Month: July 2018

Boys talk be best

by digby

Yes they are going into the man cave to have a private little chat:

President Donald Trump plans to meet one-on-one with Vladimir Putin at the start of their July 16 summit in Helsinki, Finland, according to a person familiar with the plans, before allowing other aides to join the highly anticipated encounter with the Russian leader.

The meeting will be the first formal summit talks between them. They have met previously on the sidelines of conferences.

Trump has shown an affinity for meeting individually with his counterparts before opening the room to fuller delegations. During his historic summit with Kim Jong Un last month, Trump met for about an hour with just the North Korean dictator, joined only by their translators. Emerging from the face-to-face, Trump told reporters the discussion was “very, very good.”

He had said before the Singapore talks that he wanted to take the measure of Kim personally and gauge their chemistry. In the case of Putin, Trump has already assessed their interpersonal ties up close, but wants more time to develop the leader-to-leader relationship, according to the person familiar with the summit’s planning.

Ahead of the North Korea summit, some US officials expressed concern about a meeting without any other aides present. Without official note-takers or other witnesses, one-on-one meetings lack any official record, making it difficult afterward to determine whether agreements have been reached.

Putin is known as a shrewd negotiator who some officials worry could exploit such a session and extract concessions from Trump.

Ya think? It actually sounds as though he’s already extracted them and just needs an update on Trump’s progress.

“The goal of this meeting really is for the two leaders to have a chance to sit down, not in the context of some larger multilateral meeting, but just the two of them, to go over what is on their mind about a whole range of issues,” national security adviser John Bolton said Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

Yeah, that’s what everyone’s afraid of.

This is madness.

Womp, womp

by digby

Here’s a little something to enjoy (sort of) on the day before the holiday:

here’s 4 months of Depressed Hannity, set to music pic.twitter.com/aPVql6xZMI

— Brendan Karet 🚮 (@bad_takes) July 2, 2018

Michael Cohen: Supahstah!

by digby

My Salon column this morning is about the Cohen interview:

If there’s one thing that must give a shady businessman or corrupt politician sleepless nights it’s the knowledge that his attorney is about to cooperate with federal prosecutors in a case against him. The lawyer is the one person, with the exception of one’s spouse (and maybe not even then) entrusted with their most nefarious secrets. If that lawyer is also his self-described “fixer” already known to pay hush money and personally threaten people on his behalf well, let’s just say sleepless nights aren’t the half of it.

Back in April of 1973, the very shady President of the United States, Richard Nixon, woke up one morning to learn that his former White House counsel, John Dean, had been cooperating with federal prosecutors who were investigating his administration’s involvement in the break-in of the Democratic National Committee the previous previous spring. And he had good reason to be sweating bullets about that since Dean had been instrumental in the cover-up the president had personally directed.

After months of a slow news drip implicating various Nixon associates in slush funds and dirty tricks the scandal had reached the oval office.The FBI director had resigned over having destroyed evidence, Nixon had fired Dean and he had been forced to ask his most trusted henchmen H.R. Haldeman and John Erlichman to resign. He knew that Dean wanted to cooperate with the investigation so it wasn’t a huge surprise to learn that he was telling all but it still had to be a very bad day.

Dean turned out to be an incredibly effective witness. He had tried to get documentary evidence out of the White House to back up his story but had been unable to do it. However he had an extremely sharp memory for detail and unlike today where the congress is actually participating in the cover up, there were public hearings and Dean’s testimony was dramatic and unforgettable. He told the story of how he had participated in White House efforts to hide its involvement in various crimes and how he went to the president and famously told him that there was a “cancer on the presidency.” When it was later revealed that the White House had taped the president’s conversations, Dean’s recollections were proven to be nearly word for word.

I would never compare John Dean to Donald Trump’s former attorney Michael Cohen in terms of legal skill or intellect. But it’s interesting that here we are 45 years later and once again we see the president’s lawyer as a possible star witness against him. Cohen gave an interview to ABC news’ George Stephanopoulos over the week-end in which he strongly implied that he was prepared to cooperate with prosecutors if he is, as expected, indicted on federal charges.

Obviously, the situation is different in dozens of ways, not the least of which is that Cohen, unlike Dean, was the president’s personal and business attorney not the White House counsel. And the issues which may involve the president are as likely to pertain to personal business as they are to the investigation into the presidential campaign. But there is no doubt that Cohen, like Dean, was involved in a cover-up. In Cohen’s case it has to do with paying hush money to porn actresses and playmates. And there is also suspicion that he was involved in covering up some aspects of Russian collusion. He does not appear to be willing to take the fall for any of it.

