... Mr. McConnell made clear in multiple phone calls with Mr. Trump and the White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, that the lengthy paper trail of another top contender, Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh, would pose difficulties for his confirmation.
Mr. McConnell is concerned about the volume of the documents that Judge Kavanaugh has created in his 12 years on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, as well as in his roles as White House staff secretary under President George W. Bush and assistant to Kenneth W. Starr, the independent counsel who investigated President Bill Clinton.
Kavanaugh rose to serve as Bush’s staff secretary, but it’s his wife who is closer with the Bush family: she followed George W. Bush to Washington from the Texas Governor’s office, served as his personal secretary for years, and has a close, personal relationship with the Bush family....
... the perception that his opposition in his judicial opinions to abortion and Obamacare was insufficiently adamant; and even a 1991 clerkship with Judge Alex Kozinski, a former federal Ninth Circuit judge who retired last year after accusations of sexual misconduct, have all come into question.
I quoted this a few days ago, but I'll quote it again, because, for Trump, I assume it was the deciding factor:
“I believe that the president should be excused from some of the burdens of ordinary citizenship while serving in office,” Judge Kavanaugh wrote in 2009 in The Minnesota Law Review. Among those burdens, he said, were responding to civil lawsuits and criminal charges.
“Even the lesser burdens of a criminal investigation — including preparing for questioning by criminal investigators — are time-consuming and distracting,” Judge Kavanaugh wrote. “Like civil suits, criminal investigations take the president’s focus away from his or her responsibilities to the people. And a president who is concerned about an ongoing criminal investigation is almost inevitably going to do a worse job as president.”
Who'll protect Trump? That seems to be what mattered most.
Recently I took a friend with only a high school degree to lunch. Insensitively, I led her into a gourmet sandwich shop. Suddenly I saw her face freeze up as she was confronted with sandwiches named “Padrino” and “Pomodoro” and ingredients like soppressata, capicollo and a striata baguette. I quickly asked her if she wanted to go somewhere else and she anxiously nodded yes and we ate Mexican.
American upper-middle-class culture (where the opportunities are) is now laced with cultural signifiers that are completely illegible unless you happen to have grown up in this class. They play on the normal human fear of humiliation and exclusion. Their chief message is, “You are not welcome here.”
Brooks didn't mention Donald Trump in this column, but other pundits believe that Trump's election was a revolt against "elitists" and their contempt for ordinary citizens, folks who eat down-home food in old-fashioned rural diners.
So as we read stories about Americans confronting Trump administration officials, I wonder why so little attention is being paid to the dining habits of those who advise the so-called Blue-Collar Billionaire.
Today The Washington Postreports on hostile confrontations between Trump aides and the public. This anecdote is getting the most attention:
One night, after [Trump adviser Stephen] Miller ordered $80 of takeout sushi from a restaurant near his apartment, a bartender followed him into the street and shouted, “Stephen!” When Miller turned around, the bartender raised both middle fingers and cursed at him, according to an account Miller has shared with White House colleagues.
Outraged, Miller threw the sushi away, he later told his colleagues.
By now, sushi isn't considered particularly exotic in much of America -- but out in rural West Virginia or Pennsylvania, I bet the most fervent Trumpers would still recoil in disgust if you offered them some. And Miller threw out $80 worth? Nobody in Bugtussle can afford to throw out $80 worth of food, even if it that disgusting raw fish. Throwing out that much food is something an elitist would do!
A couple of weeks ago, Sarah Sanders was asked to leave the Red Hen in Lexington, Virginia. The Red Hen is a "farm-to-table" restaurant -- what could be more elitist than that? When Sanders was asked to leave, she and her party were eating cheese boards. Do rural diners have cheese boards? Isn't this how Democrats eat?
And the woman who asked Scott Pruitt to resign last week did so at Teaism, where menu items include buckwheat and hempheart pancakes, cabbage butts stir-fried in gochujang, and seared salmon belly with collard stems pickled in a brine of herb trimming. (I think the friend David Brooks brought to lunch would have required hospitalization after one look at the Teaism menu.)
I know that the typical Trump voter wasn't actually working-class, but even many of the financially comfortable Trumpers claim to hate the "elites." So how come this food is okay with them, while they recoiled in horror when President Obama put Dijon mustard on a burger?
At this point in the Obama presidency, a big scandal for Fox News was when he ordered the wrong mustard. pic.twitter.com/fB0PTmM8L8
Hi, I'm back. Thank you again, Yastreblyansky, Crank, and Tom, for some great posts while I was away.
Today I'm looking at a video from the right-wing group Campus Reform. A an interviewer from the group found a few students who had strong opinions about President Trump's new Supreme Court pick -- even though the nominee hadn't been named yet.
... what would college students have to say about the matter? Did they have substantive reasons for not trusting the potential replacement, or were they simply set on opposing any Trump nominee?
To find out, I headed to New York University to ask students what they thought about who Trump had chosen to replace Justice Kennedy.
... “He’s quite extreme in his views,” said one student of the fictitious Judge.
“I saw it all over the news, that he’s like racist,” another student added, referring to the announcement that hadn’t yet happened.
“I saw the new nominee is like racist, and he’s starting a new wave of something very negative, and I’m really scared about the future and what choices he will make,” another pupil added.
When asked if she’d seen the online coverage of the event, one faculty member described witnessing “outrage… as it should be.”
What else did students have to say? Did anyone realize the decision had not yet been made?
I guess it's hilarious that left-leaning college students were talking as if they knew the name of the nominee -- it certainly seems hilarious to Fox & Friends, Glenn Beck's Blaze, and Power Line's John Hinderaker, who are all running with the story. But how is this different from the decision by a lavishly financed conservative group called the Judicial Crisis Network to begin a campaign called #AnotherGreatJustice late last month, also before the announcement of Trump's pick?
