Greg Sargent/WaPo:
Pelosi just challenged Trump’s corruption and lies. Here’s what should come next.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) and her fellow House Democrats just introduced a resolution to terminate President Trump’s national emergency. In coming days, the resolution will likely pass the House, setting in motion a process that will force a Senate vote on it. Either Senate Republicans will side with Trump, or they’ll pass the measure, after which Trump will veto it.
This represents a small challenge to Trump’s corruption and lies — to his corruption of our institutions and political system with autocratic and authoritarian conduct, and to the deep rot of bad faith at the core of his willingness to declare a national emergency to build his wall based on false pretenses and invented metrics.
The move probably won’t succeed in terminating the emergency. But it points to something we need to see a lot more of: discussion of concrete proposals and actions designed to fortify our institutions and democracy against Trump’s ongoing degradations of them, and to restore confidence in them once Trump is gone.
Julie K.Brown wrote the Miami Herald story about Jeffrey Epstein getting away with a slap on the wrist for child sex trafficking.
Relevant re the Robert Kraft (NE Patriots owner) charges about sex trafficking and solicitation/prostitution.
Daily Wire:
Following the news about Kraft, [ESPN's Adam] Schefter reported on ESPN's "SportsCenter" that Kraft is supposedly not the biggest name involved.
"There are people down there in that area I’m told who say this story is going to heat up and get a lot worse," Schefter reported. "I don’t mean involving Robert Kraft, I’m talking about with all the human trafficking that has gone on down there, I’m also told that Robert Kraft is not the biggest name involved down there in South Florida, and we will see what police turn up in the report."
"We got 25 names today, there are 175 more names coming," Schefter later said. "Now some will just be regular people whose names we don’t know. But there could be other names that we do know, and that’s how it was explained to me."
Schefter concluded by saying, "I was speaking and texting with someone who lives down there, and they told me it’s going to get a lot worse down there, that there will be other people involved, that everyone down there is very nervous right now, that there are people being arrested that are prominent members of society down there."
The Kraft thing is amplifying the Epstein thing. But the issue is the trafficking and the women/girls who are the victims. As for the “more to come” :
As for that Mueller report, WaPo:
“The rules for what the department turns over to Congress are based almost exclusively on precedent, and now that Republicans have established these new precedents, they’re about to find themselves hoisted on their own petard,” said Matthew Miller, a Justice Department spokesman during the Obama administration. The department, he said, “just has no good argument why it shouldn’t provide the same transparency for the Mueller probe that it did for the Clinton investigation.”…
What Democrats will be looking for most closely in Mueller’s report, aides said, is any hint he uncovered evidence that could have led to an indictment of Trump. In their letter to Barr on Friday, the House Democratic leaders warned of “the particular danger” of withholding any evidence of misconduct by Trump. “To maintain that a sitting president cannot be indicted, and then to withhold evidence of wrongdoing from Congress because the President will not be charged, is to convert Department policy into the means for a cover-up. The President,” they wrote, “is not above the law.”
Nice job, Republicans.
In international news, Axios reports:
Netanyahu's political rivals unite in one party
What's next ... The joint list has one big advantage on their side: Next week, Israel's attorney general is expected to announce that he is indicting Netanyahu in 3 different corruption cases.
- The combined formation of the united party and the indictments could push voters to drop Netanyahu and move their support to Gantz and Lapid. If 2 to 3 seats (or about 70,000 to 100,000 voters) switch sides, Netanyahu will lose the elections.
Bibi is meanwhile looking for support from a far right racist party. Sound familiar?
NiemanLab with a tale of survival:
Local TV is still the most trusted source of news. So how do you collaborate with a station?
“The idea that you would collaborate with your competitor when you’re fighting for ratings is anathema to broadcasters.” But it may be a key part of how local news remains sustainable.
David Rothkopf:
The problem is not socialists.They have no place in US politics and won't. The problem is not capitalism. It worked well to make American the economic powerhouse of the world. The problem is rigged capitalism--which for 40 yrs the GOP has engineered with the help of some Dems.
Our system has been hijacked by the rich and powerful to serve them. With wages at effectively the same level as more than 4 decades ago and the minimum wage at effectively the same level as 6 decades ago, while the 1 percent get richer, everyone else is left behind.
Increases in productivity no longer translate into higher wages for workers. Companies don't use tax breaks to create jobs they use them to buy back stock and enrich top management and shareholders. Regulations are rolled back. Tax cuts help only the wealthy.
Vann R Newkirk III/Atlantic:
The Racial Divide Is the Political Divide
White, black, and Hispanic people hold distinctly different views of American identity and values.
The profiles of the Republican and Democratic parties have shifted accordingly. In the 2018 midterm elections, Democrats elected one of the most racially diverse incoming classes of legislators since Reconstruction, and a diverse field of potential presidential contenders revolves around a multifaceted policy debate that’s heavily influenced by progressive ideas. Republicans have had to shape their party around explicit appeals to white voters and their anxieties, and have had to build an electoral strategy that can promote low overall turnout and stoke white grievances. In short, Democrats have cultivated an image as the party of racial and cultural pluralism, while Republicans have rejected pluralism as a viable strategy.
A new site from Taegan Goddard (Political Wire fame) looks ahead to 2020 via the flawed electoral college. Taegan’s current forecast:
Republicans: 220 |
Democrats: 232 |
Tossup: 86 |
Asawin Suebsaeng/Daily Beast:
Trump White House Is Forcing Interns to Sign NDAs and Threatening Them With Financial Ruin
Not even the interns are exempt from the legally dubious rite of passage that is signing a Trump NDA.
Trump White House Is Forcing Interns to Sign NDAs and Threatening Them With Financial Ruin
Not even the interns are exempt from the legally dubious rite of passage that is signing a Trump NDA.
Nothing on election fraud from Republicans
Nothing on white supremacist domestic terrorism from Republicans
Nothing on violating the Magnitsky Act over Khashoggi's murder from Republicans
Republicans have ceased to function. The public will formalize that in 2020.
Susan B Glasser/New Yorker:
Audience of One: Why Flattery Works in Trump’s Foreign Policy
Slavishly praising Trump in public, of course, is a signature tactic of his advisers and others who seek his favor. This week, though, Presidential flattery as a tool of foreign policy seemed particularly prominent. In Japan, a mini political uproar broke out when a newspaper reported that Prime Minister Shinzo Abe had secretly nominated Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize, at Trump’s request. (Abe, who eagerly flew to New York for a Trump Tower session only days after the 2016 election, did not deny the reports.) Among Trump’s men in Munich, the performance of Vice-President Mike Pence, who has always been an especially avid practitioner of public boss-praising, stood out. He admiringly mentioned President Trump at least thirty times in his Saturday address to the conference (far more attention, tweeters quickly pointed out, than the vice-chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, who spoke later, gave to his boss). In a separate appearance meant to honor McCain, Pence paused for applause after he uttered his usual boilerplate line, “I bring greetings from the President of the United States.” Even in a room that included a couple dozen Republican members of Congress, Graham among them, no one clapped. Not surprisingly, the video of the moment, which the Pence and Trump biographer Michael D’Antonio described to me as “self-emasculating,” went viral on Twitter, a perfect metaphor at an annual forum that has, for decades, both celebrated and ratified America’s leadership in the West.
This wasn’t just a matter of a speech that flopped, though. This latest dance of the Republicans overseas was a reminder of why the bipartisan effort to convince the rest of the world that America’s commitments are unchanged, even under its America-First President, just doesn’t work.