Month: January 2019

Robbing Pedro
by Tom Sullivan

Hole cut in prototype border fence using common power tools. Image via NBC News.

Except for bald-faced lying, it is not as if some of our politicians work all that hard at hiding the truth. It is just still a surprise when they speak it aloud, as Rep. Steve King, Republican of Iowa did … again:

A New York Times piece on King is generating more controversy for the already embattled Republican. “White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization—how did that language become offensive,” King wonders in the piece. “Why did I sit in classes teaching me about the merits of our history and our civilization?

King has drawn fire for the comments, but really, it is nothing new. In July 2016, King bragged of his white pride to MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, saying, “Where did any other sub-group of people contribute more to civilization?” Complaining about immigration in a 2015 radio interview, King claimed Barack Obama was recruiting “people in foreign countries to come in here illegally.” That could destroy the republic, King said, and keep us from “saving Western Civilization for the world.”

Since the partial shutdown of the government for the last three weeks is over immigrants from largely Christian, Spanish-speaking lands to the south, one wonders just what defines western civilization in King’s mind.

Statements like King’s stir controversy, but maybe it is more important to watch what such people do.

The sitting president (likely people working under him) is formulating plans for using a national emergency declaration to divert tax dollars to fund the southern border wall he spent his 2016 campaign promising Mexico would pay for. Since Donald Trump is getting pushback on diverting funds from the military, the White House is eyeing other funds, including “diverting emergency aid from storm- and fire-ravaged Puerto Rico, Florida, Texas and California.”

CNN reports:

Congress appropriated $14 billion in supplemental funds to repair infrastructure in areas of the country hardest hit by disasters including hurricanes, like Hurricane Maria which slammed Puerto Rico in 2017 and resulted in the deaths of nearly 3,000 people.

In anticipation of a national emergency declaration, the official tells CNN that the Pentagon was asked to provide lists of unspent funds including those earmarked for civil works projects that are part of disaster recovery in Puerto Rico, Texas, California, Florida, and elsewhere. The official said the funds were only recently received. There is more than $13 billion not yet physically spent on the infrastructure repair projects, but that have been promised to these communities.

For instance, more than $2 billion planned for projects in Puerto Rico has not yet been spent. More than $4.5 billion for projects in Texas, including those related to 2017’s Hurricane Harvey, has also not been spent.

Hurricane Maria relief was itsef a disaster. Now the White House may compound it. For Americans in Puerto Rico and Latino Americans elsewhere, this is the Trump plan: rob Pedro to prohibit Pablo.

What white nationalists say about “sub-groups” is offensive, yes. What they do speaks louder.

“This will be in the dustbin of history before tonight”

by digby

Meanwhile, the dumpster fire blazes across the globe:

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s stridently partisan speech in Cairo today chiding the former Barack Obama administration for its Iran nuclear diplomacy and attempts to engage the people of the Middle East received a withering response from former US diplomats and regional experts, who called it unstatesmanlike and tone-deaf.

“In falsely seeing ourselves as a force for what ails the Middle East, we were timid in asserting ourselves when the times — and our partners — demanded it,” Pompeo said in the speech, titled “A Force for Good: America Reinvigorated in the Middle East,” at the American University in Cairo.

“Our desire for peace at any cost led us to strike a deal with Iran, our common enemy,” Pompeo said in another swipe at the Obama administration. “The good news is this: The age of self-inflicted American shame is over, and so are the policies that produced so much needless suffering.”

Current and former diplomats were, in a word, not impressed.

Pompeo’s speech “was a regurgitation of what they have been saying for two years. There was nothing new, and it was offensive,” former career US diplomat and ambassador to Yemen Gerald Feierstein told Al-Monitor. “That they think that anyone still wants to hear about Barack Obama’s 2009 Cairo speech — get over it.”

“You own the issue now, you own the policy,” Feierstein continued. “People want to know what you are going to do, not what you think Barack Obama did wrong. And on that score, there was nothing there, Just a lot of empty rhetoric of all things they are going to do and how wonderful the United States is and it never occupied anybody. So what.”