Recall that two weeks ago, ABC’s Stephanopoulos broke the story that  Cohen was changing lawyers and follow up reporting by others indicated that there were some complications with the payment of legal fees, which had been handled at least in part by the Trump organization. It was suspected that Trump’s public distancing from his former lawyer and his unwillingness to part with a dollar was showing Cohen that he was on his own. Now Stephanopoulos gets another scoop, this time an interview in which Cohen makes it very, very clear that he is no longer Trump’s loyal sycophant.

“My wife, my daughter and my son have my first loyalty, and always will,” Michael Cohen told me https://t.co/svj067Z314 pic.twitter.com/CTm7wLoEMR

— GeorgeStephanopoulos (@GStephanopoulos) July 2, 2018

Pres. Trump’s former personal attorney Michael Cohen to @GStephanopoulos on @GMA: “I am not a villain of this story, and I will not allow others to try to depict me that way.” https://t.co/w3FzffAwEn pic.twitter.com/qwBCuW5nCW

— ABC News (@ABC) July 2, 2018

Most of the pundits and analysts assume that Cohen was making a Hail Mary pass at Trump to issue him a pardon before he gets indicted and spills everything to the prosecutors.And that’s certainly possible. In the interview he was asked whether he could say that Trump told him to pay off Stormy Daniels and whether Trump knew about the Trump Tower meeting with the Russian lawyers and he said that he could not answer on the advice of his attorney which certainly does imply that the answer to both of those questions is yes. And Trump would know the answer was yes. If he’s inclined to issue a pardon, Cohen is saying that he’d better do it soon.

But keep in mind that this is Trumpworld we’re talking about and among those people you really don’t exist unless you’re on TV. I suspect that this has much more to do with the fact that Michael Cohen is trying to figure out how he can possibly parlay this situation into a new career in media once this mess is over. And there’s only one way for him to do that: take the John Dean route and become the man who saved America from Donald Trump. After all, Dean lost his law license and did four months in jail but he is now considered a hero and a national icon. It’s not a bad model.

This idea isn’t coming out of thin air. Emily Jane Fox of Vanity Fair reports that Cohen has finally accepted that Trump never had any loyalty to him and that he’s on his own. Friends are telling Cohen, Fox writes, that he could change the course of history, sending messages like this: “Please let him know that he could go down in history as the man that saved this country. I think his family would be so proud of him. Even people like me that were disgusted with the things we heard on those audio recordings, would totally forgive him.” She also reports that Cohen has been planning a big media push for some time — this is just the beginning.

That’s heady stuff for anyone but particularly someone who is possibly facing years in prison or a presidential pardon that will still leave him broke and without a future. This could be a way for him to become as big a star as Donald Trump. Nothing would be a sweeter revenge.

The left is very shrill

by digby

Nancy LeTourneau at the Washington Monthly has written an excellent post examining this forming consensus among the Villagers that the Democrats are in big trouble because their voters are so angry — and that’s just off-putting to the Real Americans who matter in this country.

As the 2016 presidential election was getting underway, here is how the New York Times described what was going on:

They are angry at a political system they see as rigged. They feel squeezed by immigration, or the power of big banks. They sense that America is heading in the wrong direction, but emphatically believe only their candidate has the strength and vision to change things. 

The voters driving two of the more remarkable movements of this election cycle — for Donald J. Trump and Senator Bernie Sanders — share striking similarities. Both groups are heavily white, more male than female, and both are fueled partly by people who, in interviews, express distrust of their parties and the other candidates, especially Hillary Clinton.

That proved to be true throughout the election because the “heavily white, more male than female” voters were indeed angry.

The election was followed by an obsession among reporters, pundits, and political scientists attempting to document just what it was that Trump supporters were so angry about. No one can dispute the fact that the train Donald Trump rode to victory was one of tapping into white male anxiety. Democrats have been lectured constantly about the need to empathize with their anger.

As we head into the 2018 midterms, it’s Democrats—more of whom are women and people of color—that are anxious and afraid of what is happening to this country under the Trump administration. All of the sudden we’re hearing lectures on civility and warnings about how anger is divisive. Here’s Michael Scherer on that:

Growing liberal agitation over a pivotal Supreme Court retirement and a simmering crisis about immigrant child separation have left Democratic leaders scrambling to keep the political outrage they’d counted on to fuel midterm election wins from becoming a liability for the party.

