It wasn’t just Trump Junior. Campaign manager Paul Manafort and Jared Kushner knew, too. They were forwarded the emails. They knew exactly what this meeting was. And they were there. They wanted the documents. They wanted to work with the Russians.
- Ezra Klein, "The Trump administration isn't a farce. It's a tragedy." (7-11-2017)
This week's featured post is "Getting Through This", in which I describe how the mindset I developed when my wife was fighting cancer is helping me survive the Trump Era. The three misunderstandings concern healthcare costs, the Biblical view of abortion, and sanctuary cities.
This week everybody was talking about Trump's collusion with Russia
Trump Jr., at least. Here are this week's new revelations, summed up by Nicholas Kristof:
Donald J. Trump Jr. received an email in June 2016, eight days after his father clinched the Republican nomination for president, that said the Kremlin had “offered to provide the Trump campaign with some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary. … This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.”
... Trump Jr. didn’t call the F.B.I.; instead, he responded, “I love it.” He apparently arranged a phone call to discuss the material (we don’t know that the call happened or, if it did, its content), and then set up a meeting for him, Kushner and campaign chairman Paul Manafort to meet with a person described in the emails as a “Russian government attorney.” [more than that, in fact]
In other words, informed of a secret Kremlin effort to use highly sensitive information about a former secretary of state (presumably obtained by espionage, for how else?) to manipulate an American election, Trump Jr. signaled, “We’re in!”
Two big consequences:
- This news conclusively demonstrates that many, many denials by Trump and his people were lies. They knew that campaign officials had at least tried to collude with the Russian government against Clinton, even as they were deriding the whole story as fake news or a hoax. The administration's relentless dishonesty has gotten to be too much even for some Fox News hosts.
- It broke the nothing-happened version of events. Something happened. The investigation still needs to pin down exactly what it was and how far it went. Trump defenders have now retreated to a but-nothing-came-of-it line. We'll see how defensible that is as the investigation unfolds. Josh Barro is skeptical: "But the people telling us that nothing came of the meeting are people who were in the meeting and would have reason to want us to believe that nothing came of the meeting. And they're also lying liars who have been lying about all sorts of stuff, including, for months, whether there were contacts between the Trump campaign and agents of the Russian government."
Vox summarizes what we currently know. Ezra Klein underlines what this week's revelations mean:
Donald Trump Jr. knew exactly what he was being offered. The email he got was crystal clear. His source is referred to as a “Russian government attorney.” The invitation for the meeting explains that she will “provide the Trump campaign with some official documents and information.” The intermediary assures Trump Jr. that “this is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.”
His reply, it cannot be said often enough, was “if it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer” — and late in the summer is exactly when the hacked Democratic emails actually began to be released.
It wasn’t just Trump Jr. Campaign manager Paul Manafort and Jared Kushner knew, too. They were forwarded the emails. They knew exactly what this meeting was. And they were there. They wanted the documents. They wanted to work with the Russians.
The best previous evidence of Trump-campaign collusion with Russia came from a series of scoops in late June by Wall Street Journal reporter Shane Harris: Peter Smith, a wealthy Republican with a long history of funding opposition research against Democrats, organized an effort to contact Russian hackers and funnel whatever dirt they had on Clinton to the Trump campaign via Michael Flynn. A major source for the story was Smith himself, who Harris had interviewed.
Harris knew when he published the story that Smith, 81, had died a little over a week later. But this week something else came out: Smith committed suicide. He left a note blaming ill health. Naturally, there are conspiracy theories floating around, but it's a measure of the left/right difference that those theories aren't getting nearly the play on the Left that comparable stories (Seth Rich, for example, or Vince Foster) get on the Right.
BTW, Trump is still calling the Russia story a hoax.
To his credit, the conservative Weekly Standard's Jonathan Last proposes Republicans take "the Earth 2 test": What if Hillary had won and was doing the exact same stuff Trump is getting away with now?
If Clinton were president and you saw an email from the campaign where Chelsea had been informed that the Russian government had damaging information about Trump and she jumped at the chance to get it and said she’d really love to use it later in the summer and rushed to have a meeting with the Russians — would you think it was all just an overblown media story that didn’t matter?
Of course not.
Earth 2, he says, tests for tribalism -- the belief that it's OK if my side does it, but not if the other side does.
