Month: March 2019

If this doesn’t define the term “pathological liar” I don’t know what does

by digby

Trump made 25 false claims last week, which ranked 62nd of 112 weeks so far. He is now up to 4,583 false claims for his presidency, 5.9 per day. Here’s the complete database: https://t.co/tUlVsaIQoY

— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) March 13, 2019

The big spike is the run up to the midterms when every other word was a lie. Imagine what it’s going to be like when he is personally on the ballot.

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“You can sleep well tonight. You have friends in high places”

by digby

….non-existent “sources” and a drunk/drugged up loser who hates Michael, a fine person with a wonderful family. Michael is a businessman for his own account/lawyer who I have always liked & respected. Most people will flip if the Government lets them out of trouble, even if….— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 21, 2018

….it means lying or making up stories. Sorry, I don’t see Michael doing that despite the horrible Witch Hunt and the dishonest media!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 21, 2018

CNN is reporting on emails exchanged in a “back channel” between Michael Cohen and another lawyer acting as a conduit between the president’s legal team in the days after the raid on Cohen’s office:

An attorney who said he was speaking with President Donald Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani reassured Michael Cohen in an April 2018 email that Cohen could “sleep well tonight” because he had “friends in high places,” according to a copy of an email obtained by CNN.

Two emails — both dated April 21, 2018, and among documents provided to Congress by the President’s former attorney and fixer — do not specifically mention a pardon. Cohen, in his closed-door congressional testimony, has provided these emails in an effort to corroborate his claim that a pardon was dangled before he decided to cooperate with federal prosecutors, according to sources familiar with his testimony.

But the attorney who wrote those emails, Robert Costello, told CNN that Cohen’s interpretation of events is “utter nonsense.” Costello said that Cohen asked him to raise the issue of a pardon with Giuliani.

“Does dangled mean that he (Cohen) raised it and I mentioned it to Giuliani, and Giuliani said the President is not going to discuss pardons with anybody? If that’s dangling it, that’s dangling it for about 15 seconds,” said Costello, who has a four-decade long relationship with Giuliani and was exploring potentially representing Cohen. “The first time I kind of danced around the issue because Michael brought it up with me and I told him, ‘Look, this is way too premature. … But if you want me to bring it up, I will bring it up.’ And I did.”

A source with knowledge of Cohen’s thinking at the time disputes Costello’s version of events and insists it was Costello who was pushing his relationship with Giuliani. Another source familiar with the emails said that Trump’s legal team was trying to keep Cohen in the fold as a way to keep him quiet, hinting that a pardon could be in the mix at some point.

[…]
Giuliani told CNN the emails Cohen provided to Congress weren’t about pardons.

“That was about Michael Cohen thinking that the President was mad at him,” Giuliani told CNN. “I called (Costello) to reassure him that the President was not mad. It wasn’t long after the raid and the President felt bad for him.”

[…]

Sure. “You can sleep well tonight. You have friends in high places” is a perfectly normal way to say “the president isn’t mad at you.”

Why would a joint defense agreement require a “back channel” I wonder?

It looks as though that back channel went directly to the president who obviously dangled a pardon in public the next morning:

The morning after Costello’s first email was sent, Trump tweeted about Cohen. “Most people will flip if the Government lets them out of trouble, even if…it means lying or making up stories. Sorry, I don’t see Michael doing that despite the horrible Witch Hunt and the dishonest media!” the President tweeted.

Costello included a “PS” message in his follow-up email, which was sent after Trump’s tweet, noting the “very positive comments about you from the White House. Rudy noted how that followed my chat with him last night.”

Here’s a nice rundown of the disintegration of the Cohen-Trump relationship:

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Update:

You’ve got to love this:

“Michael, Since you jumped off the phone rather abruptly, I did not get a chance to tell you that my friend has communicated to tell me that he is meeting with his client this evening and he added that if there was anything you wanted to convey you should tell me and my friend will bring it up for discussion this evening. I would suggest that you give this invitation some real thought.”

