Tom Tomorrow on living in a post-truth world:
That’s two out of the eight. The full strip.
They would have liked him more
Dec 21st, 2016 4:08 pm | By Ophelia BensonWe were told during the campaign that there was a lot of bad stuff from Trump’s reality tv show The Apprentice, but also that nobody wanted to make it public because contracts and also because Trump is evil. Now we’re being told it again, with maybe a little bit more detail.
The actor Tom Arnold has claimed to have video of Donald Trump using racist language, obscenities and denigrating his own son in outtakes of The Apprentice.
[That is: using racist language and obscenities, and denigrating his own son]
“I have the outtakes to The Apprentice where he says every bad thing ever, every offensive, racist thing ever. It was him sitting in that chair saying the N-word, saying the C-word, calling his son a retard, just being so mean to his own children,” Arnold told the Seattle-based radio station KIRO.
The actor and comedian said a contact from the reality TV show passed him the material before last month’s election, but he did not release it because of a confidentiality clause and the expectation that Trump would lose.
Well, you know, the Access Hollywood tape didn’t keep him from being elected, so why think this would have? Apparently nothing is enough. Apparently enough people in the right states have no problem with a guy who talks about niggers and cunts and bullies his own children that there is nothing that would turn them off him.
Arnold said that the Sunday before the election Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Hollywood agent asked him to release the material on behalf of Hillary Clinton.
“I get a call from Arnold’s CAA agent, sitting next to Hillary Clinton. They said, ‘I need you to release him saying the N-word.’ I said, ‘Well, now these people – two editors and an associate producer – are scared to death. They’re scared of his people, they’re scared of they’ll never work again, there’s a $5m confidentiality agreement.”
The Guardian points out that the claims haven’t been verified.
The president-elect presented NBC’s The Apprentice from 2004-2015 before running for the White House. Rumours of damaging outtakes surfaced after outtakes from another show, Access Hollywood, leaked in October. They revealed Trump bragging about sexually assaulting women.
Bill Pruitt, a producer on the first two seasons of The Apprentice, tweeted that there were “far worse” behind-the-scenes tapes of Trump on the programme.
As a producer on seasons 1 & 2 of #theapprentice I assure you: when it comes to the #trumptapes there are far worse. #justthebegininng
— Bill Pruitt (@billpruitt) October 8, 2016
Meanwhile we’re stuck with the worst man in the world about to have a lot of executive power.
The actor said he believes the material will emerge publicly in part because Mark Cuban, a tycoon who has clashed with Trump, has offered to employ anyone who releases the tapes.
The actor said he doubted the material would have altered the election outcome. “I think if the people that like him saw him saying the N-word, he’s sitting matter-of-factly in front of, there has to be 30 people there, and he’s matter-of-factly saying all of this stuff. So I think they would have liked him more, the people. For being politically incorrect,” he said.
I think so too. I think there’s no limit. It makes me not like living here.
Thriving with high birth rates
Dec 21st, 2016 11:43 am | By Ophelia BensonLet’s read Giles Fraser’s Comment is Free piece that inspired Jesus and Mo. It is, predictably, retrograde in the extreme.
This week a doctor from north London was telling me about one of his patients, a lad of 20 who has lived in the borough of Hackney all his life. He was born here and grew up here. And he’s a bright boy – yet he speaks only a few very rudimentary words of English. The language he speaks at home and at school is Yiddish. Some may be appalled by the insularity of the community in which this young man was raised. But I admire it. In particular, I admire the resilience of a community that seeks to maintain its distinctiveness and recognises, quite rightly, that assimilation into the broader culture would mean the gradual dilution, and the eventual extinction, of its own way of life. It is no surprise to me that the ultra orthodox are thriving, with high birth rates and predictions that they will be constitute a majority of the Jewish population within 20 years. They have refused assimilation.
Notice the way he simply assumes, without argument, that “its own way of life” is good – that he doesn’t pause even to consider the possibility that it’s a way of life that is better for some of its members than others, or that it’s one that just plain frankly oppresses most of its members. There are such ways of life, but Giles Fraser ignores that obvious fact.
Then notice his ludicrous equation of “thriving” with a high birth rate and nothing else. What he means is that the ultra orthodox are increasing in number. It’s possible to have a high birth rate without thriving – and indeed for most people the higher the birth rate the less thriving there is.
Then notice his complete refusal to consider that the “lad” of 20 who lives in London but doesn’t speak English might be missing out on something.
It adds immeasurably to the richness and diversity of how life is apprehended that not everyone sees the world in the same way. It is mind-expanding to be challenged by those who commit to another way of life. What a miserably grey one-dimensional place it would be if the dominant model of middle-of-the-road liberal secular capitalism became the only acceptable way of living.
Blah blah blah blah. Easy for him – he’s not the kind of person who would be a lesser being in some of those other ways of life. I’m a woman, and I’m happy to have done without the colorful multi-dimensional life I would have had in a fanatical insular religious community, which is obviously the only kind Fraser is talking about. Hooray for miserably grey one-dimensional liberal secularism! And I suppose even miserably grey one-dimensional liberal secular capitalism, if the capitalism could be a lot more tempered with social concerns.
How does an insular religious community get high birth rates? By preventing women from doing anything other than bear and raise children. What about women who would like to do something else, in addition or instead? Nothing; they don’t have that choice; they don’t get a vote; they are subject to the rule of men. Hey it’s colorful, it’s traditional, it’s not assimilationist!
