The Amazing Fall Of Donald Trump’s Wall

Walls Are Mirrors Multiplied

 The National Memo:

[The Dotard] trumpets that he is the most bodacious barrier builder of all, yet he can’t seem to get his one “big, beautiful wall” funded or even taken seriously, much less built. Throughout his presidency, Donald Trump has continuously stamped his tiny feet and demanded that Congress shell out more than 10 billion of our taxpayers’ dollars to erect a monster of a wall across some 2,000 miles of the U.S. border with Mexico. Like a flimflamming snake-oil peddler, he rants that his magnificent edifice would magically keep “aliens,” “rapists,” “murderers,” “terrorists,” “drugs” and “cartels” from entering the U.S. from the south. But even when his own party controlled both houses of Congress, the presidency and the courts, his grand scheme went unloved, unfunded and unbuilt.

Still, he kept insisting … and persisting. In January, he directed his Customs and Border Control officials to put up a short section of his 30-foot-tall wall on the border at Calexico, California, to show the world how effective the Trump bulwark would be. Alas, though, the thing blew over! Not from a hurricane-force storm but from moderate winds topping out at only 37 miles an hour. The metal panels flung over into Mexico. Embarrassing.

A month later, a climbing group in Kentucky built a replica of that wall and held an up-and-over competition. Winning time was 13.1 seconds! Sixty-five competitors easily topped it, including an 8-year-old girl and a guy who climbed it one-handed while juggling various items with his other hand.

(click here to continue reading The Amazing Fall Of Donald Trump’s Wall – The National Memo.)

Would be amusing if it wasn’t so sad. What else could Wall money be spent on? Nearly anything would be more useful…

Plus this:

El Paso Times reports:

 

Smugglers in Juárez have engineered camouflage hook-and-ladders made of rebar that blend in so well with the border wall that it can be hard to detect, according to U.S. Border Patrol. The ladders are the same rust brown color as the mesh panels or steel beams of the fence.

 

El Paso’s urban stretch of border is littered with the rusted rebar ladders at the base on both sides — ladders lying in wait on the Mexican side, ladders pulled down by border agents or abandoned by smugglers on the U.S. side. One of the rebar ladders was poking out of a dumpster in a lot near the Chihuahuita neighborhood on Thursday.

The ladders appear to be made with two poles of 3/8-inch rebar and four thinner poles, outfitted with steps and bent over at the end in a U, to hook on the top of the wall. It’s the sort of cubed rebar support structure used in construction in Mexico, called castillo. 

Six meters of castillo costs 99 pesos, or about $5.30, at the Hágalo — or Do It Yourself — True Value hardware store in Juárez. There is no indication that smugglers are shopping at that store in particular.

Romero said the rebar ladders started turning up in large numbers in the El Paso sector last year in May, around the time that construction of the most recent replacement wallfinished downtown. They’ve been a go-to method for scaling the fence in the urban footprint since.

 

 

(click here to continue reading Smugglers in Mexico use camouflage ladder to cross border wall.)

When Trump Pardons Roger Stone…

From The Nation:

A pardon for Roger Stone would be the capstone of the White House’s extraordinary interference in this legal case. Attorney General William Barr already created a firestorm by overriding the sentencing guidelines of the original prosecutors in the case, who resigned in protest.

Trump’s use of his pardon power can be distinguished from the other scandals of his presidency in that it is a perfectly legal, indeed constitutional, form of corruption. The fact a president can pardon his own criminal associates doesn’t make the action any better than actually impeachable offenses like obstructing justice or using foreign aid to advance his political fortune.

Rather, the very constitutionality of Trump’s actions makes them worse, because they show how the legal powers of the presidency are themselves ripe for abuse. Trump, by being bolder than his predecessors, has shown how easily a president can undermine the rule of law without even breaking any laws.

Rule of Law, ha.

If Trump Pardons Roger Stone, Blame the Constitution
It gives the president sweeping pardon powers that he’s more than happy to use for partisan and personal ends.

Michael Bloomberg Is Not A Democrat

I couldn’t stomach watching much of the debate last night, happily, from what I saw, the loser was Michael Bloomberg. He was only in the debate because he is a billionaire, which is such a strange decision by the DNC. What is the depth of support for an oligarch among the Democratic Party’s base? Not much.

That said, I hope Bloomberg is a man of his word who spends freely up and down the ticket to unseat the Republicans, including in the Senate. We’ll see.

