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Month: October 2019

In case you were wondering what in the hell happened in Turkey…

In case you were wondering what in the hell happened in Turkey…

by digby

Spencer Ackerman has the low down on “the deal”:

Last month, at the United Nations, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan waved a map of northeastern Syria before the world’s dignitaries. His point was to demand U.S.-backed Kurdish fighters, whom Washington had relied upon to fight the so-called Islamic State, get out. His subtext was that he was ready to violently extend the Turkish border southward, seizing Syrian territory.

In Ankara on Thursday, Vice President Mike Pence gave Erdoğan everything the Turks wanted in the long-telegraphed war Erdoğan launched following a green light from President Donald Trump during a now-infamous Oct. 6 phone call. The U.S. did not even get the status quo ante.

The Turks did not agree to withdraw from Syrian territory. They agreed to a ceasefire, Pence announced. Over the next five days, the Kurdish forces that the U.S. abandoned are to withdraw approximately 20 miles south. In exchange, the Trump administration agreed not to implement new sanctions—Sens. Lindsey Graham and Chris Van Hollen introduced a new sanctions package as Pence briefed reporters—and, should the Turkish ceasefire hold, will lift those the administration placed on Turkey after Trump’s greenlight drew widespread backlash.

“It’s a ratification of what Donald Trump told the Turks they could do,” assessed Aaron Stein, the director of the Middle East program at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.

A Turkish official told Middle East Eye, “We got exactly what we wanted out of the meeting.” Erdoğan’s foreign minister, Mevlut Cavusoglu, even boasted that Turkey had agreed to do no more than “pause” its war for the five agreed-upon days. “We will only stop the operation if our conditions are met,” Cavusoglu said.

Pence said he and the other members of the high-level U.S. delegation in Ankara, which included Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and new national security adviser Robert O’Brien, had a brief to deliver no more than a ceasefire. “This will serve the interests of the Kurdish population in Syria,” Pence insisted, crediting the agreement to “President Trump and President Erdoğan.”

Ackerman has a lot more on how they got to this and how thoroughly Trump and his enablers have sold out their allies for reasons nobody understands. I recommend you read the whole thing.

Meanwhile, here’s our lunatic president:

Update:

What are these emoluments you speak of?

What are these emoluments you speak of?

by digby

You’ve heard by now that in the middle of an impeachment and foreign policy crisis, our psycho president announced that he had decided to hold the G7 next summer at his wholly-owned golf club in Florida, opening him up to more charges of graft and corruption.

Oh boy:

Paul Waldman reports:

It’s unlikely that the Senate will remove President Trump from office if or when he’s impeached, but the president isn’t taking any chances: He’s going to squeeze every last dime he can out of the presidency while he still has the opportunity.

Which is why the White House just announced that it has awarded the privilege of hosting next year’s Group of Seven summit of world leaders to the Trump Doral golf course in Miami.

As Post reporters Toluse Olorunnipa,David Fahrenthold and Jonathan O’Connell note, “That decision is without precedent in modern American history: The president used his public office to direct a massive contract to himself.”

Acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney came before reporters Thursday and said — remarkably, with a straight face — that Trump’s resort was chosen solely because it is “the best physical facility for this meeting.” It’s pure coincidence that it just happens to be owned by Trump.

What’s more, when Mulvaney was asked if the White House would share documents illuminating the decision, he said no: “If you want to see our paper on how we did this, the answer is absolutely not.”

Trump’s blithe flaunting of this corruption, in the midst of a deepening impeachment inquiry — along with Mulvaney’s middle finger to basic accountability — may help build the case for his ultimate impeachment.

How Democrats can respond

In an interview, Rep. Jamie B. Raskin (D-Md.), a member of the Oversight and Judiciary committees, laid out a process by which Democrats might bear down harder on this latest corrupt misconduct.

Raskin told us he’s been discussing with other Democrats the prospect of holding a House vote on a resolution disapproving of Trump’s decision on Doral, as well as of his continued violation of the Constitution’s emoluments clauses via his acceptance of untold sums from foreign officials and governments, and the U.S. government.

