[y66]

barmar, on 2019-June-07, 08:58, said:

Why is this a problem?

I seem to recall that California has long been a leader in auto emissions standards. And car makers simply adopted their standards across the board, because it was cheaper to have one design than try to take advantage of lower standards in other states.

Is Trump trying to prohibit state-level emissions standards that are more progressive than the federal standards?

Trump is seeking to lower *federal* standards to levels that California will not accept hence the risk of litigation and the nightmare scenario for automakers aka a bifurcated market.

[Winstonm]

Bits and pieces from Greg Sargant at the WaPo, writing about the coordination among the president, Laura Igraham, and Sean Hannity:

Quote

It should be impossible to watch these diatribes in full without quickly realizing that this isn’t ordinary political dishonesty but rather is something much more insidious. What’s notable is the sheer comprehensiveness of the effort to create an alternate set of realities whose departure from the known facts seemingly aims to be absolute and unbridgeable.

Or, collusion, as it is more commonly known.

Quote

But this absurd duality should be understood as a feature of this kind of Trumpian disinformation. It won’t do to note its self-contradictory nature. The whole point is to wield this kind of absurdity as an instrument of power. It’s to use an alternate reality to supplant and extinguish good faith efforts to discern actual reality — to blot out the possibility of shared agreement on facts that are in front of all our noses through the sheer insistence that the alternate reality is supreme. The alt-reality doesn’t have to be proved as the true one; just established as the dominant one.

Disinformation and ‘constitutional rot’

Some call it gaslighting.

Quote

Don’t take my word for it. With Trump’s lies and distortions now numbering over 10,000, serious political theorists have noted this aspect of Trumpian disinformation. See this Jacob Levy essay, which argues that Trump’s autocratic reshaping of reality on multiple fronts depends on the delegitimization of other institutional authority.


Or see this Jack Balkin essay on “constitutional rot.” One key sign of our breakdown, Balkin argues, is the fact that Trump has the backing of what can only be understood as “domestic propaganda machines."

Orwell called it NewSpeak

Quote

Such propaganda, Balkin notes, “undermines the crucial role of deliberation and the search for truth in a democracy. Propaganda attempts to put everything in dispute, so that nothing can be established as true.” It “undermines shared criteria of reasoning, good faith attempts at deliberation, and mutual accommodation between political opponents in democracies.”

It’s impossible to watch Trump’s Fox interview and not come away convinced that, by instinct or design, this is what Trump is up to.

Quote

Trump actually does face the real possibility of prosecution for campaign finance crimes after he leaves office. He did engage in extensive, documented wrongdoing and (but for Justice Department policy) likely criminal obstruction of justice. The Trump/Hannity narrative seeks to expunge these facts precisely through the act of trying to overwhelm reality with falsehoods.

Quote

Yet little of this understanding of Trumpian disinformation, or the deep asymmetries created by it, has penetrated to the broader media. As The Post’s Paul Farhi aptly reports, many in the media are still shy about accurately characterizing Trump’s serial lying. Read press critic Jay Rosen’s acid thread in response, which argues that false balance in the face of this deep disinformation-driven imbalance is itself profoundly distortive.

Indeed, it’s a particularly galling irony that the refusal to treat this disinformation for what it is itself helps contribute to a badly misleading picture of one of the most basic realities about our current political moment. We are still not reckoning adequately with what’s happening.

That our democracy is actually in the balance, holding on by a thread.

[y66]

re: It should be impossible to watch these diatribes in full without quickly realizing that this isn’t ordinary political dishonesty but rather is something much more insidious:

Good to see Sargent calling Trump's massive propaganda and disinformation campaign what it is and pointing out that we are still not reckoning adequately with what’s happening. Can the wc get this going the other way? No pressure.

[Winstonm]

y66, on 2019-June-07, 15:41, said:

re: It should be impossible to watch these diatribes in full without quickly realizing that this isn’t ordinary political dishonesty but rather is something much more insidious:

Good to see Sargent calling Trump's massive propaganda and disinformation campaign what it is and pointing out that we are still not reckoning adequately with what’s happening. Can the wc get this going the other way? No pressure.