That raises an obvious question: who gets permission to be angry in America? Rebecca Traister answered with an article titled: “The Summer of Rage.”

White men are at the center, our normative citizen, despite being only around a third of the nation’s population. Their outsize power is measurable by the fact that they still — nearly 140 years after the passage of the 15th Amendment, not quite 100 years after the passage of the 19th Amendment, and more than 50 years after the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts — hold roughly two-thirds of elected offices in federal, state, and local legislatures. We have had 92 presidents and vice-presidents. One-hundred percent of them have been men, and more than 99 percent white men. 

But it’s not just in the numbers; it’s also in the quotidian realities of living in this country. The suffocating power of our minority rule is evidenced by the fact that we’re always busy worrying about the humanity — the comfort and the dignity — of white men, at the same time discouraging disruptive challenge to their authority.

I am reminded of something Adam Serwer wrote recently.

An era in which Americans are supposedly exhausted with political correctness is thus defined by the acute political sensitivities and persecution complexes of white voters who object if things they do and say are described as racist, even as the bodies pile up in the background.

Contrasting the demands to do away with “political correctness” with the recent calls for civility underscores the point.

No kidding. The angry Trump voter is a fucking icon in this country. We hang on their every word, worry incessantly over their needs and wants and deepest anxieties. Somebody denies Sarah Sanders a side salad and out come the smelling salts.

Read the whole thing. There’s a lot more to it including a good discussion of Rebecca Traister’s great piece called Summer of Rage.

It’s quite shrill. As it should be. 🙂

.

Try, try again
by Tom Sullivan

Living in one of Charlie Pierce’s “laboratories of democracy,” an attentive voter sees patterns in how “the real work of governmentin’ gets done” among the insane clown posse running the state legislature. Give them this: they are relentless.

No matter how many voting rights court cases they lose, Republicans here try, try again, tweaking one law after another, looking for that legislative “sweet spot” that will tilt the balance of power even more in their favor without drawing another pie-in-the-face from the courts. Pay attention, because the behavior is not unique to North Carolina.

The sitting president’s crew tried again and again since January 2017 to enact its Muslim travel ban. Finally, they got the Supreme Court ruling they wanted last week. The Court ruled that the president’s statement about banning Muslims were not the issue, but rather sufficient national security justification for the policy.

A federal judge last week ordered the administration to halt most family separations at the southern border. The court also gave the government a hard timetable for reunifying families. That simply means it is time for the administration to try, try again.

Within 48 hours of the judge’s order last week, attorney Kate Lincoln-Goldfinch told “The Rachel Maddow Show” last night, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) began denying bond to asylum seekers so they could reunite with their children. An ICE spokesman denied to TRMS any change in policy had occurred.

Mother Jones reports:

In an interview with Mother Jones, Austin-based immigration attorney Kate Lincoln-Goldfinch says that by denying bond and forcing migrant parents to remain in detention while they apply for asylum, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement is “completely disobeying the judge’s order—intentionally.” Jodi Goodwin, a south Texas immigration lawyer who is working with separated parents at the Port Isabel detention center, agrees that the bond denials conflict with the recent injunction.

Maddow asked whether the actions isn’t in direct defiance of the judge’s order.

“That was my reaction,” Lincoln-Goldfinch replied, “and when I spoke with a deportation officer, I said I don’t see how this is possibly in compliance with the judge’s order, and he said I don’t see how it is either.”

She sees no activity by the administration to comply with the order. “In fact, it’s the opposite.”

The Washington Post reports another federal court issued a ruling Monday against the administration’s immigration policies:

U.S. District Judge James E. Boasberg of Washington said U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement ignored its own policy stating that asylum applicants who establish a “credible fear” of persecution in their native country must be granted a court hearing within seven days or released.

He granted a preliminary injunction preventing the government from carrying out blanket detentions of asylum seekers at five large U.S. field offices, including those currently held, pending resolution of the lawsuit.

The American Civil Liberties Union claims mass imprisonment stems from the administration’s desire to deter immigrants from seeking asylum.

U.S. District Judge James E. Boasberg wrote in his decision, “This Opinion does no more than hold the Government accountable to its own policy, which recently has been honored more in the breach than the observance.”