Ted Cruz criticizes vasectomy bill, exposing his hypocrisy on reproduction rights

Yellow Ballon Protest at Family Planning Clinic

The Guardian reports:

Ted Cruz, the Republican Texas senator, has given an unwitting boost to an Alabama lawmaker’s attempt to push back on restrictive abortion laws in her state, by tweeting about her proposal to force men to have vasectomies when they reach the age of 50.

Democratic representative Rolanda Hollis introduced the measure to the state’s House last week, intending it as protest against a law passed by the Alabama legislature last year to outlaw abortion in almost every case unless the life of the mother was at risk.

“The responsibility is not always on the women. It takes two to tangle [sic],” Hollis wrote in a tweet acknowledging that her long-shot House bill, which would also a mandate a vasectomy after the birth of a father’s third biological child, was intended to “neutralize the abortion ban bill”.

After an initial flare of mostly local publicity, the issue was set to fade back into obscurity – until Cruz waded in with a tweet that placed it firmly before a national audience and his own 3.5 million Twitter followers, exposing his apparent hypocrisy over reproductive legislation at the same time.

“Yikes. A government big enough to give you everything is big enough to take everything… literally!” Cruz wrote, linking to an Alabama news website’s account of the story from three days previously.

(click here to continue reading Ted Cruz criticizes vasectomy bill, exposing his hypocrisy on reproduction rights | US news | The Guardian.)

Ted Cruz is not as smart as he pretends to be, in other words. Or else, secretly he believes in progressive ideals but says the opposite because he is a Senator from Texas? 

Nahh, Cruz is just not that smart.

Baby Factory

Wonkette:

For nearly a decade, as male politicians have repeatedly sought to chip away at our reproductive rights, female legislators have responded with bills of their own, meant to regulate theirs. In 2012 we had a whole slew of them — Rep. Kelly Cassidy of Illinois proposed adding an amendment to a bill requiring those who get abortions to watch an ultrasound beforehand that would also require men who get Viagra to watch a graphic video about its potential side effects; Sen. Janet Howell of Virginia thought men who wanted Viagra should probably get a rectal exam first; and Ohio state Sen. Nina Turner felt that the best way to show men who feel they need a drug for erectile disfunction “that we care” about them would be to require a psychological examination beforehand, and then a cardiac test every 90 days after that, and that they should also be required to sign a form saying they understand the side effects.

Then, in 2017, Texas state Rep. Jessica Farrar “A Man’s Right To Know Act” proposed fining men $100 for masturbating (every sperm is sacred!), allowing doctors to refuse to perform vasectomies or prescribe Viagra if they feel they have a religious objection to it, and requiring all men to read an informational booklet before getting Viagra or a vasectomy or a colonoscopy. So good! All of them!

The latest of these bills comes from Alabama state Rep. Rolanda Hollis (D-Birmingham), who on Thursday filed a bill (HB 238) that would require men to get a vasectomy prior to their 50th birthday or after their third child. Naturally, this would be at the man’s own expense. And Ted Cruz is positively outraged!

 

(click here to continue reading Ted Cruz Positively Outraged That The Government Would Interfere With His Reproductive Rights – Wonkette.)

Compromised encryption machines gave CIA window into major human rights abuses in South America

Eye see u Willis

The Washington Post reports:

South American military dictatorships combined forces in the late 1970s on a continent-wide crackdown they called Operation Condor against perceived threats to their rule. It was part of a broader wave of violence in which nuns and priests were imprisoned, dissidents were tossed out of airplanes and thousands of victims were “disappeared.”
To coordinate this brutal campaign, Argentina, Chile and other countries established a secret communications network using encryption machines from a Swiss company called Crypto AG.

Crypto was secretly owned by the CIA as part of a decades-long operation with West German intelligence. The U.S. spy agency was, in effect, supplying rigged communications gear to some of South America’s most brutal regimes and, as a result, in unique position to know the extent of their atrocities.

Whether there were opportunities to act, and failures to do so, are among the difficult questions raised by the revelations about the CIA’s involvement in Crypto — dubbed Operation Rubicon by the agency. The program enabled U.S. spy agencies to monitor the communications of dozens of countries in Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America over half a century.

(click here to continue reading Compromised encryption machines gave CIA window into major human rights abuses in South America – The Washington Post.)

Revolution of The Innocent

Two brief thoughts: one, why didn’t the US government do more to reign in these abuses? Because they were being conducted by right-wing governments?

