“The FAKE NEWS media (failing @nytimes, @NBCNews, @ABC, @CBS, @CNN)
is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!”
Donald Trump, February 17, 2017
A discussion of the most interesting, useful and/or entertaining recent articles and observations on Trump, the Republicans, and politics generally from the enemies of the American People:
How is it even possible for the WH to ban major news outlets? Keeping with the “fake news” theme — After telling the CPAC audience what a fan he is of the First Amendment, that very same day the Trump administration canceled the normal Spicer press briefing and instead held court with a handpicked group of select news outlets:
The Associated Press and Time magazine boycotted the briefing because of how it was handled.
Well, thank god for the AP and Time! But what in the world was every other established news outlet thinking? And are they now prepared going forward? I mean we have a kooky President — currently embroiled in a major international scandal — who has both declared war on journalism and prominently quoted the National Enquirer on the campaign trail. Given all that, the press was caught off-guard or, worse, complicit in a low-rent scheme like this? For pete’s sake! Band together!
This problem has been building for a long time and has gotten out of hand. For example, do the younger readers here know that the last Republican president (George W. Bush) secretly placed a gay male escort in the press room to pose as a journalist and ask W. softball questions? I know that the White House Correspondents Association exists, but it seems like that group needs to be thrown out on the ash heap of history (which would help get rid of their truly execrable White House Correspondents’ Dinner as well).
Btw: for those keeping count, Trump has now told us that we shouldn’t trust or believe the free press, the FBI, all the U.S. intelligence agencies, the State Department, the federal courts, and actual photographs (see inaugural crowd size). Seems reasonable and is in no way a red-flag . . . .
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Oh nyet! Commerce Secretary nominee Wilbur Ross too? Based on a deep dive by DCReport.org, we can add billionaire Commerce Secretary nominee Wilbur Ross to the long list of people in Trump’s circle with troubling ties to Russian oligarchs:
In the midst of the Trump Administration’s many other Russian entanglements, it turns out that Wilbur J. Ross, Jr., the billionaire American investor who is one of Donald Trump’s closest advisors on trade and economics, has direct financial ties to several leading oligarchs from Russia and the Former Soviet Union or FSU . . . .
Central to this inquiry is the question of Ross’s role as Vice Chair and a leading investor in the Bank of Cyprus, the largest bank in Cyprus, one of the key offshore havens for illicit Russian finance. Ross has been Vice Chairman of this bank and a major investor in it since 2014. His fellow bank co-chair evidently was appointed by none other than Vladimir Putin.
The Bank of Cyprus is just one of more than 100 direct and indirect investments that Ross listed on his U.S. Office of Government Ethics financial disclosure form last month. He recently promised to resign as Vice Chairman of the Bank and disinvest from it within the next 90 days if his nomination is approved.
Mere divestiture will not suffice here, even if it was immediate. Exiting a brothel in a hurry doesn’t explain what you were doing there in the first place.
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So this is the fundamental question:
How did a prospective U.S. Commerce Secretary come to play a lead role in what turns out to be one of the world’s leading haven banks for laundering Russian money, precisely at a time when the U.S. Government and the EU have been trying so hard to enforce economic sanctions against Russia and Putin’s wealthy allies?
Before the U.S. Senate approves Ross’s nomination, it is essential to get to the bottom of these curious relationships. Unfortunately, no one bothered to ask Ross even a single question about them, the Bank of Cyprus, or dirty Russian money at his January 18 confirmation hearing before the Senate Commerce Committee, where he received unanimous approval along with a ringing endorsement from his Florida Senator.
In “TrumpLand,” however, as we have recently come to appreciate, that was eons ago. And there are now signs that the U.S. Senate may finally be waking up.
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Six good questions for the Supreme Court nominee. Jeffrey Toobin at the New Yorker outlines “Six Questions Senators Should Ask Neil Gorsuch.” I’ll let you read the column, but I wanted to highlight one terrific question here:
3. The authors of the Fourteenth Amendment, which guarantees the equal protection of the law and was adopted in 1868, almost certainly believed that racially segregated schools were permissible. Does that mean that Brown v. Board of Education was incorrectly decided? I f Brown was correct, doesn’t that suggest that the meaning of the Constitution can change over time?
That’s a great question. Gorsuch, like his hero J. Scalia, prides himself on being an “originalist.” Originalists scorn the notion of a “living Constitution,” and believe that their jurisprudence is derived from the “original understanding” of the Framers of the Constitution. Whatever those words meant to them, at that time, is what the Constitution means today — and contrary interpretations consist of dreaded “judicial activism” and “legislating from the bench.”
Now, nearly all judges include some level of “originalism” — like the notion of “precedent” — as one tool of interpreting the Constitution in what has always been a small-c conservative legal profession. The problem with Originalists like Gorsuch and Scalia, however, lies in their ideological use of the theory because there are a lot of self-evident problems with Originalism.