The WaCo rather than the WaPo - is that your plan?

[Winstonm]

In case no one is taking note, bond prices continue to rise while yields continue to fall and the 3-month/10-year is in a strong inversion (2.28%-2.09%). Interesting to note that jobs report showed only 75,000 were added when 175,000 were expected. Does the bond market know something no one else does?

[Winstonm]

From the NYT: (numbering added)

Quote

4 Disturbing Details You May Have Missed in the Mueller Report
Some troubling-to-outright-damning episodes have been lost in the noise around its release.

By Quinta Jurecic
Ms. Jurecic is the managing editor of Lawfare.


After two years of silence, the special counsel Robert Mueller recently made his first public remarks — to complain, it seemed, that no one had read his report. “We chose those words carefully,” Mr. Mueller said, “and the work speaks for itself.”

But at a dense 440-plus pages, if the report speaks for itself, it takes a great deal of time and focus to listen to what it has to say. Mr. Mueller tells a complicated story of “multiple, systematic” efforts at Russian election interference from which the Trump campaign was eager to benefit. And he describes a president eager to shut down an investigation into his own abusive conduct. This is far from, as the president put it, “no collusion, no obstruction.”

The document is packed with even more details, ranging from the troubling to the outright damning. Yet these have been lost in the flurry of discussion around the report’s release.

Even the most attentive reader could have trouble keeping track of the report’s loose ends and dropped subplots. Here are four of the most surprising details that you might have missed — and none of them are favorable to the president


1) Coordinating with WikiLeaks?
(VOLUME I, PP. 52-54)

How much did Mr. Trump personally know about Russian efforts to assist his campaign, and when did he know it? Three pages of heavily redacted text provide hints.

Rick Gates, a top adviser, said that the campaign was “planning a press strategy, a communications campaign, and messaging based on the possible release” of Hillary Clinton emails by WikiLeaks. After receiving a call during a drive to La Guardia Airport, Mr. Trump “told Gates that more releases of damaging information would be coming.” The details are redacted, and the redactions are marked “harm to ongoing matter,” perhaps related to the prosecution of Roger Stone. Mr. Mueller has alleged that Mr. Stone, a Trump affiliate, sought to obtain information about WikiLeaks’ planned release of anti-Clinton material and pass that information to the campaign.

Mr. Mueller found “insufficient evidence” to charge a criminal conspiracy between the Russian government and the campaign. But the campaign was clearly keeping a close eye on Russia-linked hacking and leaking efforts and expecting to benefit from them.

This section suggests that Mr. Trump may have been in the loop on the campaign’s efforts to get a heads-up about what WikiLeaks had planned. And that is a very long way from “no collusion.”

2) Looking for Clinton’s “missing” emails
(VOLUME I, PP. 49, 62-63)

At a July 27, 2016, campaign rally, Mr. Trump said, “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing” — referring to Clinton emails reportedly stored on a personal server. “Within approximately five hours” of Mr. Trump’s remarks, according to the Mueller report, Russian military intelligence began a cyberattack against “Clinton’s personal office.”


After his July 27 comment, the report states, Mr. Trump “asked individuals affiliated with his campaign to find the deleted Clinton emails” — including Michael Flynn.

Mr. Flynn, in turn, reached out to a Republican Senate staffer and a party operative who worked separately to obtain the emails. The operative raised money to support the project, which he marketed as “coordinated with the Trump campaign,” and told others that he was in communication with Russian hackers who had access to emails he believed were Mrs. Clinton’s. But Mr. Mueller “did not establish” that the operative had actually made contact with any real Russian hackers. And while the staffer obtained emails, an effort funded by a businessman close to the campaign found that they were not really Mrs. Clinton’s either.

“Collusion” has no legal definition. But if the term means working behind the scenes with Russian actors to obtain hacked information damaging to Mrs. Clinton, then this section of the report describes just that — collusion that took place at Mr. Trump’s request. It just wasn’t successful.