Total Information Awareness - Homeland Security Logo 

and two, no wonder China wants to emulate this program with the installation of Huawei networking gear, and also no wonder the US is opposed.

WaPo/AP:

No NATO ally should succumb to the temptation of letting Chinese tech giant Huawei into their next-generation cellular networks, U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Monday at Allied headquarters, turning U.S. opposition to Huawei into a bipartisan effort.
Pelosi said the invasion of privacy that would result from having Huawei integrated into Europe’s 5G communication networks would be “like having the state police, the Chinese state police, right in your pocket.”

She insisted such technology was far too sensitive to turn to over to Chinese interests, even though they can deliver such technology cheaper, thanks to the fact that the company relied on Western know-how to build its systems.

“While some people say that its cheaper to do Huawei — well yeah — it’s a People’s Liberation Army initiative using reversed engineering from Western technology,” Pelosi, the senior Democratic lawmaker, told reporters in Brussels.

“So, of course it’s going to be cheaper to put on the market. And if it’s cheaper, then they get the market share and then they (China) bring in their autocracy of lack of privacy.”

(click here to continue reading US House speaker Pelosi warns allies against using Huawei – The Washington Post.) 

Dark Towers: Deutsche Bank, Donald Trump, and an Epic Trail of Destruction by David Enrich

Same Sentiment

The Washington Post Book review:

A revelatory book about the rise and fall of the world’s biggest bank might hold some interest to financiers, business school professors and readers of the Economist. But what about one that also has all the elements of a page-turning mystery novel: suspicious suicides, Russian money laundering, securities and tax fraud, price fixing, $100 million bonuses, whistleblowers who are ignored and fired, and a heroin junkie peddling stolen documents to journalists and FBI agents? Add to that a big client with a sketchy financial history who suddenly becomes president of the United States, and you’ve got the makings of a blockbuster.

A new Russian subsidiary laundered tens of billions of rubles into dollars for Russian oligarchs and cronies of President Vladimir Putin. Its London traders helped organize a conspiracy to fix interest rates. Its New York investment bankers were at the front of the pack peddling collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) and mortgage-backed securities they knew would go bad. Its bankers conspired with corporate clients to evade economic sanctions against Iran and Syria, and helped giant hedge funds avoid taxes in the United States. Its enormous stash of risky derivatives was carried on its books at prices well above their market value. And its top executives repeatedly lied about all these things to investors, regulators and even their own directors.

The consequences of all this risk-taking, mismanagement and fraud are now clear. Between 2015 and 2017, the bank was forced to record losses of more than $10 billion, and it only barely returned to profitability in 2018. Since 2007, its stock price has fallen 95 percent. And as Enrich reports, the bank’s financial position was so precarious that even longtime corporate customers abandoned it. The International Monetary Fund recently singled out Deutsche Bank as the institution posing the biggest risk to the global banking system.

Trump Stamp

And when Trump was on the verge of defaulting on loans used to buy his failing hotels and casinos in Atlantic City, Deutsche Bank came to the rescue by peddling $484 million in junk bonds to investors — bonds on which Trump defaulted within a year.

Normally, such a default would have been enough to scare away even the most risk-tolerant lenders. But within months, Deutsche Bank’s real estate division was again providing Trump with a $640 million loan needed to build a new Chicago hotel, while its team in Moscow was steering Russian investors to Trump projects in Hawaii and Mexico. The relationship hit a low point in 2009 when Trump announced he had no intention of repaying his loan on the Chicago hotel, claiming that the unfolding financial crisis was an act of God that freed him of his obligation.

When Deutsche Bank sued to get its money back, Trump countersued, preposterously accusing the bank of predatory lending practices. The matter was finally settled with a two-year extension on the loan — and a vow by the bank’s real estate lenders never to do business with Trump again. But two years later, Trump somehow sweet-talked his way into Deutsche’s private banking division, which over the next several years provided him with $350 million in personal loans to cover projects in Chicago, Miami and Washington.

(click here to continue reading Book review of Dark Towers: Deutsche Bank, Donald Trump, and an Epic Trail of Destruction by David Enrich – The Washington Post.)

Sounds interesting. It always seemed odd to me that a bank would continue to lend vast sums of money to such an obvious deadbeat like Trump. Was it all money laundering? Something else? I guess I’ll have to read the book and find out.