Initially, the Framers wrote a constitution, not a legal code like statutes. The former is broad and aspirational by its nature; the latter is narrow and circumscribed to specific circumstances. In addition, the very notion of what the many Founders (some not so famous, but equal in this endeavor) — much more the various state ratifying populations — “intended” by each phrase in the Constitution is arguably unknowable and frequently murky at best. On this point, Originalists often devolve to sifting, selectively, through the historical record to pick out this or that which already confirms their desired outcome.
And most of all, the problem with Originalism is that it appeals to a sort of narrow, fundamentalist mindset adherents — caught up with the notion of their own understanding of a “divine text” — fool themselves and others that they are engaged in a more pure, legitimate exercise of power — and that disagreeing opinions are corrupt and unmoored.
Which brings us back to the great question above. If Originalists truly believe that the Constitution remains static, frozen in the meaning of the original drafters, well . . . then the acclaimed school desegregation case of Brown v. Board of Education must have been wrongly decided. Mr. Gorsuch can agree with Brown or he can be an Originalist . . . but he can't be both. Or, as Mr. Toobin puts it:
In the confirmation hearings for Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, most Republicans on the Judiciary Committee embraced an originalist view of the Constitution. They asserted that allowing Justices to interpret the words of the framers beyond what those men believed the words meant gave the Justices undue freedom to inject their own views. The Brown case, which is an unassailable touchstone of Supreme Court precedent, presents one of the toughest issues for originalists, because the decision was a clear departure from an originalist approach. But, if it was appropriate to depart from the intent of the authors of the Fourteenth Amendment in Brown, doesn’t that open the door to other departures from originalist dogma? What, then, is wrong with recognizing a right to privacy, a right to abortion, a right to same-sex marriage—none of which were envisioned by the framers?
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Abandon all hope. . . or not? Measured by party affiliation, President Trump’s current 84% approval rating among Republicans beats the last five other presidents dating back to and including Reagan, except for former President Obama who had an 86% Dem approval at this point in his first term. This supports my strong belief that the next two national elections are going to be more than ever about turn-out versus persuasion. While that is so true-as-to-be-trite about the mid-terms, Trump’s election may have finally displaced the notion that presidential candidates “need to move to the middle” after the primaries. As this phenomena today appears to be limited to the Democrats anyway, it should be an encouraging development. (Are you listening new DNC Chair Tom Perez?)
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Trump’s new D.C. Hotel is a perfect reflection of its owner. A little while back Emily Jane Fox at Vanity Fair had a scathing review of the Trump International Hotel in D.C. (“a frightful dump”), and noted that the hotel does not shy from matching the owner’s ubiqituous self-promotion:
To spend a night in the new Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C., is to spend a night reading, and rereading, and rereading the full capitalized, glitzily rendered name on just about anything that can fit five letters. Behind the check-in desk is a pyramid of Trump-branded water bottles ready to hydrate arriving guests—of which there were seemingly few on the Sunday evening before Election Day—and another pile that awaits gym-goers in the fitness center downstairs. The Trump tower—a soaring, $120 steeple of a one-pound lobster, eight oysters, four clams and shrimp—sits prominently on the lobby bar’s menu. Bottles of Trump Wine line the white marble staircase leading up to the hotel’s sole restaurant (two other restauranteurs, who were supposed to open haunts within the hotel, pulled out of the venue because of Trump’s anti-immigration comments).
The in-room minibar is a Trump tour de force—a mini bottle of Trump Wine; several different sizes of Trump-branded chocolate bars that have been rendered, naturally, as gold bars; clear boxes of nuts and M&Ms packaged with a gold Trump sticker stamped on top. The bathroom, impossibly, was even more Trumped out. Trump-branded mouthwash. Trump facial soap. Trump body wash. Trump shampoo, Trump hand soap. Trump slippers. The towel on the white marble floor had a “T” embroidered on its center.
Ms. Fox concludes:
Improbably, the room described to me by two employees as the Jefferson Library made less sense. Tucked behind the lobby, the largely empty room has no books in it. And instead of paying homage to the aforementioned third president of the United States, the room instead has five huge paintings and photos of Abraham Lincoln. (After publication, a representative for the hotel said it is called the Lincoln Library.)
Trump’s new hotel, like his campaign, is a big idea followed by lazy execution, a problem identified without any way of getting to the solution. From the outside, it looks O.K., but the specifics, the details are empty and illogical.
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Did Mitt Romney dodge a bullet? Multiple sources are reporting that new SOS Rex Tillerson and the State Department as a whole have been effectively cut out of the loop to a degree never seen in prior administrations.
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Scientists begin to push back. The WashPo reports:
Some of the nation's biggest scientific organizations, including the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Geophysical Union, are partnering with grass-roots organizers to plan the March for Science, an Earth Day rally in Washington and cities around the world aimed at defending "robustly funded and publicly communicated science."
