Month: February 2019

“What did you do when the Taliban came?

by digby

These burqas have no sleeves

A different perspective on the proposed Afghanistan withdrawal:

The driver of a car that was stopped in the middle of the road, blocking traffic, was shocked when a passing motorist rolled down the window and shouted at him, “Dirty donkey.”

He was even more surprised when he looked up to see that the insult came from a woman. A woman driving a car. A woman driving a car without wearing the obligatory hijab.

That was Laila Haidari, who runs a popular cafe in Kabul that allows men and women to dine together, whether married or not, with or without a head scarf, and uses the profits to fund a rehabilitation clinic for drug addicts.

Nearly everyone addresses Ms. Haidari, 39, as “Nana,” or “Mom,” and her supporters describe her as the “mother of a thousand children,” after the number of Afghan addicts she has reportedly saved.

Now, Ms. Haidari plans to start a popular uprising against the continuing peace talks with the Taliban.

“Guys, the Taliban are coming back,” she said one day recently to a mixed group of diners at her restaurant, Taj Begum, which has been subjected to virulent attacks in the local media that have all but compared it to a brothel.

“We have to organize,” she told her customers. “I hope to find 50 other women who will stand up and say, ‘We don’t want peace.’ If the Taliban comes back, you will not have a friend like me, and there will be no restaurant like Taj Begum.”

Ms. Haidari’s Kabul restaurant, Taj Begum, where men and women dine together, whether married or not, with or without a head scarf.

Ms. Haidari’s Kabul restaurant, Taj Begum, where men and women dine together, whether married or not, with or without a head scarf.CreditKiana Hayeri for The New York Times
Her nearly always crowded restaurant, on the banks of the sewage-drenched Kabul River, is named after a 15th-century warrior princess from Herat who helped rule a vast kingdom, a rare example of female power from that time.

Ms. Haidari is as unusual in her own age.

While most women’s activists in Afghanistan have been Western-financed and supported, she has insisted on organizing her political activity herself, and on her own terms.

“We need to change our own men and our own families first,” Ms. Haidari said in an interview. “Don’t think of me as a victim, like so many of our women in public life seem to be. I’m not going to sit across from the Taliban wearing hijab begging for my rights.”

Few women’s activists here challenge patriarchal social norms to the degree Ms. Haidari does, and those who do, tend to do it quietly and politely. They also tend to come from Western-educated, liberal families who support their rebellion.

Ms. Haidari does it loudly and often rudely, and comes from a religiously conservative family who married her at 12 to a mullah two decades older.

“Ever since age 12, I feel like I’ve been in a boxing ring,” she said. “Back then I didn’t know that child marriage was something unjust, even though I had this feeling I was being raped every night by a full-grown man, and that was wrong.”

Her family had fled to Iran as refugees, and Ms. Haidari bore the mullah three children there. Her husband allowed her to take religious classes, but she secretly began studying general subjects and eventually went to an Iranian university, where she earned a degree in filmmaking.

Ms. Haidari divorced her husband — under Islamic law, he kept the children — and returned to Afghanistan, where she discovered her brother Hakim living under a bridge in Kabul, a heroin addict. She promised God she would open a treatment center for addicts if she could save him, and she did, using the Narcotics Anonymous 12-step method, and a dose of tough love.
[…]
“We are face to face with an ideology, not a group of people,” she said. “They believe that women are defined as the second gender and you can’t change that ideology, so I have no hope for Taliban talks.”

Ms. Haidari’s three children, now aged 16 to 21, have fled to Germany from Iran, and while she has not been able to visit them, she is in touch by WhatsApp.

Her work is for them, she said.

“I should have something to tell my own children and my grandchildren, when they ask, ‘What did you do when the Taliban came?’”

I am generally a non-interventionist because we usually make things worse. I don’t honestly know if that’s the case here. I do remember that prior to the invasion in 2001, when the Bush administration absurdly took up the “cause” of Afghan women as a phony motivation for their invasion, human rights groups and advocates for women were the only one’s screaming into the void about the Taliban. Now that they are resugent, they’re back at it apparently:

May 7, 2016 —New video has emerged online of a woman being publically executed by the Taliban in Jowzjan Province, Afghanistan. Contradicting reports say that the woman was accused of either killing her husband or committing adultery in the province, which borders Tajikstan in the country’s northern frontier.