Everyone believes “their team” is better than “the other guys.” That’s why they’re on the team to begin with. But the problem with that view is that there’s no limiting principle to it. Once you subscribe to “us good/them bad,” then you can rationalize anything.
The Earth-2 test applies to liberals too, of course. I recommend everybody take it from time to time.
and the ObamaCare Repeal
At the moment, McConnell still doesn't have the votes. He has no Democrats, and all the Republicans he can afford to lose -- Rand Paul and Susan Collins -- have announced opposition. He needs everybody else to vote yes, which is why John McCain's unexpected surgery has delayed the vote. Collins has estimated that 8 to 10 senators are still undecided.
but we should pay more attention to the NASA budget cuts
In stories about Trump's proposed budget for fiscal 2018 (which starts in October), NASA budget cuts usually rate only a tiny mention. (It didn't make The Washington Post's six worst cuts list, for example.) In particular, the budget for space missions gets cut only about 1% ($53 million out of $5.7 billion). Compared to a proposed 31% cut at EPA or 11% at NSF, that doesn't seem like much.
Hidden in that near-level funding, though, was a major cut in NASA's earth-science missions -- the ones that gather data on climate change. Scientific American describes four scrapped missions, including a truly astounding cut involving the DSCOVR satellite, which is already in orbit. DSCOVR has one set of instruments pointed at the Sun, and another at the Earth. The data is already flowing, but if this budget passes we'll simply start ignoring data from the Earth-viewing instruments; there's no money allocated to collect or process it. It's the scientific equivalent of putting your fingers in your ears and singing "la-la-la" really loud.
NASA's agency-wide budget cut is also too small to get headlines: $19.1 billion next year compared to $19.6 billion in the current year. But that involves a total zeroing-out of NASA education office. (All it gets is the $37 million necessary to shut down.) So whatever NASA does discover about climate change will remain in the ivory towers of science, where it won't threaten the profits of fossil fuel companies.
While it's still there, you should check out NASA's climate web site. The evidence page features a clearer image of this graph of the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere:
I've long believed that atmospheric CO2 is the right place to begin if you're trying to convince an intelligent person that climate change is real. Unlike global average temperature, it's a direct measurement that is not as noisy as temperature: CO2 has an annual cycle, but goes up every year. Also, the CO2 graph directly addresses the religious protest that only God can change the climate: Man has already changed the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels. Once you understand that the atmosphere has changed, it's not a big leap to imagine the climate changing. Then you're ready to hear about how greenhouses gases trap infrared radiation, and then when you see graphs of global average temperature, the warming trend is just what you'd expect.
Like most agencies in the Trump Era, NASA has somebody running a rogue Twitter account. This one is Sarcastic Rover, which claims to be the voice of the AI that drives the autonomous Mars Rover. This morning it commented on Sarah Silverman's tweet suggesting NASA scientists strike over climate change:
No more new planets until you learn to take care of the one you’ve got!
Some of the tweets express a definite AI point of view, like its take on Donald Trump Jr.'s self-destructive release of the emails leading up to his meeting with Russians.
Pretty sure Don Jr. just broke the third law of robotics.
and you also might be interested in ...
A big new iceberg: Something the size of Delaware just broke off of Antarctica. This particular chunk of ice was already part of an ice shelf, so it was mostly floating anyway. That means its breaking-off won't directly raise ocean levels. But if the break-up of Antarctic ice shelves leads to land-borne ice sliding into the ocean, that will raise ocean levels.
and let's close with something out of this world
While I've got you thinking about NASA, take a look at their humorous Exoplanet Travel Bureau, where you can find travel posters for the planets NASA has been discovering in distant star systems. HD 40307g, for example, is classified as a "super Earth" (bigger than Earth, smaller than Neptune). It has an atmosphere and higher gravity, so sky-driving there would probably be very exciting.
Kepler 186f might have surface water and is a good candidate to support life. But if it does, its red sun could change the color spectrum of photosynthesis. So its poster advertises a planet "where the grass is always redder". PSO J318.5-22 is a rogue planet that doesn't orbit any star at all, so that's "where the nightlife never ends".
The images are free for download, and various online vendors will print them beautifully for you for not a lot of money.
My inside source at NASA assures me that this is all after-hours fun, and no taxpayer dollars are actually spent on designing exoplanet travel posters. Yet.
No comments:
Post a Comment