Make America Great Again - Deport Trump

Jacket blurb

“Enrich tells the story of how one of the world’s mightiest banks careened off the rails, threatening everything from our financial system to our democracy. Darkly fascinating. A tale that will keep you up at night.” — John Carreyrou, #1 bestselling author of Bad Blood

From New York Times finance editor David Enrich, a searing exposé of the most scandalous bank in the world, revealing its shadowy ties to Donald Trump, Putin’s Russia, and Nazi Germany

On a rainy Sunday in 2014, a senior executive at Deutsche Bank was found hanging in his London apartment. Bill Broeksmit had helped build the 150-year-old financial institution into a global colossus, and his sudden death was a mystery, made more so by the bank’s efforts to deter investigation. Broeksmit, it turned out, was a man who knew too much.

In Dark Towers, award-winning journalist David Enrich reveals the truth about Deutsche Bank and its epic path of devastation. Tracing the bank’s history back to its propping up of a default-prone American developer in the 1880s, helping the Nazis build Auschwitz, and wooing Eastern Bloc authoritarians, he shows how in the 1990s, via a succession of hard-charging executives, Deutsche made a fateful decision to pursue Wall Street riches, often at the expense of ethics and the law.

Soon, the bank was manipulating markets, violating international sanctions to aid terrorist regimes, scamming investors, defrauding regulators, and laundering money for Russian oligarchs. Ever desperate for an American foothold, Deutsche also started doing business with a self-promoting real estate magnate nearly every other bank in the world deemed too dangerous to touch: Donald Trump. Over the next twenty years, Deutsche executives loaned billions to Trump, the Kushner family, and an array of scandal-tarred clients, including convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Dark Towers is the never-before-told saga of how Deutsche Bank became the global face of financial recklessness and criminality—the corporate equivalent of a weapon of mass destruction. It is also the story of a man who was consumed by fear of what he’d seen at the bank—and his son’s obsessive search for the secrets he kept.

(click here to continue reading Amazon.com: Dark Towers: Deutsche Bank, Donald Trump, and an Epic Trail of Destruction (9780062878816): David Enrich: Books.)

Contemporaneous Memos

New Hampshire 2020 Primary

Retreat Was Out Of Hope

Briefly, I’ve never understood the reasoning behind dropping out after not coming in first or second in New Hampshire and/or Iowa. Why not wait a few more weeks and see what happens in the next round of primary states, especially the Super Tuesday round?

I’ve never been on a campaign, so maybe this is naive, but dropping out before any meaningful votes vast seems dumb. Your team and you have spent gazillions of hours so far, why not see what chance you have nationally before quitting?

I assume part of this is fundraising drying up, but in the 21st C.E. system, that shouldn’t be such a big deal.

And I’m not talking about peripheral candidates who never got any traction, for whatever reason, candidates like Deval Patrick, Michael Bennet, and that tier. No I’m talking about Andrew Yang, Cory Booker, Kamala Harris and maybe even Julián Castro. Why drop out before March 3?

Alabama primary
American Samoa caucuses
Arkansas primary
California primary
Colorado primary
Maine primary
Massachusetts primary
Minnesota primary
North Carolina primary
Oklahoma primary
Tennessee primary
Texas primary
Utah primary
Vermont primary
Virginia primary

Yet another reason that Iowa and New Hampshire should not automatically first, as we discussed recently

The Family: inside the sinister sect that has infected western democracy

If you haven’t watched the 5 episodes of The Family on Netflix – based on Jeff Sharlet’s book of the same name, you should. Fascinating, and a bit creepy. Jesus has no place in the corridors of power, per my reading of the Christian Bible, but these dudes think otherwise.

The Guardian:

The series profiles an American evangelical Christian organisation, sometimes dubbed “the Family” but more often known as the Fellowship – which presumably was felt to lack the connotations of death cults and organised crime that make for a juicy documentary title. For decades, the Fellowship was overseen by the mysterious Doug Coe: a series of amusingly Zelig-esque photographs of him lurking smoothly behind US presidents and foreign leaders confirms Coe (who did Netflix’s lawyers a favour by dying in 2017) as the most powerful guy you never heard of.

It is made clear to Sharlet that the gang he has joined is all about power, based on a Bible reading that sees Jesus – and, in the Fellowship’s reading of its favourite scripture story, murderous home-wrecker David – as a sort of original alpha male, lending legitimacy to men who believe they have been chosen to be in charge. The faith and devotion are perfunctory, a means to an end, an excuse.

