Sean Gallagher on Donald Trump’s latest big step to protect America.
Ars Technica
Okay, to be honest, this isn’t an opinion piece and Gallahger isn’t a pundit. It’s an article about an executive order that Donald Trump signed with little fanfare on Friday. And … I’ll let the article take it from there.
On March 26, President Donald Trump signed an executive order aimed at preparing the US to withstand an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack. "Human-made or naturally occurring EMPs can affect large geographic areas, disrupting elements critical to the Nation's security and economic prosperity, and could adversely affect global commerce and stability," Trump's order stated. "The Federal Government must foster sustainable, efficient, and cost-effective approaches to improving the Nation's resilience to the effects of EMPs."
Okay. EMP is a real thing. And while strategic facilities are already hardened against EMP, checking to make sure we’ve covered our bases doesn’t seem all that whackadoodle. That is … until you get to this.
The drumbeat picked up again after North Korea's successful nuclear tests. In March of 2017, former CIA Director R. James Woolsey and EMP Commission Chief of Staff Dr. Peter Vincent Pry penned an opinion piece for The Hill warning that North Korea "could kill 90 percent of Americans" with an EMP attack. "A single warhead delivered by North Korean satellite could blackout the national electric grid and other life-sustaining critical infrastructures for over a year—killing 9 of 10 Americans by starvation and societal collapse," Woolsey and Pry wrote.
Except no. That would not happen. Tests have indicated that vehicles knocked out by an EMP are not permanently damaged. And the same safety measures built into most systems to deal with surges and solar flares would also limit any effect from an EMP. So … where did they get the idea that a single bomb from North Korea could kill 90 percent of Americans?
That claim comes from figures cited in One Second After.
One Second After is a science fiction doomsday novel by William Forstchen, who frequently co-authors books with Newt Gingrich. It happens to be both a bad novel, in the sense that it’s poorly written with flat, unbelievable characters and a plot that stumbles along on a combination of ignorance and conservative Red Dawn fantasy thinking. And also bad science fiction, in that it’s not extrapolated from any real science. It’s just … made up. So on Friday, Donald Trump signed an executive order to save America from a ridiculous science fiction novel.
Let’s all send the bill for meeting these new nonsense standards to Newt. And stay turned next week as Trump signs an executive order to safeguard the nation from Martians. Because, hey, at least War of the Worlds is a good book.
All right, let’s go read pundits.
Virginia Heffernan and the Schiff Test.
Los Angeles Times
On Thursday, [Representative Adam Schiff], as he has done many times before, patiently spelled out the state of play between Trumpworld and the Russians to the members of the Intelligence committee and anyone watching on C-SPAN.
There was none of Barr’s fuzziness or torque in what Schiff said. He didn’t hypothesize. He didn’t speculate. He just laid it all out.
“The Russians offered dirt on a Democratic candidate for president as part of what was described as the Russian government’s effort to help the Trump campaign,” he said.
“When that was offered to the son of the president, who had a pivotal role in the campaign, the president’s son did not call the FBI, he did not adamantly refuse that foreign help. Instead that son said that he would love the help of the Russians.
“Paul Manafort, the campaign chair, someone with great experience in running campaigns, also took that meeting…. The president’s son-in-law also took that meeting…. They concealed it from the public…. Their only disappointment after that meeting was that the dirt they received on Hillary Clinton wasn’t better.”
And Schiff kept going.
Heffenan has become one of those voices I really look forward to each weekend. And I particularly like how she framed this issue on her Twitter account.
Paul Krugman is watching Trump’s boom … bust.
New York Times
So far, Donald Trump has passed only one significant piece of legislation: the 2017 tax cut. It was, to be fair, a pretty big deal: corporations, the principal beneficiaries, have already saved more than $150 billion, and over the course of a decade the tax cut will probably increase the budget deficit by more than $2 trillion.
But the tax cut was supposed to do more than just give stockholders more money — or at least that’s what its proponents claimed. It was also supposed to lead to many years of high economic growth, 3 percent or more at an annual rate.
Independent observers were skeptical, to say the least. They conceded that the tax cut might lead to a brief sugar high, because that’s what big deficits do. But any favorable effects on growth, they argued, would soon fade out. And they always insisted that it would take some time to assess the tax cut’s actual effects.
Nonetheless, when the economy grew pretty fast in the second quarter of last year, Trump and his supporters cried vindication, and ridiculed the critics.
But a bit of time has passed since then. The chart shows the U.S. economy’s growth rate by quarter since the beginning of 2018. The last number isn’t official; but there are a number of independent observers, including both Federal Reserve banks and private financial institutions, who produce “nowcasts” that estimate growth based on early data. At this point all of these nowcasts show slowing growth, and most put the first quarter at around 1.5 percent.
Don’t expect to hear if from Trump. After all, he’s been talking about the car manufacturers pouring back into Michigan (they’re not), and the booming steel industry, (it’s not), and the comeback of coal (not even close) since election day 2016. When Trump can’t distort the truth or steal credit from someone else, he simply makes things up.