3) Sharing polling data
(VOLUME I, PP. 130-131, 140)

Throughout his time as the Trump campaign chairman, Paul Manafort stayed in touch with a Russian man named Konstantin Kilimnik, whom, according to the Mueller report, “the F.B.I. assesses to have ties to Russian intelligence.” Mr. Gates, Mr. Manafort’s deputy, believed Mr. Kilimnik to be a “spy.” — a view, the report says, that he shared with Mr. Manafort.

While managing the campaign, Mr. Manafort told Mr. Gates to share “internal polling data” private to the campaign with Mr. Kilimnik, so he could share it with Ukrainian oligarchs and a Russian oligarch. Mr. Gates sent Mr. Kilimnik the data regularly, deleting the WhatsApp messages after he did so. In an in-person meeting with Mr. Kilimnik, Mr. Manafort shared more information about the campaign’s election plans and polling, including information about “battleground states” that would be key to Mr. Trump’s election.

Mr. Gates likewise told the special counsel that Mr. Manafort believed sharing the polling data with Mr. Kilimnik, who passed it to a Russian oligarch, Oleg Deripaska, would help resolve a financial dispute between Mr. Manafort and the Russian oligarch. The report also states that Mr. Manafort hoped his campaign work would help him recover money he was owed by the other oligarchs. Yet Mr. Mueller “could not reliably determine Manafort’s purpose” in sharing the data with Mr. Kilimnik.

This remains one of the more troubling loose ends in the report.

4) Obstructing justice
(VOLUME II, PP. 90-93)

A month after Mr. Mueller’s appointment, President Trump’s ordered his former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski — who was not a government employee — to convey a message to Attorney General Jeff Sessions, telling him to constrain the scope of the Mueller investigation. Mr. Sessions, Mr. Trump said, was to deliver a speech restricting the investigation to only future election interference. Mr. Lewandowski never delivered the message


Simply firing Mr. Mueller would have been within the president’s power. Asking a private citizen to deliver that message, however, moves this outside the realm of the president’s management of the executive branch and toward clearer-cut obstruction of justice. Attorney General Bill Barr’s view that the president did not obstruct justice is informed by his argument that presidential conduct authorized by the Constitution cannot constitute obstruction. But this does not address conduct, like the order to Mr. Lewandowski, that took place outside the scope of the Constitution.

“Substantial evidence,” Mr. Mueller writes, “indicates that the president’s effort to have Sessions limit the scope of the special counsel’s investigation to future election interference was intended to prevent further investigative scrutiny of the president’s and his campaign’s conduct.”

The longer one spends with the report, the more disturbing a document it is, despite the initial fuzziness of some of Mr. Mueller’s conclusions. The instances here make up only about 12 pages out of a report that spans hundreds. Mr. Mueller makes clear that the Russian government interfered in the 2016 election with the goal of supporting Mr. Trump; that the Trump campaign sought to benefit from that interference; and that the president worked to put to an end to the office investigating the interference effort. Questions remain, but the most important question is whether this conduct should be acceptable.

[PassedOut]

barmar, on 2019-June-07, 08:58, said:

Why is this a problem?

I seem to recall that California has long been a leader in auto emissions standards. And car makers simply adopted their standards across the board, because it was cheaper to have one design than try to take advantage of lower standards in other states.

Is Trump trying to prohibit state-level emissions standards that are more progressive than the federal standards?

Yes.

Quote

The administration’s plan to freeze federal fuel-efficiency requirements for six years and end California’s authority to set its own standards has injected uncertainty into the auto market and raised the prospect of a drawn-out legal fight between federal officials and the nation’s biggest state.

The Environmental Protection Agency and the Transportation Department are poised to finalize a proposal this summer that would set federal car standards at roughly 37 miles per gallon, rather than raising them to nearly 51 miles per gallon for 2025 models. The rule would also revoke California’s existing waiver to set its own rules under the Clean Air Act, a practice the federal government has sanctioned for decades.

Trump is surely a pinhead, and the people manipulating him are evil. The Trump disaster is getting more and more dangerous.

