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Month: January 2018

Nuclear War – The Defining Issue of Our Time by tristero

Published by digby on January 14, 2018

Nuclear War – The Defining Issue of Our Time

by tristero

The defining issue of our time is imminent nuclear war. Everything seems to be pointing towards the deployment sometime soon by the United States of so-called tactical nuclear weapons in North Korea.

Although there is some awareness (Digby links to the Times editorial this morning), I don’t think people fully understand how serious this is. This is not to minimize the myriad existential dangers we face from the international rise of the extreme right to power, especially in the US. But as I see it, imminent nuclear war trumps them all. Meanwhile the media seem to be focused more on incessantly repeating a racist, scatalogical term that Trump used rather than sounding unequivocal alarm bells about how close to we are to a nuclear war. The snickering is making us oblivious to Armageddon.

But in truth, I don’t think it will happen with apocalyptic bangs and mammoth mushroom clouds. As I see it, if Trump and his military start using nuclear weapons, they won’t drop them – at least initially – on cities. They’ll be used in remote areas of North Korea where the Internet is non-existent or spotty. They used a similar tactic – and got away with it, there was hardly any global outcry – with the MOAB in Afghanistan, the world’s largest conventional weapon.

At least for the first few days after a so-called tactical nuclear strike, there won’t be too many horrible pictures or videos of victims. That will give the Trump administration some time to set the agenda and pooh-pooh the horror. Trump will do his usual tweetery distraction thingie, making it all about his personality rather than the ghastly suffering of his victims. Meanwhile, the generals will tout the surgical purity of the strike against some military target, “proving” that nuclear weapons can be deployed successfully without risking annihilation.

But the annihilation will come. Because once one of these nuclear bombs goes off, countries – especially the US – will find plenty of reasons to use them more often.  No matter how small they are, the effect will add up. There will be global fallout. And nuclear arsenals will expand worldwide, increasing the risk of accident, sabotage, and theft by neo-Nazi nationalists and political extremists from every religion. As a result, the global fallout will increase.

In short, if Trump drops a single nuclear bomb, annihilation is extremely likely, but not all at once. It will come with increased cancer rates worldwide over the following decades and the poisoning of our environment from the expanded usage of these so-called small nuclear weapons. And once again Republican leaders and other right wingers will pull out a variation of the obfuscating defense they’ve used so successfully to deflect the banning of tobacco and to scuttle climate change initiatives.

I’ve been studying nuclear war history and policy during the 1960’s for a project I’m working on. It makes for terrifying reading, not the least because of the sheer stupidity and wooly thinking by some of the finest minds on the planet, the men  (they were almost exclusively men)   who crafted nuclear strategy. When you consider the spectacular mistakes and accidents that occurred back then (not to mention the Missile Crisis), it is simply mind-boggling that we haven’t yet been blown up.

It looks like our luck’s about to run out. Those 60’s nuclear planners are all gone from power. And as poor as their thinking was – and it was remarkably bad, with very rare exceptions – the level of thinking today in the Trump administration is an order of magnitude worse.

I am extremely worried. You should be, too. And alarms should be sounding loudly, clearly, and constantly.

Dear Leader’s Enforcers to the rescue

Published by digby on January 14, 2018

Dear Leader’s Enforcers to the rescueby digby

You can believe me or you can believe your lying eyes:

They are lying. They are protecting their Dear Leader. They are more dangerous than he is.

Here’s Rand Paul warning that nobody should criticize Dear Leader:

I know I keep saying this, but as Trump is getting worse, proving he is incapable of doing the job, melting down under the stress, these GOP henchmen are stepping up to back him.

These are Senators accusing fellow Senators of being liars to defend the most dishonest man on the face of the planet — and daring the rest of us to say otherwise.

Tom Cotton is Trump with brains. Sonny Perdue is a weak sycophant. Rand Paul is vying for the role of racist overseer. They are all-in.