Laurie Roberts on the exploits of Arizona state senator David Stringer
Arizona Republican
I usually skip over pundits when their weekend column focuses on local issues, but this time I’m making an exception. You’ll see why.
That collective gasp you hear across Arizona?
That’s the sound of this state reacting to what Rep. David Stringer has been hiding.
The House Ethics Committee on Friday released the Baltimore police report on the 1983 case that led to Stringer’s guilty plea on several sex charges.
Turns out he was accused of paying for sex with two young boys, one of them disabled.
One of the boys, who was not more than 14 years old, told police Stringer approached them in a park and asked if they wanted to come to his house and "have some sex." The boy said he had gone to Stringer’s apartment at least 10 times to have sex and that the two showered together. Stringer was 35.
On the old political scale of being caught with a “dead girl or a live boy” in bed … a pair of underage boys, one of them disabled, would seem to be creating a whole new Overton Window of nope.
Art Cullen on the way farmers are being crushed across the Midwest.
Storm Lake Times
Suicide rates are soaring among the last of the independent Wisconsin dairy farmers getting squeezed out by consolidation and a USDA program that isn’t helping. Net farm income has dropped in half in the Midwest over the decade. Iowa corn and soy farmers have lost money five years in a row. Loan delinquencies are at their highest levels since the Farm Debt Crisis of the mid-1980s.
“Farmers and bankers are having difficult conversations,” said Aaron Heley Lehman, president of the Iowa Farmers Union, himself a crop and livestock farmer from central Iowa. “Because of the loss of farm income, we are losing equity as we speak. A lot of people don’t have enough equity left to get them through this.”
Trade wars with China, Mexico and Canada tanked soybean markets for US farmers as Brazil emerged as a more reliable supplier. Rural people wonder when a third of the nation’s hogs are owned by a Chinese subsidiary, Smithfield Foods. And they wonder when JBS of Brazil, the biggest meatpacker, gets a disaster check from the USDA for Trump’s tariffs.
As if Trump’s tariffs are about protecting Americans. That’s not even on the list of reasons.
Michael Tomasky on how William Barr has become Trump’s man for all reasons.
Daily Beast
As the dust settles, it grows clearer and clearer just what a fast one Attorney General Bill Barr pulled on America.
Last June, he wrote an opinion—out of nowhere, unsolicited—arguing that President Trump did not obstruct justice in his statements about the firing of James Comey and that Robert Mueller’s obstruction investigation was “fatally misconceived.”
Gee, guess what happened next? Barr was nominated to be attorney general—to oversee the Mueller probe, that is—last Dec. 7. Two weeks later, word of that memo got out. But the GOP-controlled Senate of course confirmed him in February.
And guess what happened next? He said—this past weekend—that he found no basis for an obstruction charge.
Well, of course he found no basis. Barr promised this verdict last year. It’s pretty obvious why he got the job after Trump dumped Attorney General Jeff Sessions for “betraying” him by following the law and recusing himself from the Mueller probe.
Yep, yep, yep, and also.Yes, that is correct, sir. And now for the encore.
And it gets worse. As if that wasn’t enough, now, just 48 hours after spinning the Mueller report for Trump, we learn that he’s in on the planned next offensive against Obamacare. The New York Times reported that Barr was at first among those opposed to the administration putting its weight behind the Texas judge’s opinion calling Obamacare unconstitutional. But, in that way that ladder-climbing invertebrates have, he caved, and the Justice Department issued a statement saying it backed the Texas judge’s decision.
In doing so, Barr isn’t just hurting Obamacare, he’s hurting the value of Justice Department positions not and forever. What good is a position from the DOJ if the DOJ is willing to take the opposite position on the same case not so many months later?
Will Bunch on Republicans fiddling away climate change while middle America drowns.
Philadelphia Inquirer
When it came to climate change in the great state of Nebraska, spending a whopping $250,000 — just one-quarter of a million dollars — on a study for how a flood-prone prairie state could prepare for the impact of the earth’s rising temperatures was simply too big a hill to climb.
The push for a climate plan in the Cornhusker State to be completed by next year emerged from a legislative committee, but it seemed dead in the water as recently as last month. Even though Nebraska had already experienced both record flooding and drought during the 2010s, some Republican lawmakers questioned the cost. The influential Nebraska Farm Bureau said the climate-change readiness bill “is not a top issue for us.”
At least until recently, it’s hard to imagine that Nebraska’s Republican governor, Pete Ricketts, would have signed off on the paltry $250K anyway. In first seeking the job in 2014, Ricketts declared: “I believe it is far from clear — despite what the other side is saying — it is far from clear what is going on with our climate.” Just this January, Ricketts openly snubbed the novelist chosen for “2019 One Book, One Nebraska” event because of the author’s activism around climate and related issues like the Keystone XL pipeline.
