Month: May 2017

Pence is no prince

by digby

I wrote about Pence’s role in this mess for Salon this morning:

This has been a week that makes Democrats feel as if the world might right itself once again. President Trump’s abrupt firing of FBI director James Comey because of his unfair treatment of Hillary Clinton in the private email server case was so laughably ludicrous on its face that the immediate reaction was that the Republican line of defense would finally break down and he would finally be subject to serious bipartisan condemnation.

Whether that will actually come to pass remains to be seen. There have been some cracks in the GOP wall but it’s too soon to know how far that will take them. The good news is that Democrats are unanimous in their outrage, even including such normally mild mannered types such as Mark Warner who was ferocious in his criticism. That is an important element of any congressional action and it’s never something you can count on with the Democratic party.

Press Secretary Sean Spicer told the media on Tuesday night that the firing originated entirely in the Department of Justice and when a reporter asked if that meant Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein he said, “it was all him.” The next day the deputy press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders appeared on MSNBC’s Morning Joe and backed up that claim:

It’s real simple. The deputy attorney general … made a very strong recommendation. The president followed it, and he made a quick and decisive action to fire James Comey.

Apparently, sometime between that interview and the daily briefing Rosenstein complained to the White House about being the scapegoat when he hadn’t actually recommended Comey’s firing and Huckabee Sanders scrambled to explain that Trump had been thinking about dismissing Comey for some time but his thoughts had been validated by Rosenstein’s opinion. Nobody much bought it but she managed to get through two days of briefings insisting that she was making sense.

But the man who really made the case to the press that the president was simply following the recommendation of the Department of Justice was Vice President Mike Pence who couldn’t have been more emphatic when he went up to Capitol Hill on Wednesday morning:

As has been stated repeatedly and the President has been told, he’s not under investigation. There is no evidence of collusion between our campaign and any Russian officials…
Let me be very clear that the President’s decision to accept the recommendation of the deputy attorney general and the attorney general to remove Director Comey as the head of the FBI was based solely and exclusively on his commitment to the best interests of the American people and to ensuring that the FBI has the trust and confidence of the people this nation.

Unfortunately for Pence, the President’s interview with NBC’s Lester Holt on Thursday evening pretty much ended all speculation about why Comey was fired when Trump incriminated himself:

In fact, when I decided to just do it, I said to myself, I said, you know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story.

Trump’s stream of consciousness dissembling gave him away.

At this writing there is no word from Pence about his comments on Wednesday morning. He’ll likely dance around the truth and the media will let him off the hook a usual. But they shouldn’t. Pence has been in the middle of all this Russia business at least since the transition, which he headed.

And he was in the middle of Comey’s firing as well. According to the New York Times Pence was among the small group of staff members with whom Trump had mulled the decision after he became angry over Comey’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee last week. So Pence knew very well that Trump had decided to fire Comey for his own reasons when he went before the cameras and said that he’d merely “accepted the recommendation” of the Deputy Attorney general.

For reasons that have more to do with style than substance, Pence is often given the benefit of the doubt in these situations, as if he’s the pasty and has no idea his boss is a notorious liar. His furrowed brow and treacly mid-western sanctimony seems to cover for the fact that he’s extremely close to Trump and is usually in the room when these lies are hatched.

Going back to the campaign, recall that Pence lied dramatically in the debate with Senator Tim Kaine, even claiming that he had never contrasted President Vladimir Putin favorably with President Barack Obama, despite videotape of him saying it.  More importantly, Pence ran the transition after Trump fired Governor Chris Christie. And it was during that period that General Michael Flynn was making his inappropriate phone calls to the Russian Ambassador, writing op-eds on behalf of the foreign government that were paying him when he wasn’t dodging complaints about his son’s white supremacist activities.

Mike Pence was the man in charge when all that was going on and despite his Sergeant Shultz  routine (you can look it up) it turned out he had been thoroughly read-in at the time about Flynn’s questionable activities, such as his work for the Turkish government. He apparently didn’t think it was something worth worrying about.