She was reportedly convicted in an informal court and the images will bring back memories of the 1990s when public executions of women was commonplace during the Taliban’s rule of Afghanistan. In the past year the public executions, including stonings and beatings, of women have taken place.

The video was reportedly shot in March or April in Khanqa village in the Aqcha district. The footage shows the woman being forced to kneel in a desert before she is shot in the back of the head.

A Taliban militant, who has his face covered with a scarf shoots the woman with an AK-47 rifle after the verdict was declared. The Taliban and local officials have not commented on the execution as yet.

During the 1990s, the Taliban would take woman convicted of adultery to the main stadium in the Afghan capital of Kabul where the public would be forced to watch executions.

In November last year, a young woman was stoned to death in Ghor province in central Afghanistan after being accused of adultery. In a 28-second clip, the woman was heard praying as several men throw rocks at her head while a crowd of onlookers watch in silence.

Here is an analysis of the current situation from Brookings:

After intense negotiations with the Taliban, the chief U.S. negotiator Zalmay Khalilzad announced yesterday that core elements of a deal to end the U.S. counterinsurgency operation in Afghanistan have been basically agreed. The disclosed core elements are not surprising: The Taliban promises Afghanistan’s territory will not be used by international terrorist groups and the United States agrees to withdraw its forces.

However, many difficult questions remain: How fast will the United States withdraw its military forces—in as few months as the Taliban wants (militarily infeasible and strategically unsound for the United States and Afghanistan), or between 16 to 24 months as the United States seeks? Will there be a residual U.S. military force, of say 1,000 soldiers, to protect the U.S. embassy, which—wink, wink, with the Taliban’s permission—will have the capacity to conduct limited counterterrorism strikes, something the Obama administration had contemplated in 2014? Will the Taliban finally agree to negotiate with the Afghan government, as President Ashraf Ghani, very leery of the U.S.-Taliban negotiations, has been insisting? Will the Taliban agree to a ceasefire while it negotiates with the Afghan government? And will the U.S. military remain in Afghanistan (and at what strength) until the agreement is concluded? If not, the U.S.-Taliban deal will merely be a fig leaf for U.S. departure while the Afghan government and people are left on their own to face the Taliban.

I don’t think the plight of the women of Afghanistan under the Taliban is considered to be much of a issue in all that. It’s not even mentioned.

Maybe there’s nothing the US can do about this.  But I can imagine that for women who have been leading a freeer life in Afghanistan since the Taliban was ousted from power must be very, very worried to see the US going around the government and negotiating with the Taliban for a total withdrawal. They will undoubtedly pay a big price once the US leaves.

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Rogue superpowers run by cretins aren’t popular

by digby

Addressing U.S. allies at the Munich Security Conference, Mike Pence is met with silence as he tells the audience: "I bring greetings from the 45th president of the United States of America, President Donald Trump." pic.twitter.com/yr7SNVhCVf— Axios (@axios) February 16, 2019

Just saying.

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Payoffs in plain sight

by digby

There’s no way to embarrass somebody for doing something like this if they’re happy to be seen selling the government in exchange cash. pic.twitter.com/p1DufyTuaa

— Maddow Blog (@MaddowBlog) February 13, 2019

And to think people had shit-fits over Bill and Hillary Clinton running an international charity that took money from rich people to save millions of people’s lives.

Washington Post:

President Trump set up a clash with an independent agency Monday evening with his call for the Tennessee Valley Authority to keep open an aging coal plant that buys much of its coal from a company chaired by Robert E. Murray, one of the president’s major supporters.

The TVA board will meet Thursday to consider whether to close the 49-year-old plant, which operated only intermittently last year because it was no longer needed to supply uninterrupted power known as baseload. The board also is considering shutting down a 52-year-old coal unit at Bull Run near Oak Ridge, Tenn.

In a tweet Monday night, Trump said: “Coal is an important part of our electricity generation mix and @TVAnews should give serious consideration to all factors before voting to close viable power plants, like Paradise #3 in Kentucky!”

