Tag Archives: kevin drum

FBI Russia Probe Is Targeting "Someone Close to the President"

by AnaFinlayczw Posted on May 19, 2017

Mother Jones

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Oh come on:

President Trump told Russian officials in the Oval Office this month that firing the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, had relieved “great pressure” on him, according to a document summarizing the meeting.

“I just fired the head of the F.B.I. He was crazy, a real nut job,” Mr. Trump said, according to the document, which was read to The New York Times by an American official. “I faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off.”

….The White House document that contained Mr. Trump’s comments was based on notes taken from inside the Oval Office and has been circulated as the official account of the meeting. One official read quotations to The Times, and a second official confirmed the broad outlines of the discussion. Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, did not dispute the account.

That’s from the New York Times, and it’s what Trump told the Russian ambassador and foreign minister the day after he fired Comey. Of course, Trump probably didn’t realize that the Russians were already keenly familiar with Comey since the FBI is America’s primary counterintelligence agency—that is, the agency that tracks down Russian spies. So they know perfectly well he’s not crazy and not a nut job. I’ll bet they also knew perfectly well that firing Comey was only going to increase the pressure on Trump over Russia. That’s because they aren’t idiots.

The Washington Post reports on just what this increased pressure is turning into:

The law enforcement investigation into possible coordination between Russia and the Trump campaign has identified a current White House official as a significant person of interest, showing that the probe is reaching into the highest levels of government, according to people familiar with the matter.

The senior White House adviser under scrutiny by investigators is someone close to the president, according to these people, who would not further identify the official.

Stay tuned.

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FBI Russia Probe Is Targeting "Someone Close to the President"

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Trumpcare Still Hasn’t Been Sent to the Senate

by AntoineEichmann Posted on May 19, 2017

Mother Jones

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As we all know, the Republican health care bill can’t survive a Democratic filibuster, so it’s being considered via reconciliation, which requires only 51 votes in the Senate. That means the bill has to obey reconciliation rules.

Normally, this is not a big problem. If some aspect of the House bill violates the rules, it gets removed in the Senate and life goes on. But what if the bill violates the prime rule of reconciliation—namely that it reduce the deficit? Then it’s dead and everyone has to start all over. This means the House has to be pretty careful that their bill does indeed reduce the deficit.

But how do they know if it reduces the deficit? Easy: the CBO scores the bill and tells them. But Paul Ryan famously rushed passage of the bill in the House before CBO had time to deliver a score, so no one knows for sure if it still reduces the deficit. Bloomberg reports on what this means:

House Speaker Paul Ryan hasn’t yet sent the bill to the Senate because there’s a chance that parts of it may need to be redone, depending on how the Congressional Budget Office estimates its effects….”I had no idea,” Dennis Ross of Florida, another member of the vote-counting team, said Thursday, adding that the prospect of another vote “does concern me.” GOP leaders never said publicly they were planning to hold on to the bill for two weeks or longer.

In the end, I imagine the bill will get scored as a deficit reduction and then be sent to the Senate. But the fact that Ryan is still holding onto the bill shows that he knew perfectly well how irresponsible it was to force a vote before the CBO delivers a score. In addition to being callous and malignant, the whole thing is also a massive FUBAR.

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Trumpcare Still Hasn’t Been Sent to the Senate

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President Trump Is Mad As Hell and He’s Not Going To Take It Anymore

by Patricia27G Posted on May 18, 2017

Mother Jones

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I missed President Trump’s press conference this afternoon, but Josh Marshall sums it up for me:

The only real consistency in Trump’s remarks are that he did nothing wrong and his anger at whomever he’s angry at at that moment. Everything else is mutable and up for grabs. He’s mad, mad at everyone, mad at Comey, also mad at Rosenstein and he made that anger clear in something like a million ways during this brief performance.

That’s our president. Mad at everybody, all the time—except himself. I wonder if he really lacks self-awareness so utterly that he has no idea he’s the one causing all the chaos? Or that he almost certainly broke the law pretty seriously when he asked Comey to kill the Russia investigation? Is he that clueless?

Probably. Trump always thought the business world was a lot tougher than politics, so being president would be a breeze. That was a level of cluelessness that’s truly mind-boggling. Leaving aside the fact that Trump never actually ran his business in any real sense of the word—and was never as successful as he thought he was—that world was patty-cake compared to big-league politics. In only a few months Washington DC has eaten him alive.

And the rest of the planet is even worse. Trump has already shown signs of being taken to the cleaners by foreign leaders, and this is almost certain to continue. That’s because despite his big talk, he’s never shown any real talent for negotiation. Dan Drezner makes the case here, and it’s not pretty.

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President Trump Is Mad As Hell and He’s Not Going To Take It Anymore

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Industrial Production Is Not Really "Surging"

by NLZGeorgina Posted on May 16, 2017

Mother Jones

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Donald Trump is bragging today that industrial production “surged” in April. And sure enough, it was up 1.7 percent compared to last year. That’s not bad. But you know what else increased since last year? The population of the United States. Here’s the industrial production index from the Federal Reserve adjusted for population growth:

That tiny blip at the end represents the surge. So don’t get too excited. Per capita industrial production in the US has been roughly flat for the past four years and nothing that Trump has done so far—or is likely to do—has much chance of changing that dramatically.