That’s not a line from the Godfather. It’s this lawyer Costello.

NY DA sends a message: don’t count on Trump pardons

by digby

So Manafort got 7.5 years total in prison. That’s a long time, especially at his age. His lawyers are still crudely angling for a pardon for him:

Just so it's crystal clear, this is all part of the campaign for a presidential pardon. https://t.co/crCEqzycgb— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) March 13, 2019

That’s not going to work:

Prosecutors with the Manhattan district attorney’s office announced state fraud charges Wednesday against Paul Manafort.

The announcement adds to the legal trouble for Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman, who is already facing years in prison on federal charges.

The newly filed charges are separate from the two concluded federal cases stemming from special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation. Shortly before the New York announcement, Manafort, 69, was ordered to serve an additional 43 months on federal conspiracy charges, bringing his total sentence between two federal courts to 7.5 years in twin cases stemming from the Mueller probe.

His guilty plea can and will be used against him …

Manafort has nothing to gain from a pardon. He’ll immediately go on trial in New York h=if he gets one. But then he knew this was a possibility. So maybe the theory that he truly feared something other than jail if he admitted his collusiohn is the correct one.

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Fasten your seatbelts. The next three days could get bumpy.

by digby

My Salon column this morning:

The next few days could be among the most exciting days yet in the Russia investigation — or they may be duds. It all depends on what happens in federal court starting today to four of Donald Trump’s close associates and campaign officials. Former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, former deputy campaign chairman Rick Gates, former national security adviser General Michael Flynn and longtime friend and political adviser Roger Stone will be making appearances before various judges over the next three days. All the Mueller tea leaf readers suggest that we will have a better idea of where Mueller stands at the end of it but we’ve heard that before so it’s best not to get one’s hopes up. Still,  it’s safe to say that we will probably know more than we did before.

Manafort will be appearing before Judge Amy Berman Jackson in Washington, D.C.today to be sentenced for the two conspiracy charges revolving around undeclared foreign lobbying work he did on behalf of pro-Russian Ukrainian political figures to which he pled guilty. He could get as much as 10 years in jail and the big question for Judge Jackson is whether he will serve his sentence concurrently or consecutively to the four year sentence he received in a Virginia courtroom last week. Berman is not expected to be particularly generous to Manafort after all the shenanigans he pulled violating bail and then lying to the government repeatedly after he’d agreed to cooperate. Unlike Judge Ellis in the case in Virginia, Berman has not shown unusual hostility to the prosecutors so Manafort may find himself staring at quite a few years in prison.

If his lawyers follow the same playbook they followed last week, they will undoubtedly emerge with another thinly veiled attempt to get Donald Trump to pardon him, by blurting out to the press that there was “no collusion.” Whether they can say that may depend upon whether there is any more information to be revealed about Manafort’s dealing with his Russian friend Konstantin Kilimnik, with whom we know he shared campaign polling data, the details of which were redacted in earlier court filings. If that remains under wraps we can conclude that unless there are other indictments coming or a report that is made public, we may never know exactly what took place which would be a real disappointment.

Also today, Michael Flynn is scheduled to appear before Judge Emmett Sullivan in a Virginia courtroom to discuss whether he has finally cooperated enough to be sentenced for the crimes to which he pled guilty over a year ago. The prosecutors were happy with his cooperation last December and were recommending no jail time but you’ll recall that the judge exploded after looking at the evidence, telling Flynn that he “sold out” his country and strongly suggesting that Flynn see whether he could “cooperate” some more lest he risk doing some real time in jail. On Tuesday night Flynn’s lawyers filed a request for another delay so that he can keep cooperating in another case regarding a plot to kidnap a Turkish dissident, which seems like a wise move considering the judge’s previous reaction.