Update:

This is not a drill

Published by digby on January 14, 2018

This is not a drillby digby


This NY Times editorial is chilling:

It was the sort of nightmare that had only ever been real for most people’s parents or grandparents — the fear of an impending nuclear attack. “Ballistic missile threat inbound to Hawaii,” read the emergency alert that residents of the Aloha State received on Saturday morning. “Seek immediate shelter. This is not a drill.”

The authorities quickly announced that the alert was a mistake. But it made tangible the growing fears that after decades of leaders trying to more safely control the world’s nuclear arsenals, President Trump has increased the possibility of those weapons being used.

At a time when many are questioning whether Mr. Trump ought to be allowed anywhere near the nuclear “button,” he is moving ahead with plans to develop new nuclear weapons and expanding the circumstances in which they’d be used. Such actions break with years of American nuclear policy. They also make it harder to persuade other nations to curb their nuclear ambitions or forgo them entirely.

Mr. Trump has boasted about the size and power of America’s nuclear arsenal, threatened to “totally destroy” North Korea, pushed for a massive buildup of an arsenal that already has too many — 4,000 — warheads and wondered aloud why the United States possesses such weapons if it isn’t prepared to use them.

Now, as he tries to force North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons capability and ensure that Iran never acquires one, Mr. Trump is poised to make public a new policy that commits America to an increasing investment in those very weapons, according to a draft document made public by HuffPost and confirmed by The Times.

A major departure in the new policy is the plan to build new low-yield nuclear weapons. The rationale is that most modern weapons are so powerful that no one believes they will ever be used, so lower-explosive warheads are needed to maintain an effective deterrent. This logic is insane.

The United States already has immense nuclear and conventional capabilities, and experts say there is no evidence these so-called more usable low-yield nuclear weapons will force adversaries to behave better. Enlarging the United States arsenal will certainly lead other countries to seek equivalent arsenals of their own, while also raising the odds that weapons fall into terrorists’ hands and heightening the risk of accidental war. Investing huge sums this way is also unlikely to protect us from tomorrow’s threats.

The administration, however, would have us believe that America is falling behind in military capability. Mr. Trump was compelled to act, the document argues, primarily because of Russia’s “unabashed return to Great Power competition,” including modernization of its nuclear weaponry. Russia is unquestionably a growing problem that needs to be confronted, but that’s a cynical rationale for a president who so far has refused to acknowledge the Kremlin’s interference in the 2016 election or its threat more generally to Western democracies.

Making matters worse, Mr. Trump, in a separate decision on Friday, continued to put the 2015 deal that froze Iran’s nuclear program in jeopardy. The president warned European allies that they must agree to overhaul the deal in 120 days, or he would withdraw the United States from it. Although he again stopped short of reimposing sanctions, his demands would effectively require renegotiating the deal, something the other parties to the agreement have refused to do.

The proposed nuclear policy says a more aggressive nuclear posture is warranted because the world is more dangerous, with China, North Korea and Iran cited as concerns. Yet blowing up the Iran deal would free Tehran to resume its nuclear activities and make the world less safe. In other words, Mr. Trump’s approach makes no sense.

Under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, signed in 1968, the United States and Russia promised to reduce the role and number of nuclear weapons. They made significant, although insufficient, progress. After reductions under a succession of past presidents, the American stockpile is 85 percent smaller than it was at the height of the Cold War. Negotiations on further reductions have stalled in recent years as Russia, threatened by America’s superior conventional arsenal, became more reliant on nuclear weapons, and there is no serious sign that Mr. Trump wants to revive the talks.

President Barack Obama made a down payment on a saner policy by narrowing to “extreme circumstances” the conditions under which nuclear weapons would be used and ruling out their use against most non-nuclear countries. Mr. Trump’s policy also talks about “extreme circumstances, ” but it dangerously broadens the definition to include “significant non-nuclear strategic attacks,” which could mean using nuclear weapons to respond to cyber, biological and chemical weapon attacks.