. . . . The March for Science is slated to take over the Mall in Washington on April 22. The Earth Day Network is co-organizing the event, which will involve speeches, a teach-in, musical performances and a march through Washington. Supporters from nearly 300 cities in 30 countries will hold satellite marches on the same day. . . . In addition, organizers say that more than 50,000 volunteers have signed up to help with the event. In a private Facebook group, more than 800,000 people have said they'll be attending.
I’ve always found it effective to note to Republican friends that only 6% of the nation’s scientists self-identify as Republicans. 55% consider themselves Democrats. If those numbers were reversed, it would certainly cause me to do some serious soul-searching.
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President Obama’s place in history. Paul Glastris and Nancy LeTourneau attempt a comprehensive legacy list for the 44th President in “Obama’s Top 50 Accomplishments, Revisited.” Here is one that I never knew about, and it involved a plan by George W. Bush to build a “moon base”:
48. Let the Space Shuttle Die and Killed the Planned Moon Mission
Allowed the expensive ($1 billion per launch), badly designed, and dangerous shuttle program to make its final launch on July 8, 2011. Cut off funding for the even more bloated and problem-plagued Bush-era Constellation program to build a moon base in favor of support for private-sector low-earth orbit ventures, research on new rocket technologies for long-distance manned flight missions, and unmanned space exploration, including the largest interplanetary rover ever launched, designed to investigate Mars’s potential to support life.
And the authors argue that this was more important than “expanding stem cell research” (which fell off the revised list). Separately, a recent survey of historians preliminarily ranked Obama as the 12th best president of all time:
Less than a month after exiting the White House, Obama received high marks from presidential historians for his pursuit of "equal justice for all" and for his commanding "moral authority," ranking third and seventh among all former presidents in each respective category. The 44th president also cracked a top 10 ranking for his "economic management" and public persuasion.
The former president's tenure earned its lowest marks for the relationship between the presidency and Congress, with bitter partisanship often stagnating the effectiveness between the two and Obama seeing his Democratic majority slip in both the House of Representatives and the Senate during his eight years in office.
The list up to Barack Obama is as follows:
1. Abraham Lincoln 7. Thomas Jefferson
2. George Washington 8. John F. Kennedy
3. Franklin Delano Roosevelt 9. Ronald Reagan
4. Teddy Roosevelt 10. Lyndon Johnson
5. Dwight Eisenhower 11. Woodrow Wilson
6. Harry Truman 12. Barack Obama
I put this question to DKos readers in 2015 (with a 167 resulting poll votes). Close to half predicted (eventually) a top 10 finish, and I (grudgingly) predicted a spot between nos. 11 to 15.
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“F*ck it! We’ll do it live!” To make sure that we have some Sunday laughs, I’ve included this hysterical video on the rare chance that there are some people out there who still have not seen this clip of Bill O’Reilly having a meltdown during his earlier tenure as an Inside Edition host. For those who have seen it before, it only gets funnier with each new viewing:
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Reader shout-out: In response to the previous Dispatch, reader “mettle fatigue” posted an excellent comment that can be read in full here. In appreciation, I will excerpt and comment on a few points below. First, in response to the post on the fascinating “lead-crime theory,” mettle fatigue rightly points out that we have little understanding of the myriad of pollutants and chemicals affecting our mind and body:
The sad-hilarious parts are [a] we don’t even actually look at/for all the pollutants involved in the toxification of the us, because there are too many — even “air quality” remains a measurement limited to just a very few that government can require and is willing to monitor— and [b] we keep looking for single-substance and single-cause culprits for our health problems, so obesity is a disease most medical practitioners still think is a food-choice issue dictated in the well-off by lifestyle and in the disadvantaged by limited circumstances, but still a choice; just as anti-vaxxers think their kids’ health is impacted solely by what’s in the vaccines and not by any disastrous confluence of everything their kids are exposed to starting when their kids were nothing more than sperm and ova being exposed via the parents’ exposure.
mettle fatigue also caught a key point about that 1970’s home run “trot” video:
The voice-over for that baseball moment apparently was of an announcer oblivious to the homerunner being mobbed not in a good way. Astonishing…
Yes! The voice-over was by the legendary Phil Rizzuto, and I completely forgot to mention that it, alone, was proof positive that something was going seriously wrong in the 1970’s because he doesn't even acknowledge that the players, sometimes assisted by uniformed police, were fighting for their lives right there on the screen. It was just another day in 1976 . . . Also, great catch on that Cadillac commercial’s use of the word “carry” and its Southern connection.
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I have been toying with this new “Dispatches . . . “ concept this week. (Previous posts here, here and here.) If the idea is not self-indulgent, and has any merit, (a) I think I would limit it to once a week (Sat. or Sun.) to improve the selections and overall quality, and (b) it would ideally spark independent contributions and commentary, like that from mettle fatigue.