#George W Bush you will pay severely for leaving these children behind

[theglassesgirl]

Christopher Nolan in about a year: wow…what an epic (wink) movie I just made! I can’t wait to see what the critics think of it!

Antis on letterbox: I cannot BELIEVE this SICK MAN had the audacity to ADD RAPE to the odyssey!!! We have to CANCEL Christopher Nolan for MAKING THE SUITORS RAPISTS!

[nevermindirah]

I've been drafting and redrafting this meta post for weeks now. It's about to be 5781 and my country that was founded on settler colonial genocide and slavery and a deeply flawed but fierce attachment to democracy might go full dictatorship in about 6 weeks and it's time for me to post this thing.

All our immortals are warriors, all have been traumatized by war. But only three of them died their first deaths as soldiers in imperial armies. This fandom has already produced gallons of meta on Nicky dealing with his shit, because Joe would not fuck with an unapologetic Crusader. But there's very rich stuff in Booker and Nile's experiences and the parallels and distinctions between them.

Nile was 11 when her dad was killed in action - that was 2005, meaning she and her dad both died in the same war that George W Bush started in very tenuous response to 9/11. Sure, Nile's dad could have died in either Iraq or Afghanistan, or in a training accident or in an off-the-books mission we won't know about for a hundred more years, but he died in the War on Terror all the same. I had to look it up to be sure because Obama "drew down" the Afghanistan war in his second term, but nope, we're still in this fucking thing that never should've happened in the first place. The US war in Afghanistan just turned 19 years old. A lot of real-life Americans have experiences like the Freemans, parents and children both dying in the same war we shouldn't be in.

I know a lot of people like Nile who join the US military not just because it's the only realistic way for them to pay for college or afford decent healthcare, but also because they have a family history of military service that's a genuine source of pride. Military service has been a way for Americans of color to be accepted by white Americans as "true Americans" - from today's Dreamers who Obama promised would earn protection from deportation by enlisting, to Filipino veterans of WW2 earning US citizenship that Congress then denied them for several decades, to slaves "earning" their freedom through service in the Union Army and in the Continental Army before it. As if freedom is a thing one should have to earn. Lots of Black Americans have the last name Freeman for lots of different escaping-slavery reasons, but it's possible that this specific reason is how Nile got her last name.

Dying in a war you know your country chose to instigate unnecessarily and that maybe you believe it shouldn't be waging is a very particular kind of trauma. It is a much deeper trauma when your military service, and your father's, and maybe generations of your ancestors', is a source of pride and access to resources for you but your sacrifice is nearly meaningless to the white supremacist system that deploys you. That kind of cognitive dissonance encourages a person to ignore their own feelings just so they can function. How do you wake up in the morning, how do you risk your life every day, how do you *kill other people* in a war that shouldn't be happening and that you shouldn't have to serve in just so that your country sees you as human?

We see Nile do her best to be a kind and well-mannered invader. Depending on your experience with US imperialism, Nile giving candy to kids and reminding her squad to be respectful is either heartwarming or very disturbing propaganda. We also see Nile clutching her cross necklace and praying. From the second Christianity arrived on this land it's been a tool of white supremacist assimilation and control, but like military service, it's a fucked-up but genuine source of pride and access to resources for many Americans whose pre-Columbian ancestors were not Christian, and it's a powerful source of comfort and resilience. This Jew who's had a lot of Spanish Inquisition nightmares would like to say for the record that it's not Jesus's fault that his big name fans are such shitty people.

Nile is a good person trying to do her best in a fucked-up world. "Her best" just radically changed. Her access to information on just how fucked up the world is has also just radically changed, because everything's so fucked up a person needs a lot of time to learn about it all and not only does she have centuries but she won't have to spend that time worrying about rent and healthcare and taxes, and because she now has Joe and Nicky and Andy's stories, and because she now has Copley's inside scoop on just what the fuck the CIA has been up to. Like, I want a fic where Copley tells Nile what was really behind the brass's decisions that led to her experiences on the ground in Afghanistan, that led to her father's death, but also I Do Not Want That.

Nile was 19 when Alicia Garza posted on Facebook that Black Lives Matter. She grew up in Chicago well before white people on Twitter were saying maybe police violence against Black people is a problem. She knows this is a deeply fucked up country, and she put on her Marine uniform and deployed with her team of mostly fellow women of color, and maybe she and Dizzy and Jay marched in the streets between deployments, maybe they texted each other when a white manarchist at a protest sneered at one of them for being a Marine. Nile's been busy surviving, and she knows some shit and she's seen some shit but she hasn't had much time to think about what it all means. Now she's got time. And Joe, Nicky, and Andy are willing to listen. (Is Copley willing to listen? I could see that going either way.)

Booker might also be willing to listen. The brilliant idea of cleaning up the rat Frenchman so that Nile can have millennia of emotional support and orgasms sent me down a Wikipedia rabbit hole, and holy shit do Booker and Nile have a lot of shared life experience as pawns of imperial wars. Obviously Booker is white and a man and that makes a very big difference. (Though G-d help me, Booker could be Jewish and France was knocking its Jews around like ping-pong balls in the 18th-19th centuries. Jewish Booker wouldn't make him any less white but it does add a shit ton of depth of common experience: military service as a way for your country to see you as a full member of society who matters, because who you are means that's not guaranteed.)

Booker was hanged for desertion from the army Napoleon sent to invade Russia as part of his quest to control all of Europe. We learn in the comics / this YouTube video that Booker was on his way to prison for forgery when he was offered military service instead of jail time. While we don't know how he felt about the choice beyond that he did choose soldier over inmate, it's unlikely he thought invading Russia was a great idea, given he tried to desert because Napoleon like a true imperialist dumbass didn't plan for how he was going to feed his army or keep them from freezing to death in fucking Russian winter.

I find it very interesting that the French Empire was at its largest right before invading Russia and fell apart completely within a few years. My country has been falling the fuck apart for a while now - see aforementioned War on Terror, growing extremes of economic stratification in the richest country in the world, abject refusal to meaningfully deal with climate change that US-based corporations hold the lion's share of blame for - but between Trump's abject refusal to meaningfully deal with the coronavirus and strong likelihood that he'll refuse to leave office even if a certain pathetic moderate I will hold my nose and vote for does manage to earn a majority of votes, ~y~i~k~e~s.

Our only immortals who have never known a world before modernity and nationalism happen to have been born of wars that were the beginning of the end for the imperialist democracies that raised them, and I think in the centuries to come that's going to give them some very interesting shit to talk about.

Nile's a Young Millennial, a digital native born in the United States after the collapse of the USSR left her country as the world's only superpower. She's used to a pace of technological change that human brains are not evolved to handle.

Napoleon trying to make all of Europe into the French Empire was a leading cause of the growth of European nationalism and the establishment of liberal democracies both in Europe and in many places that Europeans had colonized. Booker's first war produced the only geopolitical world order Nile has ever known and I just have so many feelings ok. Nile the art history nerd is probably not aware of this, and why would she be? This humble meta author is, like Nile, a product of US public schools, and all they taught me about world history was Ancient Greece/Rome/Egypt/Mesopotamia and then World War 2. Being raised in The World's Only Superpower is WEIRD.

Nile the Young Millennial is used to the devastating volume of bad news the internet makes possible. But she has absolutely no concept of a world where the United States of America is not The World's Only Superpower. In order to get up in the morning and put on her gear and point guns at civilians in Afghanistan, she can only let herself think so much about whether that American exceptionalism thing is a good idea.

She's about to spend many, many years where the only people who she can truly trust are people who are older than not only her country but the IDEA of countries.

She's got time, and she's got a lot of new information at her disposal. But there comes a point where my obsession with her friendship and eventual very hot sex life with Booker just isn't about sex at all. Nile needs someone to talk to about the United States who Gets It. Booker the rat Frenchman coerced into Napoleon's army, and Copley the Black dual citizen of the US and UK who's retired from a CIA career that he half understands as deeply problematic but half still believes in hence his mind-bogglingly stupid partnership with Merrick, are the only people on the planet Nile can talk to honestly about, and really be understood in, all the thoughts and feelings and fears and hopes of her experience as a US Marine.

And one more thing before I go get ready for Rosh Hashanah: Orientalism was a defining element of the Crusades and that legacy is painfully clear in current US-led Western military activity in Afghanistan, Syria, Israel/Palestine, you name it. Turns out memoirs by French veterans of the Napoleonic Wars are full of Orientalist language about Russia as well. I am maybe/definitely writing a fic where Booker spends his exile reading critical race theory and decolonial feminism and trauma studies monographs because he can't be honest with a therapist but maybe he can heal this way and become the team therapist his own damn self. I just really need him to read Edward Said and Gloria Anzaldúa and then go down on Nile, ok?

[reading-writing-revolution]

Heather Cox Richardson:

24 Aug 2020

Trump is running far behind Democratic nominee Joe Biden in the polls. In early February 2020, at its best, his overall popularity rating hovered close to 50%. In the same month, according to a Gallup poll, 63% of Americans approved of the way he was handling the economy. To keep this economic success story going, Trump downplayed the coronavirus, leaving us wide open to its devastation. It hit the U.S. in earnest shortly after this poll was taken. The economy shut down, and we plummeted into the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

But Trump is determined to be reelected, so determined that he has begun to suggest he will not accept a Biden victory as valid. There is room to speculate about why he is so obsessed with reelection that he took the unprecedented step of filing for reelection way back in January 2017, on the day of his inauguration. One possible answer is that campaign money can be used to pay for lawyers under certain circumstances. As of May, the campaign had spent more than $16 million on legal services—in comparison, George W. Bush spent $8.8 million; Barack Obama spent $5.5 million; and, in May, Biden had spent just $1.3 million. Another possible answer is that the Department of Justice maintains that a sitting president cannot be indicted.

To pull off a win Trump is trying to guarantee loyal Republican voters will show up to vote. To that end, he is favoring evangelical voters, his most loyal bloc. Last week’s posthumous pardon for Susan B. Anthony was a gift to anti-abortion activists; yesterday Trump explicitly called the attention of evangelical Christians to his lie that “The Democrats took the word GOD out of the Pledge of Allegiance at the Democrat National Convention.” (They didn’t. The Muslim caucus and the LGBTQ caucus, both of which met privately, left the words “under God” out. All the public, televised events used the words.)

This morning he was more abrupt. He tweeted: “Happy Sunday! We want GOD!” And then he went golfing.

He is also trying to consolidate power over Republican lawmakers, making the party his own. The Republican National Convention starts tomorrow night, and it seems it will be the Trump Show. The convention was initially supposed to be in Charlotte, North Carolina, and then Trump moved it to Jacksonville, Florida, when North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper, a Democrat, would not guarantee he could have full capacity despite the coronavirus. Finally, in the wake of the under-attended Tulsa rally, Trump recognized that the convention would have to be virtual. But this has left planners scrambling to plan a convention in four weeks, when planning one usually takes a full year. No one seems quite sure what is going to happen.

It is traditional for a candidate to put in a short appearance to acknowledge the nomination and then give a keynote acceptance speech on the last day. But the RNC’s announced line-up features Trump speaking every night in the prime-time slot. The speakers include the First Lady and all of the adult Trump children, including Tiffany, but do not include any of the previous Republican presidents or presidential nominees, which is unusual.

Trump will speak live from the White House. This raises legal questions because while the president and vice-president are not covered by the Hatch Act, which prohibits federal employees from engaging in political activities, the rest of the White House staff is. Further, it is against the law to coerce federal employees to conduct political activity.

Vice President Mike Pence will also speak from federal property—possibly Fort McHenry— the First Lady will speak from the newly renovated Rose Garden, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will apparently speak from Jerusalem while on an official trip to the Middle East, although secretaries of state generally do not speak at either political convention. Democrats have raised concerns about the overlap between official property and business and the Trump campaign.

The Republicans have written no platform to outline policies and goals for the future. Instead they passed a resolution saying that “the Republican Party has and will continue to enthusiastically support the President’s America-first agenda.” The party appears now to be Trump’s.

But….

The Republicans’ next resolution calls on the media “to engage in accurate and unbiased reporting, especially as it relates to the strong support of the RNC for President Trump and his Administration.” And a final resolution prohibited the Republicans from making any motions to write a new platform.

If you read that carefully, you see people trying to convince everyone that they are united, when they are, in fact, badly split.

Trump’s extremism is alienating the voters that other Republican lawmakers need to stay in power, and those lawmakers are trying to keep their distance from him without antagonizing his base. Yesterday, in Portland, Oregon, the police refused to respond as neo-fascist Proud Boys and armed militia members staging a “Back the Blue” rally attacked Black Lives Matter protesters, who fought back. It is a truism in American history that violence costs a group political support, and militia groups are angry because Facebook has banned them, hurting their ability to recruit.

Today, in Kenosha, Wisconsin, police officers shot Jacob Blake, a Black man, in the back multiple times in front of his children; the shooting was caught on video and has sparked outrage.

Tell-all books are also undermining the president. Yesterday, it came out that when researching her book, Mary Trump, the president’s niece, recorded her aunt, Maryanne Trump Barry, Trump’s sister, discussing Trump. “All he wants to do is appeal to his base,” Barry said. “He has no principles. None. None.” “Donald is cruel,” she said, “he was a brat.” A new book by CNN reporter Brian Stelter shows how Trump simply echoes the personalities at the Fox News Channel. And former Trump fixer Michael Cohen is about to release his own book about his years working for Trump.

Trump also took a personal hit tonight, when advisor Kellyanne Conway announced she was leaving the White House. Both she and her husband, George Conway, a co-founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, are stepping away from the public eye to deal with family issues exacerbated by the political drama of the past several years.

And the Russia story, revived by the fifth volume of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on Russian connections to the 2016 Trump campaign, is not going away. Tonight, the Daily Beast reported that Jared Kushner—who after, all, could not get a security clearance until Trump overruled authorities-- has been using a secret back channel to communicate with a Putin representative. According to the story, Steve Bannon, who was arrested on Friday by the acting U.S. Attorney at the Southern District of New York and so now has an excellent reason to flip, knew all about it.

This afternoon, Trump tried to change the news trend when he called a press conference to announce what he called a “safe and effective treatment” for Covid-19. The FDA has approved an Emergency Use Authorization for convalescent plasma, a treatment involving giving anti-body rich plasma from those who have had the virus to those ill with it. Studies show that the treatment has some potential, but there has been little scientific study of it, and it is certainly not established as an effective treatment. Federal health officials, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, have objected to the EUA until there is more information; Trump has accused the doctors of delaying approval for political reasons. He walked out of the press conference after a reporter asked about the discrepancy between his triumphant announcement of a treatment and a doctor's explanation that plasma has potential.

So the best option for the president to win in 2020 might be to keep Biden supporters from voting. Yesterday, the House passed a bill committing $25 billion to the United States Postal Service and to stop Postmaster General Louis DeJoy from making more changes that are delaying the delivery of the mail. Today, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) refused to take up the bill.

But Americans have figured out that they can avoid using the slowed USPS by turning to Ballot Drop Boxes. So today, Trump tweeted that “Mail Drop Boxes… are a voter security disaster,” that are “not Covid sanitized.”

Twitter slapped a warning on it: “This tweet violated the Twitter rules about civic and election integrity.”

[dr-archeville]

INDY Primer: There Are Human Costs to Elections.  Now, 200,000 Salvadorans Are Going to Pay. [2018/01/09]

As always, you can check out the web-browser version of this newsletter here.

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1. HEARTLESS POLITICS (OR, THE HUMAN COSTS OF AMERICAN ELECTIONS).

THE GIST: Yesterday, the Trump administration announced that, come September 2019, it would no longer grant Salvadorans what’s called temporary protected status, a status that allows individuals who fled natural disasters or armed conflicts to stay in the U.S. legally and obtain a work permit.  The White House has previously ended TPS for Haitians and will do so soon for Nicaraguans.  This latest decision means that, in eighteen months, nearly two hundred thousands citizens of El Salvador will face a choice: go back home, to a country many of them haven’t seen in a decade, perhaps leaving their American-born children behind (there are more than 190,000 of them), or stay here illegally and without a work permit.