The special prosecutor’s office has behaved oddly about this case. In their current filing they say that while he could testify or cooperate more, “his cooperation is otherwise complete.” As former US Attorney Joyce Vance told Rachel Maddow on Tuesday, “it’s unusual for a prosecutor to be willing to give a cooperator credit at sentencing before his cooperation is done, before he has testified.” She suggested that “there is something that we don’t know that Bob Mueller’s team knows.” There’s always the possibility that they just think the former General’s service to his country makes him a stand-up guy except for these little hiccups with Russians and Turks but if that’s so, the Mueller investigation isn’t quite as unimpeachable as we might have hoped.

Just to round out Wednesday, former Acting Attorney General Matt Whitaker will be back up on Capitol Hill to “clarify” some of his testimony, which House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler D-NY characterized as “unsatisfactory, incomplete or contradicted by other evidence.” Whitaker will be meeting privately with Nadler and the ranking Republican member Rep. Doug Collins of Georgia but unlike the investigations by the Department of Justice, the House Democrats will almost assuredly reveal all the testimony at some point, maybe even tomorrow.

On Thursday, Manafort’s former business partner Roger Stone will appear before Judge Jackson to set a trial date for his charges of lying to congress and obstructing the Russia probe. Stone could be sent to jail immediately if Jackson determines that his repeated violation of the gag order requires it. Stone has been dancing as fast as he can to explain away his reckless behavior but it’s obvious that he’s close to running out of chances.

The prosecutors have asked for a trial date in October which would normally suggest that they are not planning to wrap up any time soon. But a couple of DC district US Attorneys have been added to the team, so some legal observers think it’s possible this case will be transferred to that office should Mueller decide to close down the investigation before then. In any case, the Stone saga is just beginning with or without the Special Counsel.

The case that probably reveals the most about the status of the Mueller investigation will be Friday’s status hearing for Rick Gates who pled guilty over a year ago and has apparently been cooperating with the Special Counsel in a number of different aspects of the investigation ever since. They have delayed his sentencing four times already. If they ask for another delay on Friday it means Gates is still cooperating and they expect him to be useful in ongoing cases we may not know about. He is one of the few characters in this whole drama who was around during the campaign, the transition, the inauguration and the White House. Gates was a major player in the inauguration so it’s possible that his testimony will be needed in the new case they’ve just opened in the Southern District of New York looking into possible corruption by the Inaugural Committee.

None of this will give us any more than vague clues about the conclusion of the Special Counsel’s investigation or whether or not there will be more indictments. And all of the breathless reporting about a report being imminent have so far proved to be premature. But that doesn’t mean any of this is incidental. This week, the president’s Campaign Chairman, Deputy Campaign Chairman, first National Security Adviser and long time friend and close associate are appearing in federal court on charges of corruption, lying, obstruction of justice and conspiracy all stemming from an investigation into foreign interference in the election. Trump can scream “Witch Hunt” all he wants but whether he likes it or not, people close to him are looking very, very witchy these days.

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Affirmative action for the rich
by Tom Sullivan

Transparency International makes an annual, country-by-country assessment of “the abuse of entrusted power for private gain.” It’s Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) review of the United States of America issued at the end of January begins:

With a score of 71, the US has dropped four points since last year. This marks the first time since 2011 that the US falls outside of the top 20 countries on the CPI.

“A four point drop in the CPI score is a red flag and comes at a time when the US is experiencing threats to its system of checks and balances, as well as an erosion of ethical norms at the highest levels of power,” said Zoe Reiter, Acting Representative to the US at Transparency International.

The U.S. ranks behind Denmark (score 88, first in the survey), Sweden (85), Norway (84) — “socialist” hellholes to hear some Republicans tell it — and Germany and England (both 80).

The occasion for citing the CPI data is Tuesday’s reports of a college admissions scandal in which federal prosecutors charged 50 people in a scheme to gain their children admission to elite universities through bribery and fraud. Hollywood celebrities and the CEO of a large private equity fund are among those charged.

The Atlantic’s Alia Wong explains those involved paid “hundreds of thousands, and sometimes millions, of dollars per child to a fixer who would then use that money to allegedly bribe certain college officials or other conspirators to help secure the child’s admission.”