And it has never been fully explained why the President failed to tell his Vice President that he was going on TV and misleading the public about Flynn’s contacts with the Russian ambassador after Acting Attorney General Sally Yates sounded the alarm. Supposedly Pence only found out by reading it in the paper which makes you wonder why he wasn’t as angry at the boss as he was at Flynn.

The fact is that Vice President Pence is not a victim in all this. He’s a very loyal member of the Trump team involved in all the top decisions and it’s important that people remember that. If Trump were to vacate the job for one reason or another (there are so many possibilities) Pence would inherit the presidency. One hopes that nobody will mistake him for an innocent in all this and give him a mandate to govern. He’s with Trump every step of the way.

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Rising U.S. deaths in childbirth
by Tom Sullivan

“The way that we’ve been trained, we do not give women enough information for them to manage their health postpartum. The focus had always been on babies and not on mothers.”

One of the glories of modern medicine is that it reduced the mortality rate women faced from childbearing since the beginning of time. It is one measure of a civilization’s advancement that infant mortality falls. Sadly, the survival of mothers is less of a focus, an afterthought. A report from Pro-Publica and NPR this morning examines just how that has gone wrong:

As a neonatal intensive care nurse, Lauren Bloomstein had been taking care of other people’s babies for years. Finally, at 33, she was expecting one of her own. The prospect of becoming a mother made her giddy, her husband Larry recalled recently— “the happiest and most alive I’d ever seen her.”

That’s enough for you to know what comes next. Lauren, a nurse married to a doctor, died of complications from childbirth in her own hospital twenty hours after giving birth to her daughter.

In the U.S., unlike some other developed countries, maternal deaths are treated as a private tragedy rather than as a public health catastrophe. A death in childbirth may be mourned on Facebook or memorialized on GoFundMe, but it is rarely reported in the news. Most obituaries, Lauren’s included, don’t mention how a mother died.

It’s a gut-wrenching story chronicling the hours of pain leading to her death. The research shines a light on a trend that further discredits the lie that the U.S. has the best health care system in the world. NPR has audio here. “America is the most dangerous place in the developed world to have a baby,” it begins. The emphasis has been on infants, leaving mothers almost an afterthought.

There are not even good records kept. In the United Kingdom, however,

… maternal deaths are regarded as systems failures. A national committee of experts scrutinizes every death of a woman from pregnancy or childbirth complications, collecting medical records and assessments from caregivers, conducting rigorous analyses of the data, and publishing reports that help set policy for hospitals throughout the country. Coroners also sometimes hold public inquests, forcing hospitals and their staffs to answer for their mistakes. The U.K. process is largely responsible for the stunning reduction in preeclampsia deaths in Britain, the committee noted its 2016 report — “a clear success story” that it hoped to repeat “across other medical and mental health causes of maternal death.”

The U.S. has no comparable system , the report finds.

The reasons for higher maternal mortality in the U.S. are manifold. New mothers are older than they used to be, with more complex medical histories. Half of pregnancies in the U.S. are unplanned, so many women don’t address chronic health issues beforehand. Greater prevalence of C-sections leads to more life-threatening complications. The fragmented health system makes it harder for new mothers, especially those without good insurance, to get the care they need. Confusion about how to recognize worrisome symptoms and treat obstetric emergencies makes caregivers more prone to error.

Yet the worsening U.S. maternal mortality numbers contrast sharply with the impressive progress in saving babies’ lives. Infant mortality has fallen to its lowest point in history, the CDC reports, reflecting 50 years of efforts by the public health community to prevent birth defects, reduce preterm birth, and improve outcomes for very premature infants. The number of babies who die annually in the U.S. — about 23,000 in 2014 — still greatly exceeds the number of expectant and new mothers who die, but the ratio is narrowing.

The divergent trends for mothers and babies highlight a theme that has emerged repeatedly in ProPublica‘s and NPR’s reporting. In recent decades, under the assumption that it had conquered maternal mortality, the American medical system has focused more on fetal and infant safety and survival than on the mother’s health and wellbeing.