The Judicial Crisis Network is launching #AnotherGreatJustice seven-figure, national cable and digital ad-buy that will target vulnerable Democrat incumbents. The ad praises President Trump’s nomination of Justice Neil Gorsuch, and looks forward to the President nominating another great justice to the bench.
Statement from Judicial Crisis Network’s Chief Counsel and Policy Director, Carrie Severino:
“When President Trump selected Neil Gorsuch for the Supreme Court last year, he kept a promise he had made to the American people to appoint judges who are fair, independent, and committed to upholding the Constitution. Like Justice Gorsuch, all of the men and women on President Trump’s judicial list are the best and brightest in their field. They are fair and independent judges with records of listening to the arguments of both sides in the courtroom, delivering well-reasoned decisions, fairly applying the law and honoring the Constitution. Like Justice Gorsuch, each one of them has the wisdom and experience necessary to sit on the Supreme Court from Day One. We look forward to President Trump nominating another great justice.”
Criticizing an unnamed nominee? Just liberals being silly again. Praising an unnamed nominee as (in the words of the ad) "the best of the best"? That's just smart politics.
The second coolest thing on Twitter is seeing experts in a field engage in serious, thoughtful, informative discussions about their areas of expertise.
The coolest thing is when, in the process, they eviscerate a buffoon like Dinesh D'Souza.
Convicted felon and habitual grifter Dinesh D'Souza has a movie and a book coming out. This movie and book (they are a package, of course) expose, at long last, a shocking secret that liberals have covered up for decades: in the 1800s, the Democrats supported slavery.
If so, how how come students on campus are consistently amazed when I talk about this? Do a better job & teach this more clearly https://t.co/0i35ueAiuB
(This is a pretty damning admission from D'Souza about the ignorance of his followers.)
Anyway, having discovered this shocking secret, D'Souza concludes that the Democrats are still secretly the party of slavery. The whole schtick is basically an even-dumber version of Liberal Fascism. And when he's challenged on it, he gets a little defensive.
Okay let’s see a list of the 200 or so racist Dixiecrats who switched parties and became Republicans. Put up or shut up https://t.co/dmXGZKXwne
Fortunately, there are people who make a living studying history--"historians", if you will--and thus have the expertise to assess D'Souza's claims. And in the last week, they've been doing it with a vengeance.
There's historian Heather Cox Richardson, author of a history of the GOP, who explains the history of the GOP in this thread:
Seriously? You're going to try this again, after what @KevinMKruse did to you?
OK then. Let's take a look at the history of the Republican Party, shall we?
— Heather Cox Richardson (TDPR) (@HC_Richardson) July 5, 2018
And there's journalist David Neiwert, author of several books about the radical right, with a thread on the enduring ties between historical fascists/Nazis and today's alt-right:
1) I’d like to start a thread chiming in on the marvelous deconstruction of @DineshDSouza and his thesis that the Southern Strategy and subsequent party switch in the 1960s and ‘70s is a myth, courtesy of @KevinMKruse and Co. Consider this a kind of return to the present.
All three are worth reading for the important and useful historical perspective they provide. But they're especially worth reading for the beatdown they serve to Dumbass D'Souza.
Speaking of North Korea, I think I may have just noticed something significant, stimulated by a Twitter friend:
I imagine Trump's demanding that people stop calling him a loser from the Singapore summit. Fox ran a story on DPRK missile plant expansion July 2 https://t.co/vYFuaEYTuC, state department announced Pompeo trip July 2 https://t.co/ePU0QsFhww
— ParticularVernacular (@Yastreblyansky) July 8, 2018
Namely, as you see, that Fox's first story on how North Korea was not doing anything to "denuclearize" and was in fact going back to building up forces appeared on the same day as the State Department announcement that Pompeo was going back for a visit to Pyongyang. And the next day that Trump tweeted for the last time (so far) on the subject:
Many good conversations with North Korea-it is going well! In the meantime, no Rocket Launches or Nuclear Testing in 8 months. All of Asia is thrilled. Only the Opposition Party, which includes the Fake News, is complaining. If not for me, we would now be at War with North Korea!
Optimistic, as ever. "If not for me, I would have started a War with North Korea by now!" He's such a consummate dealmaker he can even snooker himself!
Yes, my guess it was the Assistant Manager being told to go out and ask the customer to please return the purchased product but also that there would be no refund. He knows it won't work but gotta try for the Manager.
Trump must have seen the story first thing in the morning, spent all day screaming at Pompeo about what a shitty job he was doing, and ordered him back to fix it up right away. Hence the stupidity of the list of negotiating demands:
If it was so important to achieve some result with NK, why did (reportedly) Pompeo present nothing more than a list of denuclearization tasks for NK and to know when they'd fulfill them? How is *that* negotiation by any definition? https://t.co/5Xxy3CTGni
Spoiler alert: He doesn't have a plan. He never has a plan, from the chaos of MuslimBan 1.0 a week after inauguration to the ongoing chaos of the Central American parent-child separation program, and the people who work for him don't have a plan either, whether because they simply don't have the ability or because there's some problem with what Trump wants them to do, like Mexico really isn't going to pay for the wall. In a sense he's the true Underpants Gnome president:
Phase one: Collect wall-building funds from Mexico
Phase two: ?????????
Phase three: Profit!!
What he has is a sense of how great he's going to look when he's successful, which is what he means by saying he "keeps his promises". He's going to look the way he told them he'd look, at the campaign rallies, and if the staff doesn't make him look that way they need to go.
Thus poor Pompeo, trying to work him through his fantasy of "solving" North Korea:
Phase one: Show the North Koreans you're tough
Phase two: ??????????
Phase three: Everything's cool!
