Month: August 2017

Some hoax
by Tom Sullivan

Image via Twitter.

There is not much sunshine to be found in Houston this morning. And maybe two more feet of rain to come. “Harvey is now the benchmark disaster of record in the United States,” writes Eric Holthaus at Politico. It is possible 40 to 60 inches of rain may fall on parts of Houston before tropical storm Harvey is done flooding the region:

Climate change is making rainstorms everywhere worse, but particularly on the Gulf Coast. Since the 1950s, Houston has seen a 167 percent increase in the frequency of the most intense downpours. Climate scientist Kevin Trenberth thinks that as much as 30 percent of the rainfall from Harvey is attributable to human-caused global warming. That means Harvey is a storm decades in the making.

This is Houston’s third “500-year” flood in three years. That is not once in every 500 years, but a storm with a 1-in-500 chance of happening in any given year, Dara Lind explains at Vox. It is based on probability, not history. With climate change adding to the factors behind massive storms and rain events, it is hard to make predictions based on past events. Sort of like your 401k performance, if you think about it:

The US appears to be getting hit with major storms with unusual frequency. From August 2015 to August 2016, there were eight 500-year flood events recorded by the National Weather Service. There were six “1,000-year” floods in the US over the five years from 2010 to 2014; in 2015 and 2016, though, there were at least three each year.

[…]

Theoretically, the odds of a 1-in-500 event occurring three straight times are one in 125 million. Because Houston is a big city and the same spots aren’t necessarily reaching 500-year levels each time, those odds don’t quite apply — but we’re still, as the Memorial City example shows, talking about events that FEMA estimates to be vanishingly unlikely.

Either Houston is incredibly unlucky or the risk of severe flooding is a lot more serious than the FEMA modeling has predicted — and the odds of a flood as bad as the ones Houston has seen for the past few years are actually much higher than 1 in 500.

The president who called climate change a hoax is expected to visit Texas today (but not Houston) to observe the effects of the hoax for himself.

The subheader on another Politico story speaks volumes: “New Jersey and New York lawmakers say they’ll back disaster relief for Texas — even if Texas Republicans didn’t help them in 2012.”

“Many Texas reps and notoriously, @SenTedCruz fought against Sandy aid, so crucial to CT,” said Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.). “Going with my better angels to fight FOR Texas aid.”

The rare public rebuke by two fellow Republicans — and less surprising Democratic criticism — underscores the frustration felt by many lawmakers whose districts were similarly hammered by Sandy. New York and New Jersey ultimately received aid amounting to nearly $60 billion, but not until conservative lawmakers attempted to pay for the package with spending cuts to other domestic programs.

CNBC asked Texas Sen. Ted Cruz whether Harvey had changed his perspective:

“No!” Cruz insisted. “Of course not. As I said at the time, hurricane funding is a very important federal responsibility. And I would have eagerly supported funding for that, but I didn’t think it was appropriate to engage in pork barrel spending, where two-thirds of that bill was unrelated to spending, that had nothing to do with Sandy and was simply politicians wasting money.”

“In Sandy, there were people in crisis and with Harvey, here, there are people in crisis,” the Texas Republican noted. “We need to focus on solving the problem and meeting people’s needs, not engaging in political games.”

Climate may change, but Ted Cruz? Never. Expect politicians to waste a lot of money in Texas post-Harvey with nary a complaint from Sens. Cruz and Cornyn.

Here is a list of ways you can help those affected by #Harvey https://t.co/vet65XtwOl— NPR (@NPR) August 29, 2017

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Request a copy of For The Win, my county-level election mechanics primer, at tom.bluecentury at gmail.

Petty little tyrant

by digby

Sad!

Donald Trump was in a bad mood before he emerged for a confrontational speech in Arizona last week.

TV and social media coverage showed that the site of his campaign rally, the Phoenix Convention Center, was less than full. Backstage, waiting in a room with a television monitor, Trump was displeased, one person familiar with the incident said: TV optics and crowd sizes are extremely important to the president.

As his surrogates warmed up the audience, the expanse of shiny concrete eventually filled in with cheering Trump fans. But it was too late for a longtime Trump aide, George Gigicos, the former White House director of advance who had organized the event as a contractor to the Republican National Committee. Trump later had his top security aide, Keith Schiller, inform Gigicos that he’d never manage a Trump rally again, according to three people familiar with the matter.

Gigicos, one of the four longest-serving political aides to the president, declined to comment.