Pompeo’s speech is unlikely to reassure American allies and partners frustrated by constantly shifting Donald Trump administration positions on the region that they are not properly consulted about, said former FBI and Treasury Department official Matthew Levitt.

“I do not think they [the Trump administration] fully appreciate the level of anxiety among our allies and potential allies in the region and beyond in Europe in terms of how reliable we are as a partner,” Levitt, now with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, told Al-Monitor.

“It is not just the decision to withdraw US forces in Syria,” Levitt continued. “Much more than that, it is the way the decision was arrived at and announced. [US Syria envoy Jim] Jeffrey said one thing one day, Trump says the opposite the next day. … People can’t keep up with the pace of the back and forth, ping pong. The lack of clarity, the lack of procedure in the policy making process — the allies see that.”

“While it is great to go to the region in a time of anxiety to reassure people you mean to have a reinvigorated role in the Middle East, it is not enough to say it,” Levitt said.

The extensive swipes in the speech at the previous administration were also discomfiting, Levitt said.

Whether it is done by Republicans or Democrats, “I always felt uncomfortable when Americans travel abroad and hang out dirty laundry,” he said.

“Embarrassing and shameful speech by the small, hyper-partisan Trump suck-up Pompeo,” Ellen Tauscher, a former undersecretary of state for arms control in the Obama administration and a former member of Congress, wrote on Twitter. “There’s not a ‘non-partisan statesman’ pore in his body.”

“Seriously. A joke. They really are struggling along with the C team only two years in,” a former US diplomat, speaking not for attribution, told Al-Monitor of Pompeo’s speech. “Honestly, it’ll be forgotten in about five minutes.”

Feierstein was among several observers who noted that Pompeo also got a big fact wrong in the speech, when he said who would have ever thought that an Israeli prime minister would visit Oman. In fact, two other Israeli prime ministers had visited Oman before Benjamin Netanyahu’s trip to Oman last fall.

“Look, when I was in government, whether in Republican or Democratic administrations, …they would never have allowed a speech to go forward like that without fact-checking the hell out of it,” said Feierstein, now with the Middle East Institute. “That they let obvious wrong statements creep in is a reflection of how this administration does business and a reflection of the fact that they don’t have professionals writing this stuff.”

“This will be in the dustbin of history before tonight,” Feierstein added. “Because it’s absolutely empty.”

When those diplomats get mad they really unleash the beast. Damn …

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Trump’s tell

by digby

Trump says he "didn't know anything" about his former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, sharing polling data with a person connected to Russian intelligence pic.twitter.com/wgbHsTh3vD— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 10, 2019

Note the way he responds. There’s a certain phony wide-eyed, soft-spoken denial he issues when he’s lying about something when he realizes the jig is up.

Here’s how he lied about the $130,000 payment to Stormy Daniels on Airforce One.

There’s a certain tone he uses in these situations and it’s quite different from his normal tone of strident denial. He doesn’t elaborate, and it’s clear he wants to change the subject.

Meanwhile, think about this from USA Today:

Members of President Donald Trump’s campaign and transition team had more than 100 contacts with Russian-linked officials, according to an analysis by the Center for American Progress think tank and its Moscow Project.

CAP, a liberal think tank, used publicly available court documents and reporting to tally up the number of contacts with Russian-linked officials, which includes those with close ties to Russian President Vladiir Putin and others tied to Russian intelligence, banks and politicians.

The organizations counted each meeting and message as a separate contact.

The number of contacts was raised to 101 this week, according to CAP, after it was reported that Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort and Rick Gates, a former campaign aide, shared polling data with Manafort’s former Russian business partner Konstantin Kilimnik.

Not one of the people Russian agents or other interested parties contacted over the course of that campaign ever reported it to the authorities. People who have worked on campaigns say this is utterly unique. In some cases, that’s not especially concerning. They were innocuous as single events and might not have set off any alarm bells. But it became a live issue early on in the general election campaign after the DNC was hacked and the government was giving briefings to the highest levels about Russian interference. You would have thought once it became news they would have looked back and thought “hmmm, that’s weird. Maybe I should tell somebody.”