And Giles Fraser is a putz.
Evident defects of experience, judgment and character
Dec 21st, 2016 9:53 am | By Ophelia BensonMartin Wolf on democrats, demagogues and despots:
There exists no such thing as “the people”; this is an imaginary entity. There are merely citizens whose choices not only may, but surely will, change. While a way must be found to aggregate those views, it will always be defective. Ultimately, democracy, or a democratic republic, provides a way for people with different views and even cultures to live side by side in reasonable harmony.
Yet institutions matter, too, because they set the rules of the game. Institutions may also fail. The US electoral college has failed doubly. Its selection of Mr Trump neither accords with the votes cast in the election nor reflects judgment of the candidate’s merits, as desired by Alexander Hamilton. This founding father argued that the college would both guard against “the desire in foreign powers to gain an improper ascendant in our councils” and ensure “the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications”. The charges of Russian hacking and Mr Trump’s evident defects of experience, judgment and character show that the college has not proved the bulwark Mr Hamilton hoped for. It is up to other institutions — notably, Congress, courts and media — and the citizens at large now to do so.
It’s the “in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications” part that keeps surprising me afresh every morning. It surprised me when Reagan was elected and when Bush was – and the surprise now is so profound that it just never goes away. How was this possible?
Demagogues are the Achilles heel of democracy. There is even is a standard demagogic playbook. Demagogues, whether of left or right, present themselves as representatives of the common people against elites and unworthy outsiders; make a visceral connection with followers as charismatic leaders; manipulate that connection for their own advancement, frequently by lying egregiously; and threaten established rules of conduct and constraining institutions as enemies of the popular will that they embody. Mr Trump is almost a textbook demagogue.
Well, he grew up with the example of Hitler to study and absorb.
Might this be the path some of the most important western democracies are now on — above all the US, standard bearer of democracy in the 20th century? The answer is yes. It could happen even there. The core institutions of democracy do not protect themselves. They are protected by people who understand and cherish the values they embody.
And here, right now, those people are outnumbered by the other kind. I have no optimistic remarks to offer.
Gingrich’s statement that wealth trumps the rule of law
Dec 21st, 2016 9:20 am | By Ophelia BensonOk so it turns out there’s a fix – if you’re worried that Trump’s many profit-seeking ventures might conflict with his ability to do the presidenting well, just change the rules to make it so that they can’t. Yeah. By the same token, can we change the rules so that it’s ok for me to rob banks?
Newt Gingrich has a take on how Donald Trump can keep from running afoul of U.S. ethics laws: Change the ethics laws.
…
Gingrich, the former speaker of the House and one-time potential running mate for Trump, says Trump should push Congress for legislation that accounts for a billionaire businessman in the White House.
“We’ve never seen this kind of wealth in the White House, and so traditional rules don’t work,” Gingrich said Monday during an appearance on NPR’s “The Diane Rehm Show” about the president-elect’s business interests. “We’re going to have to think up a whole new approach.”
Ah, I see. So the “traditional rules” were there to cover people who don’t have financial conflicts of interest, and when there is someone who does have financial conflicts of interest, then obviously it’s time to change the rules. I hadn’t realized that. I thought the point of the rules was to avoid financial conflicts of interest, and thus are more needed, not less, when there are giant conflicts at every turn. Silly me.
And should someone in the Trump administration cross the line, Gingrich has a potential answer for that too.
“In the case of the president, he has a broad ability to organize the White House the way he wants to. He also has, frankly, the power of the pardon,” Gingrich said. “It’s a totally open power. He could simply say, ‘Look, I want them to be my advisers. I pardon them if anyone finds them to have behaved against the rules. Period. Technically, under the Constitution, he has that level of authority.”
And that would be the perfect solution in every way. It wouldn’t be or appear at all autocratic or dictatorial, nor would it appear or be the least bit corrupt. It would be fabulous to have a president milking the office for every dollar he could – it makes me proud to think of it.
“Speaker Gingrich’s statement that wealth trumps the rule of law, basically that’s what he was saying, is jaw-dropping,” added American University government professor James Thurber. “I can’t believe it. He’s a historian. He should also know that we did not want to have a king. A king in this case is somebody with a lot of money who cannot abide by the rule of law.”
Richard Painter, a former George W. Bush White House ethics lawyer, said Gingrich was off on his reading of the Constitution. “If the pardon power allows that, the pardon power allows the president to become a dictator, and even Richard Nixon had the decency to wait for his successor to hand out the pardon that he received for his illegal conduct,” Painter said. “We’re going down a very, very treacherous path if we go with what Speaker Gingrich is saying, what he is suggesting.”
A dictator is what we have. Trump will be as much of a dictator as he can. He’s not the least bit shy about it, and he’s not constrained by respect for US history or traditions or by any kind of moral scruples. He’s the self-declared pussygrabber, and he basically sees the whole world and everything in it as his pussy to grab.
Flirting with fascism
Dec 20th, 2016 5:48 pm | By Ophelia BensonTrump’s choice for national security adviser, Michael Flynn, met with the head of an Austrian anti-immigrant party that was founded by Nazis.
The leader of the Austrian far-right Freedom Party has signed what he called a cooperation agreement with Russia’s ruling party and recently met with Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, the designated national security adviser to President-elect Donald J. Trump of the United States.
Word of the agreement with Russia was the latest sign that the Kremlin is forging bonds with political parties across Europe in what some European leaders suspect is a coordinated attempt to meddle in their affairs and potentially weaken Western democracies. Many of these efforts are murky and involve obscure groups, and it is unclear whether President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has any direct involvement.