But the TVA is leaning toward the closure of the Paradise and Bull Run plants precisely because they are not viable.

The agency has already said that closing the Paradise coal plant would have no significant effect. The unit “does not provide the level of flexibility needed to balance hourly, daily and seasonal changes in energy consumption,” the agency said in a proposal. “In addition, cycling the unit off and on results in more wear and tear and higher operation and maintenance costs,” it added.

“With less need for base load resources, assets that have relatively high projected future maintenance cost and environmental compliance expenditures, high forced outage rates and poor generation portfolio fit are now the focus of more detailed study for potential retirement,” the agency said on its website. “The Tennessee Valley Authority’s Paradise Fossil Plant (PAF) Unit 3 falls into this category of assets.”

As recently as 2013, Murray Energy was delivering nearly 100,000 tons of coal a month to the Paradise coal plant. But two other coal units, Paradise 1 and 2, on the same site in Muhlenberg County in western Kentucky were replaced with natural gas generation in the spring of 2017. The Paradise Unit 3 employs about 140 people.

Murray, founder of Murray Energy and a leading donor to Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, has been pressing the president to help prop up coal-fired plants since the beginning of the administration. In Energy Secretary Rick Perry’s first month in office, Murray presented a four-page “action plan” to rescue the coal industry. The plan said that commissioners at three independent regulatory agencies “must be replaced,” Environmental Protection Agency staff slashed, and safety and pollution rules “overturn[ed].”

Murray is also a customer at Trump’s hotel in downtown Washington, according to a list of “VIP Arrivals” distributed to Trump hotel staff on June 20, 2018. This list, which was obtained by The Washington Post, showed Murray and a fellow coal executive, Heath Lovell of Alliance Energy, checking in for one-night stays. Under both of their names, the hotel’s staff wrote “High Rate,” signifying they were especially high-paying.

He has literally paid Trump off, not just with campaign donations the way these people normally do. He has put money into Trump’s personal pocket.

Trump’s populism sure is great. He’s a real friend of the working man.

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Yes, he is a big fan of the death penalty and summary executions. What else is new?

by digby

We have a new entry for the “both sides” hall of fame: Trump says summary executions are good but “rights groups say” they’re bad.https://t.co/jsbqt2XZi7 pic.twitter.com/N9fcJ0aFY8

— Adam Jentleson 🎈 (@AJentleson) February 16, 2019

He said there should be the death penalty for drug dealers, not summary execution. Of course, that’s also bad.

President Trump spoke fondly again on Friday about the practice — popular among some anti-Democratic leaders — of executing drug traffickers.

Speaking at the White House to announce that he was declaring a national emergency to secure funding to build his long-promised border wall, Trump digressed to speak about a recent conversation he had with Chinese President Xi Jinping.

“Their criminal list — a drug dealer gets a thing called the death penalty,” he said of China. “Our criminal list a drug dealer gets a thing called: How about a fine?”

Trump continued: “When I asked President Xi, I said, ‘You have a drug problem?’ No no no.” I said, ‘You have 1.4 billion people, what do you mean you have no drug problem?’ No we don’t have a drug problem. I said, ‘Why?’ Death penalty,” Trump said, imitating someone who speaks broken English. “We give death penalty to people who sell drugs. End of problem.”

Trump has repeatedly praised authoritarian leaders around the world and shown a particular affinity for the punitive measures some have used against drug traffickers and users.

Last winter, he told an audience in Pennsylvania that discussions about instituting the death penalty for drug dealers was “a discussion we have to start thinking about,” again saying he got the idea from Xi. Trump previously suggested the death penalty was a way to fight the opioid epidemic.

He’s for summary execution as well. It’s one of the issues he ran on. He said this over and over again on the stump:

“We get a traitor like Bergdahl, a dirty rotten traitor, who by the way when he deserted, six young beautiful people were killed trying to find him. And you don’t even hear about him anymore. Somebody said the other day, well, he had some psychological problems. You know, in the old days … bing – bong [pantomimes shooting]

When we were strong, when we were strong.”

Recall that he also said the psychopath leader of the Philipines, Ricardo Duterte, handled his drug problem “the right way.”
There have been over 10,000 drug users executed extra-judicially.

