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Month: May 2019

Sunday Funny

Published by digby on May 5, 2019

Sunday Funny

by digby

Lol. McKinnon is great. So is Warren. I would happily vote for both of them.

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Trump has no “worldview” there is only his personal survival

Published by digby on May 5, 2019

Trump has no “worldview” there is only his personal survival

by digby

Fareed Zakaria had an interesting program this week in which he discusses John Bolton’s worldview and how it influences Trump’s foreign policy:

It’s interesting and probably correct. But I don’t think Trump agrees with Bolton (and Dick Cheney’s) worldview. He believes that everyone in the world is a mark for one of his fraudulent real estate deals. He doesn’t have a “dark” view of human nature. He doesn’t think that way. He believes that his experience as a con man shows he can hustle world leaders with shallow flattery, ill-informed bombast and bribes. And he doesn’t need to lrarn or even think. He relies totally on instinct:

He said it out loud at one of his rallies:

Trump said he would find a way to work with a divided Congress.

“My whole life, you know what I say? ‘Don’t worry about it, I’ll just figure it out.'” he said. “Does that make sense? I’ll figure it out.”

There is no philosophy, there is no worldview, there is no strategy. He wakes up every morning and does whatever he thinks is necessary to survive another day. That’s it.

In the case of foreign policy his only motivation is to prove that he is the world’s greatest negotiator, although he is so far out of his depth that the one thing that can save him is confusion and chaos accidentally breaking in his favor.

The only good news is that Trump is such an egomaniac that he doesn’t listen to anyone and that includes Bolton. It’s not much, but it’s all we’ve got.

There are two yuge dangers in this Trump presidency. The first is his blatant defiance of political norms and breaking of the constitution in service of malevolent conservatives, setting precedent for Republicans to hold power illegitimately for decades to come. The second is his cavalier treatment of national security and chaotic behavior on the world stage. He’s made us a very unpredictable rogue superpower and that’s dangerous for everyone on the planet. Trump and the GOP have fucked us six ways to Sunday and it’s not going to be easy to fix it.

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“Madman Theory?” No. “Stupid Man Theory.”

Published by digby on May 5, 2019

“Madman Theory?” No. “Stupid Man Theory.”

by digby

Pompeo lays down the law:

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had strict words on Sunday for Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov regarding Venezuela – a day before the two are scheduled to meet to discuss, among other things, the continuing political crisis in the South American nation.

“I’m going to tell him the same thing the president told the world: that every country must get out, including the Russians,” Pompeo said during an interview on “Fox News Sunday.” “That’s what I’ll tell him. We don’t want anyone messing around with Venezuela.

How does that square with this?

On Friday, Trump told reporters at the White House that Putin had assured him Moscow isn’t seeking to “get involved” in the crisis in Venezuela, despite assertions by the U.S. president’s top national security advisers that the Kremlin is offering critical support to Nicolas Maduro’s regime.

“He is not looking at all to get involved in Venezuela other than he’d like to see something positive happen for Venezuela,” Trump said of Putin. “And I feel the same way.”

Putin understands that the president of the United States is a doddering fool but he also knows that the doddering fool is extremely powerful and is the final word. So does Kim Jong Un, who shot off a rocket for the first time since 2017 this week:

Mr. Kim has pushed for a gradual, step-by-step approach to denuclearization, where each nation would make a concession that would be met with one of similar weight by the opposing side. But Mr. Trump’s top foreign policy officials — John R. Bolton, the national security adviser, and Mr. Pompeo — have argued that that approach is flawed because previous administrations had tried it, only to see North Korea continue its development of nuclear weapons. North Korean officials say they do not want Mr. Bolton or Mr. Pompeo involved in future negotiations.

Here’s Trump’s reaction to the missile test:

He honestly thinks he has cajoled Kim with promises of real estate development money. He is so narcissistic that he thinks everyone has the same small-minded, venal, motivations that get him excited. And I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he doesn’t think of Kim as a childlike primitive he can bribe with beads and blankets. He is that racist.

Trump is being played for a fool by all these strongmen. And his sycophantic enablers are helping them do it:

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The New Consensus: It’s All Trump’s Fault by tristero

Published by tristero on May 5, 2019

The New Consensus: It’s All Trump’s Fault 

by tristero

Maureen Dowd:

Sorry, James Comey. You’re wrong again. 

