Month: January 2019

Roger Stone clearly expects a pardon

by digby

And he will probably get one.

Greatest Witch Hunt in the History of our Country! NO COLLUSION! Border Coyotes, Drug Dealers and Human Traffickers are treated better. Who alerted CNN to be there?— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 25, 2019

Roger Stone, arrested today for lying, obstruction and witness tampering in the Russia probe, just said he will never testify against the president after proudly asserting that he’d been his close friend for decades.

Trump only associates with the best people. He told us so.

This arrest doesn’t go to the heart of the suspicions about conspiracy between the Russians and the Trump campaign but it’s getting closer. Bannon has been reported to be the person in the indictment who was “directed” (presumably by the person he worked for) to find out about future Wikileaks releases in the fall of 2016. That would be

By the way:

The president is asking, who alerted CNN to be there?

Journalists don't have to be alerted. It was expected for weeks that Roger Stone would indicted.

It's called a stakeout and a reporter doing their job. https://t.co/bgZ7MpM7n4— Yamiche Alcindor (@Yamiche) January 25, 2019

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Criminal-in-chief
by Tom Sullivan

“You want the obvious, you’ll get the obvious,” Todd Rundgren once sang. And yet, the news is so busy reporting scandalous “breaking news” every day, it misses the obvious.

Breaking news at this hour: President Donald Trump’s former adviser Roger Stone was arrested Friday on charges of charges of obstruction of justice, giving false statements and witness tampering.

Breaking news last night: The Trump White House in an unprecedented action overruled two of its career security specialists and granted top secret clearances to Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, as well as about 30 others, after FBI background checks turned up concerns they posed security risks.

Almost lost in Thursday night’s breakage was a stunning exchange on MSNBC’s “All In” between host Chris Hayes, former assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York Mimi Rocah, and former federal prosecutor Glenn Kirschner.

Under discussion was news that the Senate Intelligence Committee would subpoena Michael Cohen. The former Trump lawyer and Trump Organization vice-president was convicted in December to three years in prison for “a ‘veritable smorgasbord’ of criminal conduct, including making false statements to Congress about the scope and status of a proposed Trump Tower Moscow project,” NBC reports:

The move comes a day after Cohen delayed his public testimony before the House Oversight Committee over alleged “ongoing threats against his family from President Trump” and members of his legal team, [Cohen’s attorney Lanny] Davis said in a statement Wednesday.

Cohen will testify on Feb. 12, a source with direct knowledge of the matter told NBC News.

Rocah appeared flabbergasted that the sitting president was making public threats, telling Hayes, “It’s absolutely mob tactics. I do not think that’s hyperbole. I did mob cases cases for 16 years and this is right out of their playbook.”

Kevin Corke, @FoxNews “Don’t forget, Michael Cohen has already been convicted of perjury and fraud, and as recently as this week, the Wall Street Journal has suggested that he may have stolen tens of thousands of dollars….” Lying to reduce his jail time! Watch father-in-law!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 18, 2019

Because the threats are so open they may be harder for the public to see, Rocah said, offering a hypothetical case. (MSNBC has not yet posted YouTube video of the exchange.)

“If I were prosecuting a mob boss and one of his capos or soldiers was cooperating against him, and the mob boss was out on bail, the capo was out on bail, and they met in the bathroom during trial or somewhere during the court proceeding. And the mob boss said to the cooperating witness, ‘You know, I can tell them about your father,’ or something like that, and that cooperator came back and told us — whether the father was or was not implicated in criminal conduct — not the point,” Rocah told Hayes. “The point is, that cooperator would take that as a threat. Now that’s said in private. In that setting, it’s more obvious.”

Trump is simply doing it publicly because he has no private access to Cohen, Rocah went on, incredulous.

“I also think he’s talking to the Department of Justice, who he would like nothing more than to focus on Michael Cohen’s father,” Rocah added. “The point is, Trump’s intent is clear, and a reasonable prosecutor could differ with that as to whether you could actually prove that intent beyond a reasonable doubt … In my mind, I would charge it.”

Kirschner agreed, saying, “This is not just witness tampering. This is President Trump taking a chapter out of the book, ‘Witness Tampering for Dummies.'”

