Look, boys and girls, it’s time for a visit from our friend, the Fascism Watch. This month, the Fascism Watch has ticked two minutes closer to Freedom is Slavery, because it’s been a very, very bad time for democracy.
After months of inaction, Republicans in the Senate have made the first criminal referral to come from any congressional investigation of the Trump–Russia affair … and that referral goes after one of the people who provided evidence against Trump. Senator Chuck Grassley, who in the past has made noises about the importance of whistle-blowers, is now willing to charge a former intelligence officer with lying to the FBI, even though neither the FBI nor the Justice Department found any reason to make such a charge. Meanwhile, Lindsey Graham has completed his shockingly rapid flip from being one of Trump’s few remaining Republican critics, to wearing out his tongue bringing those jackboots to high gloss. In making these charges, neither Senator felt it necessary to so much as let any Democratic member of their committee know what they were up to, much less call for a bipartisan vote on the matter.
Meanwhile in the House, Devin Nunes — whose Trumpist antics have until now been an embarrassment to Republicans — was brought back into the fold as Paul Ryan embraced Nunes’ astounding threat to file charges, not against James Comey, or HIllary Clinton, but against Christopher Wray, the man Trump selected to replace Comey at the FBI. With Ryan’s help, Nunes forced Wray and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to bow to his demands. Nunes now appears free to resume full command of the Intelligence Committee after his period of pretend recussal and free to use the committee to assault anyone he chooses.
And speaking of the Justice Department, after Donald Trump pulled Jefferson Sessions away from his full time job of re-legislating everything since Brown vs. Board of Education to give him another table-smashing, foul-mouthed example of stable genius, Sessions scurried back to the Justice Department to launch another investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email server. And we discovered this week that the FBI had already been pushed into renewing an investigation into the Clinton Foundation that started weeks ago. This goes on top of the three separate Congressional investigations already announced to look into the Uranium One sale. And on top of how both Republicans in the House Intelligence Committee and Senate Judiciary Committee have converted what started as investigations of Trump’s connections with Russia into persecutions of those who have brought forward evidence, or spoken out against Trump.
There are, at this moment, far more investigations underway intended to bring criminal charges against Donald Trump’s political opponents than there are against Trump, his associates, or his family. There are, at least, five open investigations of Hillary Clinton. And at least four investigations intended to make it impossible for Robert Mueller to continue as special counsel. It may be easy to believe that the Mueller investigation is the only one that counts … but it only counts to the extent that Republicans allow it to count. Trump has the House in his pocket. Trump has the Senate in his pocket. Trump has the Justice Department in his pocket. There are no other pockets.
And Trump is continuing to point at people when he wants to make an example and scream “Jail!” Which at least isn’t “off with their head.” Yet.
There were a lot of other things going on this week. Some of them were fun. Some were distracting. Don’t get distracted. This was a very bad week that took us close to the real constitutional crisis; Not what happens if we get a lunatic for a president, but what happens if Congress refuses to act.
Come on in. Let’s read pundits.
Trumpism
Jonathan Freedland and the Republican surrender of every principle but Trump.
The Trump depicted in the book is ignorant: the adviser who tried to teach him about the constitution could get no further than the fourth amendment before Trump’s eyes glazed over. He doesn’t read, or even skim, barely having the patience to take in a headline. …
He is also loathsome: we read that a favourite sport of Trump’s was tricking friends’ wives to sleep with him. …
We learn that Trump believes Saturday Night Live is damaging to the nation and that it is “fake comedy”; that daughter Ivanka wants to be president herself and that privately she mocks her father’s nature-defying combover. And, perhaps most amusingly, we get an answer to the question that has long enraged Trump: the identity of the mystery leaker behind the stream of stories of White House chaos and fratricidal dysfunction that have appeared since he took office. It turns out that the president rants endlessly on the phone to his billionaire friends, who feel no duty of confidentiality. In other words, the leaker Trump seeks is … himself.
And of course Republicans will refuse to acknowledge any of this. It doesn’t matter if there are tapes. It wouldn’t matter if the participants staged a live reenactment in the House Chamber. Republicans already know Trump is lying. They’ve determined that they will stick with him. no matter what he says, or how vile he acts.
Given all this material, you’d forgive congressional Republicans for being glum. ...
Instead, the official campaign account for Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader in the Senate, tweeted a gif of McConnell grinning mightily.
Republicans are thrilled about the book, because they think it clears Bannon and his weirdos from the field, leaving Trump no alternative but to stick with the “establishment” GOP. And in return, that establishment is throwing itself on the ground at Trump’s feet. They think that what FIre and Fury does is hand Trump’s voters to McConnell and Ryan. Which is why guys like Grassley and Graham are rushing to demonstrate their loyalty. It’s all one happy family in the GOP — with Nazis on the side.