“We worry a lot about vulnerable little babies,” said Barbara Levy, vice president for health policy/advocacy at the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) and a member of the Council on Patient Safety in Women’s Health Care. Meanwhile, “we don’t pay enough attention to those things that can be catastrophic for women.”

At the federally funded Maternal-Fetal Medicine Units Network, the preeminent obstetric research collaborative in the U.S., only four of the 34 initiatives listed in its online database primarily target mothers, versus 24 aimed at improving outcomes for infants (the remainder address both).

Under the Title V federal-state program supporting maternal and child health, states devoted about 6 percent of block grants in 2016 to programs for mothers, compared to 78 percent for infants and special-needs children. The notion that babies deserve more care than mothers is similarly enshrined in the Medicaid program, which pays for about 45 percent of births. In many states, the program covers moms for 60 days postpartum, their infants for a full year. The bill to replace the Affordable Care Act, adopted by the U.S. House of Representatives earlier this month, could gut Medicaid for mothers and babies alike.

And you wonder why people at town halls are shouting down their congressmen.

When women are discharged, they routinely receive information about how to breastfeed and what to do if their newborn is sick but not necessarily how to tell if they need medical attention themselves. “It was only when I had my own child that I realized, ‘Oh my goodness. That was completely insufficient information,'” said Elizabeth Howell, professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City.

“The way that we’ve been trained, we do not give women enough information for them to manage their health postpartum. The focus had always been on babies and not on mothers.”

If a nurse married to a doctor can die of complications from childbirth in her own hospital, how about the average expectant mother? But no worries. This guy is going to fix everything. You’re gonna love it:

Trump to TIME" "In a short period of time I understood everything there was to know about health care" https://t.co/eAqV4111Id— Joanne Kenen (@JoanneKenen) May 12, 2017

Sorry, folks… 

by tristero

…but whether or not you’re for impeachment, he ain’t goin’ nowhere:

…[Among Trump supporters] the outrage is that Mr. Trump is again being held to an unfair standard set by the very people and institutions that tried to stop his election in the first place: Democrats, resentful Republicans and, perhaps most of all, the news media.

And while Trump supporters may be a minority, they are the only people who matter. Here’s why:

Eighty-six percent to 13%, those who identify as Republicans or as independents who lean Republican have a favorable view of Trump, the Pew survey found.

And why does this matter? Because as you might recall, Republicans have locked down the entire federal government, that’s why. Add in that Republican congress critters are way less popular than Trump:

Asked who they would trust if the two sides disagreed, 52% of Republicans said they would side with Trump and 34% with the Republicans in Congress.

…and he’s goin’ nowhere. There’s is a tremendous incentive for Republicans to let Trump be Trump.

As for a serious investigation into collusion with Russia… puhleeeze.

They loaded up the truck and they moved to DC

by digby

Has there ever been a first family this gross? I don’t think so. Billy Carter and Roger Clinton were no prizes but they had a lot more class that these Trump scions.

Ugh:

Donald Trump Jr promoted a long-debunked, far-right conspiracy theory on Thursday by sharing a tweet that linked former President Bill Clinton’s firing of an FBI director to the death of his then-aide, Vince Foster.

In an apparent effort to defend his father’s firing of FBI Director James Comey, Trump Jr. retweeted user @StockMonsterUSA, who wrote, “President Clinton fired his FBI director on July 19th, 1993, The Day before Vince Foster was found dead in Marcy Park.” The tweet included a picture of Foster with the Clintons.

Several investigations have ruled Foster’s 1993 death a suicide. However, conspiracy theories spread by the far-right linking the Clintons to Foster’s death still persist to this day.

During the campaign, then-candidate Donald Trump alluded to these theories in an interview with the Washington Post and referred to Foster’s death as “very fishy”

Trump Jr. didn’t immediately respond to an email seeking comment.

His twitter feed is a monstrosity.