As Raskin noted, if the House passes such a resolution, and Trump continues down this course — as he will surely do — the House would have made its opposition crystal clear. The emoluments clause permits presidents to accept such emoluments only if Congress approves them, and here the direct opposite would have happened.

At that point, Raskin argued, Democrats would have strong grounds to consider making this latest corruption — and the broader emoluments violations — part of their ongoing impeachment inquiry and potentially grounds for an appropriate article of impeachment as well.

Raskin pointed out that the G-7 corruption and the ongoing Ukraine scandal — in which Trump is pressuring a foreign government to help him rig the next U.S. election on his behalf — have a connecting thread.

“The president’s conversion of his public office into an instrument of private profit and political reelection is the cardinal sin of his presidency,” Raskin told us. “The government is not the president’s private property. The emoluments clauses are essential to framing the high crimes and misdemeanors of the president.”

“It’s hard for me to imagine a comprehensive impeachment resolution that does not refer to the president’s repeated and continuing violations,” Raskin continued. “The get-rich-quick scheme that the president has cooked up with the G-7 and Doral has the kind of alarming public clarity that the Ukraine shakedown does. The president is essentially writing his own impeachment articles.”

Waldman goes on to point out all the other violations of the emoluments clause, the promotional appearances at his properties, the foreign pay to play at his hotels, the endless, overwhelming graft.

Some of this is legally questionable; all of it is unethical, and the G-7 caper may be the most unethical action yet.

And while Trump waxes about how spectacular and convenient Doral is, G-7 summits are usually held in more isolated locations where establishing security for a collection of many of the world’s most important leaders is less of a challenge.

Doral, furthermore, has been described as run-down; the resort’s revenues are down, and a G-7 meeting could be just the ticket to give it publicity.

But all the money Trump ends up reaping from this scheme may help lead to his impeachment. Surely he views the trade-off as well worth it.

They must take up this emoluments stuff. A president blatantly using the office for his own financial benefit like this may be the crudest example of our descent into banana republicanism but it’s extremely important that they take a stand. It’s the best way to set us up for the necessary reforms that are required to stop this descent into oligarchy.

h/t to Spocko for the Youtube mashup.

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He’s dragging his accomplices down with him

He’s dragging his accomplices down with him

by digby

Oh, lookie here:

The most vulnerable Republican senators are not improving their standing in their home states ahead of a tough 2020 election cycle, while the field of potential Democratic challengers took shape and began to flex its muscle.

According to Morning Consult’s latest quarterly Senator Approval Rankings based on nearly 534,000 responses from registered voters collected July 1 through Sept. 30, Republicans representing Colorado, Arizona, North Carolina, Maine and Iowa all saw their net approval — the share of voters who approve of a senator’s job performance minus the share who disapprove — decline between the second and third quarters of 2019.

Amazing how that works. Once the House took decisive steps and the public realized this was serious, voters start to pay attention and when they do, they see what’s going on. And they are starting to look at his enablers.

The best way out of this for everyone is that Trump resigns. Mitch wouldn’t have to force his Senators to take the tough vote and they get that potted plant Pence, who will probably lose, but will potentially preserve the Senate.

The problem is that the only way Trump will resign is if he’s blackmailed into it. And it’s hard to imagine there’s anything out there that would be so bad it would persuade his cult to betray him if they find out what it is. Honestly, after all he’s done, I can’t imagine what it would be.

Unless he succeeds in stealing the election in 2020 (a serious possibility) he will probably not survive. The question is whether or not those Senators are willing to go down with his ship. I seriously doubt that Trump’s foreign friends will put in the same effort to help them. Why would they? He’s the great prize.

