NOW AND THEN THERE'S A FOOL SUCH AS

Now comes the news that Donald Trump entertained two Russian diplomats last week by revealing highly classified intelligence, thereby jeopardizing not only our own intelligence efforts, but also exposing the work of one of our allies in the fight against ISIS.

Paul Ryan said, “Individuals who are extremely careless with classified information should be denied further access to such information.”  Trey Gowdy said, “If this conduct does not warrant prosecution, what does?”

Of course, those quotes are from last year, voicing Republican complaints about Hillary Clinton. 

Today, Republicans are keeping pretty quiet.  Ryan issued a statement saying he’s waiting for more information.  John McCain did what he does best, which is express concern.  As of this writing, Fox News has yet to report on the incident, although to be fair, they are speculating about whether the next FBI Director will reopen an investigation into Hillary Clinton.

My guess is that Republican talking points will be limited to expressions of concern, tempered with the qualification that the President has a right to share our intelligence with whomever he sees fit.   And don’t forget Hillary’s emails.

Remember this every time you hear about a successful ISIS terrorist operation.

WOULD IS STILL SEE SUSPICION IN YOUR EYES?

Back in the 1970s, during the golden age of Watergate, Peter Falk played a rumpled police detective named Columbo.  Columbo had a knack for solving crimes by just letting people talk.  The guilty party invariably gave himself away by talking too much.

Fast forward to 2017, and once again we have a guilty party who can’t keep from talking too much for his own good.  He contradicts himself, he blames his subordinates for his problems, and he’s got an enemies list.  Paranoia still strikes deep.

The whole Russiagate scandal seems so improbable that every so often I wonder whether I’ve stepped through the looking glass into a world where coincidences and random events start to look like conspiracies.  But then the Red Queen screams “Off with his head” at the Director of the FBI, and no conspiracy theory looks completely implausible.

Nevertheless, I don’t blame anyone for being skeptical about some of the theories I’m about to share here.  Skepticism is a good thing.  The higher the stakes, the more skeptical we should be.  So I’m going to share more details of the so-called conspiracy theories that strike me as worth taking seriously.  I report, you decide. 

“Follow the money” was the motto of the Washington Post’s Watergate investigation back in the day, so let’s begin with an overview of Donald Trump’s financial involvement with Russia.  Trump has filed for bankruptcy in the U.S. at least four times, walking away from debts and leaving investors holding the bag.  As a result, he became toxic to American investors, and had to look overseas for money to finance his projects.  He hit the jackpot in Russia, where there are a lot of oligarchs, many of whom were crime bosses with money they needed to hide somewhere.  Eric Trump has been quoted on two separate occasions as bragging to friends that “we have all the funding we need out of Russia.”  All of this is a matter of public record.

Moving from facts to speculation, I’m going to summarize some comments from Adam Davidson, who writes about economics for The New Yorker, and who co-founded NPR’s Planet Money.  He’s not a fringe figure, in other words.  Davidson says:

·         Trump’s organization (including projects led by Ivanka & Jared, Donald Jr., and Eric) works in high risk businesses such as casinos, New York and Miami real estate, and special projects catering to Russian oligarchs.

·         Even by the standards of those businesses, Trump’s organization has a high tolerance for risk.  They’ve done deals with a lot of shady characters, and with a minimum of due diligence.  Trump always goes for quick buck and worries about the consequences later.

·         The Senate Intelligence Committee, with the approval of both parties, has asked the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) for information about money laundering in Trump’s businesses.  The fact that Republican members of the committee have signed off on this request is significant.  It suggests that they’ve seen enough evidence to override their natural reluctance to dig into areas that are likely to prove embarrassing (at the very least) to the nominal leader of their party.

·         The suspicion is that Russian mobsters have used Trump’s businesses to launder – disguise the origin of – money from illegal activities.  We know that in 2012, Trump’s Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City paid a $10 million fine for not reporting years’ worth of suspicions transactions.

·         Davidson says he “would not be surprised to see, within months, pardons for family and associates.”

Would evidence of money laundering for Russian crime bosses, combined with brazenly pardoning his children and friends, constitute impeachable offenses?  I say yes.  Sadly, I suspect that the Republican controlled Congress would look the other way.  Who among us, after all, has never made a quick buck by helping Russian mobsters launder their drug money?  Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell certainly aren’t going to be the ones to cast the first stone.

But of course there’s more.  Let’s look at the Russian interference with our electoral process.  No one claims that the Russians hacked voting machines and changed vote totals (although there is evidence of Russian hacking voter registration data).  What they did was steal some data and use it to introduce information (and apparently some disinformation) into the campaign in order to help Donald Trump.  That much is clear to the FBI, the CIA, and the Director of National Intelligence.  They’ve said so more than once, including under oath in testimony to Congress.  How can they tell?  Evidence shows that Russian hackers obtained data from both Democrats and Republicans, but only used data from Democrats (seeded with some fake emails). 

Russian strategists looked at various opportunities and decided that the Left was America’s weakest link in 2016.  They released tons of emails from the Democratic National Committee that were embarrassing to the Clinton campaign.  There was nothing illegal, but a few of the messages were hostile to Bernie Sanders.  Sure enough, the press jumped on the story.  That turned out to be enough to move some votes away from Clinton and over to the Green and Libertarian Parties; and to cause other people to decide not to vote at all.  Libertarians won 3.3% of the votes in 2016, compared to 0.99% in 2012.  Greens won 1% vs. 0.36% in 2012.  The difference the DNC hack made wasn’t huge, but it may have been enough to tip the election to Trump in key states.

What has yet to be proved is whether or not the Trump campaign collaborated with Russia (and their Triple A farm club, Wikileaks) in this effort.  There is good reason to believe that Trump insiders had advanced knowledge of the Wikileaks operation.  Both Roger Stone and Rudy Giuliani made public statements predicting trouble for Democrats in advance of the email release.  All of that is a matter of record, as is Trump’s infamous “Russia, if you’re listening” plea for Russian hackers to find and release more Clinton emails.  My opinion:  at the very least, Trump and his inner circle knew that Wikileaks was connected to Russia, and was on their side. 

But of course there’s even more.  Let’s turn to Paul Manafort and Mike Flynn.  Both men are in trouble for failing to register as foreign agents.  Flynn also lied to the FBI.  Both are reported to be seeking immunity from prosecution in exchange for their testimony.  Trump and his people have tried to minimize Trump’s connection to these unsavory characters.  When you hear that, remember this.  Manafort was Trump’s campaign manager.  Flynn was Trump’s National Security Advisor.  Yes, Donald Trump put a paid Russian agent on the National Security Council.  All this is, once again, part of the public record.

Now comes the conspiracy theory.  I’m basing what follows on the Twitter accounts and blogs of citizen journalists Louise Mensch (who is a colorful and controversial eccentric), Claude Taylor, and Eric Garland.  You can google ‘em for more information.  I found them by following Rick Wilson on Twitter.  Wilson is a Republican campaign strategist and #NeverTrumper.  He’s not a liberal or a Democrat – he’s just an old fashioned Republican who wants his party back.  He hasn’t endorsed these people or their theories, but he has retweeted them. 

Republicans hate them for obvious reasons.  Mainstream media looks down on them because they don’t have journalism degrees, don’t work for conventional news outlets, aren’t afraid of controversy, and are unabashedly partisan.  MSM finds it particularly galling when these citizen journalists turn out to be right, and Mensch/Taylor/Garland have a better track record than the mainstream media when it comes to predicting the evolution of this scandal.  Most recently, they revealed the existence of the grand jury that issued the warrants that were served by the FBI on a Republican consulting firm in Maryland on Thursday. 

That doesn’t mean they’re infallible, but in my view, it earns them the right to have their arguments taken seriously.  They believe in the FBI and the intelligence community, and they have faith in American institutions.  They are convinced that Trump will be impeached once evidence of his crimes is made public.  They strike me as patriotic to the point of naiveté.  One critic joked that Louise Mensch was a Russian agent working to raise false hope in traditional American institutions.

With that introduction, here’s a summary of their recent claims:

·         There was an explicit attempt on the part of the Trump campaign, involving Donald Trump himself, to collaborate with Russians.  The deal Trump allegedly offered was that in return for Russian help with the campaign, Trump would ease American sanctions on Russia once he took office.  Russia got Trump to change the Republican platform position on the Ukraine as part of the deal.