Even by his standards, Trump was remarkably strident in Phoenix. After introductory speakers, including Vice President Mike Pence, lauded him for his commitment to racial harmony, the president came on stage and lambasted the media for what he called inaccurate reporting on his remarks about violence between hate groups and counterprotesters in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Anger and Threats

He threatened to shut down the federal government unless Congress funds construction of the Mexican border wall he promised in his campaign. He telegraphed that he’d pardon former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, convicted of defying a court order to stop racial profiling by his deputies. And in their home state, he assailed Arizona Senator John McCain for the failure of Obamacare repeal and Senator Jeff Flake for being “weak” on illegal immigration, without mentioning their names. Both are fellow Republicans.

Gigicos had staged the event in a large multipurpose room. The main floor space was bisected by a dividing wall, leaving part of the space empty. There were some bleachers off to the side, but otherwise the audience was standing — and the scene appeared flat, lacking the energy and enthusiasm of other rallies.

Although the crowd looked thin when Trump arrived at about 6:30 p.m., rallygoers filled in the space while Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson, Alveda King, Franklin Graham and Pence delivered introductory speeches. A city of Phoenix spokeswoman told the Arizona Republic newspaper that about 10,000 people were inside the room when Trump took the stage.

Trump’s first words when he stepped to the microphone: “Wow, what a crowd, what a crowd.”

A week later, Trump was still reminiscing about the event.

“You saw the massive crowd we had,” he said at a White House news conference on Monday with Finland President Sauli Niinisto. “The people went crazy when I said, ‘What do you think of sheriff Joe?’ Or something to that effect.”

Climate change is complicated. Who knew?

by digby

This explainer by David Roberts at Vox about Harvey and climate change is very helpful:

1) Harvey is not centrally about climate change

Talking about climate change during a disaster always runs the risk of insensitivity. The story that most matters about Harvey right now is the effect it’s having on lives and land in Texas and the efforts underway to prevent more suffering.

More broadly, climate is never going to be central to a story like this. There have always been hurricanes and floods in Texas. The things making the state’s coastal developments vulnerable to severe weather — heedless development, sandy subsoil, insufficient drainage — would be problems even in the absence of climate change.

Climate is not central, but by the same token it is grossly irresponsible to leave climate out of the story, for the simple reasons that climate change is, as the US military puts it, a threat multiplier. The storms, the challenges of emergency response, the consequences of poor adaptation — they all predate climate change. But climate change is steadily making them worse.

2) “Did climate change cause Harvey?” is a malformed question

Climate change does not cause things, because climate change is not a causal agent. “Climate change” is a descriptive term — it describes the fact that the climate is changing. What’s causing the changes is an increase in heat energy trapped in the atmosphere, due to greenhouse gases.

But saying that heat energy caused Harvey is also somewhat problematic. Let’s explain by way of an analogy.

Say I turned up Earth’s gravity by 1 percent. More people around the world would trip and fall. Does it make sense to say, of a particular person tripping and falling, that the increase in gravity (“gravity change”) caused it to happen? No. Does it make sense to say that gravity cause it to happen? No.

For any particular instance of tripping and falling, there will be proximate causes — a slippery patch on the sidewalk, a moment’s inattention, whatever. Gravity is a background condition of anyone tripping, but no one would say gravity caused them to trip. If it’s true, it’s trivially true.

What we might say is that the increase in gravity raised the probability of tripping and falling, or raised the average severity of tripping and falling. Those are measurable facts that can be entirely true without increased gravity causing any particular fall.

Increased gravity is a causal condition in every fall, but it is not the primary causal agent in any one fall. Similarly, increased heat energy is a causal condition in every storm (not just the bad ones) — every storm forms and travels in the same global climate — but it is not the primary causal agent in any storm.

<img src=”https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/9115467/harvey_goes_82517.jpg” alt=””>
Caused by moisture and warm air and high pressure, like normal hurricanes.
NASA/NOAA GOES Project
There is, to be sure, increasing sophistication in the science of attribution — that is, in distinguishing the climate signal from the “normal weather” noise. We’re learning to say things like, “There’s only a 5 percent chance the storm would have been this severe in the absence of climate change.”

But still, saying a storm “probably wouldn’t have happened this way in the absence of climate change” is not the same as saying climate change caused the storm. What caused the storm is warm air, atmospheric moisture, and weird high/low pressure systems, just like all storms. Climate change just gave it its winning personality.

3) Yes, climate change made Harvey worse

Thanks to the recent profusion of great climate journalists and communicators, this story has been well told already. Probably the best source is this Facebook post from climate scientist Michael Mann, but also see Chris Mooney, Robinson Meyer, John Schwartz, and Emily Atkin.