Interested parties in South Korea (above all, and let me emphasize that President Moon Jae-in and Foreign Minister Kang Kyung-wha are still the only characters in this story I unambivalently approve of), Russia and China, and not least in Foggy Bottom, tried to make this narrative look real, and to give the impression that Trump's alternately threatening, insulting, and cajoling tweets were accomplishing something, and Trump got his meeting in Singapore and his vague document, and I think he really believed it was over. "I denuclearized North Korea!" He looked great! Unless you took the trouble to look at the document, and realized that it didn't say anything was in fact going to happen on the DPRK side.
Now, if you didn't understand it before, it's clear that nothing happened, as Pompeo reports that his two days of talks with Kim Yong-chol were "productive" and "in good faith" and made progress" while the North Korean foreign ministry announced that the meeting was "regrettable". Was what????
While Pompeo offered a relatively positive assessment of his meetings, North Korea’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement that the U.S. betrayed the spirit of last month’s summit between President Donald Trump and Kim by making “unilateral and gangster-like” demands on “CVID,” or the complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearization of North Korea....
“We had expected that the U.S. side would offer constructive measures that would help build trust based on the spirit of the leaders’ summit ... we were also thinking about providing reciprocal measures,” said the statement, released by an unnamed spokesman and carried by the North’s official Korean Central News Agency.
“However, the attitude and stance the United States showed in the first high-level meeting (between the countries) was no doubt regrettable,” the spokesman said. “Our expectations and hopes were so naive it could be called foolish.”
Laura Rozen wondered why Pompeo would allow himself to look so clueless :
#AudienceOfOne it's not how he's presenting it to the public that matters, it's how he's presenting it to the Fox-watcher-in-chief. He's really not concerned with how stupid it looks to the rest of us. Strange times.
— ParticularVernacular (@Yastreblyansky) July 7, 2018
Really, what else is there to say? Pompeo may well have started out believing, like any bully-ass Republican, that North Korea is a nuclear power because the US hasn't treated it with sufficient Manly Firmness, but he has to have learned through the last few months that it's not going to be that easy and that in the best possible case it's going to take a very long time. But he can't tell Trump that because it conflicts with Trump's visualization of himself getting the Nobel Peace Prize, and this is how it works with an emperor: everybody has to manage up, not down, keeping him calm as the first order of business every day.
Who the hell cares?
I’ll speak to anybody.
Who knows? There’s a 10 percent
or a 20 percent chance that I
can talk him out of those damn nukes
because who the hell wants him to
have nukes? And there’s a chance —
I’m only gonna make a good deal for us.
On Wednesday, Dato' Sri Haji Mohammad Najib bin Tun Haji Abdul Razak, Najib Razak for short, the son of Malaysia's second prime minister Tun Abdul Razak and nephew of the third prime minister Dato' Hussein Onn, and himself the nation's sixth prime minister, serving from 2009 until just a couple of months ago, was arrested and charged with three counts of criminal breach of trust over a sum of 42 million Malaysian ringgit (US $10.6 million) from a finance company called SRC International, which had wandered into the prime minister's own bank acccount. That's only a fraction of the $731 million Najib is alleged to have siphoned from SRC's parent, the government-run investment fund 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB) that Najib created in his first year as PM, in a case being run by prosecutors in the United States, money that Najib and his wife had largely converted into luxury goods that have been seized from his various properties, including 567 handbags, 2,200 rings and 14 tiaras, and a $27.3-million pink diamond necklace.
Which is in turn only a fraction of the $4.5 billion extracted from 1MDB by a conspiracy led, apparently, not by the ex–prime minister but by a close associate of his, the now fugitive financier Low Taek Jho, who may be the owner of the 54th largest yacht in the world, the 90-meter Equanimity (sleeps 28 crew and 18 guests) seized by Indonesian authorities as it sailed from Lombok to Bali last March.
The political part of this story is utterly fascinating in its own right, but also interesting in a couple of immediately relevant aspects, first of all because of the way it relates to "identity politics", since Malaysia has been governed from the outset of independence from Britain in 1957 by a coalition that looks like the nightmare Republicans are trying to frighten you with when they use the term.
That is, the government has always been a national front of one party each claiming to represent a different one of the country's three largest ethnic groups: the United Malays National Organization, the Malaysian Chinese Association, and the Malaysian Indian Congress, against a somewhat leftist opposition party dominated by Chinese and a somewhat Islamist party dominated by Malays. UMNO always being the senior partner as representing the majority (tenuously, until the divorce from Singapore removed the threat that there might one day be a Chinese majority) and the nominal indigens or Bumiputera, "Princes of the Soil" (Malays proper are at least in part the descendants of Muslim immigrants from Sumatra and probably farther west, in fact, beginning in the 12th century or so, but never mind), and finally the beneficiaries of various affirmative action programs, because the vast majority of Malays who are not members of Sultanic families are often economically pretty disadvantaged, but also creating certain opportunities for corruption when a non-Malay wants to start a business and must find a Bumiputera partner to legitimize the operation.
And the Malay royal families who provide the constitutional sultans of most of the states and a constitutional king elected from among their ranks also provided the prime minister, until 1981, when a commoner, Dr. Mahathir Mohamed, got the UMNO nod and proceeded to rule the country as its fourth prime minister for the next 22 years.
The “master race” masters the art of surrendering with its hands
on its head in this 1945 photograph of captured German troops.
Are the troops of MAGA next?
During the Second World War, one of my aunts joined the Red Cross and ended up just behind the front lines, mostly serving donuts and coffee to war-weary GIs as they came back from combat.
But she had a chance to see plenty more than just tired American dogfaces. Her sightseeing, if you can call it that, included the insides of field hospitals where the patients were not only American soldiers, but also some of the wounded Nazi troops. She wrote home about her experiences. Some of what she saw was on a disturbing spectrum that spans the space between harrowing and hilarious.
