Month: January 2018

A partisan gerrymander, pure and simple
by Tom Sullivan

A federal court has once again struck down district maps drawn by North Carolina Republicans as unconstitutional gerrymanders. The ruling was precedent-setting for why the court deemed the maps unconstitutional. It was not because of racial gerrymandering:

The ruling was the first time that a federal court had blocked a congressional map because of a partisan gerrymander, and it instantly endangered Republican seats in the coming elections.

Judge James A. Wynn Jr., in a biting 191-page opinion, said that Republicans in North Carolina’s Legislature had been “motivated by invidious partisan intent” as they carried out their obligation in 2016 to divide the state into 13 congressional districts, 10 of which are held by Republicans. The result, Judge Wynn wrote, violated the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection.

The maps not only deny a voice to Democrats in the ten Republican-majority districts, but to Republicans in the three districts Republican lawmakers reserved for Democrats.

Courts rejected previous Republican-led attempts at redrawing racially gerrymandered state legislative maps and handed over the task to a special master. Tuesday’s decision by the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals repeats that formula.

The three-judge panel, by now weary of the four-corners delay state Republicans have run since issuing the maps in 2011, gave the majority lawmakers two weeks to redraw the congressional map thay had already redrawn or it would turn over the process to a special master.

(Owing to the seesawing effect of these follies, I voted in North Carolina’s 11th Congressional District in 2010, voted in the 10th Congressional District in 2012, 2014, and in the 2016 primaries, and was back in the 11th in time for the 2016 general election — all without changing address.)

Lawmakers are certain to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.

At Election Law Blog, Rick Hasen examined the ruling, noting:

The result is not a big surprise given what North Carolina did here. After its earlier redistricting was declared a racial gerrymander, it came up with a new plan using only political data that it described as a partisan gerrymander on its own terms. It did this as a defense against a future racial gerrymandering claim. As the court explained at page 16, NC “Representative Lewis said that he “propose[d] that [the Committee] draw the maps to give a partisan advantage
to 10 Republicans and 3 Democrats because [he] d[id] not believe it[ would be] possible to draw a map with 11 Republicans and 2 Democrats.” If there’s any case that could be a partisan gerrymander, it’s this one.

The Supreme Court is already considering two partisan gerrymandering cases, one from Wisconsin and one from Maryland. No doubt NC will appeal this case to the Supreme Court, which is likely to hold it in light of the decision in those cases (it would be too late, absent extraordinary briefing, to set the case for argument this term). It likely will be sent back to this court to reconsider in light of what the Court does.

Hasen’s colleague Nicholas Stephanopoulos adds that the court rejected the defendants’ arguments against using empirical evidence of partisan discrimination to reject their maps:

The court, though, observed that “plaintiffs do not seek to constitutionalize any of the empirical analyses they have put forward,” adding that “these analyses provide evidence that the 2016 Plan violates a number of well-established constitutional standards.” The court further criticized the defendants for their “cynical” view that analysis should be discarded if it has “its genesis in academic research.” “It makes no practical or legal sense for courts to close their eyes to new scientific or statistical methods.” “The Constitution does not require the federal courts to act like Galileo’s Inquisition and enjoin consideration of new academic theories.”

Not that Republican lawmakers have any history of doing that.

As satisfying as it is to see Lewis and his oleaginous associates slapped down again, it is frustrating that Democrats only recourse these days is the courts. With Donald Trump in the White House, that last line of defense will not hold much longer if Democrats do not regain control of the Senate this fall.

As I continue to remind readers, progressives’ fixation on Washington is misplaced. The real action, the gerrymandering action, takes place at the state legislative level where Republicans dominate.

Regaining control of those legislatures has been complicated by the sort of gerrymandering North Carolina Republicans have perfected. Undoing that control will take multiple cycles and commitment to that local work.

It is possible the court’s decision in this case will have a ripple effect that will impede further shenanigans in other Republican-dominated states. But the only longer-term solution is an electoral one.

