Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

President Donald Trump was eager to have a Republican memo alleging bias in the Russia probe released to the public, several people around him said.

Now that’s it out, he may be disappointed.

The memo didn’t touch on the work of Special Counsel Robert Mueller and didn’t give Trump much pretext to fire Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who’s overseeing the inquiry into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential campaign.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

The U.S. Labor Department recently proposed a rule change that could cost some of the country's lowest-paid workers billions of dollars. Worse, it now appears that the administration understood the likely consequences, and suppressed its research on the matter.

In December, the Department of Labor said it wanted to revoke a 2011 https://www.dol.gov/whd/regs/compliance/whdfs15.pdf that forces restaurant owners to let servers keep their customers' tips. The industry opposed the rule, arguing that it has widened the wage gap between the waiters and bartenders who work for tips and the "back of house" workers, like cooks and dish washers, who don't. Restaurants said they wanted to pool the tips and share them with all their workers, which would be fairer.

On the face of it, not such a bad idea. The problem was that the new policy wouldn't require any such pooling. Businesses would be free to treat tips as just another source of revenue. As a result, according to one estimate, employers would skim $5.8 billion of the $36.4 billion in tips earned annually by restaurant workers.

When the Labor Department announced its intended new policy, starting a 60-day public-comment period that ends Feb. 5, it offered no analysis of how the new policy would affect workers. But in fact it had crunched the numbers. According to Bloomberg Law, the department found that workers would indeed lose billions in earnings. Rather than let the public judge the impact of the policy, based on this evidence alongside any reasons it might advance for discounting it, the administration apparently chose to bury the findings.

Who exactly made this decision is unclear. But it's one more disturbing sign of this administration's approach to government. One wonders, what's worse -- failing to do this kind of policy analysis in the first place, or doing it and then suppressing the inconvenient results?

 

[Michael Scally MD]

· Kissinger, 94, warned that North Korean denuclearization was vital
· He said that relations with Kim Jong-un's country have reached a key juncture
· The U.S. must now choose between pre-emptive military action or increasingly tighter sanctions, he said
· His warning came before North Korea warned that the U.S. is pushing the whole world towards a 'nuclear war'

 

[Michael Scally MD]

When the House Intelligence Committee finally did its dramatic reveal of the so-called Nunes memo, several things were immediately clear — and all were bad for committee chairman Devin Nunes and President Trump , the man his efforts were ultimately intended to benefit.

The push by Republican leaders to unveil this document, over the strenuous objections of the FBI, the Justice Department and Democrats in Congress, fit a https://acslaw.org/sites/default/files/The%20Smear%20Campaign%20Against%20Mueller%201.31.18.pdf of coordinated attacks on Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and Trump team ties to Russia. It began as soon as Mueller was appointed with phony claims about conflicts of interest, and has continued until today. The Trump allies' MO: gin up hysteria around unsubstantiated allegations, ignore or suppress efforts to get to the truth, and move on to the next effort to tarnish.

Most of the allegations in the Nunes memo had already been aired, and others were quickly discredited as misleading or undercut by other information that was excluded from the memo. Indeed, to the extent the document contained any surprises, it was the degree to which it actually undermined the attacks that the president and his allies had been advancing.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

The memo, while trying to paint the origins of the Russia investigation as tainted, did nothing to clear Mr. Trump of either collusion or obstruction — the lines of inquiry being pursued by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III.

The memo in fact undermined Republicans’ effort to cast doubt on the roots of the investigation by confirming that the inquiry was already underway when law enforcement officials obtained a warrant from a secret intelligence court to conduct surveillance on Mr. Page.

The Republican document, which Democrats dismissed as containing cherry-picked information and focusing on an obscure figure in the Trump campaign, confirms that a primary factor in the opening of the investigation in July 2016 was initial contacts between a former Trump foreign policy adviser, George Papadopoulos, and Russian intermediaries.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

“Nixonian” is not the right word to use to describe the behavior of President Trump. In important ways, that characterization smears Richard Nixon.

It is hard to believe I am writing this. But it is also hard to believe it has come to this: The president is in open warfare with his Justice Department and the FBI — asserting flatly that its “top Leadership and Investigators . . . have politicized the sacred investigative process in favor of Democrats and against Republicans — something which would have been unthinkable just a short time ago.”

This was a breathtaking gut punch to the constitutional system. The release of the House Intelligence Committee memo purporting to discredit the Russia probe was predictably followed by a https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/statement-press-secretary-23/ bemoaning “serious concerns about the integrity of decisions” by senior law enforcement officials.