Paul Krugman on the Republican inability to find any fault with Trump.
It seems to me that that the real news now is the way Republicans in Congress are dealing with this national nightmare: rather than distancing themselves from Trump, they’re doubling down on their support and, in particular, on their efforts to cover for his defects and crimes. Remember when Paul Ryan was the Serious, Honest Conservative? (He never really was, but that was his public image.) Now he’s backing Devin Nunes in his efforts to help the Trump coverup.
While everyone is busy reading Fire and Fury, let me mention another book that’s coming out nine days from now. It’s How Democracies Die, by Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt. I’m hoping to have both men on Daily Kos in the next two weeks for a live Q & A, but right now let me slip away from Krugman for a moment to share a paragraph from the book.
This is how democracies now die. Blatant dictatorship—in the form of fascism, communism, or military rule—has disappeared across much of the world. Military coups and other violent seizures of power are rare. Most countries hold regular elections. Democracies still die, but by different means. Since the end of the Cold War, most democratic breakdowns have been caused not by generals and soldiers, but by elected governments themselves.
The emphasis of Levitsky and Ziblatt’s work is that democracy dies right in front of the citizens. It’s not something that happens by force. It’s something that happens when, say. a president is caught obstructing justice, and no one stops him. When senators move not to protect justice, but to persecute opposition leaders. When representatives act to threaten not only those who are actively in opposition, but even those who are nominally on the same team. It happens step by step, day by day, while people are saying “we’ll get them in the next election” — as if that’s still possible.
Leonard Pitts on the Mueller Grand Jury.
There were not enough white men in the room.
Indeed, there were almost none, if we are to believe an anonymous witness who testified before the Washington, D.C., grand jury that has been handing down indictments in special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into Donald Trump’s campaign and administration. New York Post columnist Richard Johnson quotes this person as saying that of 20 jurors, 11 are African American. The witness likened this to “a Black Lives Matter rally in Berkeley.”
“There was only one white male in the room,” the witness griped, “and he was a prosecutor.” He or she added, “That room isn’t a room where POTUS gets a fair shake.”
The rumor is that this anonymous complaint came from the same place as most anonymous complaints in the Trump White House — straight from Donald Trump. Considering the racial make-up of Washington D. C., the description of the jury as mostly, or even all African America could well be true. The idea that this racial make-up is unfair to Trump … fits perfectly with the guy who spent weeks attacking a “Mexican” judge who was born in Indiana.
The ignorance and tone deafness are prodigious, yes. But what really leaps out from this person’s remarks is the haughty indignation of having found himself or herself in a room, a room of power and authority, no less, from which white men were nearly absent.
I certainly want to believe it’s true. Unfortunately, once those charges are past the Grand Jury, for Donald Trump at least, the primary responsibility for doing something about them will fall on Congress. Which looks only slightly less snowy than much of the East Coast at the moment.
Ruth Marcus wonders why Trump is so desperate to find someone to protect him.
For all the unsettling questions swirling about Trump in recent days, this may turn out to be the most important and, for the president, the most ominous. The more information that emerges about Trump’s mania to keep Jeff Sessions in control of the investigation and his fury when the attorney general chose to step aside, the more perilous the president’s legal situation appears.
Marcus is generous to Trump on the obstruction issue by focusing on Sessions. There’s one instance, at least, in which Trump’s efforts to obstruct justice are both indefensible and unshielded by his role as president: His instructions to obfuscate the reasons behind the Trump Tower meeting. It may be that Trump’s attorneys can make a case that firing Comey and even lying about the cause for that firing doesn’t constitute obstruction. After all, Trump had the right to fire Comey for no cause whatsoever. But ordering the draft of the “adoption” memo was both an open attempt to mislead and unprotected by any conceivable power of the office.
There are two possible explanations for Trump’s persistent refusal to acknowledge the reality of Russian meddling and his anger over the resulting criminal investigation. The more benign is that he is so insecure that he cannot tolerate any insinuation that his victory is tainted and his presidency illegitimate. The more worrisome is that Trump knows he or those around him have something to hide.
It’s clear that Trump Jr, Kushner, Flynn, and Manafort all conspired with Russia, along with lesser players like Papadopoulos and Page. Sessions should likely be on that list as well, except that we don’t know the contents of his lengthy, private, conveniently forgotten conversation with Sergei Kislyak. And really, if Mueller continues on the money laundering topic that covered the bulk of charges against Manafort, Trump is sunk, because that’s all he does for a living. Oh, and this week we learned that, while visiting at Trump Tower, the Russian representatives also chatted with Ivanka on topics unknown.
