With Senator McCain’s absence from the Senate to recuperate from surgery, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has announced a further delay of the vote on the Republicans’ odious tax cut masquerading as health care reform. We should use this delay to continue to put pressure on vulnerable Republican senators to kill this nightmare once and for all. We should also take the extra time afforded by this delay to fully understand this wolf in sheep’s clothing. The BRCA is nothing less than a covert attempt to overturn Medicaid, a bedrock of the American health care system since 1965. Continue reading “A wolf in sheep’s clothing”
Plausible deniability
Plausible deniability. Those of us old enough to remember Watergate, remember this talismanic phrase. Whether a President had it determined whether he could avoid being engulfed in a scandal that ensnared top members of his administration. The answer to the question, “What did he know and when did he know it?” determined whether a presidency survived or ended in disgrace. The lack of plausible deniability brought down Richard Nixon during Watergate. The presence of it saved Ronald Reagan during Iran-Contra. With the revelation that Kushner, Manafort and Donald, Jr. met, not only with Kremlin connected lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, but with Russian lobbyist and “former” counter intelligence officer and hacker, Rinat Akhmetshin, there can be no credible claim that Trump and his campaign did not actively attempt to (and perhaps actually did) collude with the Russian government to impact our election. Continue reading “Plausible deniability”
Danger in this moment
There is danger in this moment. Over the last four days we have seen the clearest evidence to date that there was an avid appetite to collude with the Russians at the highest levels of the Trump campaign. The e-mail correspondence which led to the meeting between Kremlin connected lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, and the trio of Trump, Jr., Manafort and Kushner demonstrates an utter lack of concern or surprise on the part of Junior that the information was from a Russian government eager to help elect Donald Trump. If these were ordinary times, we’d be anticipating a perp walk by the trio. During the Watergate scandal, Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Mitchell and Dean all did prison time for their roles in the Watergate break-in and cover up and they didn’t have the aid of a hostile foreign power. Continue reading “Danger in this moment”
Whose America Is This?
With Trump’s Sunday tweetstorm announcing that he believed Putin’s denial and the revelation by The New York Times that Donald Trump, Jr., Paul Manafort and Jared Kushner met with Kremlin connected lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, in the hope of obtaining damaging information on Hilary Clinton, we have arrived at that depressing place that Sarah Kendzior and Timothy Snyder presaged in November. When confronted with the imminent publication of details about this meeting by The Times, Donald Jr seemed to express disappointment that Veselnitskya failed to deliver the goods and instead pressed him on the Magnitsky Law, which imposes sanctions on Russian individuals responsible for human rights abuses. Continue reading “Whose America Is This?”
Five-alarm Fire
July 8, 2017
After Trump’s Warsaw speech on Wednesday and his love-fest with Putin at the G-20 on Friday, there is no shred of doubt remaining about where Trump’s loyalties lie or what his vision for America is. As @JohnJHarwood wrote in his CNBC column, Trump helps those who help him. As Putin clearly directed cyber-attacks aimed at getting Trump elected, Trump is eager to give Putin what he wants. He will ingratiate himself with Putin to ensure that Putin gives him (and the Republicans) the same help in 2018 and 2020. What goal could the Election Integrity Commission have, other than to make hacking easier by providing a central database of American voter information? Continue reading “Five-alarm Fire”
The return of Jim Crow?
July 6, 2017
With every passing day, it is increasingly clear that the Trump administration is engaged in nothing less than an effort to reinstitute Jim Crow on a nationwide basis. If that sounds hyperbolic, we need only examine its recent efforts to curtail voting rights, starting with its so-called Election Integrity Commission. By now, 45 of 50 states have refused to comply with the Commission’s onerous demand for extensive personal information on their voters, including names, addresses, party affiliation, ten year voting history and the last four digits of Social Security numbers. Despite having neither clear authority to request this information nor a demonstrably secure portal through which the information could be sent, the Commission’s letter demanded that states turn over the information within sixteen days.
It is difficult to see what positive aims could be achieved by such a massive data dump of highly sensitive personal information. Trump cleared up any ambiguity about the Commission’s purpose when he lambasted states’ refusal to provide information to the “voter fraud” commission. In addition, given that the vice chair is Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, a staunch anti-immigrant zealot who advocates for strict voter i.d. laws, it is clear that this commission is nothing more than an effort to federalize the patchwork of voter suppression laws in various states, in order to deprive Americans of our constitutional rights more efficiently. Continue reading “The return of Jim Crow?”
Independence Day
As we lurch into our annual ritualistic celebration of American independence, we have every reason to be depressed about the state of our union. Our current Commander-in-Chief, who rode into The White House on a wave of toxic, vulgar racism and Islamophobia, has spent the last week attacking journalists of every stripe, from talk show hosts, to cable news networks, to newspapers staffed with prizewinning, relentless investigative journalists. Continue reading “Independence Day”
Leave the gun, take the Constitution
June 29, 2017
By now, many of us have seen the terrifying recruitment video produced by the NRA. In it, an attractive, white Everywoman narrates a script that depicts the exercise of the constitutionally protected right of assembly as evidence of civilization run amok. Protest against the very real threat to democracy posed by this presidency is recast as a threat to the republic that can only be contained by letting police officers “do their jobs.” Snarling narration is imposed over images of “Black Lives Matter” protests and angry Congressional town halls, interspersed with footage of anarchists torching property. The narrator practically hisses that “they” compare “our President” to Hitler, as if hyperbole is a crime punishable by death. Continue reading “Leave the gun, take the Constitution”
Republican social engineering
June 27th, 2017
Republican cruelty continues unabated. The CBO score of the Senate “healthcare” bill released yesterday confirmed our worst suspicions. Although the topline number of people slated to lose health insurance by 2026 is marginally better under the Senate bill (22 vs. 23 million), in all important respects, it is equally draconian. The Senate bill will entail a devastating $772 billion cut to Medicaid over time, which will wrest coverage from children, the elderly and disabled Americans. It would shred mental health coverage, leaving states adrift to manage a crippling opioid crisis without funding. Despite the fact that thousands of their constituents will be grievously harmed by this bill, Senators Murkowski and Capito are still equivocating, rather than dooming this bill to the dustbin of history where it belongs. Continue reading “Republican social engineering”
The threat within
June 25, 2017
On Friday, The Washington Post published a mammoth story detailing how and when the Obama Administration learned that Vladimir Putin had directed a cyber-attack of our election systems with the explicit goal of hurting Hilary Clinton and helping to elect Trump. The article, exhaustively reported by Greg Miller, Ellen Nakashima and Adam Entous, citing three dozen sources, fills in the details of a story whose broad outlines we already knew. In August 2016, the CIA became aware that on orders from Putin, Russia had embarked on a campaign to wreak havoc on our presidential race. Hackers breached the servers of the DNC, state election officials and a key vendor of voting software, while others seeded social networks with fake news stories that were damaging to Clinton. Continue reading “The threat within”