The Family’s focus on the Fellowship hides what is really a portrait of the whole “Christian” right wing in the US – as well as the type of (white) man who has thoroughly infected western postwar politics. A stale whiff of viciously inadequate masculinity hangs over the whole show, from the young Fellows’ awkwardly enforced celibacy to the episode that sets out how Fellowship missionaries have been sent to less developed countries that might be vulnerable to campaigns against gay rights. As an LGBT activist in Romania puts it: “They have a purpose in their life now. To hate you.”

(click here to continue reading The Family: inside the sinister sect that has infected western democracy | Television & radio | The Guardian.)

As an aside, I knew that Hillary and Bill Clinton were at the least allies of Doug Coe’s group, one of the reasons I’ve never supported them. I did not know until I started browsing the Wikipedia entry on The Fellowship (aka The Family) that Senator Amy Klobuchar was the chairperson of The Family’s National Prayer Breakfast in 2010. Ewww. No wonder I don’t support her for president

National Prayer Breakfast keynote and chairs
National Prayer Breakfast.PNG

Democratic Debate in New Hampshire

Well, I watched as much of the debate last night as my liver could tolerate. No candidate changed my mind, I have the same rough ranking of all the Democrats on the stage, if my state’s primary were tomorrow, I know who I’d chose. If my preferred candidate is not still in the race by the time that happens, I have backups.

Any of them are better than The Dotard.

Elizabeth Warren Was A Blogger Before A Politician

Low Key Lobby

Talking Points Memo reports:

Starting in December of 2004 and into the early months of 2005 TPM turned itself almost exclusively over to a focus on President Bush’s eventually failed effort to partially phase out Social Security and replace it with a system of private investment accounts. This got the attention of a Harvard Law Professor named Elizabeth Warren and her students and alerted them to the potential of online advocacy about key public policy issues affecting ordinary Americans’ lives. Warren and her students reached out to me and this led to our setting up a short-run blog exclusively focused on the federal bankruptcy bill then moving through Congress. Around the time that legislative battle had run its course we were launching TPMCafe. We decided to make that short-term effort permanent with Warren Reports, one of five sections of the original TPMCafe.

In 2005 Warren was far from an unknown figure. She had published widely read books on middle class squeeze and consumer debt issues and her public profile was growing. But she wasn’t an elected politician and I suspect (though obviously I can’t know) had little expectation of becoming one. Certainly she was far less well known than she is today and has been for going on a decade.

So today we’re republishing the posts she wrote for the TPM Bankruptcy Bill Blog (read them here) and Warren Reports (read them here) from mid-2005 through 2008, after which she went into the Obama administration.

(click here to continue reading Elizabeth Warren Before She Was a Pol | Talking Points Memo.)

That’s pretty interesting actually. I’d read a few of these back then (TPM has long been an essential read for me), but not all of them, and not in many years. 

Iowa Should No Longer Be First, Nor Should the Caucus System Exist

Gather Ye Popcorn While Ye May

The Washington Post reports on the debacle of the 2020 Iowa Caucus:

But whatever the culture that exists in evaluating candidates, Iowa has also come under strong and recurring criticism for exercising outsize influence on the nominating process. This predominantly white state, where agriculture is a dominant industry, is far from representative of the nation. The absence of a larger minority population, especially for a Democratic Party that has become increasingly diverse in its makeup, rubs raw many non-Iowa Democrats.

Beyond that, the caucus system itself is a target of criticism. Unlike primary elections, in which voters can cast their ballots in secret at any time of the day when the polls are open, the caucus process is far more demanding. Participants must arrive by a fixed time in the evening and be prepared to stay for several hours as the process of alignment and realignment plays out.

The caucuses disenfranchise some voters who, because of working hours or other issues, are not able to be at their precinct sites at the appointed hour. This year, special provisions were made to make it possible for those people to attend satellite caucuses at different hours. Still, the caucuses are cumbersome and to critics unfair as a result.
  

(click here to continue reading An epic breakdown in Iowa casts a spotlight on the caucus system – The Washington Post.)

Iowa is the first primary because…why exactly? Just because in 1972 they decided to be the first? Iowa may or may not be a great state1 but nobody can argue that it is first because it is a diverse, pluralistic state.

Caucuses seem like a modernized version of the proverbial smoke filled room which used to be how presidential candidates were often selected. Why not just have a primary? Everyone votes, in secret, and go from there? Why make the process so cumbersome?