Until Mr. Trump, no one could imagine the United States ever using a nuclear weapon again. America’s conventional military is more than strong enough to defend against most threats. But Mr. Trump has so shaken this orthodoxy that Congress has begun debating limits on his unilateral authority to launch nuclear weapons. Expanding the instances when America might use nuclear weapons could also make it easier for other nuclear-armed countries to justify using their own arsenals against adversaries.

As the residents of Hawaii can tell you, it’s a risk the world cannot afford.

Trump is a risk the world cannot afford. But here we are. This is not a drill.

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Status is a moving target by @BLoggersRUs

Published by Tom Sullivan on January 14, 2018

Status is a moving target
by Tom Sullivan


Image, public domain via Wikipedia.

If King were alive now, he would be standing w/ DACA & all immigrants. He would challenge a tax reform bill that transferred $2 trillion from the poor to the wealthy. He would be dealing head-on with health care & the resegregation of public schools….

…Dr. King would challenge a nation that spends 54 cents of every dollar on a military. He would be building a #PoorPeoplesCampaign to shift the moral narrative in America.

— The Rev. William J. Barber II in a series of tweets

This weekend Americans celebrate the life and accomplishments of Dr. Martin Luther King. Again. But too often those memorials are soft-focused celebrations held in ballrooms and not in the streets.

The Rev. William J. Barber II is in Dallas this weekend to continue the work of his new Poor People’s Campaign when he heard of the president’s “shithole” heard round the world. But rather than his rhetoric, it is the president’s policies and their harmful effects that should draw our attention, Barber believes. If the only place we see racism is in what he says, “you’re missing the racism entirely,” Barber said:

If King were alive now, he says, he would be “standing with DACA, with all immigrants. He would challenge a tax reform bill that transferred $2 trillion from the poor to the wealthy. He would be dealing head-on with health care and the resegregation of public schools. He would challenge a nation that spends 54 cents of every dollar on a military.”

He would preach from every mountaintop, Barber contends, that a continuation of such policies will guarantee “a spiritual death.”

Barber warns against “loving the tomb of the prophets but not the prophets themselves. It is dangerous to isolate Dr. King. Dr. King was all about ‘we.'”

King’s original Poor People’s Campaign ended with his death. That 1968 effort attempted “to push Congress into passing an economic bill of rights including a package of guaranteed income, equitable housing and funds for poor communities.” Barber’s renewed effort aims to unite disenfranchised groups in common cause.

As dispirited as people may be and as disparate, they share more than they know. A study highlighted in the New Yorker finds that the mere perception of being disadvantaged has consequences without regard to quantitative measures. Keith Payne, a psychologist at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, finds feeling poor itself has leads to risky behaviors and other negative impacts:

This feeling is not limited to those in the bottom quintile; in a world where people measure themselves against their neighbors, it’s possible to earn good money and still feel deprived. “Unlike the rigid columns of numbers that make up a bank ledger, status is always a moving target, because it is defined by ongoing comparisons to others,” Payne writes.

Rising inequality has consequences for the wave of xenophobia, racism and conspiracy mongering Donald Trump rode to the White House:

People’s attitude toward race, too, [Payne] argues, is linked to the experience of deprivation. Here Payne cites work done by psychologists at N.Y.U., who offered subjects ten dollars with which to play an online game. Some of the subjects were told that, had they been more fortunate, they would have received a hundred dollars. The subjects, all white, were then shown pairs of faces and asked which looked “most black.” All the images were composites that had been manipulated in various ways. Subjects in the “unfortunate” group, on average, chose images that were darker than those the control group picked. “Feeling disadvantaged magnified their perception of racial differences,” Payne writes.

“The Broken Ladder” is full of studies like this. Some are more convincing than others, and, not infrequently, Payne’s inferences seem to run ahead of the data. But the wealth of evidence that he amasses is compelling. People who are made to feel deprived see themselves as less competent. They are more susceptible to conspiracy theories. And they are more likely to have medical problems. A study of British civil servants showed that where people ranked themselves in terms of status was a better predictor of their health than their education level or their actual income was.