The Freedom Party leader, Heinz-Christian Strache, reported the signing of the agreement with United Russia, Mr. Putin’s party, on Monday on his Facebook page, where he also disclosed that he had visited General Flynn a few weeks ago in Trump Tower in New York.
Well, Trump is anti-immigrant, and the “Freedom Party” is anti-immigrant, so there you go.
The Freedom Party, founded in the 1950s by ex-Nazis, surged this year to nearly capture the largely ceremonial presidency of Austria in May, but was defeated in a final runoff on Dec. 4. Still, its ascendance, alongside the rise of rightist parties in many European countries and with Mr. Trump’s victory, has raised new questions about political realignment across the continent.
World. Trump’s victory isn’t on the continent, it’s on this other one over here.
Aside from sowing domestic ferment in Austria, a Freedom Party-led government would press to lift the sanctions imposed on Moscow for its 2014 seizure of Crimea and meddling in war-torn eastern Ukraine. On Facebook, Mr. Strache said Monday that having the United States and Russia stand together would be important to solving the crises in Syria and Crimea and “to get rid of the sanctions that damage the economy and are in the end useless.”
Hey, maybe we could have a Tsar again.
A grilled-cheese sandwich over and over again
Dec 20th, 2016 3:14 pm | By Ophelia BensonIt takes only seven minutes to turn Alec Baldwin into Donald Trump.
A dusting of Clinique Stay-Matte powder in honey. A hand-stitched wig. Eyebrows glued up into tiny peaks. The rest is left to Alec Baldwin: the puckered lips, a studied lumbering gait and a wariness of humanizing a man he reviles.
The transformation of Mr. Baldwin, an outspoken liberal, into the president-elect, Donald J. Trump, for his running parody on NBC’s “Saturday Night Live,” entails a tangerine hairpiece and a tricky tightrope walk. It means balancing a veteran actor’s determination to subsume his identity into a character, even as, in his offstage life, he is firm in his belief that the man about to take office is a dangerous figure.
The key to a convincing Mr. Trump, the actor said, are “puffs” — his word for the pregnant pauses in the president-elect’s speech. “I see a guy who seems to pause and dig for the more precise and better language he wants to use, and never finds it.”
Haaaaaaaa exactly. He never finds it because he never had it. He knows how to “make deals” but not how to think or be eloquent.
“It’s the same dish — it’s a grilled-cheese sandwich rhetorically over and over again.”
See Trump couldn’t make that joke or that metaphor, because he doesn’t have that kind of intelligence. There are other kinds of intelligence, certainly, but he doesn’t have those either. He has cunning, but that’s all.
Release your tax returns and I'll stop.
Ha— ABFoundation (@ABFalecbaldwin) December 4, 2016
His Trump is as much censure as impersonation. He does not write the sketches. He is paid $1,400 for each appearance on the show, he said.
“I’m not interested much by what’s inside him,” he said, but in how he moves and takes up space. Mr. Baldwin then amplifies the gestures, and distills them. An emphatic wave becomes a goofy “wax-on, wax-off” movement, he said, the simple hand motion reducing a candidate to an essence: pitchman.
There isn’t anything inside him. I’ve seldom seen anyone so empty in my life.
It diverges from the best practices
Dec 20th, 2016 3:00 pm | By Ophelia BensonThe Trumps still haven’t grasped the basic norm that they’re not supposed to use the presidency as an excellent chance to make money by selling access to their wonderful selves.
Last week, Eric Trump tried auctioning a coffee date with his sister Ivanka to raise money for a children’s hospital. Now, Eric and Donald Trump Jr. are named as part of a nonprofit venture that offered the chance to rub elbows with their father during inauguration weekend and go hunting or fishing with the sons in exchange for $1 million donations that would go to conservation charities.
It’s a wonder they haven’t set up a tent on 57th street selling lemonade and/or a chance to be grabbed by their daddy.
The two previous presidents, Barack Obama and George W. Bush, expressly forbade immediate family members from such fundraising activities to avoid the appearance of selling access.
“We kept it simple. We did not allow the first family to be auctioned off, which is what is happening here,” said Norman Eisen, who served as White House chief ethics counselor as Obama took office in 2009.
Richard Painter, who filled a similar role for Bush, said the White House “strongly discouraged” the president, his family and top aides from fundraising for charities, and avoided altogether charity fundraising that came with any access to those people.
Both said that while there’s nothing explicitly illegal about the charity fundraising, it diverges from the best practices of previous White House administrations.
But the Trumps just don’t have that kind of finely-tuned perception of the sleazy. The sleazy is their oxygen, their soft pillow at night, their warm bath after a walk in the snow.
Painter and Eisen — the former White House counselors, who have been critical of Trump’s business entanglements and failure to publicly address them so far — said part of the problem with these charity fundraisers is that the president-elect has yet to explain which of his family members will be involved in the government and which will stay at the helm of his international business empire.
They praised the Trumps for making quick adjustments after seeing bad press about the fundraising but said that doesn’t eliminate the need for Trump to develop and follow hard-and-fast rules as previous presidents did.
“How many times are they going to have to stub their toe?” Eisen said. “If you continually have to reverse course and improvise, what is the point at which it becomes a sign of recklessness instead of willingness to do good will?”
I know! I know the answer! We’ve passed that point.