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All roads lead to Putin

All roads lead to Putin

by digby

Yep. It’s finally become inescapable, even to people like myself who were just as willing to assume that Trump is an unfit ignoramus who didn’t know what he was doing. I wrote this on Monday in my Salon column:

The consensus is that Trump “impulsively” told Erdogan to go ahead and invade Syria and said the U.S. would not object. (Since Turkey has 50 American nuclear bomb sites on its territory, Erdogan probably figured Trump wouldn’t say such a thing if he didn’t mean it.) It’s also possible that Trump wanted to keep Turkey happy since he has two Trump Towers in Istanbul and several other active business ventures that require Erdogan’s cooperation. But it’s impossible to ignore the fact that while every single Trump foreign policy bungle can be attributed to his ignorance, narcissism or corruption, for some reason they always seem to accrue to the benefit of Vladimir Putin.

They all can’t be a coincidence.

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Somebody’s making some dubious trades on Trump chaos

Somebody’s making some dubious trades on Trump chaos

by digby

I’ve wondered whether anyone was making money on Trump’s imbecility. He does spend a lot of time on the phone …

In the last 10 minutes of trading at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange on Friday, September 13, someone got very lucky. That’s when he or she, or a group of people, sold short 120,000 “S&P e-minis”—electronically traded futures contracts linked to the Standard & Poor’s 500 stock index—when the index was trading around 3010. The time was 3:50 p.m. in New York; it was nearing midnight in Tehran. A few hours later, drones attacked a large swath of Saudi Arabia’s oil infrastructure, choking off production in the country and sending oil prices soaring. By the time the CME next opened, for pretrading on Sunday night, the S&P index had fallen 30 points, giving that very fortunate trader, or traders, a quick $180 million profit.

It was not an isolated occurrence. Three days earlier, in the last 10 minutes of trading, someone bought 82,000 S&P e-minis when the index was trading at 2969. That was nearly 4 a.m. on September 11 in Beijing, where a few hours later, the Chinese government announced that it would lift tariffs on a range of American-made products. As has been the typical reaction in the U.S. stock markets as the trade war with China chugs on without any perceptible logic, when the news about a potential resolution of it seems positive, stock markets go up, and when the news about the trade war appears negative, they go down.

The news was viewed positively. The S&P index moved swiftly on September 11 to 2996, up nearly 30 points. That same day, President Donald Trump said he would postpone tariffs on some Chinese goods, and the S&P index moved to 3016, or up 47 points since the fortunate person bought the 82,000 e-minis just before the market closed on September 10. Since a one-point movement, up or down, in an e-mini contract is worth $50, a 47-point movement up in a day was worth $2,350 per contract. If you were the lucky one who bought the 82,000 e-mini contracts, well, then you were sitting on a one-day profit of roughly $190 million.

A week earlier, three minutes before the CME closed on September 3, someone bought 55,000 e-mini contracts, with the index at about 2906. At around 9 p.m. in New York—9 a.m. in Hong Kong—the market started moving and kept rallying for the next six hours or so, reaching 2936. Around 2 p.m. in Hong Kong—2 a.m. in New York—Carrie Lam, the Hong Kong leader, announced that she would be withdrawing the controversial extradition bill that had been roiling the city in protest for months. Whoever bought those e-mini contracts a few hours earlier made a killing: a cool $82.5 million profit.

But these wins were peanuts compared to the money made by a trader, or group of traders, who bought 420,000 September e-minis in the last 30 minutes of trading on June 28. That was some 40% of the day’s trading volume in September e-minis—making it a trade that could not easily be ignored. By then, President Trump was already in Osaka, Japan—14 hours ahead of Chicago—and on his way to a roughly hour-long meeting with China’s President Xi Jinping as part of the G20 summit. On Saturday in Osaka, after the market had closed in Chicago, Trump emerged from his meeting with Xi and announced that the intermittent trade talks were “back on track.” The following week was a good one in the stock market, thanks to the Trump announcement. On Thursday, June 27, the S&P 500 index stood at about 2915; a week or so later, it was just below 3000, a gain of 84 points, or $4,200 per e-mini contract. Whoever bought the 420,000 e-minis on June 28 had made a handsome profit of nearly $1.8 billion.

