On Saturday, it felt as if two major storms were hanging in the air. One was Hurricane Barry, creeping slowly toward the Louisiana coast with buckets full of rain for an already sodden area. The other storm was hanging over cities across the nation, in the form of threatened ICE raids on thousands of immigrant families.
The feeling of impending doom from the two situations was eerily the same. In New Orleans, shopkeepers piled up sandbags in front of doorways and grocery shelves emptied as residents hunkered down. Stores also saw activity in other cities, as those under a different kind of dark cloud closed their doors, pulled down the shades, and held their family close, terrified over the prospect of a knock—or a kick—at the front door.
Though most of the day, it seemed that the lingering threat from ICE continued to linger. On Friday evening, The Wall Street Journal reported that agents had made their first foray to homes in New York City, but when agents arrived in Harlem and Brooklyn without warrants, the residences they visited stayed resolutely shut. So the agents retreated. For now.
The raids had been slated to begin in ten cities: Miami, Atlanta, Chicago, Baltimore, Denver, Houston, Los Angeles, New Orleans, New York and San Francisco. Those cities saw protests on Saturday, but as of midnight on the East Coast, it didn’t seem that any of them had yet experienced anything like large scale raids. Whether that means ICE has decided to delay operations due to the widespread protests, active participation of neighborhood groups, and continued pushback from local officials, or it means that ICE is rolling out any moment now … isn’t clear.
At this point, what remains of Barry is deep into southern Louisiana, bringing the promised deluge and threatening both local floods and a broader disaster. But somehow, it seems like the nicer, and certainly the more predictable, of the two storms.
Come on. Let’s read pundits.
Jonathan Chait on Donald Trump being stupid about being called stupid.
New York Magazine
Tim Alberta’s new book, American Carnage, quotes Paul Ryan making several unflattering comments about President Trump. … You might be wondering if Trump is taking the insults well. The answer is no, Trump is not taking it well.
In a lengthy rant to reporters at the White House today that was unhinged even by Trumpian standards, the president made several attacks on the former Speaker of the House. Employing his favorite method of turning the insult around on the insulter, Trump claimed it was Ryan who had no knowledge of the government: “Frankly, he was a baby, he didn’t know what he was doing.”
Gentlemen, please don’t fight. You’re both perfectly ignorant of the way government should work. it’s a tie.
More strangely, Trump’s indictment of Ryan’s tenure includes lambasting him for failing to get subpoenas: “He was no leader … he wouldn’t get subpoenas … when Nancy Pelosi hands them out like they’re cookies.”
I’m sure that Trump is actually complaining that Ryan didn’t hand out subpoenas to … Hillary. And Barack Obama. And random black people.
And most strangely of all, Trump insinuated Ryan is only criticizing him because he is accepting secret bribes. “For him to be going out and opening his mouth is pretty incredible. But maybe he gets paid.”
It’s true. Everyone who criticizes Trump gets paid. I’m just waiting to cash in all my chits at the “wait a second, don’t Republican billionaires have all the money” bank.
Paul Krugman on Trump’s attempts to manipulate economic conditions for his benefit
New York Times
Before going to the White House, Donald Trump demanded that the Fed raise interest rates despite high unemployment and low inflation. Now he’s demanding rate cuts, even though the unemployment rate is much lower and inflation at least a bit higher. To be fair, there is a real economic argument for rate cuts as insurance against a possible slowdown. But it’s clear that Trump’s motives are and always have been purely political: he wanted the Fed to hurt President Obama, and now he wants it to boost his own reelection chances.
After the shocking news that Trump is willing to damage the economy for millions in order to make a perceived enemy look bad, or risk an inflationary spiral for momentary gain at the polls, Krugman spends most of his column on how supposedly true believers in the gold standard (also ready as “economic idiots”) are willing to set their supposed positions aside for Trump. Like every other Republican.
There is overwhelming consensus among professional economists that a return to the gold standard would be a bad idea. That’s not supposition: Chicago’s Booth School, which surveys a broad bipartisan group of economists on various topics, found literally zero support for the gold standard.
