Monday, February 19, 2018
Secret Agent Man
Monday, February 12, 2018
Preserve, Protect, and Defend
The bottom line of this is that they protected an abuser. And guess what is a job qualification to work in this White House? To protect someone who talked favorably about sexual assault on the Access Hollywood tapes. That is a job qualification in this White House. There's a pattern of behavior. ... They protect abusers. There's no way of getting around it, and I guess people will say, "Well, it doesn't matter. You can still be a good president. You can still do your job." No. If you are willing to defend someone who hurt somebody in this fashion, you have no boundaries. You have no restraint. You have no respect for the law.
- Amanda Carpenter, former staffer for Jim DeMint and Ted Cruz
This week's featured post is "Does the Exploding Federal Deficit Matter?"
This week everybody was talking about the White House defending spousal abuse
CNN summarizes the background:
Rob Porter, a top White House aide with regular access to President Donald Trump abruptly resigned on Wednesday amid abuse allegations from two ex-wives, who each detailed to CNN what they said were years of consistent abuse from Porter, including incidents of physical violence.
As so often happens with this White House, the move arises not because higher-ups found out -- White House Counsel Don McGahn apparently knew already -- but because the story was becoming public. CNN reports:
By early fall, it was widely known among Trump's top aides -- including chief of staff John Kelly -- both that Porter was facing troubles in obtaining the clearance and that his ex-wives claimed he had abused them. No action was taken to remove him from the staff. Instead, Kelly and others oversaw an elevation in Porter's standing. He was one of a handful of aides who helped draft last week's State of the Union address.
Porter was serving in the White House on an interim security clearance. (Until this week, I didn't know such a thing existed. I used to have a job that required a clearance, and you couldn't wander around the building unescorted until your clearance came through. Your boss would have to go outside the security perimeter to visit you in your temporary office. Apparently this White House has a more lax attitude. Jared Kushner also has an interim clearance.) He hadn't gotten a permanent clearance precisely because his ex-wives had told their stories to the FBI, who consequently worried that Porter could be blackmailed by America's enemies.
So far, we don't know exactly what Kelly knew when. (A Congress that was doing its job would ask him.) But he definitely had known for weeks that Porter wasn't getting a clearance, and that the issue involved a court order against him by one of his wives. When the initial reports surfaced in the press Tuesday, Kelly's first reaction Wednesday was to stand by Porter:
Rob Porter is a man of true integrity and honor and I can't say enough good things about him. He is a friend, a confidante and a trusted professional. I am proud to serve alongside him.
Sarah Sanders echoed his sentiment:
I have worked directly with Rob Porter nearly every day for the last year and the person I know is someone of the highest integrity and exemplary character. Those of us who have the privilege of knowing him are better people because of it.
Only later in the day, when pictures like the one above started circulating, did Kelly change his tune -- sort of.
I was shocked by the new allegations released today against Rob Porter. There is no place for domestic violence in our society. I stand by my previous comments of the Rob Porter that I have come to know since becoming Chief of Staff, and believe every individual deserves the right to defend their reputation.
The difference wasn't that Kelly learned new facts, but that the pictures in the press made Porter indefensible.
A second White House staffer resigned Friday after abuse allegations by his ex-wife. Trump played defense Saturday morning:
Peoples lives are being shattered and destroyed by a mere allegation. Some are true and some are false. Some are old and some are new. There is no recovery for someone falsely accused - life and career are gone. Is there no such thing any longer as Due Process?
Porter's second wife took that tweet personally. After all, Trump said "lives", which indicates he's talking about more than one case. In an op-ed in Time, Jennie Willloughby wrote:
The words “mere allegation” and “falsely accused” meant to imply that I am a liar. That Colbie Holderness is a liar. That the work Rob was doing in the White House was of higher value than our mental, emotional or physical wellbeing. That his professional contributions are worth more than the truth. That abuse is something to be questioned and doubted.
The really stunning part of this story is that Porter has been dating White House Communications Director Hope Hicks. Vanity Fair describes Hicks as: "one of the most powerful people in the White House, protected by Trump almost like a member of the Trump family." We're left with two possibilities: (1) Hicks knew that Porter had abused his two wives, and decided to date him anyway. (2) Hicks didn't know, and Kelly was content to let her date Porter without knowing.
