#^d 2019-03-31 #^h Weekend Roundup
Started late, figuring I'd "just go through the motions," and I'm giving up with maybe half of my usual sources unexamined. Anyhow, this should suffice as a sample on what's gone on this past week.
One piece I intended to link to was an article in the Wichita Eagle a few days ago about sex abuse in the local Catholic diocese, going back to the 1960s or earlier. My closest neighborhood friend attended Catholic schools and often talked about how sex-obsessed the priests were -- not that he was himself abused, but something I found completely baffling at the time. That was something I often wondered about When the scandals in Boston and elsewhere were finally exposed, but until this article appeared I had never seen mention of Wichita. Can't find the article on the Wichita Eagle website -- although I did find an earlier one, KBI investigating clergy sex abuse cases in Kansas, asks victims to come forward, mostly on Kansas City, KS.
Some scattered links this week:
Matthew Yglesias:
Trump EPA appointees want more air pollution -- that's a very bad idea: "Fine particulates are, if anything, massively under-regulated. . . . The question of exactly how much we are under-regulating particulates seems somewhat open to me, but the sign of the error is very clear."
The emerging 737 MAX scandal, explained: "It's more than bad software."
Amy Klobuchar's $1 trillion infrastructure plan, explained: "Fulfilling a pledge Trump infamously left on the cutting room floor." Seems like a nice, round ballpark figure, but I suspect the need is much more. Also note that you could triple it and it would still cost less than the Iraq War debacle.
Elizabeth Warren's plan to make farming great again, explained: "A crackdown on agribusiness conglomerates, and more."
The panic over yield curve inversion, explained: "A key financial indicator says a recession is coming soon (maybe)."
It's time for Congress to do its job and investigate Trump:
It's worth remembering how Mueller's investigation came into existence. Back in 2017, Trump's relationship with Russia was the only question that Republicans, who controlled Congress, wanted to investigate.
Even on Inauguration Day, there were plenty of obvious lines of inquiry into Trump to pursue. There were the credible allegations of sexual assault (allegations that have only multiplied since then), the campaign contributions that helped Trump University investigations go away, the fake charity Trump ran for years, the dubious financing of his real estate ventures, and, of course, the mystery of his tax returns.
Since he's taken office, the list of questions worthy of investigation has only grown. There's his family members' weird security clearances, reporting that a group of Mar-a-Lago club members appear to be running the Veterans Administration, and the prosecution of Trump's personal attorney Michael Cohen, which seems to have implicated Trump personally in a crime.
The problem with all of this has been that Republicans didn't and don't care. It was not until Nancy Pelosi took over as speaker of the House this January that there was anything Democrats could do to take on these questions without Republican help.
Democrats got behind Mueller's investigation because it was the only game in town, not because it seemed incredibly promising. It was Trump's abrupt decision to fire FBI Director James Comey, followed by months of incredibly guilty-sounding tweets and other statements from the White House, that led many of us to believe Mueller was likely to uncover something big.
Michael Ames: How Bowe Bergdahl may end up being the key to peace with the Taliban: Author of the book American Cipher: Bowe Bergdahl and the US Tragedy in Afghanistan, which my wife recently read and touts as one of the best books written on the whole misbegotten Afghanistan fiasco.
Ross Barkan: Will Rachel Maddow face a reckoning over her Trump-Russia coverage? I've done my best to avoid her for more than the two years she's been obsessed with Trump/Russiagate, but I've seen enough to suspect that she's earned her winning spot in The Post's Mueller Madness bracket -- she beat Ann Navarro, John Oliver, John Brennan, and Stephen Colbert along the way. I've watched Colbert regularly over the period, although he's sometimes stretched my patience with his jokes on Mueller, Putin, and "treason" (a word that should never be uttered). Of the other 30 bracket picks, I recognize about two-thirds of the names, but only follow a couple regularly -- Jimmy Kimmel, Paul Krugman -- with another half-dozen I've read on occasion. Most of those have a much broader critique of Trump, so I doubt they'll have problems moving on.
Jamelle Bouie: Oliver North showed Republicans the way out: "Belligerence, shamelessness and partisanship can take you far."
Alexia Fernandez Campbell:
Maryland just became the sixth state to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour: Over the Republican governor's veto.
Thousands of workers at US factories in Mexico are striking for higher wages.
Jane Coaston: The Mueller investigation is over. QAnon, the conspiracy theory that grew around it, is not.
Steve Coll: The media and the Mueller Report's March surprise.
Coral Davenport: Trump's order to open Arctic waters to oil drilling was unlawful, federal judge finds.
David A Farenthold/Jonathan O'Connell:
Mary Fitzgerald/Claire Provost: Trump-linked US Christian 'fundamentalists' pour millions of 'dark money' into Europe, boosting the far right.
Masha Gessen: After the Mueller Report, the dream of a sudden, magic resolution to the Trump tragedy is dead.