Why does Iowa have an out-sized role in selecting presidential candidates, especially Democratic Party candidates? Trump stomped Hillary Clinton in 2016 in Iowa by nearly 10 percentage points, and there are only 6 electoral college votes in play. Why not spend time in a state who has enough electoral college votes to make a difference in the end? 

I say rotate the early voting states, maybe the first 5 are selected randomly via a televised lottery? Why not go to other parts of the country to test a candidates skills at fundraising and organization? Why not Hawaii? Alaska? Michigan? Or California, Texas and Florida? 

Non-GMO Sweet Corn

FiveThirtyEight suggested Illinois should be first, based on how the state’s population matches the Democratic Party base:

To sort states by how much they resemble the larger party, I looked at the race, ethnicity and education levels of Democratic voters in each state using the Cooperative Congressional Election Study, a survey of more than 50,000 people conducted by YouGov in conjunction with Harvard University.2 The CCES asks respondents who they voted for in the general election, so to estimate a state’s potential Democratic electorate, I included anyone who voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016, plus anyone else who identified as a Democrat. From there, I broke the Democratic electorate into five groups: white voters with no college degree, white voters with a college degree, African-American voters, Hispanic voters, and “everyone else.”3 (I broke white voters into two groups because education is a particularly meaningful distinction among white Democrats — and white voters overall.) I then looked at how different each state’s demographic makeup was from that of the national Democratic Party electorate. This allowed me to sort states by which ones best reflected the party.4

And as you can see in the table below, Illinois is the state whose population comes closest to being a cross section of Democratic voters. So under this hypothetical where Democrats prioritize states that best reflect their party, Illinois would go first in the nominating process, and Iowa and New Hampshire would move toward the back of the line. Now, if this calendar followed the current setup where four “carve-out” states vote by themselves at the start of the primary process, the three states after Illinois would be New Jersey, New York and Florida. Just after the first four would be Nevada, which currently goes third, reflecting the fact that there has been some effort to increase diversity at the start of the real presidential primary calendar.

(click here to continue reading We Re-Ordered The Entire Democratic Primary Calendar To Better Represent The Party’s Voters | FiveThirtyEight.)

Dance of the Devil Corn

Sounds good to me. No matter what, Iowa shouldn’t be first anymore. 

And if that changes, maybe ethanol won’t be subsidized so heavily…

Footnotes:

  1. I have little interest in visiting, but maybe one day []

Mr. President, here’s how the budget works

Fire Neurons Not Bombs

The Washington Post reports:

The way the federal budget works is often a mystery to Americans. But it shouldn’t be to the president of the United States.
Here, the president makes a basic mistake. He asserts that even though he signed into law a bill cutting taxes in 2017, revenue has kept going up — a fact he attributes to a robust economy. Some listeners might even have gotten the impression that the tax cuts were paying for themselves — a false claim the administration made repeatedly before the passage of the tax bill.

But revenue was always supposed to be going up year after year, despite the tax cuts. And revenue is way down from what had been anticipated before Congress approved the tax cuts, which (along with higher spending) is the reason the federal budget deficit is soaring despite a good economy.

Raw numbers don’t tell the whole story, of course. When comparing budget numbers over time, it’s generally more useful to look at revenue as a percentage of the gross domestic product (GDP), the broadest measure of the U.S. economy. As a percent of GDP, revenue was expected to drop from 17.2 percent in 2017 to 16.3 percent in 2019 and 16.4 percent in 2020, the CBO said.

That’s a key reason the federal deficit is soaring — from $665 billion in 2017 to more than $1 trillion in 2020. That’s not supposed to happen when the unemployment rate is below 4 percent. Recall that in Bill Clinton’s presidency — he raised taxes and Congress cut spending — that the budget actually went into surplus. But Trump has signed bills that cut taxes and also dramatically increased spending — the exact opposite approach.

(click here to continue reading Mr. President, here’s how the budget works – The Washington Post.)

One of my biggest wishes is for the citizens of the United States to collectively decide that the office of the President is important, and should only be staffed by competent, smart people, and not award it to someone who proves again and again he is not competent, nor smart.

Some Kinda Bubble Boy

Senators Who Are Up For Re-Election in 2020

Lake Michigan at Dusk, number 713

Since I looked this up, here is the list of Senators who are running for election in 2020. I would suggest that the ones who voted against witnesses in the Trump* trial should not win their re-election, unfortunately, some will anyway.