The New York Times elaborates:

At the center of the sweeping financial crime and fraud case was William Singer, the founder of a college preparatory business called the Edge College & Career Network, also known as The Key.

The authorities said Mr. Singer used The Key and its nonprofit arm, Key Worldwide Foundation, which is based in Newport Beach, Calif., to help students cheat on their standardized tests, and to pay bribes to the coaches who could get them into college with fake athletic credentials.

Singer has already pleaded guilty to racketeering, conspiracy, and money laundering. In a Boston courtroom on Tuesday, he described the broad outlines of his scheme:

“If I can make the comparison, there is a front door of getting in where a student just does it on their own, and then there’s a back door where people go to institutional advancement and make large donations, but they’re not guaranteed in,” Mr. Singer said. “And then I created a side door that guaranteed families to get in. So that was what made it very attractive to so many families, is I created a guarantee.”

Anand Giridharadas, editor-at-large for Time and author of “Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World,” spoke with MSNBC’s Chris Hayes Tuesday on “All In.” There is garden-variety rigging of society for the wealthy that benefits them as a class, Giridharadas say, and then there is the allure of being elite among the elite. Giridharadas views the admissions scandal in the context of a larger culture of corruption [timestamp 5:22]:

Giridharadas: I think what’s so telling about this, it’s possible to look at this story as this one story and it’s possible to to go a little broader and look at our education system … But I think it’s also possible to look at this story as a biopsy of corruption as the increasingly all-saturating theme of American life in 2019: where the president who essentially did similar things to guard and keep his fortune from his parents; with a president who has essentially lied his way to the top and lied to stay in; all the way through the legalized bribery system in the post-Citizens United world; to Michael Cohen and everything he’s exposed. These things can’t be isolated from each other. This is becoming who we are and the essence of who we are.

We. One cannot absolve the broader, non-rich culture of the sin. The man a minority of Americans elected president in 2016 is the poster child for indemnified wealth cheating to get, not ahead, but even further ahead. Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation may yet prove he defrauded the United States in conspiracy with Russian agents to rig an election he never expected to win. He ran for president in hopes of a big score — hundreds of millions from a Trump hotel deal in Moscow. For many Americans, proof will not matter. We absolve wealth of its sins the way Catholics once sold indulgences.

Per Thomas Piketty roughly 60% of America's wealth is inherited, meaning most of America's riches are owned by people who didn't work for them. https://t.co/zBo8XYepm0 pic.twitter.com/uG1ExgCa8Y— Christopher Ingraham (@_cingraham) February 4, 2019

Generations after America ceased working this way, we delude ourselves that we want a country in which, through hard work and playing by the rules, anyone can get ahead. But we stop by the convenience store on the way home from low-paying jobs to buy lottery tickets for a shot at a workaround. We lionize wealth as a sign of personal merit and God’s grace when the birth lottery and a willingness to flaunt the rules have more to do with it. The sitting president’s children, too, are proof wealth does not make one smarter, wiser, more virtuous, or fit to lead.

Each July 4th, America celebrates its liberation from rule by a corrupt, wealthy aristocracy. Then, every election a large fraction of us vote to be ruled by one. We want to be them.

If That Was a US Flight Instead of an Ethiopian Flight, Would the FAA Be Hesitating? 

by tristero

I assume you know the outlines of the tragic story re: the Boeing 737 MAX 8s. But Rachel Maddow pointed to this horrific detail tonight:

Boeing wouldn’t comment Tuesday on the delayed FAA discussions, but the company did confirm the upcoming changes to its MAX aircraft. They are expected to come sometime in April. 

According to the WSJ, US officials have also blamed part of the delay on this year’s government shutdown — saying it halted work for at least five weeks.

And once again, just as it does whenever I hear about those thousands of children in cages, nausea and disgust with the Trump administration reaches projectile levels.

Nancy, impeachment may not be on your table, but every day, Trump is giving the rest of us more and more reasons to demand impeachment immediately.