Nebraska isn’t one of the states that has passed a law to actively forbid the examination of climate change when planning for infrastructure or calculated expected disaster relief. But then, in Nebraska that’s pretty much just understood. Nebraska Republicans are happy to call this flood “unprecedented” and “record-breaking” and “history.” What they want call it is the the result of climate change. And even more, the result of not planning for climate change.
Nancy LeTourneau’s advice for Democrats going to rural areas is … just go to rural areas.
Washington Monthly
Pat Rynard is a former Democratic campaign staffer who is the founder of Iowa Starting Line, a website “devoted to bringing readers breaking news, in-depth analysis, and general coverage of Iowa Caucus and Iowa political news.” He recently wrote a piece titled, “What Many Democrats Still Don’t Get About Rural Campaigning.” To the extent that it is possible for Democrats to reduce the margins by which Republicans are winning elections in rural areas, this is a guy who is positioned to provide some helpful advice.
Rynard says that the conventional wisdom is wrong when it suggests that Democrats don’t talk enough about the issues that matter to rural voters. He zeroes in on the campaign of Fred Hubbell, the Democratic nominee who lost the race for governor in 2018.
As it has for several weeks, LeTourneau’s piece contains more quotes than an average APR, making it hard to cite. So … go read it. She has a good point.
Charles Pierce goes Pulp Fiction on the Trump regime.
Esquire
At the end of the week in which he once again fulfilled admirably his lifetime role as the Winston Wolf of complex Republican scandals, Attorney General William Barr announced that something resembling the Mueller report will be available just in time for Easter, or something like that. From the Washington Post:
“Everyone will soon be able to read it on their own,” Barr wrote. Barr’s new letter lays out a timeline for the next steps of the hotly-debated process by which Justice Department officials are sharing the nearly 400-page report. In the letter, Barr said he does not plan to submit the report to the White House for review. "Although the president would have the right to assert privilege over certain parts of the report, he has stated publicly that he intends to defer to me and, accordingly, there are no plans to submit the report to the White House for a privilege review.”
What a guy. Of course, there are loopholes anyway.
Pierce is also making a column load of quotes, but the person he’s quoting here is William Barr so … that seems like fair game.
In case you’ve forgotten Winston Wolf, he’s the character played by Harvey Keitel in Pulp Fiction. He’s the guy who shows up to save the gangsters when they’ve made a large, and bloody, mistake. He’s a fixer. And Trump is always in the market for one of those.
Paul Musgrave on the wish for an easy fix to a bad problem.
Washington Post
To understand why this nonevent was so significant, we have to examine the function that Mueller’s report served for Democrats while it was being written. Because they lacked any real power to counter the trauma of the 2016 election and everything that has come since then, the idea that Saint Robert would slay the orange dragon held appeal as a salvation myth. Trump’s opponents could remain hopeful that, even though they didn’t have the means to do it, somebody else would fix the almost impossible problem of how to oust a president they viewed as illegitimate and catastrophic.
Musgrave’s column would have more impact if he waited for the Mueller report to appear rather than acting as if we’ve already seen it.
Dana Milbank speculates on how Trump would react if roles were flipped.
Washington Post
Suppose a special prosecutor in the Obama administration had filed a 400-page report about crimes possibly committed by President Barack Obama, and Obama appointees sat on the report while offering a “nothing to see here” summary.
Trump would no doubt have speculated that the prosecutor had found evidence that Obama had conspired with Lee Harvey Oswald, murdered both Vince Foster and Antonin Scalia, was an operative of both Islamic State and the “deep state,” ran a pedophile ring out of a pizza restaurant, and was shown by DNA to be Osama bin Laden’s twin brother.
And most people would have just figured that was Trump being Trump.
Actually, though these few paragraphs were fun, the largest part of Milbank’s article is about how Trump gets out of things by simply being too ridiculous to take seriously. And how that’s a serious issue.
Anne Applebaum on the difference between the protests in France, and policy in France.
Washington Post
From the beginning, the movement found it hard to articulate what, exactly, it opposed. At first, it was the gasoline tax, but protests continued after that was lifted. Later, protesters told journalists, or anyone who asked, that they felt discriminated against because they paid taxes but, because they lived in the provinces, received no social services.
Yet that could not have been true. As James McCauley pointed out in the New York Review of Books, France’s welfare system extends well beyond the cities: Anyone in France “who has ever received housing assistance, a free prescription, or sixteen weeks of paid maternity leave has benefited from the social protection system.” The Economist also noted, in response to protesters’ complaints that they pay high taxes and receive nothing in return, that “France has excellent infrastructure, (mostly) free education and first-rate health care that comes at little direct cost to patients.” Somehow, it seems that all these things have come to be taken for granted. Americans may look on with envy, but free health care, in France, is so humdrum that no one counts it as a benefit at all.
I’m half convinced that protests in France only exist now so that Donald Trump can use them in some joke about the Paris climate agreement. Which never had anything to do with the protest to begin with, not that it matters to Trump.