From the NYT: “Homeland security officials said that they were ending a humanitarian program, known as Temporary Protected Status, for Salvadorans who have been allowed to live and work legally in the United States since a pair of devastating earthquakes struck their country in 2001.  Salvadorans were by far the largest group of foreigners benefiting from temporary protected status, which shielded them from deportation if they had arrived in the United States illegally.  The decision came just weeks after more than 45,000 Haitians lost protections granted after Haiti’s 2010 earthquake, and it suggested that others in the program, namely Hondurans, may soon lose them as well.  Nicaraguans lost their protections last year.”

“The Department of Homeland Security said that because damaged roads, schools, hospitals, homes and water systems had been reconstructed since the earthquakes, the Salvadorans no longer belonged in the program. … The ending of protection for Salvadorans, Haitians and Nicaraguans leaves fewer than 100,000 people in the program, which was signed into law by President George Bush in 1990.”

“Temporary protections were granted to Salvadorans who were in the United States in March 2001 after two earthquakes in January and February of that year killed more than 1,000 people and destroyed hundreds of thousands of homes.  Over the next 15 years, the George W. Bush and Obama administrations extended the protections several times.  In 2016, the final time, the government cited several factors, including drought, poverty and widespread gang violence in El Salvador, as reasons to keep the protections in place.”

“El Salvador has rebuilt since the earthquakes.  But the violence — San Salvador, the capital, is considered one of the most dangerous cities on Earth — has inhibited investment and job creation, and prompted tens of thousands to flee.  The country’s economy experienced the slowest growth of any in Central America in 2016, according to the World Bank.”

“The government of El Salvador had asked the Trump administration to renew the designation for its citizens in the United States, citing drought and other factors.  Money sent home from Salvadorans abroad is a lifeline for many in the country, where four out of 10 households subsist below the poverty line, according to the World Bank.  In 2016, the $4.6 billion remitted from abroad, mostly from the United States, accounted for 17 percent of the country’s economy.”

Programming note: In a few weeks (if all goes to plan) the INDY will profile a Salvadoran who was deported.  His family, who live in the Charlotte area, are here under TPS.

WHAT IT MEANS, PT. 1: The program was designed to be temporary, as the Trump administration has pointed out.  But I don’t see the point of forcing them out.  These are people who settled into the U.S. more than decade ago, raised kids here, have jobs here, have integrated themselves into our economies and communities.  And while some infrastructure in El Salvador has been repaired, why is the government ignoring the endemic violence in that country, not to mention its widespread poverty?  Just so Trump can beat his chest about immigration?  At best, this is callous, pointless policymaking.  At worst … well, I’ll leave that to your imagination.

Elections, as they say, have consequences.  In this case, for two hundred thousand ex-pats from one of the South America’s most dangerous and impoverished countries, those consequences will be ruinous.

MEANWHILE: Trump is still pushing for the wall along the southern border.  And to pay for it — Remember when Mexico was going to pay for it?  Those were the days — the White House is proposing cutting funding for border security measures that actually work. [NYT]

“The Trump administration would cut or delay funding for border surveillance, radar technology, patrol boats and customs agents in its upcoming spending plan to curb illegal immigration — all proven security measures that officials and experts have said are more effective than building a wall along the Mexican border.”

“President Trump has made the border wall a focus of his campaign against illegal immigration to stop drugs, terrorists and gangs like MS-13 from coming into the United States.  Under spending plans submitted last week to Congress, the wall would cost $18 billion over the next 10 years, and be erected along nearly 900 miles of the southern border.”

“David Bier, a policy analyst with the Cato Institute, said a border wall would do little to stop the drug trade.  Most of the cocaine, heroin and methamphetamines smuggled into the United States come through legal ports of entry rather than areas that would be stopped by a wall, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration.  Nor would a wall stop illegal immigration, other experts said.  Data from the Department of Homeland Security and research groups like the New York-based Center for Migration Studies show that most undocumented immigrants now simply overstay legally obtained short-term visas — and did not sneak across the border.”

“The wall also has become a bargaining chip in negotiations with Congress as lawmakers seek to prevent nearly 800,000 young undocumented immigrants from being deported.”

WHAT IT MEANS, PT. 2: Here again, you have the administration prioritizing its outlandish promises to its base over good policy.  If Congress goes along, the administration will cut things that work to pay for things that won’t.  And if Congress won’t go along, that could imperil the eight hundred thousand DACA recipients in the country.  Again, elections have consequences.

Related: A bipartisan pair of congressman has unveiled a compromise on DACA recipients that would offer qualifying individuals the ability to get a green card and eventual citizenship under certain circumstances. [CNN]

Related: Under pressure from the business and tech communities, the Trump administration has backed off a plan to force foreign tech workers out of the country. [McClatchy via N&O]

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2. MR. PRESIDENT, ROBERT MUELLER WOULD LIKE A WORD.

THE GIST:  I noted this briefly yesterday, but this story warrants a bit of a deeper dive, as the consequences could be huge for the White House.  Special counsel Robert Mueller has told Trump’s lawyers that he’ll probably seek an interview with the president. [NYT]

“No formal request has been made and no date has been set.  White House officials viewed the discussion as a sign that Mr. Mueller’s investigation of Mr. Trump could be nearing the end.  But even if that is so, allowing prosecutors to interview a sitting president who has a history of hyperbolic or baseless assertions carries legal risk for him.  Mr. Mueller has already brought charges against four of Mr. Trump’s former aides.  All face accusations of lying to the authorities.”

“Mr. Trump’s lawyers are expected to try to set ground rules for any interview or provide answers to written questions.  If Mr. Trump were to refuse outright to cooperate, Mr. Mueller could respond with a grand jury subpoena.”

“One person familiar with the discussions said Mr. Mueller appeared most interested in asking questions about the former national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, and the firing of the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey — not the broader question of possible collusion with Russia.  Those topics signal an interest in whether Mr. Trump tried to obstruct justice.  The person was not authorized to talk about internal discussions and spoke on condition of anonymity.”

“Mr. Mueller will have three choices for questioning Mr. Trump: written questions, an interview with his investigators or a subpoena to appear before a grand jury.  Legal experts said Mr. Mueller would almost certainly want to speak directly with Mr. Trump in person.  They said Mr. Trump’s lawyers would want to prevent Mr. Mueller from putting Mr. Trump alone before a grand jury, where lawyers normally are not present.”

“Mr. Trump has sat for depositions before and shown discipline when under oath.  His testimony in civil cases reveals a canny ability to avoid being cornered and a frank acknowledgment that he uses ‘truthful hyperbole’ or ‘innocent exaggeration.’  But he has never faced questioning from someone like Mr. Mueller, a veteran prosecutor and former F.B.I. director who has a dozen experienced litigators behind him.  And the stakes have never been higher.  President Bill Clinton was impeached on a perjury charge over his grand jury testimony about his relationship with a White House intern.”

WHAT IT MEANS: The president is a known fabulist, which is why Trump’s lawyers would love to answer questions in writing.  Mueller won’t play that game.  And Trump won’t want to go before a grand jury, where his lawyers won’t be there.  So, an interview it’s likely to be.  And if you’re the White House, you have to be worried that he’ll be tripped up and say something that a) is a lie, which would be a felony; or b) says something that demonstrates that he fired Comey to shut down the Russia investigation.  Both are those things, in my estimation, are as if not more likely than the president staying disciplined while being questioned by experienced criminal prosecutors.  

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3. FIVE LOCAL HEADLINES.

North Carolina and Wake County still lead the nation in teachers certified by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards. [N&O]

2017 was North Carolina’s warmest year on record. [INDY]

If you don’t already have season tickets to DPAC, scoring Hamilton tix is going to be difficult. [N&O]

Attorney General Josh Stein is investigating Uber over data breaches. [N&O]

A fire at a Carrboro apartment complex displaced several residents. [WRAL]

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4. ELEVEN POLITICAL HEADLINES.

The Trump administration is contemplating a preemptive strike against North Korea and hoping not to prompt a nuclear war in the process.  Hoo, boy. [Axios]

The White House is struggling to quash talk of Trump’s mental fitness. [WaPo]

This won’t help: last night, at the college football championship, Trump appeared to have trouble remembering the words to the national anthem. [ThinkProgress]

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission unanimously rejected the Trump administration’s plan to guarantee payments to coal plants that would be facing retirement due to market forces. [Politico]

The VA will allow its doctors to discuss medical marijuana with their patients, but they can’t refer vets to state-run medical marijuana programs. [NPR]

The U.S. House’s Foreign Affairs Committee chairman is retiring — the eighth House panel chairman to do so. [The Hill]

Former presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich is running for governor of Ohio. [AP]

Senate Democrats have enough cosponsors to force a vote on a bill to reinstate net neutrality.  That effort is unlikely to work, though it could force Republicans into an uncomfortable vote. [The Hill]

Sinclair Broadcasting’s acquisition of Tribune Media will give the right-wing network control of two TV stations in the Des Moines, Iowa, market, a target area for presidential aspirants. [Axios]

A Kansas Republican lawmaker says marijuana should be illegal because black people can’t handle it.  “What you really need to do is go back in the ’30s, when they outlawed all types of drugs in Kansas [and] across the United States.  What was the reason why they did that?  One of the reasons why, I hate to say it, was that the African Americans, they were basically users and they basically responded the worst off to those drugs just because of their character makeup, their genetics and that.” [Raw Story]

A fire broke out on the roof of Trump Tower in Manhattan, injuring three. [NYDN]

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5. FIVE ODDS & ENDS.

The Alabama Crimson Tide claimed their fifth national championship in nine years, coming back from a 13–0 halftime deficit to stun the Georgia Bulldogs in overtime.  At halftime, Nick Saban replaced his starting QB with a true freshman, who became the game’s MVP and threw the walk-off touchdown pass. [Bleacher Report]

My alma mater, the undefeated University of Central Florida, finished sixth in the AP football poll and declared itself national champions anyway. [Orlando Sentinel]

A Game of Thrones-themed ice hotel opened in Finland. [CNN]

LG has made a 65-inch television screen that rolls up like wrapping paper. [CNN]

Warmer today, with a high of 55. [WRAL]

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[bigyack-com]

Stephanie Grisham: Trump’s Press Secretary Who Doesn’t Meet the Press

It’s not every day that the White House press secretary is offered $200,000 to appear on camera and explain the president’s decisions — any of them — to the public.But as one of the most consequential weeks in President Trump’s tenure draws to a close, the world beyond the Beltway is beginning to notice that Stephanie Grisham — unlike her predecessors, colleagues and boss — does not appear to relish the talking-to-the-public part of her job.In six months as press secretary, Ms. Grisham has held zero briefings for reporters. When she does give interviews, she prefers to leave the West Wing via a side exit and is driven to a studio, rather than walk toward the cameras outside the White House and risk encountering a journalist along the way.Outside of appearances on Fox News, the One America News Network and the Sinclair Broadcast Group, she rarely goes on TV. Throughout her time in the job, Mr. Trump has wondered why she does not appear on television more often, according to two people familiar with his thinking.The country’s pre-eminent political spokesperson is virtually unknown to the public. And as the Trump administration scrambled this week to coordinate a public explanation for the killing of an Iranian general, Ms. Grisham kept mostly out of sight. The night that Iran launched missiles into Iraq, she surfaced on Twitter — after a briefing in the Situation Room with the president and other high-level advisers — to accuse CNN of fabricating sources.Even those sympathetic to the Trump administration seemed befuddled. “If ever there was a time for more briefings, it was the last few days,” said Ari Fleischer, a press secretary to President George W. Bush. He added, though, that briefings had become less useful, given the hostilities between the White House and its press corps.Ms. Grisham’s under-the-radar style has caused consternation in Washington, where protocol is prized. Now she is facing the kind of scrutiny she has tried to avoid.On Friday, 13 former White House and military officials — including press secretaries from the three administrations before Trump — published a letter calling for the restoration of press briefings. “Credible men and women, standing in front of those iconic backgrounds at the White House, State Department and Pentagon, are essential to the work the United States must do in the world,” they wrote.In response, Hogan Gidley, a White House spokesman, dismissed the letter writers as “D.C. establishment swamp creatures.”Ms. Grisham was not cited by name. But on CNN this week, Anderson Cooper devoted a prime-time segment to why taxpayers should pay her $183,000 salary. And in a viral Twitter post, the author Don Winslow pledged to donate $100,000 to charity if Ms. Grisham agreed to answer questions from the White House press corps. The novelist Stephen King tossed another $100,000 into the pot.Her response was curt.“If you have $200,000 to play with, why not just help children because it’s a good thing to do?” Ms. Grisham, 43, said in an email to Jake Tapper of CNN. Ms. Grisham did take questions on Wednesday from the Sinclair anchor Eric Bolling, a former Fox News personality. She accused the media of “mourning” the death of Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani and shrugged off skeptics of her low-profile style. “People aren’t sure of me because I’m not out at the podium, I’m not fighting with them, it’s not public, I’m not giving them their ratings,” she said, adding: “I’m as accessible as I can be.”It was vintage Trump White House: defiant, scorched-earth and unbothered about offending the journalists she is expected to interact with day to day.The view inside the White House is that Ms. Grisham — who also serves as communications director for both Mr. Trump and the first lady, Melania Trump — has improved her on-camera approach. In her early days as press secretary, Mr. Trump joked with aides that Ms. Grisham was “a studier,” and that “she learned that from the first lady,” according to a senior administration official who heard the exchange but was not authorized to comment on it publicly.“When it comes to certain topics I’ve certainly left much of the Q-and-A to subject matter experts,” Ms. Grisham said in an email. “They can answer technical questions and recognize the importance of classified information, which I believe better serves both the press and the public.”Mick Mulvaney, Mr. Trump’s acting chief of staff, was one of several White House officials who offered statements on Friday in praise of Ms. Grisham. “Stephanie has been doing exactly what the president wants and needs her to do,” he said. “I continue to be baffled by a press corps that fails to see access to the president as preferable to access to a 20-minute briefing from a spokesperson.”Mr. Mulvaney added: “We had a great week from a comms perspective.”Unlike her predecessors, Sean Spicer and Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who had relationships with the national press corps after years in high-level politics, Ms. Grisham is a relative newcomer to the world of Washington spin. An aide in the Arizona House of Representatives, she joined the Trump campaign as a “wrangler,” herding and feeding reporters on the trail. At the White House, she became Mrs. Trump’s spokeswoman.Representing Mr. Trump on the world stage is a different matter. Mr. Spicer and Ms. Sanders faced public scorn and savage “Saturday Night Live” imitations, not to mention the occasional ire of a president who believes he is his own best spokesman.Ms. Grisham was not spared such scrutiny: Reports surfaced of her two past arrests for driving under the influence. Later, she was praised for physically pushing for press access during a meeting between Mr. Trump and Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, on the Korean Peninsula.Her allies say Ms. Grisham’s reluctance to expand her public profile is reasonable, given the way the job has evolved in the Trump era. “The job of the press secretary is to speak in the absence of the president,” Mr. Spicer said in an interview, noting that Mr. Trump frequently talks to journalists in informal settings like the Oval Office. “If the president is constantly engaging with the press, there’s not as much need to be out in front.”Still, Ms. Grisham’s lack of visibility has sparked speculation among allies of the president that she may modify or step back from her role at the conclusion of Mr. Trump’s impeachment trial in the Senate. She has said she has no plans to step back.Allies of Ms. Grisham said she spent a significant amount of her time working with individual reporters, and credited her with organizing an in-flux press shop. But some White House reporters complained that she was less accessible than her predecessors.Though Ms. Sanders sparred with the press corps, journalists often described her as helpful behind the scenes. Reporters helped organize a cocktail party in her honor when she took the job; after she was mocked at the White House Correspondents Dinner in 2018, journalists surrounded her at a reception to offer sympathies.Ms. Grisham has not cultivated that level of respect, but it is not clear she seeks it, either. Inside the West Wing, she is viewed as fiercely loyal to the president and his family — and willing to channel Mr. Trump’s slashing language and laissez-faire approach to facts.In an op-ed in September for The Washington Examiner, Ms. Grisham singled out The Washington Post for criticism and added a litany of complaints about coverage she deemed biased. “No wonder,” she wrote, with Trumpian flourish, “the national media’s popularity sits somewhere between smallpox and the plague.” Read the full article

[genelutz]

ALPHABETICAL QUIPS LIST LISP

ALCHEMY'S FUNDAMENTAL ERROR

Through the centuries, alchemists have searched in vain for a way to turn base metals into gold.   They should have used plastic.

