With his usual sumptuous and serrated snark, Charles P. Pierce at Esquire writes—What Do the Russians 'Have' on the Trump Family? Fear. Some thoughts on Junior's changing story:
So, Donald Trump The Second now has his ass in a crack because he went out after something that hundreds of elite political journalists have sought since at least 1991—some dirt on the Clintons. The difference, of course, is that many of the latter took meetings with every poolroom liar and state house grifter in the state of Arkansas. According to the remarkable one-two thrown by The New York Times over the weekend, Junior went spelunking for slime in an incredible universe of murderous gangsters, which shares a very big chunk of the Russian government's Venn diagram with the political elite of that country. [...]
And since I’ve got the magazine already open, here’s Pierce having his say on the hearings for the guy whom The Don has selected to be the next FBI director—Christopher Wray Signifies America's Thirst for Normalcy Or what passes for it, on both sides of the aisle:
Everybody got what they wanted. The Republicans got a nominee who likely will be confirmed, perhaps even overwhelmingly. The Democrats got Wray on the record as supporting Robert Mueller's investigation, as promising to be loyal to the Constitution and to the rule of law to the point of resigning if asked to do something untoward by the president*, and as not being a guy who drinks vodka with a guy named Boris, to borrow a phrase from Congressman Trey Gowdy, the lopheaded Javert of Benghazi. Even Gowdy is completely fed up with the kazatsky around the truth that the denizens of Camp Runamuck have been doing. After the hearing, chairman Chuck Grassley of Iowa said he wanted Paul Manafort under oath before the committee in one quick hurry.
That was the acknowledged bipartisan subtext behind Wray's hearing. Please be honest. Please give us something to believe in. Please don't be a tool of the band of thieves and boobs that the country installed in the White House. There was something child-like and adorable about the whole business, and I will grant you that Not Being Corrupt is setting the bar for an FBI director somewhere deep in the planet's mantle, but these folks will take anything they can get. Only someone who's been asleep since 1933 would take seriously the notion of the FBI as the bulwark guardian of constitutional government. Politicization of the FBI has been a bipartisan project for decades. But, again, these are not normal times. The president* who is the subject of an FBI investigation is getting to appoint the guy to replace the FBI director he fired because the previous director was getting too close on "the Russia thing." You take what you can get and you hope for the best.
Charles M. Blow at The New York Times minces no words, but in Scions and Scoundrels, he minces the Junior and Senior Trump:
Donald Trump is president because a multiethnic, forward-thinking coalition twice elected a black man president and in so doing sent pulsing waves of fear down the spine of the traditional power structure in America. Barack Obama represented a fast-approaching future in which whiteness is not synonymous with power, in which power is more widely shared. [...]
Donald Trump is president because American sexism, misogyny and patriarchy know no bounds. All politicians have flaws; Clinton had flaws. I could fill this column enumerating them. But as Bernie Sanders was fond of saying during the campaign, “On her worst day, Hillary Clinton will be an infinitely better candidate and president than the Republican candidate on his best day.” [...]
After Trump Jr. hid the meeting with the Russian lawyer, then acknowledged it, then had a rolling list of lies about the purpose of it, then was forced to release emails about the meeting that proved not only him but the entire Trump camp to be liars, he gave an interview to the Trumps’ favorite state propaganda machine, Fox News. His father chimed in on Twitter:
“My son Donald did a good job last night. He was open, transparent and innocent. This is the greatest Witch Hunt in political history. Sad!”
Everything in that tweet is not only a lie, but it is in diametrical opposition to the truth. But that is Trump’s tactic: Don’t shade the truth with a little lie; destroy the truth with an enormous lie. Consider the truth and then say the exact opposite is true. It is so disconcerting that it must be entertained and investigated because it is so foreign to honest people.
E.J. Dionne Jr. at The Washington Post writes—Get off the Trump train before it crashes:
There is good reason to feel uneasy about having anyone appointed by Trump lead the FBI at this moment. It is obvious to all except the willfully blind that we now have a president who observes none of the norms, rules or expectations of his office and will pressure anyone at any time if doing so serves his personal interests.
We also know beyond doubt that this team will lie, and lie, and lie again whenever the matter of Russia’s exertions to elect Trump and defeat Hillary Clinton arises. [...]
The revelations about Trump Jr. might have been the moment when Republican leaders at least started to grab their luggage in preparation for disembarking from the Trump train. After all, as Post blogger Greg Sargent underscored, there is evidence that the president himself cooperated in putting out the original lies about his son’s meeting. This may prove to be the wedge that opens up a larger examination of the president’s determination to cover up.
Yet the GOP is having trouble kicking its Trump habit.
Brian Beutler at The New Republic writes—Democrats should vote en masse against Trump’s FBI director nominee:
We’re a couple hours into Christopher Wray’s confirmation hearing, and so far, President Trump’s designee has delivered bog standard testimony—overly cautious, a little dodgy, no surprises. The kind of testimony that under normal circumstances would lead to a nominee’s overwhelming confirmation. But precisely because the circumstances are not ordinary, I think zero Democrats should support him, either in committee or on the Senate floor.