Gaining U.S. Senate seats this fall may be the only near-term leverage Democrats have for preventing Republicans from enhancing the courts the way they have used mapping Viagra to keep their state and federal majorities artificially firm.

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

Trump Is Like, TV Smart
by Spocko

I read a great article  5 Things TV Writers Apparently Believe About Smart People  by @cs_coville from Cracked in 2011. My favorite section was “It’s Okay To Be A Dick, As Long As You’re Smart” There are many examples of smart dicks, but at the time she used Dr. House.

“A further staple of the supergenius genre is the guy who treats other people like crap, and gets away with it because of his amazing talents. It’s actually hard to find a TV genius who isn’t a shithead. These people are unfriendly, antisocial, or generally messed up when it comes to communicating with other humans, but avoid getting sued or shot in the face only because it turns out they’re always, always right.”

“When Trump says he is “like, really smart.” he might mean a TV version of a smart person. Specifically someone who uses his “smarts” to win. The type of smarts Trump used to win isn’t your standard IQ smart.  Trump can look at the big picture and say, “The Apprentice ratings didn’t lie. I was a hit. The Electoral College numbers didn’t lie. I’m the President.” Both of those statements are true. Trump can ask “Would a dumb person be able to do that?” The answer should be no. Not unless a lot of people helped and we expand our definition of smarts. What types of smarts made his win happen? He credits only himself, but we know there were others who helped. Whose “smarts” got him there?

I’ve actually worked with dozens of smart people whose names you would recognized as IQ smart. I’ve also worked with people who have different kinds of smarts, not standard IQ. Here are a few types of smarts I’ve worked with:

• Financially
• Computer programming
• Emotionally
• Marketing and sales
• Advertising smart
  Not “Who’s the ad genius who thought of this?”
• Mathematically
• Engineering
• Medically
• Theoretically
• Entrepreneurial
• Leadership
• Politically
• Strategically
• Tactically
• Street

In America, if you successfully create money with your smarts your opinion is valued more.  But even if you got your money the old-fashioned way, by stealing or inheriting it, money can be used to get people who are smart in other areas to help you win. One big focus of the rich has been on hiring politicians to change the laws so they keep the money and make more of it. The ROI on politicians is huge.

The current situation shows that financially successful people like the Mercers and Kochs have used their money to buy various kind of “smart” people.  They have then used “like, a smart person” to achieve their strategic goals. Lower taxes and no regulation.

Donald Trump recently tweeted about a Michael Goodwin column in the New York Post, “We are still better off with Trump than Clinton“

Trump has since deleted his Tweet because he incorrectly quoted Goodwin’s column tweeting “enormously consensual presidency” instead of  “enormously consequential presidency” but I think it is important to note who was the really smart person in this story: Rupert Murdoch, the owner of the money losing New York Post.

I quoted that tweet and added this fun fact.

Fun Fact. The @nypost loses about 110 million every year. From 2013 @politico story by @joepompeo, (he’s now at @VanityFair ) https://t.co/LBiHRTA42x https://t.co/PuZG9KRg3i

— Spocko (@spockosbrain) January 8, 2018

In the corporate world making money is one of the major measures of success. So if you are running the country “like a business” you can grow your bottom line by cutting costs or benefits to workers.  You can cut costs by firing workers. With a country there are other goals than just the bottom line.

In the dot com days people spent millions for “eyeballs”  They didn’t care about profitability.  They planned to go public or sell to a bigger company. It wasn’t their goal to be profitable as long as they had a “liquidity” event on the horizon they were happy. If making money was the only metric, a lot of companies were NOT successful.

Murdoch has a strategy with the New York Post. In order to achieve his goals in other areas he is fine with the @nypost LOSING over 110 million dollars every single year. That’s a long-term strategy that has paid off for him. He can strategically, and continually, lose money if he–as the major shareholder– thinks it is necessary.
(And, speaking about companies that didn’t make money, but had a lot of eyeballs, I give you MySpace. It was bought by NewsCorp. What was Murdoch’s ROI on that deal?)