Payne writes, “Inequality so mimics poverty in our minds that the United States of America … has a lot of features that better resemble a developing nation than a superpower.”

All the more reason for people outside the One Percent to find common cause with one another than not. If Barber succeeds, perhaps they can bridge their divides. The president, on the other hand, finds his power rooted in division. Stoking people’s feelings of being disadvantaged his his coin.

* * * * * * * *

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

Now we know when Trump thinks America was great

Published by digby on January 14, 2018

Now we know when Trump thinks America was greatby digby

We now know when Donald Trump thinks America was great and what he thinks will make it great again: the 1920s. God help us he may just bring us to the same point to which his apparent idol — Warren G. Harding — brought us. It, uh, wasn’t good.
This piece by Adam Serwer gets to the heart of Trump’s entire worldview. He talks about the racist, xenophobic, eugenicist policies that led to the immigration act of 1924, which pretty much cut off all immigration from anywhere but northern Europe. Then this:

More than a century later President Donald Trump would put it differently, as he considered immigration from Africa, wondering, “Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?” instead suggesting that America take in more immigrants from places like Norway.

These remarks reflect scorn not only for those who wish to come here, but those who already have. It is a president of the United States expressing his contempt for the tens of millions of descendants of Africans, most of whose forefathers had no choice in crossing the Atlantic, American citizens whom any president is bound to serve. And it is a public admission of sorts that he is incapable of being a president for all Americans, the logic of his argument elevating not just white immigrants over brown ones, but white citizens over the people of color they share this country with.

The racist pseudoscience underpinning Walker’s belief that immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe were incapable of responsible self-government is out of vogue today, but the both the sentiment and logic are now applied by the descendants of those very same “beaten races” who now work for Trump in the White House, who craft arguments defending his prejudice, and who cast ballots bearing his name. Whether through ardent commitment or conflicted resignation, they are all now a part of Trump’s only sincere ideological project, the preservation of white political and cultural dominance. That was the goal of Walker and the immigrant restrictionists of his day, and it is Trump’s project now.

It is one the president has pursued with abandon. As Elise Foley writes, since taking office, he has cancelled the Deferred Action Program for Childhood Arrivals,subjecting more than 600,000 people brought to the U.S. illegally as children to the prospect of deportation, and cancelled Temporary Protected Status for 50,000 Haitians and 200,000 El Salvadorans living in the United States. Trump has adopted policies that would be responsible for the displacement of nearly a million people of color in less than 12 months in office.

Virtually all of Walker’s complaints, staples of anti-immigrant rhetoric at the turn of the century, will sound familiar to those who have paid attention to American politics for the past two years.

Their habits of life, again, are of the most revolting kind. Read the description given by Mr. Riis of the police driving from the garbage dumps the miserable beings who try to burrow in those depths of unutterable filth and slime in order that they may eat and sleep there! Was it in cement like this that the foundations of our republic were laid? What effects must be produced upon our social standards, and upon the ambitions and aspirations of our people, by a contact so foul and loathsome? The influence upon the American rate of wages of a competition like this cannot fail to be injurious and even disastrous.

A few hours after news of his remarks broke, Trump attempted to reframe his objections as a matter of public safety. “The Democrats seem intent on having people and drugs pour into our country from the Southern Border, risking thousands of lives in the process,” Trump tweeted. “It is my duty to protect the lives and safety of all Americans. We must build a Great Wall, think Merit and end Lottery & Chain. USA!”

Or as Walker put it, “the present situation is most menacing to our peace and political, safety. In all the social and industrial disorders of this country since 1877, the foreign elements have proved themselves the ready tools of demagogues in defying the law, in destroying property, and in working violence.” He offered that “There may be those who can contemplate the addition to our population of vast numbers of persons having no inherited instincts of self-government and respect for law; knowing no restraint upon their own passions but the club of the policeman or the bayonet of the soldier; forming communities, by the tens of thousands, in which only foreign tongues are spoken, and into which can steal no influence from our free institutions and from popular discussion. But I confess to being far less optimistic.”

