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Trump Team Continues to Act Guilty Over Russia Ties

Mother Jones

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One of my complaints about Hillary Clinton during the email affair was the fact that she sometimes acted guilty even when she wasn’t. Now it’s Donald Trump’s turn. Here is the Washington Post today:

The Trump administration sought to block former acting attorney general Sally Yates from testifying to Congress in the House investigation of links between Russian officials and Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, The Washington Post has learned, a position that is likely to further anger Democrats who have accused Republicans of trying to damage the inquiry.

….Yates and another witness at the planned hearing, former CIA director John Brennan, had made clear to government officials by Thursday that their testimony to the committee probably would contradict some statements that White House officials had made, according to a person familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity. The following day, when Yates’s lawyer sent a letter to the White House indicating that she still wanted to testify, the hearing was canceled.

Yates, you’ll recall, was the acting attorney general left over from the Obama administration who Trump fired for refusing to defend his first immigration order in court.

This whole Russia thing is crazy. Whenever I start believing there’s really something there, I feel like I’m turning into a nutball conspiracy theorist. But if there isn’t anything there, it’s plenty odd that the Trump team keeps acting as if there were.

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Trump Team Continues to Act Guilty Over Russia Ties

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BREAKING: Donald Trump Played Golf This Weekend

Mother Jones

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The sad thing about this tweet is that it really would be news if Donald Trump was at the White House working this weekend:

But no: Trump played golf at his club in Virginia this weekend, so it’s not clear what Fox was up to here. Perhaps they meant to say that by 5:26 pm on Sunday, Trump was back in the White House.

Normally, I’d suggest that everyone cool it with the golf snark. We’ve now had four consecutive presidents who have taken endless grief every time they hit the links, and it’s pretty stupid. Let ’em golf if they want to. But there are two differences with Trump. First, the guy really does play a ton of golf. You’d think the first few months of a new presidency would be a busy time, but Trump has played 12 rounds of golf, mostly at Mar-a-Lago, in only ten weekends. That’s more than he played before he was president. Second, like an embarrassed drunk, he’s now trying to hide his golf addiction. This weekend marked the second in a row in which his press office tried to pretend that Trump was “meeting with people” at the club, only to have Trump’s golfing exposed, as they must have known it would be, by someone with a cell phone tweeting out pictures. Why do they bother with such flimsy and easily exposed lies?

And while we’re on the subject of Trump, I’d like to note that he’s hit the quadfecta I predicted on Thursday. He has now blamed all four of the following for the failure of Trumpcare:

Paul Ryan, for insisting on doing health care before tax reform and then being unable to shepherd the bill through the House.
The Freedom Caucus, for voting against his bill.
Democrats, for…being the opposition party, I guess.
Obama, for deliberately designing Obamacare to fail in 2017.

Apparently Reince Priebus is also taking some heat from within the White House, because he’s pals with Ryan and was supposed to know about all this congressional hoo ha. But it’s not clear if Trump himself blames Priebus for anything.

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BREAKING: Donald Trump Played Golf This Weekend

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Republicans Unveil Their Health Care Plan. It’s a Bloodbath.

Mother Jones

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Republicans have finally released their shiny new health care plan. It’s pretty much the same as the discussion draft that leaked a couple of weeks ago, and includes the following basic features:

Subsidies (in the form of advanceable tax credits) are age-based, starting at $2,000 for young people and going up to $4,000 for older folks.
The subsidies begin to phase out above incomes of $75,000 ($150,000 for households). This will affect about 10 percent of the population and probably reduces the cost of the bill by about 5 percent.
Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion is frozen in 2020 and then gradually phased out.
The bill allocates about $10 billion per year for high-risk pools run by states. This is far too little to work effectively.
The tax meant to pay for everything was removed.
Insurers are required to cover everyone who applies, even if they have pre-existing conditions. However, if you have a coverage gap longer than two months, insurers can impose a premium surcharge of 30 percent for one year. This “continuous coverage” provision is designed to motivate people to buy insurance, since the bill repeals the individual mandate.
The funding formula for Medicaid is changed to a “per-capita allotment,” which is a fancy way of saying it gets cut.
All the Obamacare taxes on the rich are repealed.