Update: More class

Of course he named Kobach to his vote suppression commission

by digby

Martin Longman at the Washington Monthly gives us the bad news:

The Minority Leader of the Kansas Senate Anthony Hensley once stated that Kobach is “the most racist politician in America today,” and with plenty of justification. Kobuch is the brains behind both Arizona SB 1070 and Alabama HB56, the two most notorious anti-immigrant bills to be produced in this country in recent decades. He’s the country’s most famous proponent of bogus voter fraud theories and has boasted of successful efforts to suppress the minority vote both during his time as chairman of the Kansas Republican Party and as Kansas’s Secretary of State.

He’s also a classic John Bircher-style nutcase who has referred to both the American Civil Liberties Union and the League of Women Voters as “communists.”

Donald Trump seriously considered Kobach to serve as his Attorney General and also as his Secretary of Homeland Security:

It was later reported that Kobach was being considered for Secretary of Homeland Security, and was photographed carrying a document entitled “Department of Homeland Security, Kobach Strategic Plan for First 365 Days” into a meeting with Trump. This plan reportedly included a register of Muslims as part of a suite of proposals, which also included the “extreme vetting” of immigrants.

So, that’s all a prelude to discussing this:

President Trump plans to name Kris W. Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state who has pressed for aggressive measures to crack down on undocumented immigrants, to a long-promised commission to investigate voting fraud in the United States, a White House official said on Thursday.

I’ve written dozens of posts and Salon articles on Kobach who is one of the most malevolent people in American politics.  I’m actually surprised they didn’t find a spot for him in the DOJ. He’s a top anti-immigration and vote suppression expert.

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Cray cray o’ the day

by digby

I think we all know Trump believes he coined the phrases “Make America Great Again”, “law and order”, “America first” etc. He hears something and thinks he made it up. (Has there ever been a narcissist quite this dumb?)

Anyway, The Economist last week interviewed President Trump. Check this one out:

ECONOMIST: But beyond that it’s OK if the tax plan increases the deficit?

TRUMP: It is OK, because it won’t increase it for long. You may have two years where you’ll… you understand the expression “prime the pump”?

ECONOMIST: Yes.

TRUMP: We have to prime the pump.

ECONOMIST: It’s very Keynesian.

TRUMP: We’re the highest-taxed nation in the world. Have you heard that expression before, for this particular type of an event?

ECONOMIST: Priming the pump?

TRUMP: Yeah, have you heard it?

ECONOMIST: Yes.

TRUMP: Have you heard that expression used before? Because I haven’t heard it. I mean, I just… I came up with it a couple of days ago and I thought it was good. It’s what you have to do.

I know we’re not supposed to notice that he’s walking around naked because it will insult his voters and all but … he’s a moron.

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Don’t they even watch “The Americans?”

by digby

So, security experts are a little bit stunned that Trump allowed an official Russian photographer into the oval Office yesterday because they’ve been known to stash listening devices in the White House in the past.

Also, the Trump administration is completely clueless:

Other former intelligence officials also described the access granted to the photographer as a potential security lapse, noting that standard screening for White House visitors would not necessarily detect a sophisticated espionage device.

The administration official also said the White House had been misled about the role of the Russian photographer. Russian officials had described the individual as Lavrov’s official photographer without disclosing that he also worked for Tass.

“We were not informed by the Russians that their official photographer was dual-hatted and would be releasing the photographs on the state news agency,” the administration official said.

As a result, White House officials said they were surprised to see photos posted online showing Trump not only with Lavrov but also smiling and shaking hands with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak.

Kislyak has figured prominently in a series of damaging stories for the administration. Former national security adviser Michael Flynn was forced to resign in February over his contacts with Kislyak last year and over misleading statements about the nature of those conversations to Vice President Pence.

The administration official said that “it is standard practice for ambassadors to accompany their principals, and it is ridiculous to suggest there was anything improper.” He added that White House rooms “are swept routinely” for listening devices.