Traders in the Chicago pits have been watching these kinds of wagers with an increasing mixture of shock and awe since the start of the Trump presidency. They are used to rapid fluctuations in the S&P 500 index; volatility is common, of course. But the precision and timing of these trades, and the vast amount of money being made as a result of them, make the traders wonder if all this is on the level. Are the people behind these trades incredibly lucky, or do they have access to information that other people don’t have about, say, Trump’s or Beijing’s latest thinking on the trade war or any other of a number of ways that Trump is able to move the markets through his tweeting or slips of the tongue? Essentially, do they have inside information?

Theoretically, market regulators are supposed to be keeping an eye on big trades such as these, to try to figure out whether they are just happy coincidences or whether there is something more nefarious afoot. And they say they do. But calls to the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, where the trades takes place, the Securities and Exchange Commission, which regulates the equity markets, and to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which regulates futures contracts, such as e-minis, were answered in different ways. Christopher Carofine, at the SEC, declined to comment. The CFTC did not respond to my inquiries, while a spokeswoman for the CME says the trades in question did not originate from a single source and they were of no concern.

There is no way for another trader, let alone an outsider such as me, to know who is making these trades. But regulators know or can find out. One longtime CME trader who has been watching with disgust says he’s never seen anything quite like these trades, not at least since al-Qaida cashed in before initiating the September 11 attacks. “There is definite hanky-panky going on, to the world’s financial markets’ detriment,” he says. “This is abysmal.”

In the case of Trump, market manipulation also yields political dividends. Perhaps the most obvious example dates to late August, when Trump, desperate to reignite trade talks with China, boasted during the G7 summit that his counterparts in Beijing had come back to the table. “We’ve gotten two calls—very, very good calls,” he told reporters. “They mean business.” The market rose more than 900 points over the next few days. But a spokesperson for the Chinese foreign ministry said he was not aware of any such calls. An editor at the Global Times, the state-controlled newspaper, tweeted that he knew of no calls made in the days leading up to the G7 meeting and that “China won’t cave to US pressure.” Two U.S government officials later told CNN that Trump misspoke and “conflated” comments from China’s Vice Premier Liu He with direct communication from the Chinese. According to CNN, the officials said Trump was “eager to project optimism that might boost markets.”

Indeed, this single Trump lie briefly inflated domestic markets by hundreds of billions of dollars. “What this describes is, quite literally, market manipulation that constitutes criminal violations of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934,” commented George Conway, the conservative attorney and Trump critic.

Whether Conway is right or wrong is a matter of legal opinion, but given how fishy and coincidental the trading in e-minis seems to be these days, the SEC or CFTC would be doing a great service (and their job) for the American people by investigating who is behind these lucrative trades, and what they knew before they placed them. At the moment, what we’re getting from them is an indifferent shrug.

Federal regulators might start here: In the last 10 minutes of trading on Friday, August 23, as the markets were roiling in the face of more bad trade news, someone bought 386,000 September e-minis. Three days later, Trump lied about getting a call from China to restart the trade talks, and the S&P 500 index shot up nearly 80 points. The potential profit on the trade was more than $1.5 billion.

I don’t know enough about trading to make a judgment as to whether this makes sense. The reporter, William Cohen, is legit however so, I’d assume he knows what he’s talking about.

But let’s just say that considering Trump’s history and criminal proclivities, it’s highly likely somebody made a profit once he figured out that his ravings could move the market. Certainly some of the “friends” he routinely talks to did. Even if he isn’t doing it on purpose (although he certainly could be) his phone pals have certainly figured it out.

This is a man who gives the Russians highly classified information to impress them in the oval office. Of course, he’s even more indiscrete with his buddies.

And who knows? he might even be just smart enough to share information with someone who can place those trades for him and his family.

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Who’s your mommy, Trump?

Who’s your mommy, Trump?

by digby

That’s the Speaker’s new twitter page. Lol.

The White House released the picture yesterday thinking that it said something bad about Nancy Pelosi.

She had said after the meeting that Trump had a “meltdown” and reports were that he’d called her a third rate politician and babble inanely about communists etc. She walked out and rightly so.