Oh, and the bill includes a one-year ban on funding for Planned Parenthood. Conservatives love this, but it’s also likely to generate some sure no votes in the Senate. Remember that Republicans can only afford two defections in the Senate. Any more than that and their bill fails.

Needless to say, there’s not yet an analysis from the Congressional Budget Office about how much the GOP plan will cost or how many people it will cover. It’s safe to say that on the cost side, it will be a lot cheaper than Obamacare. In fact, since the tax credits are so stingy, it’s likely that very few people in the bottom third of the income spectrum will use them. They leave insurance too expensive for most poor people to afford.

Because of this, my horseback guess is that the Republican plan will be used by about 3 million people, compared to 10 million for Obamacare. The Medicaid expansion will be unchanged for a while, continuing to cover about 10 million people. Total cost for subsidies + high-risk pools + Medicaid expansion will run about $25 billion per year, compared to $100 billion for Obamacare.

Three million is far too small a pool for any kind of successful program, and the pre-existing conditions clause ensures that the pool will be not just small, but very, very heavily weighted toward the very sick. It’s a disaster for insurance companies, who will almost surely refuse to participate.

That’s my guess, anyway. It’s a bloodbath. More detailed analysis from think tankers will be available soon, and the CBO will weigh in eventually too. It’s not going to be pretty.

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Republicans Unveil Their Health Care Plan. It’s a Bloodbath.

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We Are Seeing a Return of the Mayberry Machiavellis

Mother Jones

Consider the following three things that have happened in the past month:

After years of promising to repeal Obamacare, Republicans finally have the power to do it. But they’ve suddenly discovered that it’s going to be a lot harder than they thought.
President Trump kept his campaign promise to institute “extreme vetting” of refugees and visitors to the US, but the rollout was bungled so horribly that he’s losing support for it even among Republicans.
Last week Trump approved his first military operation. It was a disaster. The evidence here is a bit murky, but it suggests that the raid was vetted less stringently than usual because of Trump’s desire to cut through red tape and give the military more freedom to fight terrorism.

These are examples of what Barack Obama was talking about when he told Trump that “reality has a way of asserting itself.” More generally, it’s the result of a Republican Party that has been averse to policy for a very long time. They have principles and beliefs, but they don’t spend much time thinking hard about how to implement those principles in the most efficient possible way.

They believe that Obamacare is a failure. They believe that immigration should be shut down. They believe the military should be unleashed. But these are just bumper stickers. They haven’t spent much time developing serious policy responses on these topics because (a) that would give Democrats something concrete to attack, (b) their base likes bumper stickers, and (c) policy analysis has a habit of highlighting problems with ideological purity and pushing solutions toward the center.1

George W. Bush had the same problem with policy. Remember what John Dilulio said in his famous “Mayberry Machiavellis” letter to Ron Suskind?

In eight months, I heard many, many staff discussions, but not three meaningful, substantive policy discussions. There were no actual policy white papers on domestic issues. There were, truth be told, only a couple of people in the West Wing who worried at all about policy substance and analysis, and they were even more overworked than the stereotypical, nonstop, 20-hour-a-day White House staff. Every modern presidency moves on the fly, but, on social policy and related issues, the lack of even basic policy knowledge, and the only casual interest in knowing more, was somewhat breathtaking — discussions by fairly senior people who meant Medicaid but were talking Medicare; near-instant shifts from discussing any actual policy pros and cons to discussing political communications, media strategy, et cetera. Even quite junior staff would sometimes hear quite senior staff pooh-pooh any need to dig deeper for pertinent information on a given issue.

This problem is now a couple of decades old and shows no signs of abating. Quite the opposite: Donald Trump makes Bush look like an analytical genius. But even on their own terms, conservative rule is going to end disastrously if both Trump and congressional Republicans don’t spend a little more time on policy analysis and implementation issues. There are only so many disasters that even their own base will put up with.

1Democrats, arguably, have the opposite problem—too much regard for policy analysis—which is why lefties are often so contemptuous of them.