“Under [similar] circumstances, as a prosecutor, I would do two things,” Kirschner continued. “One, I would immediately invite the father-in-law in and I would say, ‘Sir, I’m sorry to inform you we have come into information that we believe constitutes a threat. So, I’d like to lay out the different witness protection options that you have available to you.’ The second thing I would do is I would draft an indictment for obstruction of justice for witness tampering.”

Responding to the Cohen postponement Wednesday, Rep. Elijah E. Cummings, Chairman of the Committee on Oversight and Reform, and Rep. Adam Schiff, Chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, issued a statement:

… efforts to intimidate witnesses, scare their family members, or prevent them from testifying before Congress are textbook mob tactics that we condemn in the strongest terms. Our nation’s laws prohibit efforts to discourage, intimidate, or otherwise pressure a witness not to provide testimony to Congress. The President should make no statement or take any action to obstruct Congress’ independent oversight and investigative efforts, including by seeking to discourage any witness from testifying in response to a duly authorized request from Congress.

Donald Trump has spent a lifetime treating the law as a weapon to wield against opponents, and otherwise as an inconvenience for him to ignore. Career prosecutors know it. Special Counsel Robert Mueller knows it. His whole life, Donald Trump has been able to get away with it.

The wheels of justice turn slowly, sometimes too slowly. But while they turn, every day Donald Trump remains in office he retains the power and the platform to commit obvious crimes in broad daylight using the presidency as a shield. Every day he remains in office, he is a threat to international stability and to the very national security he purports to care about in his ongoing shutdown-tantrum over funding for a wall/fence/barrier on the southern border. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of federal workers go unpaid, and government work that goes undone makes Americans everywhere less safe. We’re all holding our breaths hoping an airliner doesn’t fall from the sky.

But people with the co-equal power to do something about it carry on as if any of this normal. They posture impotently as they watch crimes committed weekly by the president of an erstwhile world power. For the press, it’s just more breaking news.

What would he do differently if he were compromised?

by digby

Nick Confessore of the NY Times says that something he hears people in Washington say often. And the answer is that it’s hard to see what it would be.  If it was just the fact that he loves a strongman, at this point he would have to tell his good buddy “Vlad, bro, you can see what kind of political pressure I’m under. I’m going to have to bring the hammer down because otherwise I won’t survive long enough to keep helping you out.”

But he’s not doing that.  He just keeps acting like he’s guilty as sin.

I mean, come on…

Nearly three months after deeming Russia in violation of a chemical weapons law, the Trump administration has yet to impose tough new sanctions on Moscow required by the law and triggered by the poisoning last year of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal.

Even as the European Union moves ahead, punishing four Russian officials this week in connection with the poisoning, the U.S. has not moved forward with its own penalties. The delay comes as the Trump administration faces intense congressional scrutiny over a Treasury Department deal to lift sanctions on companies that had been controlled by Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska.

Asked about the Skripal sanctions, the State Department told NBC News the U.S. “will proceed with our statutory requirements” but would not comment on when the sanctions will take effect.

“There is no deadline in the law for imposing sanctions,” the State Department said, adding, “We intend to proceed according to the statutory requirements.”

This should have been an easy one.

As California goes?

by digby

Maybe ride the wave instead of ignore it?

I confess that I hadn’t realized that the Democratic party has pretty much ignored the western part of the country for most of its history, at least as far as presidential politics are concerned. It’s not that I never noticed the overwhelming obsession with the eastern establishment, in both media and politics, or the idea that “real America” exists only in the South and the Midwest, but I hadn’t homed in on the fact that while the Republicans in the past had been savvy enough to look to the west to see the future,  the allegedly “progressive” Democrats just keep burrowing into their ivy covered halls.

Maybe it’s time for that to change:

If Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) wins her party’s nomination to run against President Trump, she will have broken through one of the impenetrable barriers of modern politics.

She would not be her party’s first female nominee, nor its first African-American nominee.

Rather, Harris, or a few other candidates who face longer odds, would become the first Democratic presidential nominee from a state west of the Rocky Mountains in the party’s 191-year history, a geographic divide that even political powerhouses like former California Gov. Jerry Brown, former Sen. Frank Church (Idaho) or former Rep. “Scoop” Jackson (Wash.) could not bridge.

The Republican Party has often gone west to find its presidential nominees, from Californians Herbert Hoover, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan to Barry Goldwater and John McCain of Arizona.