Not one of them reported any of these incidents, not even the ones that had to have seemed bizarre or inappropriate.

Even if this conspiracy has a dozen different strands in which none of the Trump campaign players knew the whole story (not a legal defense by the way) it’s already obvious that they were both the dumbest and the most unethical presidential campaign in history. And that includes Tricky Dick’s.

Update: Another one:

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Will the report become public? One expert weighs in.

by digby

Neal Katyal, former acting Solicitor General and Professor of National Security Law at Georgetown University Law Center wrote the current Special Prosecutor policy for the Department of Justice.

He posted this twitter thread yesterday:

THREAD ON WHETHER MUELLER REPORT WILL BE PUBLIC, AND @washingtonpost STORY ABOUT TRUMP HIRING MANY NEW LAWYERS TO ASSERT EXEC PRIVILEGE.

Short Answer: It will be public.

The special counsel rules, which I drafted at DOJ 20 years ago, contemplate 2 kinds of reports. One is a report from Mueller to the AG, at the close of his investigation: “a confidential report explaining the prosecution or declination decisions reached by the Special Counsel.”

That document is to be confidential. But there is a second, separate reporting requirement, which forces the AG to notify Congress “with an explanation for each action…upon conclusion of the Special Counsel’s investigation, including  a description and explanation of instances (if any) in which the AG concluded that a proposed action by a Special Counsel was so inappropriate or unwarranted under established Departmental practices that it should not be pursued.” 

That report must explain why the investigation has concluded, and any instance in which the AG overruled the Special Counsel.  The provision was designed to ensure “Congressional and public confidence in the integrity of the process.”

Notably, we wrote the circumstances for an AG to overrule a Special Counsel very tightly—it has to violate “established Departmental practices.”

So, to take one hypothetical example, generic DOJ opinions about whether a sitting President could be indicted do not create an “established Departmental practice” about whether an individual could be indicted for successfully cheating in a Presidential election.

There is no DOJ established practice that says if a Presidential candidate cheats enough and wins the Presidency, that he gets a get-out-of-jail-free card.

There is one other important aspect to the regulations. If a Special Counsel is worried that the AG may cover something up, the regs give him an important weapon.

Because they require a mandatory report to Congress about any instance of the AG overruling a Special Counsel, they put the thumb on the scale of a Special Counsel telling the AG he will take a sensitive act and waiting for AG to say no. That triggers the reporting requirement.

It is a safeguard to prevent a cover-up, it creates a mandatory report to a separate and coequal branch of govt.  So that is why I believe Mueller has a move left to play if Whitaker or Barr (if confirmed) try to stymie him and his full report.

Now the President can try to claim executive privilege. Nixon tried that, it didn’t turn out so well. He got crushed in the Supreme Court. Trump’s claim appears even weaker—much wont even concern presidential deliberations&the part that might (Comey) has been waived by Trump.

And here, there is another problem: Trump’s legal team has been saying they don’t think a sitting President can be indicted.

Leaving aside the point above in (6) and (7), the only way that claim makes any sense is if the President must be impeached first. Every real scholar who says a sitting President can’t be indicted couples that with a view that impeachment is the remedy.

So if the President asserts the view he can’t be indicted, he has to allow the turnover of all investigative material to Congress.  Otherwise he would be no different than King George III, literally above the law.

This point is fleshed out in my NYT op-ed below. The key point is that even if you think Trump won’t be indicted, his legal claims about his immunity from indictment set up&invite the launch of impeachment investigation+eviscerate his exec priv claims. 

Bottom line: the President can try to hide the Mueller Report. He will lose to the public’s right to know.

I hope he’s right.

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Bad Propaganda Theatre

by digby

GOP lawyers insist that whatever drivel Trump vomits out in person or on his twitter feed is legally irrelevant. But this ridiculous manufactured “crisis” is salient?

Liptak also reports that the lawyers are “looking for other ways to illustrate that an emergency is underway, recognizing a declaration would be challenged by Democrats. That has included hosting lawmakers in the Situation Room, a setting that lends to the sense of crisis.”