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We Are Seeing a Return of the Mayberry Machiavellis

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Obama Was Right Not to Get Involved in Syria

Mother Jones

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Charles Krauthammer comments on the war in Syria:

Look, the most important thing here is that this cease-fire, to the extent that it holds, is not a result of clever diplomacy. It’s what the Romans called “the peace of the grave.” The rebels were dealt such a huge defeat in Aleppo, they are in no position to carry on the fight in the same way as before. This is a Russian victory. The mantra out of this administration always was, “You can’t solve a civil war militarily.” The answer is, you can.

It’s worth clearing this up. Obama and his team did indeed say this in various formulations over the past few years. But any honest reading includes the following implicit qualifiers:

  1. Obama said you can’t solve this civil war militarily, not civil wars in general.
  2. He said there was no ultimate military solution in Syria.
  3. And in the short term, he said there was no way for us to help the anti-Assad rebels to victory without an enormous commitment of ground troops.

You can argue with #2 and #3. But I’d still put my money on Obama being right. Syria is likely to be unstable for a good long time, and I doubt there was anything we could have done to defeat Assad that didn’t include a serious invasion force. This was an asymmetrical conflict from the beginning, and Assad had a real army at his disposal. I’ve just never bought the idea that we could have won if only we’d armed the “moderate” rebels back in 2012, or put up a no-fly zone, or anything like that.

Putin apparently decided that assisting Assad was worthwhile because (a) Assad could win with a modest additional reinforcement, and (b) in return Russia got better access to its Tartus naval facility, their only port on the Mediterranean. I wouldn’t be surprised if sometime soon Assad gives Putin permission to upgrade Tartus so that it can handle larger ships.

Would it have been worth a massive American presence to prevent that? I suppose Krauthammer would say yes, but I’m not sure how many Americans would agree with him.

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Obama Was Right Not to Get Involved in Syria

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There Will Never* Be an Israel-Palestinian Peace Settlement

Mother Jones

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For many years:

Virtually every country in the world has condemned Israel’s settlements in the West Bank.
They have all repeatedly voted to say so in the UN.
The US has also opposed Israel’s settlements, but hasn’t officially said so in the UN.
And Israel has said very clearly that the UN is virulently anti-Israel (true) and they pay it no mind.

A few days ago one small part of this formula finally changed when the US abstained from a UN vote condemning Israel’s settlements on the West Bank. It was a parting blow from a lame-duck president who has been treated appallingly by Bibi Netanyahu, and the only surprising thing about it is that President Obama managed to hold his temper this long.

In any case, it’s entirely meaningless: Donald Trump will take office soon and Netanyahu claims to consider the UN illegitimate on this subject anyway. So why has everyone gone ballistic over it? Sure, there’s now an “official” UN resolution condemning the West Bank settlements, but what difference does that make? An “official” UN resolution is barely worth the minute or two it takes to read it. Even as a PR coup it doesn’t amount to much.

The whole Israel charade long ago ceased to interest me. I can hardly pretend to be any kind of expert, but my take is that the last chance for any kind of peace deal ended in the 90s. The huge influx of conservative Jews from Russia after the fall of the Iron Curtain, followed by the Second Intifada, turned Israel permanently against any kind of settlement with the Palestinians.

Because of this, I never blamed George Bush for not trying to broker a peace deal and never blamed Obama for not succeeding. Even people who are sympathetic toward Obama often say that he handled the Middle East badly—and the Israel relationship particularly badly—but I simply don’t see how he could have done any better. Netanyahu treated him with unconcealed contempt; was unapologetic about publicly undermining him; decided to ditch bipartisanship and openly team up with the Republican Party; and very plainly was never open to any kind of settlement at all. There is absolutely nothing Obama could have done to change that.

In any case, the following things are indisputably true:

Israeli leaders will never* stop building in the West Bank. It would be electoral suicide.
Israeli leaders will never give up the West Bank. It would be electoral suicide.
Israeli leaders will never formally annex the West Bank. It would be electoral suicide.

In other words, nothing is going to happen. Period. Israel is going to keep things as they are, fight off world opinion forever, and hope that maybe over the course of several decades they can slowly get all the Palestinians in the West Bank to emigrate elsewhere. It’s sort of like Mitt Romney’s “self-deportation” on steroids.