But the Democratic Party has never nominated a presidential or vice presidential candidate from a state west of Texas (Lyndon Johnson), South Dakota (Hubert Humphrey) or Nebraska (William Jennings Bryan).

Harris, who launched her bid in a national television interview Monday, represents perhaps the greatest chance a Westerner candidate has had to win the Democratic presidential nomination since 1984, when Colorado Sen. Gary Hart (D) lost the nomination to Walter Mondale.

She is one of as many as five other Democrats from Western states who have said they will or are likely to run this year, including Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, Montana Gov. Steve Bullock, Washington Gov. Jay Inslee and Reps. Eric Swalwell (Calif.) and Tulsi Gabbard (Hawaii).

The lack of Western representation on Democratic presidential tickets has become all the more stark in recent decades, as California especially and the West more broadly have become cultural and economic engines that drive the country.

“California is a nation-state of 40 million people and in many ways a microcosm for the country,” said Sean Clegg, a senior Harris adviser and a Democratic strategist based in San Francisco. “It’s a state, like America, that has always stood for optimism and innovation. In California, we don’t just speak of the ‘American dream.’ We talk about the ‘California dream.’ ”

The new cohort of Westerners running for president is a reflection of the region’s decades-long growth in influence.

Massive federal investment in West Coast and Mountain West states during World War II and the Cold War, coupled with the more recent rise of a technology-based economy centered around Western urban areas, has fueled a century-long population and economic explosion.

A hundred years ago, states west of the Rocky Mountains accounted for just 55 electoral votes. Those same states — plus new entrants Alaska and Hawaii — represented 85 electoral votes when John Kennedy won the presidency in 1960. Today they account for 128 electoral votes, a little under half the 270 a candidate needs to win the White House.

While Republicans use California — and especially San Francisco, home to both Harris and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D) — as political shorthand, a microcosm of liberalism run amok, the same dismissive attitude masked the rise of another politician once seen as a Western extreme.

“Reagan’s political trajectory is a certain mirror to what we see happening now. He represented a type of extreme Western conservatism that the Eastern elite found laughable, until he was elected,” said Eric Jaye, a California Democratic strategist. “Just as the country once moved to the right to meet the views of a Reagan, the Democratic Party has moved to the left, making California progressives like Harris and Garcetti both electable.”

Scorn from Eastern elites — an attitude freely reciprocated by Westerners looking down on older states back east — contributes to the trouble those in Mountain West or coastal states have in breaking through.

“East Coast pols dominate the national media landscape. That’s a function of where the media and federal government are headquartered,” said Steven Maviglio, a Democratic strategist in Sacramento. “If you are from the West you have to spend tons of time back east, and that’s difficult, particularly for a sitting elected official. The three-hour time difference has practical complications.”

Perhaps seeking to mitigate those complications, Harris has decided to headquarter her campaign in Baltimore.

Western states have taken their own steps to increase their influence in the presidential nominating process.

After holding their nominating contest near the end of the 2016 cycle, California will now be the single biggest prize up for grabs on Super Tuesday. Nevada is entering its third cycle as one of four early nominating states, and Arizona and Colorado also plan early contests.

Washington, Hawaii, Alaska and Wyoming — all of which played an important role in handing Midwesterner Barack Obama the 2008 Democratic nomination over New York’s Hillary Clinton — have yet to set the dates for their 2020 caucuses and primaries.

Unlike Iowa and New Hampshire, most Western states feature racially diverse Democratic electorates.

“There have been very few candidates to come out of the West, likely in part because of late primaries or the fact that a bunch of these states were led by Republicans back in the day,” said Lisa Grove, a Democratic pollster with roots in Oregon and Hawaii. “The changing composition of the primary electorate, the higher profile of some of the Western contenders like Harris and the earlier primary dates in places like California should make a big difference.”

Plenty of Western Democrats have tried to break through the Rocky Mountain divide. Brown and his father, Pat Brown, ran for president a combined six times. Jackson, the powerful father of what became the Neocon movement, and Church, who led a high-profile investigation into the CIA, barely made a dent. Former Rep. Mo Udall (D-Ariz.) finished in second place in 10 primaries in 1976, and second at that year’s convention, behind Jimmy Carter.