CRIMINAL PLATITUDE

Crime does not pay—it pays off.

EUGENIC EUGENE

Here's a few genetic facts about Eugenic Eugene:

Eugenic Eugene's genes haven't hurt him none.

Eugenic Eugene's genes are the genes for me.

EXISTENTIAL DILEMMA

I don’t know who I am or what I’m doing here, but I’d better get out of here quick before I find myself.

GLIMMER OF HOPE?  NOPE.

I saw a glimmer of hope for the world, and I lost a few pounds of despair, but then I was fed a ton of bad news, the pounds piled back on, and now I’m more cynical than ever.

HOW I JUDGE OTHERS

IF MONEY IS SPEECH, THEN...

Now that the Supreme Court has ruled that money is speech, you are going to have to put your money where your mouth is.

If I was as bad as you say I am, I would be you, but if I were you, you would be a much better person.

HOW TO LIE

Since truth is stranger than fiction, it is better to make up a lie that is absurd if you want suckers to believe you.

IDIOMS SUCK

I hate idioms—they’re so idiotic!

INSOMNIAC AMNESIA

Sometimes when your brain is telling you you’re going insane, you can just sleep it off.

Once you’ve slept it off, you can sleep it back on again, then it will be time to wake up and you’ll forget everything…

…everything you’ve ever dreamed of.

IT'S ALL JUST TALK

There’s nothing that you would want to talk about with me, or that I would want to talk about with you, that we would want to talk about, if you know what I’m talking about…

LIFE SAVINGS

You saved my life--now I can spend the rest of it.

LOST IN THOUGHT

The reason some people get lost in thought is because it's unfamiliar territory.

MIND OVER MATTER

It has been traditionally assumed that it was “mind over matter” but now it seems that ��matter” seems to be winning over “mind” (which really doesn’t matter much to me because I don’t mind).

NEVER SAY THINGS LIKE THIS

To avoid arguments, don't say things like "Unlike you, he seems very intelligent and charming." or "With all due respect, sir, you are the epicenter of ignorance."

NEW HEALTH WARNINGS

Coke can give you a stroke. Pepsi causes epilepsy.  Steer clear of root beer.  Mountain Dew will do you in.

ONE THING AFTER ANOTHER

Life can make you happy.

Then life can make you sad.

You can feel like you’re in Heaven.

Or life can become a living Hell.

Life can be full of love.

Or it can be empty with loneliness.

You know…if it isn’t one thing, it’s the other!

A POOR POET'S DESTINY

Almost anyone could become a poet if they wanted to, but no one wants to because the pay is so bad.

I told my Daddy I wanted to be a poet and he said, "Son, it's a mighty hard road, just do the best you can."

PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT

This is to announce that the public will no longer be served.

REASONABLE GREED

Open-minded people are so greedy--they're never satisfied with only one point-of-view.

RENT A CONGRESSMAN

I was thinking of starting a business where you could rent a Senator or Representative, since most of them have already been bought.

SHAKESPEARE QUIZ

To be or not to be, that is the question.

A. To be.

B. Not to be.

C. Either A or B.

SILLY ARGUMENT ETIQUETTE

I'm not one to prolong a silly argument, but I am perfectly willing to take up the issue at a later date.

THE COSMIC SCHEME OF THINGS

In the cosmic scheme of things, anything is possible and anything that’s possible has probably already happened, so planning for the future is really just re-living the past.

THE ISLAND OF TRUTH

Imagine yourself on the Island of Truth, surrounded by the Ocean of Ignorance.

Oh, oh, rising sea level...

THEORETICAL ETHICS

The antithesis of Anti-theism is not necessarily antithetical to being theoretically ethical.

THE 99 PERCENT AND THE ONE PERCENT

From the point of view of the 99%, the 1% have way too much money. From the point-of-view of the 1%, way too much is not enough.

THE PREVALENCE OF PREVAILURE

US Presidents from George HW Bush to Clinton to George W Bush to Obama have said we will "prevail" in the Middle East, but so far, it's only been a prevailure.

THE PRICE OF WORLD DOMINATION

World for sale!! (asking price: your soul). Depreciation allowance available for tax purposes.

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY

I think, therefore I am, and I do, therefore I’ve been there, done that.

I think, therefore I am,  I do, therefore I’m done for.

THOUGHTLESS PEOPLE WHO THINK

In a scientific poll that was never conducted, it was found that 18 percent of people who think are thoughtless people.

UNDERSTANDING GOOD AND EVIL

The reason they hate us is because we're good and they're evil, and evil people always hate good people, that's obvious.  But why do evil people hate good people?  They're jealous of our goodness--they wish they could be good like us, but they can't, because they're evil.

UNDERSTANDING POLITICS

Politicians have a special talent for seeing how absurdities relate to each other in the most improbable and illogical ways.

A WAY TO IMPROVE WAR

I always thought it would be a better idea if we sent old men to fight our wars instead of young men.   There are several advantages to this:

1. Old men who are killed in battle don’t leave bereft children and wives behind.

2. People aren’t as sad when old men die as when young ones do.

3. It would save the government lots of money on Social Security and Medicare.

4. Old men can’t see so well, so they’re more likely to miss their targets. which would save lives.

5. If you’re hard-of-hearing, bombs bursting in air won’t be as terrifying.

6. It would give old men something to live for, or at least make dying worthwhile.

WHAT HAPPENED

Superman always fought for truth, justice, and the American Way. Then he died.

WHAT NORWEGIAN SALMON DO FOR A LIVING

"Fjord every mountain, climb every stream."

WHAT TO EXPECT

If you mix good with bad, the best outcome you can expect is not so bad, but not as good as you might expect.

WHY I NEVER TAKE ADVICE FROM ANYONE

If I don’t take your advice, I have only myself to blame if your advice is good.  If I do take your advice, and your advice is bad, I’ll have not only myself to blame but you as well.

WHY MY MIND IS FULL OF STRANGE THOUGHTS

Strange thoughts sometimes pop into my head, and since I'm closed-minded, they stay there.

WHY THE GRASS SEEMS TO BE GREENER ON THE OTHER SIDE

If you think the grass is greener on the other side, it's because it's fertilized with bullshit.

WHY WE'RE SUNK

Planet Earth is like a sinking ship where everyone is arguing whose fault it is that the ship is sinking.

WHY YOU DO WHAT YOU KNOW YOU WANT TO DO

If you know what you want to do and you do what you want to do, you’ll get to do what you want.  And who wouldn’t want that?

[plusorminuscongress]

New story in Politics from Time: John McCain Laid to Rest at U.S. Naval Academy Beside a Lifelong Friend

(ANNAPOLIS, Md.) — Sen. John McCain’s final journey ended Sunday on a grassy hill at the U.S. Naval Academy within view of the Severn River and earshot of midshipmen present and future, and alongside a lifelong friend.

A horse-drawn caisson carrying the senator’s casket led a procession of mourners from the academy’s chapel to its cemetery following a private service. The senator’s widow, Cindy, and his children were among those who walked behind the caisson. Joining them were family and friends as well as members of McCain’s Class of 1958, military leaders and academy midshipmen.

About 4 p.m. a flyover of military aircraft honored the Navy pilot who was shot down over Vietnam and held more than five years as a prisoner of war.

After the American flag was removed from the casket, a grieving Cindy McCain pressed her check to its surface and McCain sons Jimmy and Jack shared a hug.

The burial was private as per the wishes of McCain, the Arizona Republican and 2008 presidential nominee died Aug. 25 from brain cancer at age 81. Vehicles that had carried mourners began leaving the area between 4:30 and 5 p.m.

One scheduled speaker at the service, Sen. Lindsey Graham, said before the service that he would tell the audience that “nobody loved a soldier more than John McCain, that I bear witness to his commitment to have their back, travel where they go, never let them be forgotten.” Also expected to pay tribute were David Petraeus, a retired general and former CIA director, and McCain’s son Jack.

As the hearse carrying McCain passed through a gate and into the academy, there was loud applause from the several hundred people lining the street outside on the hot and muggy summer day. Many held their hands over their hearts and waved American flags. Some shouted, “God bless you.”

People in the crowd held signs that read “Senator John McCain Thanks For Serving! Godspeed” and “Rest In Peace Maverick.”

For his final resting place, McCain picked the historic site overlooking the Severn River, not Arlington National Cemetery, where his father and grandfather, both admirals, were buried.

Years ago Chuck Larson, an admiral himself and an ally throughout McCain’s life, reserved four plots at the cemetery — two for McCain and himself, and two for their wives, now widows. Larson died in 2014, and McCain wrote in a recent memoir that he wanted to be buried next to his friend, “near where it began.”

Among the pallbearers on a list provided by McCain’s office were Frank Gamboa, his academy roommate; Defense Secretary Jim Mattis; and two men who were POWs with McCain in Vietnam, John Fer and Everett Alvarez Jr.

Read more:How McCain Got Washington to Reach Across the Aisle Again

Tributes to McCain began Wednesday in Arizona and continued for the remainder of the week. On Saturday, speeches by his daughter Meghan and two former presidents — Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Barack Obama — remembered McCain as a patriot who could bridge painful rivalries. While their remarks made clear their admiration for him, they also represented a repudiation of President Donald Trump’s brand of tough-talking, divisive politics. Trump and McCain were at odds during the 2016 campaign and for much of Trump’s presidency.

“There’s a lesson to be learned this week about John McCain,” said Graham, R-S.C.

“No. 1, Americans appreciate military service. … If you work hard and do your homework and know what you’re talking about, people will listen to you. That if you pick big causes bigger than yourself, you’ll be remembered,” he told Fox News Sunday.

“He tried to drain the swamp before it was cool, that you can fight hard and still be respected. If you forgive, people appreciate it, and if you admit to mistakes, you look good as a stronger man. That’s the formula, John McCain. This was a civics lesson for anybody who wanted to listen. Why do we remember this man? Because of the way he conducted his public life.”

By Susan Walsh / AP on September 02, 2018 at 09:25PM

[bountyofbeads]

The Unraveling of Donald Trump

As the impeachment inquiry intensifies, some associates of the president predict that his already erratic behavior is going to get worse.

Peter Nicholas | Published October 18, 2019 9:45 AM ET | The Atlantic | Posted October 18, 2019 |

The country is entering a new and precarious phase, in which the central question about President Donald Trump is not whether he is coming unstrung, but rather just how unstrung he is going to get.

The boiling mind of Trump has spawned a cottage industry for cognitive experts who have questioned whether he is, well, all there. But as the impeachment inquiry barrels ahead on Capitol Hill, several associates of the president, including former White House aides, worry that his behavior is likely to get worse. Angered by the proceedings, unencumbered by aides willing to question his judgment, and more and more isolated in the West Wing, Trump is apt to lash out more at enemies imagined and real, these people told me. Conduct that has long been unsettling figures to deteriorate as Trump comes under mounting stress. What unfolded Wednesday inside the West Wing’s walls might be only a foretaste of what House Speaker Nancy Pelosi described that day, after a meeting with Trump, as a presidential “meltdown.”

“He’s grown more comfortable in the job and less willing to assimilate new information and trust new advisers,” a former White House official told me. “He’s decided to throw caution to the wind and go it alone, especially when he’s stressed and feels under attack and threatened in various ways. Then his worst impulses and vices shine through.”

On Wednesday alone, he peddled a discredited conspiracy theory in an Oval Office meeting with his Italian counterpart; threw a tantrum during the meeting with Pelosi; dismissed former Defense Secretary James Mattis as “the world’s most overrated general”; and released a letter he wrote to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan that was so bizarre, people weren’t convinced it was real (“Don’t be a tough guy. Don’t be a fool!”).

At least one associate has confronted Trump recently about his judgment, specifically his decision to repeatedly attack the Biden family. Isn’t it unseemly for a president to target Joe Biden’s son Hunter? Wouldn’t it be smarter, at least, to outsource this sort of attack to someone else?

According to a person close to the president, who spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to discuss private conversations, Trump’s explanation was that he acts as any normal person might, and that he won’t be moved by what he calls “political correctness.” “You don’t get it,” Trump said.

Most presidents in the modern era have had emotional moorings to sustain them during crises. President Franklin D. Roosevelt fussed over his stamp collection as he plotted victory in World War II. President Barack Obama would play miniature golf with his young daughters and basketball with old friends from Hawaii as he navigated the financial crisis. In Trump’s world, these sorts of leavening influences don’t seem to exist. Apparently absent from his life are traditional family bonds, creative outlets and hobbies, even exercise. (While some of his children are visible and vocal advocates for their father, Trump’s relationships with them are notoriously complex.) Splayed out on Twitter, his life has always seemed a limitless diet of Fox & Friends episodes and interpersonal disputes. Long gone are the trusted aides with whom he seemed comfortable (and who were willing to speak their mind), such as the senior adviser Hope Hicks.

“I think what we’re viewing, if you think about the human side of it, is the man has no life. He just has no life,” the person close to him told me.

A common question these days is whether Trump has an impairment of some sort that might explain his behavior. Writing in The Atlantic earlier this month, the lawyer George Conway, who is married to the Trump aide Kellyanne Conway, described how some health professionals have ascribed two personality disorders to Trump: pathological narcissism and antisocial personality disorder.

But the latest concerns about Trump are just a crescendo in a long-running drama. Sam Nunberg, a former 2016 Trump-campaign aide, told me that a colleague once approached him and asked if Trump was losing it, saying they had just had the same conversation twice. Nunberg dismissed such concerns, assuring him that it was only because Trump likely wasn’t paying attention the first time.

His speech has changed over time, too. Software programs show that Trump currently speaks at a fourth-to-sixth-grade level. (Politicians are practiced at speaking to wide swaths of Americans, but Obama, for example, according to those speech analyses, spoke at an 11th-grade level in his final news conference as president.) A study last year by two University of Pittsburgh professors examining Trump’s appearances on Fox News found that the quality of his speech was worsening. They studied his comments over a seven-year period ending in 2017—just as his presidency began—and found that he had begun using substantially more “filler words”such as um and uh, though the authors did not conclude that the change signaled cognitive decline.

Even a casual observer can see the disordered and nonlinear thinking behind Trump’s speech. A case in point was Trump’s rally last week in Minneapolis. Within minutes of taking the stage, Trump launched, without explanation, into a dramatic reading of what he imagined was the pillow talk between Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, a pair of former FBI officials who had exchanged text messages critical of the president. He gave no context as to why he was talking about them, leaving it to the audience to fill in the Mall of America–size blanks. Trump never even mentioned that they had worked for the FBI or that Strzok was at one point involved in the Russia investigation—just that they were “lovers” who disliked him. (Still, as theater, it seemed to work. When Trump cooed, “Oh, God. I love you, Lisa!” the audience laughed appreciatively.)

Other people who have worked with Trump in the White House and on the 2016 campaign pushed back on the notion that his mental acuity has eroded over time. “Every president has a super-exaggerated ego and personality in some way,” Tom Bossert, Trump’s former homeland-security adviser and a former official in President George W. Bush’s administration, told me. I asked him if presidents or presidential candidates should be subject to a fitness test measuring whether they’re up to the job. Various psychologists have floated this idea in response to Trump’s behavior. “I’m not sure what the fitness standard would reveal about people who are already wired that way,” Bossert said.