And just in case you think this puts me on the side of the Arabs and Palestinians, forget it. To the extent that I stay even marginally on Israel’s side, it’s because the Arabs have acted even more abominably. They tried to invade Israel twice. They never cared a fig for the Palestinians except as a convenient poster child. (Jordan must have been the first country in history to lose territory in a war and be happy about it.) They never accepted Israel as legitimate, but for decades they’ve tacitly tolerated its existence because it gives them an easy way of stirring up demagogic hatreds that help prop up their own vicious regimes. The PLO was a murderous terrorist organization, and Hamas is worse. The intifadas were depraved and ruinous. And despite the fact that the Palestinians were clearly on the losing end of a war and needed to accept the best deal they could get, they remained delusional to the end. I’ve never bought into the revisionist history that Bill Clinton’s Wye River/Camp David/Taba negotiations were unfair to the Palestinians and Yasser Arafat was right to turn down the final proposal. He needed to accept it, and he probably knew it. He was just too cowardly to do it and too convinced that his own leadership was dependent on opposition to Israel.

Even in theory, there is literally no settlement that either the Israelis or the Palestinians would accept right now. This isn’t necessarily true forever, but it will be true for a good long time. We should all stop wasting our time on the fantasy that peace talks have any value.

*All uses of never in this post are figurative. Never is a long time. But in this case, it means many decades at a minimum.

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There Will Never* Be an Israel-Palestinian Peace Settlement

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As drought shaming fades in California, lawns are making a comeback.

Following an exceptionally dry winter in 2015, Gov. Jerry Brown mandated that cities cut back on water use by 25 percent. Californians responded by letting their grass turn brown, or replacing it with artificial turf and less thirsty plants.

Sod suppliers, landscapers, and conservation activists now say that lawns are coming back into fashion, the Guardian reports. California did away with mandatory water restrictions in June, which may have sent the wrong message to residents. In August, urban water consumption had risen nearly 10 percent from the previous year.

Before it dropped these restrictions, the state spent $350 million on rebates for those who tore out their water-sucking grass. Anti-lawn campaigns emerged, such as “Brown is the new green,” and the media drought shamed those who maintained lush, grassy expanses.

It seemed like these efforts were working: One major lawn supplier saw orders plunge from 500 per day to 80 during the height of drought shaming.

The orders have now crept into the hundreds — despite the severe drought conditions that persist. Another dusty winter would send California into its sixth straight year of drought.

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As drought shaming fades in California, lawns are making a comeback.

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Newt Gingrich Refuses to Discuss His Attack on Megyn Kelly

Mother Jones

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On Tuesday night, Newt Gingrich, the Republican who was forced to resign as House speaker in the late ’90s and who now is a top Donald Trump surrogate, got into a row with Fox News host Megyn Kelly. Toward the end of a segment on the presidential election, the often combative Gingrich started grousing about the media paying too much attention to all the women who have accused Trump of sexual assault (after a video emerged of Trump bragging about committing sexual assault). Kelly defended the media’s handling of this story: “We have to cover that story, sir.” What about a Hillary Clinton speech in which she referred to open borders? Gingrich retorted. “That is worth covering,” Kelly said.

Gingrich then angrily exploded: “Do you want to go back to the tapes of your shows recently? You are fascinated with sex and you don’t care about public policy. That’s what I get out of watching you tonight.” Kelly shot back: “I am not fascinated by sex. But I am fascinated by the protection of women.” Gingrich became irate and dared Kelly to say “Bill Clinton” and “sexual predator.” She did not take the bait, and shortly after that, Kelly said goodbye to Gingrich and asked him to “spend some time” working on his “anger issues.”

The exchange blew up Twitter and was the talk of the politerati. On Wednesday morning, as Trump was holding an event in Washington, DC, to promote his new hotel, with Gingrich one of the few notable GOPers in attendance, he congratulated Gingrich for tangling with Kelly (with whom Trump once feuded).