You might hope for some tearful apology from Porter, maybe coupled with a statement about how he had found Jesus and turned his life around. But no, he denies everything. So it's a he-said/she-said-and-she-said-and-has-pictures story. The second staffer (David Sorenson) says he was actually the victim of his wife's violence.
As for the rumors that Kelly might be on his way out ... I'll believe that when he's gone.
Kelly has long been able to hide behind his reputation as a Marine general. But it has been obvious for some while that he himself is not "a man of true integrity and honor" either. Back in October, when Trump was feuding with the wife of a soldier killed in action in Niger, Kelly supported Trump's false account of their phone conversation, and then slandered Congresswoman Frederica Wilson, who heard the widow's side of the call. When video proved that Kelly had lied about Wilson, he refused to apologize.
That's the kind of man John Kelly is, and it's totally consistent with what we're seeing now.
and the budget deal
The government was actually shut down for a few hours after midnight on Friday, but hardly anybody noticed. Friday morning Congress passed and Trump signed a deal that did a few things:
- kept the government funded until March 23
- agreed on spending levels for the rest of FY 2018, which lasts through September
- raised the debt ceiling for another year
The agreement blew away spending caps that have been around since the budget sequestration agreement that ended the 2013 debt-ceiling crisis. That deal had linked caps on defense spending with caps on non-defense spending. Republicans have long wanted to do away with the defense cap, which Democrats weren't willing to do with the non-defense cap still in place. So they circumvented both: Each of the next two years, the Defense cap goes up by $160 billion to around $700 billion, and the non-defense cap goes up $128 billion to $591 billion.
Coupled with the recent tax cut, Congress is now looking at a deficit of around $1.2 trillion for FY 2019, not counting the infrastructure proposal Trump is making today. The featured post discusses just how worried we should be about that.
Raising the budget caps, though, doesn't actually appropriate money. That has to happen in a separate bill that has to get worked out by March 23. The appropriation bill, called an "omnibus", has to describe where the money goes in more detail.
Beyond just "making America great again", I haven't seen a detailed analysis of what the Pentagon needs more money for. The non-defense part includes money for disaster relief, community health centers, the opioid problem, and infrastructure.
and the Dreamers
One thing the budget deal didn't include was a resolution to the problem of the Dreamers, who could start being deported next month (though probably not, because of certain court decisions). Certainly there is deportation risk later in the year.
Democrats sent mixed messages. Nancy Pelosi cited the lack of a DACA fix when she voted against the budget deal herself and gave a record-setting 8-hour speech on the floor of the House. But Democratic leadership did not try to hold House Democrats together to vote down the deal, which Democrats could have done if they had stuck together (given that some Republicans were also voting no for other reasons). I'm uncertain whether the caucus would have held together if Pelosi had tried.
In the deal that resolved the last shutdown, Democrats got a commitment from Mitch McConnell to let a DACA bill come to the floor, but the bipartisan group of senators who are supposed to write such a bill haven't been able to agree on a text yet, so McConnell's promise hasn't been tested.
If you think the Dreamers won't get deported even after DACA runs out, you need to understand the kind of things ICE is doing now: About a month ago, Dr. Lukasz Niec, "a physician specializing in internal medicine at Bronson Healthcare Group in Kalamazoo", a legal permanent resident with a green card, and the father of a 12-year-old girl (who is an American citizen), got arrested in his home. The problem: the 43-year-old physician was convicted of two misdemeanors when he was a teen-ager, so he is "subject to removal" back to Poland, where he hasn't lived since he was five years old, when his family escaped the Communist regime then in power.
He spent about three weeks in county jail and went back to work Thursday. His deportation case is still pending while a parole board considers whether to pardon him for his crimes.
So, Dr. Niec is one of the "bad hombres" Trump was talking about.
Another bad hombre is Syed Jamal, who lives in Lawrence, Kansas and teaches chemistry at Park University in Missouri. Jamal came to the U.S. legally in 1987 as a student from Bangladesh. He stayed after his student visa ran out, married, and is raising several children (U.S. citizens) between ages 7 and 14.
