maintain about the same level of support for most parties, though the far-right Sweden Democrats did make big gains. Power still rests with the Social Democrats and the Moderates.
  5. We learn that last year, the Trump administration met with Venezuelan rebels to discuss plans for a coup. One of the rebels is on our own sanctions list of corrupt officials. Nothing came of it.
  6. The Trump administration is expanding a drone program in Africa that the Obama administration had constricted due to collateral damage.

Family Separation:

  1. More than 400 immigrant children are still separated from their parents. Of these, around 300 of the parents are out of the country, either because they were deported or because the children came with other family members.
  2. 199 of the parents signed papers stating that they didn’t want to be reunited. Some might be valid, but most are suspected to have been coerced by immigration officials.
  3. 34 of the parents had red flags in their background checks or were deemed unsafe.

Travel Ban/Immigration/Discrimination:

  1. The Trump administration proposed rules blocking immigrants who have used any kind of welfare from ever becoming citizens. Even though these rules haven’t been implemented yet, immigrants are dropping out of these programs out of fear of a crackdown.
  2. Nike announces Colin Kaepernick as the new face of the company in ad campaigns. People cut the Nike logo off their shirts and burn their shoes in protest. Also, Nike sees a 31% increase in sales.
  3. And here’s another way Trump is getting rid of immigrants in the U.S. The administration has been trying to deport Vietnamese immigrants who are here under a formal agreement with Vietnam. They’ve been here for over two decades.
  4. It turns out that the Trump administration ignored a report from the National Counterterrorism Center that showed that refugees do not pose a domestic threat. They replaced it instead with a report written by immigration hardliners in the administration that over-inflate the cost and threat of refugees here. In the end, the administration didn’t cite security as an excuse to reduce the number of refugees we accept; instead they said DHS was shorthanded and couldn’t handle any more.
  5. The Trump administration proposes a regulation to overrule the Flores rule that blocks us from detaining immigrant children indefinitely. This is how they’re trying to get around the laws about detaining or separating families seeking asylum.

Climate/EPA:

  1. Eight states’ attorneys general bring a suit against the Department of the Interior over their narrowing of migratory bird protections. I thought Trump loved birds. Isn’t that why he doesn’t like wind turbines?
  2. Eric Buermann, the former general counsel of Florida’s Republican Party and the chair of the South Florida Water Management District, puts the blame for the current toxic algae bloom on Governor Rick Scott, who is running for Senate. Buermann says that Scott only recently started to address the issue because it’s become political and not because Scott wants to address pollution or climate change. The blooms are devastating Florida communities.
  3. I’m not sure where to put this since it covers a few things, but Trump plans to roll back regulations on safety inspections for underground mines, on offshore oil rigs, and on meat processing plants, all pretty dangerous occupations. The offshore rig rules were put in place to prevent another Deepwater Horizon disaster.
  4. A jury finds Plains All American Pipeline guilty of one felony and eight misdemeanors in the Santa Barbara oil spill in the waters off Refugio State Beach. The felony was for failure to maintain the pipeline. The misdemeanors were things like not reporting the spill right away, killing marine life, and lying about it.
  5. Tens of thousands of climate activists hold rallies and marches around the globe to demand action on climate change.
  6. Ryan Zinke opens 251,000 acres in 30 wildlife refuges to hunting and fishing.
  7. California Governor Jerry Brown signs a bill into law blocking Trump’s expansion of offshore drilling in the state. Brown also announces opposition to Trump’s expansion of BLM land for new oil drilling.
  8. The inspector general for the EPA releases their final report on the cost of Scott Pruitt’s protective services. The report says there is no justification for the costs.

Budget/Economy:

  1. Economists think that U.S. GDP growth might have peaked in the second quarter at 4.2%.
  2. The U.S. trade deficit is getting larger despite Trump’s trade wars and threats. It’s growing at its fastest rate since 2015, reaching new records with the EU and China.
  3. The new farm bill in the House would knock nearly 2 million low-income Americans off their SNAP benefits.
  4. The latest BLS report shows the economy added 201,000 jobs in August, and the unemployment rate held at 3.9%.
  5. Ahead of the elections, Republicans shelve a plan to make the limits on SALT (State And Local Taxes) deductions permanent. This rule hits people hardest in states with high property values and high taxes, and Republicans are afraid that pushing it through now would make it harder for Republicans to win elections.
  6. Trump is open to shutting down the government if a spending bill agreement can’t be reached in September.

Elections:

  1. Arizona Governor Doug Ducey appoints former U.S. Senator Jon Kyl to fill John McCain’s old Senate seat.
  2. ICE subpoenas voter information from the North Carolina Elections Board in an apparent hunt for undocumented voters. The Elections Board fights those subpoenas for both the state and county elections boards. The information ICE is looking for even includes what the ballots look like. So they want to know how people voted. What’s up with that?
  3. Due to the influx of Puerto Ricans into Florida, a judge rules that election ballots must be printed in both Spanish and English.
  4. Former president Obama hits the campaign trail to stump for Democratic congressional candidates. Republicans dig up their old vitriol against him.
  5. Even though a court ruled that North Carolina’s congressional maps are unconstitutionally gerrymandered and that they must redraw the lines for the midterm elections, the same court now acknowledges they don’t have time. So the elections will continue to be racially and politically gerrymandered for this election.

Miscellaneous:

  1. On Labor Day, Trump criticizes AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka in a tweet, saying he didn’t represent his labor union well over the weekend. Trumka had said that the things Trump has done to hurt workers are greater than the things he’s done to help them.
  2. Bob Woodward releases his new book, “Fear: Trump in the White House,” in which accounts from White House insiders give a anxiety-provoking glance into the inner workings of Trump’s White House.
    • I don’t typically like tell-all books, but Bob Woodward is a well-sourced journalist who’s written about many presidents (most of whom complain about his books, Republican or Democrat).
    • Woodward’s account portrays a White House staff that feels they must protect Trump (and us, I guess) from his worst impulses and that frankly seems to be performing a subversive coup by not allowing the president to fulfill his agenda.
  1. Here are a few highlights from the book (or so I’ve heard):
    • John Mattis had to stop Trump from ordering an assassination of Syrian leader Bashar Al-Assad.
    • Trump thinks that denouncing white supremacists and Neo-Nazis after the Charlottesville rally was one of the worst things he’s ever done. Apparently he was being sincere the first time when he said there were good Nazis and white supremacists.
    • Trump called Jeff Sessions “mentally retarded” and a “dumb southerner.” He denies this, saying it isn’t how he talks; but he’s on record saying both of these things at different times in the past.
    • To quote John Kelly (from the book): “We’re in Crazytown. I don’t even know why any of us are here. This is the worst job I’ve ever had.”
  1. Trump calls Woodward to discuss the book, and Woodward (after telling Trump he’s recording it) releases the recording of their discussion.
  2. A top official fans the flames by publishing an anonymous op-ed in the New York Times basically confirming the allegations in Woodward’s book. This official seems to think this little group of resistors on the inside are saving the world from Trump, but I think they’re only doing it to be self-serving. They‘re using Trump to get their own agenda through.
  3. Trump wonders if this might amount to treason and calls on the NYT to release the name of the author.
  4. Journalists and bloggers furiously speculate about who the author could be, while top officials furiously deny it was them. All distracting from the real news of the week, the Kavanaugh hearings.
  5. The op-ed leads a few Democratic officials to urge White House staff to invoke the 25th amendment if they think Trump really isn’t fit for office.
  6. After merely suspending Alex Jones for a week, Twitter bans Infowars and Alex Jones permanently for abusive behavior.
  7. Trump is on the campaign trail, stumping across the midwest. At one rally, he says that someday his speeches will be viewed as being as good as the Gettysburg Address. He also says the “fake news” bashed the Gettysburg Address. Huh?
  8. Trump suggests that protests should be illegal. This isn’t the first time.
  9. Omarosa Manigault-Newman says she recorded nearly every single conversation she had while working in the White House. She’s no fool. But where are the recordings?
  10. The latest rumor is that Trump is looking to replace Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis. I only report this because those rumors do actually seem to pan out. We’ll see.
  11. I’d like to catalogue this one under “What a fucking waste of money and time.” The Interior Department inspector general actually looked into inauguration crowd size drama, and found that a photographer had digitally edited the photos to make the crowd size look like it was larger than it actually was.
  12. Trump agrees not to enforce Stormy Daniels’ non-disclosure agreement, likely to get out of testifying in the case.