So…

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Democrats plan to talk to the translators

by digby

I don’t know if this will work, but it’s a good idea to at least try. Maybe busy Americans will at least hear about the fact that their president is meeting with foreign leaders privately and ensuring there are no records of the conversation:

House Democrats are taking their first real steps to force President Donald Trump to divulge information about his private conversations with Russian President Vladimir Putin, setting up an extraordinary clash with the White House over Congress’ oversight authority.

Rep. Adam Schiff, the Intelligence Committee chairman, and Rep. Eliot Engel, the Foreign Affairs Committee chairman, told POLITICO they are actively consulting with House General Counsel Douglas Letter about the best way to legally compel the Trump administration to turn over documents or other information related to the president’s one-on-one discussions with the Russian leader.

“I had a meeting with the general counsel to discuss this and determine the best way to find out what took place in those private meetings — whether it’s by seeking the interpreter’s testimony, the interpreter’s notes, or other means,” Schiff (D-Calif.) said in a brief interview.

It’s a development that indicates Schiff and Engel are close to taking action on the matter; key members of the majority party often consult with the chamber’s general counsel on issues that could end up playing out in court. Democrats want to ensure that they are on the strongest possible legal ground because they anticipate the Trump administration will mount spirited challenges.

The move also underscores the seriousness with which Democrats view Trump’s conciliatory statements and actions toward Moscow and its place as a top House priority as the party pursues wide-ranging investigations into the president and his administration.

In particular, Democrats say they want to find out what Trump and Putin discussed during their private meeting in Helsinki last July, where Trump put himself at odds with the U.S. intelligence community and declared — while standing next to the Russian president — that the Kremlin did not interfere in the 2016 elections.

Trump’s remark prompted Democrats to call for Marina Gross, the State Department translator who was the only other American present for the Trump-Putin meeting, to share her notes with Congress and testify in public.

Schiff and Engel have left all options on the table, including issuing subpoenas, which the White House would surely fight.

Democrats acknowledge long-standing precedents about the sensitivity of presidential communications with world leaders. But they argue that Trump’s posture toward Russia and his efforts to conceal details of his private conversations with Putin are good enough reasons to pursue the issue with the House general counsel.

“I’m not saying that I’m in favor of interpreters turning over all their notes, but I do think that it shouldn’t be up to the president to hide the notes,” Engel (D-N.Y.) said in an interview.

A White House spokesman declined to comment.

Democrats’ campaign to find out what Trump and Putin discussed began in earnest last month after a Washington Post story revealed that the U.S. president went to “extraordinary lengths” to shield his interpreter’s notes about a 2017 meeting with Putin in Hamburg from senior officials in his administration.

I very much doubt they’ll let this happen. But it will bring attention to the matter which may filter out more effectively to the American people and that’s part of what the Democrats need to do. The fact that Trump tore up the notes and that he’s meeting privately with Putin and there’s no official record is damning behavior. But I’m not sure that the public is fully aware of how outrageous his actions have been.

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A problem of bandwidth
by Tom Sullivan

Even the most news-inhaling political junkies among us have only so much bandwidth to spare. There are only so many broadcast hours in a day, only so many column inches in our thinning papers. The current occupant of the White House demands and gets our attention. Convictions among his associates mount as Trump scandals deepen. It is hard to look away.

Still, we are aware, vaguely, that outside our own troubles the world’s percolate unbothered if not emboldened by them.

Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum urges readers to turn away for a moment from the bright, shinies holding our attention. People ask her as a historian of Soviet history about Western indifference to Stalin’s rise. Why did British diplomats who knew about During the Ukrainian famine of 1932-1933, why did British diplomats who knew Stalin had confiscated villagers’ grain do nothing? Or the Catholic Church? Or the press?

There was Hitler’s rise, of course, and the Depression to distract us. Political calculations were being made, Applebaum explains, writing:

The audiences I speak to are sometimes unsatisfied with these answers. They want to talk about the perfidy of the Left or the New York Times, or they want to blame the U.S. president at the time, Franklin D. Roosevelt. But blame is easy. Far more difficult, both for them and for me, is to admit something more profound: That precisely the same indifference, and the same cynicism, exist today.