Donald Trump does not eat “your soul in small bites,” as you wrote in a Times Op-Ed. He devours the entire thing in one big gulp. 

The transformation of William Barr from respected establishment lawyer to evil genius outplaying and undermining his old friend Robert Mueller is a Grand Guignol spectacle.

Anyone remotely familiar with Barr’s history knows that Dowd is delusional. Barr has always behaved as a cynical GOP hatchet man. It’s just now he’s swinging that axe on behalf of a vulgar someone that none of Dowd’s friends want to pinky-sup with. No, Barr never bent over backwards to be equitable towards Trump and then got swallowed up. He’s one of the avid swallowers.

The rest of the column is pretty good, but really, it’s high time the chatterers recognize that so-called Establishment Republicans may make classier dinner guests than Trump, but that does not mean anything when it comes to policies or actual behavior. The GOP rotted out a long time ago.

Asleep at the Senate by @BloggersRUs

Published by Tom Sullivan on May 5, 2019

Asleep at the Senate
by Tom Sullivan

Keeping track of how many Democrats are running for president in 2020 is futile. The candidate count stands somewhere above 20, making the chances of actually winning the primary contest a long shot for most, if not simply an expensive vanity project. Democrats have a wealth of riches, goes the popular narrative. What they lack are candidates for U.S. Senate. Thirty-four seats are on 2020 ballots.

Salon Deputy Politics Editor Sophia Tesfaye worries talented Democrats itching to take down Donald Trump may leave the Senate and approval of federal judges in Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s control. Red-state Democrats who need more control in their state legislatures could use some local races to boost voter turnout and may not get it.

“Beto O’Rourke in Texas, Steve Bullock in Montana, and John Hickenlooper in Colorado all gave up opportunities to challenge potentially vulnerable Republicans for Senate seats” to run for president, Tesfaye writes. With rumors that Joe Manchin may leave his West Virginia Senate seat to run for governor, a Democrat in the White House could face an even more hostile Senate in 2021 if Democrats loose ground there. Democrat Doug Jones could lose his Alabama U.S. Senate seat in 2020.

After running a headline-catching campaign for Senate in 2018 and narrowly losing to Sen. Ted Cruz, O’Rourke passed on a chance to challenge Texas Republican Sen. John Cornyn. Last elected with 62 percent of the vote, Cornyn’s approval stands at 62 percent to Cruz’s 83 percent.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) appears to be backing MJ Hegar for Senate in Texas. Rep. Julian Castro has all but bowed out and Hegar, another almost-won Democratic candidate from 2018, has proved “formidable” at fundraising. But so has O’Rourke, and he ran a statewide race and lost by an even slimmer margin.

Georgia Democrat Stacey Abrams has decided not to contest Republican Sen. David Perdue’s seat in 2020. With a national profile, Abrams could be the first Democrat to win statewide office in Georgia since 2000, Tesfaye observes. Abrams seeks a more executive position.

Eric Levitz cautions (as I have) that even should Democrats win the White House in 2020, a Democrat in the White House will need McConnell’s permission to do most anything:

Right now, the odds of Team Blue winning control of the Senate next year are slim, and getting slimmer. Democrats will need a net gain of three seats next November to wrest the upper chamber from Mitch McConnell’s caucus. And while Republicans will have 22 of their incumbents on the ballot in 2020, only two of those represent states that have leaned Democratic in the past two presidential elections — Colorado and Maine.

Democrats need three seats to reach 50-50 Senate parity. Yet the most vulnerable Republican seats in Texas, Georgia, and Montana may see Democrats’ most promising challengers sitting out those races to run for president. Abrams has not ruled out a run and could find a place as vice president on the national ticket. Gov. Steve Bullock, the Montana Democrat, is hiring staff he may need for a presidential run instead of challenging Montana Republican Sen. Steve Daines whose seat is on the 2020 ballot.

The sitting president may be drawing all the fire to himself, but Democrats need more attention to their flanks. There is little to suggest a Democratic presidential candidate in 2020 will pay much attention to red states, especially to red states with no competitive contests for U.S. Senate. The longer the Senate goes under-contested, the worse it will go both for Democrats and American democracy.