Of course, Donald Trump has not single-handedly destroyed the American public sphere. It had been in decline for a while, with the horse-race culture of its political campaigns, the anti-intellectual posture of many of its politicians, and its media's obsession with entertainment. But Trump has forced the deterioration to new lows. This is true of Trumpism in general: its elements -- corruption, xenophobia, isolationism, disdain for the media, denigration of the government, and lack of transparency -- are not new phenomena but are, rather, long-standing trends. But Trump represents a quantum shift, a leap into the abyss. And much of the descent has gone underdiscussed by public figures and undercovered by the media, which has been focussed on the investigation by the special counsel, Robert Mueller, to the exclusion of much else.
The Mueller investigation, as a media story and a conversation topic, has been irresistible largely because it promised a way to avoid thinking of Trump as an American development. The Russian-collusion story dangled the carrot of discovering that Trump was entirely foreign to U.S. politics, a puppet of a hostile power. It also held the appeal of a secret answer to our catastrophe, one that would make the unimaginable suddenly explicable.
The truth about Trump has been in plain view all along. The President has waged an attack on political institutions, the law, and culture, and has succeeded to an astonishing extent. We are no longer surprised, for example, that more than a month passes between White House press briefings, or that the President and his spokespeople lie openly and routinely. The assumption that the Administration should at least act as though it were accountable to the public has vanished, and we barely took notice.
Tara Golshan:
w/Dylan Scott: The big divide among 2020 Democrats over trade -- and why it matters.
Congress is at a stalemate over disaster relief because Trump doesn't want to help Puerto Rico: "Trump told senators he thinks Puerto Rico got too much funding compared to mainland states."
Joshua Gotbaum: The federal government gave up on retirement security: "As companies shortchange employees with pensions, Treasury and Labor look the other way."
David A Graham: The Steele Dossier set the stage for a Mueller letdown.
Sean Illing: Did the media botch the Russia story? A conversation with Matt Taibbi. Also see links to Taibbi's latest pieces, below.
Jen Kirby:
Sarah Kliff: Donald Trump is very committed to taking away your health insurance:
But in office, Trump has attempted to implement an agenda that does the opposite. He's backed legislation, regulations, and lawsuits that would make it harder for sick people to get health insurance, allow insurance companies to discriminate against patients with preexisting conditions, and kick millions of Americans off the Medicaid program.
This week, his Justice Department filed a legal brief arguing that a judge should find Obamacare unconstitutional -- a decision that would turn the insurance markets back into the Wild West and eliminate Medicaid coverage for millions of Americans. By at least one estimate, a full repeal could cost 20 million Americans their health care coverage.
Elizabeth Kolbert: Louisiana's disappearing coast: "The state loses a football field's worth of land every hour and a half. Now engineers are in a race to prevent it from sinking into oblivion."
Dara Lind:
Dylan Matthews: The government failed to stop the last recession. It can prevent the next one. A smorgasbord of ideas, none of which strike me as especially good (or even appropriate), but perhaps worth thinking about. My impression is that recessions are mainly caused by asset bubbles and excessive leverage, and none of these really address those problems. Some do fit under the rubric of "automatic stabilizers," which don't prevent recessions but do limit the damage.
Ella Nilsen:
Trump's vision for higher education is limiting student loans and prioritizing for-profit colleges.
Senate Democrats unveiled an anti-corruption companion bill. Mitch McConnell is already blocking it: "All 47 Senate Democrats have signed on to the For the People Act, which the House passed earlier this month."
Michael Paarlberg: Enough collusion talk. It's time to focus on Trump's corruption: "If there is a silver lining to the confusion and disappointment of Russiagate, it is that we can now pay attention to the real fleecing." This piece could have been written two years ago, and would still have come too late. I always hated the "collusion talk" -- basically, four reasons: it lazily recirculated cold war prejudices, ignoring the fact that Russia's motives have fundamentally changed (from left to right, from inept socialism to the oligarchy of mafia capitalism); it assumed that a temporary alignment of interests (both Putin and Trump wanted to bend their governments to better support the rich, and both were deeply cynical and contemptuous of democracy) amounted to an alliance; and they saw Trump (even as president) as naive and submissive to the stronger and more cunning Putin; and finally, it was embraced most fervently by Hillary Clinton's fans, because it seemed to offer an explanation for her loss that she couldn't be held responsible for -- by a devious, hostile foreign power dedicated to hurting Americans by denying us the blessings of her wise and generous rule, which brings full circle to the lazy thinking of the first point. As Masha Gessen notes above, Russiagate seemed to have the appeal of a magic bullet, but it ignored the simpler explanation, which was that Trump was no more than a "useful idiot" for Putin, the Kochs, the Mercers, and a cast of others (including Israelis and Saudis and Chinese and less notorious "foreigners") -- made useful precisely because he was and is so utterly, shamelessly corrupt. So sure, let's talk about his corruption now, as many of us have been doing since he selected his cabinet and started cashing in chits at his hotels. But we should also acknowledge that a big part of why Clinton lost was that she was tainted by the same corruption as Trump: in fact, he could even brag about the favors his campaign dollars bought from her. Still, I suspect that corruption misses the real crux of the problem with Trump. There is a deeper problem with Trump, and indeed with nearly all Republicans these days, and that is worldview: their understanding of how the world works, and of how people should live and act in the world.