Yes, the West looked the other way during the 1930s, when people were starving. But the West is also looking the other way in 2019, refusing to see the concentration camps in China’s Xinjiang province. These camps have been designed to suppress the Uighurs, a Muslim ethnic minority whose status in China in some ways resembles that of Ukrainians in the old U.S.S.R. Like the Ukrainians who did not want to be Sovietized, the Uighurs do not want to be fully absorbed into the Chinese state. Like the Soviets, the Chinese have responded with repression. Previous Chinese leaders sought to flood Xinjiang with ethnic Chinese, the same tactic they used against Tibetans. More recently, the state has grown harsher, creating camps where at least 1 million Uighurs undergo forced indoctrination designed to eradicate their language and culture.

We know much more about these latest camps today than the world did about Ukraine in 1933, Applebaum explains. The New York Times and the Post have reported on them. Canada’s Parliament has produced a detailed report, calling Chinese actions “a campaign of assimilation unprecedented in its scale and sophistication.” China has moved beyond informants and police checkpoints, Applebaum continues, to “artificial intelligence, phone spyware and biometric data. Every tool that a future, larger totalitarian state may use to control citizens is currently being tested in Xinjiang.”

She concludes:

As in the 1930s, there are explanations for the world’s lack of outrage. Newspaper editors are distracted by bigger, more immediate stories. Politicians and foreign policy “realists” would say there are more important issues we need to discuss with China: Business is business. Xinjiang is a distant place for people in Europe and North America; it seems alien and uninteresting. None of that changes the fact that in a distant corner of China, a totalitarian state — of the kind we all now denounce and condemn — has emerged in a new form.

We have less time for Xinjiang because we are trying to forestall the emergence of another one here, less-competent if not less cruel. Our domestic, wanna-be totalitarian (on the Russian disinformation model) knows instinctively the public’s attention is limited. When he wants our attention, he knows how to draw it. When he’s drawing the wrong kind of attention, he knows how to divert it or to lob smoke. The Internet’s bandwidth may be increasing, but human bandwidth is limited. He uses that.

3G, 4G, 5G, it doesn’t matter. The amount of information downloadable through our devices far exceeds our human capacity to consume and process it. This makes the 1980s, before the Internet and widespread use of personal computers seem like simpler times, before the “middle class squeeze” had more of us working longer hours just to stay in the same place economically. The world found the emotional and political bandwidth then to take on and so weaken the Apartheid system in South Africa that internal resistance could finally dismantle it.

With any luck, we will free up enough political bandwidth in the near future to be agents of change again elsewhere in the world.

Friday Night Soother

by digby

Slinking through the darkness, these stunning images show an ultra-rare black leopard in action.

The creature – which almost has a mythical status – was captured by British wildlife photographer Will Burrard-Lucas, 35, while it was prowling around Laikipia Wilderness Camp in Kenya in the dead of night with a full moon looming above.

This is the first time that one has been caught on camera ‘properly’ in Africa for 100 years.

Its wide eyes can be seen looking eagerly for prey, while leopard-like spots can vaguely be seen on its sooty coat, which is the result of melanism.

This genetic variation, the opposite of albinism, results in an excess of dark pigmentation.

Burrard-Lucas told MailOnline Travel that it had been his dream to photograph the black leopard since childhood.

After learning that several had been spotted in the Laikipia area of Kenya – the only area thought to have black leopards in all of Africa – he decided to investigate further and set up an expedition this January.

Working in collaboration with biologists from San Diego Zoo in the area, Burrard-Lucas went about installing camera traps in a well-protected area where the black leopard was rumoured to frequent.

He used specialist equipment including wireless motion sensors, high-quality DSLR cameras and two to three flashes.

The Brit said he couldn’t believe it when he returned to one of the traps one day and saw a black leopard staring back at the camera lens.

In a video documenting his photography expedition, Burrard-Lucas explains: ‘As far as I know none of these leopards has never been photographed properly in Africa before… So I’ve left the cameras for a few days and now I’m heading back to see if I’ve got anything.’

While checking his equipment, the photographer continues: ‘Scrub hare, mongoose… we have something. All I can see is eyes but this is a black leopard emerging from the darkness. Look at this!