Week 84 in Trump

Posted on September 10, 2018 in Politics, Trump

This week was all about saying goodbye to Senator John McCain. I don’t remember politics without him being in the thick of it. In planning his services, he gave Trump some parting shots, excluding him from the memorials and final funeral and enlisting politicians from all sides in a final show of working both sides of the aisle.

Here’s what else happened this week in politics…

Missed from Last Week:

  1. 16 states filed a brief urging the Supreme Court to rule that the 1964 Civil Rights Act doesn’t cover rights for the LGBTQ community and therefore you can fire someone based on their sexual orientation or their gender identity. Or deny them housing. Or refuse to serve them. Or…

Russia:

  1. The judge grants a brief delay in Paul Manafort’s second trial because his lawyers haven’t had time to recover from his first trial. Remember, they could have done this all in one trial, but Manafort chose to have two trials instead.
  2. Manafort’s legal team was in negotiations with Mueller to avoid a second trial, but those negotiations fell apart.
  3. Earlier this month, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes travelled to the UK to dig up dirt on Christopher Steele. Nunes tried to meet with leaders of British intelligence agencies, but they were wary of Nunes’ intentions; so he ended up meeting with the deputy national security advisor, Madeline Alessandri.
  4. Trump tweets that China hacked Clinton’s emails and that they got classified info. That was just little false info he picked up from the Daily Caller.
  5. Trump accuses NBC of editing interviews with him. He’s specifically pointing at his interview with Lester Holt when he admitted that he had the Russia investigation in mind when he fired Comey. If there were any merit to the accusation, you’d think he would’ve brought it up when the interview aired.
  6. Now we know why Trump is working so hard to discredit DOJ lawyer Bruce Ohr. Ohr told lawmakers that two years ago, he met with Christopher Steele who told him that he thought Russia had leverage over Trump (or in his words, Russia had him over a barrel).
  7. Michael Cohen’s lawyer, Lanny Davis, is backing down from his claim that Cohen knows that Trump Sr. knew ahead of time about Trump Jr.’s meeting with Russian lawyers in 2016.
  8. George Papadopoulos accepts his plea deal and pleads guilty to lying to the FBI. He had previously been considering backing out of the deal.
  9. Sam Patten, a former associate of Paul Manafort and a former employee of Cambridge Analytica, agrees to a plea deal and to cooperating with Mueller’s investigation. He pleads guilty to failing to register as a foreign agent and lying to a Senate committee.
  10. Trump says that the Supreme Court Chief Justice should tell the FISA court to investigate the DOJ and FBI over their FISA requests during the 2016 campaign.
  11. Trump says he should get personally involved if the FBI and DOJ don’t do their job, accusing them of being biased against Republicans. Even though many of them are themselves Republicans.
  12. We’re coming up to 60 days before the election, so Rudy Giuliani says Mueller has to stop investigating. Which isn’t true since this isn’t a hard and fast rule. Even if it were a hard rule, Mueller could continue his investigation behind closed doors right up through the election as long as he doesn’t publicize information.
  13. Mueller says he’ll accept some answers from Trump in writing. Giuliani says they won’t be providing any answers to questions about obstruction of justice.

Legal Fallout:

  1. GOP Members of Congress circulate a spreadsheet itemizing the things they think Democrats might investigate if they win the House in November. Those things include:
    • Trump’s tax returns
    • Trump Organization, specifically around the emoluments clause.
    • Trump’s dealings with Russia and his preparation for the meeting with Putin
    • The Stormy Daniels payment
    • Trump’s firings of James Comey and of U.S. attorneys
    • The transgender ban in the military
    • Steven Mnuchin’s business dealings
    • The use of personal email by White House staff
    • Abused perks, mostly by cabinet members like Scott Pruitt, Ben Carson, and Ryan Zinke
    • That time he discussed classified information at a public dinner at Mar-a-Lago
    • Whether Jared Kushner is in compliance with ethics laws
    • Firing the EPA board of scientific counselors
    • The Muslim ban
    • The family separation policy and the failure to reunite separated families
    • The response to Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico
    • Election security and hacking attempts
    • Security clearances
  1. New York City fines Jared Kushner’s family business once again. This time, the fine is $210,000 for falsifying building permits. This brings the total the company’s been fined over the past few years to over $500,000.
  2. The above leads to the DCCC issuing warnings to other Democratic candidates about being doxxed.
  3. Lawyers for GOP Rep. Duncan Hunter accuse federal prosecutors of rushing to indict his client. Interesting tact, since they’ve been accusing prosecutors of dragging out this investigation over two years.
  4. Trump blames the DOJ for allowing the indictment of both Duncan Hunter and Chris Collins, two “very popular Republican Congressman” (according to Trump). He complained that these would’ve been two easy GOP wins. I guess it doesn’t matter if they might be criminals.
  5. An inspector general reports that Trump participated in a decision to cancel a 10-year effort to develop a new FBI headquarters in the suburbs of Maryland or Virginia. The plan now is to develop the headquarters right across the street from Trump’s hotel in DC, which turns out to be more expensive. Government employees were told not to talk about anything Trump said about this.
  6. According to a recorded conversation, Michael Cohen and Trump tried to buy up all the damaging information the National Enquirer had on him and was storing in their vaults.

Courts/Justice:

  1. Chuck Schumer makes a deal with Mitch McConnell to fast-track 15 of Trump’s lower court judicial nominees. We don’t know yet what he got in return, if anything. Unless he did it just so his Senators could have some time to campaign.
  2. A judge in Texas allows a defamation lawsuit against Infowars’ Alex Jones to move forward. The suit was brought by parents of Sandy Hook victims who’ve been harassed and further victimized by Jones’ supporters.
  3. Trump refuses to release over 100,000 pages of Brett Kavanaugh’s records during the time he worked in the White House under George W. Bush. Trump cites executive privilege as a reason.
  4. Marches and protests against Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court continue this week. 7 in 10 Americans are pro-choice, and don’t want him confirmed.
  5. Trump reconsiders firing Jeff Sessions. Again.