Which would seem to make a lock for Trump’s new platform.
Art Cullen feels like that we really, really don’t need any more candidates.
Storm Lake Times
Tom Steyer’s television ads urging the impeachment of President Trump are tremendous. So were his ads on climate change. The California wealth manager should continue to sink his billions into electing progressives to Congress, to getting people to listen on climate change, and to fumigate President Trump from the White House. He should not run for President himself. Enough, already.
I would like to endorse the position of Daily Kos Communications Director Carolyn Fiddler who has long expressed the thought that bored white billionaires would be much better off attempting to become Batman than president. Think about it, Tom. Think of the gadgets. Think of the cool cave.
The problem for many of us is that there are too many outstanding Democrats in the field. We were sad to see Eric Swalwell (whose father was an old friend in Algona) drop from the race just this week. He said it was so crowded he could not find a way to stand out. A popular two-term governor in John Hickenlooper, or a good senator in Kirsten Gillibrand, can barely get oxygen.
Renée Graham says that everyone knew what Jeffery Epstein was doing, and looked away.
Boston Globe
According to published reports, Jeffrey Epstein, a man of seemingly vast and certainly mysterious wealth, had associates who helped recruit teenage girls into his lair of trafficking and sexual assault. He also had friends who knew Epstein was a registered sex offender and accused pedophile, but treated the allegations as little more than a nasty habit best ignored.
In the toniest circles of Manhattan and Palm Beach, the rich and famous flocked to his lavish homes for parties, flew on his planes, and went scuba diving off the coast of his private Caribbean islands. Befriended by former and future presidents, Epstein made contributions to politicians, and burnished his reputation as a philanthropist with major donations to top-notch universities, including Harvard and MIT.
Everyone knew. And except for Julie K. Brown, the intrepid Miami Herald reporter who pursued the Epstein story for two years, few gave a damn.
Brown doesn’t deserve a Pulitzer for this work. She deserves a medal of valor.
Like Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, and R. Kelly, Epstein was suspected of sexual misconduct, and enjoyed relative impunity for decades. Even when he was arrested for multiple counts of unlawful sex acts with a minor in 2006, Epstein received extraordinary leniency in a secret deal brokered by Alexander Acosta, then a US attorney for the Southern District of Florida, and now labor secretary in the Trump administration. (He announced Friday that he would resign July 19.)
The rich are different. In all bad ways.
Michelle Celarier talked to some actual hedge-fund managers about fake fund manager Epstein.
New York Magazine
Long before Jeffrey Epstein pleaded guilty to prostitution charges in Florida more than a decade ago, his fellow Palm Beach resident and hedge-fund manager Douglas Kass was intrigued by the local gossip about his neighbor.
“I’m hearing about the parties, hearing about a guy who’s throwing money around,” says Kass, president of Seabreeze Partners Management. While stories about young girls swarming Epstein’s waterfront mansion and the sex parties he hosted for the rich and powerful were the talk of the town, Kass was more focused on how this obscure person, rumored to be managing billions of dollars, had become so wealthy without much of a track record.
Epstein was somehow making billions, or at least, many millions, managing funds with only a handful of workers, without an office on Wall Street, without working with other brokers, and with no visible clients. That’s not just a mystery, it’s the kind of thing that should have set off a million alarm bells.
Naturally, this air of mystery has especially piqued the interest of real-life, non-pretend hedge-funders. If this guy wasn’t playing their game — and they seem pretty sure he was not — what game was he playing?
The whole article is very, very worth reading. The underlying suspicion is that Epstein was running an empire that was based on investing other people’s money in bog standard items like treasury bonds or index funds and then skimming something off the top for himself. Why would his fellow billionaires sign up for that service? Because it came with teenage girls sprinkled on top—which gave Epstein leverage. Honestly, there seems like about a thousand people who should go down before this is over. And that might be a conservative estimate.
Aisha Sultan on why sex trafficking, Epstein, and enablers.
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
It seemed like a low-level risk to warn our girls about sex trafficking in this middle class, suburban town in the middle of America.’