The benefit of this history is that we know how the story ended then; with the adoption of racist immigration laws, and the immigrants from the “shithole countries” of the turn of the century defending the country in two world wars. But their children and grandchildren, having assimilated into the very whiteness Walker and his ilk saw as endangered, now repeat the same slander laid upon their ancestors against a new generation of immigrants looking for a better life in America. The old lies are now again embraced by the descendants of those who once suffered because of them.

Read on.

I wrote a lot about Trump’s eugenicist belief system during the campaign. He hasn’t made a secrt of his belief that he comes from superior stock. For some reason too many people in the media decided to ignore all this about him and pretend that he was making a class argument. I guess because he is a billionaire he’s assumed to also be an economic determinist. He is anything but that:

Trump biographer Michael D’Antonio explains that Trump was raised to believe that success is genetic, and that some people are just more superior than others:

“The family subscribes to a racehorse theory of human development. They believe that there are superior people and that if you put together the genes of a superior woman and a superior man, you get a superior offspring.”

Huffington Post also took the liberty of compiling a whole bunch of times Trump suggested that genes are the main factor behind brains and superiority. Here are just a few choice quotes from good ol’ Trump:

“All men are created equal. Well, it’s not true. ‘Cause some are smart, some aren’t.”

“When you connect two racehorses, you usually end up with a fast horse.”

“Secretariat doesn’t produce slow horses.”

“Do we believe in the gene thing? I mean, I do.”

“I have great genes and all that stuff which, I’m a believer in.”

He used to say his family came from Sweden because there was a point in American history where bragging about being of “good German blood” was socially frowned upon. But he stopped that and went back to it.

It should not be a surprise at all that Trump thinks countries which are predominantly made up of non-whites are “shithole countries.” He’ a white supremacist and has been his whole life.

No Laws Stopped Trump From Launching A Nuke Today @spockosbrain

Published by Spocko on January 13, 2018

No Laws Stopped Trump From Launching A Nuke Today

By Spocko

Did you know that Trump could have launched a nuke today? It would have been in response to a false alarm in Hawaii.

No law could have stopped him. Only “norms” — and as we know, he’s not good at following those.

On December 1, 2016  Alex Wellerstein, a historian of nuclear weapons at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, N.J.  wrote a piece for the Washington Post explaining how and why the whole system was set up so the president — and only the president — could decide when to launch.

 No one can stop President Trump from using nuclear weapons. That’s by design. 

[Trump] will have sole authority over more than 7,000 warheads. There is no failsafe. The whole point of U.S. nuclear weapons control is to make sure that the president — and only the president — can use them if and whenever he decides to do so. The one sure way to keep President Trump from launching a nuclear attack, under the system we’ve had in place since the early Cold War, would have been to elect someone else.

I’ve been listening to the book Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety  nuclear accidents. It’s scary.

Yesterday I listened to former Congressman Alan Grayson on the David Feldman podcast talk about the bill he tried to get passed that would stop Trump from having sole control of the launch of a nuclear weapon.  Two things to know

1) The bill did not pass.
2) Even if it HAD passed, the circumstances of this kind of mistake would not be covered, because it would have fallen under the category of a sneak attack since–as Wellerstein noted–a law would most likely:

..allow the president to use nuclear weapons in the face of imminent danger, the sort of situation in which a matter of minutes or even seconds could make a difference…

THIS is why Trump needs to be removed from office.

When we don’t have laws, just norms, and someone NOT normal is in charge, we are in trouble.

This Hawaii example is exactly what I was talking about in my earlier piece about Trump’s nuclear tweets. WE NEED TO FIX THIS NOW. A psychiatric test needs to be requested by congress and then administered. One already exists, it is given to the military who are in charge of launching the missiles.

