Tag: taliban

Week 137 in Trump

Posted on September 12, 2019 in Politics, Trump

That crucial moment where everything went terribly awry.

Every week under this administration is a little weird, but this week was surreal. SharpieGate sucked up all the air in the room for nearly the entire freaking week. Any normal president would’ve just said ‘sorry, I made a mistake,’ thanked the weather service for the correction, and gotten on with the business of presidenting. But this isn’t a normal president, and so now we all know what a spaghetti graph is and why none of us can interpret one. We also know that our scientific federal agencies have now been compromised by politics and that we can’t rely on the president to give us truthful information during a disaster.

Here’s what else happened in politics for the week ending September 8…

Shootings This Week:

  1. The week‘s mass shootings (defined as killing or injuring four or more people):
    • Two shooters injure four men in Chicago’s Washington Park neighborhood.
    • Four people are injured in a shooting in Jacksonville, FL. The details aren’t known.
    • A shooter kills two people and injures two more, including an infant (who DOES that?), in Greensboro, NC.
    • A fourteen-year-old shooter kills his entire family of five in Elkmont, AL. This shooting includes another infant.
    • Two shooters kill two people, including a 7-year-old girl, and injure two others in Marrero, LA.
    • Shooters kill a family of three, including a 5-year-old boy, and injure one other in Whiteville, NC.
    • A female shooter kills one person and injures three more after an ongoing altercation in Alexandria, LA. This is the first known female mass shooter since I’ve been recording shootings.
    • A gang-related shooting in Sumter, SC, leaves two people dead and three others wounded.
    • A shooter injures four people in Chicago, IL.
  1. Walmart halts sales of all handgun ammunition, and while they don’t end their policy of allowing guns in the stores, they do request customers not openly carry weapons in Walmart and Sam’s Club stores.
  2. A federal judge rules that victims can sue the government when shooters obtain guns through background check loopholes. The suit stems from the 2015 shooting at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, where the shooter obtained a weapon despite a prior drug offense. This ruling could make the federal government responsible for such loopholes in the law.
  3. In other background check loophole news, the Odessa, TX, shooter obtained his weapon from a private seller, which didn’t require a background check. The shooter had failed a previous background check for mental health issues. Close those damn loopholes, Congress!
  4. We find out that Texas Attorney General received more than 100 pages of racist letters filled with violence, threatening to kill undocumented immigrants. The letters poured in over the past year, and the Attorney General didn’t do or say anything about it. In the same period, police responded to 911 calls about the man who sent them at least 35 times. They didn’t do anything about it either.

Russia:

  1. A jury acquits former Obama White House counsel Greg Craig on charges of misleading the DOJ about the lobbying work he did for Ukraine. Craig is the only Democrat to be charged so far in Mueller’s investigation.
  2. Russians vote in local elections following months of opposition protests, which led to the biggest crackdown on dissenters in the country in years. Before the elections, Putin’s party, United Russia, held 40 out of 45 seats on the Moscow city council. They lost 15 of those seats in the elections to hold on to 25. Center-left and far-left parties took the remaining seats.
  3. Investigators in Congress find that Deutsche Bank had several points of failure in their money-laundering controls while handling financial dealings with Russian oligarchs.
  4. We learn that in 2017, the CIA extracted one of their most valuable assets in the Kremlin over fears that media scrutiny would give the spy away. This person is how the CIA found out that Putin was directly involved in our 2016 election interference.
    • At first, some media outlets (I’m looking at you, CNN) report that the extraction was over fears that Trump’s carelessness would give the spy away, but that is corrected by later New York Times reporting (always read your news; don’t watch it!).
  1. Michael Flynn refuses to cooperate with House Intelligence Committee subpoenas for testimony and documents. The committee gives him a deadline of September 25 for testimony and September 18 for documents.