But only three have even come close to winning: In 1992, Brown finished a distant second behind Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton (D). Hart was the front-runner in 1984, before monkey business derailed his bid. And in 1920, California Sen. William Gibbs McAdoo (D) lost the nomination to Ohio Gov. James Cox (D) on the Democratic National Convention’s 44th ballot.

Harris, and the others planning to join the race, hope to break the West’s winless streak in the Democratic primary. But for any of them to do so, they will have to appeal beyond their Western roots.

“Can a Californian play in Iowa? We think so,” Clegg said.

This is not an endorsement of Harris by the way. I’m not endorsing anyone. But I do think that the Democrats might benefit from getting away from the Acela corridor and the Midwest and take a look at what’s going on out here. As the piece points out there are several candidates probably running from west of the Rockies  (I’d add Inslee of Washington and  Merkeley of Oregon to that list) and probably a few more who are thinking about it.

Since California was once the heart of Reagan and Nixon country and is now so Democratic that there are only 7 out of 53 congressional reps and the state GOP is on life support — and the rest of the west is rapidly moving blue, and not just the coast, but Arizona, Nevada and Colorado too — maybe there’s something to learn from that experience. There are a whole lot of people out here. Hello!

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Could the fates be so kind as to make Ann Coulter challenge Trump for the presidency?

by digby

Some people are pushing for it:

A political action committee that pushes for stricter immigration controls said Thursday it is launching a campaign to draft conservative writer Ann Coulter to challenge President Trump.

Americans for Legal Immigration PAC has been among those most critical of Mr. Trump’s latest immigration proposal that includes temporary legal status for some 700,000 illegal immigrant “Dreamers” now protected by the Obama-era DACA program.

ALIPAC, which had been a backer of Mr. Trump’s in the 2016 election, says it’s lost faith and is now seeking a new champion.

“I hope Ann Coulter will give serious consideration to running against Trump in the primary and run on a MAGA platform offering conservative voters a pledge to keep her promises … unlike Trump!” said William Gheen, president of ALIPAC.

He said he hoped such a bid would at least convince Mr. Trump to worry about his base voters as he prepared for re-election, and perhaps force him to abandon his latest immigration plans.

There is so little in this misbegotten political era that gives me any pleasure. But the idea of Ann Coulter ruhning to Donald Trump’s right on immigration in the presidential race made me smile for the first time today.

Go for it Ann! Your country needs you.

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Yeah well, they knew he was a snake etc, etc… That’s what they liked about him.

by digby

Philip Bump of the Washington Post wonders what it would have been like if trump were a totally different person than it was obvious he was from the moment he rode down on that silly escalator:

There is a very good reason that most presidents reach across the aisle to build relationships and decide against constantly lying about things both big and small. Enacting an agenda as the head of the executive branch usually means cajoling the opposition into action, which itself often means having to demonstrate that the opposition’s base won’t revolt against the president’s idea.

This is not the path President Trump chose. He chose to continue the pattern he demonstrated during the campaign: Lying or misleading about things big and small and focusing his attention and energy almost exclusively on his core base of support.

His thinking seems to be: Hey, it worked for me in 2016. But it’s worth wondering what his presidency would have looked like had he approached the job with a more traditional, inclusive approach. There would still have been many skeptical Democrats, certainly, but it’s more than possible that much more of the Democratic base and many more independents would be willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. Trump says there’s an emergency on the border? Well, many more voters might have thought, we can trust him to both be honest about that crisis and to be putting the country’s needs first.

So we end up with poll numbers like this one, from Fox News.

Only about 20 percent of Americans think that there’s an emergency on the border — including only 4-in-10 Republicans. Trump has insisted that it’s an emergency, even toying with the idea of declaring a national emergency to get a wall built. But Americans aren’t convinced.

It’s not clear, in fact, that Trump’s convinced Americans of much. A poll from the Associated Press and NORC asked respondents what effect they thought the construction of a wall might have, specifically focusing on issues that Trump has touted as problems that the wall would solve. The result? Most Americans — often including Republicans — don’t seem to be buying Trump’s rhetoric.

For example, the pollsters asked if a wall would make the country more safe, a central tenet of Trump’s pitch. Only about a third of the country said it would, including about 3-in-10 independents.

The Wall isn’t really about anything to do with safety and a vast majority of the country knows that, probably including Trump. Its about two things: delivering for the racists and dominating the majority of the country that rejects them. In fact, those two things are really the same thing.