One of the things that I’ve found is that people often defer to financially successful people on what actions to take. (I saw this mostly in the VC world, but in other areas too.) The problem that I’ve seen is that someone’s smarts in one area doesn’t always apply to other areas. Just because someone made millions manipulating financial markets doesn’t mean they know jack squat about marketing political ideas to the public.

Building our side is important. It’s great to be part of that. I love to do that. It makes me feel good to see others succeed. But tearing down their side is also important.

When we look to defeat the right, we need to understand what has worked for the right. That does not mean we have to do the exact same things they do.  But we should acknowledge that different kinds of smarts can help us.  It also means we need to apply multiple strategies, smarts and tactics to multiple areas. That includes offensive strategies directed toward our enemies.  I’m seeing a lot of blocking, but not much tackling.

I’m also seeing people attacking individuals or institution on our side. If you are doing that please ask yourself. “How can I use this attack energy against the other side?” I ask myself,

1. What are the tactics that will cost our enemies money?
2. What are the tactics that will cost our enemies their jobs?  
3. Who can I help with their fight? How can I help them? 
4. Where is my help needed most?
5. What unique smarts can I bring to the table? 

I say fight the other side. It’s what really smart people do.

The terrorist nobody noticedby digby

If there’s one thing the Trump administration cares about it’s terrorism, amirite? The minute one hits, the president is on twitter taking credit for predicting it and promising to “be strong an smart” and put a stop to it. His ruthless attitude toward terrorism was one of his major selling points.
Surprise! It turns out they are only concerned if the terrorist is a muslim. Get a load of this:

Usually, when the FBI arrests a terrorist and the Justice Department charges them, it’s a big deal. Combatting terrorism is one of the Justice Department’s top priorities, and terror cases are a great way for federal prosecutors and agents to make names and build careers. The press and the public are very interested. Officials will typically blast out a press release, and, if it’s a big takedown, might even hold a press conference.

The Justice Department didn’t do any of that when federal prosecutors unsealed terrorism charges last week against Taylor Michael Wilson. The 26-year-old white supremacist from St. Charles, Missouri, allegedly breached a secure area of an Amtrak train on Oct. 22 while armed with a gun and plenty of backup ammunition. He set off the emergency brake, sending passengers lunging as the train cars went “completely black.”

The attempted terrorist attack took place aboard an Amtrak train that started off in California and was making its way through a part of Nebraska so remote that it took an hour for the nearest deputy to arrive on the scene. Wilson was found in the second engine of the train, “playing with the controls,” according to the FBI affidavit.

As passengers waited in dark train cars that smelled of burning rubber, Amtrak workers kept the man pinned down. “I’m the conductor, bitch,” Wilson allegedly said to Amtrak personnel while subdued. They say Wilson had tried to reach for his front waistband, where he was storing a fully loaded handgun.

The incident received little national coverage at the time, perhaps in large part because law enforcement officials didn’t initially treat it as a terrorism case. A subsequent FBI investigation, however, painted a disturbing portrait of an individual who escalated his radical activity in recent years as he built up a massive gun stash, even hiding weapons and extremist propaganda in a secret compartment behind his refrigerator.

In a court affidavit, the FBI agent who investigated the attempted terrorist attack said he’d learned that Wilson traveled with an “alt-right Neo Nazi group” to the deadly “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville in August; may have helped vandalize restaurants with “whites only” stickers; pointed a gun at a black woman during a road rage incident; and spoke of “killing black people” during recent protests against police violence in St. Louis.

But even when the federal terrorism charges were unsealed against Wilson last week, the case didn’t get a ton of national pickup. One key reason: The Justice Department didn’t tell anyone.

I know I don’t have to draw a picture of how differently they would handled this if his name were Mohammed.

The reporter Ryan J. Reilly, notes that we could conclude that this is a case of the Trump administration which has demonstrated its sympathy for Nazis and Neo-confederate cover up for one of its supporters but the truth is more complicated:

But the lack of attention the Wilson case has received actually reflects the priorities embedded in a system built up by U.S. lawmakers and law enforcement officials over the years: a U.S. criminal code and federal law enforcement apparatus that treats domestic terrorism as a second-class threat.