Boasberg granted provisional class status to asylum seekers. While the lawsuit is ongoing, the judge barred ICE from detaining applicants for more than seven days without doing a personalized review of their asylum claim, and giving specific written explanations for anyone the government says must be held.

The Justice Department said the case should be thrown out arguing that asylum detention decisions are the sole discretion of government agencies and insulated from court review to prevent asylum applicants from flooding courts with lawsuits.

Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer recounted the familiar tale of another president intent on getting his way, courts be damned:

In 1832 the Cherokee Indian tribe lived on land guaranteed them by treaty. They found gold on that land. Georgia tried to seize the land. The Cherokees sued. And eventually the Supreme Court, in Worcester v. Georgia, held in favor of the Cherokees. Georgia then refused to obey the Court. President Andrew Jackson reportedly said, “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it.” And Jackson sent troops to evict the Cherokees, who traveled the Trail of Tears to Oklahoma, thousands dying along the way.

For President Donald J. Trump and Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, that is the stuff of their dreams. For now, at least, there are plenty of tears.

North Carolina Republicans so far seem satisfied with legal workarounds to get their way. Outright defiance may come through observing their D.C. colleagues.

UPDATE: “Use your leverage,” the sitting president advises. Now there’s documentation his administration is using immigrant infants and toddlers as “leverage” to get their parents to give up asylum claims and agree to deportation.

* * * * * * * * *

For The Win 2018 is ready for download. Request a copy of my county-level election mechanics primer at tom.bluecentury at gmail.

Willing human sacrifices for the Trump cult

by digby

This is so pathetic, I just don’t know what to say:

President Donald Trump has vowed to bring back American jobs, but three months since making his first move to impose tariffs on foreign steel and aluminum, his trade policies have cost 60 employees their positions at the country’s largest nail manufacturing plant.

For 29 years, Chris Pratt has worked the floors of the Mid Continent Nail Factory, a business started in 1987 in this town of 17,000 people. He is now the operations manager and oversees 500 employees. But this month, he eliminated 60 positions at the factory after a 50 percent drop in nail orders following Trump’s June 1 announcement of a 25 percent tariff on all steel imports from Mexico, the source of the company’s raw material.

“The economy is thriving, the home building business is thriving — so we should be doing well in turn,” Pratt told NBC News. “But it’s like he’s turned the lights off now. And it’s all because of the tariffs.”

Before this month’s layoffs, the company had doubled its workforce since 2012. But Mid Continent had to increase the price of its products to offset the cost of the tariffs. Many of the company’s customers immediately canceled their orders, since they could purchase nails at a lower price from international markets like China or Taiwan.

Pratt would like Trump to grant the company exclusions from the steel import tariffs — in which case Mid Continent would be able to re-employ the 60 workers laid off. If not, the other 500 workers’ jobs are at stake.

“A lot of people would be in trouble,” said Diane Brogdon, who has worked on the assembly line at the factory for 12 years. “I don’t have a clue where we would turn for another job. It’s always been a reliable job, and it’s the reason I have the house I just bought and that I can support my daughters and two grandchildren.”
[…]
Brogdon voted for Trump and hopes the president will get a better deal for the American worker. But she noted, “He wants to make America great, but he has to remember that we have jobs here that we need to keep. He’s fighting in Washington D.C. for us, but we’re fighting just to be able to live here in Poplar Bluff.”

Jimmie Coffer has worked as a skilled machinist in Mid Continent’s shop for five years. He describes his line of work as “more than just a job.”

Chris Pratt has worked at the Mid Continent Nail Factory for 29 years. As operations manager, he oversees all 500 employees and feels personally responsible for these jobs.Chris Pratt has worked at the Mid Continent Nail Factory for 29 years. As operations manager, he oversees all 500 employees and feels personally responsible for these jobs.

“I come here every day and I do what I love,” he said. “These people here are my brothers and sisters.”

Although Coffer is fearful that his own job and those of his co-workers could all be at risk, he continues to support the Trump administration’s efforts.

“I know what affects me, and the tariffs are hurting me on a daily basis — I’d like to see relief,” Coffer told NBC News. “I still have faith in the president. I believe he knows what he’s doing and can turn everything around for us.”

Pratt’s message to the administration: “Save our jobs. Give us the exclusions we’ve applied for. Put us back to work. Save Poplar Bluff jobs, and in turn, American jobs.”