Trump isn’t capable of learning and even if he could, Trump is in so much trouble that at this point he’s dependent on keeping at least one-third of the Senate in that camp in order to prevent conviction in an impeachment trial. His base is his survival.

Someone needs to tell him that if he loses the presidency, he will also lose this daft immunity from prosecution while in office.

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They’re actually begging for another Benghazi

by digby

The US is refusing to withdraw its diplomats from Venezuela, apparently using them as some kind of hostage to its and several other countries’ decision to recognize the opposition leader as the president. The Maduro government wants them out. There are massive protests and violence in the streets. Both sides are in a very tense and desperate situation.

What could go wrong?

Here’s Marco Rubio making what I found to be a chilling statement on the matter:

Andrea Mitchell: What about the safety of our embassy employees and staff? How secure are they given the threats by Maduro?

Rubio: We expect them to be treated like any diplomats are. And that is to be respected. Their job is to have a relationship with the government of Venezuela, the constitutional government of Venezuela as recognized by over 15 countries around the world and the OAS, is the Guaidó government, and obviously, we are going to interact with them. I would say two things. We are always going constantly going to be watching to see that none of our people abroad are in a dangerous situation. We pulled people out of Havana because we didn’t know how to protect them from these mysterious attacks that left many of them deeply injured.

But I will say this. It’s not for me to make announcements or even openly speculate. These are decisions made by the president. But if any harm should come to these diplomats, I want everybody to know the consequences, I believe, from this administration that they’ll impose will be swift and decisive I know this for a certainty and this message needs to be clear.

For good or for — I know a lot of people don’t like him I work with him on a lot of issues, disagree with him on some, but the one thing I’ll say about this president is that he does things other presidents didn’t do and wouldn’t do and I think we’ve seen some of that decisiveness here, for good, in the case of Venezuela. And I also think they deserve credit because the US is not doing some unilateral action, we are working through multilateral international organizations, the OAS has been reinvigorated. The reason this coalition has held together is because the administration has not gone further, has not fractured as a result

Mitchell: How can you be sure that our embassy staff is secure? Can we evacuate them if necessary?

Rubio: There’s no doubt that we have the capability to do so. We have strong allies in Brazil and Colombia and others but I’m not going to get into tactical details.

Recall that these Republicans spent years hammering on the Obama administration and in particular Hillary Clinton for failing to protect the embassy personnel in Benghazi.

I can’t believe what I’m seeing.

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Let them eat payday loans

by digby

When asked about the stories of federal workers having to get food from food backs, Commerce secretary said this:

“I know they are, and I don’t really quite understand why,” Ross said on CNBC, referring to the trips for food. He was discussing the economic damage of the shutdown, which has stretched into a 34th day. Ross added the following:

‘The obligations that they would undertake, say a borrowing from a bank or a credit union, are in effect federally guaranteed. So the 30 days of pay that some people will be out, there’s no real reason why they shouldn’t be able to get a loan against it, and we’ve seen a number of ads from financial institutions doing that.’Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross

These people …

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Ten paces, turn, and fire
by Tom Sullivan

“Dueling plans” for ending the month-long partial government shutdown reach the floor of the U.S. Senate on Thursday. Proposals from Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) may both fail, the Washington Post reports:

The votes will test the abilities of McConnell and Schumer to unify their sides, and likely, to negotiate with each other afterward. In other dramatic fiscal showdowns over the past decade, the Senate has almost always been the chamber that found the bipartisan solution as the House hit roadblocks, from the Wall Street bailout of 2008 to reopening of government after the 2013 shutdown. But those were crises that predated President Trump’s mercurial presidency.

In effect, the defeat of both measures would demonstrate in the most concrete manner yet that what both sides have been pushing for is not possible in the Senate, and that some new compromise must be forged to pass the chamber.

The sitting president faces crashing poll numbers — as low as 34 percent approval in one poll as he hangs onto hope he can pressure Democrats into approving $5.7 billion for a border wall/barrier/fence, ill-defined and changeable by the day. Democrats oppose the wall, but will discuss increased border security once the shutdown ends.