  • Alabama – Doug Jones – voted for witnesses, but who knows if he’ll win again in deeply conservative Alabama
  • Alaska – Dan Sullivan – voted no, sadly will probably win re-election
  • Arizona (special) – Martha McSally – voted no, of course, and should lose her election because of it and other reasons
  • Arkansas – Tom Cotton – voted no, sadly will probably win re-election 
  • Colorado – Cory Gardner, voted no, should lose because of his moral cowardice
  • Delaware – Chris Coons – voted yes, should win in a Democratic plurality state
  • Georgia –David Perdue – voted no, sadly will probably win re-election 
  • Georgia (special) –Kelly Loeffler – voted no, sadly will probably win re-election 
  • Idaho – Jim Risch -voted no, sadly will probably win re-election 
  • Illinois –Dick Durbin – voted yes, should win re-election handily as he’s fairly popular in Illinois
  • Iowa – Joni Ernst – voted no, should lose for being a tool of Putin, but Iowa is a toss-up so who knows 
  • Kansas – Pat Roberts (retiring) -voted no, because he has no moral courage. Not sure who wins to replace Roberts, the universe sure hopes it isn’t Kris Kobach. Doubtful this seat flips, but maybe? 
  • Kentucky – Mitch McConnell -voted no, sadly will probably win, but it will be closer than usual for Moscow Mitch.
  • Louisiana  – Bill Cassidy – voted no, sadly will probably win re-election 
  • Maine – Susan Collins – voted yes, but is not popular in Maine and could very well lose which would cause much rejoicing across the country.
  • Massachusetts – Ed Markey – voted yes, should win easily
  • Michigan –Gary Peters – voted yes, and probably will win, but it will be close
  • Minnesota – Tina Smith – voted yes, and might squeak out a win in Al Franken’s old seat
  • Mississippi –Cindy Hyde-Smith – voted no, sadly will probably win re-election in deeply conservative Mississippi 
  • Montana – Steve Daines -voted no, sadly will probably win re-election 
  • Nebraska – Ben Sasse – voted no, sadly will probably win re-election despite having no moral courage
  • New Hampshire – Jeanne Shaheen – voted yes, will probably win re-election
  • New Jersey – Cory Booker – voted yes, will probably win easily. Did you know he is a vegan?
  • New Mexico – Tom Udall (retiring) – voted yes, but will the seat flip? Depends who wins the primary I suppose
  • North Carolina – Thom Tillis – voted no, could very well lose because of it, but it’s currently a toss-up 
  • Oklahoma – Jim Inhofe – voted no, sadly will probably win re-election. Should really move to Yemen or somewhere not America.
  • Oregon – Jeff Merkley – voted yes, should win easily
  • Rhode Island – Jack Reed – voted yes, should win easily
  • South Carolina – Lindsey Graham – voted no, of course, and is in real trouble. I’d be embarrassed to be represented by such a sycophant if I lived in South Carolina
  • South Dakota – Mike Rounds – voted no, sadly will probably win re-election 
  • Tennessee – Lamar Alexander (retiring) – voted no, even though said Trump* was probably guilty. No moral courage, in contrast to his mentor Howard Baker. Will the state flip? Probably not. 
  • Texas – John Cornyn – voted no, and as much as I hate to say it, will probably win because of rural Texans and voter suppression etc.
  • Virginia – Mark Warner – voted yes, should win re-election, though it could be close
  • West Virginia – Shelley Moore Capito – voted no, sadly will probably win re-election 
  • Wyoming –Mike Enzi (retiring) – voted no, sadly will be replaced by a similarly morally bankrupt Republican. 

Remembering That Imperfect Memory

Too early to game it out with certainty, but it is possible that Moscow Mitch will no longer be Senate Majority Leader in 2021, and the nation will collectively heave a sigh of relief

Trump Impeachment Trial: The Senate Can Stop Pretending Now

In The Less Part Of Your Day

The New Yorker reports:

Just like that, at precisely 11 p.m. on Thursday, minutes after the end of the ninth day of the Senate trial of Donald John Trump, Senator Lamar Alexander ended it. In a statement tweeted out by his office, the Tennessee Republican said that the President was guilty of “inappropriate” pressure on Ukraine in the service of his own reëlection. The House Democrats managing the case had “proven” it, but that was not enough to impeach and remove Trump from office. Nor was it enough to continue the trial, Alexander said. He would not support calling witnesses. He would not support any effort to obtain further evidence. He did not want to hear even from John Bolton, the former Trump national-security adviser who is prepared to testify that the President directly admitted to the central allegation in the impeachment case. Without Alexander’s support, the trial almost certainly cannot continue. Democrats do not have the fifty-one votes they need to call witnesses, and so, sometime on Friday or early Saturday, the third Presidential-impeachment trial in American history is virtually certain to reach its preordained conclusion: a partisan acquittal by the Republican-controlled Senate, following a partisan impeachment by the Democratic-controlled House.