I recall one paragraph in particular. It’s impact was so ironic, and yet so horrendous, that I’ve committed it to memory. Permit me to reproduce a few lines. She was speaking about Nazi soldiers in an American field hospital.
“I saw one soldier who was blind from his burns. His arms and legs were blown off. He was still waving his stumps and raving, at the top of his lungs, that Germans were the master race and that they were going to conquer the world.”
A few months later, the war was over. Germany lay in ruins. Der Fuhrer of the “master race” put a bullet in his own brain, immediately after similarly executing his girlfriend.
I bring this up because there’s something about Trump’s followers that brings to mind the armless, legless, battle-blinded nincompoop Nazi. They are insanely raving in support of an evil cause that was built on ridiculous assumptions and doomed not only to fail, but to create misery for themselves and countless others in the process.
In this case I’m talking about the assumptions that the Trump Administration has made concerning the economy. The information has been out there for a while — along with a constant gush of news about strategic and tactical mistakes made by the White House and Trump’s cabinet — mistakes that are plainly becoming catastrophes, either in the making or already made.
The sheer number of in utero calamities staggers the mind. Like Trump’s projectile vomiting of tweets — unrelenting, sometimes mutually contradictory, often completely false, overwhelmingly outrageous and disgusting — there have been so many that it’s hard put them in some kind of meaningful order. Or is even thinking that Trump’s assumptions and pronouncements can be put in a meaningful order inherently an oxymoron?
At any rate, let me start with one of Trump’s earliest declarations about how he’d defend and build the economy, “Trade wars are easy to win.”
And to see more ramifications of Trump’s “easy-to-win” war, check out this clip.
Then, for some of the excruciating details concerning Trump’s economic policies, see Paul Krugman’s recent article here, from which I quote just a few paragraphs to raise the hair on the back of your neck:
On Sunday, Canada — a country that, by the way, imports about as much from us as it exports in return — announced retaliatory tariffs against $12.6 billion of U.S. products. The European Union and China have also announced retaliatory tariffs. Mexico, with its new leftist president-elect, is hardly likely to be accommodating. And the E.U. has warned that it will go much bigger if Trump follows through on his threat to put tariffs on European cars, potentially imposing retaliatory tariffs on almost $300 billion of U.S. exports. The U.S. is now behaving in ways that could all too easily lead to a breakdown of the whole trading system and a drastic, disruptive reduction in world trade.
And then this:
[American] Exporters will be hurt, of course — and exports support around 10 million jobs. Some industries that compete with imports might end up adding jobs. But they wouldn’t be the same jobs, in the same places: A trade war would cause huge worker displacement. And what’s especially striking right now is that even industries Trump claims he wants to help are protesting his policies, urging him to reverse course. General Motors warns that proposed auto tariffs could lead to “less investment, fewer jobs and lower wages for our employees.” The Motor & Equipment Manufacturers Association has urged the administration to stand down, declaring that “counterproductive unilateral actions” will “erode U.S. jobs and growth” while doing nothing to protect national security.
But Trump isn’t budging. He won’t back back down because that’s simply not what he does. And doubling down instead will just double the misery — and the wave of unemployment to come — generated by his ridiculous notions. The rest of the world retaliates by blowing our economy to smithereens with tariffs that have a nuclear impact. Moreover, we can’t say that Trump wasn’t asking for it.
And yet, as all this begins to unfold, Trump’s base remains firmly behind him.
He may get their jobs blown out from under them. His actions may render them essentially helpless and unemployed, perhaps even unemployable. But Trump’s die-hards are blinded. They’re waving their stumps and raving in the dark that they are conquering the world and making America great again.
They shout ever more loudly as the world draws away from us and we turn our friends into enemies, leaving us isolated, economically disabled, and ready for conquest, perhaps by the Russians.
Scott Pruitt has resigned, and it's safe to assume that this happened not because Pruitt himself, or anyone in the administration in a decision-making capacity, thought he'd done anything wrong. To judge from this CNN story, published shortly before Pruitt tendered his resignation, the only problem was that the evil liberals were planning to say mean things about him during the campaign:
Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt, facing additional reporting about his many controversies, is "inching forward to the tipping point," a senior administration official said.
The official, describing the feeling within the administration towards Pruitt, wondered whether the EPA administrator would still hold his job as he could crop up in Democratic candidates' ads hitting President Donald Trump's "swamp."
Fear of midterm attack ads was what finally brought this to a head. Morality and ethics certainly weren't getting the job done.
Pruitt, in a resignation letter addressed to the president, portrayed his work in the administration as labor on God's behalf.
My desire in service to you has always been to bless you as you make important decisions for the American people. I believe you are serving as President today because of God’s providence. I believe that same providence brought me into your service. I pray as I have served you that I have blessed you and enabled you to effectively lead the American people.
So Pruitt and Trump are on God's side ... and Pruitt's enemies are pure evil:
BREAKING: EPA Chief Pruitt Resigns - Cites "Unrelenting Attacks" on Himself and His Family by Unhinged Leftists https://t.co/V2ZjUvnZPy via @gatewaypundit
Scott Pruitt is a good friend and a very good man, caricatured by left and MSM. I hope he sets to work on a memoir ASAP and deals out a tenth of what he took. He’s a man of great faith and perseverance so he probably won’t, but the attacks on his family were unconscionable. https://t.co/Ob69m6fctg
Has Pruitt done anything wrong? Pruitt's answer is no. Trump's answer is no -- nothing except possibly providing fodder for negative campaign commercials. The Republican commentariat's answer is an unasmbiguous no as well.
Here's what truly matters to President Trump in picking a Supreme Court justics, according to Politico:
After meeting Marie Louise Gorsuch and picking up on the easy chemistry between the homemaker and her husband, President Donald Trump requested that she stand next to Neil Gorsuch during his nomination speech to the Supreme Court.