— Kaitlan Collins (@kaitlancollins) January 10, 2019

This is getting dumber by the day. I don’t think even Trump’s unqualified judges would buy this nonsense. I guess you never know, but a fake emergency that allows Trump to expressly ignore the most important congressional prerogative — the power of the purse — in pursuit of a policy that is only supported by a minority of the country for what is clearly political purposes is a very, very serious abuse of presidential power.

It’s possible they will let him get away with it in the end, of course. We are in the Twilight Zone.  And after all, congress has abdicated their duty many times before, setting up the inevitable moment when a president would blatantly abuse the power he was given. But if the courts can’t bring themselves to check that power in this instance, we are probably permanently on the road to a new, more autocratic, America.  God help us when there’s a real crisis.

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The people have no respect for their own country

by digby

What kind of disgusting behavior is this?

Illegal roads, cut down Joshua trees, and damaged federal property, along with the need to clean up garbage, prompted Joshua Tree National Park Superintendent David Smith to announce Tuesday that the park would close indefinitely on Thursday to address those impacts incurred during the ongoing partial government shutdown.

“The park will be closed until I can ensure that resources inside the park are protected,” Smith said during a short phone call. “We’re hoping that the shutdown will be over soon.”

While the closure will take effect 8 a.m. Thursday, the superintendent could not say how long it would last. Acting Interior Secretary David Bernhardt has directed the National Park Service to use fee revenues brought in under the Federal Lands Recreation Enhancement Act to pay for cleanup and additional law enforcement personnel. Smith said that while his park normally takes in about $9 million a year, most of that has been committed to projects. Staff was working to see how much in unobligated funds remained.

Joshua Tree is a geologic showcase that is a climber’s gymnasium, one that offers two different desert settings. Straddling the geographic divide that splits the Mojave Desert from an element of the Sonoran Desert, the park located about two hours east of Los Angeles in Southern California is both a day tripper’s paradise and an adventurer’s escape. The cooler winter months are the busiest in the park, which has made the task of preventing damage with a handful of rangers during the ongoing shutdown extremely difficult.

Last week park staff closed its campgrounds to overnight use because of sanitation problems, but many visitors ignored that closure. With just eight law enforcement rangers working during the partial government shutdown it was impossible to cover all areas of the park, which is about the size of Delaware.

“There are about a dozen instances of extensive vehicle traffic off roads and in some cases into wilderness,” Smith replied when asked about the damage in the park. “We have two new roads that were created inside the park. We had destruction of government property with the cutting of chains and locks for people to access campgrounds. We’ve never seen this level of out-of-bounds camping. Every day use area was occupied every evening.

“Joshua trees were actually cut down in order to make new roads.”

Since the National Park Service was told to keep as many units of the National Park System open as possible during the partial government shutdown, but only with essential personnel, many have struggled with skeleton contingents of law enforcement rangers. With no maintenance crews to collect trash or maintain restrooms, and no budget to pay for outside help, many parks have been blighted by litter and human waste. There have been reports of illegal off-road travel, metal detecting on battlefields in the park system, and damage to resources.

Following Bernhardt’s directive to use fee revenues, park staff across the country was busy seeing how much was available.

The new roads at Joshua Tree didn’t run for miles, but rather jogged around gates to gain access in many cases, according to the superintendent.

“It’s short spurts for people to get around gates for the most part. They would just go out into the country, and then once 20 or 30 cars would go over it you would essentially have a new road created in pristine desert,” he said.

One place that saw traffic was around Joshua Tree’s Live Oak area, which is not far from the north entrance to the park.

“We had some pretty extensive four-wheel driving around the entire area to access probably our most significant tree in the park,” Smith said. “We have this hybrid live oak tree that is deciduous. It is one of our kind of iconic trees inside the park. People were driving to it and camping under it. Through the virgin desert to get to this location. That would probably be a quarter-mile or so around the rock formation that is there.”

