Getting to the point where I'm actively glad that Trump used Stormy Daniels like a teenager on the internet uses handfuls of Kleenex, threw her away and tossed a few singles at her haggard ass just because it provokes liberal tears and Fredocon frenzies.😎💥🤷🏼♂️— Kurt Schlichter (@KurtSchlichter) May 3, 2018
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| Oh, Rudy, how much did you screw up? Let me count the ways... |
I think it’s quite possible that it was the President’s legal team’s plan to eventually claim Cohen had in some way been reimbursed for paying $130,000 to Stormy Daniels. But it’s clear to me that Giuliani did not plan to do it this way or do this at all. For starters, it does not put his client in a better legal position. If anything it takes a possible FEC violation by Michael Cohen and creates a false report violation by Donald Trump. It also throws into question whether Cohen was actually performing legal duties at all (nominal attorney fees are now described as loan repayments and not for legal work). Most directly, it makes a number of previous claims by Trump and Cohen into lies.
My best guess is that Guiliani and Trump and other members of the legal team had discussed this story (true or not) as a way to escape a claimed FEC violation. They did so with what appears to have been a fairly limited understanding of campaign finance law. But they thought it was a good idea. Giuliani then meandered his way into floating it during his interview with Sean Hannity. Note how he immediately fixes on the point that this solves the campaign finance problem (even though it appears not to). He’s adamant and cocky about it. He is then caught off guard when Hannity – himself caught off guard and scrambling in response to the initial claim – reminds him that the story is that Trump never knew anything about the Daniels deal at all and did not know where the money was from.
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In any case, people often imagine there are plans when there are no plans. Or they think that when there’s an intricate argument it must show a plan and perhaps a good one. The reality is that sometimes you have no good plan because you, in fact, have no good options. You’re stuck. Put more coarsely, sometimes you’re just fucked. What you have are a half dozen brainstorms cooked up by a group of old men in a room used to bending reality to their purposes when something goes wrong. That’s much more difficult on a national stage in front of intense scrutiny. That’s what happened last night. Rudy Giuliani is far, far past his prime, used to the accommodating hothouse world of Fox News cronies and cash and carry deal-making in his law firm gigs. This was as sloppy as it looked and did his client no favors.It's sad, and that would be it, if it weren't so dangerous to the country. And it's not over.
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| Danish fathers still don't take enough advantage of paid paternity leave, study says. But the Danish system beats the hell out of the U.S., where we have none. |
I’m not saying that politicians shouldn’t be open to new thinking and evidence about policy. But a political party isn’t like Apple, which needs to keep coming up with glitzier products to stay ahead of Android. There are huge problems with U.S. policy on many fronts, but very few of these problems come from lack of good new ideas. They come, instead, from failure to act on what we already know – and, for the most part, have known for a long time.That's exactly right. We know how to do these basic things, and we only need the correct political environment in which to accomplish them and expand upon them.
Let me give two big examples: access to health care and environmental protection.
On health care, we know perfectly well how to provide more or less universal access, because every other advanced country does it.
How can a nation provide universal access to health care? There are actually three ways. You can have direct provision by a government health system, like Britain’s NHS; you can have a single-payer system of government health insurance, like Canada (or Medicare here); or you can use a combination of regulation, mandates, and subsidies to prod the private sector into covering everyone, like Switzerland.
And all three systems work! True, you can have trouble if the funding is inadequate or the rules aren’t effectively enforced, but that’s true of any policy. Universal health care is a solved problem. We don’t need new ideas to achieve that goal here – in fact, we got about halfway there under Obama, and all we need to finish the job is a progressive president and a progressive majority in Congress.
What about protecting the environment? I guess you can make the case that there were important new ideas in the 1980s. Until then, environmental policy consisted almost entirely of top-down regulation. Economists had known for generations that there was a case for exploiting market forces via things like emission taxes or tradable emission permits, but these first made it into the world of political reality with the Bush-era emissions-trading scheme used to control acid rain.
Moving past the two Republican crimes against American humanity of the greatest 'free-market' healthcare rip-off in the world at an obscene 17% of GDP and the Trump-Pruitt Environmental Pollution Agency, let's give full credit to the primary Republican crime against American humanity: the branding, marketing and force-feeding of 'supply-side' economics strychnine to 320 million.
This incredible economic fraud and Big Lie is simply a form of economic torture and sadism, an enshrined misanthropic assault on virtually every building block of this democratic republic that has decimated the election process, destroyed national infrastructure, trashed public education, made a Reverse Robin souffle of the tax code, and pervertedly turned public goods like national defense, prisons, healthcare, and the the environment into private profit centers for vulture capitalists.
Supply-side economics is a Republican fraud.
Demand-side economics is what powers healthy economies; Keynesian economics is what works well, not right-wing cuckoo Robber Baron economics.
Higher worker wages, strong worker unions, high consumer spending and increased government spending leads to business expansion resulting in greater employment opportunities.