Let’s Politicize This Near Disaster

I want to politicize this mistake. We can ask, “Why this mistake now? Are there people running the defense industry who know how scary it is to have Trump in charge, so they let this slip? Did they do this at this time because they KNEW he was on the golf course? (But wouldn’t his team have gotten to him instantly with the news, and the nuclear football?) But let’s not focus on the parts that might be conspiratorial.

Let’s use this as an opportunity to change laws, and get Trump out of this position of  power over the life or death of millions. 

Someone should revive Grayson’s bill. Maybe Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard from Hawaii. She’s motivated.

We dodged a nuclear bullet today. Let’s not blow this.



Trump’s “dark nuclear perspective”

Published by digby on January 13, 2018

Trump’s “dark nuclear perspective”
by digby



Oh look:

In his first year in office, President Barack Obama gave a landmark address in Prague in which he famously affirmed “clearly and with conviction America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.” The commitment to total nuclear disarmament was a major departure from the George W. Bush administration — the first time, in fact, that the United States had declared a nuclear-free world a major policy goal.

Now, eight years later, it’s the Trump administration’s turn to lay out its nuclear weapons policy. And according to a pre-decisional draft of the 2018 Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) obtained by HuffPost, Trump’s Department of Defense has gone a decidedly different route: new nukes, for no good reason.

The final version of the NPR is scheduled to be released in February. You can read the draft in full at the bottom of this article. A Defense Department spokesperson declined to comment on the draft, saying that the agency “will not discuss pre-decisional drafts of the document.”

In October, NBC reported that President Trump had told a gathering of high-ranking national security leaders that “he wanted what amounted to a nearly tenfold increase in the U.S. nuclear arsenal.” While the report doesn’t nearly go that far, it does call for the development of new, so-called low-yield nuclear weapons — warheads with a lower explosive force.

The logic of those pushing for the development of smaller nukes is that our current nuclear weapons are too big and too deadly to ever use; we are effectively self-deterred, and the world knows it. To make sure other countries believe that we’d actually use nuclear force, the thinking goes, we need more low-yield nukes.

But official language around nuclear weapons is slippery and euphemistic. “Low yield” suggests a softer sort of weaponry, diet nukes, until you realize that the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were technically “low-yield” weapons.

Trump’s NPR draft euphemizes the euphemism, referring to low-yield weapons as “supplements” that will “enhance deterrence.” The document claims that Russia is threatening to use these smaller nuclear weapons; the U.S. needs to match and deter the Russians in kind.

2018 NUCLEAR POSTURE REVIEW DRAFT

What goes unmentioned is that we already have over 1,000 nuclear warheads in our arsenal with low-yield options, to say nothing of the fact that the more nuclear weapons you introduce into the world, the more likely it is that they’ll one day be used.

“Making the case that we need more low-yield options is making the case that this president needs more nuclear capabilities at his disposal,” said Alexandra Bell, a former senior adviser at the State Department and current senior policy director at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, “regardless of the fact that we have 4,000 nuclear weapons in our active stockpile, which is more than enough to destroy the world many times over. So I don’t think it makes a convincing case that we somehow lack capabilities. And, in fact, I don’t think you can make the case that this president needs any more capabilities.”

The draft itself doesn’t do all that much to convince anyone of the necessity of these low-yield weapons. One tactic it uses right up front is fear. Look no further than Page 6:

2018 NUCLEAR POSTURE REVIEW DRAT

This is a slightly darker picture than reality would support, according to Laura Holgate, a special assistant to Obama for weapons of mass destruction terrorism and threat reduction and a former U.S. ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna. “The notion that there are uncertainties is actually not new,” Holgate told HuffPost. “That’s always going to be true about the international environment. And there were references to uncertainties in the 2010 report, as well. But this dark perspective and this uncertain view underpin the decisions to walk back some of the decisions or postures presented in the 2010 report.”


Yeah. There’s more. If you can stand it.