Conventional wisdom in Washington is that impeachment won’t lead to Trump’s removal, but that view rests on Republicans continuing to stay by his side. Even those most loyal to Trump could lose patience if his rash decision making collides with their own interests. Trump’s impulsive decision to pull U.S. troops out of northern Syria last week, setting the stage for Turkey’s attack on America’s Kurdish partners, has already infuriated some of his closest friends in Congress. It was soon after the House, in an overwhelming bipartisan vote, rebuked his Syria gambit on Wednesday that Trump lashed out at Pelosi, prompting her to abruptly walk out of their meeting. (Democrats, of course, are seizing the opportunity. “For those who don’t do politics professionally or even follow it closely: It is getting worse. He is getting worse,” Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii tweeted last night.)

At least one lawmaker thinks that Republicans could hit a tipping point—though he’s a Democrat. Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland told me that it might be easier for Republicans to concede that Trump is unwell than that he’s a criminal who violated his constitutional oath by committing “high crimes and misdemeanors.” The path to removing Trump, in this formulation, might not be impeachment, but the Twenty-Fifth Amendment.

Raskin, a former constitutional-law professor, is sponsoring a bill aimed at clarifying a provision of that amendment—a vehicle for removing a president who is unable to carry out his duties, with the consent of the vice president—by shifting responsibility for making such a judgment from the Cabinet to a panel created expressly for that purpose.

“It may be easier for at least certain Republican colleagues just to admit that the president is acting increasingly incapable of meeting the arduous tasks and duties of his office,” Raskin told me.

That’s still a lot to ask of Republican lawmakers who fully grasp Trump’s mystic hold on his political coalition and fear backlash. The question is whether Trump’s base starts to notice, or care, that the man it elected, facing pressures he’s never seen before, is devolving unmistakably into a different sort of man.

********

Why Turkey Treated Trump’s Letter as Trash

There may be no more vivid illustration of how American leadership has declined in the world.

David A. Graham | Published October 17, 2019 | The Atlantic | Posted October 18, 2019 |

When Fox News’ Trish Regan first reported President Donald Trump’s October 9 letter to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, some journalists and pundits wondered whether it was a joke or a hoax. But the White House confirmed: It was genuine.

“History will look upon you favorably if you get this done the right and humane way. It will look upon you forever as the devil if good things don’t happen. Don’t be a tough guy. Don’t be a fool!” Trump wrote, signing off incongruously, “I will call you later.”

As it turns out, the Turkish government didn’t stop to puzzle over whether the missive was authentic or a joke: It quickly concluded that it was both.

The letter “was not taken seriously at the time, especially given its lack of diplomatic finesse,” Gülnur Aybet, a senior adviser to Erdoğan, told NPR’s Morning Edition today. The BBC quoted a Turkish source saying that “President Erdoğan received the letter, thoroughly rejected it, and put it in the bin.”

The letter’s language and the puerility of Trump’s attempt at forestalling a Turkish invasion of northern Syria are embarrassing on their own—the language and syntax resembling a tense note exchange in a middle-school classroom far more than the stilted conventions of international relations.

But Trump has long dismissed such critiques of his language as mere tone-policing, another side of the political correctness he decries. His language is, he has contended, “MODERN DAY PRESIDENTIAL”—all caps his, and self-reinforcing. Trump may not sound like a typical president, he and his defenders contend, but his blunt style is more forceful and effective than the mannered language of po-faced diplomats and effete leaders such as Barack Obama.

The fiasco in Syria shows, however, that this style is not only unbecoming—it’s ineffective, too. Faced with a strongly worded missive from the president of the United States—the supposed leader of the free world and the most powerful head of state in NATO, an alliance of which Turkey is a member—Erdoğan snickered and tossed it in the trash. (And not just metaphorically, according to the BBC.) There are perhaps more vivid illustrations of how little respect Washington gets and how American leadership has declined in the world, but none comes to mind at the moment.

The best argument for Trump’s decision to yank American troops out of northern Syria is that Turkey was determined to invade no matter what and the president acted to get U.S. soldiers out of harm’s way. It’s not a very good argument, since Trump successfully held off Erdoğan for two years, but let’s assume for the sake of argument that it is true.

If so, Trump wasted more than a week of precious time. Erdoğan charged forward with the invasion without regard for Trump’s warnings. When the president moved forward with the sanctions he threatened in the letter, it didn’t rattle Erdoğan at all. American troops were fired on in the chaos of withdrawal. American planes are bombing U.S. munitions dumps to prevent them from falling into enemy hands. Independent observers have identified atrocities in the fighting.

Today, Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo are in Ankara to attempt old-fashioned diplomacy. By now, it might be too late. “They say, ‘Declare a cease-fire.’ We will never declare a cease-fire,” Erdoğan said Tuesday. If Erdoğan sticks to his guns, literally and metaphorically, it will show how little American leadership is respected overseas. If Pence and Pompeo succeed, it will demonstrate the failure of the president’s personal approach. Not that he seems to care what happens. “They’ve got a lot of sand over there,” Trump said yesterday. “So there’s a lot of sand that they can play with.” It’s hard to believe that world leaders don’t put more stock in his word.

********

The Senate Must Rein In Trump

Unless Congress acts, the Kurds may not be the last allies this president abandons.

Chris Coons, Democratic U.S. senator from Delaware | Published October 18, 2019 10:36 AM ET | The Atlantic | Posted October 18, 2019 |

After President Donald Trump’s disastrous decision to abandon the Kurds and withdraw our troops from northern Syria, Congress spent this past week trying to decide how best to respond. A resolution of denunciation? Tough sanctions on Turkey? Reconsider our relationship with Turkey? Convene the coalition against ISIS and consider how to recapture or even track the hundreds of escaped fighters?

I think we have an even bigger problem on our hands.

Until now, it was reasonable to debate whether Trump was simply an unconventional president, the first with no prior experience serving in either our military or government, or whether he was truly willing to work with foreign dictators to place his own political interests ahead of our nation’s. This week, we learned that this was a false choice—he’s both.

First, despite the temporary cease-fire that Vice President Mike Pence and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan announced on Thursday, the damage President Trump has caused cannot be undone. He betrayed our Kurdish allies, aided Russia and Iran, and gave ISIS a chance to reconstitute itself—all to serve his own perceived political interests.

Second, Trump’s abrupt order to withdraw U.S. troops from northern Syria was not a legitimate response to Americans who are tired of “forever wars.” An abrupt withdrawal from Syria that emboldened our enemies and has already led to the death of hundreds of innocent people was not what the American public had in mind. And just days after Trump announced the withdrawal from Syria, abandoning the Kurds and risking the revival of ISIS, he deployed another 3,000 troops to Saudi Arabia. The net impact is more American troops in the Middle East.

Third, and perhaps most importantly, Trump knew full well how ill-advised an abrupt withdrawal from Syria would be because he tried to do it once before, in December 2018. In response, Secretary of Defense James Mattis resigned in protest and a broad coalition in Congress voiced its strong opposition to the withdrawal.

Less than a year later, all it took to convince Trump once again that Mattis and nearly every serious foreign-policy and security leader from either party in Congress were wrong was a phone call with Erdoğan, the increasingly authoritarian leader of Turkey.

The president apparently chose to listen to the Turkish dictator instead of his top advisers and the bipartisan consensus in Congress because he thought it would make a good campaign talking point.

While we need to do everything we can to limit the impacts of the president’s decision, members of Congress also need to ask ourselves what we can do to prevent Trump from letting other dictators steer U.S. foreign policy as Erdoğan has done.

What’s to stop Trump from pulling the United States out of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, offering up Taiwan to China’s President Xi, or handing over Estonia to Vladimir Putin? What about withdrawing our troops from South Korea to secure a nuclear deal with Kim Jong Un or abandoning the Baltics to secure peace in Ukraine? Those terrible ideas might strike Trump as bold strokes designed to bring our troops home, too.

We can’t let any of those hypothetical situations come to fruition, because, as we have seen in Syria, the vacuum of American leadership is quickly filled by adversaries.

If the Senate fails to act now to constrain the president and dissuade foreign dictators from asking Trump to desert longtime allies, disregard U.S. interests, and overturn years of U.S. foreign policy, we will have no one to blame but ourselves. It’s true that foreign policy is primarily driven by the executive branch, but it’s Congress’s role to establish guardrails, particularly when the president cannot be trusted to pursue American interests.

The Senate needs to put Trump, our national-security leadership, our allies, and the strongmen with whom Trump regularly flirts on notice. We need to demonstrate to dictators that our system is different: Congress can constrain the president and punish dictators for acting against our interests. There is broad bipartisan support for doing so in this case, and that should extend to preventing a repeat performance.

The Senate must preemptively put in place mechanisms to defend our democracy and our network of alliances before Trump acts against our interests once again, whether to indulge his isolationist impulses or to distract from impeachment.

Specifically, we should pass legislation to prevent a U.S. withdrawal from NATO without congressional approval, require Senate approval of any adjustments to U.S. troop levels in South Korea or Japan, and debate an Authorization for Use of Military Force that accurately reflects the conflicts in which we are currently engaged and claws back war-making authority from the executive branch.

Trump’s tragic decision in Syria unleashed ISIS and abandoned our Kurdish partners to the mercy of their new defenders, whether “Russia, China, or Napoleon Bonaparte,” as Trump tweeted. This cannot be accepted on its own, and it cannot be allowed to establish a new precedent for American foreign policy.

*********

The Intelligence Fallout From Trump’s Withdrawal in Syria

The chaotic withdrawal from Syria will severely weaken U.S. efforts in the country—and could also be a boost for Russia and Iran.

Mike Giglio | Published October 18, 2019 6:00 AM ET | The Atlantic | Posted October 18, 2019 |

This version of the forever war in Iraq and Syria was built around the work done by local U.S. allies. The fight against ISIS was America’s, but it was also being fought by Syrians, Kurds, and Iraqis—a U.S. strategy known as “by, with, and through.” It meant that local troops carried out ground fighting in battles drawn up by American war planners. It meant that they received arms, training, and logistical support from the U.S. military and were backed by U.S. air strikes. Crucially, it also meant that they were getting help from special-operations forces, the U.S. military’s most elite units, who work in the shadows around the world to carry out difficult and sensitive missions.

Perhaps the best-known unit is SEAL Team Six, which carried out the Osama bin Laden raid in 2011. But task forces made up of SEALs and other officially classified units such as the Delta Force have carried out the dangerous work of hunting terrorists and breaking up insurgent networks since America’s forever wars began. Often, they work on their own; but sometimes, as in the war against ISIS, they work with local counterterrorism units specially trained for the task. In the “by, with, and through” strategy, these special-operations forces, along with the better-known U.S. Army Special Forces, or Green Berets, served as a force multiplier—a relatively small number of American troops who made the war effort by local forces far more deadly.

These partnerships have proved invaluable in the war against ISIS. At the same time, they have also opened a small hole in the secrecy that typically shrouds the special-operations community—by giving the local partners who work with these forces a rare and up-close view of who they are and how they do their jobs.

In Syria, elite U.S. troops among the 1,000 American personnel in the country worked closely with Kurdish counterterrorism units while regular Kurdish fighters carried out most of the ground operations against ISIS. The U.S. partnership with the Kurds grew as America armed and trained them and later merged them with Arab groups under an umbrella militia called the Syrian Democratic Forces. The SDF spearheaded the fight against ISIS in Syria, rolling back its most important strongholds. It has said that it lost more than 10,000 soldiers in that fight.

U.S. military officials wasted no opportunity to laud the SDF’s prowess. So President Donald Trump’s announcement of a hasty and ill-planned withdrawal of U.S. troops from Syria to allow for a Turkish onslaught left everyone—allies, lawmakers, defense officials, but most significantly the Kurdish-led forces themselves—stunned. Fearing for its existence in the face of an invasion from NATO-allied Turkey, which considers it an enemy, the SDF has rushed to strike a deal with the Iran- and Russia-backed Bashar al-Assad regime. While the details of this arrangement remain in flux, one possibility is for SDF forces to be folded into the Syrian state, following negotiations to which they suddenly bring very little leverage. As a result, the same Kurdish counterterrorism units that have worked with U.S. special-operations forces and intelligence may suddenly find themselves working with—or at the mercy of—the Syrian government. This raises a vexing counterintelligence question for America: Might these units be forced to spill their secrets to some of America’s foremost global adversaries, in Assad, Russia, and Iran?

Eric L. Robinson, a former U.S. intelligence official who worked on anti-ISIS strategy at the National Counterterrorism Center, calls the fact that the SDF was forced to seek Assad’s protection in Syria a counterintelligence “nightmare.” He worried, in a Twitter post this week, that “given years of SDF exposure” to U.S. special-operations forces and intelligence, it would “be forced to give up TTPs [tactics, techniques, and procedures], names, locations, etc. What a coup for the Russian intelligence services—five years of history regarding the elite forces of NATO.”

Robinson, who was a senior civilian in the United States Special Operations Command until last year, also noted that the same elite troops who served in Syria also work around the world on America’s most sensitive national-security missions. They’re “from the same community that relieves an embassy under siege, identifies [North Korean] mobile missile capacity, rescues hostages, or defends Tallinn from [a] Russian invasion,” he wrote.

“We’re now five years into a relationship that has metastasized from a handful of basically cellphone connections between American special-operations forces and [Kurdish soldiers] into a robust operation,” Robinson told me by phone.

Along the way, Robinson said, the Kurds “got a close look at the way Americans fight war, and [it was] an extraordinary chance to observe segments of the American military within special operations that are not necessarily covert or clandestine but do try to keep a low profile.”

“Whether [the Kurds] like it or not, they are exposed to the way the United States conducts unconventional warfare,” he added. “Whether you’re talking about communications infrastructure or response times for medevac or response times for aviations support, that stuff is all interesting.” Robinson worries that any potential deal between the Kurds and Assad will include “not just speaking with Syrian intelligence officers but Russians and Iranians,” he told me. “It’s going to turn out that, all of a sudden, the ways that elite American counterterrorism forces operate are known to the opposition.”

The chaotic nature of the U.S. withdrawal from Syria—following a snap decision by Trump during a phone call with the Turkish president earlier this month—is unnerving those who have been involved in all levels of the fight against ISIS.

Brett McGurk, the former senior U.S. diplomat who helped to arrange and then oversee the partnership between the U.S. military and the Kurds, told me by email: “The chain of reaction from Trump’s call with [Turkish President Recep Tayyip] Erdogan to a predictably catastrophic situation on the ground led to abrupt abandonment of military posts and relationships that had been built over years.” (McGurk declined to comment on the specifics of potential intelligence ramifications.) “None of these issues were thought through or prepared, no consequences considered. It’s a disaster.”

Several news outlets have reported that U.S. troops who worked with the Kurds in Syria are “heartbroken” and “ashamed,” while senior administration officials were reportedly left scrambling to deal with the ramifications of Trump’s decision. As they made their retreat in Syria, U.S. troops were reportedly fired on by Turkish-backed fighters. U.S. fighter jets later launched air strikes to destroy ammunition that American forces left behind amid the chaos.

“We’re running out of appendages in which to shoot ourselves,” Brian Katz, a former CIA official who recently took a post as a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told me. “Understanding how the U.S. military, special-operations, and intelligence community operates is going to be very valuable for Russia and Iran—if not in Syria now, then wherever we’ll be competing and fighting in the coming years. They’ll have a playbook for how we operate.”

A U.S. military official with experience on special-forces missions pushed back against the idea that Kurdish counterterrorism units will reveal sensitive information. “It’s not a huge concern if they go and play ball with somebody else, because the relationship that we have at the tactical level endures over time,” he told me on the condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to discuss the issue publicly. He added that “there’s a counterintelligence risk whenever you work with a partner force,” and the U.S. military is accustomed to mitigating it.