Jamal was arrested while walking his children to school, and was whisked away to a jail in El Paso, from which he could have been flown back to Bangladesh at any moment. (Sometimes ICE grabs people off the street and deports them the same day.) A judge has granted him a temporary stay until Thursday, at which point no one knows what will happen.
If the Iraq War taught us anything, it should have taught us that dragging fathers away while their sons watch is a good way to nurture future terrorism.
Roberto Beristain, who lived in the U.S. for 20 years, and owned and operated Eddie's Steak Shed in Granger, Indiana, was deported to Mexico in April. His wife, a citizen, now regrets voting for Trump; she had believed his promise that he was only interested in deporting criminals. They were raising three children together, including one from her previous marriage.
CNN talked to Beristain's attorney, who told this story:
Beristain bounced between detention facilities -- Indiana, Wisconsin, Illinois, Louisiana, New Mexico and Texas -- making it more difficult for his attorneys to file legal motions in one jurisdiction. Then on Wednesday, as his legal team was expecting a ruling, they got the news: ICE had deported him to Juarez in the middle of the night.
From an immigrant shelter in Mexico, Beristain describes how it went down:
"They suddenly told me it was time to go," Roberto Beristain was quoted as saying. "They told me to get my stuff, they put me in the back of a van and sped toward the border. They took me to another facility while in transport to sign paperwork. I asked to speak with my attorney, but was told there wasn't time for that. At around 10 p.m., I was dropped off at the Mexico-US border and walked into Mexico."
and the stock market
The stock market drop of the last couple weeks has been unnerving, but so far the problem seems to be more about the market economy than the real economy. In other words: Investors are worried that stock prices got too high, not that there is something wrong with the economy.
I don't make market predictions, and you shouldn't trust me if I did. But if you are invested in the market, you shouldn't panic, you should just ask yourself why you own what you own. If the reasons you bought a stock are still valid -- you believe in the product, the earnings and dividend numbers look good, and so on -- then stand pat. But if you bought stocks because stocks were going up, well, lately they've been they're going down. I don't know what to tell you.
and (still) the Nunes memo
Last week I dissected the Republican memo that tried (and failed) to de-legitimize the Mueller investigation. This week Trump refused to allow the release of the Democrats' memo critiquing the Republican memo. That's where we are: The administration is openly cherry-picking classified information, releasing stuff that supports Trump and keeping secret anything it can that makes him look bad. National security is a secondary concern; propaganda comes first.
When Trump said he was "looking forward" to talking to Robert Mueller, and would do so under oath, I didn't buy it.
If anybody expects to see Trump under oath without (or even with) an order from the Supreme Court, let me remind you of all the times he has said he would release his tax returns.
This week, we found out that Trump's lawyers are laying the groundwork to resist a Mueller/Trump interview. Ultimately, it will probably come down to whether or not he invokes the Fifth Amendment. Lawyer Seth Abramson explains the legal issues involved.
Vox listed all the stories that slipped under the radar last week while everybody was arguing about the memo: A Labor Department analysis shows that a new rule will result in restaurants stealing billions from their workers, but it isn't releasing that information. The CDC is facing a huge cut to programs that address foreign epidemics; I guess Trump's Wall will stop all those germs from getting here. People in public housing will face higher rents and more red tape. Ben Carson's son is benefiting from his Dad's job as HUD secretary. The payday lending industry is rewarding Trump for favorable treatment by holding a big conference at one of Trump's clubs.
and you also might be interested in ...
Amazing article this week in the NYT Magazine: "What Teens Are Learning From Online Porn". Some Boston teens from a variety of high schools attended a Porn Literacy class; their conversations have a lot to teach adults. Pretty much everybody understands that the plotlines of porn videos are ridiculous. (Delivering pizzas to lonely housewives is not a good strategy for losing your virginity.) But inexperienced teens are taking porn seriously as a lesson in what kinds of things their future partners will expect them to do, and what kinds of things s/he will enjoy. And since adults refuse to recognize that kids are seeing this stuff, the lessons don't get critiqued.