I’d suggest that Trump’s obstinance on the Russia investigation serves a third purpose: Stall until Republicans are so thoroughly tainted by association that they don’t dare go against Trump. So far, that’s been a singularly effective tactic.
Kathleen Parker “almost” feels sorry for Donald Trump.
The thing is, countless people — and not just Democrats — have been trying all last year, and before, to convey that Trump wasn’t up to the job. Even his inner circle concluded as much after a brief romance with the fantasy that they could make him into a useful president. His behavior, language, outbursts, impulsiveness — all suggested that he is “like a child,” as Wolff put it Friday on NBC’s “Today.” Worse, given those very characteristics, that he’s quite possibly not mentally competent to perform his duties. ...
Other interesting tidbits include that members of Trump’s Cabinet have called him an “idiot” and a “dope” behind his back. Would the two people in the back of the room who have not used these words to describe the president please raise your hand? We’re so glad you were able to join us before returning to the asylum today.
I confess to enjoying it when Parker lets her full Trump-disdain loose. But of course, by next week she’ll likely put that aside if it means supporting another tax bill or an attempt to subvert healthcare.
The Guardian on Fire and Fury, and where the Trump White House goes now.
It is a measure of how troubled the White House is seen to be that senior Republicans openly worry that the president is unravelling. Yet however erratic Mr Trump might be and however unsuited for high office, Republican voters remain loyal. Despite the rhetoric, Mr Trump’s base is largely made up of well-off and rightwing citizens rather than white, working-class voters struggling in a rapidly shifting global economy. This explains why his singular accomplishment, the Trump tax cut, will hurt poorer voters more than the Wall Street fatcats he railed against on the campaign trail.
Now that the furor over the book is dying back, expect next week to include at least a dozen “Trump voters still love Trump” stories that are only lightly modified from Election Day … except that they all include a paragraph about how none of them believe the book.
Dana Milbank looks at Trump from the four-way comb-over down.
For years, Donald Trump has labored to convince us that “I actually don’t have a bad hairline,” that “it’s not really a comb-over,” that “it’s my real hair.” His personal physician attested that Trump “has all his hair.” ...
Now, via Wolff, comes a plausible explanation from Ivanka Trump of her father’s bouffant: “She often described the mechanics behind it to friends: an absolutely clean pate — a contained island after scalp-reduction surgery — surrounded by a furry circle of hair around the sides and front, from which all ends are drawn up to meet in the center and then swept back and secured by a stiffening spray.” And the color “was from a product called Just for Men — the longer it was left on, the darker it got. Impatience resulted in Trump’s orange-blond hair color.”
Honestly, this is the least interesting fact from Wolff’s book. The only thing interesting about Donald Trump’s hair is Donald Trump’s willingness to lie about it every day. But Milbank is most interested in Trump’s threat to announce his own “worst of” awards for the media this week — an event we’ll definitely not be covering live.
For once in his life, Trump is being modest. In the field of dishonesty, it is he who deserves the Cecil B. DeMille Award for Lifetime Achievement: Obama wiretapped him. He had the largest inauguration audience ever. The Russia story is fake news. Muslims celebrated in New Jersey on 9/11. He only got a small loan from dad. Hillary Clinton started the “birther” movement. The tax cut will cost him a fortune.
Economics
David Von Drehle on the pending “Trump recession.”
It may have been Donald Trump’s most conventional move as president. During his holiday break at Mar-a-Lago in Florida, he convened meetings to start planning his reelection campaign.
Of course he did. When you finish screaming about that, you can come back in.
Despite evidence to the contrary, Trump wants to be liked. So I don’t doubt that he’s laying plans for 2020, though a great many Democrats, some rival Republicans, and maybe special counsel Robert S. Mueller III have other plans in mind. When he schedules his next skull session, then, a certain topic ought to be on the agenda: timing the Trump Recession.
Yes, recession. I know this is one of those moments when people imagine the rules of economics have been suspended. The stock market races endlessly upward. Help-wanted signs paper shop windows. Economies around the world are in a rare period of simultaneous growth, and tax cuts have brightened corporate boardrooms from Portland, Maine, to Portland, Ore.
But the Trump tax scam has been priced into Wall Street’s thinking for a year, and while all the one tenth of one tenth percenters will enjoy their billion dollar checks, the fact that the cuts do nothing for the average household means they’ll generate no cash to spend among much of the population. Not only is this an commitment to a huge debt, it’s a tax cut without a base whose Step Two is likely to be demanding reductions in Social Security and Medicare — changes that will directly impact the economy.