Healthcare:

  1. An appeals court rules that Alabama can’t ban “dilation & evacuation” abortions after 15 weeks. Note that over 90% of abortions do occur before 15 weeks so don’t use that method.
  2. Senator Kamala Harris (D-CA) introduces legislation with 13 other Democrats aimed at reducing the racial disparities in maternity care and deaths in the U.S. Currently there are about 40 deaths out of 100,000 live births for black women versus 12 for white women.

International:

  1. The Trump administration announces plans to cut all U.S. funding for the UN program that provides aid to Palestinian refugees. It’s pretty amazing that there have been Palestinian refugees for over 50 years now.
  2. We learn that Trump’s last meeting with Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe turned sour when Trump said he remembers Pearl Harbor and then criticized Japan’s economy and our trade deficit with them. Up to now, the two seemed to have a good working relationship.
  3. Trump blames China for the lack of progress in the negotiations with North Korea. He says China is applying pressure on North Korea.
  4. Trump announces that joint U.S. – South Korea military exercises will be temporarily suspended as a gesture of goodwill toward North Korea.

Legislation/Congress:

  1. California’s legislature passes a bill raising the age for buying assault weapons from 18 to 21. The bill also limits gun purchases to one per month per person.
  2. California passes net neutrality laws. The bill brings back the FCC guidelines put in place under Obama, but only for California.

Travel Ban/Immigration/Discrimination:

  1. Will the ways in which we can push Hispanics out of the country never end? Now the U.S. is denying passports to people with U.S. birth certificates, or even revoking them for people who already have them. The problem arises from cases in the 1990’s where some midwives admitted to falsifying birth documents, and now anyone born to a midwife is suspect. Some have been detained and some are in deportation proceedings. Even though there is no proof that they were NOT born here.
  2. Some passports were denied under Bush and Obama for the same reason, but a lawsuit ended the practice in Obama’s first year as president.
  3. California signs a bill into law overhauling its money bail system. The bill mostly gets rid of money bail and instead would use a system of probation departments to analyze flight risk and risks to the community. Opponents of money bail say this still won’t fix the problem.
  4. We’re on day 14 of the 19-day prison strike. Prisoners have stopped eating and working to protest unsafe and unjust conditions. Some immigrant detainees have joined in on the strike.
  5. The mother of a toddler who died after being separated and then reunited files a lawsuit against the city where her daughter was detained. Allegedly, the child became ill at the detention center, wasn’t given adequate medial care, and was released with a clean bill of health by a nurse who didn’t have the authority. Once reunited, the mother tried to see a doctor but was turned away several times.
  6. And finally some justice. A jury convicts a police officer in Texas of killing Jordan Edwards, an unarmed, 15-year-old black teen. The officer gets a 15-year sentence.
  7. A judge rules against Texas and other states trying to end DACA, saying they waited too long to file suit. The ruling doesn’t protect DACA long term, though, and the judge leaves an opening for the states to file again, saying that DACA is likely illegal.
  8. The backlog is growing for immigrants who have applied for citizenship and are still being processed. Part of the slowdown is a longer questionnaire created under Obama, and part is longer delays for getting interview appointments. Part of it could also be an increase in the number people trying to get their citizenship.
  9. The family of Mollie Tibbetts, who was allegedly killed by an undocumented immigrant, asks people to stop politicizing her death. Specifically, they say Mollie would be against using this as an excuse to hate undocumented immigrants.
  10. Ron DeSantis, who is the Republican nominee for governor of Florida, was an administrator of a Facebook page that features conspiracy theories as well as racist and anti-Muslim rhetoric. The page also attacks Parkland shooting survivors. Remember, this is the guy who said “we don’t want to monkey this up” by electing a black governor.
  11. 16 states have introduced legislation to restrict the use of non-disclosure agreements in sexual harassment cases.

Climate/EPA

  1. The California legislature passes a bill that would require the state to get its energy from 100% carbon-free sources by 2045. Several other states are considering the same, and Hawaii has already passed it into law. Orlando, FL, has the same goal for 2050.
  2. The BLM publishes a notice of intent to open 1.6 million acres of publicly held land in California to fracking and oil drilling. There’s been a moratorium on leasing federal land in California to oil companies.
  3. Despite the governor of Puerto Rico recently raising the official Hurricane Maria death toll to 2,975 (up from the previous 64), Trump says the administration’s response to the disaster was fantastic.
  4. The EPA considers reversing Obama-era limits on mercury emissions from coal power plants. The health effects of mercury exposure can include tremors, neurological damage, emotional changes, headaches, impaired mental performance, and muscle weakness, among others.
  5. According to a new study, hotter temperatures caused by climate change will make insects hungrier, causing diseases to spread faster and ruining crops.
  6. Over 100 schools in Detroit don’t have drinking water after tests find elevated levels of lead.

Budget/Economy:

  1. The U.S. and Mexico reach a preliminary agreement to update NAFTA, possibly without Canada. Trump wants to drop the name NAFTA because he calls it the worst trade deal in history and says it has a bad connotation.
  2. The TPP, the Obama trade pact that Trump disbanded, was basically a renegotiation of NAFTA but with nine additional countries. TPP and Trump’s renegotiated NAFTA are very similar with the exception of the North American auto industry. The updated NAFTA has tighter restrictions and better worker protections than TPP.
  3. Trump says the deal will be good for farmers and for manufacturers. (Note: I haven’t found a good analysis to verify this yet.)
  4. Stocks jump on Trump’s announcement that we’ve reached a trade deal with Mexico, calming down some of the uncertainty over trade. The NASDAQ hits an all-time high on the news.
  5. Mexico is a little more subdued about the agreement, saying that we’re continuing to make progress.
  6. Canada misses Trump’s Friday deadline to agree to the new terms of NAFTA. Both sides say negotiations are ongoing, though. Trump says he won’t give in to any of Canada’s requests and that this will all be on our terms.
  7. Seth Frotman, the student loan ombudsman at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, resigns in protest. He says that the bureau has lost sight of its mission to protect consumers, and specifically that they no longer protect students’ financial futures and are openly hostile to protecting student borrowers.
  8. The USDA announces it’s ready to accept applications from farmers who’ve been hurt by the tariffs. They play to make payments totaling $4.7 billion, their first installment of the $12 billion bailout.
  9. Trump cancels a planned cost-of-living pay raise for federal employees citing budget constraints. This is not something you do during a booming economy. Unless, of course, you already created a $1 trillion deficit by giving out big tax breaks to corporations and the wealthy.
  10. Trump also wants to get rid of locality adjustments for federal worker wages. These are cost-of-living adjustments based on the standard of living in the city in which a worker resides. Most large companies adjust wages this way.
  11. The U.S. International Trade Commission (USITC) blocks the Trump administration’s tariff on newsprint. They say there’s no sign of any unfair competition from Canadian imports.
  12. Trump wants to impose the additional $200 billion in tariffs on Chinese goods next week.
  13. Trump also threatens to pull out of the World Trade Organization, saying they’ve treated the U.S. very badly and that it’s all very unfair. How did the biggest economy in the world get such a persecution complex?
  14. Did you know that many restaurant chains have policies where they don’t allow employees to try for higher-paying jobs at other locations of the same chain? Now 15 chains have ended that policy. But that businesses continue to do things like this is why we still need unions.