I asked whether he was concerned about the identities of special-operations forces being exposed. “I would say that’s by and large an individual’s responsibility,” he said. “I look about 15 years older and like a wild man when I have my beard [in the field], and I’m assuming that the majority of these guys are probably in similar fashion. There are ways that guys protect their identities when they’re down-range. It’s not like we’re giving our Social Security cards and bank information to the [Kurds].”

A spokesman for the U.S. military, Commander Sean Robertson, declined to comment on the issue in detail. “We take information security and operational security seriously. It is integral to our partnerships, and we plan for it regularly,” he said in an emailed statement.

The Kurdish militants who partnered with the U.S. military in Syria hail from the YPG—an offshoot of a separatist group, the PKK, that has waged a decades-long insurgency in southeastern Turkey and is labeled a terrorist group by the U.S. State Department. The U.S. relationship with the YPG was controversial from the start, and a major source of friction between America and Turkey.

While regular YPG forces carried out various ground offensives, its specialized counterterrorism units worked with U.S. special-operations forces to disrupt ISIS networks and target its leadership, Nicholas Heras, a fellow at the Center for a New American Security who briefs the U.S. military on Syria, told me. That work continued even after the demise of ISIS’s so-called territorial caliphate; in fact, it became arguably even more important, as ISIS returned to its roots as an underground insurgency. YPG counterterrorism forces worked with U.S. troops to capture the Tabqa Dam from ISIS, Heras said, and conducted “other discreet operations to capture and kill ISIS targets.”

Heras traveled to SDF-held Syria this summer and met with Kurdish commanders who oversaw the YPG’s counterterrorism units. He learned how they worked not just with U.S. intelligence and special-operations forces, but also with those from Britain and France. “This was a major line of effort that was quietly being done to improve the capabilities of the SDF and prevent the reemergence of ISIS,” he said. “It means U.S. special-operations forces considered certain elements of the YPG to be so trustworthy that they can go on these sensitive missions.”

Heras stressed that it’s still unclear what will become of the YPG and its counterterrorism units under a deal with Assad, though he noted that integration into the Syrian security forces is one likely possibility. Even setting aside the potential counterintelligence risk that would come with the YPG switching sides, he added, the U.S. will suffer a major intelligence setback with the loss of a crucial partner.

“This kind of hasty withdrawal creates a collapse in our intelligence collection on ISIS,” Katz, the former CIA official, told me. “People sometimes think there’s this magical intelligence button that the military and intelligence community hits—boom, start collection now. But building an accurate and active intelligence picture of a terrorist group, and one as savvy and sophisticated as ISIS, is a tedious and years-long enterprise.”

All of that is now at risk of being lost. “It’s human intelligence that gives the U.S. government its best ability to understand the strategic plans and intentions of terrorist groups—not only their movements on the ground, but their plotting of extremist attacks,” Katz said. “And human intelligence requires proximity and access and trust and building relationships with sources on the ground.”

Another ramification for the U.S. intelligence community is the potential for mass escapes of ISIS prisoners. The SDF holds thousands of suspected ISIS militants, including many foreign fighters, in its territory. Some prison breaks have already been reported, and the fate of the prisoners who remain in SDF hands is uncertain. Heras, the Center for a New American Security expert, told me that the possibilities are grim: More could escape, or all could be handed over to the Assad regime, which could torture and execute them, or perhaps seek to co-opt them, as it did in sending jihadists against U.S. troops during the Iraq War.

Regardless, U.S. investigators will likely lose access to a vital source of information about ISIS. One former U.S. military officer who worked at senior levels of the anti-ISIS campaign told me he doubted that U.S. investigators had managed to interview all the ISIS prisoners, especially those captured more recently. “We’ll lose out on interrogations that didn’t happen and on follow-on interrogations that won’t happen,” he said, speaking on the condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the issue. “The historical knowledge that’s resident there would take years to get through. And that’s knowledge that we’re probably not going to have access to.”

Anne Speckhard, who directs the International Center for the Study of Violent Extremism, has interviewed dozens of the suspected ISIS prisoners held in SDF prisons. She told me that many had turned against ISIS and were powerful voices in persuading others not to join militant groups. “Most of the people that we interviewed got disillusioned by ISIS—and got disillusioned because they felt ISIS is un-Islamic, corrupt, and really brutal,” she said. “We’re just losing a gold mine of data.”

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Subsidized housing renters pay price in roaches, mold, leaks

In this Feb. 20, 2019 photo, Destiny Johnson shows the broken door to her oven that she uses string to hold together, in her apartment in Cedarhurst Homes, a federally subsidized, low-income apartment complex in Natchez, Miss. The complex failed a health and safety inspection in each of the past three years. Upset with conditions, Johnson moved out in late March. (Rogelio V. Solis/Associated Press)

NATCHEZ, Miss. — In this city known for pre-Civil War mansions, a young mother shared a government-funded apartment with her three small children and a legion of cockroaches.

They lurked in the medicine cabinet, under the refrigerator, behind a picture on the wall. The mother nudged a bedroom dresser and more roaches skittered away as her 2-year-old son stomped on them.

It was home, sweet home for Destiny Johnson and her kids — until she got fed up and moved out last month.

Inspectors had cited the apartment complex with urgent health and safety violations for the past three years. Yet the federal government continued to pay Johnson’s rent at a property where a three-bedroom unit like hers can run $900 a month.

“I’m not asking for the best,” she told a reporter weeks before leaving, “but something better than this, especially for these kids.”

Health and safety inspection scores at taxpayer-funded apartments assigned to low-income tenants have been declining for years, typically with no serious consequences for landlords, an Associated Press analysis of federal housing data shows.

Johnson’s former apartment is one of nearly 160,000 at private properties with federal contracts that have failed at least one inspection since 1999. Nationwide data show the vast majority of failing inspections involved urgent violations. They can range from electrical hazards to rampant vermin to piles of garbage.

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development subsidizes rents for tenants assigned to both privately owned apartments and public housing run by state or local authorities. Many in these 2.1 million households are disabled, elderly or single parents. As the nation’s biggest affordable housing provider, the federal government will spend about $18 billion this year for these two programs.

Yet tenants curse heaters that don’t heat, emergency exits that don’t open, windows that don’t close. They complain of rats, rust, holes and mold.

In 2015 alone, families living in subsidized housing reported at least 155,000 more cases of childhood asthma than expected if the rate were the same as for renters in other households, according to AP’s analysis of a national tenant survey. Medical studies tie asthma to mold.

Federal authorities acknowledge the long slide in inspection scores, which started a decade ago in the privately owned housing. They say in recent years they have been protecting tenants by reinspecting sites with surprisingly high scores and closely monitoring repairs.

“These older properties,” Housing and Urban Development spokesman Brian Sullivan said, “the private owners may not have the means to do needed repairs.”

Conditions have deteriorated so badly in many subsidized buildings that by the government’s own estimate it would take tens of billions of dollars to rehabilitate them.

___

Destiny Johnson lived with her children ages 1, 2, and 5, at Cedarhurst Homes on a dead-end street in Natchez, where Mississippi River trading and wealth built on slave plantations have yielded to inveterate poverty among a largely black population.

The heater in Johnson’s apartment didn’t work, so she was using the oven to keep warm until a stovetop fire last year. Johnson, 21, said she tried to use her fire extinguisher, but that didn’t work either, so she rushed to borrow one from a neighbor.

The oven still hadn’t been replaced several months later. Its door was tied closed with a bright pink cord.

In late March, she said, management finally provided a letter that let her move to a nearby subsidized complex with a better inspection record.

“I couldn’t take it anymore,” Johnson said.

A former neighbor who still lives at the 30-unit Cedarhurst Homes, Whitley Williams, wanted to show a reporter and photographer her leaking water heater. The door to its closet was damp and swollen. She tried to heave it open, but the bottom scraped the floor and broke apart.

Her three children prefer to stay elsewhere, with her father.

Federal records list the site owner as The Columbia Property Group, which has managed or owned at least 66 federally contracted properties in Georgia, Florida and its home state of Mississippi.

Company President Melanie Moe referred questions to Bryan King, an officer at Mississippi-based Triangle Development, LLC. In an emailed statement, King said his development company was acquiring Cedarhurst Homes and planned to pursue federal tax credits for a “large renovation.”

The property earned inspection scores of 46, 53, and 54 out of a possible 100 from 2016 through 2018, federal data show. Any score up to 60 is now considered failing. At least three other Columbia Property Group sites have failed inspections since 2011, federal records show.

Federally subsidized private apartments, where tenants typically pay about a third of their income, fare worst in the South. Louisiana had the nation’s highest inspection failure rate at 12%, with Mississippi second at 10%.

Housing experts say landlords in poor, rural communities with low rents can have trouble amassing cash for repairs, despite federal payments.

Nationally, inspection scores at privately owned complexes like Cedarhurst Homes reached a peak of 90 in 2007 during the George W. Bush administration. Scores averaged 86 during Barack Obama’s two terms and 81 under President Trump as of June. AP’s analysis of historical trends uses data released in January. Since then, HUD has been revising its databases and released one that isn’t directly comparable and drops pertinent inspections.

Federal housing officials partly attribute the recent drop in scores to their crackdown on substandard repairs and inflated inspection scores . Under Trump, 92% of inspections found a violation, up from 85% under Obama and 77% under Bush.

Federal housing officials also say their new approach has driven up some scores as managers understand they must take repairs seriously.

In a March report , however, the Government Accountability Office told Congress that HUD’s inspection processes are outdated and need a thorough overhaul to ensure stronger oversight of building conditions.

And tenants in some buildings still complain that management hides problems from inspectors, covering cracks with duct tape, mold with a quick coat of paint, or even old junk with temporary partitions.

Michael Kane, executive director of the National Alliance of HUD Tenants, acknowledged the department has gotten tougher on inspections but said the decline in scores reflects continued deterioration of living conditions.

“As the buildings age, they develop certain kinds of problems. They didn’t have water leaks and mold at the beginning, but they sure … did 40 years later,” he said.

Federal officials acknowledge they must think hard before taking enforcement action that might shutter a property. The federal government ended most of its efforts to build new affordable housing in the 1980s, and private-sector financing for new construction has long been scarce.

HUD’s main programs now rely on the existing, gradually aging housing stock. “We lose the affordable housing forever. You never get it back,” HUD spokesman Sullivan said.

Since the start of 2016, he said, the agency has terminated 36 housing contracts. There are now about 24,000.

Most failing sites get what amounts to a warning and multiple chances to correct violations.

“Yet what’s going to save these programs is aggressive enforcement,” says Linda Couch, a housing policy official at the elderly advocacy group LeadingAge.

___

Job cuts over decades have hobbled HUD’s enforcement efforts from within.

“You could walk around all the offices and see all the empty desks where people used to work,” said Merryl Gibbs, a lawyer who enforced anti-discrimination housing law before retiring from the department in 2016.

The Trump administration proposed deep cuts in department funding as recently as March, but Congress has resisted.

Spending for HUD’s main housing programs is expected to increase about 2% to nearly $40 billion this year, by AP’s calculation. The total includes a third program that gives vouchers to another 2.2 million households, letting tenants pick a unit on the private market.

Many housing advocates want more vouchers and incentives for private landlords to accept them. Others suggest increasing tax credits for construction and repairs, more federal staff and resources for better oversight, and more tenant participation in site improvements.

HUD Secretary Ben Carson has acknowledged a drastic shortage of low-cost housing and stressed the federal role. A physician by training, Carson has also pointed to the connection between residential mold and asthma.

That tie is supported in federal data. The share of U.S. households reporting mold was higher in subsidized rentals than other rentals, according to the latest data available from the American Housing Survey. Meanwhile, 13% of subsidized rental households reported at least one child with asthma, compared with 7% for other rentals. The differences hold even accounting for family size and poverty.

Housing advocates say funding remains the bottom line.

“We try and come up with solutions that don’t cost anything,” said Priya Jayachandran, a former senior administrator at HUD and now president of the National Housing Trust. “The answer is money.”

___

On a recent visit to Baltimore’s Rosemont Tower for elderly or disabled tenants, stairwells were littered with plastic caps for needles used to inject heroin.

Tenants in this federally funded public housing complained of bedbugs and mice. Signs saying “mandatory fire watch” alerted residents that the sprinkler system was broken, requiring a firefighter to stand watch around the clock.

A recurrent leak has sopped a prized Oriental rug and spread mold into the living room of Della Thomas.

“Every time there’s a real heavy rain, the ceiling gets a big bubble, and it starts to leak. They just kind of patch it up until the next time,” said Thomas, 64. She pointed to a plastic trash can, saying management provided it to catch drips.

Ingrid Antonio, a spokeswoman for the Housing Authority of Baltimore City, said security guards make regular rounds and pest extermination happens at least every three months. She said stairwells are cleaned daily.

To increase funds for repairs, however, the building will be converted to private ownership in coming months but remain subsidized housing, she said.

Inspectors gave the 200-unit high-rise a failing score of 25 in 2017. That jumped to 71 last year, according to the housing authority, though urgent violations and smoke detector problems persisted. A reinspection was planned for later this year.

Of 37 Baltimore public housing sites, 22 failed their last inspection, according to data from HUD and the housing authority.

“Steadily declining federal investment in public housing for more than a decade has taken a tremendous toll,” the city’s housing authority said in a statement.

Largely due to Baltimore’s blighted complexes, since 2013 Maryland had the country’s highest inspection failure rate for public housing at 32%. The District of Columbia was second at 29%. The national average was 10%.

Around the country, inspection scores at public housing have fallen under both Democratic and Republican administrations. Scores averaged 89 during Obama’s second term, dropping to 79 under Trump through March 2018.

HUD’s most recent estimate, from 2010, concluded that public housing needed about $25.6 billion in large-scale repairs and at least $3.4 billion more each year. That would have added up to well over $50 billion by now. Instead, Congress has restricted repair spending to $23.5 billion.

The federal government also has tried to avoid expensive takeovers.

HUD knew for years of broken appliances, pests, racial discrimination and other “deplorable conditions” at buildings run by the Alexander County Housing Authority in southern Illinois, according to the agency’s inspector general. It wasn’t until 2016 that department officials finally took control.

By then, they needed to close four complexes and relocate hundreds of residents.

___

Donn reported from Plymouth, Massachusetts. David McFadden in Baltimore contributed.

___

Reach Jeff Donn on Twitter at https://twitter.com/jadonn7

Copyright 2019 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Reporting the facts for over 140 years.

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Business Haley exits on her own terms, but some question her timing

Business Haley exits on her own terms, but some question her timing Business Haley exits on her own terms, but some question her timing http://www.nature-business.com/business-haley-exits-on-her-own-terms-but-some-question-her-timing/

Business

Washington (CNN)Departures from President Donald Trump’s Cabinet are rarely dignified affairs. Jettisoned officials have learned of their fates by tweet or ill-timed phone call or following a humiliating leak.

So it was a novelty Tuesday when Trump and outgoing

Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley appeared together in the Oval Office

, cheerfully announcing an end-of-year exit that caught most of the West Wing and State Department unaware and led to grumbles about inopportune political timing.

“I thought this would be an appropriate way of doing it. When you write it out on a piece of paper that ‘Ambassador Haley will be leaving’ and you say nice things, people say, ‘What’s going on?’ ” the President said. “When you really think somebody has done a terrific job, I felt this was an appropriate way of doing it.”

Appropriate or not, Haley’s decision to announce her resignation four weeks ahead of midterm congressional elections and immediately after a bruising Supreme Court confirmation battle that

laid bare deep political faults on sex and gender

led to questions about her timing.

And it exposed what has sometimes been a fraught relationship between Haley and other administration officials, who viewed her both as an effective face of administration policy and an ambitious political operator willing to break ranks.

That dynamic became apparent after Trump revamped the top of his national security team earlier this year, swapping more moderate advisers for Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and national security adviser John Bolton. Those changes occurred last March — roughly the same time Haley first told the President of her intentions to resign.

‘Time to step aside’

In the Oval Office, Haley insisted she made her decision not for personal reasons, but because she felt she’d served long enough.