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Hawaii: the Trump era in a nutshell

Published by digby on January 13, 2018

The Trump era in a nutshellby digby

This mistake (or some kind of sabotage) happened earlier today:

People were evacuated from hotels, running from the beach etc. They don’t know at this point if the Hawaiian system might have been hacked.

If it was, imagine if the unfit moron in chief decided to retaliate.

He was busy on the golf course today, thank God.

This is why he is the most dangerous president in history. We cannot depend on him to even listen to experts or his own advisers. He’s fucking nuts, he’s looking for a fight. Anything can happen.

I’m old enough to have lived through the duck and cover drills back in the day. We lived with the fear of nuclear war. There was a lot we didn’t know at the time but I don’t think any American at thought that our own president was incapable of understanding the threat.

I do now.

I hope to God nobody decides they need to put him on TV to “reassure” the public. The mere sight of him in the context is terrifying.

Update:This was published a week or so ago:

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has scheduled a briefing for later this month to outline how the public can prepare for nuclear war.

“While a nuclear detonation is unlikely, it would have devastating results and there would be limited time to take critical protection steps. Despite the fear surrounding such an event, planning and preparation can lessen deaths and illness,” the notice about the Jan. 16 briefing says on the CDC’s website, which features a photo of a mushroom cloud.

The notice went on to say that most people don’t know that sheltering in place for at least 24 hours is “crucial to saving lives and reducing exposure to radiation.”

Two of the people presenting at the briefing specialize in radiation studies. Robert Whitcomb is the chief of the radiation studies branch at the CDC’s National Center for Environment Health and Capt. Michael Noska is the radiation safety officer and senior advisor for health physics at the Food and Drug Administration.

This comes amid rising tensions between the U.S. and North Korea. President Trump tweeted Tuesday night, boasting about the size of his “nuclear button” and how it’s “much bigger & more powerful” than North Korea’s.

“North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un just stated that the Nuclear Button is on his desk at all times.’ Will someone from his depleted and food starved regime please inform him that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!” Mr. Trump tweeted.

Both former Vice President Joe Biden and Admiral Mike Mullen have said in recent days that they worry the U.S. has never been closer to nuclear war with North Korea.

“Do Columbia”: Nixonian in every way but brains

Published by digby on January 13, 2018

“Do Columbia”: Nixonian in every way but brainsby digby

Nixon had his plumbers break into Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office. Apparently, that gave Trump ideas:

Donald Trump in 2013 asked James O’Keefe, the controversial conservative filmmaker, if he could “get inside” Columbia University and obtain President Obama’s sealed college records, according to a passage in O’Keefe’s forthcoming book, a copy of which was reviewed by CNN.
O’Keefe, a guerrilla filmmaker whom critics have decried for his tactics and who pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor for entering federal property in 2010 under false pretenses, writes in “American Pravda: My Fight for Truth in the Era of Fake News” that during a meeting in New York City Trump complimented his ACORN sting videos (“That pimp and hooker thing you did, wow!”). But, O’Keefe writes, Trump “was a man with a plan” and “did not agree to this meeting to sing my praises.”

What was Trump’s plan?

According to O’Keefe, Trump “suspected Obama had presented himself as a foreign student on application materials to ease his way into New York’s Columbia University, maybe even Harvard too, and perhaps picked up a few scholarships along the way.”

O’Keefe wrote that during the 2013 meeting Trump suggested O’Keefe infiltrate Columbia and obtain the sealed records: “‘Nobody else can get this information,'” O’Keefe quoted Trump as saying. “‘Do you think you could get inside Columbia?'”

O’Keefe said he explained to Trump that the request did not fall into his “line of work,” and that he considered himself and his colleagues to be journalists, not “private eyes.”

But that didn’t seem to deter Trump. At the end of the meeting, O’Keefe wrote, “Trump shook my hand, encouraged me to keep up the good work, and half-whispered, ‘Do Columbia.'”

What do you suppose he’s really saying and doing in the White House?

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