Some people, as they get older, stop caring about other people's approval and just say what's on their minds. Check out this interview with 84-year-old musician Quincy Jones.
Jonathan Rauch and Benjamin Wittes argue that the Republican Party has passed a point of no return:
This, then, is the article we thought we would never write: a frank statement that a certain form of partisanship is now a moral necessity. The Republican Party, as an institution, has become a danger to the rule of law and the integrity of our democracy. The problem is not just Donald Trump; it’s the larger political apparatus that made a conscious decision to enable him. In a two-party system, nonpartisanship works only if both parties are consistent democratic actors. If one of them is not predictably so, the space for nonpartisans evaporates. We’re thus driven to believe that the best hope of defending the country from Trump’s Republican enablers, and of saving the Republican Party from itself, is to do as Toren Beasley did: vote mindlessly and mechanically against Republicans at every opportunity, until the party either rights itself or implodes
Jennifer Rubin, who used to work at The Weekly Standard and was a strong Mitt Romney supporter in 2012, comes pretty close to saying the same thing. She connects defending spouse-abusers in the White House with the abuse of classified documents, the abuse of Senate procedure, and the whole raft of norm-violations that have been going on for a while now. "The core mission of the GOP is now to defend abusers," she writes.
EPA Director Scott Pruitt was interviewed by KSNV in Las Vegas. Here's some of what he said:
We know humans have most flourished during times of what, warming trends. So I think there's assumptions made that because the climate is warming, that that necessarily is a bad thing. Do we really know what the ideal surface temperature should be in the year 2100, in the year 2018? That's fairly arrogant for us to think that we know exactly what it should be in 2100.
The stupidity here is subtle, so it probably gets past people who don't want to think about the climate, or who have vested interests in the fossil-fuel industry.
- The problem isn't just that we're in a warming trend, it's that the speed of the warming is unprecedented. If global average temperature went up 4 degrees over 10,000 years or 100,000 years, various natural and human systems might adjust smoothly. But the same warming in 100 years is catastrophic.
- The warming trend isn't just happening to us, we're causing it. So he's got the arrogance exactly backwards: It's arrogant to think that we can cause drastic climate change and not think about the consequences.
Closing the hole in the ozone layer is usually considered one of the victories of environmental regulation. But now there might be a new problem.
John Quiggen argues that Bitcoin disproves the idea that markets are efficient. The objects of previous bubbles -- dot-com stocks, market derivatives -- had plausible (if ultimately false) claims to value.
The contrast with Bitcoin is stark. The Bitcoin bubble rests on no plausible premise.... Hardly anyone now suggests that Bitcoin has value as a currency. Rather, the new claim is that Bitcoin is a “store of value” and that its price reflects its inherent scarcity. ... If Bitcoin is a “store of value,” then asset prices are entirely arbitrary. As the proliferation of cryptocurrencies has shown, nothing is easier than creating a scarce asset.
Here's the kind of clever entrepreneurship our country needs: A Girl Scout sold 300 boxes of cookies in six hours by setting up outside a legal marijuana shop in San Diego.
and let's close with something unexpected
In New Zealand, elderly people (and others who think they might die sooner rather than later) have started forming "coffin clubs". With help from the other members, they build their own coffins and decorate them creatively, preparing for funerals that will be celebrations of their lives rather than somber and depressing affairs. And they publicized the idea with a jazzy music video.
Monday, February 5, 2018
Doing Putin's Job
The latest attacks on the FBI and Department of Justice serve no American interests – no party’s, no president’s, only Putin’s. The American people deserve to know all of the facts surrounding Russia’s ongoing efforts to subvert our democracy, which is why special counsel Mueller’s investigation must proceed unimpeded. Our nation’s elected officials, including the president, must stop looking at this investigation through the warped lens of politics and manufacturing partisan sideshows. If we continue to undermine our own rule of law, we are doing Putin’s job for him.
This week's featured post is "The Nunes Memo: It's ridiculous and it damages the country, but it might work." On my religious blog Free and Responsible Search, I posted the text of the sermon "Owning My Racism", which I preached on Martin Luther King Sunday.