Trump and the School of Roy

by digby

Never back down, never say you’re sorry, never acknowledge any mistakes, if something goes wrong it’s somebody else’s fault, double down, triple down, throw anything back in the opposition’s face…

Daniel Dale of the Toronto Star wrote up one of Chris Hayes’ favorite segments:

The prepared text of his State of the Union address in 2018, emailed to reporters by the White House in advance, had Trump lauding a Homeland Security agent named Celestino Martinez, who “goes by C.J.” Instead, Trump said, “He goes by D.J.”

Then he added: “And C.J. He said, ‘Call me either one.’ So we’ll call you C.J.”

Trump has repeatedly used “and” in this way — to suggest his erroneous initial word was just as valid as the correct word he has added afterward. He has spoken of a Border Patrol agent “on the Clintons’, and Chiltons’, ranch,” mocked a country that opposed the presence of U.S. “mishes, and missiles,” urged skeptics of his Israel policy to “open our hearts and minds to possible, and possibilities,” and boasted of beating election expectations “for the midtown, and midturn, year,” not quite getting to “midterm” on the second try.

He pulled the “and” trick three separate times in his September speech to the United Nations, as MSNBC’s Chris Hayes noted. In one of them, he said that “tolerance for human struggling, and human smuggling, and trafficking, is not humane.”

Gwenda Blair, author of a biography on Trump, said the president is a disciple of the “school of Roy.” One of Trump’s key mentors, the late ethics-challenged lawyer Roy Cohn, advocated endless brawling over any admission of fault.

“Never back down, never say you’re sorry, never acknowledge any mistakes, if something goes wrong it’s somebody else’s fault, double down, triple down, throw anything back in the opposition’s face,” Blair said. “It’s worked pretty well with a certain constituency.”

There might also be a famously large ego involved — and Trump’s oft-expressed worry about being laughed at. For Trump, Blair said, “saying you’re wrong for something small is as bad saying you’re wrong for something large. It’s admitting some kind of fallibility.”

At an Illinois rally in October, Trump said a large percentage of American steel jobs were “vanquished” before he took office, an inadvertent departure from his usual line about how they had “vanished.”

“You could say ‘vanquished’ and ‘vanished.’ It’s a combination of both,” he said.

Appearing in June on the Fox News show Fox and Friends, Trump was attempting to complain about the diversity visa lottery program when he mixed up his words.

“We have the lottery program. It’s called lotta visary,” he said.

“Diversity lottery program,” host Steve Doocy interjected.

Trump’s dismissive response: “Yeah, or lottery visa. OK? Whatever. They have 50 names. Every one of them has ‘lottery.’”

There was at least one time Trump confessed to a word error. Or, perhaps, a supposed word error.

Trump received furious criticism in July for saying, while appearing beside Russian President Vladimir Putin, that “I don’t see any reason why it would be” Russia that interfered in the 2016 election.

His implausible explanation more than 24 hours later: “I said the word ‘would’ instead of ‘wouldn’t.’ The sentence should have been, ‘I don’t see any reason why I wouldn’t — or why it wouldn’t — be Russia.’”

Press secretary Sarah Sanders said the next day that Trump’s willingness to admit such errors demonstrates his “credibility.”

“When he sees that he has misspoken,” she said, “he comes out and he says that.”

Except, of course, he does exactly the opposite. And that’s when he isn’t just lying outright, as he was with the Tim Apple gaffe and the “would-wouldn’t” nonsense.

Most people make these sorts of mistake. (Not the would-wouldn’t which he clearly meant to say the first time.) But because he is such a lying egomaniac, his automatic reaction is to pretend that he meant to say what is obviously a mistake.