Guest post: The only appropriate reaction is to charge at the danger with your hair on fire
Dec 20th, 2016 2:35 pm | By Ophelia BensonOriginally a comment by quixote on Somewhat laid-back.
I grew up in a Russian family, Russian was my first language, and I’ve lived in the US since forever, but post-Joe McCarthy. I’ve always thought the “better dead than Red” testerical nonsense in this country to be evidence of softening of the brain.
I mean, the Russians’ idea of a national sport is watching a chess match. Weird, yes. Dangerous, no.
And now this. This, take it from one who knows, is different. There’s a guy who made his bones running the KGB. The KGB, godammit! Americans seem to have no concept what that means. You’ve got to be some kind of intelligent extraterrestrial fungus without a shred of human feeling to rise to the top of that heap. That’s Putin.
And that’s the guy who’s messing with democracies all over the Western world, not just the US, although that’s bad enough.
That’s an existential threat on the order of climate change to the US way of life. The only appropriate reaction is to charge at the danger with your hair on fire.
Instead we have Obama letting us know that he did tell Putin to “cut it out.” Oh, and time for vacay now. Not his problem. So long, suckers.
This is beyond bizarre.
Somewhat laid-back
Dec 20th, 2016 11:37 am | By Ophelia BensonI’m still wondering why the official reaction to Putin’s role in the recent US election is so…mellow. The Guardian reports that so is former Defense Secretary Robert Gates.
The former CIA director and defense secretary Robert Gates has criticised the Obama administration and congressional leaders of both parties for a “somewhat laid-back” response to the discovery of Russian interference in the US presidential election.
Not a thing to be laid-back about, wouldn’t you think?
Speaking to NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, Gates said a “thinly disguised” operation by Russia had aimed to undermine the credibility of the American election and was to weaken Hillary Clinton.
“Given the unprecedented nature of it and the magnitude of the effort, I think people seem to have been somewhat laid-back about it,” he said.
…
Gates said he was unsure if the aim was to swing the election to Trump.
“Whether it was intended to help one or other candidate, I don’t know,” he said. “But I think it clearly was aimed at discrediting our elections and I think it was aimed certainly at weakening Mrs Clinton.”
If it aimed to weaken Clinton then it necessarily aimed to swing the election to Trump. You can’t do the first without doing the second. You can’t throw a lighted match onto a gasoline-soaked pile of junk without aiming to start a fire.
Gates worked for Republican and Democratic presidents, as CIA director under George HW Bush and secretary of defense under George W Bush and Obama. Asked by NBC host Chuck Todd if the White House, leaders of both parties and Trump had shown enough urgency, he answered flatly: “No.”
…
On Friday, Obama told a press conference his administration had not acted during the election because it did not want to appear partisan. It has been reported that the White House expected Hillary Clinton to win.
Because it what?
He’s a Democrat! He’s not a Republican! He campaigned for Clinton! Not appearing “partisan” is not an option in that situation.
Gates said Russia had carried out “a thinly disguised, covert operation intended to discredit the American election and to basically allow the Russians to communicate to the rest of the world that our elections are corrupt, incompetent, rigged, whatever, and therefore no more honest than anybody else’s in the world, including theirs”.
And to make us look like pathetic bumbling idiots, and by god he succeeded.
Bailing
Dec 20th, 2016 10:59 am | By Ophelia BensonAnother item to be filed under “Terrifying” –
[Part of me wants to turn my back, ignore the whole thing, maybe revert to being a literature nerd…but the rest of me feels the need to know the truth, if only for planning reasons. Stockpile? Find out the lethal dose of something? These questions don’t answer themselves.]
The White House is struggling to prevent a crippling exodus of foreign policy staffers eager to leave before the arrival of the Trump administration, according to current and former officials.
The top level officials in the National Security Council (NSC) are political appointees who have to submit resignations and leave in a normal transition. The rest of the 400 NSC staff are career civil servants on secondment from other departments. An unusual number of these more junior officials are now looking to depart.
The reasons are obvious. It’s not because it’s Republicans, it’s because it’s people who are programmatically opposed to expertise and knowledge and basic competence. It’s people who skip their security briefings. Not that the Guardian says that; I’m assuming it – but it’s not usual for civil servants to leave when an administration changes, so the explanation has to be something other than “wrong party.” The wild disregard for relevant expertise is the one that jumps out at me. In what part of government do you really not want wild-eyed amateurs in charge? National security.
Many are concerned by a proliferation of reports about the incoming national security adviser, Michael Flynn. On Wednesday the Washington Post reported that Flynn had improperly shared classified information with foreign military officers. On the same day, CNN reported that the former Defense Intelligence Agency chief had this week deleted a tweet he had sent out a few days before the election that linked to a fake news story suggesting Hillary Clinton took part in crimes against children.
Flynn fits the wild-eyed amateur pattern. He’s a military guy, not an intelligence expert, and he’s reckless as fuck. It’s amateurish to put him in that job and he’ll be an amateur in that job.
“Career people are looking get out and go back to their agencies and pressure is being put on them to get them to stay. There is concern there will be a half-empty NSC by the time the new administration arrives, which no one wants,” said one official.
The official added that the “landing team” sent to the NSC – Trump representatives who are supposed to prepare for the handover to Trump appointees – have been focused on issues of process and how the office functions, rather than issues of substance involving an explanation of current national security threats and the state of the world the new administration will inherit.
There it is again – they don’t know the subject and they don’t care that they don’t know the subject. They’re anti-knowledge pro-business hacks, and they don’t belong there.