The truth is that the American political system just doesn’t think that white people killing people is as big of a deal as people of color killing people. It just doesn’t. If a white man shoots up someplace because he’s got a beef or if he’s got mental problems we shrug our shoulders and say that may if someone else had been armed at the time they could have shot the gun out of his hand before he had a chance to kill anyone. Other than that, it’s just the way things are. If the shooter is black or brown or came from another country, the only answer is more prisons, building walls, keeping everyone who looks like them out maybe even starting a war.

Gun violence and (non-Muslim) domestic terrorism are like earthquakes, fires and mudslides. We can try to prepare but mostly we just accept that it’s going to happen and then clean up the mess after it’s over. Too bad about the dead bodies.

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A billionaire populist goes to Davosby digby

He obviously wants to bask in the glow of being the most important man in this group of vastly wealthy oligarchs who’ve always known he was a brand name in a suit poseur and now have to bow down to him because he’s the president of the US. He wouldn’t miss that for the world:

Trump and those around him largely shunned Davos in 2017. A senior member of Trump’s transition team told Bloomberg at the time that Trump thought sending an official representative or attending the event himself would betray his populist movement, and that the gathering represented the “power structure that fueled the populist anger” that propelled him to the White House in the first place.

This time last year, Trump was singing a very different tune

The World Economic Forum’s annual meeting at Davos is one of the most elite gatherings in the world. Held in the Swiss Alps, it has come to symbolize modern globalization and exclusivity at its peak. Last year, although Trump didn’t attend, he was a looming presence, according to multiple reports.

At Davos in 2017, Alibaba’s Jack Ma openly worried about a potential US-China trade war and said he believed observers should give then-President-elect Trump “some time.”

Former Secretary of State John Kerry said he hoped Trump wouldn’t reverse his achievements. “Take Iran: I bet you that our friends and allies will get together and that Russia, China, Germany, France, and Britain will say, you know what, this is a good deal, we’re going to keep it,” he said.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise CEO Meg Whitman acknowledged that the election “didn’t go the way I wanted” but said she hoped to give Trump “the benefit of the doubt.” Actor Forest Whitaker was similarly cautiously optimistic in a talk there. “I hope he’ll be a president who, in the end, represents all people,” he said.

Igor Shuvalov, first deputy prime minister of Russia, weighed in on what was then the impending Trump presidency as well:

Trump is a leading businessman; you can’t survive in business if you’re not dying for victory. He’ll have to get results; it’s part of his personality. I hope Trump — a superb professional entrepreneur — will become a professional president and achieve results for global security. I hope he’ll agree with Putin on how to solve Ukraine. But for results, you need to negotiate with Russia and not put Russia in a corner.

Meanwhile, Trump and his team largely stayed away. Gary Cohn, now director of the National Economic Council under Trump, skipped the 2017 gathering after being a regular attendee in the past, and other Trump appointees opted out as well.

The exception was Anthony Scaramucci, who would go on to serve a 10-day stint as White House communications director the following summer. The former hedge funder said he found himself “jammed up” with meeting requests at the summit and appeared on several panels, billing himself as a sort of Trump whisperer, close to the incoming president’s ear.

“If you guys get a little bit upset about the tweeting or some of the things that he’s saying, I want to put your mind at ease,” Scaramucci said during last year’s event, according to a report from the Wall Street Journal. “Directionally, this is a super-compassionate man.”

The Trump anomolyby digby

It’s a real sign of his weakness as a president and a politician that he is so unpopular despite the fact that he’s riding the crest of a booming economy. Nate Cohn analyzed the phenomenon for the New York Times:

The stock market has surged. Unemployment is at 4.1 percent. ISIS has largely been vanquished from Iraq and Syria.

But despite it all, Donald J. Trump’s approval ratings are mired in the upper 30s. No president has had worse ratings at this stage of his term since modern polling began more than three-quarters of a century ago.