Later:

As Michaelangelo Signoreli tweeted:

Seriously, Trump’s reaction is the most glaring example of “I know you are but what am I” that I have ever seen in my life.

Via Crooks and Liars, here’s Lawrence O’Donnell paying tribute last night:

Well, you’ve never seen anything like it and I’ve never seen anything like it and I’ve been in the room where it happened many, many times. But I never saw anyone in that room do what Nancy Pelosi did today when she literally stood up to the President of the United States. And because Donald Trump has the weakest mind in the history of the American presidency, he released the photograph of that moment captured perfectly by a White House photographer.
We would not have that photograph if Donald Trump had not made the profoundly stupid mistake of tweeting it. And that photograph, thanks to Donald Trump, will now become the single-most important and indelible photographic image of the Trump presidency. It tells the story of the Trump presidency better than any other photograph.

Nancy Pelosi immediately placed that photograph on her Twitter page and she will never replace it with a better photograph. It is the perfect portrait of the child president, the Trump face is full of the confusion and fear of a 4-year-old boy being rebuked by an adult in the room full of adults who know he shouldn’t be there

50 years from now, schoolchildren studying American history will come upon this photograph and they will instantly know who was in charge in that room. The adult standing and pointing at the pained face across the table. Historians will recognize that when Nancy Pelosi stood up to that president today, she wasn’t just standing up for herself and for Congress.

Update

That picture brings another one to mind:

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Rep. Elijah Cummings dies at 68 by @BloggersRUs

Rep. Elijah Cummings dies at 68
by Tom Sullivan


Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), chairman of the Committee on Oversight and Reform

Rep. Elijah Cummings, son of sharecroppers, proud resident of inner-city Baltimore, has died in Baltimore. First elected to Congress in 1996, Cummings rose to chair the House Committee on Oversight and Reform. He was 68.

Cummings did not return to work this week after a medical procedure. His office attributed his death at a Johns Hopkins Hospital hospice care facility to “complications concerning longstanding health challenges.” In recent months, Cummings used a wheelchair and a walker.

Cummings led one of the three House committees charged with pursuing the impeachment inquiry of the president.

AP reports:

In a statement, his widow, Maya Rockeymoore Cummings, chairwoman of Maryland’s Democratic Party, said “Congressman Cummings was an honorable man who proudly served his district and the nation with dignity, integrity, compassion and humility. He worked until his last breath because he believed our democracy was the highest and best expression of our collective humanity and that our nation’s diversity was our promise, not our problem.”

In dramatic closing remarks after Michael Cohen’s testimony before his committee in February, Cummings empathized with Cohen’s pain in going to prison and the pain it brought his family. He invited Cohen to ask himself not “Why did it happen to me?” but “Why did it happen for me?” Cummings offered hope that Cohen’s troubles would make this country better and Michael Cohen a better man.

“We are better than this! … As a country, we are so much better than this,” Cummings insisted.

“The one meeting I had with President Trump, I said to him, ‘The greatest gift that you and I, Mr. President, can give to our children is making sure that we give them a democracy that is intact.'”

“When we’re dancing with the angels,” Cummings continued, “the question will be asked: In 2019, what did we do to make sure we kept our democracy intact? Did we stand on the sidelines and say nothing?”

Cummings called out critics for saying this was the committee’s first hearing. The committee had already addressed prescription drugs, voting rights and corruption in government.

“Come on now! We can do co more than one thing. And we have got to get back to normal.”

I remember normal. Vaguely.

Just a Reminder by tristero

Just a Reminder 

by tristero

That seriously disturbed man who just had a meltdown? He can, on a whim, order nuclear strikes anywhere.

Every moment that man is president is a moment during which all life on earth hangs by a thread.

Today’s batshit performances

Today’s batshit performances

by digby

There’s a whole lot of crazy going on in Trump’s head right now. Here are some highlights:

oy….