As David Birdsell, professor of political science and dean at Baruch College, has observed, “By 2040, 70 percent of Americans are expected to live in the 15 largest states, which are also home to the overwhelming majority of the 30 largest cities in the country. By extension, 30 percent of Americans will live in the other 35 states. That means that the 70 percent of Americans get all of 30 Senators and 30 percent of Americans get 70 Senators.”

“Imagine,” writes Levitz, “a Democratic president who isn’t just too weak to advance any of the ambitious legislation she promised her base, but also to rebalance the courts or effectively implement her regulatory agenda. Might this dampen Democratic voters’ enthusiasm for electoral politics when the midterms come around?”

Those red states across the American South and West will have effective veto power over any president, rendering the position largely ceremonial with a Democrat in the Oval Office. Someone at the switch had best wake up.

Restored Nuremberg doc: Lessons learned-or ignored? By Dennis Hartley @denofcinema5

Published by digby on May 5, 2019

Saturday Night At The Movies

Restored Nuremberg doc: Lessons learned-or ignored?

By Dennis Hartley


Dennis reviewed this back in 2011. It seems like a good time to revisit it.– d







Hear no evil, see no evil: Goring and Hess on trial

“These men saw no evil, spoke none, and none was uttered in their presence. This claim might sound very plausible if made by one defendant. But when we put all their stories together, the impression which emerges of the Third Reich, which was to last a thousand years, is ludicrous.”

-Justice Robert Jackson (chief counsel for the U.S. at the first Nuremberg trial in 1946)


Herman Goring. Rudolf Hess. Hans Frank. Wilhelm Frick. Joachim von Ribbentrop. Alfred Rosenberg. Julius Streicher. Any one of those names alone should send a chill down the spine of anyone with even a passing knowledge of 20th Century history. Picture if you will, all of those co-architects of the horror known as the Third Reich sitting together in one room (along with a dozen or so of their closest personal friends). This egregious assemblage really did occur, in the courtroom where the first Nuremberg trial (November 1945 to October 1946) was held. Through the course of the grueling 11-month long proceedings, a panel of judges and prosecutors representing the USA, the Soviet Union, England and France built a damning case, thanks in large part to the Nazis themselves, who had a curious habit of meticulously documenting their own crimes. The thousands of confiscated documents-so neatly typed, well-annotated and (most significantly) signed and dated by some of the defendants, along with gruesome films the Nazis took of their own atrocities, helped build one of the most compelling cases…well, of all time. By the time it was over, out of the 24 defendants (several of whom were tried in absentia for various reasons), 12 received a sentence of death by hanging, 7 were given prison sentences ranging from 10 years to life, and the remainder were either acquitted or not charged. One of the biggest fish sitting in the docket, Herman Goring, ended up “cheating the hangman” by committing suicide in his cell (Martin Bormann, one of the condemned tried in absentia, had already beat him to the punch-although his 1945 suicide in Berlin was not confirmed until his remains were identified in a 1972 re-investigation).

Hollywood would be hard pressed to cook up a courtroom drama of such epic proportions; much less a narrative that presented a more clearly delineated battle of Good vs. Evil. Granted, in the fog of war, the Allies undoubtedly put the blinders on every now and then when it came to following the Geneva Convention right down to the letter-but when it comes to the short list of parties throughout all of history who have willfully committed the most heinous crimes against humanity, there seems to be a general consensus amongst civilized people that the Nazis are the Worst.Bad.Guys.Ever…right? At any rate, this is why a newly-restored U.S. War Department documentary, produced over 60 years ago and never officially released for distribution in America (until now) may well turn out to be the most riveting courtroom drama that will hit theaters this year.

Nuremberg: Its Lesson for Today (made in 1948) was written and directed by Stuart Schulberg, who had worked with John Ford’s OSS field photography unit, which was assigned by the government to track down incriminating Nazi film footage to be parsed by the Nuremberg prosecution team and help build their case. Schulberg’s brother Budd (who later became better known in Hollywood as the screenwriter for On the Waterfront and A Face in the Crowd) was a senior officer on the OSS film team; he supervised the compilation of two films for the U.S. prosecutors; one a sort of macabre Whitman’s Sampler of Nazi atrocities, from the Third Reich’s own archives, and the other assembled from that ever-shocking footage taken by Allied photographers as the concentration camps were being discovered and liberated by advancing troops in early 1945. Stuart Schulberg, in turn, mixed excerpts from those two films with the official documentation footage from the trial to help illustrate the prosecution’s strategy to address the four indictments (conspiring to commit a crime against peace; planning, initiating and committing wars of aggression; perpetrating war crimes; and crimes against humanity).