It’s a complex story, especially in its particulars, but in broad strokes, climate change made Harvey worse in three ways.

First, it raised sea levels more than half a foot in recent decades. Higher seas mean more storm surges.

Second, it raised the temperature of the water in the region, which means more evaporation and more water in the air. Mann:

Sea surface temperatures in the area where Harvey intensified were 0.5-1C warmer than current-day average temperatures, which translates to 1-1.5C warmer than the ‘average’ temperatures a few decades ago. That means 3-5% more moisture in the atmosphere.

More moisture in the atmosphere means more rain.

Finally (and most speculatively), one of the most damaging aspects of Harvey is how it’s hanging around in one place, thanks to weak prevailing winds. Mann recently published a paper suggesting that such near-stationary summer weather patterns are made more common by climate change.

All these factors contributed to the size and severity of the storm. Exactly how much they contributed will have to await peer-reviewed attribution science, but logic, experience, and measurements all make clear that Harvey’s damage was worse than it would have been absent recent changes in the climate. “The storm is a bit more intense, bigger and longer lasting than it otherwise would be,” climate scientist Kevin Trenberth told Mooney.

<img src=”https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/9129309/840160568.jpg” alt=”Epic Flooding Inundates Houston After Hurricane Harvey”>
Worse than it woulda been.
Photo by Erich Schlegel/Getty Images
4) We don’t know if climate change is making hurricanes more likely

The scientific battles over hurricanes and climate change go way, way back, and run hot. They are also, for a nonpartisan outsider, quite technical and boring.

So I’ll skip to the end: The evidence is mixed, and the jury is still out. We’re still not sure if climate change increases hurricane frequency.

5) We know climate change is making severe downpours more likely

Severe downpours in the Houston area have become 167 percent more frequent in the past decade, which is commensurate with one of the best-understood and most confident predictions of climate science: Climate change is going to bring lots more heavy rains (and thus flooding). See Andrea Thompson’s great rundown at Climate Central on this.

In fact, due to sea level rise and more moisture in the air, I expect flooding to be the most frequent public face of climate change over the next decade or so.

6) Climate change is nowhere near the biggest determinant of Harvey’s damages, but it’s in there

Another hotly contested area of climate research has to do with climate change’s role in rising natural disaster damages.

Financial damages from natural disasters are definitely rising worldwide, but that’s not just being driven by climate change. Most of it has to do with increasing populations building unsafe buildings on land vulnerable to disasters.

These big demographic and economic trends are putting more people and property in harm’s way, so naturally there’s more harm, financial and otherwise. (Andy Revkin is good on this connection; see here and here.) To truly pick out the climate signal from that noise, you’d have to run a model with all the same trends and no climate change. For understandable reasons, that is extremely difficult.

Some researchers believe there is no climate signal discernible at all yet. (Spare a thought for Roger Pielke Jr.’s long, lonely crusade on this question.) Others disagree, and the battle wages on, but that battle has always struck me as less important than its participants take it to be.

Humanity is growing more financially vulnerable to natural disasters for lots of reasons, so there are, correspondingly, lots of ways to reduce vulnerability. Most of them are far more direct than climate mitigation — changing the location and nature of settlements, mainly, along with reforms in building codes, insurance, and government emergency planning. If your main goal is to reduce vulnerability as much and as quickly as possible, reducing greenhouse gases would be a silly way to do it.

But again, at the same time, it’s grossly irresponsible to leave climate out of the picture. We know it’s going to get worse. We know it’s going to make every other challenge more challenging, every damage more damaging, every expense more expensive.

Whether the climate signal is discernible now, it surely will be by the end of the century. By then, our opportunity to prevent some of it will be long past.

7) Adapting to climate change is very, very different than mitigating it

Obama presidential adviser John Holdren is credited with what has become a familiar way of formulating the challenge of climate change: We will end up with some mix of prevention, adaptation, and suffering; it is for us to determine the ratio.

This is a powerful way to approach the subject. It emphasizes the consequences of inaction. We prevent what we can, we adjust to what we can’t prevent, and we suffer what we can’t adjust to. The status quo is not an option.

But in another way, it is misleading, making it seem as though mitigation (that is, preventing greenhouse gas emissions) and adaptation (adjusting to a changed climate) are two sides of the same coin, fungible even. A dollar spent on one is as good as a dollar spent on the other.

Indeed, many conservatives — at least among those who accept the reality of climate change — argue that humans have adapted to all sorts of climates and it’s better to just adapt again than to upend the global energy system. And it’s not just conservatives. Economists generally have great faith in the power of human beings to adapt.