·         A server located in Trump Tower in Manhattan was used by Alfa Bank (owned by Russians) to launder hacked Facebook data, enabling Russians to use social media to target voters with disinformation during the campaign.  Alfa Bank was the target of one of the FISA warrants issued last October.  Jeff Sessions’ chief of staff, Richard Burt, is a lobbyist for Alfa Bank.  CNN reported in March that the FBI had evidence of “odd” communications between the Alfa Bank server and a server owned by the Trump Organization.

·         Russia, through its Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, negotiated a deal last August with Reince Priebus – then chair of the Republican National Committee, now Trump’s White House Chief of Staff – to make substantial campaign contributions to the Republican Party.  Such contributions are illegal. 

·         They also assert that there are various audio tapes with the voices of prominent Republicans incriminating themselves.  Those tapes came from FBI surveillance of known foreign agents like Kislyak, as well as multiple foreign intelligence services.  If you talk to a Russian, it’s best to assume you’re being recorded by someone.  Beyond these intercepts, there’s also a possibility that one or more of the players was wearing a wire.

·         There are a lot of other players in trouble for one or another aspect of the scandal, including major figures such as Mike Pence, Jeff Sessions, Paul Ryan, and Mitch McConnell on down to Trump staffers like Carter Page and Boris Epshteyn.   This part seems too good to be true.

The fact that very little has yet been proven doesn’t bother me.  I’m willing to give the FBI, the congressional committees, and the grand juries time to do their work.  If there are no indictments by the end of the year, we can say that it was all much ado about nothing.  But it’s early days right now.  At this point in the Watergate scandal, most Republicans and many journalists were convinced that nothing would come of an investigation into what they called “a third rate burglary.”

Critics from the opposite end of the political spectrum complain that it doesn’t matter whether any of these allegations are true, because Trump and Sessions and their new FBI Director will find a way to stop the investigations.  The bad guys will get away with it. 

But that theory ignores two factors.  First, it overlooks the work of New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, who has jurisdiction because many of Trump’s businesses are headquartered New York.  Trump has no authority over the New York AG.  Second, it fails to acknowledge the potential response of the intelligence community if Trump were to shut down their investigations.  They have the capacity to drive Trump crazy with surgically targeted leaks.  So do the intelligence agencies of our allies, if they decide Trump’s cozy relationship with Putin threatens their interests.  If – IF – Trump is genuinely compromised, we’ll find out about it one way or another.   

There’s one criticism of the Mensch/Taylor/Garland theories that has some merit.  Pragmatists worry that anti-Trump forces will pin all their hopes on the criminal justice system and the congressional impeachment process.  They argue that real key to better government is electing Democrats.  I agree wholeheartedly.

But this isn’t an either/or choice.  We can hope for vindication through the courts and Congress AND participate in various Resistance activities AND work to flip the House and Senate to Democratic control in 2018.   

None of this speculation is guaranteed to pan out.  Personally, I find a lot of it plausible, but your mileage may vary.  Nevertheless, Russian interference in the 2016 election is a fact, and I think any objective observer would have to agree that there are a helluva lot of Trump insiders with ties to a helluva lot of Russians.  What are the odds that no laws were broken along the way?

However you answer that question, now you know what I’m thinking and where most of it came from.  You can decide for yourself whether I’m a raving lunatic or not. 

ALL GOD'S CHILDREN GOT SHOES

And they’re beginning to drop.  Before noon today:

·         The FBI seized files from Strategic Campaign Group, Republican campaign consultants in Annapolis MD.  I’m guessing this has to do with money laundering (Russian money going into Republican coffers), but we’ll see.

·         Acting FBI Director McCabe told a Senate committee that he and the entire FBI admired James Comey (contrary to Team Trump’s assertions); refused to confirm Trump’s claim that he wasn’t under investigation; called the investigation into Russian election interference “major” (again contradicting the White House line) and promised to tell Congress if the White House tried to interfere in the investigation.  Today, FBI agents were replacing their web photos with photos of James Comey, a practice ordinarily reserved for mourning the death of an agent.

·         Trump made (further) fools of all his flacks when he admitted on NBC this morning that he’d intended to fire Comey no matter what Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein wrote as justification.  That eviscerates his stated rationale for the firing, and opens him up to charges of obstruction of justice.  Not only that, but the bizarre paragraph in his letter of dismissal, claiming that Comey had three times assured Trump that he wasn’t under investigation, may have amounted to a waiver of executive privilege with regard to the Comey firing.  Spicer, Sanders, and Conway are being paid to sacrifice their reputations by repeating Trump’s lies.  But Trump’s inability to stick to an alibi for even 48 hours ought to serve as a warning to people like Mike Pence and congressional Republicans who trot out dutifully to parrot talking points that evaporate before their very eyes.  I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again.  Everything Trump touches turns to shit.   

Meanwhile, Louise Mensch, whose conspiracy theories are looking better every day, outlined the RICO case against Reince Priebus and Paul Ryan.  She says that the FBI has audio tape of Reince Priebus at a secret meeting with Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, agreeing to accept laundered Russian money into the campaign.  She says the FBI also has tape of Paul Ryan acknowledging that he was aware of this scheme.  I know this sounds preposterous.  But is there anything about this scandal that doesn’t sound preposterous? 

RICO is the Racketeer and Corrupt Organizations Act, although you could be forgiven if you called it the Republican and Corrupt Organizations Act. 

Can’t tell the players without a scorecard?  Here are a couple of links that should help. 

http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2017/3/3/1634738/-Evidence-of-Trump-s-Connections-with-Kremlin-Expanded-Now-with-Citations-Links?_=2017-04-02T12:33:31.766-07:00

http://m.dailykos.com/story/2017/4/2/1649582/-Part-II-of-Compilation-of-Trump-s-Russian-Connections

LOOKING FOR CLUES AT THE SCENE OF THE CRIME

If President Obama had fired James Comey when he needlessly re-opened the Clinton email controversy and handed the election to Trump, I’d have cheered. But that moment passed, and since then, Comey appears to have been doing his job, a part of which involved investigating credible claims of illegal collaboration between Russia and various members of Trump’s campaign and administration. That makes Trump’s decision to fire Comey now a very different proposition from the choice that faced Obama last October.

The next several days will determine the future of the republic, as well as the future of the Republican Party. I expect Republicans to be divided between those who will argue that everything’s fine and there’s no need for an independent investigation, and those who will profess to be concerned (perhaps even worried), but who will ultimately concluded that there’s no need for an independent investigation. Who has time to worry about treason when there’s an opportunity to take health care away from millions of people while passing massive tax cuts for the super-rich? Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell are keeping their eyes on the prize.

There may be a few Republicans who issue stern statements. Arizona’s two senators have done that, and there are probably others I haven’t seen yet. But talk is cheap. Unless they support an independent investigation, they’re complicit in Russian espionage.

I fear that the Republican Party is hopelessly compromised, but our judicial system is not, at least not yet. Two weeks ago, Louise Mensch and Claude Taylor were conspiracy theorists. This week, their allegations are slowly being verified. Word on the street (Camino de Twitter) is that one federal grand jury has already prepared nine indictments, and another will soon issue sixteen. Even in the unlikely event that Trump and the suddenly un-recused Jeff Sessions find a way to quash those indictments, Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey said on CNN today that a grand jury in New York has been empaneled. New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman can’t be fired and won’t be bullied by Donald Trump.

As John McCain remarked, this scandal is a many-legged centipede, and there are more shoes waiting to drop. The stupid runs deep in the Trump White House. They don’t seem to understand that too many people know too much about what they did. And not just in this country. Intelligence agencies around the world share information. It was British intelligence, after all, who brought Trump’s Russian kompromat to the FBI’s attention last fall. Perhaps Teresa May will keep Trump’s secrets. But will Emmanuel Macron in France do the same, especially after Trump basically endorsed Marie Le Pen? Will Germany’s Angela Merkel?

Our allies know that Russia is interfering in their own elections, and they are now beginning to worry about the integrity of the American intelligence community. If they determine that Trump has compromised the FBI and/or the CIA, they won’t allow their own intelligence agencies to be put at risk. Information on Trump’s Russian scandal will either be leaked or perhaps even released outright.

James Comey is now the third person Donald Trump has fired for investigating his Russian connections. That is obstruction of justice, plain and simple. As Josh Marshall put it, “There is only one reasonable conclusion that can be drawn from the decision to fire Comey: that there is grave wrongdoing at the center of the Russia scandal and that it implicates the President.”

TRUMPAGEDDON

So now we have a full blown constitutional crisis.  Trump knows he’s in big trouble, and he’s fired FBI Director James Comey.  In his letter of dismissal, Trump stated three times that he wasn’t under investigation.  That’s a pretty good indication that he is, in fact, under investigation.