This isn’t meant as comment on Wray himself, who may turn out to be a perfectly fine FBI director. The problem is that because of what we know about Wray’s soon-to-be boss, there’s no way anyone in the Senate can have confidence that he’ll serve honorably. In fact, Wray himself can’t know whether he’ll serve honorably, even if he intends to. Trump tried to corrupt James Comey. He even made Comey go wobbly at a couple key junctures. But when Trump’s efforts to obstruct investigations failed, he fired Comey and lied about it. Would Wray put up Comey-levels of resistance? No one can honestly say, but the fact that Trump handpicked Wray should put everyone on alert.
Democracy Now! cablecast a segment on Christopher Wray featuring the formidable independent journalist Marcy Wheeler, who as emptywheel analyzes subjects in depth that most pundits won’t dare take a peek at. Here’s an excerpt from her Wednesday interview with Amy Goodman:
You mentioned torture. He is known to have gone to Gitmo. He is known to have been involved in torture. But the details about his role in torture are all still redacted. They're all over these ACLU documents they got in a FOIA, but we don't know what the substance of it is.
And then, finally, during the period he was the assistant attorney general for Criminal Division, he oversaw a deal with Chiquita, the banana company. Chiquita, as you recall, had been materially supporting terrorism in Colombia, both sides, so both the right-wing terrorists and the left-wing terrorists. And the company itself paid a penalty, but no Chiquita executive was held accountable for that. So, you know, it's this classic case of double standard of justice. If a young Muslim man had been found to have done the kind of material support for terrorism that Chiquita did, that young man would be facing 30 years of prison time. But when they're white Republicans, they end up facing no punishment at all for knowingly supporting terrorism. And he was very much involved in that negotiation. So I'd love to see him be asked questions about that.
Frank Rich at “The Daily Intelligencer” section of New York magazine has written one of those essays that it seems also criminal to excerpt, but the link to every word of Watching the Downfall of a Presidency in Real Time is there for everyone not on a tl;dr schedule:
There will be no single smoking gun that will bring down this White House. It will be death by firing squad — or perhaps a sequence of firing squads — as the whole story inexorably pours out of the administration’s smoldering ruins. [...] Was Little Donald trying to protect his father from even worse revelations? To take down his brother-in-law even as his brother-in-law (a possible source of the emails) tried to take down him? To deliver a message from or to the Kremlin?
For all we know, the released email chain may be only a small and relatively minor part of a much larger criminal web that stretches from Donald Trump’s tax returns to his and the Kushner family’s respective real-estate dealings in Russia and beyond. The authorities who matter — the investigators at the special counsel’s office and the FBI — are not telling us what they are up to. They may already know — or may soon know — of evidence far more incriminating than the revelations of the past 72 hours. [...]
The good news for those who want to see justice done is that this scandal not only resembles Watergate but also The Godfather — albeit a Godfather where every Corleone is a Fredo and not a single lawyer is as crafty as Tom Hagen, despite the fact that Little Donald’s private attorney has a history of defending clients from mob families. The level of stupidity of the conspirators is staggering.
Richard Wolffe at The Guardian writes—Trump Jr's message to Russian operatives? I'm open for business:
Donald Trump Jr is a curious beast. Of all the hotheads around his hotheaded father, the oldest son leads the charge in confirming the president’s very worst instincts.
If there’s a public spat with the media, you can find Trump Jr throwing his own punches. If there’s an ultra-rightwing gadfly (inside the White House or just on the internet), you can find Trump Jr heartily endorsing their comments.
And now we know: if there’s a Russian stranger offering up dirt on his political opponents, Trump Jr will happily sit down with them.
The younger Donald may have many talents. His Twitter bio cites, for instance, his position as “Boardroom Advisor on The Apprentice”. Those capital letters add a surprising degree of gravitas to this part of his résumé.
But whatever his talents, good judgment is not one of them. Nor is honesty.
Emily Atkin at The New Republic writes—The Power and Peril of “Climate Disaster Porn.” Climate scientists say New York magazine's cover story about global warming is unnecessarily apocalyptic. But can fear help the planet?
New York magazine’s latest opus on climate change, “The Uninhabitable Earth,” is a horror story. Over 7,000 words, reporter David Wallace-Wells lays out global warming’s worst-case scenario in excruciating and apocalyptic detail. If humanity does nothing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, Wallace-Wells writes, prehistoric ice could unleash million-year-old bacteria, sparking devastating disease outbreaks. Thicker, hotter air could bring a “rolling death smog that suffocates millions.” Drought, heat, and crop failure in conflict-ridden zones could create “perpetual war” and violent death. “It is, I promise, worse than you think,” he declares. “No matter how well-informed you are, you are surely not alarmed enough.”
The article has generated significant controversy, and not just from the usual denier crowd. “I am not a fan of this sort of doomist framing,” Michael Mann, a climate scientist who often warns of the potentially devastating impacts of global warming, wrote in a lengthy Facebook post. “It is important to be up front about the risks of unmitigated climate change, and I frequently criticize those who understate the risks. But there is also a danger in overstating the science in a way that presents the problem as unsolvable, and feeds a sense of doom, inevitability and hopelessness.” In a Medium post, Daniel Aldana Cohen, an assistant sociology professor at the University of Pennsylvania who works on climate politics, called the piece “climate disaster porn.”
