It is upsetting to discuss sexual assault and its repercussions, yet I felt guilty and compelled as a citizen about the idea of not saying anything.
This week's featured post is "10 Years After: the Post-Recovery Economy".
This week everybody was talking about hurricanes
Early in the week, it was thought that Hurricane Florence might make landfall as Category 4 or even 5. But it spread out, slowed, and weakened, hitting North Carolina as Category 1. It's now down to a tropical depression, but its cloud-field still covers a huge chunk of the Southeastern seaboard. Swansboro, NC has gotten over 30 inches of rain.
Meanwhile, Super Typhoon Mangkhut hit China's Guangdong province (south of Hong Kong) yesterday.
The decision to evacuate towns and cities in southern China came as Hong Kong was left reeling by ferocious winds of up to 173 kilometers per hour (107 miles per hour) and gusts of up to 223 kph (138 mph).
Before getting to China, Mangkhut ravaged the Philippines, killing 54 people.
The series of huge storms we've seen in recent years is either an enormously improbable coincidence, or it's evidence of global warming. But it's not just that the administration doesn't want to do anything about climate change, it's actively been undoing what little Obama managed to get done.
In its latest retreat from federal action on climate change, the Trump administration on Tuesday proposed to lift rules on the leaking and uncontrolled release of the potent greenhouse gas methane from oil and natural gas operations.
Methane is such a potent greenhouse gas that (depending on your estimate of how much methane gets leaked between the well and the consumer), it might make natural gas less climate-friendly than coal. Environmental Defense Fund writes:
Whether natural gas has lower life cycle greenhouse gas emissions than coal and oil depends on the assumed leakage rate, the global warming potential of methane over different time frames, the energy conversion efficiency, and other factors. ... Technologies are available to reduce much of the leaking methane, but deploying such technology would require new policies and investments.
In particular, government regulation is needed to make energy companies care about the methane they leak. Trump's EPA is making sure they have no reason to care.
Florence is drawing attention back to the complete botch of the response to Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico last year. The NY Post reports:
Hundreds of thousands of water bottles meant for victims of Hurricane Maria are still sitting at a Puerto Rico airport — nearly a year after the deadly storm
Trump, of course, denies everything. The federal response to Maria was "one of the best jobs that's ever been done with respect to what this is all about". And the 3,000 excess deaths? Fake news, made up "by the Democrats in order to make me look as bad as possible".
It's important to realize just how not-normal this is. George W. Bush was known to spin and dissemble (that's how he got the Iraq War started), but it's impossible to imagine him claiming that Katrina only killed a few dozen people, and that stories about more than a thousand deaths were just Democratic inventions meant to make him look bad. Literally NO previous president has ever been this dishonest, or willing to insult the public intelligence to this degree.
Jennifer Rubin draws the inescapable conclusion:
Trump’s outburst should remind us of several troubling facts. First, whether he is lying (or is simply a victim of his own self-delusion that he is incapable of error) is beside the point. He’s not functioning as a president or any other officeholder should. He cannot comprehend facts, process them and take appropriate action. He is, in a word, non-functional.
... Republicans’ inability to check or challenge the president and their insistence on rubber-stamping his decisions while ignoring his outbursts pose more than a constitutional and moral challenge. They, too, are responsible for confirmed Cabinet officials who are incompetent or corrupt, for lack of serious governance, for failure to hold officials accountable, and for the suffering and deaths (e.g. separated families, dead Puerto Ricans) that come about by virtue of a president who is never forced to confront reality.
and Paul Manafort
On Friday, Trump's former campaign manager pleaded guilty and accepted a plea deal that involves him cooperating with the Justice Department. He also will forfeit ill-gotten assets that might be worth as much as $46 million. That means that the Mueller investigation could making money for the government. I have been unable to track down where I heard this line, but it's not mine: "Trump will be impeached, and Russia will pay for it."
There's a big guessing game going on concerning what Manafort might be able to testify about, but nobody outside the investigation really knows. Noah Bookbinder, Barry Berke and Norman Eisen wrote in the NYT:
According to prosecutors, Mr. Manafort has already participated in a so-called proffer session, in which he described information that investigators deemed valuable. Mr. Manafort’s agreement will also require him to give further interviews without the presence of his own counsel, turn over documents and testify in other proceedings. His surrender is complete.
Even if you're a die-hard MAGA-hatter, you have to be wondering where this stops. With Flynn, Cohen, and Manafort all cooperating, the only bigger fish to go after are in the Trump family.
and Brett Kavanaugh
Last week, my comment about the hearings on Kavanaugh's nomination to the Supreme Court was "nothing matters". Was Kavanaugh's paper trail being covered up? Did he lie under oath in previous confirmation hearings? Would he gut abortion rights and grant conservative Christians the special right to ignore discrimination laws? Was he so pro-business that he was anti-consumer and anti-worker? It didn't matter. Even an anonymous accusation of sexual assault (which became publicly known on Wednesday and which Kavanaugh denied) wasn't worth taking the time to investigate. The Republicans have the majority in the Senate and were determined to push Kavanaugh through as fast as possible.
But now, finally, a few Republican senators are asking to slow this train down. The difference is that the anonymous accuser came forward yesterday. She's Christine Blasey Ford,
a professor at Palo Alto University who teaches in a consortium with Stanford University, training graduate students in clinical psychology. Her work has been widely published in academic journals.
At WaPo's "The Fix", Amber Phillips assesses:
As far as tracing decades-old sexual harassment allegations go, Ford’s story is remarkably credible. Ford is speaking on the record about her experience. She passed a polygraph test, the results of which The Post reviewed. She told other people about the alleged attack years before Kavanaugh was a Supreme Court nominee. She allowed her records from a therapy session about it to be reviewed by The Post. She says she didn’t want to come forward and decided to do so only after her story was leaked to news outlets.