The Trump transition team in New York did not respond to a request for comment. The current NSC spokesman, Ned Price, said in an email: “The administration has undertaken its national security transition planning with the utmost rigour and seriousness in order to effect the most seamless and responsible transition.”
Price added: “We have been working since this spring to assemble a broad variety of transition material focused on critical national security challenges as well as NSC organizational issues and the NSC-led interagency policy process. The NSC staff also is offering to the incoming team in-person briefings and discussions with current NSC leadership and staff, and is coordinating statutorily required interagency homeland security exercises that will include both incoming and outgoing national security leadership from departments and agencies, as well as senior career public servants who will provide continuity through the transition.”
You know who Trump’s Ned Price will be? Fox News commentator Monica Crowley.
Yes, really.
It is unclear how much contact there is between the embryonic policy teams in New York and the landing teams in Washington, however.
“Most of the folks I have talked to at the three agencies – DoD (Department of Defense), state and White House – claim they have little or no interaction with these teams to date,” Julianne Smith, a former deputy national security adviser to Vice-president Joe Biden, said.
“There are very important substantive handoffs that need to be occurring that are in fact not happening. That is creating added concern about the career civil servants who are in these agencies, wondering what they are in for.”
I think it’s pretty clear what they’re in for. They’re in for being bossed by a group of people who have no clue what they’re doing and don’t care that they have no clue.
Staffers at the State Department are apparently hoping for the best.
Reports from the state department suggest most of its staff are taking a wait-and-see approach to the prospect of having the ExxonMobil oil chief executive, Rex Tillerson, at the helm. On Thursday, most of the Democrats on the House foreign affairs committee wrote to the current secretary of state, John Kerry, offering his staff protection against a “witch-hunt” by the new administration against civil servants who worked on Obama policies Trump wants to reverse. The letter was sent after the energy department refused to hand over to the Trump transition team a list of names of staffers who had worked on climate change.
Drip drip drip, the poison enters and spreads.
Government by Twitter
Dec 20th, 2016 10:18 am | By Ophelia BensonSo another feature of Trump world is that he tweets shit that’s wrong, and that he would know was wrong if he took the security briefings he’s supposed to take. But it’s no biggy, because it’s only China.
Donald Trump launched his Twitter campaign against China’s seizure of a U.S. Navy research submersible last week to great fanfare ― and, as it turns out, hours after the crisis had already been defused.
It’s unclear whether the president-elect or his aides knew that fact ― it would have been included in the intelligence briefing available to him each morning ― before he sent out his misspelled missive of outrage at 7:30 a.m. Saturday.
“China steals United States Navy research drone in international waters ― rips it out of water and takes it to China in unpresidented act,” Trump wrote. He deleted that version and replaced it with “unprecedented” spelled correctly at 8:57 a.m.
But even his first version came four hours after U.S. Ambassador to China Max Baucus was informed that the Chinese navy had agreed to return the “underwater unmanned vehicle.”
To be fair – the fact that China agreed to give it back didn’t alter the fact that China had taken it.
But all the same – do we want a president who tweets smack about other countries right after he rolls out of bed in the morning and without talking to anyone? Like, the State Department or intelligence officials? No, we don’t.
Trump transition team spokesman Jason Miller was quick to take credit for his boss when news broke that China had agreed to return the device. At 11:54 a.m., he tweeted: “@realdonaldtrump gets it done,” and attached a link to an article in The Hill about the resolution of the incident. At 6:52 p.m., Miller tweeted a link to another story in The Hill, this one about his earlier tweet taking credit for Trump’s initial tweet.
Seriously? They claimed Trump had anything to do with it?
The encounter’s resolution, though, resulted not from Trump’s 140-character snippets of anger, but days of traditional diplomacy. The Chinese vessel had taken the submersible on Thursday just as the USNS Bowditch was preparing to retrieve it about 60 miles northwest of the Philippines’ Subic Bay in the South China Sea.
Baucus, a former Democratic senator from Montana, lodged his first protest that day, as did U.S. military representatives to their Chinese counterparts. Late Saturday afternoon Beijing time ― pre-dawn 3:30 a.m. in Washington ― Baucus relayed word that China had agreed to return the device, according to the State Department. That handover took place Tuesday, near the same location as the original incident.
I wonder how many wars we’ll be involved in by, say, mid-February.
Maximum sleaze
Dec 19th, 2016 4:57 pm | By Ophelia BensonGood lord.
The Embassy of Kuwait allegedly cancelled a contract with a Washington, D.C. hotel days after the presidential election, citing political pressure to hold its National Day celebration at the Trump International Hotel instead.
A source tells ThinkProgress that the Kuwaiti embassy, which has regularly held the event at the Four Seasons in Georgetown, abruptly canceled its reservation after members of the Trump Organization pressured the ambassador to hold the event at the hotel owned by the president-elect. The source, who has direct knowledge of the arrangements between the hotels and the embassy, spoke to ThinkProgress on the condition of anonymity because the individual was not authorized to speak publicly. ThinkProgress was also able to review documentary evidence confirming the source’s account.
In the early fall, the Kuwaiti Embassy signed a contract with the Four Seasons. But after the election, members of the Trump Organization contacted the Ambassador of Kuwait, Salem Al-Sabah, and encouraged him to move his event to Trump’s D.C. hotel, the source said.
After the election. After the election, members of Trump’s company pressured a foreign government to spend money on their product at the expense of a rival company. Jimmy Carter sold his god damn peanut farm, and Trump and his peons do this!