Trump’s delight in what he considered the picture-perfect couple, recounted by a Republican close to the White House familiar with the proceedings, is now resurfacing as the process of filling a second Supreme Court opening plays out like a political campaign, with attention to the whole package, including a potential nominee's appearance as well as the look and feel of his or her family....
“Beyond the qualifications, what really matters is, does this nominee fit a central casting image for a Supreme Court nominee, as well as his or her spouse,” the Republican close to the White House said. “That's a big deal. Do they fit the role?”
Here's that picture of the Gorsuches.
They look like two of the whitest people in human history. Clearly that's a great deal of what "a central casting image for a Supreme Court nominee" means to Trump.
Amul Thapar, son of Indian immigrants, who's reportedly on the short list? Probably not going to be Trump's pick.
“I believe that the president should be excused from some of the burdens of ordinary citizenship while serving in office,” Judge Kavanaugh wrote in 2009 in The Minnesota Law Review. Among those burdens, he said, were responding to civil lawsuits and criminal charges.
“Even the lesser burdens of a criminal investigation — including preparing for questioning by criminal investigators — are time-consuming and distracting,” Judge Kavanaugh wrote. “Like civil suits, criminal investigations take the president’s focus away from his or her responsibilities to the people. And a president who is concerned about an ongoing criminal investigation is almost inevitably going to do a worse job as president.”
But Politico says that while this photo of Kavanaugh and wife seems like "all-American" perfection from Trump's point of view, it isn't, because of other Trump concerns:
For Kavanaugh, however, the problem stands to his right in the photo: President George W. Bush is smiling, too. And a few questions about the wife in the picture would reveal deep ties to the Bush family.
Kavanaugh rose to serve as Bush’s staff secretary, but it’s his wife who is closer with the Bush family: she followed George W. Bush to Washington from the Texas Governor’s office, served as his personal secretary for years, and has a close, personal relationship with the Bush family -- a fact Republicans close to the White House said would be a mark against Kavanaugh in Trump’s thinking.
It’s a part of Kavanaugh’s bio that has nothing to do with his qualifications to become a Supreme Court Justice. But his family’s ties to the Bush family are expected to matter to Trump, who sees that dynasty as the embodiment of the Republican establishment that still doesn’t take him seriously.
So does that mean Trump will pick Amy Coney Barrett, the reported co-frontrunner, along with Kavanaugh? Well, she has two adopted children from Haiti -- one of Trump's "shithole countries." She also has a special-needs child. That might not sit well with our eugenicist president.
A short-lister who hasn't been talked about much is Joan Larsen. Could she be the pick? Probably not if Trump sees old clips of her husband with a goatee, ponytail, and bow tie.
Embattled Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt directly appealed to President Donald Trump this spring to fire Attorney General Jeff Sessions and let him run the Department of Justice instead, according to three people familiar with the proposal. In an Oval Office conversation with Trump, Pruitt offered to temporarily replace Sessions for 210 days under the Vacancies Reform Act, telling the President he would return to Oklahoma afterward to run for office.
Advisers quickly shot down the proposal....
The Federal Vacancies Reform Act of 1998 gives the President the authority to temporarily fill a vacancy at a federal agency if the official "dies, resigns, or is otherwise unable to perform the functions and duties of the office."
An April CNN story said that Trump was considering this move, but it's news that Pruitt was lobbying for it. (Pruitt has denied the report.)
Not sure what’s more wild: that a guy did this while facing over a dozen federal probes right now, mostly for things related to being a tacky dipshit, or that he firmly believes he has a political future waiting for him back in Oklahoma right now.
But of course he has a political future waiting for him back in Oklahoma. He's under investigation, but who's worked up about what he's reported to have done? Liberals. Democrats. The mainstream media. Who's upset at the things he's done as EPA administrator? Environmentalists.
If he wants to run for office in Oklahoma, he has all the right enemies.
And if he'd been given the opportunity to shut down Robert Mueller's probe, how do you think that would be received in Trump Territory? He would have been a hero -- after Trump, he'd have been the single most admired political figure in Red America. How pro-Trump is Oklahoma? In 2016, Trump beat Hillary Clinton in the state 65%-29%. According to the most recent Morning Consult poll, conducted in May, Trump is viewed favorably by a double-digit margin in the state -- 53% favorable, 42% unfavorable. A January poll from Harstad Strategic Research had the margin as 57%-38%. And a poll conducted last month by the Republican-leaning Magellan Strategies said that Trump has 80% approval in the state, and only 14% disapproval.
Pruitt wanted to be the biggest non-Trump hero in Trumpistan. If he'd gotten his wish, the governorship would have been his for the asking.
A majority of Americans believe the Republican-led Senate should vote on President Donald Trump's Supreme Court nominee before the November midterm elections, undercutting the Democratic argument that it should be delayed until after the pivotal fall elections, according to a new NBC News|SurveyMonkey poll.
More than six in 10 Americans, or 62 percent, said Trump's nominee, who will be announced on Monday, should be confirmed or rejected before the elections in which control of the House and Senate are at stake. About three in 10, or 33 percent, said the Senate should wait until after the elections, the poll found.
Sixty-six percent of Democrats and 60 percent of Republicans said Trump's nominee would be an important factor in their vote in the midterms. However, less than half of independents, 46 percent, said it would be on their mind when casting their November ballot.
In that case, the Senate should be responsive to the will of the people, just the way it always is. Oh, wait -- you mean it isn't always responsive to the will of the people in similar circumstances? For instance, the similar circumstances two years ago?
Following President Barack Obama's nomination of Merrick Garland to fill the open seat on the Supreme Court, a new CNN/ORC poll finds two-thirds of Americans want the Senate to hold confirmation hearings on his candidacy, and a majority of Americans say the Senate should ultimately vote to confirm him.
According to the survey, 52% say Garland ought to be confirmed, 33% that the Senate should not vote in favor of his nomination. Another 15% are unsure.