Will the presence of an actual accuser, a woman willing to stand up and watch her life be shredded by right-wing media outlets (as it inevitably will be), make a difference? Maybe. Republican Senators Jeff Flake and Bob Corker have both called for Thursday's vote in the Senate Judiciary Committee to be delayed. Flake's view is particularly important here, since he is on the Judiciary Committee, and could be a swing vote against Kavanaugh if his doubts are not addressed. "We can't vote until we hear more," he said.
So what happens after Republican senators "hear more", assuming they do? I can't guess.
I want a venn diagram of people willing to argue "Give Kavanaugh a break, he was only 17" and "Trayvon Martin got what he deserved."
The accusations are about events that happened a long time ago, but Kavanaugh's response to those accusations is happening now. We'll see how that unfolds, and what it tells us about his character. Matt Yglesias:
There’s a good case for forgiving teenage misconduct but to receive forgiveness you have to seek it, not call the victim a liar and participate in a smear campaign against her.
Here's the text of the letter Ford wrote to Senator Feinstein in July.
Other Kavanaugh issues: Kavanaugh's previous Senate testimony under oath appears to not entirely correspond to the truth. But the legal scholars Vox consulted say the case falls short of criminal perjury.
Senator Kamala Harris showed a clip in which Kavanaugh appears to characterize contraceptives as "abortion-inducing drugs", an extreme claim by religious-right groups that the science doesn't support. If true, that would be disturbing, because a lot of court cases hang on whether or not a judge takes seriously some fantastic unscientific claim. But a longer version of the clip makes it clear that Kavanaugh was summarizing the position of one side of the case, not stating his own opinion. Politifact rated Harris' charge false.
and you also might be interested in ...
Thursday evening, dozens of fires broke out in the Boston suburbs of Lawrence, Andover, and North Andover. The cause hasn't been officially identified, but the most likely speculation is that Columbia Gas overpressurized a gas main, resulting in multiple gas leaks.
The Trump administration is taking in many fewer refugees than the U.S. has in recent years. But one group's numbers are up: white Evangelicals from the former Soviet Union.
Jonathan Chait's take on Elizabeth Warren is pretty similar to the one I gave a few weeks ago.
The Massachusetts senator has made a series of unusually early moves that, taken together, suggest a well-designed strategy to compete across the spectrum of the Democratic Party without risking her viability in a general election. ... She is building a national profile to position herself to win a primary and a general election, without sacrificing one for the sake of the other.
Earlier this year, I often told people I had no idea at all who would win the Democratic nomination. In a potentially huge field, it is still impossible to predict the outcome with much confidence. But at this point, Warren’s early moves position her as a clear front-runner.
NRATV hit a new low last week: The September 7 edition of "Relentless", hosted by Dana Loesch, closed by ridiculing the Thomas the Tank Engine TV show, which has made the trainyard more diverse by bringing in girl trains, including one from Kenya. Loesch rejected the idea that the trains had ever had races before, and showed this parody image, which presumably is how liberals saw the show before the new characters were introduced.
The Atlantic's Adam Serwer explores the NRA's perverse attitude towards police violence against blacks.
When armed black men are shot by the police, the NRA says nothing about the rights of gun owners; when unarmed black men are shot, its spokesperson says they should have been armed. ... If innocent unarmed black men like [Botham] Jean are shot, it’s because they lack firearms; if innocent black men who are armed like [Fernando] Castile or [Alton] Sterling are shot, it’s because they had a gun. Heads, you’re dead, tails, you’re also dead.
He also notes that in recent years the NRA has become much more of an across-the-board right-wing organization, as the Thomas example above illustrates.
In recent years, the NRA has made frequent forays into culture-war disputes that have little to do with gun rights per se.
His explanation is that the NRA is primarily about selling guns, not defending gun-owners' rights. (It's funding comes primarily from gun manufacturers.) And its current why-you-should-be-armed message is a right-wing dystopian fantasy.
NRATV tells its viewers that they are under assault from liberals, black people, undocumented immigrants, and Muslims and that they might one day need to kill them—in self defense, of course. Like the president, the NRA has correctly divined that fomenting and exploiting white people’s fears and hatreds is an effective sales strategy. If marketing murder fantasies is what it takes to move the product, then so be it.
A Kansas woman who was born at home, rather than at a clinic or hospital, was denied a passport.
[S]he received a letter from the federal division of the U.S. Passport Agency out of Houston, TX, telling her the application was denied and required further documentation. ... The letter stated, because her birth certificate was not issued at a institution or hospital, it was not considered proof enough of her citizenship.
She received a letter asking her to submit any number of the listed additional documents. “Border crossing card or green card for your parents issued prior to your birth? My parents were born in the United States….Early religious records? We don’t have any. Family Bible? They won’t accept a birth certificate but they will accept a family Bible?” Barbara said.
Eventually her senator intervened, and the passport came through.
If you live in Arizona (or are thinking of moving there), you should be aware that a young-Earth creationist was on the special committee that reviewed the state's science curriculum standards on evolution. The outgoing Arizona Secretary of Education appointed Joseph Kezele, who teaches at Arizona Christian University and is president of the Arizona Origin Science Association.
He advocates for a literal interpretation of the history presented in the Bible, and claimed that all land animals, including humans and dinosaurs, were created on the sixth day when God created the universe. Adolescent dinosaurs were present on Noah's Ark because adult dinosaurs would have been too big, Kezele said. "Plenty of space on the Ark for dinosaurs – no problem," Kezele said.
and let's close with something to make people look twice
Imagine flying this radio-controlled version of Snoopy's dog house around your neighborhood.
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