Kuwait has now signed a contract with the Trump International Hotel, the source said, adding that a representative with the embassy described the decision as political. Invitations to the event are typically sent out in January.
Abdulaziz Alqadfan, First Secretary of the Embassy of Kuwait, told ThinkProgress last week that he couldn’t “confirm or deny” that the National Day event would be held at the Trump Hotel. Reached again Monday afternoon, Alqadfan did not offer any comment. An email sent directly to Ambassador Al-Sabah was not immediately returned.
Well, eventually it will be confirmed or denied, because otherwise people won’t know where to go.
The apparent move by the Kuwaiti Embassy appears to be an effort to gain favor with president-elect through his business entanglements, and it appears to show Trump’s company leveraging his position as president-elect to extract payments from a foreign government. The latter, according to top legal experts, would be unconstitutional and could ultimately constitute an impeachable offense.
If the Republicans in Congress have enough integrity. That seems highly unlikely.
The Trump Organization’s pressure campaign has not been limited to Kuwait. The country was targeted as part of a larger effort by the Trump Organization to lure lucrative diplomats to the Trump International Hotel.
It’s working.
Kuwait cancelled with the Four Seasons a few days after the Trump International Hotel held an event for diplomats, reported the Washington Post, encouraging them to patronize the hotel.
I remember blogging that story in the Post. It was a startling news item.
Less than two weeks after that event, Politico reported that Bahrain, another Middle Eastern monarchy, would host its National Day reception at the Trump hotel on December 7.
That is so fucking sleazy. Look at it. The name of the god damn president attached to the hotel where a foreign country is throwing a bash. It’s revolting.
Congressman Jim McGovern (D-MA) harshly criticized the Bahrain event, writing in a letter to Trump that he should “reject all business income from the Bahraini monarchy and all other foreign governments.” McGovern wrote that Trump’s “private commercial dealings with a repressive governments” endanger the fundamental principle that the president will “act solely in our country’s interests.”
The Republic of Azerbaijan also recently co-hosted a Hanukkah party at the Trump hotel, despite the anti-Semitic undertones of the Trump campaign. Rabbi Rick Jacobs, president of the Union for Reform Judaism, blasted the decision as “tone deaf at best, naked sycophancy at worst.”
Ugh, god, this is making me feel sick.
Trump contributed to the impression that his businesses and administration are intertwined by naming three of his children to his transition team, while also saying that the children will manage his companies.
Trump planned to explain in a press conference this month how his businesses would operate after he assumes office, but he has postponed the announcement indefinitely.
Ivanka, Eric, and Donald Jr., meanwhile, have all been featured in public transition events. The transition team handed out a photo of Ivanka meeting with the Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, and a summit with a group of top American tech leaders held last week featured all three Trump children perched at the head of the table.
Was that appropriate? Having his children / company managers sitting in on that meeting with the tech people? Of course not. He’s not supposed to share his presidency with his kids, and he’s not supposed to mix his business with his presidency. It’s inappropriate from both directions. It’s grotesque. IT IS GROTESQUE.
They should not have been there.
Although the president is exempt from some conflict-of-interest laws, the Congressional Research Service recently identified nine federal conflict of interest and ethics provisions that could apply to the president.
One looms large over the apparent hotel deal with the Kuwaitis: The Emoluments Clause of the Constitution, which prohibits the president from receiving money from a foreign government or head of state.
According to Democratic and Republican legal experts, such a payment is not only unconstitutional, it’s an impeachable offense.
Putin wanted to make the US a laughing stock. He won.
If you support tolerance you don’t support Trump
Dec 19th, 2016 4:29 pm | By Ophelia BensonThere will be resistance however.
IBM employees are taking a public stand following a personal pitch to Donald Trump from CEO Ginni Rometty and the company’s initial refusal to rule out participating in the creation of a national Muslim registry. In November, Rometty wrote Trump directly, congratulating him on his electoral victory and detailing various services the company could sell his administration. The letter was published on an internal IBM blog along with a personal note from Rometty to her enormous global staff. “As IBMers, we believe that innovation improves the human condition. … We support, tolerance, diversity, the development of expertise, and the open exchange of ideas,” she wrote in the context of lending material support to a man who won the election by rejecting all of those values. Employee comments were a mix of support and horror. Now, some of those who were horrified are going public, denouncing Rometty’s letter and asserting “our right to refuse participation in any U.S. government contracts that violate constitutionally protected civil liberties.” The IBMPetition.org effort has been spearheaded in part by IBM cybersecurity engineer Daniel Hanley, who told The Intercept he started organizing with his coworkers after reading Rometty’s letter. “I was shocked, of course,” Hanley said, “because IBM has purported to espouse diversity and inclusion, and yet here’s Ginni Rometty in an unqualified way reaching out to an admin whose electoral success was based on racist programs.”
I’m somewhat shocked that IBM refused to rule out participating in the creation of a national Muslim registry.
Resist.
This is what happens in a dictatorship, not a democracy
Dec 19th, 2016 3:56 pm | By Ophelia BensonAri Berman makes clear what an outrage the North Carolina coup is.