The superintendent said there also were instances of graffiti in the park this past week. Park officials were identifying additional staff and resources needed to address immediate maintenance and sanitation issues.

Monitoring a park the size of Joshua Tree, which covers 1,235 square miles and has about 20 different entrances due to dirt roads that ring the park, is extremely difficult with just eight law enforcement rangers. Were it not for the shutdown, there would have been more than 100 other “sets of eyes” to help keep an eye on visitor behavior, the superintendent said.

“We have 120 employees in the park, plus 30 associates that work for Great Basin Institute, the majority of whom are in the park every day,” he said. “Those are the folks that are in the campgrounds and in the day-use areas and doing science. So you’ve got 100 sets of eyes in the park every day with folks contacting visitors.”

Law enforcement rangers were to continue to patrol the park and enforce the closure until park staff completes the necessary cleanup and park protection measures.

I think this pretty much clears up any question of what these disrespectful humans would do to what’s left of this country’s land and what kind of environment we would have if there was no laws or regulations protecting it.

By the way, like those who love to shoot endangered species, these are the sorts of “outdoorsmen” who always insist that they are the ones who are the real stewards of the land. They are the razers of the land, disrespectful of all the natural beauty and animals with whom we share this planet. They are awful, awful people.

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Big fat lie o’ the day

by digby

Trump on Mexico paying for the wall: “When during the campaign I would say Mexico is going to pay for it. Obviously I never said that and I never meant they are going to write out a check.” pic.twitter.com/wr5XBMLvyL

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) January 10, 2019

Nope. He clearly promised that he was going to directly extort 5-10 billion from Mexico.

Trump’s new insistence that he never envisioned Mexico writing a check to pay for the wall is contradicted by a since-archived memo posted on his campaign website in 2016. The memo, titled “Compelling Mexico to Pay for the Wall,” outlines a plan to pressure Mexico to put up funds for a border wall within three days of Trump taking office.

“It’s an easy decision for Mexico: make a one-time payment of $5-10 billion to ensure that $24 billion continues to flow into their country year after year,” the memo says, referring to “remittances from Mexican nationals working in the United States.”

The memo says that Trump would propose on his first day in office a rule aimed at barring undocumented immigrants in the U.S. from wiring money outside the country, which Mexico would “immediately protest” on Day 2.

“On day 3 tell Mexico that if the Mexican government will contribute the funds needed to the United States to pay for the wall, the Trump Administration will not promulgate the final rule, and the regulation will not go into effect,” the memo states.

Also, remember this from January 2017:

Trump spent much of his call with Peña Nieto seeking to enlist the Mexican president in a deal to stop talking about how the wall would be paid for. Two days earlier, Trump had signed an executive order mandating construction of the wall, but funding for it remains unclear.

“On the wall, you and I both have a political problem,” Trump said. “My people stand up and say, ‘Mexico will pay for the wall,’ and your people probably say something in a similar but slightly different language.”

Trump seemed to acknowledge that his threats to make Mexico pay had left him cornered politically. “I have to have Mexico pay for the wall — I have to,” he said. “I have been talking about it for a two-year period.”

To solve that problem, Trump pressured Peña Nieto to suppress the issue. When pressed on who would pay for the wall, “We should both say, ‘We will work it out.’ It will work out in the formula somehow,” Trump said. “As opposed to you saying, ‘We will not pay,’ and me saying, ‘We will not pay.’ ”

Peña Nieto resisted, saying that Trump’s repeated threats had placed “a very big mark on our back, Mr. President.” He warned that “my position has been and will continue to be very firm, saying that Mexico cannot pay for the wall.”

Trump objected: “But you cannot say that to the press. The press is going to go with that, and I cannot live with that.”

Here’s the first part of the memo at the Wayback machine:

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Red state shutdown blues

by digby

It looks like the Trump Shutdown is getting pretty bad ratings in a very important GOP demographic. TPM reports on the latest polling in states with possibly vulnerable 2020 Senators:

In Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Iowa, Maine and North Carolina, voters disagree with Trump by double-digit margins that “government should be kept closed until he gets funding for the wall.” Voters also oppose spending billions to construct a border wall along the U.S.-Mexico border in all seven states, though those numbers are a bit closer. And voters in all seven states say by double-digit margins that their Republican senator’s support of Trump on this issue is making them less, not more, likely to vote for their reelection.