“I think that it’s just very important for government officials to understand when it’s time to step aside. And I have given everything I’ve got these last eight years,” she said, referring to time spent both as the UN envoy and as South Carolina governor. “And I do think that sometimes it’s good to — to rotate in other people who can put that same energy and power into it.”

Still, neither Trump nor his top aides were looking to announce the departure of one of the administration’s highest-profile women just as Republicans work to repair whatever damage was inflicted by an ugly confirmation fight for Brett Kavanaugh, the Supreme Court justice who was accused by women of sexual assault.

Haley’s

resignation letter was dated October 3

and officials said she informed the President of her intentions during a meeting in the Oval Office that day. The previous evening,

Trump publicly mocked one of Kavanaugh’s accusers, Christine Blasey Ford,

during a Mississippi campaign rally, drawing condemnation from Democrats and Republicans alike. Making Haley’s departure public then would have caused further complications for the Kavanaugh confirmation, officials said.

The lack of forewarning led to griping among some aides that Haley was again stepping out on her own on a day the President was still basking in the glow of the ultimately successful Kavanaugh nomination.

“A lot of people would celebrate,” Trump told reporters later as he was departing for a campaign rally in Iowa. “We go back to business the next day.”

‘I don’t get confused’

As UN ambassador, Haley has carved out her own space in the public sphere as a prominent voice on issues ranging from alleged Syrian war crimes to Russia’s aggressive behavior around the globe, even when her rhetoric got ahead of the President’s views.

In recent months, however, Haley had lost clout with the President, two people familiar with their relationship noted in wake of her resignation. When Rex Tillerson was still secretary of state, Trump sought out Haley’s advice often and was regularly seen in the Oval Office, the people said.

But when the President orchestrated a revamp of his national security team — replacing Tillerson with Pompeo and bringing in Bolton, who served in the same UN post as Haley under President George W. Bush — Haley saw her time with the President diminish.

When she stepped out in April to announce the US would sanction Russian companies linked to Syria’s chemical weapons program, the White House refuted her the next day, announcing Trump had decided not to move forward with the sanctions. Some White House officials, including the President’s top economic adviser,

were quick to discount her in public, claiming she was mistaken

.

“With all due respect, I don’t get confused,” Haley struck back, in a stunning statement.

The past discord aside, Trump sought to make Haley’s resignation a decorous event. It was the President’s own idea to make the Oval Office announcement, an official said, but there was a behind-the-scenes scramble in the hour or so leading up to it because her decision took senior officials across the board by surprise — par for the course at this stage in the administration, one exasperated senior White House official said.

“The President and the ambassador wanted to do it. And he’s the boss,” the official said. “This is the way the White House works.”

As rumors began to circulate early Tuesday that Haley was stepping down, even senior level White House aides were caught off guard, and downplayed the whispers as mere gossip. Confidants of Haley’s from South Carolina, who had spoken to their friend over the past week, said they received little indication she was preparing her imminent resignation. Top State Department officials received no warning the announcement was coming.

Haley arrived to the White House around 10 a.m. ET, walked past a crowd of reporters and refused to confirm then-unverified reports she was stepping down. She did not have a meeting on the President’s public schedule.

Haley, officials said, insisted on giving the news privately to the President, though Trump later said she’d informed him six months ago she planned to depart after serving for two years in the administration.

It wasn’t until last week during a scheduled meeting at the White House that Haley officially informed Trump of her plans to resign, two sources familiar with the meeting said. But Trump and Haley decided to keep it under wraps, with only a small group of the President’s closest aides looped in before Tuesday morning.

The timing of the Tuesday morning announcement also raised eyebrows, coming a day after the ethics watchdog group CREW filed a government complaint alleging Haley undervalued the cost of flights she took on private planes owned by South Carolina businessmen.

“No, I know nothing about that,” Trump said when asked by CNN whether the complaint affected the timing. “I know Nikki. This is one of the most honest human beings I have ever seen.”

Possible replacements

Trump, who said in the Oval Office he would announce Haley’s successor in the next several weeks,

has a working list of possible contenders

. But even as he works to tap a replacement, he has not shared that list widely with even most senior White House officials, one aide said.

Among those speculated to be under consideration: Dina Powell, the former deputy national security adviser who departed the administration last year; Richard Grenell, the firebrand US ambassador to Germany who is close to Bolton; and even Ivanka Trump, the President’s eldest daughter who Haley praised during her remarks on Tuesday.

A source familiar with discussions said the President’s daughter laughed Tuesday morning when she heard about the speculation that she would replace Haley. And Trump himself shot down the notion he would nominate her later in the afternoon.

“I think Ivanka would be incredible, but it doesn’t mean I’d pick her, because I’d be accused of nepotism even though I’m not sure there’s anybody more competent in the world,” he said on the South Lawn.

He did not downplay the chances he could select Powell, who is now a senior executive at Goldman Sachs and recently spent time with Haley and her husband in South Carolina.

“Dina is certainly a person I would consider and she is under consideration,” he said.

It’s long been expected that Haley would be among the Cabinet officials to leave by the end of the year, joining an expected exodus after the midterm elections that could also include Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who Trump despises and has openly said he could replace.

A person close to Haley suggested she selected Tuesday for her announcement as a way to separate herself from the other departures.

“She wanted to make her own announcement now — not after the midterms — when there is a wave of people leaving if Republicans lose,” the person said, who added that by putting word out now that she was leaving, Haley was essentially notifying potential employers of her availability in the new year.

Haley, who has served in elected positions for years and will soon pay for two children in college, is eager to bolster her financial standing, a person familiar with her thinking said. In her resignation letter to Trump, Haley implied her next act would come outside government.

“As a businessman, I expect you will appreciate my sense that returning from government to the private sector is not a step down but a step up,” she wrote.

CNN’s Dana Bash and Gloria Borger contributed to this report.

Read More | Kevin Liptak, Jeremy Diamond, Jeff Zeleny, Kaitlan Collins and Jim Acosta, CNN,

Business Haley exits on her own terms, but some question her timing, in 2018-10-09 21:40:40

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Business Haley exits on her own terms, but some question her timing

Business Haley exits on her own terms, but some question her timing Business Haley exits on her own terms, but some question her timing http://www.nature-business.com/business-haley-exits-on-her-own-terms-but-some-question-her-timing/

Business

Washington (CNN)Departures from President Donald Trump’s Cabinet are rarely dignified affairs. Jettisoned officials have learned of their fates by tweet or ill-timed phone call or following a humiliating leak.

So it was a novelty Tuesday when Trump and outgoing

Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley appeared together in the Oval Office

, cheerfully announcing an end-of-year exit that caught most of the West Wing and State Department unaware and led to grumbles about inopportune political timing.

“I thought this would be an appropriate way of doing it. When you write it out on a piece of paper that ‘Ambassador Haley will be leaving’ and you say nice things, people say, ‘What’s going on?’ ” the President said. “When you really think somebody has done a terrific job, I felt this was an appropriate way of doing it.”

Appropriate or not, Haley’s decision to announce her resignation four weeks ahead of midterm congressional elections and immediately after a bruising Supreme Court confirmation battle that

laid bare deep political faults on sex and gender

led to questions about her timing.

And it exposed what has sometimes been a fraught relationship between Haley and other administration officials, who viewed her both as an effective face of administration policy and an ambitious political operator willing to break ranks.

That dynamic became apparent after Trump revamped the top of his national security team earlier this year, swapping more moderate advisers for Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and national security adviser John Bolton. Those changes occurred last March — roughly the same time Haley first told the President of her intentions to resign.

‘Time to step aside’

In the Oval Office, Haley insisted she made her decision not for personal reasons, but because she felt she’d served long enough.

“I think that it’s just very important for government officials to understand when it’s time to step aside. And I have given everything I’ve got these last eight years,” she said, referring to time spent both as the UN envoy and as South Carolina governor. “And I do think that sometimes it’s good to — to rotate in other people who can put that same energy and power into it.”

Still, neither Trump nor his top aides were looking to announce the departure of one of the administration’s highest-profile women just as Republicans work to repair whatever damage was inflicted by an ugly confirmation fight for Brett Kavanaugh, the Supreme Court justice who was accused by women of sexual assault.

Haley’s

resignation letter was dated October 3

and officials said she informed the President of her intentions during a meeting in the Oval Office that day. The previous evening,

Trump publicly mocked one of Kavanaugh’s accusers, Christine Blasey Ford,

during a Mississippi campaign rally, drawing condemnation from Democrats and Republicans alike. Making Haley’s departure public then would have caused further complications for the Kavanaugh confirmation, officials said.

The lack of forewarning led to griping among some aides that Haley was again stepping out on her own on a day the President was still basking in the glow of the ultimately successful Kavanaugh nomination.

“A lot of people would celebrate,” Trump told reporters later as he was departing for a campaign rally in Iowa. “We go back to business the next day.”

‘I don’t get confused’

As UN ambassador, Haley has carved out her own space in the public sphere as a prominent voice on issues ranging from alleged Syrian war crimes to Russia’s aggressive behavior around the globe, even when her rhetoric got ahead of the President’s views.

In recent months, however, Haley had lost clout with the President, two people familiar with their relationship noted in wake of her resignation. When Rex Tillerson was still secretary of state, Trump sought out Haley’s advice often and was regularly seen in the Oval Office, the people said.

But when the President orchestrated a revamp of his national security team — replacing Tillerson with Pompeo and bringing in Bolton, who served in the same UN post as Haley under President George W. Bush — Haley saw her time with the President diminish.

When she stepped out in April to announce the US would sanction Russian companies linked to Syria’s chemical weapons program, the White House refuted her the next day, announcing Trump had decided not to move forward with the sanctions. Some White House officials, including the President’s top economic adviser,

were quick to discount her in public, claiming she was mistaken

.

“With all due respect, I don’t get confused,” Haley struck back, in a stunning statement.

The past discord aside, Trump sought to make Haley’s resignation a decorous event. It was the President’s own idea to make the Oval Office announcement, an official said, but there was a behind-the-scenes scramble in the hour or so leading up to it because her decision took senior officials across the board by surprise — par for the course at this stage in the administration, one exasperated senior White House official said.

“The President and the ambassador wanted to do it. And he’s the boss,” the official said. “This is the way the White House works.”

As rumors began to circulate early Tuesday that Haley was stepping down, even senior level White House aides were caught off guard, and downplayed the whispers as mere gossip. Confidants of Haley’s from South Carolina, who had spoken to their friend over the past week, said they received little indication she was preparing her imminent resignation. Top State Department officials received no warning the announcement was coming.

Haley arrived to the White House around 10 a.m. ET, walked past a crowd of reporters and refused to confirm then-unverified reports she was stepping down. She did not have a meeting on the President’s public schedule.

Haley, officials said, insisted on giving the news privately to the President, though Trump later said she’d informed him six months ago she planned to depart after serving for two years in the administration.

It wasn’t until last week during a scheduled meeting at the White House that Haley officially informed Trump of her plans to resign, two sources familiar with the meeting said. But Trump and Haley decided to keep it under wraps, with only a small group of the President’s closest aides looped in before Tuesday morning.

The timing of the Tuesday morning announcement also raised eyebrows, coming a day after the ethics watchdog group CREW filed a government complaint alleging Haley undervalued the cost of flights she took on private planes owned by South Carolina businessmen.

“No, I know nothing about that,” Trump said when asked by CNN whether the complaint affected the timing. “I know Nikki. This is one of the most honest human beings I have ever seen.”

Possible replacements

Trump, who said in the Oval Office he would announce Haley’s successor in the next several weeks,

has a working list of possible contenders

. But even as he works to tap a replacement, he has not shared that list widely with even most senior White House officials, one aide said.

Among those speculated to be under consideration: Dina Powell, the former deputy national security adviser who departed the administration last year; Richard Grenell, the firebrand US ambassador to Germany who is close to Bolton; and even Ivanka Trump, the President’s eldest daughter who Haley praised during her remarks on Tuesday.

A source familiar with discussions said the President’s daughter laughed Tuesday morning when she heard about the speculation that she would replace Haley. And Trump himself shot down the notion he would nominate her later in the afternoon.

“I think Ivanka would be incredible, but it doesn’t mean I’d pick her, because I’d be accused of nepotism even though I’m not sure there’s anybody more competent in the world,” he said on the South Lawn.

He did not downplay the chances he could select Powell, who is now a senior executive at Goldman Sachs and recently spent time with Haley and her husband in South Carolina.

“Dina is certainly a person I would consider and she is under consideration,” he said.

It’s long been expected that Haley would be among the Cabinet officials to leave by the end of the year, joining an expected exodus after the midterm elections that could also include Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who Trump despises and has openly said he could replace.

A person close to Haley suggested she selected Tuesday for her announcement as a way to separate herself from the other departures.

“She wanted to make her own announcement now — not after the midterms — when there is a wave of people leaving if Republicans lose,” the person said, who added that by putting word out now that she was leaving, Haley was essentially notifying potential employers of her availability in the new year.

Haley, who has served in elected positions for years and will soon pay for two children in college, is eager to bolster her financial standing, a person familiar with her thinking said. In her resignation letter to Trump, Haley implied her next act would come outside government.

“As a businessman, I expect you will appreciate my sense that returning from government to the private sector is not a step down but a step up,” she wrote.

CNN’s Dana Bash and Gloria Borger contributed to this report.

Read More | Kevin Liptak, Jeremy Diamond, Jeff Zeleny, Kaitlan Collins and Jim Acosta, CNN,

Business Haley exits on her own terms, but some question her timing, in 2018-10-09 21:40:40

[internetbasic9]

Business Haley exits on her own terms, but some question her timing

Business Haley exits on her own terms, but some question her timing Business Haley exits on her own terms, but some question her timing https://ift.tt/2CyKMxz

Business

Washington (CNN)Departures from President Donald Trump’s Cabinet are rarely dignified affairs. Jettisoned officials have learned of their fates by tweet or ill-timed phone call or following a humiliating leak.

So it was a novelty Tuesday when Trump and outgoing

Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley appeared together in the Oval Office

, cheerfully announcing an end-of-year exit that caught most of the West Wing and State Department unaware and led to grumbles about inopportune political timing.

“I thought this would be an appropriate way of doing it. When you write it out on a piece of paper that ‘Ambassador Haley will be leaving’ and you say nice things, people say, ‘What’s going on?’ ” the President said. “When you really think somebody has done a terrific job, I felt this was an appropriate way of doing it.”

Appropriate or not, Haley’s decision to announce her resignation four weeks ahead of midterm congressional elections and immediately after a bruising Supreme Court confirmation battle that

laid bare deep political faults on sex and gender

led to questions about her timing.

And it exposed what has sometimes been a fraught relationship between Haley and other administration officials, who viewed her both as an effective face of administration policy and an ambitious political operator willing to break ranks.

That dynamic became apparent after Trump revamped the top of his national security team earlier this year, swapping more moderate advisers for Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and national security adviser John Bolton. Those changes occurred last March — roughly the same time Haley first told the President of her intentions to resign.

‘Time to step aside’

In the Oval Office, Haley insisted she made her decision not for personal reasons, but because she felt she’d served long enough.

“I think that it’s just very important for government officials to understand when it’s time to step aside. And I have given everything I’ve got these last eight years,” she said, referring to time spent both as the UN envoy and as South Carolina governor. “And I do think that sometimes it’s good to — to rotate in other people who can put that same energy and power into it.”

Still, neither Trump nor his top aides were looking to announce the departure of one of the administration’s highest-profile women just as Republicans work to repair whatever damage was inflicted by an ugly confirmation fight for Brett Kavanaugh, the Supreme Court justice who was accused by women of sexual assault.

Haley’s

resignation letter was dated October 3

and officials said she informed the President of her intentions during a meeting in the Oval Office that day. The previous evening,

Trump publicly mocked one of Kavanaugh’s accusers, Christine Blasey Ford,

during a Mississippi campaign rally, drawing condemnation from Democrats and Republicans alike. Making Haley’s departure public then would have caused further complications for the Kavanaugh confirmation, officials said.