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Elizabeth the Stalwart

by digby

I’m not endorsing anyone at this point because it’s way, way, way, way too early and I have no idea where this race will be when it comes time to cast my vote. Also, I don’t like endorsing in presidential primaries because life is short and social media is a hellscape at such times. Suffice to say that I hope the voters will collectively choose a progressive who can dispatch the orange monster in the White House and I’ll be looking at qualities that convince me they can do that. I suspect there is more than one …

Having said that, I will admit that I am a big fan of Elizabeth Warren and if the California primary were held today, I would likely vote for her for president. I have been a fan for years. She is a sophisticated and nuanced political thinker and I find her progressivism to be compelling, persuasive and practical.

Anyway, I do hope that whatever happens, people will be open minded and give her a listen before they decide. Here’s a good place to start:

There are at least two Elizabeth Warrens — Bankruptcy Law Liz and Michelob Ultra Betsy.

Bankruptcy Law Liz has more sweeping policy ideas than you have friends. She reads two books a week, which happens to be the number of books the median American reads in six months. She was a Harvard professor. She calls herself a “data nerd.”

Michelob Ultra Betsy is an Okie by birth. She says “dangit” and “golly” and “boo-hoo.” She puts an “h” before words that start with “w,” as in “hwhite.” She sounds like people who are probably unlikely to vote for her. She is a populist. And while Liz reads serious tomes, Betsy is currently on the fifth book in the “Victor the Assassin” series.

This past weekend, I got to interview both of these figures, who together make up Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts and presidential hopeful. We had breakfast together in New York on Friday. Sometime during our breakfast, Senator Warren’s campaign publicly dropped her latest track, which is a plan to break up Amazon, Google, and Facebook, as part of a larger proposal to intensify antitrust scrutiny of Big Tech.

Then, on Saturday, I interviewed Warren onstage at the Texas Tribune’s daylong political chat fest at South by Southwest in Austin, a business and technology conference. It is the kind of place where it is safe to refer to yourself as an influencer. As in, that is your job. Like your actual job. Not everyone who attends South by Southwest currently works for a monopoly, but not a lot people seem opposed to their startup becoming one. Which is to say, proposing to break up the big tech companies and then flying to South by Southwest is sort of equivalent to Nietzche doing a “God is Dead” book panel at the Vatican.

I asked those in the audience who work for the tech giants she proposes to break up to stand. “Can you explain to them why you want to break up the place they work?”, I asked. A smattering of people rose.

Her answer surprised me. “Because it will be a lot more fun to work there,” she said. It was as if she was making a startup pitch to the startup-pitch people: “It’s like Google meets an ax.” She wanted to distinguish the billionaire monopolist owners and investors from the rank and file of Big Tech, whom she said would benefit from more competitive markets. It offered a clue to Warren’s philosophy — she is a reformer, not a revolutionary. And it revealed something about the culture of our age of capital, which requires even its most strident critics to seek to persuade those whose clout is being challenged that it’s good for them.

We talked about a recurring theme of her own life and her work studying other people: the way in which people mistakenly, in her view, blame themselves for problems that are systemic, structural, engineered through policy. We feel bad that we can’t keep to our diets, not realizing what Big Food is doing behind our backs. We feel bad that we can’t shake our iPhone addiction, not realizing how Big Tech has thousands of people investigating our psyches to render our willpower defenseless against its creations. If there is a motif of Warren’s life — first as a young woman making her way in the world, let go from her job teaching special-needs children after her first year because she got pregnant; then as a scholar of bankruptcy; and now as a policy maker — it is a quest to help Americans grasp that what they might interpret to be their fault is often a more complex story about systems they cannot see and powerful interests they can’t easily fight alone.

We talked about race. I asked her, coming off the well-worn controversy about her ancestry (when she took a much-criticized DNA test to prove she had a small percentage of Native American blood), what she has learned from that episode and from her life more generally about being white — in a moment in our history when whiteness is losing its place as the default setting of Americanness and as yet trying to find its new place in shifting sands. I would have liked to hear even more about her answer: “The differences that protect us are often unseen.” I think she was, in her way, pushing back against something you often hear from white people challenged about racism: saying you don’t see race is hardly proof that racism is not at work.