So why had Schulberg’s film (commissioned, after all, by the U.S. government to document a very well-known, historically significant and profound event in the annals of world justice) never been permitted open distribution to domestic audiences by same said government? After being shown around Germany in 1948 and 1949 as part of the de-Nazification program, extant prints of the film appeared to have vanished somewhere in the mists of time, with no documented attempts by the U.S. government to even archive a copy. Even the man who had originally commissioned the film, Pare Lorentz (who at the time of the film’s production was head of Film, Theatre and Music at the U.S. War Department’s Civil Affairs Division) was given the brush off by Pentagon brass when he later petitioned to buy it and distribute it himself. A 1949 Washington Post story offered an interesting take on why Lorentz had been stonewalled, saying that “…there are those in authority in the United States who feel that Americans are so simple that they can only hate one enemy at a time. Forget the Nazis, they advise, and concentrate on the Reds.” (There are several layers of delicious, prescient irony in that quote…so I won’t belabor it).

Luckily for us, Stuart Schulberg’s daughter Sandra, along with Josh Waletzky, embarked on a five-year mission back in 2004 to restore this important documentary. Now, I should mention here that the term “restore”, in this particular case, does not necessarily refer to crystalline image quality (they have done the best they can with what is purported to be the best existing print, located at the German Film Archive). They did have better luck with the soundtrack; they found what sounds to my ears to be fairly decent audio from the original trial recordings, which they painstakingly matched up as best they could to reconstruct the (long-lost) sound elements from the original. Voice-over narration has been newly re-recorded (by Liev Schreiber, who is a bit on the dry side, but adequate enough). It is chilling to hear the voices of these defendants; even if it is at times merely a “jawohl” or a “nein”- one hopes that it is enough to give even the most stalwart of Holocaust deniers cause for consternation (or at least…the tiniest little nervous twitch).

So what is the “lesson for today” that we can glean from this straightforward and relatively non-didactic historical document? Unfortunately, humanity in general hasn’t learned too awful much; the semantics may have changed, but the behavior, sadly, remains the same (e.g. we call it “ethnic cleansing” now). “Crimes against humanity” are still perpetrated every day-so why haven’t we had any more Nurembergs? If it can’t be caught via cell phone camera and posted five minutes later on YouTube like Saddam Hussein’s execution, so we can take a quick peek, go “Yay! Justice is served!” and then get back to our busy schedule of eating stuffed-crust pizza and watching the Superbowl, I guess we just can’t be bothered. Besides, who wants to follow some boring 11-month long trial, anyway (unless, of course, an ex-football player is somehow involved). Or maybe it’s just that the perpetrators have become savvier since 1945; many of those who commit crimes against humanity these days wear nice suits and have corporate expense accounts, nu? Or maybe it’s too hard to tell who the (figurative) Nazis are today, because in the current political climate, everyone and anyone, at some point, is destined to be compared to one. Maybe we all need to watch this film together and get a reality check.





Tonight? Broadway. Tomorrow…

R.I.P. Kenneth Mars 1936-2011


He helped Mel Brooks prove that, in skilled hands, even the Third Reich can be funny.






Dennis Hartley

The Democrats go to the dogs

Published by digby on May 4, 2019

The Democrats go to the dogs

by digby

This is a nice little story about the presidential candidates’ pooches:

The 2020 Democratic presidential contenders are going to the dogs — and a turtle.

Donald Trump is the first president to forgo an animal companion in the White House since Andrew Johnson in the 1860s, according to the Presidential Pet Museum. Trump has said he’d “feel a little phony” with a dog, but presidents haven’t kept just canines — Calvin Coolidge had a bobcat, Teddy Roosevelt had a one-legged rooster, and Thomas Jefferson kept a pair of grizzly bear cubs on the White House lawn.