The love for Trump transcends all. They think he cares about them personally and will save them. It’s always possible that if they go on Fox and beg, he will. That’s how our government works now — like a cult where people individually petition for relief from their Dear Leader And if he feels like it, and they are properly obsequious and sycophantic, he might grant it. Or not. You just have to be among the lucky ones he singles out.

And his subjects seem to love him for it even if he destroys them personally.

To think they used to be the ones who waved the constitution in our faces and blathered on about liberty and freedom all the time.

.

One More Pseudo-Intellectual Conservative

by tristero

Matthew Schmitz is a beneficiary of the New York Times’s long-running affirmative action program for right wing pundits. Like David Brooks, Schmitz loves making absurd assertions from dubious generalizations. With the tedious prose of a Very Serious Person discussing Very Big Ideas, he begins:

In their book “Red Families v. Blue Families,” Naomi Cahn and June Carbone popularized the idea of “blue” and “red” family models. Blue families prize equality and companionship between spouses while putting a low value on childbearing. Red families tend to be inegalitarian or complementarian, viewing the man as the primary breadwinner and the mother as the primary caregiver. Early marriage and multiple children are typical.

Red families tend toward conservatism, and blue tend toward progressivism, but the models share an upper-class stress on respectability and a strong taboo against out-of-wedlock birth.

A third model can be found among working-class whites, blacks and Hispanics — let’s call it purple. In these families, bonds between mothers and children are prized above those between couples. Unstable relationships are the norm, and fathers quickly end up out of the picture.

The difference among these three family models explains three different reactions to Mr. Trump’s candidacy. Liberal professionals decried his sexism, which violated the prime value of the blue family model: equality. Elite evangelicals decried his infidelity, which ran counter to the red family model’s stress on fidelity.

I haven’t read Cahn and Carbone’s book but I doubt they are to blame for the numerous and very obvious problems with Schmitz’s precis. Here’s one: it’s not only patently ridiculous to assert that “blue families” — aka liberals — put “a low value on childbearing,” it’s insulting.

But let’s go on, because — incredibly — Schmitz claims that:

Baffling as it may be to elites, Mr. Trump embodies a real if imperfect model of family values. People familiar with the purple family model tend to view his alienation from his children’s mother as normal and his closeness to his children as exceptional and admirable. I saw this among my acquaintances in Nebraska.

Now, I’ll bet dollars to donuts that none of Schmitz’s “acquaintances in Nebraska” are blacks and hispanics. That’s because ” Trump’s job approval sits at only 7% among black voters and 24% among Hispanic voters.” In other words, two thirds of the “purple class” ethnic groups that Schmitz claims admire Trump’s family values actually loathe Trump.

That means that among purple families, only the white working class support Trump — with the emphasis on white. We knew this and we also know that it’s not class but racial identity that best determines Trump-loving. As Ta-Nehisi Coates pointed out:

 According to Edison Research, Trump won whites making less than $50,000 by 20 points, whites making $50,000 to $99,999 by 28 points, and whites making $100,000 or more by 14 points. This shows that Trump assembled a broad white coalition that ran the gamut from Joe the Dishwasher to Joe the Plumber to Joe the Banker.

In other words, it’s Trump’s racism that attracts so many whites, regardless of class. It’s certainly not his exceptional and admirable closeness to his children. And speaking of which…

This isn’t closeness. And it sure isn’t admirable. This is just plain creepy:

“Yeah, she’s really something, and what a beauty, that one. If I weren’t happily married and, ya know, her father….” 

“Is it wrong to be more sexually attracted to your own daughter than your wife?”

More Jared and 666

by digby

Over at Salon today, Jesse Korbluth discusses some of the rumors surrounding Anthony Kennedy’s son and his relationship to Trump and zeroes in on something I haven’t seen anywhere else:

But as Stephanie Ruhle of MSNBC has reported, Justin Kennedy left Deutsche Bank long before the money laundering and had no direct connection to the bank’s loans to Trump. The more interesting fact is where Justin Kennedy went next — he became the co-CEO of LNR Property. And that brings us straight to the most immediately vulnerable member of the Trump family, Jared Kushner.

From the New York Times, in 2012:

The Kushners’ purchase in 2007 of 666 Fifth Avenue for a record price of $1.8 billion is considered a classic example of reckless underwriting. The transaction was so highly leveraged that the cash flow from rents amounted to only 65 percent of the debt service.