This week everybody was talking about the Nunes memo
The featured post goes into detail about the memo itself. But there are a number of articles about the larger effects, like "Why I Am Leaving the FBI" by counterterrorism expert Josh Campbell. The comments contain a lot of you-should-stand-and-fight messages, but they miss the point: FBI rules prevent agents from speaking out in public. If the problem is in the political arena, Campbell has to leave the FBI to work on it.
Another interesting perspective comes from former Illinois congressman and right-wing talk-radio host Joe Walsh: "Based on my experience working with him, nothing about the way he’s behaving now as chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence — overseeing part of the so-called Russia-Trump investigation — is particularly shocking. The Nunes I knew was a purely partisan animal. ... With Nunes, I found it was all about politics, almost never about policy."
As TPM's Allegra Kirkland points out "the FBI isn't a hotbed of Democratic partisans". It makes sense that, say, career EPA officials would be Democrats, because protecting the environment is much more of Democratic value than a Republican one. But it defies logic that career FBI agents as a group would have a liberal bias, or that the FBI chain-of-command would be dominated by partisan Democrats.
Think about it: If you run into a college student who's majoring in environmental studies and hoping to work at the EPA, she's almost certainly a liberal. But if she's majoring in law enforcement and hoping to work at the FBI, I don't think you can say much about her politics. If anything, she's probably more conservative than most Americans her age.
In the meantime, Putin's investment in Trump continues to pay dividends. In particular, the Trump administration is not going to enforce some of the sanctions overwhelmingly passed by Congress.
Also, the head of a major Russian intelligence service came to the U.S., in spite of sanctions that are supposed to keep him out. Last I heard, no one was taking credit for letting him in.
and the State of the Union
Tuesday seems like a long time ago, but Trump's first State of the Union address was this week. By now we all realize that Teleprompter Trump and Campaign Rally Trump are two very different speakers. This was Teleprompter Trump. The numbers are pretty much all nonsense, like the claim that cutting the corporate tax will "increase average family income by more than $4,000", but at least he didn't call Mexicans rapists or invite the gallery to punch his opponents in the face.
As I predicted before he took office, he's taking credit for a lot of Obama's accomplishments. ("We are now an exporter of energy to the world.") He continued to paint immigrants as criminals, making the MS-13 gang the face of immigration, and a reason to turn away refugee children. He made a lot of probably empty promises about infrastructure and new trade deals. He talked about "clean coal" as if those words actually meant something. I would examine the text more closely, but I've become skeptical of anything Trump says. Let's see what actual proposals get made.
One passage does deserve attention, because it's a very dangerous idea I suspect we'll hear again:
I call on the Congress to empower every Cabinet Secretary with the authority to reward good workers — and to remove Federal employees who undermine the public trust or fail the American people.
That's how the federal government worked in the 19th century, when it was a giant patronage machine similar to some of the big-city political machines. That's why the Civil Service Act got passed in 1883.
I thought Joe Kennedy did a good job with his response to Trump's speech. The Trump administration, he said, is turning America into a zero-sum game, where "in order for one to win, another must lose".
As if the mechanic in Pittsburgh and the teacher in Tulsa and the day care worker in Birmingham are somehow bitter rivals, rather than mutual casualties of a system forcefully rigged for those at the top. As if the parent who lies awake terrified that their transgender son will be beaten and bullied at school is any more or less legitimate than the parent whose heart is shattered by a daughter in the grips of opioid addiction. So here is the answer Democrats offer tonight: we choose both. We fight for both.
That sounds like a theme Democrats can run on. It ties right in to the budget battles, where there's never enough money for what ordinary Americans need, because we've already given it away in tax cuts for the rich.
CBS News shines a light on the administration's all-talk-no-action opioid policy.
The answers, according to the president's speech: tightened immigration laws that will slow drug trafficking and getting "much tougher on drug dealers and pushers if we are going to succeed in stopping this scourge." But the rhetoric omitted any mention of the actual solutions proposed by experts on the front lines of the crisis.
What's left out?
- Addiction to prescription drugs, which are made right here and trafficked through doctors and drug stores.
- Funding for treatment programs.
Trump declared opioid addiction a "public health emergency" in October, but that in itself opened up only $57K in federal funding. Since then, he has not proposed any opioid program to Congress.