About half of the declared Democratic candidates looking to move into the White House, however, are dog owners. Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s pup has become a force on the campaign trail, while others have become social media stars. Some have shunned the political spotlight altogether.

Here’s a look at the potential presidential pooches:
BAILEY (SEN. ELIZABETH WARREN)

Bailey, a golden retriever, has accompanied Warren to town halls, where the Massachusetts senator’s supporters have waited on lengthy lines to pet the cuddly canine and get their pictures taken with him. Bailey, who turned one this past week, even has his own Twitter account, @FirstDogBailey, which is filled with messages like “things I love: my ball, chasing my ball, and humane immigration policies w/ a path to citizenship.

A gift from Warren’s husband, he was named after Jimmy Stewart’s community banker character in the movie “It’s a Wonderful Life,” after Warren said she decided against suggestions like “Anthony Scarapoochie.”

Bailey is described in his Twitter bio as a “consumer watchdog and campaign furrogate.”

ARTEMIS AND ROSIE (BETO O’ROURKE)
The former Texas congressman has two dogs, Labrador retrievers Artemis and Rosie, along with a cat and a turtle that recently vanished.

Artemis went viral earlier this year after she was featured in a Vanity Fair photo spread in the runup to his campaign announcement. Artemis showed up in many of photographer Annie Leibovitz’s pictures, looking sad-eyed and setting the internet ablaze.

New York Magazine’s The Cut site did a story on the pictures headlined “What is Beto’s Dog Thinking?”

“Artemis looks somehow mournful in every single shot she’s featured in throughout the Vanity Fair spread,” the article read.

O’Rourke shared pictures of Artemis, Rosie and cat Silver on Facebook last year for National Pet Day, and the family also boasts a snake and a gerbil. But the latest addition to the O’Rourke menagerie, a tiny turtle named Gus, disappeared last week.

“Our baby turtle Gus went missing last night,” he said at a town hall meeting in San Diego on Tuesday, according to The Times of San Diego. “And it does not look good.”

There was speculation online that Artemis might have taken the turtle out, but O’Rourke reported Friday that Gus had been found alive and well, hiding in a closet. “Artemis, not guilty!” his Instagram post said.

TRUMAN AND BUDDY (MAYOR PETE BUTTIGIEG)

Buttigieg and his husband also have two dogs, Truman and Buddy, and they have their own Twitter account, @firstdogsSB. The South Bend, Indiana, mayor got beagle/labrador retriever Truman from a shelter in 2017. The couple added Buddy, described by Buttigieg as a one-eyed puggle with “a little bit of a weight problem,” to their clan last year.

The dogs’ Twitter account is less partisan and has less policy than Bailey’s, and is filled with tweets like, “CHICKEM OVER SAMON THERE I SAID IT.” They did respond “Hi” to a picture of Warren helping Bailey wave. While all are good dogs, Buddy and Truman’s Twitter feed has 65,000 more followers than Bailey’s 3,817 or O’Rourke’s Artemis, who has 3,700.

CHAMP AND MAJOR (JOE BIDEN)
The former vice president recently added a new dog to his household, a German shepherd named Major. Biden got Major from the Delaware Humane Society.

“Major was 1 of 6 puppies who were brought to DHA after coming in contact with something toxic in their home. Their original owner was unable to afford veterinary care so they surrendered them,” the group wrote on its Facebook page. “Joe Biden caught wind of them and reached out immediately. The rest is history!”

Biden had been on the lookout for a pal for his aging German shepherd, Champ, who’d been a fixture at Biden’s side during the Obama administration. The veep was known to give out little “Champ” plush pets to kids during his time in office.

MAPLE (SEN. KIRSTEN GILLIBRAND)
Gillibrand has one dog — a labradoodle named Maple that she got in 2017. While Gillibrand’s campaign tried raising money last week with video of her making a tricky beer pong shot, Maple seems to have some shooting skills as well.

The New York senator tweeted out a video of Maple making a difficult trashcan basket with a ball last year.

SKYE (JOHN HICKENLOOPER)
Hickenlooper’s dog, Skye, was a frequent guest in his office during his two terms as Colorado’s governor, but the Akita-bulldog-Chow Chow mix might be a little too busy for presidential politics.