As many real estate specialists predicted, the deal ran into trouble. Instead of rising, rents declined as the recession took hold, and new leases were scarce. In 2010, the loan was transferred to a special servicer on the assumption that a default would occur once reserve funds being used to subsidize the shortfall were bled dry.

Instead of foreclosing on the 39-story building, which stretches from 52nd Street to 53rd Street, the lenders agreed last month to reduce the principal and defer some of the interest payments on the interest-only loan and extend its maturity for two years, until February 2019.

Vornado has taken an ownership stake in several troubled Manhattan properties. But the 666 Fifth deal raised some eyebrows because Vornado is also a part-owner of the special servicer on the loan, LNR Partners, of Miami Beach.

The plot thickens. As Bernstein and Rusk note:

— There was a direct business relationship between LNR and Kushner Companies at the time Justin Kennedy and Jared Kushner were both CEOs. Even the future President was aware of the deal and commented on its respective merits.

— In 2011, the year in which some of these negotiations took place, Justin Kennedy for the first time was ranked on the New York Observer’s 100 Most Powerful People in New York Real Estate at #36. Donald Trump clocked in at #12. At that time, The New York Observer was owned by Jared Kushner.

The 666 Fifth Avenue deal is generally regarded as the all-time stinker in New York commercial real estate. What did LNR see as the upside? Better question: Was there any upside? As we know, 666 Fifth Avenue went badly for the Kushners, so badly that they were scrambling for a partner. Where might one be?

The Intercept reported earlier this year that Charles Kushner, Jared’s father, had discussed a financing deal for 666 Fifth Avenue with Qatari finance minister Ali Sharif Al Emadi in April 2017. A month after that deal cratered, a group of Middle Eastern countries, with Jared Kushner’s backing, led a diplomatic assault that culminated in a blockade of Qatar. NBC News reported that Qatari government officials visiting the U.S. “considered turning over to Mueller what they believe is evidence of efforts by their country’s Persian Gulf neighbors in coordination with Kushner to hurt their country.”

Back in March 2017, when Bernstein and Rusk published their Medium article, they ended on a hopeful note:

We know what the Justice’s son may have done for Mr. Kushner, but what did the President’s children do for Justin Kennedy? How have they been nice to him? Evidently Justice Kennedy knows, and this may have had an impact on his opinion of the Trumps in general and the President in particular. This is perhaps a significant cause of concern for those who hope that Justice Kennedy will try and hold out until after Trump is replaced by a Democrat. Time will tell.

Well, time has told. Kennedy didn’t hold out. Although there’s clearly more to this story than an 81-year-old justice who was ready to retire, I’m thinking Anthony Kennedy’s farewell gift to Trump isn’t just right-wing control of the Supreme Court for the rest of most of our lives. For once, it may not be about the money. The real prize here may be a gold-plated Get Out of Jail Free card.

It could very well be.

.

Politics and Reality Radio: John Amato on “Civility”; Imani Gandy and Jessica Mason Pieklo on SCOTUS and the Future of Roe; Trump’s Crackpot Trade War

with Joshua Holland

We kick off this week’s show with Crooks and Liars founder John Amato talking about Sarah Huckabee-Sanders, Maxine Waters and the right’s crooked civility game.

Then we talk to Imani Gandy and Jessica Mason Pieklo, Rewire.News legal analysts and co-hosts of the podcast Boom! Lawered, about this week’s atrocities at the Supreme Court and how everything is going to get much, much worse after Justice Anthony Kennedy is replaced with a soulless, reactionary android developed in the Federalist Society’s basement.

Finally, we’re joined by Roosevelt Institure fellow Todd Tucker to discuss his new book, Judge Knot: Politics and Development in International Investment Law, and help us dissect Trump’s erratic tradewars.

Playlist:
Ken Lazarus: “Ob La Di Ob La Da”
Bitter: Sweet: “Dirty Laundry”
The Rolling Stones: “Good Times, Bad Times”
Lou Reed: “Dirty Boulevard”

As always, you can also subscribe to the show on iTunes, Soundcloud or Podbean.

Friendly reminder: he’s a lazy liar too

by digby

Trump arrived at #Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, NJ.

This is his 163rd day at a Trump property as “president” and 120th day at a Trump golf club.

On vacation 31% of the time. Not bad for a guy that said he’d have “no time for golf.” Lazy, lying schmuck. #MAGA MY ASS. pic.twitter.com/yusG2HpVjB— Bryan Dawson (@BryanDawsonUSA) June 30, 2018

.