What began as a special legislative session to help victims of Hurricane Matthew quickly turned into something very different when the GOP-controlled legislature hastily passed a series of bills stripping incoming Democratic Governor Roy Cooper of his constitutional powers. Most noteworthy, Cooper will no longer get to appoint a majority of members to the state board of elections or 100 county boards of elections, and the state board will be chaired by a Republican in all even-numbered years—i.e., any time there’s a major congressional, statewide, or presidential election. With Republicans holding a super-majority in the legislature, this is a guaranteed prelude to future voter-suppression efforts. The bill also makes it harder for the state Supreme Court, which has a 4-3 Democratic majority, to review future challenges to election-law changes. Outgoing Republican Governor Pat McCrory signed the bill 48 hours after it was first introduced.
They’re hell-bent on suppressing the black vote in North Carolina, and the Shelby ruling will make it impossible to use the Voting Rights Act to stop them. We’re going fucking backwards.
Ari says they’re turning what was one of the most progressive states in the South into a laboratory for voter suppression.
The legislative coup is merely the latest in a series of outrageous and illegal actions by the North Carolina GOP to undermine democracy in the state.
First, after taking power after the 2010 election for the first time since 1870, North Carolina Republicans gerrymandered legislative and congressional districts by resegregating the state politically in violation of the Voting Rights Act. Federal courts have already struck down two congressional districts for racial gerrymandering and ordered new elections for 28 General Assembly districts next year. In other words, the legislature that stripped power from the next Democratic governor was elected by illegal means.
Second, a month after the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in June 2013, the North Carolina legislature passed the country’s worst voter-suppression law. The “monster” bill required strict voter ID, cut early voting, and eliminated same-day registration, out-of-precinct voting, and preregistration for 16- and 17-year-olds.
They made voting as difficult as possible, and guess who is targeted when legislatures do that.
The pattern in North Carolina is clear: When Republicans win, they suppress the Democratic vote to solidify power in future elections. And when they lose, they rig the rules to prevent their opponents from being able to fairly exercise and maintain power. This is what happens in a dictatorship, not a democracy. And it’s a preview of what’s to come in Trump’s America.
I’ve written that Trump is the greatest threat to American democracy in our lifetime because, unlike his Democratic or Republican predecessors, he has little respect for basic democratic institutions like a free press or a fair election. But Trump is also such a threat because his party, as we’re seeing in North Carolina, has displayed the same brazen disregard for the will of the people. And now it will control the White House, the Congress, the courts, and two-thirds of state legislatures.
It’s terrifying.
Breitscheidplatz
Dec 19th, 2016 3:16 pm | By Ophelia BensonUpdate: it’s now 12 people killed.
An articulated lorry has ploughed into a busy Christmas market in the heart of Berlin, killing nine people and injuring many more, police say.
Police say they suspect it was deliberate. Video shows stalls knocked over and people lying injured.
A suspicious person was arrested nearby, while what police describe as a passenger was found dead, police say.
The market is at Breitscheidplatz, close to the Kurfuerstendamm, the main shopping street in the city’s west.
It’s also right near the Berlin zoo. I once knew some elephant keepers at the Berlin Zoo.
Here’s the Facebook safety check page, in case you have friends there. I’ve heard from a couple of friends.
According to the DPA news agency, police believe the lorry drove 50-80 metres (54-87 yards) through the market area during the incident, which occurred at 20:14 local time (19:14 GMT).
“We are investigating whether it was a terror attack but do not yet know what was behind it,” a police spokesman told AFP news agency.
“One person was detained. The cab of the truck was found empty.”
That’s a hell of a distance to drive by accident, plus there’s the fact that it happened in Nice as well as other places in France, plus there have been news reports that this is a recommended method for freelance mass murderers. No need to mess with explosives or guns, just get a truck and drive it into a crowded open air spot.
Images of the lorry show it was registered in neighbouring Poland and Polish media are suggesting it may have been stolen earlier on Monday.
The Polish haulage company which uses the vehicle has reportedly been unable to get in touch with the original driver, a Polish national, since 16:00 (15:00 GMT).
So the driver is probably dead.
A British eyewitness, Mike Fox, told The Associated Press at the scene that the large lorry had missed him by only about 3m as it drove into the market, tearing through tables and wooden stands.
“It was definitely deliberate,” said the tourist, visiting from Birmingham.
He said he had helped people who appeared to have broken limbs, and that others were trapped under Christmas stands.
Allahu akbar.
Another irregular verb
Dec 19th, 2016 11:24 am | By Ophelia BensonRichard Rothstein points out that social engineering is not just when people try to undo housing segregation – it’s also when people segregate housing in the first place.
President-elect Donald Trump proposes to nominate Ben Carson to head the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Mr. Carson has expressed opposition to the Obama administration’s new HUD requirement that cities and suburbs develop plans to end their segregation or face possible loss of federal funds. He calls this “social engineering,” and says that such well-intentioned programs have unintended consequences that their proponents later come to regret. Instead, he says, emphasis should be placed on revitalizing distressed minority neighborhoods in central cities.
What Mr. Carson’s view ignores is that the racial segregation of every metropolitan area in the nation is also the result of “social engineering”—the purposeful efforts of federal, state, and local governments to create and enforce the residential separation of the races. What the Obama administration has begun are plans to undo this social engineering. Failing to continue these plans doesn’t avoid social engineering—it perpetuates it.
Carson grew up in Detroit and claims that that gives him insight into depressed neighborhoods, but Rothstein says that knowing how they got that way is crucial. It didn’t just happen; it was made to happen.