[hrothgar]

PassedOut, on 2019-June-07, 18:59, said:

Yes.


Trump is surely a pinhead, and the people manipulating him are evil. The Trump disaster is getting more and more dangerous.

I really wish that the Democrats would simply announce that everything Trump does will be sterilized once the Democrats take back the White House and the Senate...

Those changes in gas standards? Gone...
Withdrawing from NAFTA? Gone...
Did you buy a mineral right on a National Park? Its being confiscated...

This should help provide the markets with a bit more certainty.

[Winstonm]

Yes, but there is so much more to undo. From Daily Beast:

Quote

LOS ANGELES, California—The five men who were arrested as teenagers, falsely convicted, sentenced to years in prison, and eventually exonerated for the rape and assault of a white jogger in Central Park in 1989, have never been keen on the name “Central Park Five.” They avoid the phrase when possible. It was not a moniker they chose, but one given to them by the press: by outlets that regularly printed their legal names, though all five were underage; by tabloids that often failed to write “allegedly” when describing their charges; by papers that ran full-page ads from a playboy real estate developer with latent political ambitions, attacking them in huge black font: “BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY.”

Friday afternoon, at the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California’s 25th Annual Luncheon, where the five men were being honored, much care was taken to orient the celebration away from that phrase, and toward the five people it had obscured: Korey Wise, Antron McCray, Yusef Salaam, Kevin Richardson, and Raymond Santana.

As actor Michael B. Jordan introduced the five honorees, he retold the famous story for the crowd. “It was East Coast news, but a familiar story to anyone growing up black in America,” Jordan said. “We didn’t know their names, but we knew their ages: 15, 14, 16—the same ages we were. They could be us.”

“In 1989, police found the body of a young white woman in Central Park, covered in blood, and left for dead after a sexual assault. Weeks later, Trisha Meili awakened from a coma. She was unable to recall her attack. But the police had already been rounding up suspects, questioning black and brown teenagers who had been in Central Park that night. They focused their interrogation tactics on five boys in particular. Four of those teenagers did not know each other when they were arrested. I repeat, four of those boys did not know each other when they were arrested.”

The men had come to receive the inaugural Roger Baldwin Courage Award, and to accept another on behalf of director Ava DuVernay, whose recent Netflix series When They See Us retold their decades-long legal battle. DuVernay had won the ACLU’s annual Social Responsibility in Media Award—an irony lost on no one, least of all Yusef Salaam. When Salaam took the stage to accept her award, he introduced himself with a new name: “I am one of the Exonerated Five.”

“After decades of being known as the Central Park Five, we thank Ava for acknowledging our humanity and telling our story with honesty and factual representation,” Salaam said, during his speech accepting her award. “We had to struggle to break the label that the media gave us. We stumbled forward, falling on our face at times.”

“It was almost as if they were trying to find someone from the darkest enclaves of society to come into our homes, drag us from our beds, and hang us from trees in Central Park.”
During his speech, Salaam recalled when the media had been less humane: when columnists called them a “wolf pack,” and when Pat Buchanan insisted that if only “the eldest of that wolf pack were tried, convicted and hanged in Central Park, by June 1, and the 13- and 14-year-olds were stripped, horsewhipped, and sent to prison, the park might soon be safe again for women.”

Salaam lingered on the full-page ad taken out by the man currently occupying the White House.

“Korey [Wise] said it so well,” Salaam said. “He said, when Donald Trump took out that full-page ad, and put them in all of New York City’s newspapers, calling for our execution, he placed a bounty on our head.”

“They had published our names, our phone numbers, and our addresses in New York City’s newspapers. Imagine the horror of that. Just step backwards once, to the 1950s—we would become modern-day Emmett Tills. It was almost as if they were trying to find someone from the darkest enclaves of society to come into our homes, drag us from our beds, and hang us from trees in Central Park.”

As he spoke, Salaam took long pauses. At one point, an aide emerged with a fistful of tissues. “I’m not ashamed to cry in front of you,” he said. “These are tears of pain. These are tears of joy. We are the heroes of this story.”