But adaptation is not fungible with mitigation. They are different beasts entirely, not only practically but on a profound moral level. I wrote a big post about this once, but to make a long story short: Mitigation has local costs and egalitarian global benefits; adaptation has local costs and inequitable local benefits. 

Because every ton of greenhouse gases mixes into the atmosphere and affects the entire global climate, preventing the emission of a ton of GHGs offers a global benefit. Climate mitigation generates benefits that are unavoidably egalitarian (distributed across the globe, to everyone who lives in the atmosphere) and progressive (the poor are most vulnerable, so they benefit first and most from harm prevention).

There’s plenty of self-interest in climate mitigation, but there’s also an ineradicable element of altruism.

Adaptation is different. The benefits of adaptation — higher sea walls, better drainage systems, more effective emergency response — are unavoidably both local (only those who happen to live behind the sea wall benefit) and regressive (wealthy people and places will adapt first, best, and most).

So adaptation is not some easier alternative route to the same goal. It is every bit as politically difficult as mitigation (mitigation has multiple co-benefits, e.g., cleaner air, while adaptation rarely does), much, much more expensive, and less morally admirable. (Joe Romm had a magnificent post on this back in 2012.)

8) Without mitigation, adaptation is a cruel joke, and Harvey shows why

Houston’s situation is unique in many ways, well captured in this tweetstorm:

There are several reasons why flooding is so bad in Houston (among them ever-growing amounts of impermeable surfacing and a not-very-absorptive soil substrate). And there are several reasons why evacuating people beforehand was a complicated and fraught decision.

Every story about a natural disaster — preparation, response, adaptation — is idiosyncratic, as is Houston’s. Lessons about how to prepare and respond will inevitably have a local flavor.

Still, while there are undoubtedly ways Houston could do better (see Natasha Geiling for much more on that), take a step back and ponder: What is good or adequate adaptation to 40 to 50 inches of rain falling on your head in 72 hours?

There’s just no way to prepare for that and no painless way to respond to it. There’s no adapting. There’s destruction and suffering, followed by slow rebuilding.

In the absence of some pretty radical mitigation, such massive rainfall events will just get more frequent and worse on the Gulf Coast, every year, year on year, more or less forever. What would adaptation in those circumstances even look like? What kind of long-lasting infrastructure do you build when the climate is changing that fast? How many cycles of destruction and rebuilding can a city cope with?

The fact is, we already know that sea level rise and frequent flooding are going to make lots of coastal cities uninhabitable over coming decades (though exactly how many, and when, remains maddeningly uncertain). Think, for a moment, about Miami slowly becoming unlivable. “Adaptation” will mean figuring out who has to leave, who has to pay for resettlement, and who bears the cost of the abandoned city’s infrastructure as it rots, crumbles, and pollutes.

That’s a lot of fateful decisions to be made about people’s lives, homes, land, families, and legacies. It is politically explosive stuff. Raise your hand if you think it will be done in an egalitarian or equitable way.

(Recall, in the wake of Katrina, House Speaker Dennis Hastert saying that New Orleans might as well just be bulldozed. Recall that 20 members of the Texas congressional delegation, who are now desperately requesting help, voted against federal aid to New York City in the wake of Hurricane Sandy. If adaptation decisions are made so callously within the US, imagine how they’ll be made internationally.)

Rebuilding after Harvey will be a test case — adaptation in action. Let’s watch to see if it’s done in a wise and equitable way. My hopes are not high.

Without mitigation, if we just let climate change get worse and worse, adaptation is only going to look uglier and uglier, more and more of a euphemism for abandoning poor people to their suffering.

9) Climate change is part of every story now, including Harvey

Everything human beings do, we do in a climate (except hang out on the space station, I guess).

Our climate has been in a rough temperature equilibrium for about 10,000 years, while we developed agriculture and advanced civilization and Netflix.

Now our climate is about to rocket out of that equilibrium, in what is, geologically speaking, the blink of an eye. We’re not sure exactly what’s going to happen, but we have a decent idea, and we know it’s going to be weird. With more heat energy in the system, everything’s going to get crazier — more heat waves, more giant rainstorms, more droughts, more floods.

That means climate change is part of every story now. The climate we live in shapes agriculture, it shapes cities and economies and trade, it shapes culture and learning, it shapes human conflict. It is a background condition of all these stories, and its changes are reflected in them.

So we’ve got to get past this “did climate change cause it?” argument. A story like Harvey is primarily a set of local narratives, about the lives immediately affected. But it is also part of a larger narrative, one developing over decades and centuries, with potentially existential stakes.