A substantial number of people are also leaving the GOP (or not ideifying as Republicans or Republican leaners anyway) which seems odd when the party has total control of government at a time of growing prosperity:

Setting aside the question of how much credit first-year presidents deserve for a strong economy — they have less influence than you might think — President Trump’s ratings should be much better. A 4.1 percent unemployment rate, the lowest in 17 years, is more typically associated with a 60-plus-percent approval rating for a first-term president.

Lyndon Johnson is the only other first-term president in the era of modern polling with an approval rating under 50 percent while the jobless rate was below 5 percent. But this came after he’d already been president for about four years (having first finished out John F. Kennedy’s term) and as the Vietnam War began to drag down his presidency.

Mr. Trump started in a far worse position than other incoming presidents. His initial approval rating was in the low-to-mid 40s, while most presidents enter with an approval rating over 60 percent. It was fair to speculate that his approval ratings would gradually rise with the benefit of a strong economy. Perhaps he would even benefit from low expectations, as many suspected he did during the presidential campaign.

But by now the economy would have been expected to lift his approval rating into the 50s, based on an analysis of presidential approval and economic data going back to 1950. This is despite the tendency for presidents’ approval ratings to decline during their time in office. If the economy were to overcome Mr. Trump’s unpopularity and send his approval ratings up, you would think we would have started to see signs of it.

It is certainly possible that the economy — or other good news — will still lift his ratings. But it seems just as likely that Mr. Trump will continue to feel the burden of his time in office. On average, a first-term president’s approval rating drops by about a point per quarter after controlling for inflation and unemployment (and controlling for the large bump George W. Bush received after the Sept. 11 attacks).

He goes on to point out that analysts are still very reluctant to make any claims about Trump because these “fundamentals” are so good that they are doubting the numbers or wondering if national polling doesn’t give a skewed picture. I guess they just can’t believe that people wouldn’t like a president when the country only has 4.1% unemployment.

Anyway:

Mr. Trump is now the president, and elections tend to be referendums on the party in power. A president’s approval rating is typically a very strong predictor of the results of presidential elections and even a helpful one in congressional elections.

Since 1950, no party has held the House through a midterm election when the president’s approval rating is less than 40 percent. The Republican Party’s considerable structural advantages in the House would at least give them a shot to survive this time, but the growing Democratic advantage on the generic congressional ballot and the G.O.P.’s weak showings in this year’s special congressional elections suggest that the president’s approval rating is weighing on the party in exactly the way one would expect.

And while Mr. Trump’s upset victory in 2016 — defying the pre-election polls that showed Hillary Clinton leading in key battleground states — has given him the sheen of invincibility, his victory was not impressive by most standards.

Fundamental-based models — without taking candidates into account — tended to show that the party out of power was a clear if narrow favorite to win in 2016: The pace of economic growth and President Obama’s approval rating were positives for the Democrats, but that wasn’t enough for the party to be favored because of the burden of seeking the presidency for a third consecutive term.

Mr. Trump had the added advantage of facing Mrs. Clinton, who was under F.B.I. investigation for most of the campaign and ended with the worst unfavorability ratings of any candidate who won a major party nomination other than Mr. Trump, according to Gallup.

Yet in the end, Mr. Trump lost the popular vote by two percentage points, with 46 percent of the vote. It was the second-worst showing since 1948 for the candidate of the party out of power against a party seeking at least a third straight presidential term (after Michael Dukakis in 1988). It was not necessarily a show of strength.

None of this is to say that Mr. Trump’s approval ratings can’t or won’t rise. But at some point, he’ll probably need them to.

Yes, he will need them too.

What this shows is that most Americans are not driven only by money. Most of them care about common decency, the future of the planet, their kids educations, nuclear war stuff like that.

I have had a number of people tell me the same thing both online and in person since Trump got elected: “I don’t feel safe anymore.”

Safety and security isn’t just about paying the bills or even keeping the “bad guys” at bay. It’s about stability and believing in the future. That’s what we don’t have with this misfit presidency and that’s why people don’t approve of him even though the economy is healthy.

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So he became a president today. Again. Not.