Martin Pengelly: Trump is the 'world's worst cheat at golf,' new book says. The book is Rick Reilly's Commander in Cheat: How Golf Explains Trump.
Andrew Prokop: Mueller's many loose ends: "What comes next now that the probe is finished."
David Roberts: The Green New Deal aims to get buildings off fossil fuels. These 6 places have already started.
Aaron Rupar:
Trump's latest comments about the border indicate he doesn't understand how trade works.
Trump's latest attack on Adam Schiff is a new low, even for him: Not really, especially "for him." But then I never thought Schiff's uncritical siding with America's "intelligence agencies" was a smart bet.
Trump is making stuff up about the Great Lakes, for some weird reason.
Stephen Moore's unpaid taxes are the latest example of Trump failing to vet high-profile nominees. Related: Allegra Kirkland: Trump Fed pick once found in contempt for failing to pay child support.
Trump on Mueller report he hasn't seen yet: "It could not have been better".
Amanda Sakuma: Georgia passes 6-week 'fetal heartbeat' bill that bans most abortions.
Dylan Scott:
Trump's health care agenda is a legal disaster: "The federal courts are slamming the Trump administration for pursuing unlawful health care policies."
Federal judge blocks Medicaid work requirements in Arkansas and Kentucky.
Sabrina Siddiqui: From victory to vengeance: Trump scents blood in 2020 fight:
t felt like a victory lap. At a rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan on Thursday night, surrounded by a sea of red Make America Great Again hats, a defiant Donald Trump held the podium before a raucous crowd.
"After three years of lies and smears and slander, the Russia hoax is finally dead," the president declared in a 90-minute speech.
Basking after the conclusion of special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation, which clouded the first two years of his presidency, Trump falsely claimed "total exoneration."
He vowed retaliation against some of his sharpest critics and suggested consequences for the media were in order. He spoke of doing away with Barack Obama's healthcare law. And he threatened to shut down the US-Mexico border as early as next week.
It was a stark reminder of how Trump views his executive authority and a glimpse of his looming fight for re-election.
Emily Stewart:
"AOC sucks" is the new "Lock her up": "The right's attacks on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez mirror criticisms of Hillary Clinton: Well, basically because no one on the right thinks before attacking: their vitriol is "one size fits all."
Betsy Devos is still struggling to explain cuts to Special Olympics funding. Trump later reversed his budget cut.
The economy is growing. Democrats want to know who's benefiting. Reminds me of the line that trial lawyers should never ask a question they don't already know the answer to. I mean, you know the answer to this one.
Recessions, and the fear that another one is just around the corner, explained.
Matt Taibbi:
On Russiagate and our refusal to face why Trump won:
Trump would already be president-elect before he was taken seriously as an electoral phenomenon. Right up until the networks called Florida for him on election night, few major American media figures outside of Michael Moore -- who incidentally was also right about WMDs and ridiculed for it -- believed a Trump win possible.
The only reason most blue-state media audiences had been given for Trump's poll numbers all along was racism, which was surely part of the story but not the whole picture. A lack of any other explanation meant Democratic audiences, after the shock of election night, were ready to reach for any other data point that might better explain what just happened.
Russiagate became a convenient replacement explanation absolving an incompetent political establishment for its complicity in what happened in 2016, and not just the failure to see it coming. Because of the immediate arrival of the collusion theory, neither Wolf Blitzer nor any politician ever had to look into the camera and say, "I guess people hated us so much they were even willing to vote for Donald Trump."
Post-election, Russiagate made it all worse. People could turn on their TVs at any hour of the day and see anyone from Rachel Maddow to Chris Cuomo openly reveling in Trump's troubles. This is what Fox looks like to liberal audiences.
Worse, the "walls are closing in" theme -- two years old now -- was just a continuation of the campaign mistake, reporters confusing what they wanted to happen with what was happening.
Peter Wade: Poll: Only 29 percent of Americans say Mueller Report clears Trump.
Alex Ward: Russia is a threat to American democracy, with or without collusion: Two subheds: "Russia is still a threat to American elections" and "There was still a lot of Trump campaign contact with Russia." Both statements are certainly true, but also taken out of context and blown out of proportion. The biggest threat to American democracy is the outsized influence of special interest money, especially its ability to focus and control media. Putin's Russian state is essentially a protection racket for international oligarchs. It's no surprise that they would want to steer other countries' elections and politicians to advance their interests -- indeed, pretty much everyone with the means tries to do the same thing (not least, Americans who have interests/allies all around the world). On the other hand, Russia's budget is trivial compared to (to pick one of many domestic example) the Koch network, and due to history they have to lurk in the shadows (in stark contrast to Israel and Saudi Arabia).
Li Zhou: The Joe Biden and Anita Hill controversy: "He just keeps apologizing -- without saying anything new."
New York Times Editorial Board: The secret death toll of America's drones: "President Trump is making it harder to know how many civilians the government kills by remote control."