We’ve got to find a way to weave together those narratives while respecting and doing justice to both.

As Trump would say, “nobody ever knew climate change was so complicated.”

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T-Rex going extinct?

by digby

It sure looks like it. Axios reports:

As of last night, we were told that no replacement of SecState Rex Tillerson is imminent. But some switcheroo may happen sooner than expected, given the jaw-dropping reporting by Axios’ Jonathan Swan last evening in his weekly Sneak Peek newsletter:

Trump is getting more and more fed up with Tillerson and recently said: “Rex just doesn’t get it, he’s totally establishment in his thinking.”

One possible scenario for replacing Tillerson: U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley moves to Foggy Bottom. Then Deputy Secretary National Security Adviser Dina Powell could be promoted to Haley’s job in New York, where Powell’s family lives.

On “Fox News Sunday,” Tillerson became the second top Trump official in three days (after economic adviser Gary Cohn) to distance himself on-record from Trump’s Charlottesville response:

Tillerson: “I don’t believe anyone doubts the American people’s values or the commitment of the American government or the government’s agencies to advancing those values and defending those values.”

Chris Wallace: “And the president’s values?”

Tillerson: “The president speaks for himself, Chris.”

Wallace: “Are you separating yourself from that, sir?”
Tillerson: “I’ve made my own comments as to our vales as well in a speech I gave to the State Department this past week.”

Responding to Swan’s article, Philippe Reines, a top State Department official under Hillary Clinton, tweeted: “Going out in a limb here but I don’t think Rex gives a damn anymore what the President & White House thinks of him.”

It would appear so.

But keep in mind that sending Dina Powell out of the WH is something Bannon was pushing for to weaken the McMaster wing. Whether this idea means he’s still got Trump’s ear I don’t know. Maybe McMaster wants her at the UN.

But whatever the case, it sure look as though sexy Rexy has one foot out the door. Will anyone even know he’s gone?

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Arpaio for Senate? Yeah, go for it.

by digby

He lost his job as Maricopa sheriff last November by 10 points. Trump only won the state by three. But sure, this sounds like a great idea. Go for it Joe:

Controversial former Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio said Monday that he is considering another run for public office, including a potential primary challenge against Sen. Jeff Flake.

Arpaio, a vocal supporter of Trump’s during the campaign, was unseated last November from his position as Maricopa County sheriff. But with his name in the spotlight once again following a pardon from Trump last week, Arpaio said he could mount another bid for public office.

“I could run for mayor, I could run for legislator, I could run for Senate,” the former sheriff told The Washington Examiner. He said, “I’m sure getting a lot of people around the state asking me” to challenge Flake, the Arizona Republican senator who refused to endorse Trump during last year’s election and one of his vocal GOP critics.

“All I’m saying is the door is open and we’ll see what happens. I’ve got support. I know what support I have,” he said.

He sure does. It goes all the way to the top.

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And they let people like this drive a car

by digby

Why do people do this? They always get caught:

A man who claimed that he was stabbed after being mistaken for a neo-Nazi now admits that he made the whole story up after accidentally stabbing himself.

Joshua Witt, 26, told police two weeks ago that he was getting out of his car in the parking lot of a Steak ‘n Shake in Sheridan, Colorado, when a man came over to him and attacked him with a knife.

On Monday, the Sheridan Police Department told BuzzFeed News in a statement that Witt admitted to making the story up after police confronted him with evidence that the attack never took place.

Witt, who posted his claims on Facebook, claimed that a man asked him if he was a neo-Nazi while reaching over his open car door to stab him.

“I was just getting out of my car to go get myself a milkshake and the next thing I hear is ‘You one of them neo-Nazis” as this man is swinging a knife at my head over my car door,” Witt told BuzzFeed News at the time. “I threw my hands up out of natural reflex and then I kind of dived back in my car as the suspect took off running.”

Police became suspicious of his story because surveillance video did not show anyone running from the scene, as Witt had claimed, and because police found and interviewed someone who matched Witt’s description of the attacker, “who is a transient and lives in the area was cleared as a possible suspect.”

They also looked at video from a nearby sporting goods store, which showed Witt buying a small knife minutes before the alleged attack.

Last Thursday, police re-interviewed Witt.

“Where he was confronted with the all the information listed above. Mr. Witt subsequently admitted to accidentally cutting himself with the knife while parked in his car in front of the sporting goods store and admitted making up the story about being attacked,” Sheridan police said in their statement.