The media lost their minds while watching Trump’s little bipartisan pageant this morning, saying things like:

“This is the presidency that a year ago we all thought Donald Trump was capable of… Just the notion of him being in command .. This is what people who had high hopes for the Trump presidency thought it would be, meeting after meeting like this.” — Dana Bash

There was more but I was distracted by my abrupt nausea and couldn’t get it all down.

But this is what actually happened. He didn’t understand what he was agreeing to and his GOP courtiers had to step in and steer Grandpa back to the position they want him to take:

Here's the incredible moment where Trump initially agrees to Feinstein's suggestion that they do a clean DACA bill, before being corrected by Republicans about what she was actually suggesting. pic.twitter.com/RaXAQAi8JF— David Mack (@davidmackau) January 9, 2018

There is no consensus. He made no deal. There was no leadership. He is still an f-ing moron.

They may come up with some kind of bipartisan agreement. I hope they do because otherwise 800,000 people are going to have their lives destroyed. And maybe the price for that is kissing the hem of this cretinous imbecile and acting as if he’s somehow sentient and in charge.

But I am going to cling to reality no matter what. The mainstream media is undoubtedly yearning to bring “balance” back to their coverage, but I have no such desire. And I would just warn Democrats that behaving “reasonably” in this environment may not have the payoff they desire. Normalizing Trump will have very little upside for Democrats and nothing but a downside for the world.

He may have had a “good day” in that he wasn’t screaming about his genius or the NFL but he’s not normal.

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The people in the WH are as afraid as the rest of us. That’s not good.by digby

Michael Wolff on PBS:

[W]hat they told me, the people closest to the president, was that things became more alarming by the day, that all of them, in some way or other, were afraid, afraid for their — both for their own careers and for the country.”

Wolff said people close to the president “just didn’t know what to do.”

“They didn’t know what to expect. They woke up in the morning, and they were in, you know, in something of a cold sweat,” he said.

“Almost all of them — for almost all of them, it was a countdown until when they could leave.”

Unfortunately, we can’t leave the planet. And that’s what’s in danger.

On the other hand:

People don’t think in the White House — don’t think that he colluded with Russia,” Wolff, the author of a controversial new book on the Trump White House, said during an interview with CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”

“They do think that if the investigation goes near his finances, he’s sunk.”

Pretty sure that if his “finances” don’t include a $30,000 loss on an Arkansas land deal from decades ago he’s fine. That’s the kind of thing that really upsets people. Millions of dollars in money laundering means he’s “like, smart.”

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Trump and Mueller may need to speak more than onceby digby

I wrote about the latest stories about Mueller requesting an interview with the president for Salon today:
With all the day-to-day craziness around President Trump, it’s easy to forget what serious legal trouble he may be in. He may have many character flaws, might be dumb as a post and could even have some kind of neurological problems, for all we know. His White House is a mess and he’s in the process of finally killing off whatever vestiges of integrity were left in the conservative movement. Any of that would be a stunning set of problems for any presidency. But the fact that just a year into his presidency, Trump will reportedly be asked to speak under oath to a special prosecutor about a counterintelligence investigation into his campaign, presidential transition and administration, is still mind-boggling.

He won’t be the first president to testify in an independent probe of his administration, of course. Ronald Reagan testified under oath in the Iran-Contra scandal, where he memorably said he could not recall anything about it. George W. Bush and Dick Cheney testified before the 9/11 commission together, under extremely limited circumstances. But the most direct parallel is Bill Clinton, who spoke with prosecutors more than once: He was compelled to give a sworn deposition in the Paula Jones case and then testified before a grand jury in the Monica Lewinsky matter.

Recall that at the time the independent counsel’s office was investigating a penny-ante real estate deal from the 1980s, “cronyism” in the firing of the White House travel office and a sexual harassment civil case from Clinton’s time as governor of Arkansas. In the course of those investigations, the affair with Lewinsky was uncovered and Clinton denied it, which led to charges of perjury and obstruction of justice. In contrast to the Russia investigation and Trump’s nepotism and ongoing corruption, it was a joke.