Elections:

  1. The DNC voted to limit the powers of their superdelegates for the 2020 primaries.
  2. For a second time, a North Carolina court rules that the state’s congressional districts are unconstitutionally gerrymandered. The first time, the lines were deemed to be racially motivated; this time they were seen as politically motivated to benefit Republicans. They might have to redraw the lines, just 9 weeks before the midterm elections.
  3. The lawmaker responsible for the congressional districts lines said they were designed to maintain Republican dominance because “electing Republicans is better than electing Democrats.”
  4. The USPS accidentally releases security clearance paperwork for an ex-CIA operative who is now running as a Democratic candidate for Congress (Abigail Spanberger). The Congressional Leadership Fund, a GOP PAC closely linked to Paul Ryan, then uses some of the sensitive information in those papers against Spanberger’s campaign.
  5. I’m not sure whether this should go under elections or discrimination, but Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who was pardoned by Trump last year, lost bigly in the Republican primary for Senate in Arizona. Arpaio was convicted of criminal contempt of court for refusing to stop racially profiling Arizona residents.
  6. Trump meets with evangelical leaders and urges them to campaign for Republicans from the pulpit. He also says that if Democrats take over, there will be violence. Though he seems to be saying the Democrats will be violent. I’m not sure why the winner would be violent.
    • Just for the record, Trump did not overturn the Johnson Amendment as he’s claimed, and religious organizations still can’t endorse a political candidate.

Miscellaneous:

  1. Last week, Trump refused to sign off on the full White House statement commemorating John McCain. This week, he raises the flags back up to full mast. After blowback from that, Trump places the flag back at half mast and issues a full statement on McCain.
  2. Even the American Legion felt they had to write a letter to Trump urging him to follow protocol and to honor McCain.
  3. As the Senate reconvenes, Senators each take some time to honor McCain on the Senate floor. McCain will lie in state in the Capitol Rotunda until his interment.
  4. There are a number of memorials for McCain, including one in Arizona, one in the Capitol Rotunda, and the final one at the Washington National Cathedral.
    • Joe Biden is among the speakers at the service in Arizona.
    • Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan, and Mike Pence speak in the Capitol Rotunda.
    • McCain had requested former presidents Bush (Jr.) and Obama to deliver eulogies, as well as Joe Lieberman. A Republican, a Democrat, and an Independent. A quaint throwback to bipartisanship.
    • McCain’s daughter Meghan gives an emotional eulogy, crediting her father for making her tough and criticizing the divisive politics of today.
    • Many of the speakers at the events take the opportunity to support reaching across the aisle and to take jabs at the current administration.
  1. McCain is buried at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, MD.
  2. Republicans bury Chuck Schumer’s proposal to rename the Russell Senate Building after John McCain.
  3. Senator James Inhofe says McCain is partly to blame for Trump bungling how McCain was honored because McCain was too outspoken and criticized Trump. That’s not how this works.
  4. Trump was not invited to McCain’s funeral, but Ivanka and Jared Kushner did attend at Lindsey Graham’s invitation.
  5. Trump claims that Google’s search results are rigged against him to only show bad news about him. Looks like he got this from a PJ Media article that was covered by Lou Dobbs on Fox.
  6. Larry Kudlow says the administration is looking at whether the government should regulate Google search results (can you say ‘state run media’?). This largely came about because of social media’s efforts to stop the spread of fake stories and lies, which often come from sources Trump relies on.
  7. Don’t mess with Google. After Trump’s accusations, Google adds his picture next to the definition of imbecile.
  8. Trump announces that White House Counsel Don McGahn will leave in the fall. It’s not clear if it’s by choice or if he was fired.
  9. Robert Chain calls the Boston Globe to tell them they are the enemy of the people and says “we’re going to kill every fucking one of you.” The FBI arrests Chain, who owns several guns and a recently purchased rifle.
  10. A judge sentences two Reuters journalists in Myanmar to seven years each for possessing confidential documents. The two were investigating the killings of Rohingya Muslims in the country.

Polls:

  1. Trump’s approval rating dips back down below 40%.

Week 83 in Trump

Posted on August 27, 2018 in Politics, Trump

Duncan Hunter, Michael Cohen, and Paul Manafort

This is a big week for legal trouble for Trump‘s associates. Paul Manafort: convicted on eight counts. Michael Cohen: guilty plea on eight counts. Duncan Hunter: indicted on I-lost-count-of-how-many counts. Hunter was the second member of Congress to endorse Trump in 2016; Chris Collins, the first member of Congress to endorse Trump, suspended his campaign for Congress when he, too, was indicted. And even though legal minds think he inadvertently incriminated himself by admitting to campaign finance violations, Trump isn’t likely to be indicted and I don’t think he’ll be impeached. At least not in the Senate. Not unless it turns out he’s done something extremely egregious.

And so it goes on. Here’s what happened last week in politics…

Missed from Last Week:

  1. Trump signed legislation updating rules for how the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. (CFIUS) vets investments from foreigners in U.S. assets. CFIUS specifically addresses national security issues around foreign investment, and this legislation gives them more specific control, especially in investments that involve critical technology, infrastructure, and personal data management.

Russia:

  1. Russian hackers start to target conservative think tanks that have broken ranks with Trump. Microsoft announces that it discovered Russian hackers use imitation websites to attack groups that continue to push for sanctions against Russia or that push for examining human rights violations.
  2. A jury convicts Paul Manafort on eight out of 18 counts, with one lone juror holding out on the remaining 10 counts. Those 10 counts result in a mistrial, so prosecution can bring them up again at a later date.
  3. Manafort is convicted on counts of bank fraud, tax fraud, and concealing a foreign bank account. The maximum sentence for all this is around 80 years.

  4. Manafort is the first person in the Mueller investigation to be tried, and he faces a second trial next month on a second set of charges. The second set of charges center more around his work with Ukraine instead of around his shady financial activity.
  5. The reason there are two trials is that Manafort had the right to stand trial in the state where he lives for some of the charges. Mueller gave him the option of being tried just in Washington, or being tried in Virginia for some and in Washington for the rest.
  6. For the record: Manafort’s charges aren’t related to the Trump campaign, but to his work with Ukrainian leaders. Also, Manafort really was Trump’s 2016 campaign chairman for about half of his campaign, despite claims that he was barely involved.
  7. A juror in the Manafort trial (who identifies as a Trump supporter) says there was one lone juror holding out on convicting Manafort on all counts. The juror also said that she, herself, didn’t want Manafort to be guilty and that she thought prosecutor’s final aim was to get dirt on Trump.
  8. The juror says the evidence against Manafort was overwhelming, but that she and her fellow jurors had to lay out the evidence trail over and over again for the lone holdout.
  9. Rudy Giuliani tells reporters that Trump has asked him about pardoning Manafort.
  10. A judge throws out a defamation suit brought by three Russian oligarchs against Christopher Steele (yes, of the infamous Steele dossier).
  11. Mueller requests another delay in Michael Flynn’s sentencing, indicating that they are still in talks.
  12. Many of our CIA informants close to the Kremlin have gone silent since the expulsion of American diplomats from Russia, the outing of an FBI informant, and the poisoning of Russian dissidents.
  13. Reality Winner, who leaked a top-secret report on Russian hacking efforts to The Intercept, is sentenced to 63 months in prison.