... most Republicans disagree with the position taken by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who says the Senate will not hold hearings on Garland's confirmation. Among Republicans, 55% say the Senate should hold hearings on Obama's choice, as do 67% of Democrats and 68% of independents. The 64% overall who say there should be hearings is about the same as the 66% who said so in February before Obama named his choice to fill the vacancy.
Most Americans, 57%, say the choice for the next justice should rest with Obama and not with the next president, and a similar majority, 58%, say that senators who believe the seat should be filled by the next president would not be justified in voting against Garland for that reason.
The new poll doesn't ask whether respondents approve of the double standard. I would have appreciated a question on that.
Oh, and the new poll also tells us this:
The majority of independents, 63 percent, and Democrats, 53 percent, said the next justice should be moderate, while 65 percent of Republicans want a conservative on the bench. However, 61 percent of Americans said, regardless of party affiliation, that they wanted a justice who would uphold Roe v. Wade, the 1973 landmark court case that legalized abortion. Only three in 10 said they wanted a justice who would cast a vote to overturn the decision.
Overall, 44% want a moderate, 20% want a liberal, and only 32% want what we're going to get, a conservative. It's Republican disrespect for the will of the people -- as usual.
This Fourth of July marks a low point in U.S. patriotism. For the first time in Gallup's 18-year history asking U.S. adults how proud they are to be Americans, fewer than a majority say they are "extremely proud." Currently, 47% describe themselves this way, down from 51% in 2017 and well below the peak of 70% in 2003.
There's a party split, with the same split we see on many other issues -- Republicans on one side and Democrats and independents on the other:
Currently, 32% of Democrats -- down from 43% in 2017 and 56% in 2013 -- are extremely proud. The decline preceded the election of Donald Trump but has accelerated in the past year.
Less than half of independents, 42%, are also extremely proud. That is down slightly from 48% a year ago, and 50% in 2013.
As has typically been the case, Republicans are more inclined to say they are extremely proud to be Americans than are Democrats and independents. Seventy-four percent of Republicans are extremely proud, which is numerically the highest over the last five years.
At Memeorandum, the headlines from the mainstream and lefty media are similar. Mainstream sites:
The overall percentage of extremely proud poll respondents is down, but the right doesn't think that amounts to a decline in patriotism among Americans, because the right doesn't think Democrats are Americans.
Obviously, if the numbers were up overall, these folks would be crowing about it. But they don't believe a decline is any reason for concern, as long as it's among people they'd love to boot out of the country in any case.
Fox News gleefully reports that alleged servant of the people Devin Nunes is trolling LeBron James:
California Rep. Devin Nunes jabbed the California Democratic Party after it sent a "welcome" message to NBA star LeBron James, who just signed a sizable contract with the Los Angeles Lakers.
Nunes, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, retweeted the message the party sent to James, a notable Hillary Clinton supporter and Trump critic, after the three-time champion decided to leave the Cleveland Cavaliers.
— California Democratic Party (@CA_Dem) July 2, 2018
Nunes (R-Tulare) said on Twitter that James should have "held out" on his contract until he was exempted from Gov. Jerry Brown's (D-Calif.) "weather tax."
LOL! Prepare to pay the highest taxes you ever have in your career!! You should have held out for more just to afford the Moonbeam weather tax!!! https://t.co/O6gZXFqZqM
California's outgoing governor, Jerry Brown, was derided as "Governor Moonbeam" in the 1970s, when critics regarded him as a stereotypical California flake. Forty years later, he's one of the best governors in America. But Republicans never tire of the creakiest anti-liberal jokes.
I thought "weather tax" was a reference to Brown's recognition of climate change as a legitimate problem, but I'm told it's a snarky way of saying you pay more taxes to live in nice weather.
LeBron is no stranger to paying taxes. A while back, TurboTax concluded that he was the U.S. athlete who paid the highest taxes.
He may be one of the biggest stars in the NBA, but LeBron James also has one of the biggest tax bills among pro basketball players. Thanks to "jock tax" laws enacted by many states, LeBron ... pays income tax in 18 other states he plays basketball in, as well as federal taxes of about $17 million at the 39.6% maximum rate. His total gross income for 2015 was $64.8 million.
A month ago, ESPN's Darren Rovell estimated that LeBron took home half his pay last season.
The Cavs paid LeBron $33.2 million this season. We estimated how much he actually took home. Here’s our math. pic.twitter.com/Q18ZwI50Jx
Luckily for James, he's an even bigger earner off the court — it's been estimated he makes $55 million in endorsements.
And even more luckily, his new deal is worth $154 million before taxes -- again, before endorsements.
He might, as Forbes says, have to pay an additional $21 million in state taxes. But he's making a really large amount of money. Rich people who pay a lot of taxes are still rich. I assume he thinks he's got it pretty good right now financially.
I have one quibble with that tweet from the California Democrats: I'd rather have LeBron voting in Ohio. Unlike California, it's a swing state.
Something dramatic is said to have happened to one of the Trump sons last week, literally on the streets of midtown Manhattan at rush hour, and yet it went unreported for five days until "Washington Secrets" columnist Paul Bedard told us about it in the Washington Examinertoday:
Eric Trump rushes into NYC traffic to save ailing woman
An ordinary morning in New York City last week for President Trump’s son Eric Trump abruptly turned frantic when he rushed to the aid of a woman who passed out near a train station, dodging rush-hour traffic to chase down a passing ambulance.
According to an eyewitness account provided to Secrets, Trump and his security detail stopped to tend to the unidentified woman outside of the F train stop near 57th Street and 6th Avenue on Wednesday morning.
Our tipster, who requested anonymity, said Trump then spotted a passing ambulance and rushed to stop it.