Following the ribbon-cutting ceremony in the hotel lobby, Mother Jones asked Gingrich about his emotional face-off with Kelly. “Do you really think that Megyn Kelly was overly fascinated with sex by asking about the sexual-assault accusations regarding Trump?” we inquired. Waving his hand, Gingrich replied, “I’m not going to talk about that.”

We followed up: “But given that you guys impeached a president” about a matter involving sex—Gingrich interrupted, “It speaks for itself. It speaks for itself.” He and his (third) wife then walked away to eat lunch at the hotel restaurant.

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Newt Gingrich Refuses to Discuss His Attack on Megyn Kelly

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Trump Continues to Lash Out at Former Miss Universe, This Time Over Non-Existent Sex Tape

Mother Jones

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Donald Trump continued his attacks against former Miss Universe winner Alicia Machado Friday morning, unleashing a series of tweets that labeled her “disgusting” and a “con”, and encouraged his supporters to uncover her “sex tape.” The allegation that Machado once starred in a porn film has been debunked by numerous sources.

The smear campaign comes days after the first presidential debate on Monday, when Hillary Clinton said Trump had called Machado “Miss Piggy” to ridicule her appearance. Following the debate, Trump doubled-down on his fat-shaming by calling Machado’s previous “massive” weight gain a “real problem.”

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Trump Continues to Lash Out at Former Miss Universe, This Time Over Non-Existent Sex Tape

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Democrats Are Freaking Out. But They’ve Been Here Before.

Mother Jones

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The polls are tightening and the freak-out is beginning. With hours to go before the first presidential debate, FiveThirtyEight‘s polls-plus forecast gives former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton just a 53.4 percent chance of winning the election. It’s the closest the race has been since the elections site unveiled its model in June. The “bedwetting cometh,” tweeted New York Times political reporter Jonathan Martin.

But Democrats have been here before. In 2012, President Barack Obama held a modest but consistent lead over Republican nominee Mitt Romney heading into the first debate, only to uncharacteristically collapse. Within a few days, the lead had evaporated—according to FiveThirtyEight, Obama’s chances went from 86.1 percent to 61.1 percent, the steepest drop of the campaign—and his supporters started to lose it. No one captured this liberal angst better then Andrew Sullivan, then of the Daily Beast, who had championed Obama in 2008 and joyfully called him “the first gay president” in a Newsweek cover story.

Following Obama’s first debate with Romney, Sullivan was inconsolable:

Maybe if Romney can turn this whole campaign around in 90 minutes, Obama can now do the same. But I doubt it. A sitting president does not recover from being obliterated on substance, style and likability in the first debate and get much of a chance to come back. He has, at a critical moment, deeply depressed his base and his supporters and independents are flocking to Romney in droves.

I’ve never seen a candidate self-destruct for no external reason this late in a campaign before. Gore was better in his first debate—and he threw a solid lead into the trash that night. Even Bush was better in 2004 than Obama last week. Even Reagan’s meandering mess in 1984 was better—and he had approaching Alzheimer’s to blame.

I’m trying to see a silver lining. But when a president self-immolates on live TV, and his opponent shines with lies and smiles, and a record number of people watch, it’s hard to see how a president and his party recover. I’m not giving up. If the lies and propaganda of the last four years work even after Obama had managed to fight back solidly against them to get a clear and solid lead in critical states, then reality-based government is over in this country again. We’re back to Bush-Cheney, but more extreme. We have to find a way to avoid that. Much, much more than Obama’s vanity is at stake.

A week later, after the vice presidential debate had passed, Sullivan was even further gone. “Obama threw it all back in his supporters’ faces, reacting to their enthusiasm and record donations with a performance so execrable, so lazy, so feckless, and so vain it was almost a dare not to vote for him,” he wrote. And then Obama rebounded at the next two debates and won 332 electoral votes.

The race heading into the first debate tonight is closer than it was heading into the first presidential debate in 2012. If the election were held today, there’s a virtually even chance that Donald Trump would win. But Clinton backers anxiously hitting refresh on FiveThirtyEight and consulting their astrologers would do well to reread Sullivan’s lament. It’s fine to panic, but a 7-point polling swing is nothing a few good debates can’t reverse.

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Democrats Are Freaking Out. But They’ve Been Here Before.

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