Legal Fallout:

  1. The House Judiciary Committee is investigating Trump’s involvement with the hush money payments to Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal. He’s already named as a co-conspirator in the legal case in which Michael Cohen pleaded guilty.
  2. Mike Pence stays at Trump’s country club in Doonbeg, Ireland while attending meetings with Irish officials (including the Prime Minister). Pence flies back and forth an hour each way for the meetings instead of just staying closer to where the meetings are held.
  3. It comes to light that in 2014, Trump entered a partnership with a struggling airport near his Turnberry golf course in Scotland. In 2015, when Trump was running for president, the Pentagon started using that airport for flight refueling, requiring flight crews to use local accommodations for overnight stays. This sometimes means that flight crews end up staying at Trump Turnberry.
    • Trump tweets that he has nothing to do with the airport (which is demonstrably not true, but might not actually be relevant in this case).
    • This is a weird intersection of two separate things (Trump entering a partnership with the airport and the Pentagon entering a partnership with the airport). However, 180 Air Force planes stopped there in 2017, 257 stopped there in 2018, and 259 have already stopped there this year.
  1. The House Oversight Committee and the House Judiciary Committee open investigations into the self-dealing around Trump’s properties, including things like Pence’s stay in Doonbeg, the airport deal, and Trump’s announcement that next year’s G-7 will be held at his Doral property (you know, the one with the bedbugs).
  2. The House Judiciary Committee prepares a vote to define impeachment hearings.

International:

  1. It’s U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad week.
    • Parliament hands Johnson four straight defeats, opposing him on his first four votes as PM.
    • Johnson loses his first Brexit vote, despite his threats that if any of his Members of Parliament (MPs) oppose him, he’ll kick them out of the party. 20 of his MPs defy him. In fact, Parliament votes to seize control from Johnson in order to debate a bill that would prevent a no-deal Brexit (which the House of Commons later passes).
    • This means Johnson loses his majority in Parliament. Actually, he lost his majority when one of his MPs got up in the middle of his speech to cross over to the other side.
    • And then Parliament votes to scrap Johnson’s no-deal Brexit and to ask the EU for a delay, effectively rendering Johnson’s reasons for suspending Parliament moot.
    • Boris Johnson’s brother quits his positions as a Member of Parliament and Minister over his disagreements with his brother over Brexit.
    • Johnson calls for new elections, but it doesn’t pass the House of Commons with the two-thirds vote it needs. (It’s pretty inevitable that elections will happen, though; it’s just a matter of timing.)
  1. Demonstrators across the U.K. gather to protest Brexit; counter-protestors come out to defend Brexit. Things get violent between the two, and 16 are arrested.
  2. Pro-democracy protests pick back up again in Hong Kong this week, despite the withdrawal of the Chinese extradition bill they were protesting in the first place.
  3. France proposes offering credit lines worth $15 billion to Iran if they’ll come back into compliance with the JCPOA (aka the Iran Deal). This relies on Trump not blocking it.
  4. Conservatives defend Trump tweeting what appeared to be an image from a classified satellite of an explosion in Iran by saying he’s just showing them that we’re watching them closely. However, the satellite has been identified online, and now it’s possible that Iran can evade its surveillance.
  5. The top U.S. negotiator with Afghanistan and the Taliban announces there’s a peace deal in principal between the parties.
    • But then Trump announces that he cancelled a secret meeting at Camp David with senior Taliban leaders and Afghan President Ashraf Ghani because the Taliban took responsibility for an attack that killed a U.S. soldier.
    • Also, the week of 9/11 might not be the best week for a meeting at Camp David.
    • This pretty much puts an end to a year of peace negotiations, in which it was agreed that the U.S. would dramatically pull back on troops in Afghanistan.
  1. Jason Greenblatt, Trump’s chief negotiator in the Mideast peace process, steps down, putting a damper on any prospects for a peace deal there. The deal stalled after Trump moved the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem in 2017, recognizing it as Israel’s legit capital. Palestinians walked away at that point, and haven’t been seriously negotiating since.

Legislation/Congress:

  1. The Cherokee Nation names Kimberly Teehee as their first delegate to the House of Representatives, finally exercising their 200-year-old right. Their Representative doesn’t get a vote in Congress.