“I watched as Eric looked up, spotted an ambulance slowly passing by on 6th, ran into traffic — almost getting hit by a bicyclist — and shouted at the ambulance to get its attention,” said the observer.
“Not sure if the ambulance had been called for or if Eric managed to hail one out of the blue, but in any case his sense of urgency was clear and he succeeded in getting the paramedics to stop and tend to the woman,” added the observer, who has no ties to Trump.
Despite being the president’s son, prominent in New York for his role as the Trump Organization’s executive vice president of development and acquisitions, his Good Samaritan role went mostly unnoticed. “I don’t know if anyone really noticed all of this going on, there wasn’t a crowd of people watching,” said the observer.
No local media outlet found out about this over the past five days? In addition to the Times and The Wall Street Journal, New York has two very competitive tabloid papers, one owned by Rupert Murdoch (in case you think the problem is that the "liberal media" wouldn't touch this story). The city has five local TV stations with large, tabloid-minded news organizations, two of which are also part of the Murdoch empire. The city has two top-rated 24-hour news radio stations. And that's just the legacy media. None of these folks got wind of the Trump story between Wednesday and now? The scoop went to Paul Bedard, a GOP-friendly columnist for a media operation most people in New York have never heard of?
I'll add that no New Yorker in living memory has ever talked like this: "in any case his sense of urgency was clear and he succeeded in getting the paramedics to stop and tend to the woman." The word "tend" with this meaning hasn't been used anywhere in the five boroughs since the days of the Model T.
And since midtown traffic is usually slowed to a crawl, Eric's reported leap into the street wasn't as brave as it seems. (Yes, the ambulance would be "slowly passing by" because all midtown car traffic in the daylight hours passes slowly.) Bedard says that Eric was almost hit by a bicycle, but that happens to the average New Yorker once or twice a week.
When he saw "a big guy with a big bat" bashing another fellow, Donald Trump did what any self-respecting billionaire would do: He ordered his driver to pull over....
Witnesses said Trump, with Marla Maples tugging at his arm to try to stop him, leaped from his black stretch limousine Monday evening during the assault on Ninth Ave. near 45th St.
Brutal-looking
"Someone in the car looked over and said, 'Gee, look at that, it's a mugging,'" Trump said. "I said to my driver to stop the car because it was brutal-looking." ...
"The guy with the bat looked at me, and I said, 'Look, you've gotta stop this. Put down the bat,'" Trump said. "I guess he recognized me because he said, 'Mr. Trump, I didn't do anything wrong.' I said, 'How could you not do anything wrong when you're whacking a guy with a bat?' Then he ran away."
Dad had a who, me? response to a reporter's query in '91:
"I'm not looking to play this thing up," Trump said yesterday. "I'm surprised you found out about it."
As did his son 27 years later:
For his part, Trump gave the credit for helping the ailing woman to the medical team he flagged down.
“I’m glad we were able to play a small role in getting help for the woman on 58th Street,” he told Secrets. “We just happened to be in the right place at the right time. I’m especially grateful to the EMTs who took over. It was certainly my first time hailing an ambulance in New York City,” he added.
Did either of these incidents actually happen? Did they happen as reported? I suspect only John Barron knows for sure.
So when Chuck Todd spent more than seven minutes interviewing Ocasio-Cortez yesterday, did he ask her about any of these issues? Medicare for All? A universal jobs guarantee? Criminal justice reform? Of course not. All that was on his mind was the horse race. What does Ocasio-Cortez's primary win against Joe Crowley say about the state of the Democratic Party? Does her tactical approach to politics clash with that of the current Democratic mainstream? Does this mean Democrats are in disarray? Who's up? Who's down?
Here's the complete interview:
I will now reproduce every question Todd asked Ocasio-Cortez. First, there was this:
CHUCK TODD:
You're not a congresswoman-elect yet. You do have a general election, but it is a pretty strongly Democratic seat. So let me first start with something that Nancy Pelosi said about your victory earlier this week. Take a listen.
(TAPE BEGINS)
CONGRESSWOMAN PELOSI:
They made a choice in one district. So let's not get yourself carried away as an expert on demographics and the rest of that within the caucus or outside the caucus. It is not to be viewed as something that stands for everything else.
(TAPE ENDS)
CHUCK TODD:
She was a bit defensive, a lot of people coming at her saying your victory means a lot more than just a primary win in the Bronx. How did you react to that?
After that, Todd asked a couple of questions about what might have prevented Ocasio-Cortez from being such a pest that she felt it necessary to challenge an entrenched incumbent:
I'm curious, if Joe Crowley had found out you were, you know, thinking about running and he called you up and said, ‘What am I doing wrong? You know, what would you like to see from me? What would you like to see me do that would make you say, You know what? I'll stand down this cycle and see what you do.'
****
What would you have said to him if he had asked you for advice about how to win your vote before you decided to run against him?
****
Meaning you never saw him in your mind? That the district never saw him, is that what you're saying?
Todd moved on to the Supreme Court vacancy -- but not, of course, to any of the issues on which the next Justice could be a deciding vote. Again, the line of questioning was all about tactics.
Some of your energy and some of the energy behind you and some of the energy behind other progressives has to do with almost the tone and tactics of the Democratic leadership. I'm curious, what was your reaction to Senator Cantwell earlier today in how she described how she would like to fight on the Supreme Court?
****
What do you want to see?
Ocasio-Cortez says that when Republicans "want to bend and break the rules and stretch the Constitution to its limits, they'll do it. But when they're on the other side of the table, it's, ‘Whoa, decorum.’" Todd asks:
So do you want Democrats to borrow some of those tactics? I mean, because that's the tricky game here, right?
She said yes and Todd asked,
Which is, you know, do two wrongs make a right?
It's news to me that Todd considers Republican hardball tactics to be a "wrong," but I guess he does when Democrats use them.