Legal Fallout:

It’s getting a little hard to discern what’s related to Russia, what’s related to Trump’s campaign, and what’s just politicians being corrupt. So I created a new category for related legal mischief.

  1. While I was making a note that Michael Cohen is in talks for a plea deal, but that it could fall apart, Cohen did indeed plead guilty on eight counts. The counts include:
    • Tax fraud
    • Bank fraud
    • Campaign contribution violations
  1. Cohen says he took out a home equity loan, which he obtained fraudulently, to cover the payment. He then invoiced the Trump Organization for reimbursement.
  2. Interestingly, his plea agreement doesn’t say he has to cooperate with federal prosecutors, but he could still cooperate with Mueller.
  3. Cohen told the court that an unnamed candidate who is now president told him to pay $130,000 in hush money right before the election to keep Trump’s affairs out of the media. They both knew this wasn’t legal, as evidenced by the shell companies they set up to take care of the payment.
  4. Also, as we’ve heard, Cohen has tapes to back up his statements.
  5. After Cohen pleads guilty, Trump tweets that Obama’s campaign did the same thing. Only it wasn’t the same thing, and Trump’s campaign even had the same issues as Obama’s, just with the added fraud on top.
  6. Cohen deletes this tweet from 2015: “@HillaryClinton when you go to prison for defrauding America and perjury, your room and board will be free!” Ironic, right?
  7. Trump, who has denied paying any hush money, now says that he did it but it wasn’t wrong.
  8. The publisher of the National Enquirer, David Pecker, gets immunity in exchange for his testimony about the hush money payments, among other things (including keeping negative stories about Trump out of the news).
  9. Pecker and Cohen worked together to pay off Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal so they would keep quiet about their affairs with Trump. Pecker corroborates Cohen’s account.
  10. It’s reported that the National Enquirer had a safe where they kept information about both the hush money and the stories it killed in the run up to the election that were damaging to Trump. They don’t know if those documents were destroyed or just moved. People who work for the company say they kept information like this on many celebrities to use it as leverage over them.
  11. The CFO of the Trump Organization, Allen Weisselberg, gets immunity in exchange for his testimony about $420,000 in payments to Michael Cohen for him taking care of Stormy Daniels. Weisselberg has worked at the organization for decades.
  12. Representative Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.) and his wife are indicted on $250,000 in campaign finance violations. They used those campaign donations for personal use. Some of the things they spent the money on?
    • Dental work
    • Private schools
    • Theater tickets
    • Trips to Hawaii and Italy
    • An airplane seat for a pet rabbit
  1. But the most damning thing is the documentation of how they worked to conceal their expenditures.
  2. New financial filings show that Eric Trump lied about how certain funds were spent by the Eric Trump Foundation. Specifically, he lied about payments to Trump Organization businesses for fundraising events.
  3. The New York State Department of Taxation and Finance subpoenas Michael Cohen as part of their investigation into the Trump Foundation. Note that this is separate from the New York Attorney General’s lawsuit against the foundation, though if the tax department finds anything, they would refer it to the AG.
  4. After all the convicting, pleading, indicting, and flipping by his associates, Trump does a one-on-one interview with Fox News host Ainsley Earhardt. Which showed us all why it’s really not in his best interest to sit down with Mueller.

Courts/Justice:

  1. Amid all that came out this week around Russia and fraud investigations. Trump criticizes Jeff Session for never taking charge of the DOJ. Sessions, for once, fights back saying he did. Sessions also says he would never let the DOJ be improperly influenced by politics.
  2. And just like that, the Twitter wars are on. Between a sitting president and his Attorney General. For real. Trump challenges Sessions to look into the “corruption on the other side” like the emails, and “Comey lies & leaks, Mueller conflicts, McCabe, Strzok, Page, Ohr…” and “FISA abuse, Christopher Steele & his phony and corrupt Dossier, the Clinton Foundation, illegal surveillance of Trump Campaign, Russian collusion by Dems.”
  3. This leads Republican leadership in the Senate to signal their OK for Trump to fire Sessions, saying they could confirm a new attorney general after the midterms. A new AG opens the door to firing Mueller and ending the Russia investigation. Though I’m not sure it would since several state laws seem to have been broken as well.
  4. A federal judge orders experts to review a private prison in Mississippi where inmates are claiming that their constitutional rights are being violated. There’s also a nationwide prison strike and rallies across the country to bring attention to justice system reform.
  5. In a 1998 memo that Kavanaugh wrote during the Clinton investigation, we learn than Kavanaugh wanted to question Clinton on the seedy details of his sexual activities with Monica Lewinsky.
  6. A federal judge turns down Trump’s request to dismiss a lawsuit filed against him by people who were attacked by Trump’s guards during a protest. The point of the lawsuit is to determine the extent to which Trump authorized or condoned the attacks.
  7. Demonstrators hold marches and rallies across the country to protest the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.

Healthcare:

  1. Last week I mentioned a measles outbreak in the U.S. Across Europe, there have been more than 41,000 people infected, 37 of whom have died. That’s up from around 24,000 the year before and 5,237 the year before that. Health experts say it’s because fewer people are vaccinating their kids.
  2. Nebraska is working to put Medicaid expansion on the November ballot.
  3. Maine’s Supreme Judicial Court rules that the governor must expand Medicaid, which the state’s residents voted for in 2017. Governor LePage has sworn he’ll never do it.
  4. Ohio releases a report of their first five years of having expanded Medicaid with no work requirement. Here are some findings:
    • The uninsured fell by more than half (from 32.4% to 12.8%).
    • Before the ACA 1 in 3 people at or near poverty were uninsured; after the ACA that dropped to 1 in 8.
    • Around 60% of people covered by the expansion transfer out, usually getting a job or a better paying job. Some were able to get coverage outside of Medicaid.
    • People said having Medicaid made it easier for them to either look for work or to keep working.
    • People with continuous Medicaid coverage had less medical debt (no brainer there).

International:

  1. ICE deports Jakiw Palij, who we’ve been trying to deport for decades but no country would take him. He was a Nazi SS camp guard in Poland during WWII. He’s now 95.
  2. Trump tweets about the non-existent seizing of land from and large-scale killing of white farmers in South Africa, prompting a bunch of confused responses from South African citizens who don’t know WTF he’s talking about.
  3. South African officials say Trump is just trying to sow division in South Africa. There has been ongoing redistribution of land, because blacks weren’t allowed to own land under apartheid. Even though apartheid fell in the early 90s, black South Africans still only own 1% of the land. They make up more than 75% of the population.
  4. Australia moves on to its fifth leader in five years. Malcom Turnball steps down despite winning a vote of confidence. Elections are coming up soon, though, so there will probably be a sixth leader soon.
  5. Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee request the translator notes from Trump’s meeting with Putin in Helsinki.
  6. Trump cancels Mike Pompeo’s trip to North Korea, saying they aren’t making any progress and blaming China for it.
  7. We learn that Trump told Italy’s prime minister that we’d help fund Italy’s debt by buying up Italian government bonds.