Another piece of the real state of the union is that we're losing environmental protections.
By coincidence, the day after Trump's speech I was reading David Wong's latest novel What the Hell Did I Just Read?, where I ran into this passage:
Marconi's pipe was leaning against an ancient figurine that looked like some kind of Egyptian god, only it had an enormous, erect penis almost as big as its torso, the figure's left hand wrapped around the shaft. ... "It's the Egyptian god Min, popular in the fourth century B.C., the god of fertility. It is believed that during the coronation of a new Pharaoh, he would be required to masturbate in front of the crowd, to demonstrate that he himself possessed the fertility powers of Min. If you have watched a State of the Union address, you will find that the ritual has not changed much."
The description of Min turns out to be accurate, but Wong writes intentionally absurd novels, so I wouldn't trust the claim about Pharaoh.
but we need to be telling stories about the cruelty of Trump's immigration policies
Max Boot tells about Helen Huynh. She and her husband came here from Vietnam after the war, in which her husband fought on our side. They became citizens and had two daughters, who of course are citizens. She developed leukemia and needed a stem-cell transplant; her sister in Vietnam turned out to be a perfect match. But the sister's visa application to come here for the procedure was rejected three times, and Huynh died a few days before Trump's State of the Union.
Also take a look at the Dreamer Stories web site. The more we can get voters to look at the Dreamers as individuals, the harder it will be to deport them.
and you also might be interested in ...
The Super Bowl: Philadelphia 41, New England 33.
The federal government is expected to borrow nearly $1 trillion this year, a sharp increase over last year. Neither party in Congress seems to be worried about this or have any plan to do anything about it. I've explained in the past why I don't believe the federal debt is a big problem, but it certainly looks like a big problem, so you can be sure that eventually we'll be told that we have to accept major cuts in the social safety net because the country can't afford it. (Reversing the recent trillion-dollar giveaway to corporations and the rich won't come up.)
Judges keep knocking down voter suppression laws. This time it's the disenfranchisement of felons in Florida. Under the current rules, anyone convicted of a felony (and many felonies are not such heinous crimes) has to serve the sentence and probation, wait five years (or seven for some offenses), and then begin an appeal process that ends up in front of "a panel of high-level government officials over which Florida's governor has absolute veto authority." According to Judge Mark Walker: "No standards guide the panel."
In other words, the governor gets to choose which Floridians will be allowed to vote for his re-election. That conflict of interest is not just theoretical. The judge writes:
Plaintiffs identify several instances of former felons who professed political views amenable to the Board’s members who then received voting rights, while those who expressed contrary political views to the Board were denied those same rights. Applicants—as well as their character witnesses—have routinely invoked their conservative beliefs and values to their benefit.
The judge focused on the arbitrariness of the system of restoring voting rights to felons, and allowed the 5-7 year waiting period. He put off ordering a remedy until later this month.
But even without the political bias, such a system is wrong. It's wrong on an individual basis, because after you've served your time, you should be allowed to re-enter society fully. But when you combine felon disenfranchisement with a justice system that is looking for black crime and far more likely to convict black law-breakers than white ones, you wind up with a significant disenfranchisement of the black community. (Walker notes that 1-in-5 of Florida's black adults is disenfranchised.) Similarly, upper-class and middle-class voters accused of a felony are more likely to have good lawyers who can either get them off or plea-bargain to a misdemeanor. So a substantial class bias gets baked into the electorate as well.
Someone might argue that the system is fair, and blacks and poor people just commit more felonies. But I think that the burden of proof in that argument should be borne by the state.
In November, Floridians -- at least the ones still allowed to -- will vote on a ballot initiative to restore felon voting rights.
No human languages or institutions have lasted for 10,000 years, so how do you make a warning symbol for something that will be dangerous that long? (Consider the skull-and-crossbones. You might intend it to say "poison", but some future person might think "pirate treasure".) What kind of warning will get people's attention, but not make them curious? Vox and 99% Invisible explore those questions in this fascinating video.
and let's close with something cute
If you can't wait for the Olympics to start, I offer this video of a girl doing an obstacle course that her Dad built in the back yard.