Hickenlooper posted a video on Instagram “with my faithful dog Skye” by his side on his couch in March as he made his case for tackling climate change, but Skye bolted after 25 seconds.

BEAR AND BUCKEYE (REP. TIM RYAN)
Ryan has two shelter dogs, Bear and Buckeye, and the siblings, lab mixes, make frequent appearances on his social media. The Ohio congressman’s office told Quartz the family had been looking for one puppy at the shelter, but couldn’t resist getting both. “They make our family pawfect,” Ryan wrote of the pair on Instagram last month.


MIMI (JOHN DELANEY)
Former Rep. John Delaney, who announced his candidacy back in 2017, used to have two dogs, but the family’s cocker spaniel, Annie, recently passed away, his campaign told NBC News. The family still has a little Maltese named Mimi.

PENNY (REP. ERIC SWALWELL)
The California congressman has a black lab named Penny, whom he brought home in 2016. The playful pooch has gone on to make numerous appearances on Swalwell’s various social media platforms.

PEPPER (SEN. MICHAEL BENNET)
The Colorado senator, who announced his entry into the race this past week, fulfilled a campaign promise in 2010 by getting his daughters Caroline, Hanna and Anne a dog after his senatorial campaign. The family adopted Pepper from Colorado Correctional Industries’ prison trained K-9 companion program, which rescues and trains shelter dogs.



THE REST OF THE PACK?
Businessman Andrew Yang reportedly has a dog, but a rep did not respond to an inquiry about his pet.

Sen. Cory Booker doesn’t have a dog, but told an 11-year-old Iowa boy at a campaign event in February that he’d get one if he’s elected president. He made headlines back in 2013 when he was the mayor of Newark, New Jersey, and rescued a dog that had been left outside in the freezing cold.

BUT WHAT ABOUT CATS???!!!

And by the way, the alleged man of the people, Donald Trump, disdains pets saying, “how would I look walking a dog on the White House lawn?”

He’s also said he doesn’t think people want to see their Dear Leader in their living rooms or carrying his own baggage. In other words, they want a King, not a president.

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The Mueller Doctrine

Published by digby on May 4, 2019

The Mueller Doctrine

by digby

Bill Barr’s testimony this past week was outrageous on many levels. But his contention that Mueller should not have said he couldn’t reach a conclusion in the obstruction case was wrong because an investigation into the president can only be used to exonerate him is the most mind-boggling.


This piece from Bloomberg Law explains why this is a totally fatuous argument and why Mueller had no choice but to do what he did:

After almost two years of waiting for the Mueller Report, it turns out that much of the suspense could have been avoided for one simple reason: Special Counsel Robert Mueller viewed himself as prohibited from reaching a conclusion that President Donald Trump committed a crime, regardless of the evidence establishing criminal conduct by the president.

In fact, based on the special counsel’s interpretation of the Constitution and Justice Department policy, the only two conclusions he could reach with respect to the president were to exonerate him or abstain from reaching a conclusion that the president engaged in criminal conduct.

In Mueller’s view, the Constitution and DOJ policy prevented any other finding.

Prohibited From Finding Criminal Activity

According to what can be termed the “Mueller Doctrine,” regardless of the evidence, a special counsel is prohibited from concluding that a sitting president committed a crime. A corollary of the Mueller Doctrine, which reserves exclusively to Congress the authority to conclude that a sitting president committed a crime, reveals serious falsehoods in the letter sent by Attorney General William Barr to Congress on March 24.

Let me explain. In the Introduction to Volume II of the Mueller Report, which looked at “whether the President had obstructed justice in connection with Russia-related investigations,” the special counsel summarized the “considerations that guided our obstruction-of-justice investigation.”

Those considerations started with the legal conclusion reached by the Office of Legal Counsel of the DOJ in an October 2000 Memorandum Opinion that the indictment or criminal prosecution of a sitting president would violate the constitutional separation of powers. That OLC memo concluded that “the Constitution requires a recognition of a presidential immunity from indictment and criminal prosecution while the President is in office.”

The special counsel took that principle a step further. In addition to prohibiting indictment and criminal prosecution, Mueller determined that he was prohibited from reaching an investigative conclusion that Trump committed a crime. As stated in the report: “we determined not to apply an approach that could potentially result in a judgment that the President committed crimes.”