Family Separation:

  1. Nearly 700 children who were separated from their parents at the border have still not been reunited with their families. 40 of them are less than five years old.The ACLU continues to work for their reunification, since the government is failing at it.

Travel Ban/Immigration/Discrimination:

  1. Los Angeles sues the administration again to stop them from forcing immigration conditions on the city as a condition for receiving $1 million for fighting gang activity.
  2. A White House speech writer was fired when it was revealed that he joined white nationalist Peter Brimelow in a 2016 panel. The day after that firing, Peter Brimelow attended a birthday party for Trump’s economic advisor, Larry Kudlow at Kudlow’s house.

Climate/EPA:

  1. A U.S. district court in South Carolina reinstates WOTUS, Obama’s Waters of the United States expansion of the Clean Water Act, which defines environmental protection regulations for our waterways. Two courts have already blocked WOTUS in 24 states, leaving 26 states where it now must be implemented.
  2. The Trump administration announces its Affordable Clean Energy rule, which is intended to replace Obama’s Clean Power Plan. This is despite the administration’s own findings that the new plan would result in 1,400 premature deaths each year.
  3. Let the water wars begin. Chinatown anyone? The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation notifies officials in California that they want to renegotiate the statewide water agreements, specifically the ones governing how water moves through the Delta to Southern California. The federal bureau wants to save more water for farmers, meaning there would be less water for state projects. Maybe that’s why Nunes is buddying up to Trump.
  4. The Trump administration is reversing course on their plans to sell off federal land that fell within the Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument before Trump reduced the size of the monument. They’ve scrapped the plans to sell 1,600 acres of that land for now.

Budget/Economy:

  1. Additional tariffs on $16 billion in Chinese goods kick in, and China responds by instituting their own tariffs of 25% on the same amount of American goods. So far, both sides have implemented tariffs on $50 billion worth of goods.
  2. A federal judges strikes down several parts of three of Trump’s executive orders that were designed to curtail the power of unions for government workers.
  3. Mick Mulvaney is trying to get protection from Trump’s tariffs for Element Electronics, which I mentioned a few weeks ago. It’s a South Carolina company that plans to close its doors due to tariffs. Mulvaney used to be a congressman in SC.

Elections:

  1. Trump plans on having 40 days of campaign-related travel between now and the midterms, which are around 70 days away. So it looks like he’ll be spending most of the next 2 1/2 months focused on winning elections and not so much on presidenting. He’s starting with Senate races.
  2. The Senate has bipartisan agreement on a bill to help protect our upcoming elections from cyber threats, but Trump says he won’t sign it so they tabled the bill. The bill would’ve given state election officials security clearance so that states and the DHS could all share information with each other. The bill also would’ve created a standard auditing system.
  3. Last week I reported on a proposal to shut down 7 out of 9 polling places in a largely black district in Georgia. It took the elections board less than a minute to vote that proposal down at their last meeting. The guy who proposed the closure had been recommended to the board by current Secretary of State Brian Kemp, who is running for governor against a black female candidate.
  4. After McCain’s family announces that he was ending his treatment, Arizona Senatorial candidate Kelli Ward accuses them of using the timing to derail her campaign. Please do not vote for this loon in the upcoming elections.
  5. Now Texas thinks they should close 87 driver’s license offices, largely in rural and poor areas. Why is this in the Elections category? Because Texas has voter ID laws, and closing these offices could prevent some people from getting the IDs they need to vote in time for the midterms.
  6. The DNC alerts the FBI of a hacking attempt, but it turns out to be an unauthorized test from a third party.
  7. The DNC votes to limit the powers of the superdelegates in presidential primaries.

Miscellaneous:

  1. After reports came out that H.R. McMaster had talked Trump out of restricting Obama’s access to intelligence briefings, Trump denies that he had even considered it.
  2. Trump holds another election rally, this one in West Virginia. I’m not sure if it’s worth it to debunk his rally lies, because he just keeps repeating them rally after rally.
  3. Ahead of Hurricane Lane in Hawaii, Trump declares a state of emergency so FEMA can prepare and plan.
  4. The family of Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) announces he’ll end his treatment for cancer, and then within a day of that announcement he passes away after a long fight against glioblastoma.
  5. Trump declines to release the White House statement honoring John McCain and instead issues a short tweet. He flies the flags at half mast over the weekend.
  6. McCain‘s body will lie in state at both the U.S. and Arizona Sate Capitols, and he’ll be buried at the U.S. Naval Academy Cemetery in Annapolis.
  7. George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Senator Jeff Flake will deliver eulogies. AFAIK, Trump won’t attend. There are several reports that McCain’s family asked that Trump not attend.
  8. Senator Chuck Schumer proposes that the Russell Senate building be renamed in honor of McCain.
  9. After losing at a Madden gaming tournament in Jacksonville, FL, a gamer opens fire on his fellow gamers and then shoots himself. Two people are dead and 11 are injured.

Polls:

  1. Now 59% of registered voters approve of Mueller’s investigation; an increase of 11 percentage points from last month.

Week 82 in Trump

Posted on August 20, 2018 in Politics, Trump

Rudy Giuliani makes Chuck Todd crack up on air when he says (true quote) “truth isn’t truth.” This is just an example of why hundreds of newspapers across the country issue op-eds this week in support of a free press. The op-eds defend the role of the press while denouncing attacks on the press, specifically the “fake news” attacks. Upon the release of the editorials, Trump accuses the papers of collusion (collusion to defend a free press, I guess?). So the senate unanimously votes to “reaffirm the vital and indispensable role the free press serves.” You can’t make this Orwellian shit up.

Anyway, here’s what happened last week in politics…

Missed From Last Week:

  1. At DEFCON, an 11-year-old hacked into a replica of Florida’s election website and changed the voting results. In less than 10 minutes. Yep, we’re safe.