Should the Senate reach no agreement Thursday, senators flying home for the weekend will ponder a Wednesday warning from associations representing air traffic controllers, pilots, and flight attendants about the safety impacts of the shutdown:

This is already the longest government shutdown in the history of the United States and there is no end in sight. In our risk averse industry, we cannot even calculate the level of risk currently at play, nor predict the point at which the entire system will break. It is unprecedented.

Pistols at 10 paces may sound less risky.

Hanging in the balance, 800,000 federal employees (and their families) will miss their second paychecks on Friday. The D.C. Council passed legislation to prevent residents from losing their homes and tapped additional funds for food assistance. Unpaid workers face eviction and have had to take out personal loans to pay bills. Washington celebrity chef José Andrés’s is providing free meals to affected federal workers.

As the shutdown battle rages, the First Battle of the State of the Union has ended. The President of the United States and the Speaker of the House exchanged volleys of letters. Reporters’ heads whipped from Capitol Hill to the White House and back. When the smoke cleared, the president conceded late Wednesday that, yes, “Nancy Pelosi – or Nancy, as I call her,” controls the podium at the House of Representatives. The State of the Union speech originally scheduled for January 29 will not occur until after the Trump partial government shutdown is over. No government, no salve for his delicate ego.

Taking advantage of the ceasefire, activist groups have announced a national day of action for the 29th. Plan your weeks accordingly.

What Kamala Harris can learn from watching Madam Secretary


by Spocko

In the last week Kamala Harris, Kirsten Gillibrand, and Tulsi Gabbard announced 2020 presidential runs. Tonight Harris will be on the Rachel Maddow Show to talk about what she wants to accomplish.

Right now all the candidates are putting out their messages. As Michael Brooks of The Majority Report put it, they are “cutting a lane for themselves” in the primary.  (We used to call it their core brand proposition, but that’s so 2000 and late.)

Here’s a New York Times summary story on who has announced they will run and who might run.

The Times summary has the conventional wisdom on each candidate and their signature issues.  For example: Warren, middle class under attack from big corporations and Wall Street’s influence on politics;  Sanders, “Medicare for All,” and free college tuition.

But what I didn’t see in any summaries or signature issues were candidates’ views on National Security. This issue is critical and must be addressed because the United States spends an estimated $1.2 trillion per year on defense.  

Pentagon spending now consumes nearly 70 percent of the discretionary federal budget.

Even if we just count direct US military spending, the figures are enormous. At $610 billion in 2017, US military spending accounted for more than a third of the world total. This dwarfs the $294 billion spent by our potential adversaries—Russia spent $66 billion; China, $228 billion.

From Progressives Need a New Way to Talk About National Security , by Joe Cirincione and Guy T. Saperstein


Now is the time for democratic candidates to get this and start talking about better ways for the country to use that money.  Will Harris talk about this?  Gillibrand and Gabbard didn’t. Maybe someone like Washington Governor Jay Inslee will bring it up.

What all Democratic candidates need to know is that the polling shows that the voters would rather money go to infrastructure and social programs than policing the world. 

But of course the Military Industrial Complex won’t let go of any money without a fight. Last week’s Madam Secretary, Strategic Ambiguity, was a great illustration of how defense contractors will lie, cheat, steal, threaten and scare people into voting for weapon systems that are inadequate, aren’t wanted or needed, and make us less safe.

My favorite scene from the episode is this short clip. 

The Madam Secretary writers, Barbara Hall and Matt Ward, explain the issue and put Presidential Candidate Elisabeth McCord in the position of pointing out the problems with the whole system while the Secretary of Defense and the President explain that yes, a defense contractor can “shake them down.”

My favorite line in the clip is when the secretary of defense defends the fighter jet and the shakedown for more money by saying, “Cost overruns are a feature of defense contracts.”

In this next clip the head of the group within the state department who works with the military on allocation for defense spending explains how untrammeled corporate greed distorts our foreign policy.

Show Me The Brightest Timeline

Madam Secretary shows viewers possible solutions and what the characters are up against. If Elizabeth is going to fight the Military Industrial Complex when she is President, she needs to realize she will be attacked, both behind the scenes and in public.

If President McCord cuts funds for a jet fighter 200 people making the wing fluid delivery system for the jets in a congressional district in North Dakota are going to need jobs. What can they do instead? Fluid delivery systems for commercial jets? High speed rail? Solar heating and cooling systems?