Clinton was supposed to testify on a live feed from the White House, but at the last minute the independent counsel demanded that it be taped because one of the grand jury members had to be absent. In the end the grand jury was never asked to return an indictment. The testimony was instead used by independent counsel Ken Starr to make an impeachment referral to the House of Representatives. House Republicans immediately voted to release the report, the underlying documents and the tape of Clinton’s supposedly secret grand jury testimony to the public.

I only bring up this stale history to show just how ruthless the independent counsel was in pursuing a case against President Clinton and how craven and openly contemptuous the GOP House was toward the normal processes pertaining to secret grand jury testimony. Keep that in mind as modern-day congressional Republicans begin to wring their hands over “prosecutorial overreach” in the Mueller investigation. You know they will.

According to The New York Times and NBC News, Trump’s lawyers have been brainstorming over how to respond to a request from special counsel Robert Mueller to speak with the president, since at least October. Mueller finally raised the subject unofficially in a meeting in late December. The assumption is that the prosecutors have homed in on possible obstruction of justice charges and that Trump will be the final witness.

According to all the experts, this is a strong signal that the case is close to wrapping up, although I would point out again that Clinton spoke with the independent counsel’s office multiple times over several years and ended up testifying before a grand jury, so it’s not written in stone that the entire probe is about to come to a close. There are a number of tentacles in this investigation, from the Paul Manafort trial to money laundering and Russian election interference, whose true extent we still don’t know.

The experts also caution that Trump’s lawyers will likely try to keep him as far away from Mueller as they can. Trump has been sued in civil court many times, so he has a lot of experience with depositions and has shown that he can be coached to be calm and say nothing more than the bare minimum. (He has also lied repeatedly under oath.) But speaking directly with the special counsel is quite different. Trump is looking at potential criminal charges for himself and his family, and nobody knows how he’ll respond in such a high-stress situation.

It seems likely that Trump’s lawyers will seek a deal that has the president swearing an affidavit or answering written questions. They may try to arrange a version of George W. Bush’s question-and-answer session before the 9/11 commission, in which the president is not under oath but agrees to speak for a very limited time.

There is no sense of whether or not Mueller and his team are amenable to any of that. If Trump refuses to cooperate outright or if they’re not satisfied with his answers, they can subpoena the president. United States vs. Nixon settled that question, which is why Clinton ended up volunteering to testify before the grand jury — Starr said he was ready to issue a subpoena if he didn’t. We know what ended up happening that time, although in Trump’s case the issue at hand isn’t nearly as important as lying about an illicit affair. We’re only talking about conspiring with a foreign adversary, and then obstructing justice to cover it up.

It’s clear that the Republicans in Congress have no intention of doing anything to further this investigation, so Trump has nothing to worry about there. If Mueller were to report to the House with articles of impeachment, as Starr did, they would immediately be thrown in the trash and the evidence would never see the light of day. If that’s Mueller’s intention, he will have to wait until the American people have their say in November.

This is why I suspect that all this talk of Mueller closing up shop soon is likely to be wishful thinking. It could be true, of course. There is some possibility that Mueller has found that all that intelligence chatter during the campaign added up to nothing and the only people who are culpable of any crimes are the four he has already indicted. But if there’s more to this and he believes there is a case against the president himself, I’d be surprised if this whole thing winds up before next year at this time. This next phase of the scandal is only beginning.

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The simplicity of nothingnessby digby

Jonathan Schell 1982:

[O]nce we learn that a holocaust might lead to extinction we have no right to gamble, because if we lose, the game will be over, and neither we nor anyone else will ever get a another chance. Therefore, although, scientifically speaking, there is all the difference in the world between the mere possibility that a holocaust will bring about extinction and the certainty of it, morally they are the same, and we have no choice but to address the issue of nuclear weapons as though we knew for a certainty that their use would put an end to our species….