Pat Buchanan calling for a public lynching. Individual-1, formerly known a The Donald, rousing the rabble with a public display in the New York Times in hopes that 5 innocent youths of color would be destroyed. Reagan invoking the false image of "welfare queens" as a drain on society.

This is the Republican party. This is what needs to be undone destroyed.

[Al_U_Card]

Winstonm, on 2019-June-08, 10:49, said:

Yes, but there is so much more to undo. From Daily Beast:



Pat Buchanan calling for a public lynching. Individual-1, formerly known a The Donald, rousing the rabble with a public display in the New York Times in hopes that 5 innocent youths of color would be destroyed. Reagan invoking the false image of "welfare queens" as a drain on society.

This is the Republican party. This is what needs to be undone destroyed.

E pluribus unum.

[Winstonm]

Roger Miller's King of the Road will never be the same.

White House for sale or rent, courtesy current resident
no blacks, no immigrants, runnin' low on sycophants
Ah, but, two hours of twitter lies
Buys a great big Putin smile
He's a man from Queens, won't come clean
King with no clothes

Third trip, Air Force One, destination Vietnam
Old worn out cons and lies, Vlad's orphans his alibi
He gives secrets to a Saudi Prince
Promises Iran will repent
He's a man from Queens, won't come clean
King with no clothes

He knows every autocrat and likes 'em real well
all their wives, stay at his hotel
policies decided with a wink and a nudge
and every crook that ain't booked will end up a judge

I say, White House for sale or rent, courtesy current resident
no blacks, no immigrants, runnin' low on sycophants
Ah, but, two hours of twitter lies
Buys a great big Putin smile
He's a man from Queens, won't come clean
King with no clothes

[Winstonm]

The Liar lies and takes credit for nothing new: NYT

Quote

WASHINGTON — The deal to avert tariffs that President Trump announced with great fanfare on Friday night consists largely of actions that Mexico had already promised to take in prior discussions with the United States over the past several months, according to officials from both countries who are familiar with the negotiations.

Friday’s joint declaration says Mexico agreed to the “deployment of its National Guard throughout Mexico, giving priority to its southern border.” But the Mexican government had already pledged to do that in March during secret talks in Miami between Kirstjen Nielsen, then the secretary of homeland security, and Olga Sanchez, the Mexican secretary of the interior, the officials said.

The centerpiece of Mr. Trump’s deal was an expansion of a program to allow asylum-seekers to remain in Mexico while their legal cases proceed. But that arrangement was reached in December in a pair of painstakingly negotiated diplomatic notes that the two countries exchanged. Ms. Nielsen announced the Migrant Protection Protocols during a hearing of the House Judiciary Committee five days before Christmas.

And over the past week, negotiators failed to persuade Mexico to accept a “safe third country” treaty that would have given the United States the legal ability to reject asylum seekers if they had not sought refuge in Mexico first.

[barmar]

What I loved about Trump's Mexican tariff threat was that one his tweets said the reason was because the US asylum system is broken. So we expect other countries to take extreme action because we can't solve our own immigration problems?

Of course, it wasn't really so broken until Trump made things worse with his border control policies.

[Winstonm]

Family affair:

Quote

A real-estate company partly owned by Jared Kushner has brought in around $90 million of investment from anonymous foreign sources since he entered the White House in 2017, The Guardian reports. Most of the money reportedly flowed into the company Cadre through a vehicle run by Goldman Sachs in the tax haven of the Cayman Islands. Kushner still holds a stake in Cadre that is believed to be worth as much as $50 million. Ethics experts said the anonymous funding could potentially create a serious conflict of interest for Kushner’s role as a senior adviser to Donald Trump. “It will cause people to wonder whether he is being improperly influenced,” said Jessica Tillipman, an ethics lecturer at George Washington University law school. The Guardian’s sources told the newspaper that the vast majority of the money came to the Cayman Islands vehicle from a second offshore tax haven, and alleged some of the cash came from Saudi Arabia.

