Earlier this week, Donald Trump announced that after an exhaustive search, an expert team of experts had determined that the only suitable place to hold next year’s G-7 summit was … at the place Trump suggested before he even left the last G-7 summit, his Doral golf resort in Florida. How many other sites did they examine? At least ten, said acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney. And those ten were? Uh … moving on, did you hear how we quid pro quo’d the heck out of Ukraine? Oh, yeah. Let’s talk about that.
But despite Mulvaney’s assurances that they had looked everywhere for a thing called a “hotel,” and that it was just not possible to find anywhere better than Trump’s financially challenged golf course for an event in which no one plays golf, people still displayed shocking levels of doubt. Almost as if Trump was selecting the option that would add even more millions to the millions of taxpayer dollars he’s made from his own golf trips. Finally after people had the gall to complain, Trump got on Twitter Saturday night to tell America the date was off.
According to Trump, he was going to do it all for “no profit” or even “no cost,” both of which were terms he didn’t use a single time before announcing that Doral was off the table. Instead, he declared that, sniff, maybe the G-7 could be held at Camp David. Even though “the press hates going there” and Donald Trump is all about making the press happy. And this is all just because some people had the nerve to complain about this very generous thing Trump was doing for us all. So, America, this is what we can’t have nice things … that make Donald Trump tens of millions of dollars.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump’s U.K. clone came before Parliament on Saturday to show off his last minute Brexit deal. Boris Johnson seemed to believe that, faced with the idea of taking his deal or watching the nation crash through the Halloween barrier into no-deal land, people would line up to admit that he had been right all along. He even gave a magnanimous speech in which he did not rub people’s noses in this “victory” that only he could achieve. Much.
Only things did not quite turn out as Johnson expected. Before his plan could even come to a vote, MPs found another option by pressing an amendment that would force the six-time-loser PM to go back to the E.U. and beg for still more time. Johnson declared that he could not, would not do it. And then Parliament passed the amendment by a wide margin. At the end of the day, Johnson finally gave in to the little thing called law that declared he would so send a note to the E.U. But to show what he thought of it all, he declared that he would not sign the note. So there. If all this sounds both confusing and ridiculous, it’s worse than that—watch this BBC explainer to get a sense of how bad it really was.
There may never have been a day that better demonstrated how the entire Western world is being run by three-year-olds.
Jonathan Chait wrote his bit before the latest news, but that’s okay.
New York Magazine
President Trump’s supporters have responded to his ongoing fire-hose stream of moral and criminal offenses in three basic ways: pretending it doesn’t exist, whataboutism, and outright support. Until now, Trump’s habit of using his office for personal profit has generally inspired response No. 1, pretending it doesn’t exist. But now the Federalist, a site that (as its stuffy name implies) once aspired to intellectual respectability but has defined itself as the Trumpiest of Trumpsites, has again broken new ground. It has a column supporting Trump’s decision to host the 2020 G7 summit at his own property.
The column, by David Marcus, does not merely defend Trump’s choice as legal or unimpeachable. Marcus praises the president for his shrewdness. Marcus argues that hosting the summit at a Trump property gives the president a “home field advantage” when negotiating with his counterparts.
There is no cause for alarm. By now, Marcus has surely finished a new column explaining why Trump’s decision to not hold the meeting at Doral is even more shrewd, and having it elsewhere will allow Trump to sneak up on other nations. Like a ninja. An orange ninja.
To be sure, the summit was always going to be held in the president’s home country. But Marcus discerns a particular advantage in situating it at a property he personally owns. “To be able to scuff the table with the heel of your shoe while sitting back relaxed? That’s a hell of a thing,” admired Marcus. “To be able to point to everything and say, That’s mine.”
Don’t worry. Donald Trump does that wherever he is.
Will Bunch on how conservatives are making environmental protesting a felony.
Philadelphia Inquirer
It’s hardly a shock that environmentalists wanted to protest against Louisiana’s Bayou Bridge pipeline while it was still under construction last year. The 167-mile-long project from Energy Transfer Partners — the builders behind the Dakota Access pipeline, where Native American protests made national news in 2016 — cut through the Bayou State’s most sensitive wetlands, ripping out the cypress trees where birds once nested and creating massive dirt piles that blocked the flow of streams.