In the end, it’s no small irony that Trump was saved from embarrassing public testimony against him by one of the last representatives of the Republican establishment that so recently scorned him—and for which the President himself has nothing but scorn. Alexander declined to endorse Trump in 2016, and had previously bucked the President on trade, health care, and his much-vaunted border wall. But as Alexander retires later this year, after decades of service once characterized by bipartisanship, his most decisive final act will have been to do Trump an enormous favor. Alexander’s mentor in politics, Senator Howard Baker, is remembered as the Republican leader who pursued the facts about Richard Nixon during Watergate and demanded answers to the key question of what Nixon knew and when he knew it. Lamar Alexander will not have such an honor. He will go down in history as the Republican senator whose choice at a pivotal moment confirmed the complete and final capitulation of the G.O.P. to the crass New York interloper in the White House.

Alexander’s late-night statement was no real surprise. The “closest friend” to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell—as McConnell made sure to point out to the Times, earlier this week—Alexander ended up where most Senate Republicans were always expected to end up. He criticized Trump but refused to vote to remove him from office. After making that decision, Alexander went a step further and said that there was no real need to hear any of the evidence that Trump has so far successfully ordered his Administration not to provide. Even the last-minute revelation, on Sunday night, in the Times, of Bolton’s unpublished manuscript, could not sway Alexander; he knew enough.

All fifteen previous impeachment trials in the U.S. Senate, including the two previous Presidential-impeachment trials, had witnesses. But Lamar Alexander has spoken. Donald Trump’s stonewalling will succeed where Nixon’s failed. Perhaps Alexander has done us all a favor: the trial that wasn’t really a trial will be over, and we will no longer have to listen to it. The Senate can stop pretending.

(click here to continue reading Trump Impeachment Trial: The Senate Can Stop Pretending Now | The New Yorker.)

Tiny Hands Tiny Wiener Tiny Heart Free The Kids

Sad day for our system of government, craven politicians choosing their own political party over the country they were elected to serve. The impeachment of Trump* was always going to fail, but the Republicans couldn’t even make a pretense of wanting a fair airing of evidence. Traitors to democracy, and to rule of law…

Our expectations for Republican senators are so low it’s astonishing

The Sun Poured Down Like Honey

 Speaking of the dignity of work, The Washington Post reports:

Every single one of the 53 GOP senators swore an oath to the Constitution. Every single one of them is supposed to be exercising oversight of the executive branch. Every single senator is receiving a taxpayer-funded salary to serve the public and ensure that the president, whatever his party, does the same.

The default assumption should therefore be that they all perform the jobs they were sent to Washington to do. The idea that we expect (or hope) just four Republicans to rise to the occasion — and that the burden is on Democrats to coax these four into doing so — is astonishing.

Truly, it’s the soft bigotry of low expectations.

Perhaps it’s understandable, though. Lately Congress has been shirking many of its most critical, constitutionally enshrined duties.
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Legislators have surrendered their power of the purse. They allow Trump to spend tax dollars as he pleases, regardless of congressional appropriations for, say, aid to Ukraine or a border wall.
They have also ceded their obligation to “regulate Commerce with foreign Nations,” allowing Trump to slap tariffs on steel, aluminum and (possibly soon) cars, under the guise of “national security.”
They’ve given up on providing “Advice and Consent” on key administration appointments, tolerating an executive branch riddled with “acting” officials in what should be Senate-confirmed posts. They’ve stood idly by as the White House has rewritten large sections of various laws wholesale, frequently contradicting legislative provisions or intent.

And of course long before this president took office, lawmakers of both parties abdicated their responsibility to declare war.

So why has Congress capitulated so readily? Maybe lawmakers are cowards. Or maybe they’re simply too lazy to do the jobs Americans elected them to do.

(click here to continue reading Our expectations for Republican senators are so low it’s astonishing – The Washington Post.)

It is pretty sad to watch one house of our government cede all of its power voluntarily. Especially in Year 4 of a Presidency…