Russia has in the past gone to significant lengths to hide bugs in key U.S. facilities. In the late 1990s, the State Department’s security came under fire after the discovery of a sophisticated listening device in a conference room on the seventh floor, where then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and others often held meetings.

I still can’t get over the fact that he met with these Russian officials and Henry Kissinger on the morning after the Tuesday Night Massacre.

You just cannot make this stuff up.

QOTD: “At least he’s not Hitler” edition

by digby

Well, he’s only been in office for three and half months …

Stop looking for heroes

by digby

I wrote about Washington’s unfortunate habit of anointing heroes for Salon this morning:

This guy
by Tom Sullivan

NC Republican Senator Richard Burr (l) and NC Democrat, Gov. Roy Cooper.

After Tuesday’s brouhaha inside the Beltway, Rob Christensen at the Raleigh News and Observer recalls how back in the day the Nixon-Watergate hearings in the Senate catapulted conservative NC Sen. Senator Sam J. Ervin Jr. from relative obscurity to national folk hero. (There were “Senator Sam” T-shirts and buttons.) Although visitors observing the hearings had to be cautioned against making verbal outbursts, it soon became routine for them to greet Ervin’s entrances with applause.

A sample of Ervin’s style from July 18, 1973:

Q. I am just a country lawyer from way down in North Carolina and I probably make inquiries with a little bit more vigor than some of these high faluting city lawyers do. But what I was trying to ascertain is whether or not I could infer from the statements that this tape recording indicates that John Ehrlichman made in this conversation represented an effort on his part to advance the theory that John Dean should be made a scapegoat and sent out into some wilderness, legal wilderness, bearing the full responsibility for any impropriety or unethical aspects of the disuse of the money.

And another:

[Q] How the emotional state or the psychological state of a patient, even if that patient was Ellsberg, could have any relation to national defense or relations to a foreign country is something which eludes the imagination of this country lawyer. Now, Mr. Ehrlichman, I’d like to ask you one question: Why, if the President has this much power, wouldn’t he have had the inherent power to have sent somebody out there with a pistol and have it pointed at the psychiatrist and said, “I’m not gonna commit burglary, I’m just gonna rob you of these records”? Wouldn’t he have had that prerogative, under your theory?

A simple, country lawyer, but a Harvard-educated one.

As Lawrence O’Donnell observed in late March, the Senate seat Democrat Ervin once held is today occupied by Sen. Richard Burr, a Republican. Now chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Burr may find himself thrust into the limelight as Ervin was.

Christensen:

The Ervin/Watergate analogy gained new resonance this week, when Trump fired FBI Director James Comey, who was investigating the Russian ties. Some drew parallels with Nixon’s firing of independent prosecutor Archibald Cox in the so-called Saturday Night Massacre, creating a political firestorm.

Burr was not happy with Comey’s ouster, who he has said had been more forthcoming with information than any FBI director he had ever dealt with.

“I am troubled by the timing and reasoning of Director Comey’s termination,” Burr said in a statement. “I have found Director Comey to be a public servant of the highest order, and his dismissal further confuses an already difficult investigation by the Committee.”

Burr has had to fight Democratic skepticism that he would be an Ervin-like bulldog in leading an investigation of Trump and any possible Russian ties.

Perhaps that is because Burr was named to the Trump campaign’s national security advisory council and stood by the candidate even after the infamous groping video appeared. “Flexibility is the first principle of politics,” as Nixon himself once said.

The ranking Democrat, Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, expressed confidence in Burr back in March. Still, the current committee seems underpowered for the task with only nine staffers on the investigation and volumes of documents to review and The Democratic Coalition Against Trump alleges Burr is dragging his feet.

Now in his final term in the U.S. Senate, Richard Burr will have to choose whether or not to run interference for his party or to share in some of Sam Ervin’s legacy by walking his shoes. Even if without socks.

Will defending the Constitution and preserving the republic fall to this guy?

I’m not opposed to socks, I just choose not to wear them.https://t.co/VP8Nqjh1E0— Richard Burr (@SenatorBurr) August 23, 2016