But there was a surprise — a big one — one morning in August 2018 for three out-of-state environmental activists who tried to paddle their kayaks out to see the remote area where work was taking place. A fleet of fan boats — manned by a private security force, composed mostly of off-duty area lawmen — appeared from nowhere and forced the three onshore, where they were arrested, handcuffed, jailed, and charged with a felony rap they didn’t even know existed.
That’s because Louisiana lawmakers quietly and quickly passed a new law extending a “critical infrastructure” definition to include the river that the pipeline would cross. And this isn’t the only such instance, or even the worst.
Now that crusade — to make it even more of a crime to protest at pipelines, fracking rigs, or more than a dozen other places that lawmakers cite as “critical infrastructure” — is coming to Pennsylvania. Again.
And as usual, this push is coming with plenty of talk about those dangerous “eco-terrorists” who have sure been dangerous in TV shows and films and in conservative speeches. But not in real life.
Joan Walsh on the Elizabeth Warren pile-on from the fourth debate.
The Nation
Elizabeth Warren made her debut as a Democratic front-runner at Tuesday’s debate, and it wasn’t her best performance. She wore a target, and many of her competitors came right at it. Warren needs some better answers—on Medicare for All, especially—but some of her thirsty rivals made themselves look bad, too, so she survived.
Call me a nitpicker, but I continue to believe Warren has to acknowledge that her Medicare for All plan will raise taxes even on middle-class people. She can quickly explain that away by showing how much less such folks will pay, overall, in medical expenses. Warren backers I respect love to see her thumb her nose at MSM nostrums like this—and they could be right. But her refusal to admit the tax increase that even Senator Bernie Sanders acknowledges—and hell, she’s supporting Bernie’s bill!—is starting to make her look dodgy.
Or, it could be that she doesn’t want to provide the one line that half the political reporters in America seem to be just dying to write, or step into the entirely visible trap that people keep setting at her feet.
Warren began her explanation of Medicare for All by saying, “Let me be clear.” So far, so good: “Let me be clear on this: Costs will go up on the wealthy, they will go up for corporations, and costs on the middle class will go down.”
I know all of that is true, but she was asked about taxes.
Yep. And if she had simply said “Yes, taxes will go up...” how much of what she said after that would have made it to paper?
Micheal Tomasky was deeply, deeply depressed by debate number four.
Daily Beast
That was the most boring presidential debate I can ever remember. People I was following on Twitter were groaning all night.
Oh, maybe there were worse ones, I don’t know. But as I think back over the years, there was always one really interesting human being on the stage, a Jesse Jackson (first major African-American candidate, and could always turn an unexpected phrase) or a Bill Clinton (that weird, cagey charisma). OK, 2000 was a little bit of a black hole, but there were only two candidates. Howard Dean (fun to watch). Barack Obama (Barack Obama).*
I don’t know. I’ve found myself watching video of Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford debating several times. Not because either of them was super interesting, but because those debates were undertaken with such seriousness and both men had clearly spent an extended time preparing and working out complete answers … if feels like watching something of a miracle when compared to the “you have 70 seconds to spit something out” of the debates so far in this cycle.
And so I watch these Democratic debates and all I can think about is, Trump’s going to win. Not that he’s a great debater. He’s horrible. And who knows. By then, we may know so much about White House criminality that the Democrat could stand up there on a debate stage and read the phone book and everything would be fine. (Are there still phone books, by the way? Would be a pity to see that metaphor die, it’s a good one.)
Forget the phone book. Let’s just kill the first sentence in that paragraph. And yes, I get that other people are still held to standards higher than Donald Trump, who is held to no standard at all. But if we need to get rid of something, let’s work on that.
Nancy LeTourneau says a sad farewell to the Kurdish women who helped defeat ISIS.
Washington Monthly
Much has been written about Donald Trump’s betrayal of the Kurds in Syria. But a recent tweet that showed up in my timeline brought it all home for me in a new way.
I don’t know why that statue should make the rubble against which it stands even more heartbreaking. But it does.
In 2014, ISIS launched an attack on Kobani, which is part of Rojava, leading to a battle that lasted for the next nine months. The city was effectively demolished, with thousands killed and hundreds of thousands becoming refugees. The statue in the picture above was sculpted by a Kurdish artist from Iraq, Zirak Mira, as a monument to the role of Kurdish female fighters in the war against terrorism. It sits in a part of Kobani that remains in ruins as an open museum to the public.