In fact, it’s a bigger deal than many parents realize. The St. Louis County Police Department investigated 191 cases of human trafficking between 2016 and 2018. The St. Louis metro area is often used as a “stop-off” point because of its location in the center of the country. Some groups of children are far more vulnerable, such as homeless and runaway teens, but anyone can get entrapped. Recruitment typically takes place over a period of time and involves brainwashing, manipulation and grooming tactics before the abuse begins.
Sultan gives a brief summary of the history of Epstein, the charges against them, and his social circle that’s a good reference if there’s anyone still out there not familiar with this guy.
Epstein’s social circles reached the highest levels of our government. President Donald Trump had called him a “terrific guy” he had known for 15 years and told New York Magazine in 2002 that “(Epstein’s) a lot of fun to be with … It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”
Former President Bill Clinton also had previously praised Epstein and had traveled on his private plane on multiple occasions. In the past several days, both men have distanced themselves from Epstein.
Senators knew about the secret sweetheart deal when they approved Acosta as Trump’s labor secretary. Trump announced on Friday that Acosta would resign because of the controversy.
That last point is a good one. For all the shouting this past week, Senators knew about Acosta’s role in this affair when they voted him in.
Michael Tomasky on how Trump is cheering on the fight between Pelosi and Ocasio-Cortez
Daily Beast
What do we make of this Democratic civil war that’s exploded over the past few days? A lot of things, but before we get to all the other things, let’s be clear about the main thing: It’s a disaster in the making. If it continues and metastasizes, it will reelect Donald Trump.
I have a problem. I didn’t even know this war was underway. Why did no one tell me? Has someone already picked sides? That’s it, isn’t it? Everyone got picked but me …
No. Seriously, what Tomasky is describing as a “civil war” seem like something that’s only warlike if you’re getting your news from Fox and Breitbart. Otherwise, it seems like ... a civil disagreement. As in actually civil. People still have those, don’t they?
Most of the country wants to vote against Trump. There are only a small number of scenarios under which he can win. The main one? A split Democratic Party. That all but guarantees four more years of Trump, and recriminations that we don’t even want to begin to contemplate.
How doesn’t a disagreement between Pelosi and AOC generate a split in the party you can drive a Trump through? I’m definitely in the only thing to fear is lots of unnecessary fear camp on this one.
Will Bunch was at Netroots Nation … so how did that go?
Philadelphia Inquirer
In the confusing, thorny maze that is the way out for defeating President Trump in 2020, there are two very different ways to solve the puzzle. Do Democrats stay in the fast-moving lane that won back the House in 2018 — energizing both suburban and urban women, who elected a record number of candidates who look like them? What about the road not taken — making a play for mostly white working-class men who liked Barack Obama’s hope in 2012 but preferred Trump’s anger in 2016.
The two meandering paths for returning Democrats to the White House nearly collided in Philadelphia on Thursday — coming within about 50 yards of each other at Netroots Nation, the yearly big-deal confab of political progressives that started in the gloaming of the George W. Bush-Iraq War years and has finally hit Philly right when the party is deeply divided over how to handle Trump.
Again, I’m having trouble spotting this divide. I’d say the answer to the “split” above was simply to do both. The only problem comes with the idea that you have to choose.
Down one corridor of the cavernous Pennsylvania Convention Center, a big room that was packed mostly with women attendees for a panel called “Women Marched, Ran and Won: What’s Next?” cheered as speakers proclaimed it wasn’t enough for #MeToo and female empowerment movements to claim the occasional scalp like ousted CBS head and sex-abuse poster boy Les Moonves, that it’s time to tackle the broader, smothering system of oppression. …
I had to wonder how that message would have played around the corner at a panel called “How to Win Back Blue-Collar Workers” where union activists from the Teamsters and left-wing radio talkers (yes, that’s a thing) insisted that easing up on cultural issues like guns and making it all about bread-and-butter economic issues can maybe get back the working men and women who defected to Trump in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin and handed him 2016′s Electoral College.
I have to wonder where the conflict is.
Nancy LeTourneau kicks back against the idea that Trump is somehow getting stronger.