I’m sure he got lots of love and sympathy from macho, individualistic wingnuts who feel as if they are always being victimized by violent liberals. 

Too decent

by digby

But it’s the right thing to do:

Mexico’s government is reaching out to the U.S. to offer help for the victims of Hurricane Harvey in Texas.

Mexican Foreign Minister Luis Videgaray spoke with Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) by phone Sunday evening to offer aid “as good neighbors should always do in trying times,” the Dallas Morning News reported.

“As we have done in the past, Mexico stands with Texas in this difficult moment,” said Carlos Gonzalez Gutierrez, the Mexican consul general in Austin.

“The government of Mexico takes this opportunity to express its full solidarity with the people and government of the United States for the damages caused by Hurricane Harvey in Texas,” the Mexican Secretariat of Foreign Affairs said in a statement.

I don’t know if Trump would do the same if the situation were reversed. I don’t recall him offering help to Peruvians when they flooded — or anywhere else. Maybe he did, but it sure wasn’t publicized. Helping foreigners angers his base. But let’s just say that if he did offer to help another country, especially Mexico, I wouldn’t be surprised if he saw it as an opportunity to extract some blood money from someone in exchange. He’s adamant that the US shouldn’t pay for anything, just like the Trump Organization doesn’t pay taxes or he doesn’t pay for work done on his properties. That’s how he rolls.

The foreign minister reminded the Governor that they should be “good neighbors.” But I’m sure in both Abbot and Trump’s minds that means that Mexico should just do whatever the US tells them to do.

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Trump tells his cops he’s got their backs. No matter what.

by digby

I wrote about the Arpaio pardon for Salon this morning:

If there is one person who could be said to be Donald Trump’s political soul mate, it would be Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County Arizona. They bonded over a very special issue: birtherism. Back in 2011, Trump was considering a run for president against Barack Obama and had his minion Sam Nunberg immerse himself in fringe right wing media for months to get a feel for the lay of the land. He found that a large part of the GOP base was convinced that Barack Obama was a secret Muslim who had not been born in the United States and was therefore ineligible to be president. Trump knew he’d found a winning issue in demanding the “long form birth certificate”  and for a time he was even tied for first place for the 2012 GOP nomination.

President Obama released the form and then humiliated Trump to his face at the White House Correspondence dinner and he set his White House plans aside until 2016. But the birther issues didn’t die. It was taken up by Sheriff Joe Arpaio, well-known as a sadistic lawman who made prisoners parade around in pink underwear in 120 degree desert heat in what he himself called “concentration camps,” took up the cause and put a  five-man “Cold Case Posse” on the case to “authenticate” the long form birth certificate.

Donald Trump was very impressed and sent Arpaio a congratulatory note on a printed copy of the AP article announcing the “finding:

From that point on, the two men were  brothers in arms, sharing a deep bond with white America’s racist id.

Sheriff Joe is a pioneer when it comes to Latino bashing. In fact, his strident enforcement of the “show me our papers” law even after it was struck down by the federal courts is what landed him in hot water and a misdemeanor conviction for contempt of court, giving Trump the opportunity to issue a pardon for his anti-immigrant, birther soulmate just seven months into his term.

And an opportunity it is. Indeed, Trump has got to be thrilled that Arpaio offered him a way to send some messages to certain people he desperately needs to keep on board the Trump train.

The first is the base itself, of course. There isn’t a lot of evidence that he’s losing his followers in any great numbers but polls are showing that he’s losing fervency among the faithful and that could lead to real erosion if he doesn’t nip it in the bud. They may be a little bit uncomfortable with coddling Nazis with torches, but pardoning a brutal, anti-immigrant cop is right in their wheelhouse.

The second reason Trump may have pardoned Arpaio is to give his pardon power a little road test to let some specific people know that he’s ready to use it. Recent reporting has the Special Prosecutor and congressional investigators homing in on some of his associates in the various Russian counter-espionage and obstruction of justice investigations and he may need to let them know that he has their backs, bigly.

Finally, I think there is an even more important reason for doing this although I don’t know that Trump is even conscious of it. He has always been an authoritarian at heart, going all the way back to his notorious 1989 full page ad entitled “Bring Back the Death Penalty, Bring Back Our Police.” In July of 2016, he gave a speech declaring,  “I am the law and order candidate.”