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Industrial Production Is Not Really "Surging"

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The Entire World Is Adapting to Having an Idiot in the White House

by NoreenChapa Posted on May 15, 2017

Mother Jones

Over at the Washington Post, Greg Miller and Greg Jaffe report that President Trump is an idiot:

President Trump revealed highly classified information to the Russian foreign minister and ambassador in a White House meeting last week, according to current and former U.S. officials, who said that Trump’s disclosures jeopardized a critical source of intelligence on the Islamic State….The partner had not given the United States permission to share the material with Russia, and officials said that Trump’s decision to do so risks cooperation from an ally that has access to the inner workings of the Islamic State.

….“This is code-word information,” said a U.S. official familiar with the matter, using terminology that refers to one of the highest classification levels used by American spy agencies. Trump “revealed more information to the Russian ambassador than we have shared with our own allies.”

Meanwhile, over at Foreign Policy, Robbie Gramer reports that our allies think Trump is an idiot too:

NATO is scrambling to tailor its upcoming meeting to avoid taxing President Donald Trump’s notoriously short attention span. The alliance is telling heads of state to limit talks to two to four minutes at a time during the discussion, several sources inside NATO and former senior U.S. officials tell Foreign Policy. And the alliance scrapped plans to publish the traditional full post-meeting statement meant to crystallize NATO’s latest strategic stance.

….“It’s kind of ridiculous how they are preparing to deal with Trump,” said one source briefed extensively on the meeting’s preparations. “It’s like they’re preparing to deal with a child — someone with a short attention span and mood who has no knowledge of NATO, no interest in in-depth policy issues, nothing,” said the source, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “They’re freaking out.”

The Republican Party has a lot to answer for. When that day comes, it’s going to come hard.

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The Entire World Is Adapting to Having an Idiot in the White House

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Chart of the Day: Gay Marriage Posts Another Gain

by MabelCadle Posted on May 15, 2017

Mother Jones

Here’s a bit more good news for you today. In Gallup’s latest poll, 64 percent of Americans say same-sex marriage should be legal. Even Republicans are getting on board: in the past four years, support for gay marriage among Republicans has shot up from 28 percent to 47 percent. At least a few things are going right these days.

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Chart of the Day: Gay Marriage Posts Another Gain

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Senate Republicans Are Arguing About How Badly to Screw the Poor

by MargartHaddock5 Posted on May 14, 2017

Mother Jones

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Medicaid doesn’t get a lot of attention in the debate over Trumpcare, but it’s likely that more people would be affected by Medicaid cuts than by any other single part of the bill. However, the Wall Street Journal reports that Senate conservatives still aren’t satisfied:

Some conservative Senate Republicans, such as Mike Lee, want to immediately start phasing back federal money for expansion enrollees, a process that would take 10 years….Conservatives also hope to use a different formula to calculate federal Medicaid funding that would mean less money for states. The House bill would slash an estimated $839 billion from Medicaid over the next 10 years, according to the CBO. Senate conservatives want to change federal funding of Medicaid in part by pegging it to a different inflation measure, which long term would mean less generous payments to the states than under the House GOP bill.

….Centrist GOP senators are on board with some Medicaid cuts but disagree over how best to implement them. Some say the House plan to halt federal funding for new expansion enrollees in 2020 is too harsh and want a longer sunset of the program.

Nearly a quarter of all Americans depend on Medicaid as their primary (or only) source of health coverage. That’s the American health care system for you. Nonetheless, of course Republican centrists are on board with “some” Medicaid cuts. They only want to quibble over whether 10 million poor people should be tossed out of the program by 2026 or if it would be more humane to toss out 9 million poor people by 2028. Decisions, decisions.

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Senate Republicans Are Arguing About How Badly to Screw the Poor

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Miscellaneous Photo Stuff

by CatalinStapleto Posted on May 13, 2017

Mother Jones

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You can do quick and easy fun stuff with color in Photoshop with the White Balance tool and Replace Color tool. For the former, just click the eyedropper randomly on the image and see what happens. For the latter, choose a color randomly and then change the hue to see what you get. If you feel like screwing around with weird tints and colors, this is a very simple way of doing it. We can all be Andy Warhol for 15 minutes.

Remember my photo of the chopsticks a couple of weeks ago? Here’s what it looks like with various combinations of color manipulation. The original image is at the top, followed by half a dozen false-color images.

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Miscellaneous Photo Stuff

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Donald Trump Sure Does Love Autocrats

by AbdulBrantley Posted on May 13, 2017

Mother Jones

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After the Cold War ended, US presidents largely stopped hosting visits from authoritarian leaders. But as in so many other things, Donald Trump yearns for the world of his youth, when the world’s bastards all got the royal treatment from the White House as long as they were our bastards. Here, as compiled by Jack Hasler and Yonatan Lupu, are the autocrat-hosting records of the past five presidents:

In only his first three months, Trump has already made good progress in returning to the realpolitik of the Cold War. Can he keep this up? Check back in three months and we’ll see how he’s doing.

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Donald Trump Sure Does Love Autocrats

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How Long Is a Long Time, Anyway?

by UlyssesRockwell Posted on May 13, 2017

Mother Jones

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From the “With Friends Like These” file:

President Trump at 5:57 am today: “The Roger Stone report on @CNN is false – Fake News. Have not spoken to Roger in a long time.”

Roger Stone, an hour or so later: “Well, I am not going to contradict the president and I am not going to say when I’ve spoken to him but I will say this, I have spoken to him very recently.”

This is nothing to get hung up on. Trump and Stone probably just have very different ideas of what “long time” and “recently” mean. To a fruit fly researcher, for example, a “long time” might mean three or four days. To an archeologist, “recently” might mean three or four centuries. So this is probably just a humorous misunderstanding.

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How Long Is a Long Time, Anyway?

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