During the siege of Kobani, U.S. forces bombed ISIS positions, while the Kurds battled them on the ground. It was the headquarters of that U.S. operation that was bombed by Turkey last Friday. As Lara Seligman reported, Turkey claims that was an accident, but a “senior administration official told Foreign Policy the attack was a deliberate attempt to push U.S. forces out of the town.”
Don’t worry. Donald Trump stepped in and got those women … a five day get out or die ultimatum.
Charles Pierce is solidly on the Hillary side of this “discussion.”
Esquire
On Friday, Hillary Rodham Clinton, who finally, after long years, has discovered that she has no fcks left to give, warned the country to beware that the Russians seem to be "grooming" a Democratic candidate—cough Tulsi Gabbard cough—for the purposes of ratfcking the 2020 election. She also stated flatly her belief that Jill Stein had been a Russian asset in 2016, a position reinforced by the now-famous photo of Stein's sharing a table with Vladimir Putin in Moscow. Gabbard, however, leapt to the electric Twitter machine to wax wroth.
And I think we can skip over the tweet exchange, since it’s been pretty hard to miss already over the last couple of days. Let’s just move to Pierce’s conclusion.
Gabbard's continued presence in the Democratic field is preposterous. She's polling in the lowest of the low single digits. Her positions on a number of issues have no constituency within the Democratic Party, and very little of one in the general electorate. HRC, on the other hand, no matter what you may think of her, got more votes for president than any Democratic candidate in American history. If she wants to continue to step out on issues within in the party, she's more than entitled to do so. In any case, if there's one person qualified to judge the effectiveness of foreign-influenced straw candidates, it's Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Writers don’t usually have a microphone, but I’m assuming Pierce found one and dropped it anyway.
Phillip Rucker on the weakness of Donald Trump.
Washington Post
President Trump, whose paramount concern long has been showing strength, has entered the most challenging stretch of his term, weakened on virtually every front and in danger of being forced from office as the impeachment inquiry intensifies.
Trump now finds himself mired in a season of weakness. Foreign leaders feel emboldened to reject his pleas or to contradict him. Officials inside his administration are openly defying his wishes by participating in the impeachment probe. Federal courts have ruled against him. Republican lawmakers are criticizing him. He has lost control over major conservative media organs. Polling shows that Americans increasingly disapprove of his job performance and support his impeachment.
It’s not so much that Trump has to show strength as that he wants to be seen as unforgiving, remorseless, and bullying. Those are what he thinks of as his good qualities. Being an ass is not the same thing as being strong, but it’s amazing how many people don’t get that.
in a rare concession to his critics, Trump announced late Saturday that he no longer plans to host the Group of Seven summit of world leaders at his Florida golf club, folding after two days of intense criticism over having picked his own property as the venue for a diplomatic gathering.
And that’s just one of three giant blunders this week, none of which is the reason Trump is in the early stages of impeachment.
Nancy Pelosi on the most important event of the week.
Washington Post
This week, the people of Baltimore, the Congress and the United States lost a voice of unsurpassed moral clarity and truth: our beloved Chairman Elijah E. Cummings.
In the House, Elijah was our North Star. He was a leader of towering character and integrity, who pushed the Congress and country always to rise to a higher purpose, reminding us why we are here. As he said whenever he saw that we were not living up to our Founders’ vision for America and meeting the needs of our children for the future: “We are better than this.”
Elijah’s story was the story of the United States: A son of sharecroppers who became Baptist preachers, he dedicated his life to advancing justice, liberty, fairness and human dignity. He believed in the promise of America because he had lived it. As chairman of the Committee on Oversight and Reform, he used his gavel to restore integrity, accountability and honesty to Washington so that government would be a force for good for working people, ensuring that all could experience the American Dream as he did. …
In Congress, we will miss his wisdom, his warm friendship and his great humanity. In Baltimore, we will miss our champion. May it be a comfort to his wife, Maya, his three children and his entire family that so many mourn their loss and are praying for them at this sad time.
God truly blessed the United States with the life and leadership of Elijah Cummings.
This should be fun …