He has also declared that he loves torture and that he would summarily execute prisoners if he could. At one point he said that on his first day in office he would declare that it is mandatory to seek the death penalty for any cop killing despite the fact that he would have no authority to do so.  And he promised over and over again that he was going to let the border patrol, ICE and local police “take the gloves off.” As he told Larry King on CNN nearly 30 years ago:

I am strongly in favor of the death penalty. I am also in favor bringing back police forces that can do something instead of turning their back because every quality lawyer that represents people that are trouble, the first thing they do is start shouting police brutality, etc… The problem we have is we don’t have any protection for the policeman..

When the Central Park Five were found to be innocent and later received a large settlement from the city, Trump was angry and he wrote an op-ed in the NY Daily News which said,  “speak to the detectives on the case and try listening to the facts. These young men do not exactly have the pasts of angels.” He refused to accept the judgment of the courts and instead apparently relied on some police officers who told him that the victims deserved what they got.

During the campaign he appeared before police groups all over the country where the rank and file cheered his speeches, many of their unions endorsed him and some even wore his iconic red hats. Just the other day he made a big speech to Long Island police and stunned everyone by telling them that they should rough up suspects during arrests. Many police chiefs responded negatively but the cops in that audience cheered.

Trump didn’t just pardon Arpaio to signal the base that he’s still the anti-immigrant xenophobe they voted for. He pardoned Arpaio to signal to the police in this country that the “law and order” president thinks that it’s fine if cops ignore the courts and the law if they believe they are inhibiting them from doing their jobs.

None of this is to say that he doesn’t truly feel a personal bond with Arpaio and want to spare him a prison sentence however short it might be. After all, he interfered with the case months ago. But he could have granted clemency which would keep him out of jail. Trump chose to pardon him for a reason: he truly doesn’t believe Arpaio did anything wrong by racial profiling or defying a court order to stop doing it.   Indeed, he wants the police to know this president will back them if they do the same.

When he says “law and order” he means that police are the law and they can keep order by any means necessary. And that’s the opposite of the rule of law, a concept for which President Trump clearly has no respect.

By the way, USA Today reported on Sunday that Trump will lift an Obama-era ban on supplying local police forces with surplus military equipment. What could go wrong?

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A more perfect populism
by Tom Sullivan

Jobs. Everybody thinks they are important. Nobody does enough to create better-paying ones. Problem is, we built a system in which people work to support the economy more than the economy supports us. Employers don’t pay enough, the middle class is shrinking, and we’re self-medicating with opioids. Even with unemployment at its lowest in 16 years, CBS reports, 8 out of 10 Americans are living paycheck to paycheck:

“Living paycheck to paycheck is the new way of life for U.S. workers,” he said. “It’s not just one salary range. It’s pretty much across the board, and it’s trending in the wrong direction.”

A year ago, about 75 percent of U.S. workers said they were living from payday to payday, a number that has grown to 78 percent this year. The study, conducted by Harris Poll, surveyed nearly 2,400 hiring and human resource managers and 3,500 adult employees who worked full-time in May and June.

A Pew survey finds Americans would rather have more stable income than more income. And maybe a little more to save for retirement.

About 40 percent of adults with a high school degree or less said they are scrambling to keep afloat, or more than twice the number of Americans with at least a college degree, according to the Federal Reserve. CareerBuilder found that about half of workers who earn less than $50,000 per year are always living paycheck-to-paycheck, compared with 28 percent of those earning between $50,000 to $100,000.

There’s the problem statement. Now, who has solutions?

Democrats have rolled out a nifty slogan, “A Better Deal: better jobs, better wages and a better future.” Is there anything behind it? That is still to be determined.

Conor Friedersdorf has been looking at what a more worker-friendly populism might look like. He cites as a jumping-off point a recent formulation by Damon Linker:

What would a more populist Democratic Party look like? It would embed its bold proposals for cradle-to-grave universal health care, free college tuition at public universities, and ambitious infrastructure projects in a galvanizing story of American citizenship and patriotism, sacrifice and civic duty.

That narrative was choked out over decades by “greed is good” and Randism. It is needed again. And free college? Fine. But for Friedersdorf the proposal is not populist enough. He puts his finger on something that vaguely bothered me about Bernie Sanders’ emphasis on free college tuition that I never quite identified :

But I also know America is overwhelmingly led by people with college degrees and white collar backgrounds––people who overvalue their own path to success and rig the system against others who’d thrive under a different approach. To them I say, a four-year degree shouldn’t be the only way for a young person to achieve the American dream.

Our elites are too often blind to the value of education that is received away from college, whether through apprenticeships or vocational schools or on-the-job training. They don’t always understand that there are lots of blue-collar jobs that are more fulfilling, better paying, and more in demand than lots of white-collar jobs. And they are blind to the wisdom in cultural enclaves where a young person is not considered “culturally competent” until knowing how to perform CPR, help a stranger change a flat, or work alongside people from different social classes without taking offense when their etiquette is different than the etiquette at UCLA or Berkeley.