Trump’s job approval rating is also upside down in all seven states. Voters say they disapprove than approve of the job Trump is doing as president by 16-point margins in Colorado and Maine, and voters disapprove of Trump’s job performance by narrower three- to seven-point margins in the other five states.

That’s not good news for Sens. Dan Sullivan (R-AK), Martha McSally (R-AZ), Cory Gardner (R-CO), David Perdue (R-GA), Joni Ernst (R-IA), Susan Collins (R-ME) and Thom Tillis (R-NC), all of whom are up for election next year. It also shows where the political pressure is likely to build the most in the Senate as the shutdown continues.

Collins, Gardner and Sullivan’s Alaska colleague, Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), are the Republican senators who’ve been most vocally critical of the GOP strategy during the shutdown. Ernst and Perdue have stood with Trump. Tillis has looked for a way out by suggesting trading wall funding for a permanent solution on the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, while Sullivan and McSally haven’t been looking to make news on the issue.

A few caveats: PPP’s random-digit dialing is not top pollsters’ preferred methodology, and they only conducted surveys over two days rather than three or more, as more reliable polls do. A complex issue like this is also difficult to poll, and the wording of the questions PPP used may have led to worse numbers for Trump and the GOP than other questions. And even if these numbers are dead on, in past years shutdowns have hurt one party temporarily before their effects quickly faded, long before the actual elections.

There have been few recent national polls of the sensitive issue, but the available numbers indicate that many more voters are blaming Trump and the GOP than Democrats for the ongoing shutdown.

A Politico/Morning Consult poll released earlier this week found that 47 percent of voters say Trump is mostly to blame for the shutdown, another 5 percent blamed congressional Republicans, and just 33 percent blamed congressional Democrats.

The full state-by-state toplines from PPP:

Do you agree or disagree with President Trump that the government should be kept closed until he gets funding for the wall?

Alaska: 41% agree; 55% disagree
Arizona: 40% agree; 55% disagree
Colorado: 38% agree; 58% disagree
Georgia: 41% agree; 55% disagree
Iowa: 39% agree; 56% disagree
Maine: 33% agree; 63% disagree
North Carolina: 39% agree; 57% disagree

Do you support or oppose President Trump’s demand that Congress spend billions in taxpayer dollars to build a wall along the southern border? 

Alaska: 47% support; 51% oppose
Arizona: 44% support; 54% oppose
Colorado: 42% support; 56% oppose
Georgia: 48% support; 48% oppose
Iowa: 45% support; 51% oppose
Maine: 40% support; 57% oppose
North Carolina: 48% support; 51% oppose

Does (your Republican Senator’s) support of President Trump’s plan to keep the government closed if he doesn’t get funding for a border wall make you more or less likely to support her/him in his next election, or does it not make a difference? 

Alaska (Sullivan): 41% more likely; 50% less likely
Arizona (McSally): 37% more likely; 50% less likely
Colorado (Gardner): 37% more likely; 49% less likely
Georgia (Perdue): 41% more likely; 51% less likely
Iowa (Ernst): 37% more likely; 49% less likely
Maine (Collins): 32% more likely; 53% less likely
North Carolina (Tillis): 42% more likely; 48% less likely

This is a problem for them and some of them seem to know it.

But someone just mentioned something on TV that I haven’t considered. Nobody has heard him say that if he calls for the National Emergency and deploys the military to pay for the wall, he will also agree to fund the government.

I wouldn’t put it past him to take this off the table and them make some other demand — just to twist the knife and prove his dominance.

His people would love it. After all, they think cheating and back-stabbing makes you “smart.”

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Blustery, with a chance of national emergency
by Tom Sullivan

“This website will not be actively managed” during the partial shutdown, reads a banner atop the home page of the United States Coast Guard. Public domain.