In 1948-49, the Detroit City Council held hearings on 12 proposed public housing projects in outlying (predominantly white) areas. Mayor Cobo vetoed all 12; only housing in predominantly black areas was approved. At the time, there was an enormous civilian housing shortage, and both whites and blacks needed public housing. Had the rejected sites been approved, families of both races would have resided in public housing located throughout the city, setting an integrated pattern that might well persist to this day.
But the mayor actively prevented that integration from happening. Social engineering.
During this period, one developer applied to the federal government for financing to construct housing in Detroit that would be restricted to white families only. Fearing possible future integration, the Federal Housing Administration approved his application only on condition that he construct a concrete wall, six feet high and a foot thick, to separate the proposed development from a neighborhood where African Americans lived.
Uh…wow. A wall. An actual wall. Like Trump’s wall to protect us from bad hombres. Like the Berlin wall. President Trump, tear down that wall.
The Feds built a bomber plant in Willow Run during the war, and built housing for the workers there. The housing was restricted to white people, and so were jobs at the bomber plant. That’s your social engineering right there.
The city of Hamtramck basically ethnically cleansed itself of African Americans.
Public officials in Detroit suburbs adopted explicit policies to exclude African Americans, preventing them from leaving the neighborhoods where Ben Carson grew up. In 1956, for example, the mayor of Dearborn, a suburb to the west of Detroit, announced, “Negroes can’t get in here. Every time we hear of a Negro moving in, we respond quicker than you do to a fire. That’s generally known.” One black family that purchased a Dearborn home in defiance of the city policy found its gas turned off and garbage uncollected, and finally moved out. The mayor of Warren, a suburb to the north of Detroit, announced “I won’t tolerate Warren being used as a guinea pig for integration experiments.” Other suburbs maintained similar policies, social engineering the concentration of African Americans in the city itself.
Note the echo of Carson’s thinking: that integration is an “experiment” while segregation is not.
Policies like these not only segregated the Detroit metropolitan area, but every metropolitan area in the nation. Certainly, private prejudice was involved, as well as private discrimination. But without the social engineering of federal, state, and local government, the nation would have a much more integrated landscape than it does today, and the distressed inner city conditions that Ben Carson proposes to address would be, at the least, much less severe.
Is there any chance that Ben Carson will ever pay any attention to Richard Rothstein? Probably not.
In Ankara
Dec 19th, 2016 10:28 am | By Ophelia BensonThe Russian ambassador in Turkey was killed in Ankara today.
A gunman in Turkey wearing a business suit and tie opened fire Monday on Russia’s ambassador, killing the diplomat and wounding several others at photo exhibit in the Turkish capital, officials said. The gunman was killed as panicked people scattered for cover in the gallery.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack. But video posted on social media purported to show a Turkish-speaking attacker decrying violence in Syria, where Russia is a key backer of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
…
Russia and Turkey, a foe of Assad, recently joined to broker a deal to evacuate civilians and rebel fighters from the last opposition enclaves in Aleppo, a major Syrian city that has been under relentless attacks from Syrian forces and their allies.
“Allah Akbar! Do not forget Aleppo!” said the gunman, according to the widely circulated video. “Do not forget Syria! Do not forget Aleppo! Do not forget Syria! As long as our lands are not safe, you will not be safe!
The authenticity of the video could not be independently confirmed.
Meanwhile, in Sarajevo, Archduke Franz-Ferdinand stepped into his car…
Take thy reward
Dec 19th, 2016 9:37 am | By Ophelia BensonTrump’s choice for very right-wing ambassador to Israel is a lawyer who helped Trump make out like a bandit from his company that went bankrupt. Ben Mathis-Lilley at Slate has the story:
In 1995, a company called Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts went public on the New York Stock Exchange. Trump was its chairman and, beginning in 2000, its CEO. The company lost money every year of its existence and went bankrupt in 2004. Its total 1995–2004 losses: $647 million. When it went bankrupt, bondholders had to settle for less than what they were owed. Employees lost their jobs and contractors went unpaid. IPO investors who held on until the end ultimately lost 90 cents for every dollar invested.
Other high-end casino and resort companies did well in the same period. And, bonus, Donald Trump did well from his bankrupt company, even as everyone else took a bath.
His contract kept him well-compensated personally even as he burdened the company itself with unsustainable debt. Like his presidential campaign, meanwhile, Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts spent big sums of (other people’s) money on other Trumpworld properties—at one point estimating in a public filing, for example, that it had paid $470,000 for “Trump Ice”-brand bottled water in one year. Fortune estimates that on the whole, Trump Hotels—and its zombie post-bankruptcy successor, Trump Entertainment Resorts, which itself went bankrupt in 2009—paid Donald Trump a total of $82 million.
No doubt he’ll do the same for us!
Trump’s bankruptcy lawyer, throughout all of this, was David Friedman. It was Friedman who filed for the bankruptcies in 2004 and 2009 and negotiated with the creditors to whom Trump Hotels had gotten in too deep. Neither Trump nor Friedman, however, was ever accused of doing anything improper or illegal in relation to Trump Hotels. Running a company into the ground and then getting to keep all of the enormous windfall you reaped while doing so, as we all learned after the 2008 bank crashes, is often just the way things are done.
And the way rich people get richer, which is the very essence of a flourishing democracy, right?
In other words, Friedman did a pretty good job on Trump’s behalf. Now, if confirmed, he gets a big reward: Becoming the United States’ ambassador to one of the world’s most explosive geopolitical hot spots despite a total lack of diplomatic experience and a history of making incendiary statements.
If this were a tv serial, it would be fascinating to watch. As reality, it’s more of a nightmare.