Russia:

  1. Here are some highlights from the Manafort Trial:
    • After delays from the previous week, the prosecution produces email evidence that Manafort participated in the alleged bank and tax fraud that Rick Gates admitted to being party to.
    • One email implicates Jared Kushner in bribing a bank CEO with the promise of a cabinet position.
    • The prosecution rests.
    • The defense requests that Manafort be acquitted, which the judge denies (duh).
    • The defense rests its case without calling a single witness to refute the prosecution’s case.
    • Manafort’s defense is basically that it doesn’t matter that he lied on his loan applications because the bank was going to give him the money anyway because he was bribing the CEO of said bank with a cabinet position in return for the loans. So we’re all good, right?
    • Trump says Manafort is a very good man and that his trial is a sad day for our country. Which hopefully won’t influence the non-sequestered jury. The judge himself is under U.S. Marshall protection due to death threats.
    • Just a heads up for the next Manafort trial, Mueller reportedly has three times the evidence against Manafort for that trial.
  1. White House counsel Don McGahn has had at least three interviews with investigators in Mueller’s Russia probe, and is reportedly being very forthcoming.
  2. A federal judge once again upholds the constitutionality of Mueller’s investigation, this time as part of an effort by Russian company Concord Management to invalidate the investigation. This is the fourth time a federal judge has ruled for the legitimacy of the investigation.
  3. Trump’s lawyers have repeatedly said that Mueller has to wrap things up by September in order to avoid violations of a Justice Department rule regarding elections. Both current and former officials disagree, however, and say Mueller can still continue his closed-door investigation and issue subpoenas. Trump wasn’t singing this tune when Comey openly announced an investigation into his opponent 11 days before the 2016 election.
  4. FBI Deputy Director David Bowdich fires Peter Strzok, despite the office that handles disciplinary actions recommending a demotion and suspension. Trump takes credit for firing him in a tweet.
  5. So far, the following notable intelligence or law enforcement agency members have been fired under Trump: Sally Yates, James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, Ezra Cohen-Watnick, H.R. McMaster, Michael Anton, Tom Bossert, Derek Harvey, and Nadia Schadlow. Trump has also repeatedly threatened Jeff Sessions, Rod Rosenstein, and Robert Mueller. That pretty much covers most of the senior officials involved in the Russia investigation.
  6. In a move that seems more petty than strategic, Trump revokes John Brennan’s security clearance, likely because Brennan has been very outspoken about the dangers of Russian interference and critical of the administration’s lack of handling it. Trump is also looking at revoking security clearance for James Clapper, James Comey, Michael Hayden, Sally Yates, Susan Rice, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, and Bruce Ohr. This is highly irregular since intelligence agencies rely on consultations with previous employees who require clearance in order to consult, and sometimes they need to review their old work for testimony.
  7. Just a few weeks before Trump announced Brennan’s clearance being revoked, Russian Artem Klyushin tweeted: “Ex-CIA directors John Brennan and Michael Hayden, ex-FBI director James Komi and his deputy Andrew McCabe, ex-director of the National Intelligence Service James Clapper, ex-national security adviser Susan Rice say goodbye to access to classified materials.” Who told him whose security clearance Trump is reviewing? Or did Russia tell Trump who’s clearance to revoke? So sketchy.
  8. In a scathing op-ed, retired Navy admiral William McRaven, who led the raid on Osama bin Laden, asks Trump to revoke his security clearance, too.
  9. The Treasury hasn’t been forthcoming with the Senate Intelligence Committee’s requests for information that would allow them to follow the money trail in the Russia investigation.
  10. Thirteen former U.S. intelligence heads write a letter in support of Brennan, rebuking Trump for revoking his security clearance. They call it inappropriate and deeply regrettable. By the end of the week, 70 former intelligence officers sign on.
    UPDATE: By Monday, over 175 members of the intelligence community have signed on.
  11. And in case you’re wondering why all this security clearance info is in the “Russia” category, it’s because Trump and Sarah Huckabee Sanders both connect revoking the security clearance to the Russia investigation. Trump said it in a quick Q&A on the way to his helicopter, Sarah Huckabee Sanders said it in her White House press briefing, Trump again said it in a Wall Street Journal interview, and then he implied it in a tweet. He also said he’s doing it because they’re “bad people.”
  12. Mueller recommends a jail sentence of 0-6 months for George Papadopoulos.
  13. Rand Paul plans to ask Trump to lift sanctions against certain Russian officials so they can come visit the U.S. later this year.

Courts/Justice:

  1. Jeff Sessions says the Justice Department will “vigorously enforce” the law against creating 3D-printed guns “to the fullest extent.”
  2. The West Virginia GOP takes over the state’s Supreme Court by impeaching four justices just after a deadline that would’ve required the justices to be replaced by election in November. Waiting until after that deadline lets the GOP governor appoint all new (presumably GOP) justices. One judge resigned before the deadline, to be replaced by a judge to be elected in November. Not that the judges were behaving, though; they are accused of lavish spending on their offices.
  3. Brett Kavanaugh has the lowest public support of nearly any nominee from the last four administrations. Only 37% support him, while 40% don’t think he should be confirmed.

Healthcare:

  1. Three Arkansas residents file a lawsuit against the Trump administration over the new work requirements for Medicaid in Arkansas.
  2. The CDC is monitoring a measles outbreak across 21 states. With 107 cases reported so far this year, it’s on track to be the worst measles outbreak in a decade. Vaccinate your kids and help save those who are can’t be vaccinated (like infants, the elderly, and people with cancer).
  3. One in six hospital patients is now treated at a Catholic-run hospital, where certain procedures might be limited or prohibited based on religious beliefs. So one in six patients isn’t getting complete care, and I’m not just talking abortions here either.

International:

  1. ISIS is rebounding in Syria and Iraq, with more than 30,000 fighters in those areas.
  2. A 29-year-old Sudanese immigrant in the UK hits pedestrians with his vehicle before ramming it into the barriers at the Palace of Westminster. He didn’t kill anyone, but they’re looking at it as a terrorist incident.
  3. After a bridge collapses in Genoa, Italy, killing at over 40 people, Italy’s deputy prime minister blames the European Union’s budget rules for the lack of maintenance. Even so, Italy’s European allies offer assistance.
  4. Blackwater founder Erik Prince has long been proposing that we privatize military operations in Afghanistan, which both Trump and John Bolton are now considering. Military contractors would report directly to Trump. So we’re looking at a group of mercenaries accountable only to Trump. What could go wrong?
    Background: You might remember Blackwater from the 2007 Nisour Square massacre in Iraq where their mercenaries killed innocent civilians and then lied about being fired on first. Even one of their own allegedly pointed his gun at his fellow mercenaries in an attempt to get them to stop shooting. Five of these operatives have since been convicted or pleaded guilty, and just recently got their charges reduced.
  5. The White House is trying to use an obscure budget rule to cancel $3 billion in foreign aid.

Travel Ban/Immigration/Discrimination:

  1. The DHS Inspector General opens an investigation into the department’s Quiet Skies program. Under this 2010 TSA program, DHS surveils travelers in airports whether or not they’re suspected of a crime or on a watch list.
  2. A class-action lawsuit brought by the ACLU reveals that U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has been conspiring with ICE in bait-and-switch stings. At least 17 people thought they were going to routine green-card interviews at CIS, but were instead greeted by, and subsequently arrested by, ICE.
  3. Los Angeles turns down hundreds of millions of dollars in funding from the Department of Homeland Security that would’ve helped target extremism. The problem with the money is that DHS wants the funds to go toward fighting Muslim extremism, which isn’t a problem in Los Angeles. Los Angeles wants to target white supremacist extremism, which actually is a problem.
  4. The White House fires Darren Beattie, a speech writer, for his connections with white supremacists and his writings in support of white supremacy.
  5. Steven Miller’s uncle writes an op-ed denouncing Miller’s views on race and immigration, calling him a hypocrite because their family came to the U.S. using family-based immigration. Miller is the architect behind some of Trump’s most restrictive and cruel immigration policies.