This is the equivalent of Watergate’s Saturday Night Massacre.  I don’t have much faith in congressional Republicans, but luckily this mess may be out of their hands.  Federal and state grand juries have been empaneled.  Indictments are being prepared.  Too many people know too much about the Trump-Russian connection for this to be swept under the rug. 

My guess is that the intelligence community won’t take this lying down.  They’ll do everything at their disposal, short of jeopardizing pending criminal cases, to make it clear what’s going down.  Comey and Yates will be heard from again.  The truth is out there!

WHEN THE NIGHT HAS COME AND THE LAND IS DARK

A few quick thoughts as we wait for the Senate to begin its work on the abomination passed by the House – which is basically a huge tax cut for the rich, disguised as a health care plan.

I wish it were otherwise, but my guess is the Senate will pass some version of an Obamacare repeal.  Even assuming Senate Democrats remain united in opposition, they’ll still need at least two Republican defections to block the Senate’s Obamacare replacement, whatever it may look like.  It’s not clear who those two Republicans would be.  Several Republican Senators (notably Arizona’s John McCain and Jeff Flake) make a great show of being mavericks, but when it comes time to vote, they do what Mitch McConnell tells them to do.

McConnell is a despicable human being, but he’s undeniably good at manipulating the legislative process.  Whether he junks the House bill and starts over from scratch, or decides to tinker with the smoldering dumpster fire that Paul Ryan handed him, he’ll come up with something slightly less cruel than the House bill.  That will be enough for the usual suspects in the press to call it a compromise and accuse Democrats of being obstructionists

One silver lining in these dark clouds is that Republicans now own health care in America.  Every bad thing that happens to sick people is going to be their fault.  They’ll be responsible for the higher premiums and pre-existing condition issues.  But they’ll also get blamed for overcrowded emergency rooms, billing errors, and all the little frustrations that are built into every health care system.  They broke it and they’ve bought it.  I predict that they won’t enjoy it.

The other silver lining in this fiasco is that it has spotlighted the hypocrisy of so-called pro-life Republicans.  No one who was genuinely pro-life would have voted for that bill.  Looking at you, Alabama Congressman Mo Brooks, the doofus who told CNN that “people who lead good lives” won’t have to worry about pre-existing conditions.  And at you, Idaho Congressman Raul Labrador, who said "Nobody dies because they don't have access to health care."

Republicans have such a twisted view of morality.  They’re vehemently pro-fetus, but once the fetus turns into a baby, they could care less what happens it.  Genuinely pro-life people might well oppose abortion, but they’d also want to protect people who are actually, you know, alive and breathing.  They’d support birth control to prevent unwanted pregnancies.  They’d support funding for prenatal care, for infant and child care, for school lunch programs, and other life affirming policies like universal health care.  They would, like that well known Christian Pope Francis, oppose the death penalty and be sympathetic to immigrants fleeing political oppression and/or famine. 

Republicans hate all of those things. They enjoy being mean.  They care more about guns than about children.  Actually, Republicans care more about guns than just about anything. 

I continue to be optimistic about the longer term.  Even rabid Republican commentator Charles Krauthammer speculates that this House bill is simply a detour on the road to a single payer system sometime in the next seven years.  For the first time in my life, I’m hoping that Krauthammer is right about something.

But seven years is a long time to wait if you’re broke and sick.  Millions of households will be affected (an estimated 40,000+ people in Arizona’s 2nd Congressional District alone), and a lot of them will be Republicans (looking at you, McSally voters).  Democrats have to make vulnerable Republicans pay for selling out their constituents.

HERE COMES THE JUDGE

It’s a relief to be able to report some good news for a change, even if the “news” is partly speculative at this point.  A citizen journalist named Claude Taylor, who was on Bill Clinton’s White House staff, and thus might plausibly have cultivated some sources in Washington DC, has said on Twitter that at least two federal grand juries are actively investigating Donald Trump and his associates.  FBI Director James Comey essentially confirmed this report in Congressional testimony yesterday.  In addition, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman is reportedly pursuing investigations of his own, since a lot of the financial activity in question took place in his jurisdiction.

Estimates of the number of individuals under investigation range from 28 to 42.  Potential charges include money laundering (Russian mob money passing through Trump businesses), failure to register as an agent of a foreign government, failure to report income, violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (bribery), perjury, and the ever-popular collusion with Russian efforts to interfere with the election.

Crime does not pay, kids.  I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – these guys aren’t nearly as smart as they think they are, and quite a few of them are going down. 

If you’d like to hear Keith Olbermann review this information, check out https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pS92ONVte8&list=PL0hKMB1-xkc-XWNf9VL-LxVYysdHpjyMF&index=1  

WHAT THEY CAN NEVER KILL WENT ON

As Joe Hill said, “Don’t mourn.  Organize.”  Step one – call your senators and let them know where you stand.  Even if one or both of them is a solid no vote, call and express your appreciation.

Step two is, as Jon Lovett wrote, “Say these names like Arya Stark.”  Curbelo, Valadao, Paulsen, Royce, Issa, Roskam, Knight, Walters, McSally, Denham, Sessions, Rohrbacher, Culberson. 

Those are the 13 Republicans in the House who voted for the Republican “Death To The Poor” bill, and represent districts carried by Hillary Clinton last year.  If you live in one of those districts, please get to work.  I’ve got McSally.

Last thing, and then I’ll try to shut up for the day.  I’m proud that no Democrat voted for this evil bill.  The next time you hear someone say there’s no difference between the two parties, you might bring that fact to their attention.  Thousands of people will die if this bill becomes law, and their blood is entirely on Republican hands.

SHE ACHES JUST LIKE A WOMAN

Incredibly, it gets worse. New York Magazine says that treatment for rape/sexual assault is also a pre-existing condition in the Republican bill: "In addition to rape, postpartum depression, Cesarean sections, and surviving domestic violence are all considered preexisting conditions. Companies can also deny coverage for gynecological services and mammograms." Apparently for Republicans, just being a woman amounts to having pre-existing conditions.

EDIT May 6: 

Since I highlighted New York Magazine’s claim that the Republican Obamacare repeal bill made rape and sexual assault a pre-existing condition, I feel obliged to point to this article from the Washington Post that says the claim is mostly false.  The Post article says that there are circumstances that could result in rape becoming a pre-existing condition, but they are rare and unlikely.  They base their argument on the fact that most states currently have laws prohibiting that sort of discrimination.

In my view it’s problematic that the Republican bill leaves this, and other key matters, to the states.  Wisconsin’s Scott Walker has already floated the possibility of letting insurers in his state raise their rates for pre-existing conditions.  The status quo could deteriorate quickly.  But for now, I’ll accept the Post’s premise.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2017/05/06/no-the-gop-health-bill-doesnt-classify-rape-or-sexual-assault-as-a-preexisting-condition/?tid=sm_tw&utm_term=.8becd7021d53

http://nymag.com/thecut/2017/05/under-new-healthcare-bill-rape-is-a-pre-existing-condition.html

HERE THERE BE MONSTERS

Below is a partial list of the Republican Obamacare replacement bill’s designated pre-existing conditions, as posted on Twitter by Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown.  The cost of your health insurance will go up – perhaps by thousands of dollars each year – if you have any of these conditions.  I have, or have had, 8 of them.  Raising rates for pre-existing conditions is far from the only thing wrong with this bill, but the list is a graphic illustration of the magnitude of the Republican assault on American health. 

As I write this, it appears that Republicans in the House have enough votes to pass the bill, despite the fact that they haven’t read it and haven’t seen the Congressional Budget Office’s impact assessment (since the CBO, like everyone else, hasn’t seen a copy of the bill).   

Anyone who votes for this bill is a monster.  There’s no reasoning with them, no possibility of accomodation or compromise.  The only thing to do is throw them out of office.  Please, let’s hold them accountable in 2018.

Here is Senator Brown’s list:  anorexia, anxiety, arrhythmia, arthritis, asthma, atrial fibrillation, autism, bariatric surgery, basal cell carcinoma, bipolar disorder, blood clot, breast cancer, bulimia, bypass surgery, celiac disease, cerebral aneurysm, cerebral embolism, cerebral palsy, cerebral thrombosis, cervical cancer, colon cancer, colon polyps, congestive heart failure, COPD, Crohn's disease, cystic fibrosis, DMD, depression, diabetes, disabilities, Down syndrome, eating disorder, enlarged prostate, epilepsy, glaucoma, gout, heart disease, heart murmur, heartburn, hemophilia, hepatitis C, herpes, high cholesterol, hypertension, hysterectomy, kidney disease, kidney stones, kidney transplant, leukemia, lung cancer, lupus, lymphoma, mental health issues, migraines, MS, muscular dystrophy, narcolepsy, nasal polyps, obesity, OCD, organ transplant, osteoporosis, pacemaker, panic disorder, paralysis, paraplegia, Parkinson's disease, pregnancy, restless leg syndrome, schizophrenia, seasonal affective disorder, seizures, sickle cell disease, skin cancer, sleep apnea, sleep disorders, stent, stroke, thyroid issues, tooth disease, tuberculosis, and ulcers.