Friedersdorf (if I am reading him right) doesn’t want all our focus and expenditure directed at colleges and universities, but on support that is more diverse and more broadly inclusive:

But I want to invest as heavily in ambitious, hard-working young people who appreciate that carpenters, day-care workers, sous chefs, masseuses, and plumbers do jobs every bit as important as accountants, marketers, lawyers, and IT staff, and who’ve concluded they can best flourish and contribute to society with an education they acquire outside of college. I don’t want anyone getting a four-year degree just because that’s the only way to receive government help, or because folks with college degrees have rigged the system so that having a credential like theirs is the only way to get ahead in America.

I want to stop robbing people of their comparative advantage.

He wants “to eliminate obstacles like professional-licensing requirements that amount to no more than credentialism,” and to move away from a business culture that demands a bachelor’s degree for jobs “that shouldn’t require one.” I have at least one friend with decades of experience who today is locked out of getting another professional job in her field because she lacks that golden-ticket degree employers require before they will even talk to her. It’s not right.

Here is a similar story, a single mom working two jobs and barely scraping together $25,000 per year:

Before the recession, Millikan earned $30,000 a year with full benefits as a property manager at a call center. It was the highest pay she ever had. The company moved to another the state, and she’s struggled ever since. She says it has been years since she’s had a full-time job, despite sending out endless resumes and earning a college degree in education in 2014 to improve her prospects. She’s repeatedly been told she’s overqualified for low-wage jobs in retail and not qualified enough for coveted positions in business and tech.

To get by, Millikan has become an expert at cost-cutting. Almost everything in her modest apartment is from a thrift store, garage sale or charity. The only thing she buys new for her son is underwear. He’s been asking for a remote-controlled monster truck lately, a toy that’s out of her price range. She hasn’t been able to find a used one at Goodwill. “I don’t ever think I’ll get to the middle class,” Millikan said in an interview, choking back tears. “I can just about guarantee I won’t.”

So Millikan earned her degree. At 39, free college won’t help her.

For years, these stories have been met by “we’re doing what we can” promises from politicians and “that’s just the way it is” shrugs from the business community, especially its libertarian-leaning members. Maybe it’s just me, but my reaction to “that’s just the the way it is” has always been, well then there’s something wrong with the way it is.

Maybe Friedersdorf means this and maybe he doesn’t, but his critique of Bernie Sanders’ free tuition proposal suggests that it acquiesces to a status quo that says a college degree is the “you must be this tall to ride” barrier to accessing the American Dream. The culture that says so it is elitist in nature and noninclusive in practice. An America that works for everyone won’t be achieved by feeding that system but by breaking it and by changing the culture.

In “The War on Stupid People,” David Freedman argued that our fascination with high intelligence and high achievement leaves behind those who by nature or economic circumstance never grow tall enough to ride. He notes ironically that British sociologist Michael Young coined the term meritocracy in 1958 in writing a dystopian satire. Freedman might agree with Friedersdorf on the elitist cast to our present economy:

We must stop glorifying intelligence and treating our society as a playground for the smart minority. We should instead begin shaping our economy, our schools, even our culture with an eye to the abilities and needs of the majority, and to the full range of human capacity.

If struggling Americans feel left behind, it is because they have been. So there is something aspirational in both Friedersdorf’s and Linker’s visions that leans towards realization of a more diverse social equality (rather than to the false promise to restore an America that never was). They both insist on more civics education as essential to a program that, in Linker’s mind:

… would speak proudly and without shame about the public aspects of our lives — and of how the self-indulgent and self-centered cynicism of our politics has led too many of us to forget, and too many of our public officials to denigrate, what we owe to one another as fellow citizens, as well as what the government does to make our freedom (as individuals but also as communities) possible.

At this point, that feels like a tough lift. But it is a sensibility that is not entirely forgotten:

Wow. "Hold the line until our country gets back to understanding & respecting each other…" Jim Mattis to US troops pic.twitter.com/VMAAXjBWyg— Richard Chambers (@newschambers) August 26, 2017

It shouldn’t take a natural disaster like Hurricane Harvey or sharing a foxhole to bring our latent sense of community to the surface again. Take care of each other out there.

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Request a copy of For The Win, my county-level election mechanics primer, at tom.bluecentury at gmail.

A backyard in Houston

by digby

I don’t know if this is real. But if it is …

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