Washington Monthly
It would be interesting to know whether David Ignatius stands by his latest column in which he warns Democrats that Trump is on a roll.
The agonizing fact for Democrats this summer is that President Trump appears to be gaining ground on domestic and foreign policy, while his potential challengers are quarreling and mostly spinning their wheels.
Trump is taunting allies and defying Congress — and seemingly getting away with it. He isn’t just rewriting the political rulebook, he’s tossing it aside.
Ignatius probably wrote that before the president backed off of his insistence that the citizenship question be added to the census and his labor secretary resigned over the lenient plea agreement he negotiated with a pedophile. But to make his point, Ignatius points to the the fact that Trump’s approval rating increased recently (even though 53 percent of the public still disapproves), the economy is doing all right, his appalling immigration policies don’t seem to be hurting him politically, and he is “getting away” with his disruptive foreign policy.
My question for Ignatius would be: “Given that Trump’s approval rating has always jumped around from the upper 30’s to the low 40’s, what has changed that leads you to believe that the president is all of the sudden ‘on a roll?'” It is pretty much the same roll he’s been on for the past three years.
Yeah, but Ignatius, like a lot of other writers this week, knows we’re coming into campaign season. And that requires drama, dammit, drama!
Connie Schultz on what we can learn from Megan Rapinoe.
Creators Syndicate
First, Megan Rapinoe was on the receiving end of a three-tweet rant from Donald Trump. He was livid that she had told Sports Illustrated that she would not visit the White House as long as he's in it.
She flicked that gnat off her shoulder, and then she and her teammates on the U.S. Women's National Soccer Team went on to win their fourth World Cup title, in France.
Now, she's back home, and on Tuesday night, she sat for an interview with CNN's Anderson Cooper. "There's a good chance the president is watching this interview, or will watch this interview," Cooper said. "What is your message to the president?"
And that's when 34-year-old Rapinoe gave the 73-year-old president of the United States a good talking-to about how to be presidential. … In a calm and strong voice, Rapinoe laid it out for him:
"I think that I would say that your message is excluding people. You're excluding me. You're excluding people that look like me. You're excluding people of color. You're excluding, you know, Americans that maybe support you.
I’m going to stop there, because I can’t quote all that Rapinoe said without adding a big chunk. But you can continue by following the link. And hey, maybe we could fit in one more candidate. When is Rapinoe’s birthday?
Leonard Pitts with a reminder for those on both sides of the ICE raids.
Miami Herald
A man named Josef Buzhminski told this story at the trial of Adolf Eichmann.
It happened on July 27, 1942, at the fence of the Jewish ghetto in Przemysl, Poland. Buzhminski was watching from hiding as an SS man named Kidash seized a Jewish woman and her 18-month-old son. “She held the baby in her arms,” Buzhminski said, “and began asking for mercy that she be shot first and leave the baby alive.
“From behind the fence,” he continued, “there were Poles who raised their hands ready to catch the baby. She was about to hand the baby over to the Poles. He took the baby from her arms and shot her twice and then took the baby into his hands and tore him as one would tear a rag.”
That’s just one story — one wrenching, awful story. There are 6 million more like it — 11 million if you count beyond the Jewish victims.
We are not there. But Germany was not there in 1938.
Understand that and you understand the fury over William Latson. He was the principal of Spanish River Community High School in Boca Raton who, in April, 2018, had a just-revealed email exchange with an unidentified mother about the Holocaust. As first reported in The Palm Beach Post, she had written to ask how that genocide is taught. Latson assured her the school has many Holocaust education activities, but added that they’re not mandatory — “not forced upon individuals as we all have the same rights but not all the same beliefs.”
Stunned, the mother pointed out the obvious: The Holocaust is not a “belief.” Latson was unmoved, reminding her that “not everyone believes the Holocaust happened,” and claiming that he is required to be “politically neutral.”
“I can’t say the Holocaust is a factual, historical event because I am not in a position to do so as a school district employee,” he said.
That’s just one of the ways you get there.
The raids still don’t seem to have come. But there’s a feeling in the air. Like thunder.