I WAS BORN WITH A CURIOUS MIND

As I write this, we are 90 days into the presidency of Donald Trump.  He has done cruel, stupid, dangerous things, and I don’t want to minimize their impact.  Even if, by some miracle, Bernie Sanders became president tomorrow, we’d be months, if not years, undoing the damage.

Nevertheless, the good guys persisted.  As bad as Trump has been, it could have been worse.  We can start by celebrating the fact that Trump is an ignorant fool, with advisors and allies cut from the same cloth.  They overreached on the Muslim ban, fell flat on their faces with Obamacare repeal, and clearly have no clue about how to implement the rest of their agenda.  Erstwhile golden boy Paul Ryan has been exposed as a fraud, and Trump’s man in the House of Representatives, Jason Chaffetz, has announced that he won’t run for re-election.  The two men Trump was counting on to stop the investigation into Russiagate, Jeff Sessions and Devin Nunes, have had to step aside.  The Senate Intelligence Committee, at least, appears to be serious about getting to the bottom of the scandal.  Steve Bannon is in disfavor, and perhaps on the verge of exile.  Even Trump’s comrade in pussy-grabbing, Bill O’Reilly, has been fired by Fox News. 

Best of all, Democrats are fighting back, with progressive citizens leading the way.  Democratic politicians know that if they collude with Trump and congressional Republicans, they’ll be primaried in their next election.  This is no time to relax our vigilance, of course, but I’m celebrating 90 days of a resistance that has been more successful than I dared hope on January 20.

I wonder what the next 90 days hold in store.  I know even less than Jon Snow, but there are a few things I’m especially curious about.  

I wonder if Jason Chaffetz will serve out his current term or quit early.  When a prominent politician abruptly resigns to spend more time with his family, it usually means news of an extra-marital affair is about to surface, but since Republicans these days are drawn to Russians like moths to a flame, it’s not impossible that there are Russiagate implications here.

Speaking of which, I wonder what hapless doofus Devin Nunes found in those classified FBI documents on Russiagate on his midnight ride to the White House.  Whatever it was, it spooked him pretty badly.  And I wonder why his first impulse was to run to Paul Ryan for advice.  All that did was insure that Ryan was complicit in the scandal, whatever it is.  I’ll bet Ryan was thrilled.  Now “what did Ryan know, and when did he know it” is a legitimate question. 

Earlier this month, former Trump advisor Carter Page (subject of a FISA warrant) was all over TV, dropping hints that he’s not going to be anybody’s fall guy.  At the same time, Moscow Mike Flynn was publicly fishing for an immunity deal, only to be told no thanks.  I wonder how long it will take before one or both of them decide to turn state’s evidence in return for leniency.

I’m curious about CIA Director Mike Pompeo’s comment last Friday that Wikileaks was “a non-state hostile intelligence service often embedded by state actors like Russia.”  You could read that as a rebuke to Donald Trump, who proclaimed “We love Wikileaks” during last fall’s campaign.  Or you could read it with an emphasis on “non-state” and assume it’s an attempt to help immunize Trump against possible articles of impeachment accusing him of working with a foreign power to influence the election.  Will Trump’s impeachment hinge on the question of whether Julian Assange was a Russian agent, or merely a Hillary hater working closely with Vladimir Putin?  Is there a meaningful difference between those two positions?

I’m really curious about British conspiracy theorist Louise Mensch, former Conservative Member of Parliament who now lives in New York with her husband (who’s the manager of the band Metallica!).  The day before the election, Mensch wrote an obscure article asserting that a FISA court had allowed the FBI to surveil an American citizen in conjunction with an investigation into the connection between Donald Trump and Russian banks.  She was ignored by the mainstream media, but she turned out to have been substantially correct. 

Now Mensch has written that Carter Page went to Moscow last August to negotiate a deal with Russia on Trump’s behalf, offering to implement policies favorable to Russia in exchange for help in winning the election.  She also says that former Trump advisor Boris Epshteyn is a Russian agent, and that American intelligence has a recording of Epshteyn, Page, and Paul Manafort discussing Page’s impending trip to Moscow on behalf of Donald Trump.  

Sounds crazy, right?  It gets crazier.  Mensch warned her Twitter followers not to get “too attached to anyone north of Hatch.”  That would be President pro tempore of the Senate Orrin Hatch, not Hatch, New Mexico, chile capital of the world.  She was referring to the line of presidential succession, clearly implying that not only Donald Trump, but also Mike Pence and Paul Ryan have been caught up in Russiagate and will be forced out of office.  As much as I love a good conspiracy theory, this seems a little too good to be true. 

But even if indictments and impeachment fall through, there’s still the 25th amendment to the Constitution, which allows for the removal of a President who is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.”  Lately, Donald Trump has had nothing to offer but rockets’ red glare and bombs bursting in air.  That makes cable news was happy, because nothing says “Presidential” like blowing foreigners up. 

But Trump managed to commit a couple of gaffes at the annual Easter Egg Roll.  Melania had to elbow him to remind him to put his hand over his heart during the national anthem.  Then he autographed a kid’s MAGA hat – and threw it into the crowd instead of simply handing it back to the kid. 

He also gave a weird interview on North Korea, where he obviously couldn’t remember Kim Jong Un’s name, repeatedly calling him “this gentleman,” and sounding very much as though he thought that Kim, his father, and his grandfather were all one person. What the heck, they’re all named Kim.  It’s like they’re deliberately trying to confuse us.

All that makes me wonder about Trump’s mental condition.  Something’s just not right with our 45th president.  Yes, he’s narcissistic, dishonest, and not particularly smart.  Nothing new there.  I’m talking about his struggles with language.  He’s worse than inarticulate.  George W. Bush was inarticulate; we know what an inarticulate president sounds like.  Donald Trump is incoherent.  (See the link below for a classic example of Trump’s digressive, recursive speech.)

Maybe it’s just the pressure of being POTUS that’s getting to him, but Trump (whose father had Alzheimer’s) sure seems to be exhibiting symptoms of cognitive impairment.  His odd behavior this past week also included a speech in Wisconsin where he twice referred to Paul Ryan as “Ron,” along with his infamous chocolate cake interview on Fox, when he said he’d dropped Tomahawk missiles on Iraq rather than Syria. 

The medical establishment is famously reluctant to speculate about any president’s mental health, but a few neurologists have begun to point to the symptoms of frontotemporal dementia (FTD), which are eerily similar to behaviors we’ve seen recently from Donald Trump.  From the Alzheimer’s Organization website:  “Although people with Alzheimer's may have trouble thinking of the right word or remembering names, they tend to have less difficulty making sense when they speak, understanding the speech of others, or reading than those with FTD.”

Trump is known to be a reluctant reader.  In his first few weeks as president, he avoided intelligence briefings entirely.  Finally he demanded shorter briefing papers consisting mainly of bullet points, graphs, and maps.  Fair enough, we know that adult learning styles differ.  Maybe Trump is an auditory learner.  But what about the way he talks?

In interviews, even friendly ones, Trump’s responses veer off on odd tangents, and he begins to repeat certain words or phrases compulsively.  Either he doesn’t know the answer to the question he was asked, or he can’t find words to explain his position.  Neither possibility is terribly reassuring.

I wonder who will be president a year from now.

http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/1/11/14238274/trumps-speaking-style-press-conference-linguists-explain

JUST SAY THE WORDS AND WE'LL BEAT THE

I’m retired, and I don’t fly nearly as much as I used to.  That’s a relief, actually, because flight delays, cancellations, and missed connections seem to be more and more a routine part of the air travel experience.  And then there’s United Airlines.  A company that once boasted of its “friendly skies” now seems to be actively trying to drive customers away.   

A couple of weeks ago, United stopped two teenage girls from boarding a flight because the girls were wearing the sort of leggings that millions of teenage girls routinely wear.  Not content with the negative publicity from that incident, United outdid itself on Sunday when they had airport security drag a passenger off their plane in Chicago.  A fellow passenger recorded the incident on her smart phone, and the video has gone viral.