She embraces Marie Kondo’s tidying approach. She doesn’t embrace democratic socialism. She is a capitalist who celebrates markets that are fair and well-policed (“Markets without rules are theft,” she told me), if not a capitalist that capitalists invite to dinner. When I asked her if she agreed with the statement by Dan Riffle, a senior policy advisor to Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, that “every billionaire is a policy failure” — or with the argument by Ocasio-Cortez herself that a society that allows there to be billionaires is immoral — Warren again surprised me. She gave a long answer about how it depends on the context. If there were a society that had in place the policies she advocates for — universal childcare, accessible education, well-regulated markets — and that society produced billionaires, good for them. No “Abolish Billionaires” for Warren. She is down with billionaires, as long as they are Norwegian.

And she can be quite funny. When I asked her whether she would vote to impeach President Trump today, based on what she already knows, she deferred to the coming Mueller report. Which prompted this from me: “I feel Mueller’s like this guy who keeps taking you to a weekend away, and you think he’s going to propose every weekend, and it’s like, Is this guy ever…? He puts his hand in his pocket, and you think the ring is definitely in the pocket. And then there’s no ring.”

“That said,” Senator Warren replied after letting me process my complicated feelings about the special counsel, “You should remember he has produced 34 indictments and guilty pleas already. I don’t know about you, but I never had a boyfriend that good.”

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Dear Bff: I love you but it’s my way or the highway

by digby

I guess there really is some turbulence in Trump and Kim’s epic bromance:

The top US diplomat tasked with negotiating with North Korea just laid out a denuclearization plan that’s destined to fail.

In his first public comments since President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un met in Vietnam last month, Stephen Biegun, the US special representative for North Korea, told a Washington audience Monday that the administration wants Pyongyang to give up all of its weapons of mass destruction before anything else.

“We are not going to do denuclearization incrementally,” the envoy said at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s nuclear conference. “The foundation of US policy is denuclearization.”

But it’s not just nuclear weapons: The Trump administration also wants the complete removal of chemical and biological weapons from North Korea, Biegun said, meaning the US wants Pyongyang only to have conventional weapons by the end of the process.

Let’s be extremely clear about what this means: If the US maintains this position, any chance for the US to convince North Korea to part with its nuclear arsenal is gone.

Pyongyang for years has said that the only way it would consider giving up its nuclear weapons is through a step-by-step process where both sides offer reciprocal, commensurate concessions. By resolving smaller disagreements, like lifting sanctions in exchange for the closure of an important nuclear facility, over time the US and North Korea would eventually arrive at the grand prize: the end of Pyongyang’s nuclear program.

But Biegun said the US won’t do that. Instead, the Trump administration wants to see North Korea dismantle its nuclear arsenal before it offers any economic or diplomatic benefits. That’s just not going to work, experts say.

“If we don’t move off this position, we have nowhere to go,” MIT nuclear expert Vipin Narang told me. “There’s no zone of agreement if we insist on everything — I mean everything, complete surrender — up front.”

I guess maybe that Nobel Peace Prize isn’t going to happen this year. Maybe he can give himself another phony golf championship instead.

Seriously, this is very bad. I’m not sure anyone could do a lot to change things. But we know for a fact that the dotard is very capable of making things a lot worse. Every day that he doesn’t create a crisis is a bonus.

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Old guy befuddled by technology rants at clouds

by digby

Airplanes are becoming far too complex to fly. Pilots are no longer needed, but rather computer scientists from MIT. I see it all the time in many products. Always seeking to go one unnecessary step further, when often old and simpler is far better. Split second decisions are….— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 12, 2019

….needed, and the complexity creates danger. All of this for great cost yet very little gain. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want Albert Einstein to be my pilot. I want great flying professionals that are allowed to easily and quickly take control of a plane!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 12, 2019

He is 100% clueless about how airplanes operate. But then, he thinks TIVO is advanced computer technology and it undoubtedly took him a while to figure out how to use it, so what do we expect?

If this isn’t an example of an old guy ranting about the good old days I don’t know what is. What an embarrassment.

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