Climate/EPA:

  1. Trump plans to further weaken Obama’s Clean Power Plan by allowing states to set their own standards for coal-burning power plants. More to come on this next week.
  2. A federal court orders a full environmental review of the Keystone XL pipeline project before the project can continue across Nebraska. Nebraskan landowners and tribal members have joined together to fight the pipeline.
  3. Despite scientific evidence otherwise, Ryan Zinke says that the role of humans in climate change is unknown. In a separate interview, Zinke blames California’s wildfires on environmental terrorist groups and says climate change isn’t to blame.
  4. And speaking of Zinke, he’s hired one of his high-school football teammates, Steve Howke, to oversee the review process for climate change research funding. Howke has been holding up funding, forcing these projects to undergo unprecedented review processes. He also has no background in science or climate issues, and holds only a degree in business administration.
  5. The Fish and Wildlife Service adds the once-common rusty patched bumblebee to the endangered species list. It’s the first bumblebee species to officially be endangered.
  6. A judge orders the Trump administration to immediately implement the Obama-era Chemical Disaster Rule, which was created in response to an explosion at a fertilizer plant in Texas.
  7. Newly released documents show that the EPA ignored its own scientific research when the agency claimed that freezing fuel efficiency standards in automobiles would save lives. Their reasoning was based on flawed models, which will help states when they fight back against freezing standards.

Budget/Economy:

  1. After making a BFD of his signing of the defense authorization bill this week, Trump signs a statement saying several (around 50) of the statutes in the bill are unconstitutional limits on his presidential powers. One of those statutes bans military funding for anything supporting Russia’s annexation of Crimea.
  2. Turkey raises tariffs on U.S. imports.
  3. Trump asks the SEC to look into reducing companies’ required reporting from quarterly to half-yearly. He says business leaders told him that would reduce pressure on them and give them more flexibility. Economists say maybe, but less transparency into business operations is not good for consumers or investors.
  4. Over the past 40 years, CEO compensation for major corporations has grown 1070%. Average worker compensation, by comparison, has grown 11%.
  5. The U.S. and Mexico are reportedly close to an agreement on NAFTA. Maybe.
  6. The U.S. and China plan to come back to the negotiating table after walking away amid trade wars. However, the U.S. delegation doesn’t have a unified message or goal, and there’s doubt that Trump has a specific goal in mind. There is no one point person who has the authorization to speak for Trump even if he did have a goal.
    Background: Trump fixates on trade deficits, which he doesn’t seem to fully grasp. Trade deficits are a reflection of countries’ growth rates, currency values, and investments, among other things. It’s not a straight-up win/lose equation, but sometimes a trade deficit means you’re winning.
  7. Sarah Huckabee Sanders apologizes for saying that Trump has created three times as many jobs for African Americans in 20 months as Obama did in eight years. She said 195,000 black workers found employment under Obama when it was actually 3 million. 700,000 black workers found work in the first 20 months under Trump.

Elections:

  1. Bobby Goodlatte, the son of House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-VA), is working to get a Democrat elected to his father’s seat. Bobby tweets, “I’m deeply embarrassed that Peter Strzok’s career was ruined by my father’s political grandstanding. That committee hearing was a low point for Congress.”
  2. Kansas Governor Jeff Colyer concedes the GOP gubernatorial primary to Kris Kobach. Kobach has instituted several voter ID laws that were struck down by the court. In fact, his court showing is so poor that a judge ordered him to go back to lawyer school.
  3. Voting rights organizations sue Arizona’s secretary of state over violations of the National Voter Registration Act. The secretary hasn’t been updating addresses in accordance with the federal “motor voter” requirements, which say each state must update a voter’s address information whenever their address on their driver’s license changes. This has resulted in thousands of votes being discarded.
  4. Whoopsies! The Treasury accidentally violates federal campaign laws by retweeting Trump’s tweet predicting a “red wave” for November’s midterms. It’s a violation of the Hatch Act, which says federal employees can’t engage in political activity while serving in an official capacity. I’m not clear, then, why it’s OK for Trump to tweet about it.
  5. A Georgia county plans to close 3/4 of their polling locations, mostly in black communities. The same thing happened in Alabama just before last year’s Senate elections, and it took a huge effort to make sure black voters were able get to the polls.
  6. Dr. Hans Keirstead, one of the democratic candidates running against Dana Rohrabacher for Congress, was hacked during the primaries. Keirstead lost out on the second position in the top-two primary to another democratic candidate by 125 votes. Law enforcement doesn’t know where the hacks came from.
  7. And the political ads are back. GOP super PACs are gearing up for the November midterms by unleashing a series of ads against several Democrats in tight districts. I’m sure it won’t be long before Democratic PACs do the same, so now’s a good time for my reminder that ALL POLITICAL ADS ARE LIES DESIGNED TO MANIPULATE YOU. DO NOT BASE YOUR VOTE ON ADS.
  8. And speaking of ads, Google posts a searchable library of political ads along with information about who funded the ads and who the ads target. They’ll update this weekly so you’ll have ready information about who is saying what.

Miscellaneous:

  1. Omarosa Manigault-Newman releases another taped conversation about her firing, this one with Trump where he professes to not know she was being fired and where he sounds perplexed that she might be leaving.
  2. Omarosa releases a taped conversation where Trump’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, offered her hush money after she left the White House. Lara told her the money would come from political donations.
  3. Trump sues Omarosa for violating her nondisclosure agreement, which many legal experts say isn’t enforceable in this case anyway. Oh. And he also calls her a dog.
  4. Omarosa claims to have over 200 recorded conversations, and she’s trickling them out one at a time (to sell her book of course).
  5. Trump has forced several of his White House staff into signing non-disclosure agreements, but most legal experts say they can’t be enforced.
  6. Trump signs a defense bill named in honor of John McCain and refuses to mention McCain’s name during the signing. But he criticizes McCain just hours later at a fundraiser.
  7. This isn’t political, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention it. Over 300 Catholic clergy in Pennsylvania are accused of molesting over 1,000 child victims. The church has been involved in a massive coverup of the whole thing for 70 years. There’s another scandal like this bubbling up in Chile as well.
  8. Twitter still won’t go all in with a ban on Alex Jones, but it did suspend him for a week over a recent post.
  9. The FCC shuts down Alex Jones‘ radio station and fines it $15,000. I wish they could shut him down for being a liar, conspiracy nut, and provoker of violence, but they shut him down for operating without a license.
  10. In their first execution in over 20 years, Nebraska becomes the first state to use fentanyl for a death penalty lethal injection.
  11. Trump cancels his military parade due to the high costs. Even though local officials have been trying to explain the costs to him, he blames them for inflating costs.
  12. The National Park Service, under Ryan Zinke’s direction, wants to charge protestors for demonstrating in our capital. AFAIK, cities don’t charge demonstrators because it’s a violation of their first amendment rights. If you have an opinion on this, you can comment here: https://www.regulations.gov/docket?D=NPS-2018-0007