As I understand it, the plane was full of paying customers, leaving no room for four United employees who were trying to get to Louisville to crew a flight there.  United decided that their employees were more important than their ticketed customers, and launched its usual “we’re in an overbook situation” spiel, offering to pay passengers who were willing to delay their trip $1000.  Apparently they came up a couple of seats short.  Rather than leave two employees behind, they approached an older Chinese-American couple and told them they had to get off the plane.  The man refused to comply, and three security personnel picked him up and dragged him out.

United obviously had better alternatives than the one they chose.  The easiest thing to do would have been to increase the value of the voucher offer.  Sooner or later, a couple of people would have taken the money.  It would have cost the airline a few hundred extra dollars.  This incident will wind up costing them a lot more than that, both in legal settlements and bad publicity. 

Newspaper accounts indicate that the United employees needed to be in Louisville on Monday.  The flight was scheduled to leave Chicago early Sunday evening.  Were there no other flights out of O’Hare (whether on United or another carrier) that could have gotten the employees to Louisville by the next day?  Or if flying wasn’t an option, it’s only a five hour drive from Chicago to Louisville.  Why not rent your employees a car and let your paying customers stay on the plane?

The other major unanswered question is how United chose its victims.  Do they have a policy with criteria (last ticket bought, last boarding pass issued) to guide the choice?  Or did the captain go eeny-meeny-miny-moe, and just happen to land on two minorities?  For that matter, why didn’t they identify the two unlucky passengers at the gate, break the news to them there and avoid a scene?  Making the decision after everyone was on the plane and seated was a big mistake. 

And – pro tip of the day for overpaid executives – when you find yourself in the middle of a PR disaster, don’t make things worse by resorting to bureaucratic bafflegab.  Apologize, promise to fix the problem, and pledge to make whatever changes are necessary to avoid a repeat of the situation.

It seems bizarre that airlines are allowed to overbook – to sell more spaces on a flight than they actually have available.  How is that even legal?  And since transporting flight crews from airport to airport is a routine part of doing business, why can’t airlines factor that into their calculations about seat allotments?  The incident in Chicago was a result of two kinds of bad management, and it doesn’t surprise me that passengers are beginning to revolt.

The days of flying the friendly skies were long gone before I ever got on an airplane, and the quality of the air travel experience has deteriorated further in recent years.  I’ll put up with TSA lines, cramped seats and minimal amenities, especially on domestic flights.  Just don’t make me miss my flight because your business model involves selling more seats than your planes actually have.  As a paying customer, all I ask is that you get me to my destination more or less on time and don’t lose my luggage.  That’s the only job airlines have.  Just do your job.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmQq6yLe2ww

BUT THE SAME GUIDED MISSILES WILL GET YOU IN THE END

As a relatively new member of the obscure “Long Facebook Screed” branch of punditry, I have some limited sympathy for my more prominent brethren who get paid for their work and are thus expected to have something worthwhile to say on every topic du jour. I’m getting tired, though, of pundits who fall back on the cliché about “this is the day that Donald Trump became President.”

For the record, Donald Trump became President on January 20, 2017. He did not become president on the day he managed to give a speech to Congress without deviating substantially from the script on the teleprompter. He certainly did not become president when he gave the order to launch 59 Tomahawk missiles at an airbase in Syria that had advance warning of the attack.

Although he didn’t bother to notify Congress, Trump did call Vladimir Putin to give him a heads up about the impending airstrike, and of course Putin passed the information on to his pal, Bashar al-Assad, who ordered the Syrian Air Force to move its planes to safety. The base resumed operations within 24 hours.

So what was the point of the exercise? TV news got some footage of explosions that they could re-run endlessly, and the Neo-Con interventionist wing of Pundit-American community got the jolt of adrenalin that they’ve been longing for. What they really want is war with Iran, but this was a good first step. CNN’s Fareed Zakaria provided the icing on the cake when he proclaimed that the missile strike meant that Trump had finally become President.

And that, in truth, was the real point of the exercise – a low risk, mostly inconsequential military strike that would impress the gullible media. Video of missile strikes is the journalistic equivalent of “Ooh, look, squirrel!” The more the press falls for it, the more Trump will use it, because it solves two of his biggest problems.

First, it diverts press attention from unpleasant realities at home, like investigations into the Russian election hack and the infighting among his advisors. Perhaps equally importantly, Trump lives for praise from cable news. Now he’s found a way to get it. Give them some tough talk and a few explosions, and much of the chattering class turns into a cheering section.

That sort of attitude is going to get people killed. Lots of them. Trump’s enablers in the press will be complicit in those deaths.

Instead of admiring the fireworks show, they should be asking hard questions. How did this make America safer? For that matter, how did it help Syrians? Why did we spend $60 million to temporarily disable one Syrian airbase? How will that stop Bashar al-Assad from gassing more people? What do you intend to do when new pictures of dead children show up on CNN? Do you have a plan to stop the mass murders? What happened to your secret plan to destroy ISIS that’s fifty days overdue?

Of course, there’s no plan, secret or otherwise. In military affairs as in everything else, Trump operates by impulse rather than strategy. That, too, will get people killed.

THESE FOOLISH THINGS REMIND ME OF

In September, 1975, TV executives involved with ABC Sports and Monday Night Football launched a short-lived variety show called “Saturday Night Live With Howard Cosell.”  It had a comedy unit called “The Prime Time Players,” featuring Bill Murray. 

A month later, NBC launched its famous late night “Saturday Night Live,” which lampooned Cosell by calling its cast “The Not Ready For Prime Time Players.”  Cosell’s show was cancelled after 18 episodes.  NBC’s “Saturday Night Live,” which recruited Bill Murray in 1977, is still around, though they dropped their “Not Ready for Prime Time Players” bit after the fifth season. 

As Karl Marx wrote in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, history repeats itself, “first as tragedy, then as farce.”  Which brings us to the administration of Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States.  Less than a hundred days into the Trump administration, it is already clear that these guys aren’t ready for prime time.  Here’s a quote that sums up the Trump presidency so far: "The truth is these are not very smart guys and things got out of hand."  Hold that thought.

I’ll turn 70 in a couple of weeks, and I’ve seen a lot of political scandals.  Some of them tempests in a teapot, blown out of proportion for political purposes (Whitewater, Benghazi).  Some of them involved military failures (pretty much every war in my adult lifetime, from Vietnam to Iraq), which always had political repercussions, even if there was no consensus on what went wrong (“bad idea in the first place” vs. “traitors in our midst sabotaged our military successes.”)  We’ve seen failures in regulatory oversight of the financial sector that ruined lives, and we’ve seen failures of personal morality that ruined careers.  And we’ve seen Watergate, the so-called third rate burglary that ended the presidency of Richard Nixon.

Donald Trump’s intentions are abominable, but his attempts to implement them have been comically inept.  Even things that aren’t illegal have been dumb and dumber.  We’ve watched Trump’s personal insecurity, which led him to destroy his credibility by complaining about coverage of the size of the crowd at his inauguration, and inflating the magnitude of his Electoral College victory.  We’ve seen Trump’s failure even to nominate people to fill hundreds of senior positions in the executive branch, which limits the administration’s ability to achieve its agenda.  Don’t get me wrong – given what Trump and the Republicans are trying to accomplish, I’m glad they’re incompetent.  But the fact remains that they’re incompetent.

Nevertheless, the piece de resistance among Donald Trump’s scandals is the Russian intervention in our presidential election.  Trump fans have repeatedly protested that no wrongdoing has yet been proven.  True enough, but the operative word in that sentence is “yet.”  Last week brought word that Mike Flynn is asking for immunity from prosecution in exchange for his testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee.  As Flynn and Trump both noted last fall, you don’t ask for immunity unless you’re guilty of something.

Common sense says that Republicans who honestly believe that Donald Trump is innocent would be pushing hard for an independent, impartial investigation:  clear the air, refute the allegations of impropriety, and let Trump move forward.  But that’s not what happening.  Instead, Trump and his defenders are trying to shut down or obstruct the ongoing investigations. 

That’s pretty convincing evidence that Trump’s defenders do NOT in fact believe that Trump is innocent.  It suggests precisely the opposite – they’re scared to death of what an investigation might reveal.  As long as Trump and his crew keep acting like they’ve got something to hide, there’s no reason to overthink the matter.  They’ve got something to hide.

There are major differences between Watergate and Russiagate, but a comparison of the two scandals may be useful in helping to project a possible Trump endgame.  The arc of the earlier scandal looked something like this. 