The complaints about the science in Wallace-Wells’s article are mostly quibbles. Climate scientist Kevin Trenberth took issue with a section titled “The End of Food,” noting that while climate change could have a significant impact on food systems, food itself won’t disappear. “It is overly dramatic but has a basis in fact,” he said.
Kashana Cauley at The New York Times writes—Why Millennials Should Lead the Next Labor Movement:
The last big boom for American unions came during a period that resembles the present one: The Great Depression, like the ’08 recession, left workers deeply unsatisfied with wages and working conditions. Thanks to the New Deal’s favorable collective bargaining legislation, Americans felt free to organize unions and petition their employers for labor rights; there were 12 million labor union members by the end of World War II.
People like me, who have mental museums filled with memories of the stability that came with our parents’ union jobs, could be the perfect leaders of the next labor union renaissance. We millennials, many of whom entered the work force during the last recession, have borne the brunt of the country’s recent decline in employment quality, with lower wages, diminishing benefits and the presence of noncompete clauses that hurt even entry-level employees from finding subsequent jobs. We show higher support for unions than previous generations, and with good reason: Unionized employees typically enjoy better benefits and have made about 27 percent more than their non-unionized counterparts for roughly the last 15 years.
The union newsletters my father kept in our bathroom magazine rack may have faded, but their message — about the value of jobs that provide a fair wage, reasonable conditions and the ability to care for a family — is as timely now as it ever was.
Nancy LeTourneau at The Washington Monthly writes—Americans Struggle With Nuance, Especially on Russia:
For decades during the Cold War, Americans were fed a steady diet on the duality of good and evil when it came to this country and the Soviet Union. It led us to back questionable military adventurism in countries like Korea and Vietnam as well as more covert actions in Latin America. Tensions all over the globe were cast as proxy battles between the “evil empire” and “the city on a hill.”
There were those in this country on the left who flipped the script and viewed U.S. interventionism on behalf of corporate America as the evil, while giving the Soviet Union a pass. [...]
Flip forward to the present Trump era and all of the sudden Russia is back on our minds again. While some people like the “nostalgia voters” I described previously have flipped positions on Russia, the duality pattern of good and evil as a way to view the relationship between these two countries continues. For example, Christian conservatives see an alignment of their values with Putin’s leadership while they describe America in decline.
Some liberals like Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald have been slow to acknowledge Russia’s interference in the 2016 election because they insist on seeing the tensions between these two countries through the eyes of the Cold War and emphasize the way this country (especially our intelligence services) wound up on the wrong side of so many conflicts in the past. [...]
Barry Eidlin at Jacobin writes—Labor’s Legitimacy Crisis Under Trump: Unions are under unprecedented attack under Trump. But labor can rebuild itself—if it chooses to:
Policy-wise, Trump has run into trouble implementing much of his agenda, most notably with his failure thus far to repeal Obamacare and courts blocking his Muslim travel ban. However, he and his Republican counterparts in Congress have had much less difficulty rolling back a slew of worker protections proposed or enacted under the Obama administration. These include an effort to raise the threshold above which salaried workers cannot receive overtime pay, regulations requiring federal contractors to disclose pay equity and workplace safety violations, rules on mine safety and exposure to beryllium, and mandates for private sector employers to collect and keep accurate data on workplace injuries and illnesses. [...]
In the 2016 election, despite unions spending millions of dollars and deploying major voter mobilization programs to support Democrats, Trump won 43 percent of union households, and 37 percent of union members. In some of the decisive Rust Belt states, Trump won outright majorities of union households.
All told, it’s a grim picture. Some of the details may be new, but they are part of a decades-long pattern of union decline that is quite familiar at this point. As we enter the Trump era, we are not entering uncharted territory. We’ve been here before. [...]
Understanding and addressing the threats that the Trump administration poses to workers is a challenge. First, it requires analyzing the particularities of labor’s current challenges in the United States within the broader context of what has happened to labor movements and politics in the Global North in recent decades. Second, it requires addressing a problem that goes deeper than unions’ declining numbers and bargaining power: their eroding ability to shape and mobilize workers’ political identities.
Evan Pop at The Progressive writes—Why Politicians From Both Parties Ignore the Poor:
A higher percentage of Americans—14.8 percent—were living in poverty in 2014 than during the late 1960s and early 1970s. And extreme poverty, definedas living on less than $2 a day, has roughly doubled from 1996 to 2012, according to Kathryn Edin and H. Luke Shaefer’s book $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America.
But you wouldn’t know it from listening to the 2016 presidential campaign. Both Trump and Hillary Clinton’s economic addresses focused much more on the middle class than on the poor, a New York Times analysis found. And transcripts of the three presidential debates show the middle class was mentioned thirteen times compared to just four mentions of poverty, the poor, or low-income people.
In ignoring the poor, Clinton and Trump have plenty of company.