Wake The Fuck Up ...
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Wake The Fuck Up ...
The hard-working staff here at Spoiler Alerts does not live inside the Beltway. That can be a very good thing, as it prevents insider gossip color my read of trends within American foreign policy. Occasionally, however, it means I am slower on the draw to shifts that matter.
Take North Korea. My position for most of this year has been that for all the Trump administration’s bluster on the DPRK, the lack of any decent military option rendered much of the war talk to be overblown wishcasting. As I wrote in September: “The current status quo is not great. Changing the status quo is not likely to make the situation any better and very likely to make things worse.”
So I was not troubled too much by Evan Osnos’s November warning that “members of America’s political class — the ‘blob’ of government officials, donors, and media types — have started to talk about war with Pyongyang as an increasingly likely prospect.” Similarly, Kori Schake’s warning from earlier this month that “the Trump White House talking about North Korea sounds eerily and increasingly like the George W. Bush administration in the run-up to the Iraq War” did not faze me too much.
I have spent the past week talking to people who are closely connected to the East Asia folks within this administration, however, and now I am seriously fazed. The message I heard was clear. Trump officials working on North Korea have developed the odd consensus that Pyongyang will use its nuclear arsenal to attempt a forcible reunification with South Korea. And if that is the goal, then time is running out for military options that would stop that from happening. In other words, I heard the exact same things as Osnos and Schake. The Trump national security team seems convinced that North Korea cannot be deterred, and war is the inevitable outcome.
What is equally disturbing is the lack of public debate on this question.
...
Maybe Trump’s national security team is trying to bluff its way into getting North Korea to back down. But having seen this White House shoot itself in the foot repeatedly, I now worry that Trump, Kelly and McMaster actually think there is a military solution.
Someone smarter and better-informed than me needs to tell me how this ends. Because every time I try to game it out, a Trump-Kim confrontation ends with hell on Earth.
The hard-working staff here at Spoiler Alerts does not live inside the Beltway. That can be a very good thing, as it prevents insider gossip color my read of trends within American foreign policy. Occasionally, however, it means I am slower on the draw to shifts that matter.
Take North Korea. My position for most of this year has been that for all the Trump administration’s bluster on the DPRK, the lack of any decent military option rendered much of the war talk to be overblown wishcasting. As I wrote in September: “The current status quo is not great. Changing the status quo is not likely to make the situation any better and very likely to make things worse.”
So I was not troubled too much by Evan Osnos’s November warning that “members of America’s political class — the ‘blob’ of government officials, donors, and media types — have started to talk about war with Pyongyang as an increasingly likely prospect.” Similarly, Kori Schake’s warning from earlier this month that “the Trump White House talking about North Korea sounds eerily and increasingly like the George W. Bush administration in the run-up to the Iraq War” did not faze me too much.
I have spent the past week talking to people who are closely connected to the East Asia folks within this administration, however, and now I am seriously fazed. The message I heard was clear. Trump officials working on North Korea have developed the odd consensus that Pyongyang will use its nuclear arsenal to attempt a forcible reunification with South Korea. And if that is the goal, then time is running out for military options that would stop that from happening. In other words, I heard the exact same things as Osnos and Schake. The Trump national security team seems convinced that North Korea cannot be deterred, and war is the inevitable outcome.
What is equally disturbing is the lack of public debate on this question.
...
Maybe Trump’s national security team is trying to bluff its way into getting North Korea to back down. But having seen this White House shoot itself in the foot repeatedly, I now worry that Trump, Kelly and McMaster actually think there is a military solution.
Someone smarter and better-informed than me needs to tell me how this ends. Because every time I try to game it out, a Trump-Kim confrontation ends with hell on Earth.
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If you thought that the tax bill was bad before, the process rushed and secretive, wait until the final version gets jammed through days from now, with no score, no hearings and no understanding among most Republicans of what’s actually in the bill. The details remain sketchy, but it’s clear that the GOP figured out how to tip the bill even further in favor of the super-rich.
...
Here we see the four defining features of the GOP — indifference to substance, anti-populism (the bill is right-wing, supply-side economics in its most cartoonish form), contempt for voters and intellectual incoherence. The result will be a hugely unpopular bill that favors the rich, grows the debt and widens inequality. Voters already have figured this out. Whether it is the USA Today-Suffolk University poll (32 percent approve, 48 percent do not), the Marist poll (52 percent say it will hurt them, 30 percent say it will help) or the Quinnipiac University poll (26 approve, 55 percent do not; 65 percent think it will favor the rich), voters are telling us that they don’t like the bill and think it’s a gift for the rich and big corporations.
After we published a list of President Trump’s lies this summer, we heard a common response from his supporters. They said, in effect: Yes, but if you made a similar list for previous presidents, it would be just as bad.
We’ve set out to make that list. Here, you will find our attempt at a comprehensive catalog of the falsehoods that Barack Obama told while he was president. (We also discuss George W. Bush below, although the lack of real-time fact-checking during his presidency made a comprehensive list impossible.)
We applied the same conservative standard to Obama and Trump, counting only demonstrably and substantially false statements. The result: Trump is unlike any other modern president. He seems virtually indifferent to reality, often saying whatever helps him make the case he’s trying to make.
In his first 10 months in office, he has told 103 separate untruths, many of them repeatedly. Obama told 18 over his entire eight-year tenure. That’s an average of about two a year for Obama and about 124 a year for Trump.
I have not watched all of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s testimony before the House Judiciary Committee yesterday. But I watched three hours of it, and that was quite enough to convey the disturbing and dangerous nature of the current moment.
It was enough to highlight the apparent breadth of the congressional Republican effort to delegitimize the Robert Mueller investigation. The attacks on Mueller and his staff and allegations of supposed conflicts of interest were not the province of a fringe but a matter of a apparent consensus among House Republicans, at least on the famously partisan Judiciary Committee.
It was enough to loose upon the world an almost hysterical attack on an FBI agent and an FBI attorney in the presence of little evidence that either has done anything wrong—as opposed to merely ill-advised and unfortunate—and in the midst of an ongoing inspector general investigation that has not yet reached any conclusions.
It was enough to lay bare the absurdity of Republican demands for the appointment of a special counsel to investigate a series of matters about which there is not even the barest allegation of criminal conduct—let alone a predicate for an actual investigation.
It was enough to bring to the surface the bizarre fixation in the Republican caucus on conspiracy theories involving Fusion GPS, the so-called Steele Dossier, FISA surveillance, and the Mueller investigation.
And it was enough to make clear, yet again, that Rod Rosenstein is a man out of his depth and to make one sympathize for him at the same time.
No modern president has jumped so directly from the world of business to the presidency as Donald Trump. And in so doing, Trump has refused to do as his predecessors have done: sever ties to the companies or financial interests that may pose, or present the appearance of, a conflict of interest. By keeping his assets in a family-managed trust, which he can revoke at any time, Trump and his family are in the unique position to profit directly from his public service. Special interests in Washington have caught on. Those seeking to curry favor with Trump are not only donating to his reelection campaign but holding fundraisers and galas at his resorts, private clubs and hotels – the proceeds of which benefit him and his family.
To track this new influence-buying and presidential profiteering, the Center for Responsive Politics has created this page to track payments to Trump properties from Trump-related entities and beyond.
Just checking in to see what the crazies are talking about today. Seeing if any evidence has been found against trump. Guess I'll check back at a later date.
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