1.       In June, 1972, Republican functionaries burglarized the files of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate office complex, hoping to find information that would help Richard Nixon win re-election.  But Nixon didn’t need any extra help; he won in a landslide.  Stealing files from Democrats was both reckless and wholly unnecessary.

2.       An FBI investigation traces the burglars to Nixon’s re-election campaign.  The burglars are sentenced to prison in January, 1973.

3.       Nixon and his top aides, worried that more scrutiny of the Watergate break-in would reveal additional illegal/ unethical activity, lie to the Attorney General about their knowledge of the burglary.  The cover-up takes on a life of its own. 

4.       Over the spring and summer of 1973, the cover-up begins to unravel, as key aides begin to take plea bargains and tell what they know.  The investigation gets closer and closer to Nixon himself. 

5.       In July, 1973, a Senate committee learns that Nixon secretly taped conversations in the White House Oval Office.  The committee subpoenas the tapes, which Nixon refuses to supply, citing “national security” reasons. 

6.       On October 20, 1973, Nixon fires the Special Watergate Prosecutor for demanding the Oval Office tapes.  Senior Justice Department officials resign in protest, and the firing, known as the Saturday Night Massacre, is widely seen as an admission of guilt.  By the end of the month, polls indicated that a plurality of Americans favored Nixon’s impeachment. 

7.       Over the next ten months, the impeachment process played out, as more and more reluctant Republicans saw the writing on the wall.  Nixon’s attempts at covering up a trivial crime amounted to obstruction of justice.  He was impeached by the House in late July, 1974, and resigned on August 9, 1974, before his Senate trial began.  Nearly twenty people, ranging from the Attorney General and senior aides to random burglars hired by campaign officials, did time in prison as a result of the scandal. 

8.       Nixon’s successor, Gerald Ford, pardoned Nixon on September 8, 2974.

Eight months after Donald Trump’s infamous “Russia, if you’re listening” speech, I’d say we’re somewhere in the vicinity of the fourth bullet in the Watergate saga. 

Trump has been able to bluff, bully, and buy his way out of trouble his entire life.  He and his close advisors (Roger Stone and Rudy Giuliani) haven’t been able to resist bragging about their advance knowledge of the Russian hacks (see the link below for details).  Their arrogance will come back to haunt them. 

Trump’s sock puppet, Devin Nunes, has been comically inept at trying to stall or derail his House Intelligence Committee investigation.  In the past two weeks, it has become so clear that Nunes is working for Trump that the Senate Intelligence Committee has basically said, “Step aside, sonny, and let the grownups handle this.”

Trump defenders who cling to the point that no wrongdoing has yet been proved would do well to remember the Watergate timeline.  It’s early days yet.  A year and a half after the Watergate break-in, most Republicans in Congress were still defending Nixon.  They lived to regret it. 

Early in this essay, I quoted something that summed up the Trump presidency:  "The truth is these are not very smart guys and things got out of hand."  That quote came from a man who was known as Deep Throat, the anonymous government employee who helped Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein uncover the Watergate scandal in the early 1970s. 

The men around Trump, like the men around Nixon, think they’re smart enough to break the rules and get away with it.  They’re about to find out how wrong they’ve been.

THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE

Is Donald Trump a Chinese agent?  Thomas Friedman in the New York Times puts it this way.  “So you tell me that Trump is not a Chinese agent. The only other explanation is that he’s ignorant and unread — that he’s never studied the issues or connected the dots between them — so Big Coal and Big Oil easily manipulated him into being their chump, who just tweeted out their talking points to win votes here and there — without any thought to grand strategy. Surely that couldn’t be true?” 

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/29/opinion/trump-is-a-chinese-agent.html?em_pos=small&emc=edit_ty_20170329&nl=opinion-today&nl_art=3&nlid=76218355&ref=headline&te=1

THE HONEYMOON'S OVER

Franklin Delano Roosevelt became President in March, 1933, in the midst of a genuine crisis – the Great Depression.  In July of that year, FDR devoted one of his weekly radio broadcasts (known as Fireside Chats) to a review of what Congress had accomplished during its hundred day session.  Basically, the President and Congress created the New Deal, which began the long process of saving the banking system, putting people back to work, and saving the economy.  That speech, and those accomplishments, were so memorable that “the first 100 days” became a benchmark for every succeeding American president. 

We are two-thirds of the way through Donald Trump’s first 100 days in the White House.  He, too, took office in a crisis, although the crisis was him.  Even a cursory examination of his life indicates that he’s King Midas in reverse.  Everything he touches turns to shit.  On January 19, despite Trump’s claims to the contrary, the economy was strong; our network of international alliances was effective; and President Obama left office with historically high approval ratings. 

Donald Trump claimed to be a great businessman, a brilliant negotiator, and the only man who could make America great again.  His biggest campaign promises were that he would deport Muslims and illegal immigrants; build a wall along the Mexican border (and make Mexico pay for it); defeat ISIS quickly; and repeal Obamacare and replace it with something that provided better coverage for less money.

Most of these things would get done on his first day in office.  It was going to be easy. “We’re going to win so much, you’re going to get tired of winning.”  After all, he had Republican majorities in both houses of Congress.  What could go wrong?  Let us count the ways King Midas in Reverse has struggled.  Here is a summary of Trump’s accomplishments two-thirds of the way through his first 100 days as president.

Trump and congressional Republicans promised to repeal and replace Obamacare on Day 1.  Instead, Day 1 was devoted to Trump whining because the press accurately reported that attendance at his inauguration was smaller than attendance at President Obama’s inaugurations.  His bizarre insistence on making obviously false claims ended his honeymoon with the press almost before it began.  Instead of giving Trump the benefit of the doubt, the press began to make a point of challenging his honesty. 

On Day 2, millions of women (and men) participated in the Women’s March on Washington and all over the world; the turnout in Washington, D.C., was also larger than Trump’s inaugural.

On Day 7, Trump issued an executive order that amounted to a Muslim ban.  It was met with massive protest demonstrations all across the country, and courts quickly blocked enforcement of the order.  After threatening to appeal, Trump withdrew the EO and issued a second one – which was in turn, promptly blocked by the courts.  Immigration & Customs Enforcement have done their best to make life miserable for immigrant families and sick people who came to America seeking expert medical care, but Trump’s best legal minds have yet to figure out a constitutional strategy to limit entry into the U.S., much less to deport millions of people who are already here.

On Day 9, Trump – who claimed during the campaign that he was smarter than the generals – revealed that his secret plan to defeat ISIS was to ask those same generals for help.  He punted the ball to the Pentagon, and gave them 30 days to devise a “comprehensive plan” to defeat Islamic terrorism.  Two months later, no plan has surfaced.

On March 16, Trump issued a proposed budget that even Republicans called “dead on arrival.”  It featured deep cuts to domestic programs in order to radically increase military spending and build a wall along the Mexican border.  The press did not failed to notice that the security costs associated with Secret Service protection for Trump’s wife and youngest son in New York, plus Trump’s regular weekend golfing trips to his estate in Florida, would easily pay for Meals on Wheels, as well as federal funding for arts, humanities, and public broadcasting.

Meanwhile, legendary policy wonk Paul Ryan, who had spent the previous seven years claiming that he had an Obamacare replacement ready to go, turned out to have been lying.  At the same time, many Trump voters were slowly coming to the realization that the Obamacare they thought they hated was the same thing as the Affordable Care Act that they loved.  As Trump said on February 28, “Nobody knew that health care could be so complicated.”  Well, no Republicans anyway.

Republican town halls were soon filled with angry voters asking questions about the Republican plan to replace Obamacare.  It was hard to answer questions about a non-existent plan, so GOP congressmen tried to change the subject by blaming their constituents for asking inconvenient questions.  They were all outside agitators, probably on the payroll of George Soros. Most Republican congressmen stopped holding town halls. 

Realizing that his bluff had been called, legendary policy wonk Paul Ryan sprang into action like a hungover freshman trying to write three term papers in 24 hours.  The result, released on Day 47, was a plan that provided tax cuts for millionaires at the expense of dropping coverage for 24 million people, many of whom were Trump voters.  This news was not well received by the American public.  Ryan’s plan mustered only a 17% approval rate, against a 56% disapproval rate. 

Congressional Republicans found themselves between a rock and a hard place.  On one side were members from swing districts who hated the bill because voting for it would have meant political suicide.  On the other were the infamous Freedom Caucus fanatics, who hated the bill because it wasn’t mean enough to poor people. 