Serious Limitation
In other words, the special counsel viewed himself as functionally not permitted to conclude that the president engaged in criminal conduct. That limitation rendered it impossible to conclude that the president committed a crime even if the evidence supported that conclusion.

In particular, the special counsel observed “that a federal criminal accusation against a sitting President would place burdens on the President’s capacity to govern and potentially preempt constitutional processes for addressing presidential misconduct.”

In a footnote supporting this proposition, that future Constitutional scholars will no doubt refer to famously as Mueller Footnote 2, the special counsel cited:

Article I, Section 2, Clause 5 of the Constitution (“The House of Representatives . . . shall have the sole Power of Impeachment”);
Article I, Section 3, Clause 6 of the Constitution (“The Senate shall have the sole Power to try all Impeachments”); and
the pages of the OLC memo concluding that it is not for the DOJ but for Congress to determine whether the public interest in removing a sitting president “whose continuation in office poses a threat to the Nation’s welfare outweighs the public interest in avoiding” the burdens incident to the impeachment process.
Based on these constitutional constraints, the special counsel determined that while he was structurally permitted to conclude that the president did not commit a crime, he was prohibited from concluding that the president did commit a crime.

In the end, Mueller found that, based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, he could not conclude that the president did not commit obstruction of justice. Since he was constitutionally prohibited from finding that a crime had been committed, the special counsel’s only option was to issue the measured determination that, “while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.”

Falsehoods in Barr’s Letter

In addition to raising questions about the future usefulness of special counsels if they are powerless to find presidential criminality, the Mueller Doctrine reveals at least two falsehoods in Barr’s letter to Congress.

In the letter, Barr asserted that the special counsel’s decision not to reach any legal conclusions on obstruction, “leaves it to the Attorney General to determine whether the conduct described in the report constitutes a crime.” That is a false description of the conclusions of the Mueller Report. The report could not be clearer that it is the responsibility of Congress—and not the attorney general or any other representative of the DOJ—to determine whether a crime was committed by the president.

Second, Barr concealed that his determination was inconsistent with the report while publicly portraying his “summary” as consistent. According to Barr, he and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein “concluded that the evidence developed during the Special Counsel’s investigation is not sufficient to establish that the President committed an obstruction-of-justice offense.”

Although the special counsel was fully empowered to reach that conclusion, he expressly rejected it based on the evidence. Instead, the special counsel found that the evidence did not support a conclusion that the president had not engaged in obstruction of justice and the report did not exonerate the president. Any suggestion by the attorney general to the contrary is false and should be rejected.

Barr has a very, very expansive view of presidential power so it’s not surprising that he believes that an investigation into potential presidential crimes simply cannot be undertaken by the Department of Justice unless the purpose is to clear him. And if it cannot do that, it must stay silent on the matter. After all, he told the Senate last week that a president is fully empowered to stop any investigation into his own behavior if he has been wrongly accused, as he contends happened to Trump. This would presumably even apply to an investigation into presidential treason, which is quite something.

In other words, “if the president does it it’s not illegal.” He cannot be subject to any legal oversight. The only remedy for a criminal president is impeachment but the congress must do their own investigations without the power of federal law enforcement, making it nearly impossible within the time frame of a presidential term.

Obviously, none of this applies to Democratic presidents and that’s because they know they can count on Democratic officials reverting to norms and procedures and Democratic voters being more concerned with the powerful following the rule of law. The shameless Republicans have no problem holding Democrats to a much higher standard.

So, the only real remedy is to beat the party that suppresses the vote and welcomes foreign sabotage of their opponents, and beat them so overwhelmingly that they can’t successfully steal it.

American democracy 2020.

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Published by digby on May 4, 2019

Bad faith all the way downBad faith all the way down

by digby


Krugman’s column shows that it isn’t just Trump or the Republican officials scared of their base who are batshit crazy or total hacks. Conservative economists have gone over the cliff too:

Do you remember the great inflation scare of 2010-2011? The U.S. economy remained deeply depressed from the aftereffects of the burst housing bubble and the 2008 financial crisis. Unemployment was still above 9 percent; wage growth had slowed to a crawl, and measures of underlying inflation were well below the Federal Reserve’s targets. So the Fed was doing what it could to boost the economy — keeping short-term interest rates as low as possible, and buying long-term bonds in the hope of getting some extra traction.