It will be partly cloudy, brisk and blustery in the nation’s capitol on Thursday, with a gale warning in effect until 6 p.m. from the Key Bridge to Indian Head, MD. Plus, a continued chance of national emergency.

A small craft advisory is in effect, too. That might keep members of the U.S. Coast Guard busy rescuing boaters while their civilian employees are home trying to survive President Trump’s partial government shutdown by walking dogs, babysitting, or holding garage sales. The agency provided a five-page tip sheet to employees furloughed by the Trump shutdown.

The Washington Post reports:

The tip sheet, titled “Managing your finances during a furlough,” applies to the Coast Guard’s 8,500-person civilian workforce. About 6,400 of them are on indefinite furlough, while 2,100 are working without pay after being identified as essential workers, said Lt. Cmdr. Scott McBride, a service spokesman. They were last paid for the two-week period ended Dec. 22.

“While it may be uncomfortable to deal with the hard facts, it’s best to avoid the ‘hide your head in the sand’ reaction,” the tip sheet said. “Stay in charge of the situation by getting a clear understanding of what’s happening.”

The Coast Guard removed the tip sheet from the support program’s website late Wednesday morning after The Washington Post inquired about it.

The sitting president has so far avoided declaring his shutdown a national emergency, or rather, his self-manufactured crisis on the southern border. Still, Trump threatens to, reports CBS:

He said last week that “I can do it if I want.” So far, he has not. “I think we might work a deal,” he reasoned Wednesday. But Mr. Trump went on to threaten, “And if we don’t, I may go that route. I have the absolute right to do national emergency if I want.”

After storming out of a contentious meeting at the White House with congressional leaders Wednesday, though, Mr. Trump might have a change of heart.

Trump still believes by declaring a national emergency he can get his border wall without congressional approval. He believes it will give him the authority to divert money budgeted for national defense to law enforcement, a move even the wall-favoring National Review calls “a lawless abuse of power.” In effect, the former CEO of the Trump Organization believes he can treat the Pentagon budget like his personal slush fund. His last slush fund was dissolved by the state of New York in December.

TONIGHT: Trump gives the unscripted version of his scripted primetime address! #LSSC pic.twitter.com/UJ7ZZLFkkc— The Late Show (@colbertlateshow) January 10, 2019

Stock up on frozen food and canned goods

by digby

This isn’t good:

The furloughing of hundreds of Food and Drug Administration inspectors has sharply reduced inspections of the nation’s food supply — one of the many repercussions of the partial government shutdown that are making Americans potentially less safe. 

The agency, which oversees 80 percent of the food supply, has suspended all routine inspections of domestic food-processing facilities, FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb said in an interview. He is working on a plan to bring inspectors back as early as next week to inspect facilities considered high-risk because they handle sensitive items such as seafood, soft cheese and vegetables, or have a history of problems. 

“We are doing what we can to mitigate any risk to consumers through the shutdown,” Gottlieb said. 

The Center for Science in the Public Interest, a nonprofit advocacy group, described the inspection reductions as unacceptable. 

“That puts our food supply at risk,” said Sarah Sorscher, deputy director of regulatory affairs at the group. “Regular inspections, which help stop foodborne illness before people get sick, are vital.” 

Foodborne illnesses are a major problem in the United States, sickening 48 million people each year and killing 3,000, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates. 

Food inspections are just one of the public health and safety efforts that have been cut or curtailed during the shutdown, now deep into its third week. The federal government also keeps airplanes from colliding, inspects pharmaceutical drugs, pursues criminals and defends against possible terrorist and cyberattacks. It is a 24-7-365 effort to make Americans safer. 

But a shutdown upends the calculus of risk management as agencies including the FBI, Coast Guard, Secret Service, FDA, Federal Aviation Administration and Agriculture Department face drastically reduced resources.

This is the world conservatives have dreamed of. Their libertarian paradise is upon us. I just hope they all have farms and gardens they can count on to keep them fed. And that they don’t need any prescriptions filled or have to fly on an airplane until the “invisible hand” can step in to make them safe.

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