For some reason, Donald Trump decided to put his prestige on the line by backing Ryan’s plan.  Mr. Art-Of-The-Deal brought in the heavy artillery (Mike Pence and Steve Bannon).  They all threatened and cajoled.  Trump, who doesn’t have a patient bone in his body, finally demanded an up or down vote within 24 hours.  The next day – Day 64, if you’re keeping score at home – legendary policy wonk Paul Ryan slunk into the Oval Office and admitted that he didn’t have the votes to pass the bill. 

Trump backed down, and began a search for scapegoats.  His first thought – even before he told his staff that the Obamacare replacement was dead – was to call the failing Washington Post and the failing New York Times to place the blame on Democrats.  It quickly dawned on the White House that blaming Democrats for Republican disunity was not a credible argument, so Trump and his media surrogates began on Day 65 to shift the blame to Paul Ryan and the Freedom Caucus.  Trump even floated the idea of working with the Democrats on health care reform. 

Are we winning yet?

And wafting through all these problems is, as historian Douglas Brinkley put it “a smell of treason in the air.”  The FBI, the CIA, and the Director of National Intelligence all agree that Vladimir Putin, working through Wikileaks, interfered in the presidential election on Trump’s behalf.  An unknown number of Trump’s campaign and transition team are under investigation for colluding with the Russians in this enterprise, and some of them are running scared. 

Late last week, the National Enquirer fingered disgraced former National Security Advisor Mike Flynn as a Russian spy.  The Enquirer is not exactly a trustworthy source, but it is owned by a longtime Trump ally, so it is reasonable to suppose that Trump’s people planted this story in the hope of shifting as much blame as possible onto Flynn.  Will the pugnacious former general meekly agree to take the fall for everyone else involved?  I wouldn’t bet on it. 

As we wrap up the tenth week of Trump’s presidency, his approval ratings are at an historic low, his legislative agenda is stalled, and members of his team are under criminal investigation. Neither he nor his closest advisors seem to have a clue about how to actually govern.  Nothing in Trump’s life has prepared him to be president.

Donald Trump was born rich, and when you start off rich, it’s easy to stay rich.  He went bankrupt four times, leaving his creditors holding the bag.  But he always failed upwards, because there was always someone (first his father, now Russian oligarchs) who’d loan him more money.  Trump’s money gave him access to the two things he wanted most: women, and flunkies to do his bidding and tell him how great he was.

As long as he was Donald Trump, celebrity businessman, he never encountered a problem he couldn’t buy his way out of, or walk away from.  Being Donald Trump, President, is a much harder job. 

Now he has to deal with a lot of other alpha males – and alpha females – who are smarter than he is, who work harder than he does, and who aren’t impressed by his money.  For the first time in his life, people are telling him “no,” and making it stick. 

The Obamacare replacement debacle has punctured his aura of invincibility, if not with his base, then certainly with congressional Republicans.  The guy who wrote The Art of the Deal couldn’t close the most important deal of his life, even within his own party.  The guy who boasted about being a big winner turned out to be a big loser.  Some people who were afraid of him aren’t afraid anymore.

Now he’ll look for quick wins elsewhere, but they’ll be hard to find.  Mexico won’t pay for a border wall, and he’ll have a tough time convincing Congress to cough up the money.  He’s already stubbed his toe twice on immigration initiatives.  He wants to rewrite the tax code, but he and his senior advisors aren’t smart enough to do it by themselves, and Paul Ryan’s reputation for budget wizardry took a pretty big hit last week.  

And if those challenges weren’t enough, tinkering with the tax code suddenly looks harder than it did last week.  Not only is the tax code more complicated than health care, but Republican assumptions about cutting taxes were based in large part on savings from the repeal of Obamacare.   

Every change in the tax code creates a new set of winners and losers.  As with health care, Republicans want the winners to be the ultra-rich, which means that everyone else will be losers.  As with health care, sooner or later many of those losers will figure out they’re being scammed, and they won’t be happy about it.     

At the age of 70, Donald Trump has failed upward as far as he can go.  From here on out, failure will take him down.

FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE

Devin Nunes, the Republican congressman who is pretending to lead the House investigation into Russian interference in our presidential election, claims an informant leaked him some inside information on who the FBI has been surveilling.  Given the handwringing among Republicans who bewail the leaks of classified information in this particular investigation, what do you suppose Nunes did about this leak?

Here’s what he did NOT do.  He did not denounce or identify the leaker, or turn him in to the FBI to face criminal charges.  Nor did he share whatever new information he received with his colleagues on the House Committee on Government Oversight and Reform, because there are Democrats on that committee and Nunes is a typically petty Republican.

No, instead of following protocol, Nunes ran to Paul Ryan and told him the news, and then ran to the White House to tell Donald Trump.  Then he held a press conference to share some, but not all, of the information with the entire world.  That press conference would have been called a leak if a Democrat had done it, but Republicans are entitled to make up rules and break them if they feel like it. 

Nunes said that the informant told him that members of Donald Trump’s transition team had indeed been under FBI surveillance – legal surveillance – after the election.  In fact, he said, there were “multiple warrants out there” involving Trump’s people, and that although his source didn’t name names, it was easy for him to figure out who they were.   Presumably he shared that information with Ryan and Trump.

Keep in mind that there are only two conditions under which a FISA court authorizes electronic surveillance of American citizens:  1) the targets are agents of a foreign government; or 2) the targets are subjects of a criminal investigation.  Or both at once, of course.

We know that both Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort (paid $10 million/year by Russia) and former National Security Advisor Mike Flynn (paid $500,000 by Turkey and additional thousands by Russian business interests) were agents of foreign governments.  What we don’t know is who else among Trump’s transition team might meet one or both of the FISA criteria for surveillance.

The always trustworthy Sean Spicer assures us that Donald Trump was shocked – shocked! – to learn that two of his closest advisors were paid agents of foreign governments.  That doesn’t exactly speak well for the vetting that went on during the campaign and transition.  But whether or not Trump knew that Manafort and Flynn were foreign agents last fall, it’s now a matter of public record.  It doesn’t take much imagination to guess that they’d have been under surveillance.  The tip that Nunes got must have been about more than that.  

One possibility is that Nunes learned that the FBI has been surveilling additional Trump insiders (and therefore indirectly gathering data on everyone who phoned, texted, or emailed one of the people under surveillance), and decided to pass that information on to Trump   Since Nunes was part of Trump’s national security transition team, it’s even possible that some of his own conversations are now in possession of the FBI.

Or maybe Nunes wasn’t really conveying new information to Donald Trump.  Maybe he was staging an event that would give Trump a pretext to claim some sort of vague vindication for his tweet accusing President Obama of placing a “tapp” on his phones.  That scenario wouldn’t even require that there actually was a new source, because it was pretty clear from the public record that Manafort and Flynn (at a minimum) were being surveilled, and logic would suggest that intercepts of their phone conversations and email exchanges would include both sides of the conversation. 

Or maybe Nunes is neck deep in a crumbling conspiracy, and when he learned the identities of some unexpected surveillance targets he hurried to tell Trump so that Trump could pass the information on to the relevant attorneys, giving them a head start on building a defense against criminal charges.  

None of these scenarios reflect well on Devin Nunes, a fact that Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the House Committee on Government Oversight and Reform was quick to point out.  At best, Nunes is a partisan hack, placing the short-term interests of the Republican Party ahead of the long-term interests of American democracy.  At worst, he’s a traitor.  Either way, Nunes should recuse himself from any connection to ongoing intelligence investigations.

Whatever his motive, Nunes is doing a darn good imitation of a man trying to hide a terrible secret.  He won’t be successful because he’s none too bright, and neither are his co-conspirators.  Manafort and Flynn have left too many pieces of the puzzle face up, and the press is now putting them together.  The FBI knows more than they’re telling, but it’s clear that they’re conducting a criminal investigation of one or more of Trump’s close associates.    

There’s a lot we don’t know yet, including what crimes were committed, who committed them, and who else may have done something illegal by helping with the cover up.  But the answers to those questions will come.  I know I sound like a broken record, but too many people are acting guilty as hell for everyone to be innocent. 

And as icing on the cake, for however long the investigation takes to complete, it will cast a shadow over Donald Trump and his administration.

TAKE WHAT YOU HAVE GATHERED FROM COINCIDENCE

The New York Times’ Glenn Thrush has noted that Donald Trump “insists on dealing with crises by creating new ones.” During the campaign, that tactic was often effective, as the press seemed bewildered by his audacity. As president, though, the tactic often backfires, as it did yesterday during the first day of hearings by the House Committee on Government Oversight and Reform on Russian interference in our recent election.