But Republicans were up in arms, warning that the Fed’s policies would lead to runaway inflation. A Congressman named Mike Pence introduced a bill that would prohibit the Fed from even considering the state of the labor market in its actions. A who’s who of Republicans signed an open letter to Ben Bernanke demanding that he stop his monetary efforts, which they claimed would “risk currency debasement and inflation.”

And supposedly respectable Republicans engaged in conspiracy theorizing, suggesting that the Fed was secretly in league with the Obama administration. Paul Ryan and the economist John Taylor declared that the Fed’s policy “looks an awful lot like an attempt to bail out fiscal policy, and such attempts call the Fed’s independence into question.”

Of course, all these warnings were totally wrong. Inflation never took off. Although almost none of the people who waxed hysterical over inflation have so much as acknowledged having been wrong, Bernanke, Fed economists, and Keynesians in general were proved right: printing money isn’t inflationary in a depressed economy.

But what lay behind all these dire warnings about inflation? Well, they came at the same time that Republicans were warning about the terrible, horrible, no-good consequences of deficit spending.

And it was obvious even at the time that G.O.P. deficit posturing was hypocritical – obvious, that it, to everyone except the entire Beltway establishment. All you had to do was look at what was actually in Ryan’s budget proposals to realize that he wasn’t sincere, that he was using deficits as an excuse to bash social programs and hobble Obama. It was utterly predictable that Republicans would decide that deficits don’t matter as soon as they recaptured the White House.

But I thought that monetary policy was a bit different. Republicans have been the party of fiscal irresponsibility since Reagan, and there was no reason to believe that they had changed. But goldbuggery, hatred of fiat money, and abhorrence for the printing press did seem to be long-standing attitudes on the right. I imagined that Ryan, who once asserted that he had learned all he needed to know about monetary policy from Atlas Shrugged, might actually believe what he was saying about the Fed.

In light of recent events, however, it appears that I was wrong. Republican posturing on monetary policy was as insincere as the party’s posturing on fiscal policy. We now have to see the party’s 2010-2011 demands for tight monetary policy, like its demands for tight fiscal policy, as reflecting not economic principles, but rather a desire to sabotage Barack Obama.

You see, Donald Trump’s attempt to install Stephen Moore at the Fed failed for the wrong reason. Moore fell short because he turns out to be a loathsome individual. But he should have been rejected out of hand simply on the basis of his economic views. Not only was he wrong, again and again, during the financial crisis and its aftermath; not only did he refuse to admit error, or learn anything from his mistakes; but he turned on a dime as soon as Trump was in office, showing himself to be a purely political animal. He demanded higher interest rates when unemployment was above 9 percent; now he’s demanding lower rates with unemployment below 4 percent.

But as I said, that’s not why Moore fell short — because his whole party has followed the same path. Mike Pence, who demanded higher rates in the deeply depressed economy of 2010, wants lower rates now. No Republicans in Congress seem to have criticized Moore for his policy views, as opposed to his misogyny. Aside from Harvard’s Greg Mankiw, not one prominent Republican economist stepped up to oppose Moore, even though he clearly was engaged precisely in the kind of politicization of monetary policy Taylor and Ryan claimed to see in 2010.

I made a little chart to summarize the evolution of Republican positioning on monetary policy. It shows the employment rate of prime-age adults, widely seen as a better indicator of the state of the labor market than the unemployment rate, and the rate at which wages are increasing. Both measures hit low points in 2010-2011, making a strong case for expansionary monetary policy. That’s precisely when the G.O.P. was pressuring the Fed to stop trying to help the economy. Both measures are at post-crisis highs now, and sure enough, Republicans are advocating now the policies they opposed when they were most needed.

As Matt O’Brien points out, you don’t see the same thing on the Democratic side: center-left economists who have argued for years that the Fed was being too conservative are still saying the same thing with Trump in office.

What all this tells us is that Republican positioning on economic policy has been in bad faith all these years. They didn’t really believe that a debt crisis and hyperinflation were looming. They were just against anything that might help the economy while a Democrat was president.

This shows as much as anything that conservative “ideology” has always been, in every way, a sham.

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