Here's Todd's final question about the Court fight -- it was, of course, an effort to make Ocasio-Cortez attack a fellow Democrat:
So what do you want Senate Democrats to do that you didn't hear from Senator Cantwell this morning?
Todd's next question began with a ray of hope:
Let me talk about some of your policy positions.
But Todd didn't actually talk about any of Ocasio-Cortez's policy positions. When he said this, what he really meant was "Let me talk about that booga-booga word 'socialism.'"
Let me talk about some of your policy positions. First, explain this to me. You were endorsed by a group, the democratic socialists. And you have embraced this label. And I think The New York Times has a headline this morning, that sort of, ‘Millennials have embraced socialism.’ What is your definition of democratic socialist?
And then more of the same:
Some Democrats are afraid of the S word. Older Americans hear socialism and they tie it to sort of ugly governments from Europe and the past. Do you -- how do you sell this to an older generation?
****
Are you a democratic socialist? Is that what you'd call yourself or you don't want that label?
And then ... one final question about potential Democratic infighting.
All right. You defeated a potential future speaker. Should Nancy Pelosi be that next speaker of the House or should be a new generation?
That's it. Seven minutes of nothing.
Ocasio-Cortez did as well as she could with what she was given, but she was treated as a freak of nature, not as a politician with ideas worth discussing.
I'd say that this is just Chuck Todd's standard M.O., but I found an interview Todd did with Republican Dave Brat immediately after his upset victory over Eric Cantor in a 2014 primary in Virginia, and here are the first three questions:
Do you believe your victory is all the immigration issue? Do you say -- if people say, "Well, you won this on immigration," you would say yes or you would say, "Well, it's more than that"?
****
Would you call yourself an anti-Wall Street Republican?
****
Where are you on the minimum wage? Do you believe in it and would you raise it?
Todd went on to ask about trade agreements. He went on to ask about arming Syrian rebels. It was a substantive interview.
The interview with Ocasio-Cortez wasn't. I don't know if that was because she's young and female, because the only thought Todd and other insiders have about Democrats is "What's wrong with them?" (see also excessive coverage of Hillary Clinton's emails), or because the issues Ocasio-Cortez talked about are simply beyond the pale for our political elite. But Todd's work in that segment was a disgrace.
The time to play hardball was 2016. Maybe there’s nothing they could have done, given that the Republicans ran the Senate. But consider this counterfactual.
I argued at the time that President Obama should have nominated not Judge Garland but Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, then 43 years old and an associate justice on the California Supreme Court. Justice Cuéllar would have been an aggressively political choice in exactly the way Judge Garland was not. As a young, impeccably credentialed Mexican-American — by far the largest of the Latino voting blocs — Justice Cuéllar would have been someone to whom the Democrats’ core constituencies would have developed an emotional attachment. Someone they’d fight for.
That, of course, is in all likelihood exactly why Mr. Obama didn’t nominate him — too political. Mr. Obama appeared to have deluded himself into thinking that if he advanced an older man (Judge Garland was 63, meaning he would not be on the court for 40 years) with something of a centrist reputation, Mitch McConnell might decide to be a reasonable fellow and give him a vote.
But as everyone else in the world knew, Senator McConnell was never going to give him a vote. And no, he wouldn’t have given Justice Cuéllar a vote either. But in that case, the refusal would have carried a higher political price. It would have energized the Latino vote. It would have made the Supreme Court a more central voting issue to Democratic constituencies than poor Judge Garland ever became.
That sounds sensible as a base-motivating strategy -- but Trump called Mexican immigrants rapists and built his campaign around a promise to construct a wall on the Mexican border. He attacked Gonzalo Curiel, a judge of Mexican descent, as well as Alicia Machado, a former Miss Universe from Venezuela. If all that wasn't enough to drive up anti-Trump turnout among Hispanics, why would a blocked Supreme Court appointment have tipped the balance?
Cuéllar doesn't appear to be a left-wing ideologue, but he'd been appointed to the California Supreme Court by Jerry Brown, whom conservatives regard as a left-wing radical, and previously worked for the Obama administration. That would have given Mitch McConnell enough of an opening to argue that he was blocking the nomination because Cuéllar is a committed hard-core progressive.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump and the right-wing noise machine would have had something to say about this:
Growing up in a hardscrabble town along the Rio Grande in Mexico, Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar crossed the border with his brother each day to attend school in Brownsville, Texas....
After living in the Mexican border town of Matamoros, where he made his daily trek to school in Texas, his family got permanent resident visas and moved to Calexico in California’s Imperial County, where he attended high school.
Cuéllar and his family were legal immigrants, but I'm sure someone on Fox News would have called him an "anchor baby," even though that's not what an "anchor baby" is. Donald Trump probably would have said the same thing.
But I also believe the choice of Cuéllar would have led to negative coverage for President Obama in the mainstream media. Here's the president of a divided country, we would have been told, and instead of offering a safe, consensus Court pick in the last year of his term, he makes a choice designed to play to his ideological base, and to the interest-group politics that plague the Democratic Party. Surely there's no more divisive force in American politics than Donald Trump, but Obama, in his own way, is being similarly divisive. Why couldn't he try to play healer by naming a middle-of-the-road justice such as ... Merrick Garland?
McConnell would have blocked Cuéllar, but he probably wouldn't have acknowledged his intention to block any nominee. Hand-wringers in the mainstream press would have argued that Obama should withdraw Cuéllar's name and nominate Garland instead. But if Obama did that, he'd have been regarded as a sellout by Hispanics and liberals. If he held firm, he'd be accused of of pandering to the base at the possible cost of a Supreme Court seat.
Okay, maybe it wouldn't have played out that way. But it could have failed the way the Garland appointment failed, as both an appointment strategy and an electoral strategy. What was really necessary was a serious focus on the court on the part of Democratic voters.
We failed. Obama might not have been able to do any better, but we could have.