The lack of forewarning led to griping among some aides that Haley was again stepping out on her own on a day the President was still basking in the glow of the ultimately successful Kavanaugh nomination.

“A lot of people would celebrate,” Trump told reporters later as he was departing for a campaign rally in Iowa. “We go back to business the next day.”

‘I don’t get confused’

As UN ambassador, Haley has carved out her own space in the public sphere as a prominent voice on issues ranging from alleged Syrian war crimes to Russia’s aggressive behavior around the globe, even when her rhetoric got ahead of the President’s views.

In recent months, however, Haley had lost clout with the President, two people familiar with their relationship noted in wake of her resignation. When Rex Tillerson was still secretary of state, Trump sought out Haley’s advice often and was regularly seen in the Oval Office, the people said.

But when the President orchestrated a revamp of his national security team — replacing Tillerson with Pompeo and bringing in Bolton, who served in the same UN post as Haley under President George W. Bush — Haley saw her time with the President diminish.

When she stepped out in April to announce the US would sanction Russian companies linked to Syria’s chemical weapons program, the White House refuted her the next day, announcing Trump had decided not to move forward with the sanctions. Some White House officials, including the President’s top economic adviser,

were quick to discount her in public, claiming she was mistaken

.

“With all due respect, I don’t get confused,” Haley struck back, in a stunning statement.

The past discord aside, Trump sought to make Haley’s resignation a decorous event. It was the President’s own idea to make the Oval Office announcement, an official said, but there was a behind-the-scenes scramble in the hour or so leading up to it because her decision took senior officials across the board by surprise — par for the course at this stage in the administration, one exasperated senior White House official said.

“The President and the ambassador wanted to do it. And he’s the boss,” the official said. “This is the way the White House works.”

As rumors began to circulate early Tuesday that Haley was stepping down, even senior level White House aides were caught off guard, and downplayed the whispers as mere gossip. Confidants of Haley’s from South Carolina, who had spoken to their friend over the past week, said they received little indication she was preparing her imminent resignation. Top State Department officials received no warning the announcement was coming.

Haley arrived to the White House around 10 a.m. ET, walked past a crowd of reporters and refused to confirm then-unverified reports she was stepping down. She did not have a meeting on the President’s public schedule.

Haley, officials said, insisted on giving the news privately to the President, though Trump later said she’d informed him six months ago she planned to depart after serving for two years in the administration.

It wasn’t until last week during a scheduled meeting at the White House that Haley officially informed Trump of her plans to resign, two sources familiar with the meeting said. But Trump and Haley decided to keep it under wraps, with only a small group of the President’s closest aides looped in before Tuesday morning.

The timing of the Tuesday morning announcement also raised eyebrows, coming a day after the ethics watchdog group CREW filed a government complaint alleging Haley undervalued the cost of flights she took on private planes owned by South Carolina businessmen.

“No, I know nothing about that,” Trump said when asked by CNN whether the complaint affected the timing. “I know Nikki. This is one of the most honest human beings I have ever seen.”

Possible replacements

Trump, who said in the Oval Office he would announce Haley’s successor in the next several weeks,

has a working list of possible contenders

. But even as he works to tap a replacement, he has not shared that list widely with even most senior White House officials, one aide said.

Among those speculated to be under consideration: Dina Powell, the former deputy national security adviser who departed the administration last year; Richard Grenell, the firebrand US ambassador to Germany who is close to Bolton; and even Ivanka Trump, the President’s eldest daughter who Haley praised during her remarks on Tuesday.

A source familiar with discussions said the President’s daughter laughed Tuesday morning when she heard about the speculation that she would replace Haley. And Trump himself shot down the notion he would nominate her later in the afternoon.

“I think Ivanka would be incredible, but it doesn’t mean I’d pick her, because I’d be accused of nepotism even though I’m not sure there’s anybody more competent in the world,” he said on the South Lawn.

He did not downplay the chances he could select Powell, who is now a senior executive at Goldman Sachs and recently spent time with Haley and her husband in South Carolina.

“Dina is certainly a person I would consider and she is under consideration,” he said.

It’s long been expected that Haley would be among the Cabinet officials to leave by the end of the year, joining an expected exodus after the midterm elections that could also include Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who Trump despises and has openly said he could replace.

A person close to Haley suggested she selected Tuesday for her announcement as a way to separate herself from the other departures.

“She wanted to make her own announcement now — not after the midterms — when there is a wave of people leaving if Republicans lose,” the person said, who added that by putting word out now that she was leaving, Haley was essentially notifying potential employers of her availability in the new year.

Haley, who has served in elected positions for years and will soon pay for two children in college, is eager to bolster her financial standing, a person familiar with her thinking said. In her resignation letter to Trump, Haley implied her next act would come outside government.

“As a businessman, I expect you will appreciate my sense that returning from government to the private sector is not a step down but a step up,” she wrote.

CNN’s Dana Bash and Gloria Borger contributed to this report.

Read More | Kevin Liptak, Jeremy Diamond, Jeff Zeleny, Kaitlan Collins and Jim Acosta, CNN,

Business Haley exits on her own terms, but some question her timing, in 2018-10-09 21:40:40

[computacionalblog]

Business Haley exits on her own terms, but some question her timing

Business Haley exits on her own terms, but some question her timing Business Haley exits on her own terms, but some question her timing http://www.nature-business.com/business-haley-exits-on-her-own-terms-but-some-question-her-timing/

Business

Washington (CNN)Departures from President Donald Trump’s Cabinet are rarely dignified affairs. Jettisoned officials have learned of their fates by tweet or ill-timed phone call or following a humiliating leak.

So it was a novelty Tuesday when Trump and outgoing

Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley appeared together in the Oval Office

, cheerfully announcing an end-of-year exit that caught most of the West Wing and State Department unaware and led to grumbles about inopportune political timing.

“I thought this would be an appropriate way of doing it. When you write it out on a piece of paper that ‘Ambassador Haley will be leaving’ and you say nice things, people say, ‘What’s going on?’ ” the President said. “When you really think somebody has done a terrific job, I felt this was an appropriate way of doing it.”

Appropriate or not, Haley’s decision to announce her resignation four weeks ahead of midterm congressional elections and immediately after a bruising Supreme Court confirmation battle that

laid bare deep political faults on sex and gender

led to questions about her timing.

And it exposed what has sometimes been a fraught relationship between Haley and other administration officials, who viewed her both as an effective face of administration policy and an ambitious political operator willing to break ranks.

That dynamic became apparent after Trump revamped the top of his national security team earlier this year, swapping more moderate advisers for Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and national security adviser John Bolton. Those changes occurred last March — roughly the same time Haley first told the President of her intentions to resign.

‘Time to step aside’

In the Oval Office, Haley insisted she made her decision not for personal reasons, but because she felt she’d served long enough.

“I think that it’s just very important for government officials to understand when it’s time to step aside. And I have given everything I’ve got these last eight years,” she said, referring to time spent both as the UN envoy and as South Carolina governor. “And I do think that sometimes it’s good to — to rotate in other people who can put that same energy and power into it.”

Still, neither Trump nor his top aides were looking to announce the departure of one of the administration’s highest-profile women just as Republicans work to repair whatever damage was inflicted by an ugly confirmation fight for Brett Kavanaugh, the Supreme Court justice who was accused by women of sexual assault.

Haley’s

resignation letter was dated October 3

and officials said she informed the President of her intentions during a meeting in the Oval Office that day. The previous evening,

Trump publicly mocked one of Kavanaugh’s accusers, Christine Blasey Ford,

during a Mississippi campaign rally, drawing condemnation from Democrats and Republicans alike. Making Haley’s departure public then would have caused further complications for the Kavanaugh confirmation, officials said.

The lack of forewarning led to griping among some aides that Haley was again stepping out on her own on a day the President was still basking in the glow of the ultimately successful Kavanaugh nomination.

“A lot of people would celebrate,” Trump told reporters later as he was departing for a campaign rally in Iowa. “We go back to business the next day.”

‘I don’t get confused’

As UN ambassador, Haley has carved out her own space in the public sphere as a prominent voice on issues ranging from alleged Syrian war crimes to Russia’s aggressive behavior around the globe, even when her rhetoric got ahead of the President’s views.

In recent months, however, Haley had lost clout with the President, two people familiar with their relationship noted in wake of her resignation. When Rex Tillerson was still secretary of state, Trump sought out Haley’s advice often and was regularly seen in the Oval Office, the people said.

But when the President orchestrated a revamp of his national security team — replacing Tillerson with Pompeo and bringing in Bolton, who served in the same UN post as Haley under President George W. Bush — Haley saw her time with the President diminish.

When she stepped out in April to announce the US would sanction Russian companies linked to Syria’s chemical weapons program, the White House refuted her the next day, announcing Trump had decided not to move forward with the sanctions. Some White House officials, including the President’s top economic adviser,

were quick to discount her in public, claiming she was mistaken

.

“With all due respect, I don’t get confused,” Haley struck back, in a stunning statement.

The past discord aside, Trump sought to make Haley’s resignation a decorous event. It was the President’s own idea to make the Oval Office announcement, an official said, but there was a behind-the-scenes scramble in the hour or so leading up to it because her decision took senior officials across the board by surprise — par for the course at this stage in the administration, one exasperated senior White House official said.

“The President and the ambassador wanted to do it. And he’s the boss,” the official said. “This is the way the White House works.”

As rumors began to circulate early Tuesday that Haley was stepping down, even senior level White House aides were caught off guard, and downplayed the whispers as mere gossip. Confidants of Haley’s from South Carolina, who had spoken to their friend over the past week, said they received little indication she was preparing her imminent resignation. Top State Department officials received no warning the announcement was coming.

Haley arrived to the White House around 10 a.m. ET, walked past a crowd of reporters and refused to confirm then-unverified reports she was stepping down. She did not have a meeting on the President’s public schedule.

Haley, officials said, insisted on giving the news privately to the President, though Trump later said she’d informed him six months ago she planned to depart after serving for two years in the administration.

It wasn’t until last week during a scheduled meeting at the White House that Haley officially informed Trump of her plans to resign, two sources familiar with the meeting said. But Trump and Haley decided to keep it under wraps, with only a small group of the President’s closest aides looped in before Tuesday morning.

The timing of the Tuesday morning announcement also raised eyebrows, coming a day after the ethics watchdog group CREW filed a government complaint alleging Haley undervalued the cost of flights she took on private planes owned by South Carolina businessmen.

“No, I know nothing about that,” Trump said when asked by CNN whether the complaint affected the timing. “I know Nikki. This is one of the most honest human beings I have ever seen.”

Possible replacements

Trump, who said in the Oval Office he would announce Haley’s successor in the next several weeks,

has a working list of possible contenders

. But even as he works to tap a replacement, he has not shared that list widely with even most senior White House officials, one aide said.

Among those speculated to be under consideration: Dina Powell, the former deputy national security adviser who departed the administration last year; Richard Grenell, the firebrand US ambassador to Germany who is close to Bolton; and even Ivanka Trump, the President’s eldest daughter who Haley praised during her remarks on Tuesday.

A source familiar with discussions said the President’s daughter laughed Tuesday morning when she heard about the speculation that she would replace Haley. And Trump himself shot down the notion he would nominate her later in the afternoon.

“I think Ivanka would be incredible, but it doesn’t mean I’d pick her, because I’d be accused of nepotism even though I’m not sure there’s anybody more competent in the world,” he said on the South Lawn.

He did not downplay the chances he could select Powell, who is now a senior executive at Goldman Sachs and recently spent time with Haley and her husband in South Carolina.

“Dina is certainly a person I would consider and she is under consideration,” he said.

It’s long been expected that Haley would be among the Cabinet officials to leave by the end of the year, joining an expected exodus after the midterm elections that could also include Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who Trump despises and has openly said he could replace.

A person close to Haley suggested she selected Tuesday for her announcement as a way to separate herself from the other departures.

“She wanted to make her own announcement now — not after the midterms — when there is a wave of people leaving if Republicans lose,” the person said, who added that by putting word out now that she was leaving, Haley was essentially notifying potential employers of her availability in the new year.

Haley, who has served in elected positions for years and will soon pay for two children in college, is eager to bolster her financial standing, a person familiar with her thinking said. In her resignation letter to Trump, Haley implied her next act would come outside government.

“As a businessman, I expect you will appreciate my sense that returning from government to the private sector is not a step down but a step up,” she wrote.

CNN’s Dana Bash and Gloria Borger contributed to this report.

Read More | Kevin Liptak, Jeremy Diamond, Jeff Zeleny, Kaitlan Collins and Jim Acosta, CNN,

Business Haley exits on her own terms, but some question her timing, in 2018-10-09 21:40:40

[captainblogger100posts]

Business Haley exits on her own terms, but some question her timing

Business Haley exits on her own terms, but some question her timing Business Haley exits on her own terms, but some question her timing http://www.nature-business.com/business-haley-exits-on-her-own-terms-but-some-question-her-timing/

Business

Washington (CNN)Departures from President Donald Trump’s Cabinet are rarely dignified affairs. Jettisoned officials have learned of their fates by tweet or ill-timed phone call or following a humiliating leak.

So it was a novelty Tuesday when Trump and outgoing

Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley appeared together in the Oval Office

, cheerfully announcing an end-of-year exit that caught most of the West Wing and State Department unaware and led to grumbles about inopportune political timing.

“I thought this would be an appropriate way of doing it. When you write it out on a piece of paper that ‘Ambassador Haley will be leaving’ and you say nice things, people say, ‘What’s going on?’ ” the President said. “When you really think somebody has done a terrific job, I felt this was an appropriate way of doing it.”

Appropriate or not, Haley’s decision to announce her resignation four weeks ahead of midterm congressional elections and immediately after a bruising Supreme Court confirmation battle that

laid bare deep political faults on sex and gender

led to questions about her timing.

And it exposed what has sometimes been a fraught relationship between Haley and other administration officials, who viewed her both as an effective face of administration policy and an ambitious political operator willing to break ranks.

That dynamic became apparent after Trump revamped the top of his national security team earlier this year, swapping more moderate advisers for Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and national security adviser John Bolton. Those changes occurred last March — roughly the same time Haley first told the President of her intentions to resign.

‘Time to step aside’

In the Oval Office, Haley insisted she made her decision not for personal reasons, but because she felt she’d served long enough.

“I think that it’s just very important for government officials to understand when it’s time to step aside. And I have given everything I’ve got these last eight years,” she said, referring to time spent both as the UN envoy and as South Carolina governor. “And I do think that sometimes it’s good to — to rotate in other people who can put that same energy and power into it.”

Still, neither Trump nor his top aides were looking to announce the departure of one of the administration’s highest-profile women just as Republicans work to repair whatever damage was inflicted by an ugly confirmation fight for Brett Kavanaugh, the Supreme Court justice who was accused by women of sexual assault.

Haley’s

resignation letter was dated October 3

and officials said she informed the President of her intentions during a meeting in the Oval Office that day. The previous evening,

Trump publicly mocked one of Kavanaugh’s accusers, Christine Blasey Ford,

during a Mississippi campaign rally, drawing condemnation from Democrats and Republicans alike. Making Haley’s departure public then would have caused further complications for the Kavanaugh confirmation, officials said.

The lack of forewarning led to griping among some aides that Haley was again stepping out on her own on a day the President was still basking in the glow of the ultimately successful Kavanaugh nomination.

“A lot of people would celebrate,” Trump told reporters later as he was departing for a campaign rally in Iowa. “We go back to business the next day.”

‘I don’t get confused’

As UN ambassador, Haley has carved out her own space in the public sphere as a prominent voice on issues ranging from alleged Syrian war crimes to Russia’s aggressive behavior around the globe, even when her rhetoric got ahead of the President’s views.

In recent months, however, Haley had lost clout with the President, two people familiar with their relationship noted in wake of her resignation. When Rex Tillerson was still secretary of state, Trump sought out Haley’s advice often and was regularly seen in the Oval Office, the people said.