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The point, from Trump’s perspective, is to undermine the legitimacy of the investigation by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, and perhaps set into motion the firing of yet another official for serving justice instead of Trump.

Nixonian? The 37th president https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/watergate/articles/102173-2.htm (ordered) the firing of Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox, triggering the resignations of the attorney general and deputy attorney general. But in instigating the Saturday Night Massacre, Nixon at least paid lip service to the legitimate needs of the criminal-justice system and the professionalism of the Justice Department.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

The memo from House Republicans, led by Representative Devin Nunes, fell well short of the hype. Its main argument is that when the Justice Department sought a warrant to wiretap the former Trump adviser Carter Page, it did not reveal that Christopher Steele — the author of a controversial opposition-research dossier — was funded by the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign through a law firm.

This is actually a fairly common — and rarely effective — argument made by defendants who seek to suppress evidence obtained by a warrant.

What might be the lasting legacy of the Nunes memo is how President Trump reacted to it. According to https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2018/02/02/did-trump-just-reveal-the-real-reason-this-memo-was-written/?utm_term=.68cb34ea75b5 (reports), Mr. Trump suggested “the memo might give him the justification to fire [the deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein] — something about which Trump has privately mused — or make other changes at the Justice Department, which he had complained was not sufficiently loyal to him.”

In fact, Mr. Trump’s approval of the release of the memo and his comments that releasing it could make it easier for him to fire Mr. Rosenstein could help Robert Mueller, the special counsel, prove that Mr. Trump fired James B. Comey, then the F.B.I. director, with a “corrupt” intent — in other words, the intent to wrongfully impede the administration of justice — as the law requires.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

You might say, having read some of my recent essays, “Umair! Don’t worry! Everything will be fine! It’s not that bad!” I would look at you politely, and then say gently, “To tell you the truth, I don’t think we’re taking collapse nearly seriously enough.”

Why? When we take a hard look at US collapse, we see a number of social pathologies on the rise. Not just any kind. Not even troubling, worrying, and dangerous ones. But strange and bizarre ones. Unique ones. Singular and gruesomely weird ones I’ve never really seen before, and outside of a dystopia written by Dickens and Orwell, nor have you, and neither has history. They suggest that whatever “numbers” we use to represent decline — shrinking real incomes, inequality, and so on —we are in fact grossly underestimating what pundits call the “human toll”, but which sensible human beings like you and I should simply think of as the overwhelming despair, rage, and anxiety of living in a collapsing society.

Let me give you just five examples of what I’ll call the social pathologies of collapse — strange, weird, and gruesome new diseases, not just ones we don’t usually see in healthy societies, but ones that we have never really seen before in any modern society.

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American appear to be quite happy simply watching one another die, in all the ways above. They just don’t appear to be too disturbed, moved, or even affected by the four pathologies above: their kids killing each other, their social bonds collapsing, being powerless to live with dignity,or having to numb the pain of it all away.

If these pathologies happened in any other rich country — even in most poor ones — people would be aghast, shocked, and stunned, and certainly moved to make them not happen. But in America, they are, well, not even resigned. They are indifferent, mostly.

So my last pathology is a predatory society. A predatory society doesn’t just mean oligarchs ripping people off financially. In a truer way, it means people nodding and smiling and going about their everyday business as their neighbours, friends, and colleagues die early deaths in shallow graves. The predator in American society isn’t just its super-rich — but an invisible and insatiable force: the normalization of what in the rest of the world would be seen as shameful, historic, generational moral failures, if not crimes, becoming mere mundane everyday affairs not to be too worried by or troubled about.

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Should the world follow the American model — extreme capitalism, no public investment, cruelty as a way of life, the perversion of everyday virtue — then these new social pathologies will follow, too. They are new diseases of the body social that have emerged from the diet of junk food — junk media, junk science, junk culture, junk punditry, junk economics, people treating one another and their society like junk — that America has fed upon for too long.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

By ..

Russell Muirhead is the Robert Clements Professor of Democracy and Politics at Dartmouth College. He is the author of The Promise of Party in a Polarized Age (Harvard University Press, 2014).

Nancy Rosenblum is the Senator Joseph Clark Research Professor of Ethics in Politics and Government at Harvard University. Her most recent book is Good Neighbors: The Democracy of Everyday Life in America (Princeton University Press, 2016).

 

[Michael Scally MD]