Border Wall/Shutdown/National Emergency:

  1. Defense Secretary Mark Esper agrees to release $3.6 billion for Trump’s border wall, as requested in Trump’s emergency declaration. He’s defunding 127 military projects to do it.
    • The affected projects include new cyber ops facilities, training facilities, hazardous materials warehouses and cargo pads, new and expanded weapons ranges, munition storage facilities, aircraft maintenance hangars, schools, power substations, SATCOM facilities, NORTHCOM alert facilities, flight simulators, rescue stations, security improvements, housing maintenance, and more.
    • Funds will be diverted from over 125 military projects in three U.S. territories, 23 states, and 21 countries.
  1. Several of these projects are modernization projects and future-looking technical projects, all being scuttled to go toward the wall, which is (IMO) a medieval solution.
  2. The Pentagon says that if Congress re-funds those projects, they won’t be delayed or canceled. So they’re asking Congress to fund these projects twice. That sounds so blackmaily to me.

Travel Ban/Immigration/Discrimination:

  1. Trump says he’ll reconsider his administration’s rule that would deny life-saving healthcare visas to immigrants. He doesn’t fully reverse the decision, which has received strong criticism, and he doesn’t say whether we’ll continue to grant these visas. Meanwhile, people who are alive here today because they’re receiving these services have one more week to leave the country or become in violation of immigration law.
  2. The State Department has dramatically reduced the number of foreign student visas issued each year. This year, 20 Chinese students returning to Arizona State University were denied entry into the U.S. They’re currently taking their classes online.
  3. Following the Hurricane Dorian disaster in the Bahamas, Trump claims we can’t provide refuge for Bahamans because the islands are filled with “very bad gang members” and “very, very bad drug dealers.” He says they have “tremendous problems” with people who “weren’t supposed to be there.” What does that even mean?? 45 people have died, and the Abaco Islands are largely uninhabitable.
  4. Meanwhile, politicians from both parties urge Trump to suspend visa requirements for Bahamans at this time to allow more refugees into the U.S.
  5. While Charles Koch is trying to rehabilitate his reputation by supporting immigrants and criticizing the way Trump scapegoats immigrants, his network is also mining data to rile up conservatives with dehumanizing messages about immigrants. His data analytics company, i360, pushes the image of immigrants as invading criminals and terrorists.
  6. A judge rules that the terrorist watch list violates our constitutional rights because the standards for inclusion are too vague. Being on the watchlist makes it harder to travel and puts you under extra police scrutiny, among other things.
  7. Trump is considering two options to drastically reduce how many refugees fleeing war and violence the U.S. allows in. One option would cut the number by half—to 10,000 to 15,000 refugees per year. Another option reduces the number to ZERO, at the advice of a “top level official” (I wonder who that could be, Steven Miller). Former Secretary of Defense James Mattis was a huge proponent in the administration for allowing refugees (it actually does make the world a safer place), but Mike Esper, who took over from Mattis, isn’t as strong-willed.

Climate:

  1. At least 45 are dead in the Bahamas after Hurricane Dorian stalled over the islands, decimating at least one of the islands. 70,000 people are homeless.
  2. Cruise ships begin evacuating refugees.
  3. Trump spends Labor Day fighting with meteorologists over the path of Dorian after several news outlets (and the National Weather Service) contradict his claim that Dorian would hit Alabama much harder than expected. And thus begins SharpieGate. Holy smokes.
    • The NWS was obligated to dispute Trump’s claim immediately in order to prevent panic in Alabama. At the time of Trump‘s claim, NWS forecast maps have Alabama at about a 5% chance of winds above 40 mph. The National Hurricane Center’s forecast at the same time show the path skimming the East Coast and missing Alabama completely.
    • Trump was looking at an outdated map of the hurricane (and it was also a spaghetti map, which show numerous possibilities and probabilities, and are notoriously impossible for laypeople to translate).
    • Trump can’t let it go, so he brings a Fox News correspondent into the Oval Office to vouch for him and holds up an official NOAA map that he had doctored by adding an extension to the hurricane path in black Sharpie to make it look like the official map includes Alabama.
    • And then, NOAA, damaging its own credibility, issues an unsigned statement that Trump was correct. The statement criticized the NWS (part of NOAA) for contradicting Trump. So we have NOAA contradicting its own scientific forecast which, by the way, was completely correct.
    • It just keeps getting worse… NOAA instructs its staff (including scientists and meteorologists) to not provide any opinion in response to Trump’s incorrect tweets about Alabama. So now we’re at a point where our scientific agencies would rather freak people out needlessly about a disaster that isn’t going to happen than contradict the president. This does not bode well if we can’t trust their forecasts.
    • And then, NOAA’s acting chief scientist says he’s investigating NOAA’s response and whether it’s in violation of NOAA policies and ethics. The Commerce Department’s Office of Inspector General opens an investigation.
    • And then, NWS Director Louis Uccellini contradicts his bosses at NOAA and defends the his agency’s forecasters at a weather industry conference.
    • And then, Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross threatens to fire the top employees responsible for the forecast that contradicted Trump’s claim EVEN THOUGH THEIR FORECAST WAS CORRECT. This would be comical at this point if it wasn’t actually so very serious.
    • Is SharpieGate over? I don’t know.
  1. It might be important to note that altering a weather map is illegal.
  2. Trump plans to weaken George Bush’s light bulb efficiency rules, which would’ve forced us to use more efficient bulbs. They’re also more expensive but they last a ton longer.
    • The rules would save the equivalent of the energy output of 25 large power plants.
    • My guess is that Trump thinks he’s reversing an Obama rule, since Obama gets blamed for this one all the time.
  1. Joe Balash leaves his job at the Department of the Interior to join a foreign oil company that’s expanding their drilling operations in Alaska. As assistant secretary, Balash oversaw drilling on federal lands.
    • Balash is at least the third high-level administration official to join up with a fossil fuel company after leaving (the other two are Scott Pruitt of the EPA and Vincent DeVito of the Interior).
  1. The DOJ opens an antitrust investigation into four of the automakers that joined with California to keep Obama’s emissions standards in place. They say Ford, Honda, VW, and BMW broke federal competition laws.

Budget/Economy:

  1. The president of the AFL-CIO workers union says that Trump has done more to hurt workers than to help them. He cites rising healthcare costs, rising housing costs, and the trade war, as well as GOP opposition to raising the minimum wage.
  2. The five U.S. industries expected to be hit hardest by the latest round of tariffs include: Food and agribusiness, retail, manufacturers and supplies, tech and telecom, and clothing and footwear. That doesn’t leave much out.
  3. Even though Congress expanded the Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) program last year, around 99% of applications for forgiveness are still denied. The program is designed for people who are employed by government or certain non-profit organizations providing a public service.
  4. The Trump administration releases a proposed overhaul of the U.S. housing market that would end government control of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. These two companies back half of all our nation’s mortgages.
    • Fannie and Freddie have been under federal control since the housing market collapse, and they’re the last loose string left from the Great Recession.
  1. Trump touts job numbers before they’re officially released (again). Despite lower-than-expected job growth numbers for August, we hit another record number of people employed (157,878,000). Of course, our population is also at a record high, so the unemployment rate is still unchanged.
    • The rise in government employment came largely from temporary workers hired to help out with the 2020 Census.
    • Employment growth is slowing down from a high of 250,000 jobs added per month in 2015 to 143,000 so far in 2019 (there were 187,000 new jobs per month in 2016, 182,000 in 2017, and 192,000 in 2018).
  1. Analysts think that tariffs will cost American households an average of $2,031 per year starting in 2020, erasing any economic gains brought by deregulation efforts.

Elections:

  1. A court rules that North Carolina must redraw their gerrymandered districting laws in time for the 2020 elections, and Republicans (finally) say they won’t appeal the ruling. This has been in the courts for ages, with one judge accusing them of drawing the lines to discriminate with surgical precision.
    • Curious about the inner workings of GOP gerrymandering? Check this out. (Note: I in no way believe that this only happens on the right; they‘ve just mastered the art since 2010.)
  1. Another Texas GOP Congressman announces he’ll retire. Bill Flores becomes the fifth Texas GOP Representative to retire.
  2. Four states plan to cancel their GOP presidential primaries, which isn’t unheard of when an incumbent president is running. But usually they wait to see how successful the challengers are before scrapping the primaries.

Miscellaneous:

  1. Trump says that we should have a state-run news outlet to counter CNN’s “fake news.” You know who else has state-run news agencies? Russia, China, Iran, petty dictators…

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.