But when the President orchestrated a revamp of his national security team — replacing Tillerson with Pompeo and bringing in Bolton, who served in the same UN post as Haley under President George W. Bush — Haley saw her time with the President diminish.

When she stepped out in April to announce the US would sanction Russian companies linked to Syria’s chemical weapons program, the White House refuted her the next day, announcing Trump had decided not to move forward with the sanctions. Some White House officials, including the President’s top economic adviser,

were quick to discount her in public, claiming she was mistaken

.

“With all due respect, I don’t get confused,” Haley struck back, in a stunning statement.

The past discord aside, Trump sought to make Haley’s resignation a decorous event. It was the President’s own idea to make the Oval Office announcement, an official said, but there was a behind-the-scenes scramble in the hour or so leading up to it because her decision took senior officials across the board by surprise — par for the course at this stage in the administration, one exasperated senior White House official said.

“The President and the ambassador wanted to do it. And he’s the boss,” the official said. “This is the way the White House works.”

As rumors began to circulate early Tuesday that Haley was stepping down, even senior level White House aides were caught off guard, and downplayed the whispers as mere gossip. Confidants of Haley’s from South Carolina, who had spoken to their friend over the past week, said they received little indication she was preparing her imminent resignation. Top State Department officials received no warning the announcement was coming.

Haley arrived to the White House around 10 a.m. ET, walked past a crowd of reporters and refused to confirm then-unverified reports she was stepping down. She did not have a meeting on the President’s public schedule.

Haley, officials said, insisted on giving the news privately to the President, though Trump later said she’d informed him six months ago she planned to depart after serving for two years in the administration.

It wasn’t until last week during a scheduled meeting at the White House that Haley officially informed Trump of her plans to resign, two sources familiar with the meeting said. But Trump and Haley decided to keep it under wraps, with only a small group of the President’s closest aides looped in before Tuesday morning.

The timing of the Tuesday morning announcement also raised eyebrows, coming a day after the ethics watchdog group CREW filed a government complaint alleging Haley undervalued the cost of flights she took on private planes owned by South Carolina businessmen.

“No, I know nothing about that,” Trump said when asked by CNN whether the complaint affected the timing. “I know Nikki. This is one of the most honest human beings I have ever seen.”

Possible replacements

Trump, who said in the Oval Office he would announce Haley’s successor in the next several weeks,

has a working list of possible contenders

. But even as he works to tap a replacement, he has not shared that list widely with even most senior White House officials, one aide said.

Among those speculated to be under consideration: Dina Powell, the former deputy national security adviser who departed the administration last year; Richard Grenell, the firebrand US ambassador to Germany who is close to Bolton; and even Ivanka Trump, the President’s eldest daughter who Haley praised during her remarks on Tuesday.

A source familiar with discussions said the President’s daughter laughed Tuesday morning when she heard about the speculation that she would replace Haley. And Trump himself shot down the notion he would nominate her later in the afternoon.

“I think Ivanka would be incredible, but it doesn’t mean I’d pick her, because I’d be accused of nepotism even though I’m not sure there’s anybody more competent in the world,” he said on the South Lawn.

He did not downplay the chances he could select Powell, who is now a senior executive at Goldman Sachs and recently spent time with Haley and her husband in South Carolina.

“Dina is certainly a person I would consider and she is under consideration,” he said.

It’s long been expected that Haley would be among the Cabinet officials to leave by the end of the year, joining an expected exodus after the midterm elections that could also include Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who Trump despises and has openly said he could replace.

A person close to Haley suggested she selected Tuesday for her announcement as a way to separate herself from the other departures.

“She wanted to make her own announcement now — not after the midterms — when there is a wave of people leaving if Republicans lose,” the person said, who added that by putting word out now that she was leaving, Haley was essentially notifying potential employers of her availability in the new year.

Haley, who has served in elected positions for years and will soon pay for two children in college, is eager to bolster her financial standing, a person familiar with her thinking said. In her resignation letter to Trump, Haley implied her next act would come outside government.

“As a businessman, I expect you will appreciate my sense that returning from government to the private sector is not a step down but a step up,” she wrote.

CNN’s Dana Bash and Gloria Borger contributed to this report.

Read More | Kevin Liptak, Jeremy Diamond, Jeff Zeleny, Kaitlan Collins and Jim Acosta, CNN,

Business Haley exits on her own terms, but some question her timing, in 2018-10-09 21:40:40

[adambstingus]

Democrats badly underestimated Trump

(CNN)Democrats have a history of underestimating Republican presidents.

His son George W. Bush, Democrats joked, was a nice guy who you might want to have a beer with but someone who didn’t know much about world or domestic affairs. Americans who saw the televised debates in 2000 can probably still hear the sound of Vice President Al Gore sighing after almost every remark.

In each case, however, the Democrats didn’t see what was coming.

Reagan went on to be a two-term president who vastly expanded military spending, slashed corporate and individual income taxes, lowered spending for much of the social safety net and negotiated a historic arms agreement with the Soviet Union.

Though he couldn’t win re-election in 1992, President George H.W. Bush led the nation into its first major military operation since Vietnam with Operation Desert Storm, reached a historic deficit reduction agreement with the Democratic Congress in 1990 and he presided over the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Under President George W. Bush, who left Democrats shell-shocked when he won a second term in 2004, the nation saw the administration vastly expand the national security state after 9/11, launch two major military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq — the second disastrous — cut income taxes even further and withdraw from a major climate change accord, while pushing through Congress several major legislative initiatives such as No Child Left Behind and the Medicare prescription drug plan.

The last two weeks have been another a loud wake-up call for Democrats who have railed against President Donald Trump but who thought that this reality star commander-in-chief was so incompetent, corrupt and self-centered that it was only a matter of time before he went away.

In their view, the President who surrounded himself with third-rate advisers and who had no legislative skills to speak of would be hampered in how much damage that he could inflict before his term ended.

It’s looking very different right now.

The minute that Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy announced he was retiring, every Democrat who has been paying attention to the Court realized the implications. With the evangelical right cheering him on, President Trump now has the opportunity to push through a giddy Republican Senate a judicial nominee who will dramatically swing the majority of the Supreme Court much further to the right.

Trump’s sway

With Justice Kennedy’s announcement coming at the same time that the court announced that it was dealing a major blow to public employee unions and upholding the president’s controversial travel ban, the implications of Trump’s sway over the highest court in the land were immediately apparent.

Whoever is president after 2020 will be dealing with a Supreme Court majority that has much less tolerance for strong intervention by the federal government and will be less supportive of the rights-based policy gains that have vastly strengthened the social standing of African-Americans, gay Americans, women and others who have suffered marginalization for decades.

Policies such as abortion access, family planning, affirmative action and voting rights now hang in the balance.

If Democrats were thinking that President Trump’s blistering rhetoric about undocumented immigrants was just talk, they now know just how far the President is willing to go. He is very serious about closing the borders and the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold his travel ban will embolden him.

Although he was pressured into backing down from his draconian policy of separating children from their parents at the border, Trump sent his message loud and clear. He is willing to go as far as he thinks is necessary to fight for stringent border policies. He is willing to inflict psychological damage on kids and subject border crossers to the toughest security measures possible until he convinces Congress to build the physical wall that he has been promising.

While he backed away from the policy of family separation, he is seeking congressional authority to detain entire families for longer than 20 days.

He has already dismantled President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, leaving hundreds of thousands of young people’s lives in America under a cloud. Their future depends on a Congress that is unable to reach agreement on any legislation dealing with immigration. Indeed, the president used his Twitter account to effectively torpedo an effort last week to pass compromise legislation on immigration that would have fixed the crisis he created with the Dreamers.

His sympathy remains with the hardline anti-immigration elements in the Freedom Caucus who will keep pushing for tighter and more restrictive policies on immigration — both undocumented and legal.

Last week’s Gallup polls and the results of Tuesday’s Republican primaries in South Carolina and New York are also strong indications that his political support remains much more substantial than Democrats had expected.

In the months that followed the inauguration, the conventional wisdom had been that as his national approval ratings kept falling, his political support within the GOP would follow. But we can see from the recent polling that Republican support for the President remains rock-solid and seems to be getting stronger.

Despite all of his chaotic and controversial decisions, his national approval ratings in some polls have even crept upward to the range of 45%. With a low rate of unemployment and a booming stock market, there is reason to believe that those numbers might hold fairly steady.

More of a destroyer than a builder

Trump is also demonstrating that the power of the President to tear things down is immense, especially if that President is not particularly interested in putting something different in its place. Interestingly enough, the real estate developer President has not turned out to be much of a builder. He prefers to take things apart and then walk away from the rubble without looking back.

Short of obtaining repeal and replace, he has severely weakened the Affordable Care Act by taking smaller steps like ending the individual mandate. He pulled out of TPP, pulled out of the Paris Climate Accord and pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal. He has issued executive orders rolling back Obama-era regulations to curb climate change and constrain Wall Street.

While Congress and the courts have significant power when it comes to checking legislative initiatives from the Oval Office, a president who is intent on dismantling policies — such as stripping away regulations or withdrawing from international agreements — can get a lot done if he or she is determined. A president who wants to use the bully pulpit to undercut the public confidence in institutions, such as the news media or law enforcement, can do great harm if they don’t care about the long-term consequences.

As the dog days of summer begin, Democrats should be more concerned than ever before about the consequences of a Trump presidency. The possibility for President Trump to seriously transform American policy keeps growing and the potential for a two-term presidency can no longer be dismissed. This unstable, shallow television star is starting to demonstrate that he has some very real political muscle to keep pushing forward.

Join us on Twitter and Facebook

The stakes of the 2018 midterm elections should be clear. If the national party does not figure out how to put forth an effective campaign that generates high turnout and excites the passions of their electorate, and if they don’t engage in the upcoming Supreme Court confirmation fight in a way that slows down the process and uses the President’s pick to awaken voters to the stakes of this struggle, President Trump could be looking at two more years of united government, with a GOP that will see him as an influential kingmaker, and the Congress will be more willing to start handing him legislative victories on the path to 2020.

from All Of Beer http://allofbeer.com/democrats-badly-underestimated-trump/ from All of Beer https://allofbeercom.tumblr.com/post/178126925257

[samanthasroberts]

Democrats badly underestimated Trump

(CNN)Democrats have a history of underestimating Republican presidents.

His son George W. Bush, Democrats joked, was a nice guy who you might want to have a beer with but someone who didn’t know much about world or domestic affairs. Americans who saw the televised debates in 2000 can probably still hear the sound of Vice President Al Gore sighing after almost every remark.

In each case, however, the Democrats didn’t see what was coming.

Reagan went on to be a two-term president who vastly expanded military spending, slashed corporate and individual income taxes, lowered spending for much of the social safety net and negotiated a historic arms agreement with the Soviet Union.

Though he couldn’t win re-election in 1992, President George H.W. Bush led the nation into its first major military operation since Vietnam with Operation Desert Storm, reached a historic deficit reduction agreement with the Democratic Congress in 1990 and he presided over the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Under President George W. Bush, who left Democrats shell-shocked when he won a second term in 2004, the nation saw the administration vastly expand the national security state after 9/11, launch two major military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq — the second disastrous — cut income taxes even further and withdraw from a major climate change accord, while pushing through Congress several major legislative initiatives such as No Child Left Behind and the Medicare prescription drug plan.

The last two weeks have been another a loud wake-up call for Democrats who have railed against President Donald Trump but who thought that this reality star commander-in-chief was so incompetent, corrupt and self-centered that it was only a matter of time before he went away.

In their view, the President who surrounded himself with third-rate advisers and who had no legislative skills to speak of would be hampered in how much damage that he could inflict before his term ended.

It’s looking very different right now.

The minute that Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy announced he was retiring, every Democrat who has been paying attention to the Court realized the implications. With the evangelical right cheering him on, President Trump now has the opportunity to push through a giddy Republican Senate a judicial nominee who will dramatically swing the majority of the Supreme Court much further to the right.

Trump’s sway

With Justice Kennedy’s announcement coming at the same time that the court announced that it was dealing a major blow to public employee unions and upholding the president’s controversial travel ban, the implications of Trump’s sway over the highest court in the land were immediately apparent.

Whoever is president after 2020 will be dealing with a Supreme Court majority that has much less tolerance for strong intervention by the federal government and will be less supportive of the rights-based policy gains that have vastly strengthened the social standing of African-Americans, gay Americans, women and others who have suffered marginalization for decades.

Policies such as abortion access, family planning, affirmative action and voting rights now hang in the balance.

If Democrats were thinking that President Trump’s blistering rhetoric about undocumented immigrants was just talk, they now know just how far the President is willing to go. He is very serious about closing the borders and the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold his travel ban will embolden him.

Although he was pressured into backing down from his draconian policy of separating children from their parents at the border, Trump sent his message loud and clear. He is willing to go as far as he thinks is necessary to fight for stringent border policies. He is willing to inflict psychological damage on kids and subject border crossers to the toughest security measures possible until he convinces Congress to build the physical wall that he has been promising.

While he backed away from the policy of family separation, he is seeking congressional authority to detain entire families for longer than 20 days.

He has already dismantled President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, leaving hundreds of thousands of young people’s lives in America under a cloud. Their future depends on a Congress that is unable to reach agreement on any legislation dealing with immigration. Indeed, the president used his Twitter account to effectively torpedo an effort last week to pass compromise legislation on immigration that would have fixed the crisis he created with the Dreamers.

His sympathy remains with the hardline anti-immigration elements in the Freedom Caucus who will keep pushing for tighter and more restrictive policies on immigration — both undocumented and legal.

Last week’s Gallup polls and the results of Tuesday’s Republican primaries in South Carolina and New York are also strong indications that his political support remains much more substantial than Democrats had expected.

In the months that followed the inauguration, the conventional wisdom had been that as his national approval ratings kept falling, his political support within the GOP would follow. But we can see from the recent polling that Republican support for the President remains rock-solid and seems to be getting stronger.

Despite all of his chaotic and controversial decisions, his national approval ratings in some polls have even crept upward to the range of 45%. With a low rate of unemployment and a booming stock market, there is reason to believe that those numbers might hold fairly steady.

More of a destroyer than a builder

Trump is also demonstrating that the power of the President to tear things down is immense, especially if that President is not particularly interested in putting something different in its place. Interestingly enough, the real estate developer President has not turned out to be much of a builder. He prefers to take things apart and then walk away from the rubble without looking back.

Short of obtaining repeal and replace, he has severely weakened the Affordable Care Act by taking smaller steps like ending the individual mandate. He pulled out of TPP, pulled out of the Paris Climate Accord and pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal. He has issued executive orders rolling back Obama-era regulations to curb climate change and constrain Wall Street.

While Congress and the courts have significant power when it comes to checking legislative initiatives from the Oval Office, a president who is intent on dismantling policies — such as stripping away regulations or withdrawing from international agreements — can get a lot done if he or she is determined. A president who wants to use the bully pulpit to undercut the public confidence in institutions, such as the news media or law enforcement, can do great harm if they don’t care about the long-term consequences.

As the dog days of summer begin, Democrats should be more concerned than ever before about the consequences of a Trump presidency. The possibility for President Trump to seriously transform American policy keeps growing and the potential for a two-term presidency can no longer be dismissed. This unstable, shallow television star is starting to demonstrate that he has some very real political muscle to keep pushing forward.

Join us on Twitter and Facebook

The stakes of the 2018 midterm elections should be clear. If the national party does not figure out how to put forth an effective campaign that generates high turnout and excites the passions of their electorate, and if they don’t engage in the upcoming Supreme Court confirmation fight in a way that slows down the process and uses the President’s pick to awaken voters to the stakes of this struggle, President Trump could be looking at two more years of united government, with a GOP that will see him as an influential kingmaker, and the Congress will be more willing to start handing him legislative victories on the path to 2020.

Source: http://allofbeer.com/democrats-badly-underestimated-trump/

from All of Beer https://allofbeer.wordpress.com/2018/09/16/democrats-badly-underestimated-trump/