History suggests that the next recession is not far off. The current expansion, though relatively weak, has been steady since June 2009, making this the third-longest upward climb on record. Juiced by the tax cut, the United States is on track to record 107 months without a recession in April, passing the boom of the 1960s in duration. That will leave only the decade-long, 120-month run in the 1990s — when the end of the Cold War met the rise of the Internet to create a Golden Age for the U.S. economy — to be beaten.
Elizabeth Bruenig ponders making the rich work for a living.
The lion’s share of poor people are elderly, children or disabled persons; another chunk are caregivers. And while caregiving isn’t compensated as market labor, parents looking after children and people caring for elderly or sick family members are hardly shiftless layabouts. Being both a mother and a writer, I am well aware that the less compensated of my two jobs is the more demanding one.
The “welfare queen” was a myth when Reagan said it, and it’s an even more deceptive idea today.
And yet rarely do politicians inveigh against the laziness of the well-off. In fact, the government shells out huge sums of money to the rich every year through tax breaks and subsidies. As Syracuse University professor Christopher Faricy points out in his book “Welfare for the Wealthy,” the federal government is hardly generous with the poor alone. In 2016, for instance, Social Security kept 26.1 million people out of poverty to the tune of $911.4 billion paid out in disability and old-age pensions; during that same year, federal tax subsidies for the pensions of the more affluent totaled $179.9 billion . Faricy observes that the same pattern holds in health care and education: While the government spent some $200 billion on Medicaid that year, it also spent $120 billion subsidizing employer-based health insurance; and while students whose families make under $20,000 per year are the main beneficiaries of federal Pell grants, households that earn between $100,000 and $200,000 receive roughly 50 percent of the benefits of college tuition-and-fee tax deductions.
Religion
Katherine Stewart and the new Washington D. C. Museum of the Bible.
The Museum of the Bible, which sits a few blocks southwest of the United States Capitol, is a continuation of politics by other means. …
The museum is a safe space for Christian nationalists, and that is the key to understanding its political mission. The aim isn’t anything so crude as the immediate conversion of tourists to a particular variety of evangelical Christianity. Its subtler task is to embed a certain set of assumptions in the landscape of the capital.
Honestly, where isn’t a safe space for Christian nationalists?
The intensely politicized religion that appears to be taking up residence at the Museum of the Bible isn’t there by accident. When Steve Green, the museum’s founder and the president of the Hobby Lobby crafts chain, formed the museum’s parent organization in 2010, he informed the I.R.S. that its purpose was “to bring to life the living word of God, to tell its compelling story of preservation, and to inspire confidence in the absolute authority and reliability of the Bible.” In 2012, the language was changed to say that the aim was simply “to invite people to engage with the Bible.”
Hey, is this the place we can go to see all the artifacts Hobby Lobby stole from the Middle East?
Miscellaneous
Haider Warraich on how the best doctors may be those with least experience.
... as the field evolves into one where data and evidence are beginning to outweigh anecdotes and opinions, one thing is becoming increasingly clear: In medicine, a lack of experience may not actually be a bad thing.
A paper published last year by researchers at Harvard showed something very striking — patients being taken care of by younger doctors were less likely to die. Younger, less experienced physicians are also less likely to order unnecessary tests in both men and women, to face disciplinary action from state medical boards or be cited for improper prescription of opioid painkillers and other controlled substances. These findings are far from isolated: The majority of research shows a consistent, positive relationship between lack of experience and better quality of clinical care.
Is there an option for someone with experience who is open to new evidence? Because I want to check that box.
Audrea Lim on the alt-Reich’s weird fixation on Asian women.
The right-wing agitator Mike Cernovich, the writer John Derbyshire and an alt-right figure named Kyle Chapman (so notorious for swinging a lead-filled stick at Trump opponents at a protest in Berkeley, Calif., that he is now a meme) are all married to women of Asian descent. As a commenter wrote on an alt-right forum, “exclusively” dating Asian women is practically a “white-nationalist rite of passage.”
Without reading another word, I’m predicting this is going to the “real Aryans originated ...” place plus the “Asian women know their place” place.
“I have never regarded the Chinese or the Japanese as being inferior to ourselves,” Adolf Hitler said in 1945. “They belong to ancient civilizations, and I admit freely that their past history is superior to our own.”
Yeah, that’s the place.
Zeynep Tufekci thinks the current security scares are a precursor to a digital dark age.