Higher wages and higher levels of employment create a multiplier effect that further stimulates aggregate demand leading to greater economic growth.
Bring back Keynesian economics.
And dump Republican Reverse Robin Hood national-train-robbery economics.About right.
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| Thing is, it doesn't trickle down if you grab it and send it back up. |
At a nationally televised town hall last week, Paul Ryan was asked how he upholds the Catholic Church’s teaching that we should help the poor. Ryan, a Catholic, answered that his emphasis on economic growth, upward mobility and opportunity for all is how, as House speaker, he puts that teaching into practice.Ugh. How many times do we have to send the money up to the top and watch income inequality increase to understand that market forces don't work (at least the way you say they do)?
Sides in an argument can agree to disagree. That, often, is civil discourse. Fine.My conclusion: Conservatives are dogged by conflicts where liberals aren't, even though conservatives can claim (statistically) that they are the proper home of Christian evangelicals.
But when one side disagrees with itself -- when its core beliefs conflict with its core values -- the only way the situation is resolved is through confession or hypocrisy.
The central problem is conservative libertarianism runs counter to Christian communitarianism. You either have to say "I don't want to give food to the poor, flat out," (honesty) or you say "Jesus would cut food stamps, too." (umm, no). This is difficult for evangelicals who primarily line up with Republicans. (inarguable)
Liberals don't generally win the religious vote (inarguable), but they don't have any such conflict of beliefs versus values. "We want to feed the poor," lines up nicely with "Jesus went right past food stamps to loaves and fishes, so good chance Jesus is into feeding the poor, too."
How many of these things are you against? Thought so.
- Allowing the government to negotiate drug prices (supported by 79 percent)
- Offering students the same interest rates as big banks (78 percent)
- Universal pre-kindergarten (77 percent)
- Fair trade that protects workers, the environment and jobs (75 percent)
- Ending tax loopholes for corporations that ship jobs overseas (74 percent)
- Ending gerrymandering (73 percent)
- Letting homeowners pay down mortgages with 401k funds (72 percent)
- Debt-free college at public universities (71 percent)
- A $400 billion infrastructure jobs program (71 percent)
- Requiring the NSA to get warrants before collecting our data (71 percent)
- Disclosing corporate spending on politics and lobbying (71 percent)
- Medicare buy-in, available to all (71 percent)
- Closing offshore corporate tax loopholes (70 percent)
- A "Green New Deal," creating millions of clean energy jobs (70 percent)
- A Full Employment Act (70 percent)
- Expanding Social Security benefits (70 percent)
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| We are and should be moving away from coal. Trumpworld wants it back. Why? |
Thinking some more about this Pruitt story. Kudos to Bloomberg for getting the facts; but I wish reporters wouldn't lump de facto bribes from lobbyists with padded expense accounts, like unnecessary first-class travel. Corruption is a much bigger deal 1/ https://t.co/cVaDP3Oap4— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) March 30, 2018
Think about it: if a govt official abuses his office by taking a fancy trip, taxpayers lose the expense of that trip. But if he accepts what amount to kickbacks from corporations who can benefit from his actions, the cost can be far larger 2/— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) March 30, 2018
Environmental enforcement is, in a way, almost custom-built for corruption. If you waive or fail to enforce a rule that, say, prevents certain companies from dumping toxins in the water supply, the benefit of your action accrues to a small, well-connected group 3/— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) March 30, 2018
Meanwhile, the costs of your malfeasance fall on a large, diffuse group -- ordinary citizens -- who may not even be aware that you're compromising their health and sending some of them to an early grave, and certainly don't employ DC lobbyists 4/— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) March 30, 2018
So if we let environmental officials get away with personally profiting from lobbyist connections, you're going to have a pronounced pro-pollution bias -- and this will be true even if the social costs of their laxness are vastly larger than the benefits 5/— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) March 30, 2018
If you try to put an economic value on the sickness and death caused by pollution, the numbers are huge; but if officials get a green light to be corrupt, they'll cheerfully impose those costs to raise a few companies' profits 6/ https://t.co/AyXcqKeyWV— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) March 30, 2018
So officials at the EPA need to be squeaky clean -- even more than officials in general. But Trump has set the standard for his administration, and we're well on our way to third-world-level corruption everywhere 7/— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) March 30, 2018
Great briefing this afternoon on the start of our Southern Border WALL! pic.twitter.com/pmCNoxxlkH— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 28, 2018
The project, which started in 2009, will replace a 2.25-mile section in the California-Mexico border wall, according to a statement last month from US Customs and Border Protection.
The original wall in that section, built in the 1990s, had been built from recycled metal scraps and old landing mat materials, the agency said.
"Although the existing wall has proven effective at deterring unlawful cross border activity, smuggling organizations damaged and breached this outdated version of a border wall several hundred times during the last two years," CBP said.
The project will replace the old wall with a 30-foot-high, bollard-style structure.