‘I can’t believe it really. I think when I started this project I didn’t actually think I was going to be able to achieve a shot of a black leopard in Africa but that it is exactly what is here on the back of my camera. Just the most stunning, spectacular creature I think I’ve ever photographed!’

He added on his blog: ‘I peered at the photograph in incomprehension. I couldn’t believe it and it took a few days before it sank in that I had achieved my dream.’

Isn’t it beautiful???

There is much more about this at the link.

What are these precedents you speak of?

by digby

Oh look, the wingnuts are hypocrites. Alert the media.

From 2014:

Trump also said in his looney Rose Garden appearance that he barely knows Ann Coulter:

Trump in Jan. 2016: “@AnnCoulter has been amazing.”

Trump in July 2015: “@AnnCoulter U were great last nite … on FOX”

Trump in June 2015: “Thank you @AnnCoulter for your nice words.” https://t.co/qqSnsYwqt1

— Aaron Blake (@AaronBlake) February 15, 2019

These aren’t the most important lies he’s told recently but they do illustrate the depth of rightwing perfidy.

This is why I roll my eyes at the idea the Republicans e worried about “precedents.” If they cared about that we’d have seen Trump’s tax returns.

They. Don’t. Care. About. Hypocrisy.

Update: Like a stopped clock, even Coulter is right about this:

“The only national emergency is that our president is an idiot.”

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After such a rousing success with the wall, Kush moves on to destroy the world

by digby

Lol:

Mr. Kushner was present in the Oval Office for a few meetings between Mr. Trump and Senator Richard C. Shelby, Republican of Alabama and the chairman of the Appropriations Committee, according to a congressional aide. But Mr. Kushner, who has fashioned himself as the Trump White House’s master deal maker, said he was stepping back to focus on a far more ambitious project, Middle East peace, according to two senior administration officials.

This is because he’s been so successful with the negotiations with congress. I’m guessing we’ll end up in a war with Iran which Trump and Kush will call middle east peace.

I think he may be an even bigger genius than his daddy-in-law.

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Cray cray in the Rose Garden

by digby

That 25th Amendment thing is looking better and better.

The president describes the process of declaring a national emergency — and getting sued pic.twitter.com/knUzNxznTI— Manu Raju (@mkraju) February 15, 2019

Here are the highlights from Toronto Star’s Daniel Dale”s twitter feed:
‏

Trump begins in the Rose Garden by talking about the trade negotiations with China. “It’s going extremely well. Who knows what that means,” he says.

Trump is more correct than usual on the trade deficit with China, saying it’s $375 billion (that’s the goods-only deficit), then reverts to his eternal lie: “Lots of people think it’s $506 billion. Some people think it’s much more than that.”

Trump is now talking about trade with the United Kingdom. A bit of an odd introduction to an announcement of a national emergency on immigration.

Trump now says there’ll be an announcement “in the next 24 hours” on the eradication of ISIS’s so-called caliphate.

Trump says he hopes that the second summit with Kim Jong Un has “the same good luck” as with the first one. He wants to be “equally as successful” this time.

Trump: “I look forward to seeing Chairman Kim. We have also established a great relationship. Which has never happened, between him or his family and the United States.”

Trump again touts North Korea as a great location for economic development, given its location near China and Russia and South Korea. “Right smack in the middle…phenomenal.”

Trump on securing the border: “Not because it was a campaign promise, which it is. It was one of many, by the way. Not the only one.” He then boasts about how the stock market is “up tremendously” today. “We have all the records. We have every record.” ?

Trump on people who accurately note that most drugs come through ports of entry, not unwalled areas: “It’s just a lie. It’s all a lie.” His own Drug Enforcement Administration says that.

Trump says that the fact El Paso supposedly only has 23 murders and there are 2000 murders “right on the other side of the wall” shows that walls work. There are some causation problems with this logic.

“Three women with tape on their mouth.”

Trump is saying stuff.

Trump falsely claims Mexico has “almost 40,000 murders. 40,000.”

He initially tweeted the correct number, 33,341, then said “38,000,” and now “40,000.”

Trump: “I’m going to be signing a national emergency. Annnd: it’s been signed many times before…there’s rarely been a problem. They sign it, nobody cares.”