For computer security professionals, 2018 started with a bang. A new class of security vulnerability — a variety of flaws that affect almost all major microprocessor chips, and that could enable hackers to steal information from personal computers as well as cloud computing services — was announced on Wednesday. The news prompted a rush of fixes, ruining the holiday vacations of system administrators worldwide. …
However, as a citizen of a world in which digital technology is increasingly integrated into all objects — not just phones but also cars, baby monitors and so on — it is past time to panic.
Tufekci notes — accurately — that the current Internet was constructed piecemeal, without much insight into where it was going and with security often applied as an afterthought. The result is layer on layer of kludges and bobby pins.
Modern computing security is like a flimsy house that needs to be fundamentally rebuilt. In recent years, we have suffered small collapses here and there, and made superficial fixes in response. There has been no real accountability for the companies at fault, even when the failures were a foreseeable result of underinvestment in security or substandard practices rather than an outdated trade-off of performance for security.
Considering that one of the largest outages in recent times was literally caused by a couple of guys in their dorm rooms looking for an edge at Minecraft, it’s easy to believe that almost any government could put together the resources to trigger a digital apocalypse.
The Washington Post on Jeffersion Sessions’ attack on something with broad bipartisan support.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions is pushing the federal government back into marijuana enforcement. This is an unwise and unnecessary move that may divert resources from more serious problems — and end up backfiring on those who want to restrain pot use.
Wait. Let’s check those numbers again. Nope, says here that programs against marijuana put far more black people behind bars than white people. That sounds like exactly what Sessions is looking for.
Mr. Sessions’s move is counterproductive even for skeptics of legalization, whose only defense against a growing tide of public opinion would be evidence that full legalization has significant negative consequences. Mr. Sessions’s move diminishes the possibility of drawing lessons — including cautionary ones — from the examples of legalization states. Similarly, Mr. Sessions has made it harder to learn how to regulate the legitimate weed economy, if that is the path the country chooses.
But for those still dreaming of poodle skirts and legalized racism, it seems like a fine step.
The Washington Post and a Jefferson Sessions double-dip. This one … is plain old weird.
[Trump] rode a claim of out-of-control crime — to be fought with “law and order” — to victory in 2016. He reinforced the message in his inaugural address about “American carnage.” So it’s no surprise that Attorney General Jeff Sessions harps on the same theme, most recently on Wednesday, when he issued a statement describing this as a “time of rising violent crime [and] a staggering increase in homicides.” As the nation’s chief law enforcement officer, Mr. Sessions can and should use his bully pulpit to raise justified concern about crime and violence; his latest remarks, however, constituted a misuse of that power. Currently available data do not support his alarmism.
What’s really happening?
The basic picture is that homicide probably dipped slightly last year. Through Dec. 16, the total number of homicides in the nation’s 30 largest cities was 4.4 percent below what it was at the same point in 2016, according to the New York-based Brennan Center for Justice.
But just like Trump, Sessions feels no compunction against lying in public — even when his own department is publishing numbers that contradict his statements.
Puerto Rico
The Washington Post would like to remind you that it’s still dark in Puerto Rico.
In the more than three months since Hurricane Maria made landfall in Puerto Rico, a lot of excuses have been offered to explain the failure to restore power and provide other critical services to American citizens who live on the island. Like the enormity of the devastation. Or the complexity of the work. Or the difficulty of getting workers and supplies to a place surrounded by water. Yadda yadda yadda.
Oh, it’s not an excuse. Not really. Trump and his team simply don’t care about people in Puerto Rico. Do they get to vote for president? Nope. Can their representative sign on to Tax Cut Round II? Nope.
The only thing you can count on from here is that any attempt to point out the real number of hurricane-related deaths in Puerto Rico will be rewarded with a “fake news” claim.
More than 100 days after Maria swept the island on Sept. 20, nearly half of its residents — more than 1.5 million people — remain in the dark, and officials are now saying it will take to the end of February to restore most power. Hard-to-reach rural areas will not get power until the end of May — “just in time,” the New York Times noted, “for the 2018 hurricane season.” Lack of power is seen as a major factor in the higher death rates that occurred after the storm passed, and it continues to pose a danger as Puerto Rico struggles with limited resources, strained health-care services and the worsening of an already-poor economy.
In Memoriam
“The greatest enemy of progress is the illusion of knowledge.”
John Young
There are now only five remaining human beings who have stepped onto the surface of another world.
- Buzz Aldrin, 87
- Alan Bean, 85
- Dave Scott, 85
- Charlie Duke, 82
- Harrison Schmitt, 82
And now, on the off chance that you haven’t seen it …