[PassedOut]

Trump lashes out at New York Times over Mexico deal revelations

Quote

Donald Trump on Monday returned to the offensive over criticism of his immigration deal with Mexico, accusing the New York Times of “sick journalism” for reporting that key components of the deal, announced on Friday, had been agreed for months.

He tweeted: “When will the Failing New York Times admit that their front-page story on the the (sic) new Mexico deal at the Border is a FRAUD and nothing more than a badly reported ‘hit job’ on me, something that has been going on since the first day I announced for the presidency! Sick Journalism.”

Trump’s tweet followed a similar attack on Sunday, when, en route to Virginia for a second day of golf at his private club there, he accused the New York Times of “bad reporting” and “Fake News” for its coverage of migrants crossing the southern border into the US.

Trump (and his sycophants) are so easy to upset. With the press under attack from Trump the anti-American pinheads who support him, it has to be one of the pleasures of life for a reporter to jerk the chain by publishing the truth! Trump is an epically comic character, but we really need to remove him from the office where he now runs amok.

[Winstonm]

Lawrence Tribe argument for impeachment:

Quote

Trump invited help in the election from Russia.
Trump accepted help in the election from Russia.
Trump has done nothing to stop Russia from attacking the electoral process of the United States.
Trump has actively obstructed every investigation into Russia attacking the electoral process of the United States.

[johnu]

Has Biden lost it???

Joe Biden: Republicans ‘Know Better,’ Will Change After Trump

Quote

“Eight years of Donald Trump will fundamentally change who we are in profound ways,” Biden said, according to a pool report. He later said change was possible in Congress, noting: “With Trump gone you’re going to begin to see things change. Because these folks know better. They know this isn’t what they’re supposed to be doing.”

If Dennison is impeached and removed from office this week, there will not be any fundamental change in the Republican political positions. The only difference is there won't be a psychopath and criminal in charge. You don't have to look further than the 10,000 votes the Republicans took to repeal the Affordable Health Care Act, the non vote on Merrick Garland for Supreme Court justice, the fly by night methods the Republicans used to pass the tax giveaway for the 1%'ers, the near complete obstructionism of Lying Mitch the Hypocrite and BribeMaster McConnell, the incompetent leadership of Paul Ryan, etc.

To even have a hint of belief that Republicans know that isn't what they're supposed to be doing assumes facts not in evidence.

[y66]

Did Biden ever have it?

[y66]

From The South’s Economy Is Falling Behind: ‘All of a Sudden the Money Stops Flowing’ by Sharon Nunn at WSJ:

Quote

NATCHEZ, Miss.—The American South spent much of the past century trying to overcome its position as the country’s poorest and least-developed region, with considerable success: By the 2009 recession it had nearly caught up economically with its northern and western neighbors.

That trend has now reversed. Since 2009, the South’s convergence has turned to divergence, as the region recorded the country’s slowest growth in output and wages, the lowest labor-force participation rate and the highest unemployment rate.

Behind the reversal: The policies that drove the region’s catch-up—relatively low taxes and low wages that attracted factories and blue-collar jobs—have proven inadequate in an expanding economy where the forces of globalization favor cities with concentrations of capital and educated workers.

“Those policies worked before, then they became fundamental constraints on the [South’s] long-term growth,” said Richard Florida, an urbanization expert at the University of Toronto.

Higher taxes and education spending aren’t a cure-all, as many northern states now suffering population loss have found. Nor is the South alone in its economic troubles: Automation and globalization have wiped out millions of good-paying factory jobs around the country, especially in the Rust Belt.

But these trends have fallen especially hard on the South, which is more rural than the rest of the country and has fewer big cities. In part because of its legacy of racial segregation the region has, relative to others, underinvested in human capital. Thus the South, the only region to have enjoyed such a dramatic rise in the postwar period, is the only one to experience such a retreat in the past decade.

[Winstonm]

y66, on 2019-June-11, 09:08, said:

From The South’s Economy Is Falling Behind: ‘All of a Sudden the Money Stops Flowing’ by Sharon Nunn at WSJ:

On the bright side, at least the South can sentence abortion doctors to 99 years hard labor.