Foreign Policy chaos

Foreign Policy chaos

by digby

Trump’s foreign policy blunders go much further than Ukraine or Syria:

The uproar in Washington over President Trump’s corruption in Ukraine and malfeasance in Syria has obscured a broader story. In little more than a month, virtually every other foreign policy initiative the Trump administration has pursued has imploded — thanks mostly to the president’s increasingly unhinged behavior.

The unraveling started on Sept. 7, when Trump abruptly announced that he had canceled a previously undisclosed summit with the Afghan Taliban due to be held the next day at Camp David, and shelved a draft peace deal that a State Department special envoy had spent a year negotiating. The immediate result was a spike in violence in Afghanistan — and at least the temporary shelving of Trump’s ambition to pull U.S. troops out of the country before the 2020 election.

A week later, Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran came undone. Following an Iranian-sponsored attack on a Saudi oil complex, Trump ruled out a military response; instead, he told French President Emmanuel Macron that he was open to a plan to meet Iranian President Hassan Rouhani at the United Nations and lift sanctions on his government in return for negotiations. The gambit failed: Rouhani left Trump waiting on a phone line. But Saudi Arabia got the message: Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has asked Iraq and Pakistan to broker a de-escalation with Tehran

Just two weeks after the Iran debacle, Trump saw his nuclear negotiations with North Korea crumble — again. At a meeting in Stockholm, Kim Jong Un’s delegation rejected a U.S. proposal for an incremental deal — a far cry from the total disarmament Trump once sought — and walked away, refusing to agree to a date for future talks. Trump’s hopes for a Nobel Prize-securing breakthrough in 2020 now look vanishingly small.

All that led up to Trump’s Oct. 6 phone call with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in which he blindsided the Pentagon by facilitating a Turkish invasion of northern Syria. The most likely result, in addition to the betrayal of the Kurdish allies who fought with American troops for the past four years, will be the revival of the Islamic State, whose destruction was Trump’s most tangible foreign policy accomplishment.

Is there anything left to the “America First” agenda? Not really. The attempt to oust the socialist government of Venezuela flopped back in April. The plan for the “ultimate deal” between Israelis and Palestinians has never been released, and Trump’s point man on that project, Jason Greenblatt, announced his departure last month.

True, Trump is still pressing his trade war with China and announced a partial deal on Friday. But most tariffs remain in place and the easy victory over Beijing he once promised is nowhere in sight.

This is the place in the column where I am supposed to identify the common thread that explains all these disasters. Only there isn’t one, other than Trump’s mounting erraticism. His explanation for pulling the plug on the U.S. mission in Syria — where just 1,000 U.S. troops were ensuring that Islamic State stayed down, while thwarting Russian and Iranian ambitions — is that he was determined to stop “endless wars.” But the deal he nixed in Afghanistan would have brought far more American soldiers home — 5,000 right away, and up to 15,000 by Election Day. The only explanation Trump offered for squelching it was that the insurgents had staged an attack that killed an American soldier — a strange reason for not ending an 18-year-old war.

Trump’s reversal on Iran was even more startling. For two years he had ramped up pressure on Tehran: While his top aides talked about regime change, Trump threatened “the official end of Iran” if it mounted a military challenge. Yet when the Iranians started striking targets in the Persian Gulf, the only casualty of Trump’s response was his hawkish national security adviser, John Bolton, who had pushed him toward war. Now he appears desperate in his eagerness to open negotiations.

Of course, there’s reason for relief about some of Trump’s broken policies. The confrontation with Iran was unnecessary, and war in the Persian Gulf would be a catastrophe. The Taliban deal would have betrayed an Afghan government in which the United States has invested two decades and hundreds of billions of dollars.

But the carnage of Trump’s foreign policy likely isn’t over yet. Kim Jong Un has set a year-end deadline for getting what he wants from Trump — an end to sanctions — after which North Korea could return to testing nuclear warheads or intercontinental missiles. Iran may carry out further strikes in the Persian Gulf to try to force Trump to lift sanctions. And the Islamic State will probably regain its footing in eastern Syria. All that may not be as threatening to Trump as an impeachment vote. But it could do a lot of damage to U.S. national interests.

This is going to get worse.