Yesterday was a bad day for Team Trump, and you can feel the panic setting in. Trump committed an unforced error by tweeting an obvious lie about FBI Director James Comey’s testimony, claiming that Comey said that, “The NSA and FBI tell Congress that Russia did not influence the electoral process.” But Democrats at the hearing were operating on internet time for once, and quickly asked Comey about Trump’s tweet. Comey, under oath, denied that he said any such thing.

Comey also testified that the FBI was investigating whether there had been “coordination” between the Trump campaign and Russian interference in the American election. Not whether there had been Russian interference in the election – all of our intelligence agencies have seen the evidence and say it definitely happened. Not whether the Russian interference was aimed at hurting Hillary Clinton and helping Donald Trump – all of our intelligence agencies have seen the evidence and say the Russians were definitely trying to help Trump. No, the only matter currently unresolved is whether or not people in the Trump campaign were working with the Russians.

If Trump’s people were not working with the Russians, there were certainly a lot of inexplicable coincidences during the campaign. In Goldfinger, Ian Fleming wrote, “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.”

Let us, therefore, count the members of Donald Trump’s inner circle who are known to have been in contact with Russia during Trump’s presidential campaign. 1) His former campaign manager Paul Manafort. 2) His longtime advisor Roger Stone. 3) His original National Security Advisor Michael Flynn. And we have bingo! Enemy action!

But of course there’s more. Among Trump’s inner circle, Jeff Sessions and Jared Kushner also had Kremlin connections, as did more minor players Carter Page and J.D. Gordon. That makes at least seven Trump operatives with known Russian contacts – not counting Trump himself and Donald Jr., who have longstanding business ties in Russia. And let us not forget Trump’s famous “Russia, if you’re listening” plea for help in hacking Hillary Clinton’s email back in July. There’s an awful lot of smoke for there to be no fire burning somewhere nearby.

It was also a tough day for Congressional Republicans, who view their job as scuttling investigations into Donald Trump’s misbehavior. They’re trying hard, but the only diversionary tactic they’ve thought of so far is to threaten a new investigation of Hillary Clinton. Because of course. Investigating Hillary Clinton is what they do.

Oh, they’d be perfectly happy to go after President Obama, but as luck would have it Comey also testified that there was no evidence to support Donald Trump’s tweeted accusations that President Obama ordered the illegal wiretapping Trump Tower. That confirms what British intelligence said over the weekend.

Back in the Watergate days, the prosecutorial question was, “What did the President know, and when did he know it?” Donald Trump is so profoundly ignorant that it’s hard to be confident that he knows anything at all. But the story is bigger than just Donald Trump, although White House strategists would love to keep the focus of the investigation that narrow.

A couple of weeks ago, Trump spokesperson Sarah Sanders tried to deflect questions about Russian connections in Trump’s inner circle by saying, “The big point here is the president himself knows what his involvement was and that’s zero. And I think that he’s the primary person that should be held responsible and he had no interaction and I think that’s what the story should be focused on.”

Yesterday, Sean Spicer added a new wrinkle to this defense, asserting that Trump barely knew some of his closest advisors. He claimed that Paul Manafort had “a very limited role” in the campaign. Right, Manafort was only Trump’s campaign manager. It’s not like campaign managers have much of a role in campaigns.

The White House is trying to frame the issue this way: Donald Trump had no direct contact with Russia during the campaign, and he’s not responsible for the actions of his subordinates, most of whom he barely knows anyway. Unless Democrats can prove otherwise (while Republicans do everything in their power to obstruct the investigation), that’s the end of the story. Russiaghazigate is over. (I’m going to call it Russiaghazigate until the press comes to a consensus on some other generic term for the scandal.)

Fortunately for American democracy, neither the press nor the Democrats will agree to restrict the investigation of Russiaghazigate simply to the question of Trump’s personal involvement. They want to know how the Russians interfered in our electoral process. The answer has to cover all of journalism’s 5 W’s: who, what, where, when, and why. Trump’s lawyers know that, even if he doesn’t.

In that context, Spicer’s and Sanders’ comments make me wonder if Team Trump is getting ready to throw some of his people under the bus. I assume that the seven Trump advisors I listed earlier are lawyering up.

I’ve read speculation that Trump will fire FBI Director Comey in the near future. That would be really stupid, but really stupid is always in play where Donald Trump is concerned. It’s hard to imagine a more counterproductive course of action, though. It would trigger comparisons to Watergate’s Saturday Night Massacre; it would be read as a tacit admission that Trump was afraid of what an investigation might reveal; and perhaps most seriously, it would really piss off the FBI.

Very early in the Watergate investigation, when the official Republican position was that the whole thing was simply a “third rate burglary,” one of those third rate burglars, former CIA agent James McCord, wrote a chilling letter to an associate of President Nixon. If you try to make the CIA your scapegoat for Watergate, McCord wrote, “Every tree in the forest will fall.”

Not that Donald Trump knows much about Watergate. But for those of you who are too young to remember, here are a few relevant lessons from that landmark scandal. First, no secret is safe. Too many people on both sides of the law know too much about Russiaghazigate. Sooner or later, one of them will have an incentive to reveal what he knows.

A corollary lesson is that there’s no honor among thieves. Several of Trump’s staff appear to have broken laws – maybe in connection with this particular scandal, or maybe in some unrelated area. When they’re faced with prosecution, the odds are good that at least one of them will take a plea bargain and start naming names. That will trigger more plea bargains from increasingly prominent people, until the investigators conclude that the biggest fish have been caught.

A third lesson is, don’t needlessly antagonize people who can make trouble for you. Trump has insulted every branch of the American (not to mention British) intelligence community, as well as the press corps. He can cry “fake news” all he wants, but when there’s blood in the water, the enemies he’s made will keep coming.

There’s an awful lot of smoke around Russiaghazigate for there to be no fire burning somewhere nearby. I certainly don’t know who did what in this whole mess. Trump and his people were rank amateurs at politics. They had Russian connections long before the campaign, and were used to bending rules in their business operations. It probably never occurred to them that colluding with Russia to influence the election was any different than running a scam like Trump University – they’d either get away with it, or pay some sort of fine and still wind up ahead.

Conventional wisdom has it that there’s a fourth lesson of Watergate, which is that the cover up is worse than the original mistake. Pushback simply signals to the press that they’re on to something important. Admit you’re wrong, they say, apologize, and move on. The attention span of the press is limited, and they’ll change the subject soon enough. It’s the resistance – anger, dishonesty, and defensiveness – that confirms the press’s suspicions and keeps them digging into the story.

Luckily for American democracy, Donald Trump is constitutionally incapable of admitting error. He always doubles down on his mistakes. It’s a strategy he's used for 70 years. It’s the only one he knows. It will probably continue to be effective with his base. But it’s a recipe for disaster in legal proceedings.

CAN'T DO THE TIME, DON'T DO THE CRIME

Pretty much every week, a national news outlet discovers that Trump’s base still likes Trump.  Well of course they do.  These are the folks who think of themselves as “real Americans.”  They believe that the country belongs to them, and they resent the hell out of people who are different than they are, including minorities, immigrants, and better educated white people, whom they suspect of looking down on them. 

Trump’s base didn’t vote for him because they thought he was a nice guy, or because they thought he’d pivot towards mainstream Republican politics when he got to the White House.  They don’t care about the hundreds of petty, stupid, malicious things he’s done in his first two months on the job.  All they want is for him to make life miserable for the people they hate – immigrants, minorities, and educated white snobs.  They enjoy watching him fuck shit up.  As long as he keeps doing that, his base will stick with him until the roof caves in.  Which it may well do, once the impact of the Trump-Republican budget hits home.  Until then, they’ll greet Trump’s mistakes with cries of “fake news.”

So along comes David Brooks, writing in the New York Times, who notes that while Donald Trump ran populist campaign, he’s governing (to the extent that what he’s done can be called governing) like a typical Republican.  That means he’s in the process of screwing over a lot of his working class supporters.  Brooks concludes by saying “it would be nice if the people who voted for Trump got economic support, not punishment.”

I don’t get it.  Why would that be nice?  Trump voters put an evil man in a position to do real harm to millions of people.  Even worse, lots of them were rooting for that outcome – as long as they thought the damage would be inflicted on someone else.   Now the chickens are coming home to roost.  It won’t be fake news when they get that letter telling them that they’ve lost their health insurance, or that they can keep their insurance, but the premiums have doubled. 

I’ll reserve some compassion for misguided Trump voters, but they’re at the bottom of my sympathy list.  If Trump’s policies are going to cause suffering, why shouldn’t the ones who brought him to power bear the brunt of it?