In trying to describe possible consequences of a nuclear holocaust, I have mentioned the limitless complexity of its effects on human society and on the ecosphere—a complexity that sometimes seems to be as great as that of life itself. But if these effects should lead to human extinction, then all the complexity will give way to the utmost simplicity—the simplicity of nothingness. We—the human race—shall cease to be.

That is relevant because of this:

U.S. officials are discussing the possibility of a targeted strike in North Korea that would serve as a warning but, hopefully, not start a nuclear war, WSJ reportshttps://t.co/Yg6bdMGo7M— Axios (@axios) January 9, 2018

“Hopefully …”

I thought it was understood that you don’t play games with nuclear war. But at this point, I just have to pray that’s what they’re doing. Because if this is serious, we could be in big, big trouble.

“And they blew it.”
by Tom Sullivan

Ryan Cooper has embarked on a series examining fissures in the Democratic Party for The Week, beginning with its embrace of neoliberal policies.

After three decades of New Deal programs that gave the country “the greatest economic boom in American history” and broadly shared prosperity, the 1970s began a slow return to the kind of economics that dominated the decades ahead of the Great Depression. That model, which functioned instead “on behalf of a tiny elite,” focused on “deregulation, tax and spending cuts, union busting, and free trade.” New Deal regulatory structures, Chicago School economists insisted, were “a drag on economic growth.”

That in itself is a curious formulation, and an even more curious response to decades of boom that produced the largest middle class in the history of the world. A drag how? It is the came response that has produced the insistence over the last year of soaring corporate profits that large corporate tax cuts were necessary to kick-start an economy that for titans of industry was already performing brilliantly. After building the largest, most evenly distributed wealth in the world (African Americans would disagree),
returning to rule by an oligarchy wasn’t happening fast enough?

Nevertheless, after the oil and political shocks of the 1970s, neoliberalism became the governing economic philosophy by the Reagan years, Cooper writes, as “both parties conspired to break the New Deal.”

And during the Clinton years, it seemed to be working, Cooper notes:

The spectacular late-’90s boom was, in retrospect, the first and last time the U.S. saw full employment under neoliberalism. It was followed immediately by a financial crisis and a prolonged “jobless recovery,” where growth returned reasonably quickly but employment and wages lagged far behind. (Only in 2017 did the median household income finally surpass the 1999 peak — despite the economy being 18 percent larger.)

Taking the governor off the the economic engine once again caused the “self-regulating” market to race out of control. Within a decade of Clintonian deregulation, the result was a series of financial crises, bailouts for the richest, and the “the worst financial panic since 1929.” And what we now call The Great Recession.

Democrats had a stupendous opportunity to examine the flaws in neoliberal economics and make a correction. After Obama came to power on a wave of goodwill and hope, they might have abandoned the policies that had led again to a repeat of 1929, Cooper writes, “and they blew it.”

Instead of pushing forward with the kinds of programs that helped lift the country out of the Depression, the Obama administration stayed the course.

Most damning of all, neoliberalism under Obama turned in the worst economic performance since the 1930s. Despite the fact that the 2008 crash left obvious excess capacity, there was no catch-up growth — on the contrary, growth was about two-thirds the 1945-2007 average, with no sign of speeding up on the horizon. Even 10 years after the start of the recession, there is every sign that the economy is still depressed.

So despite the confident predictions of the Chicago School, the political economy created by neoliberalism turned out to be identical to 1920s laissez-faire economics in every important respect. The United States is once again a country which functions mostly on behalf of a tiny capitalist elite. It has the same extreme inequality, the same bloated, crisis-prone financial sector, the same corruption, and the same political backlash to the status quo and rising extremist factions.

All of this, one hopes (as Cooper does), leaves neoliberal economics discredited within the Democratic Party. What replaces it is still a developing narrative. Cooper plans to take that up in future installments.

On the party politics side, there are other dynamics at work that bear discussing another day. Some of the philosophical splits are driven by legislative necessity. Others, by temperament and human nature. There is a certain chicken-and-egg question on which Democrats disagree. Do you strengthen the party by electing more Democrats or do you elect more Democrats by strengthening the party? Party elites subscribe to the first. The grassroots, to the second.

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