There has never been an emergency declaration to seize money for a controversial initiative Congress refused to fund.

Trump on “angel moms” whose kids have been killed by illegal immigrants: “It’s so sad.” He says to someone he says is a “new” angel mom: “Stand up just for a second. Show how beautiful your girl is. Was.”

Trump asks another woman to stand up to show a picture of her husband, who he says was killed in Maryland by an illegal immigrant. “Incredible man. Just killed.”

Trump reads the official statistic that 70,000 Americans were killed by drugs in 2017, “At least. I think that number is ridiculously low.”

Trump, adopting the grammar of a non-native English speaker, says, quoting Xi Jinping, “We give death penalty to people who sell drugs.”

Trump is now saying that China does not have a drug problem because it gives the death penalty to drug dealers. China has a drug problem.

Trump on why he’s declaring an emergency: “Invasion of drugs, invasion of gangs, invasion of people. And it’s unacceptable.”

Trump: “In a way, what I did by creating such a great economy, and if the opposing party got in, this economy would be down the tubes.” He mocks people who say “the previous administration” had something to do with the good economy. He is rambling hard.

Trump lies that more people are trying to illegally immigrate than “probably” ever before. Apprehensions on the southwest border are a quarter of what they were two decades ago. From http://FactCheck.org :

Trump is simultaneously claiming that he has done an amazing job on border security but that there is a crisis on border security. He says that is because “we haven’t been given the equipment. We haven’t been given the walls.”

Trump says he would have done this earlier, but “I was a little new to the job. A little new to the profession.” And he blames other people who “didn’t step up.”

“We’re stepping up now,” he says.

“We’re right now in construction with wall in some of the most important areas,” Trump lies. There is no new wall under construction. Construction on a short stretch of levee wall in the Rio Grande Valley is close to starting.

Trump: “So the order is signed. And I’ll signed the final papers as soon as I get into the Oval Office. And we will have a national emergency, and we will then be sued, and they will sue us in the 9th Circuit…and we will possibly get a bad ruling…”

Trump is talking in a singsong list-making voice: “And we will possibly get a bad ruling…and we will end up in the Supreme Court…” He is saying that he will win on this in the Supreme Court as he did on the Muslim-focused travel ban.

Trump says, of a possible legal challenge, that a national emergency is “probably the easiest one to win” in court, “because we’re declaring it for virtual invasion purposes: drugs, traffickers, and gangs.”

Trump refers to MS-13 members as “gang monsters.”

As he does often, Trump gives the first question to Fox News, which asks a legit question about taking away money from other military functions. Trump says “some of the generals think this is more important” than “what they were going to use it for.”

Trump says he asked a couple generals what they’d use this money for if Trump didn’t emergency-seize it for the wall. He says he can’t say what they answered, but “didn’t sound too important to me.”

Trump says a wall is “very important for the military because of the drugs that pour in.” No explanation.

Trump calling on a reporter: “ABC, not NBC. I like ABC a little bit more. Not much.”

Trump asked about Republicans who worry about the precedent he’ll set for future Dem presidents: “Not too many people have said that. But the courts will determine that.” He doesn’t directly address the precedent point; repeats that this is “an invasion.”

Trump, now addressing the precedent complaint, shrugs it off, saying that there have been “56” previous emergencies, and “that’s creating precedent.”

Asked about his criticism of Obama not going through Congress on immigration, and whether he failed, he says, “I went through Congress. I made a deal. I got $1.4 billion…but I’m not happy with it.”

These questions are all legit and important, but I personally would like Trump to be asked at some point today for the first time about all of the unauthorized immigrants his businesses have hired.

Trump on tariffs: “You’re talking to the wrong person, because I happen to like tariffs.” He says the U.S. is taking in lots of money “from China”; the tariffs are paid by American importers of Chinese products, not China, though Chinese firms eat some of the cost.

Trump on the USMCA: “By the way…that’s where the money’s coming from – not directly, but indirectly – for the wall. Nobody wants to talk about that.” That’s because it’s a lie; even if ratified, we don’t know how it’ll impact the US economy, and it won’t pay for any initiative.

If you have some time to kill, check out the video. He’s … getting worse.

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