Tag Archives: donald trump

Obama’s favorite books of 2018

In a Facebook post, Barrack Obama claims to have read 29 books this year. That’s impressive, even if there is some skimming involved. I guess the dude is basically retired and he probably also has some help with childcare. Good for him. No word on whether Donald Trump reread his copy of the collected speeches of Adolf Hitler even once this year.

in praise of Richard Nixon

This post on History News Network makes a case that Richard Nixon looks great if you compare him to Donald Trump.

Richard Nixon did not set out to destroy our foreign policy, and in fact, improved it dramatically with the promotion of détente with the Soviet Union, the overture to the People’s Republic of China, and the nurturing of close ties with America’s allies in NATO. He had a mastery of foreign policy based on great experience from his Vice Presidential years onward for which he is often remembered aside from Watergate. This does not excuse the lengthening of the Vietnam War, or the terrible decisions on foreign policy regarding Chile, Greece, and the issue of the Indo-Pakistan War (which is associated with the creation of the nation of Bangladesh). But Donald Trump has been totally destructive in foreign affairs, alienating our allies in NATO, antagonizing all nations with his protectionist tariff policies, and consorting with authoritarian dictators including Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un, and the leaders of such other nations, as the Philippines, Turkey, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia. Trump has also worsened relations with Iran and Cuba, based upon extremist right wing influences of John Bolton and Mike Pompeo. The Middle East has become much more unstable. The US Foreign Service itself has been badly damaged by the inconsistencies and instability of Donald Trump.

Richard Nixon had many battles and conflicts with the Democratic-controlled Congress during his years in the Presidency, and yet managed to sign into law many signature measures that built upon the accomplishments of the Great Society of his predecessor, Lyndon B. Johnson. These included the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the enactment of Affirmative Action in employment and education. Donald Trump, in contrast, has been backtracking, destroying environmental protections, undermining consumer agencies, rolling back labor rights, ignoring scientific advancements, and curtailing civil rights. The Republican Party itself has become a willing participant in the destruction of these major domestic accomplishments of Richard Nixon.

Richard Nixon also promoted the concept of welfare reform, including the expansion of the Food Stamp Program, and attempted, though he failed, to advance health care reform. Donald Trump, on the other hand, has wished to destroy the health care plan represented by ObamaCare, stranding millions of people without health care, and offering no alternative, in collusion with a Republican Party far to the Right of what it was in Nixon’s time in the Oval Office. Additionally, Richard Nixon expanded Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, and initiated Supplemental Security Income (SSI) for the elderly and disabled, all programs now in danger from Trump and the GOP.

Trump has added to the long-term existential risks to our civilization posed by climate change and nuclear weapons. But so far, we’re incredibly lucky he has not been faced with a major global economic or geopolitical crisis. My apologies to people in Puerto Rico and Yemen, among other places, when I say that. These are horrible crises for limited geographic areas and limited numbers of people (millions, in the case of Yemen) and the U.S. administration has blood on its hands. But think about the world-wide suffering caused by the financial crisis of 2008 or the world at the brink of nuclear war in 1962, and now imagine Trump in charge at those moments. Two years down, two to go.

democrats likely to run for President in 2020

Five Thirty Eight has a list of who they think is currently serious about a run for President in 2020. It’s a long list. I’ve added their ages in parentheses.

  • Lawyer Michael Avenatti (47)
  • South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg (36)
  • Montana Gov. Steve Bullock (52)
  • former Vice President Joe Biden (75)
  • New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker (49)
  • former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Julian Castro (44)
  • Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper (66)
  • Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti (47)
  • New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (51)
  • California Sen. Kamala Harris (53)
  • Former Attorney General Eric Holder (67)
  • former New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu (58)
  • Sen. Jeff Merkley of Oregon (61)
  • former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley (55)
  • Rep. Seth Moulton of Massachusetts (39)
  • Rep. Tim Ryan of Ohio (45)
  • Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders (77)
  • Rep. Eric Swalwell of California (37)
  • businessman and pro-impeachment activist Tom Steyer (61)
  • Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren (69)

To break it down a little:

  • 20 candidates
  • by age: 3 in their 30s, 5 in their 40s, 5 in their 50s, 5 in their 60s, 2 in their 70s
  • by gender: 3 women, 17 men
  • by ethnicity: 4 black or Hispanic people, 16 white people (from a very quick scan, and I could easily have missed someone)

I can really only say I am familiar with five of these names: Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Eric Holder, Elizabeth Warren, and Cory Booker. At least there is some variety in the list. Maybe the DNC learned a lesson last time – not to put their thumb on the scale and try to force a particular candidate, rather than just letting the primary process play out.

Trump still has a number of challenges between now and when he faces one of these people in two years: criminal prosecution of close associates and possibly even family members or himself, possible impeachment by a majority Democratic House of Representatives, and possible challengers in the Republican Primary. It seems like a lot, but you have to admit Trump is a man who has tended to get his away against the odds and I have learned not to underestimate him.

Noam Chomsky’s take on Trump and Russia

Noam Chomsky’s take on Trump and Russia is interesting. He is contrarian, as usual. To summarize, he is worried that climate change and nuclear weapons are existential threats to our civilization, and he thinks our political system is failing to deal with these threats regardless of who is nominally in charge.

So, of all Trump’s policies, the one that is the most dangerous and destructive, in fact poses an existential threat, is his policies on climate change, on global warming. That’s really destructive. And we’re facing an imminent threat, not far removed, of enormous damage. The effects are already visible but nothing like what’s going to come. A sea level rise of a couple of feet will be massively destructive. It will make today’s immigration issues look like trivialities. And it’s not that the administration is unaware of this. So, Donald Trump, for example, is perfectly aware of the dangerous effects, in the short term, of global warming. So, for example, recently he applied to the government of Ireland for permission to build a wall to protect his golf course in Ireland from rising sea levels. And Rex Tillerson, who was supposed to be the adult in the room before he was thrown out, as CEO of ExxonMobil, was devoting enormous resources to climate change denial, although he had, sitting on his desk, the reports of ExxonMobil scientists, who, since the ’70s, in fact, were on the forefront of warning of the dire effects of this accelerating phenomenon. I don’t know what word in the language — I can’t find one — that applies to people of that kind, who are willing to sacrifice the literal — the existence of organized human life, not in the distant future, so they can put a few more dollars in highly overstuffed pockets. The word “evil” doesn’t begin to approach it. These are the kinds of issues that should be under discussion. Instead, what’s being — there is a focus on what I believe are marginalia…

And I think we find this on issue after issue, also on issues on which what Trump says, for whatever reason, is not unreasonable. So, he’s perfectly right when he says we should have better relations with Russia. Being dragged through the mud for that is outlandish, makes — Russia shouldn’t refuse to deal with the United States because the US carried out the worst crime of the century in the invasion of Iraq, much worse than anything Russia has done. But they shouldn’t refuse to deal with us for that reason, and we shouldn’t refuse to deal with them for whatever infractions they may have carried out, which certainly exist. This is just absurd. We have to move towards better — right at the Russian border, there are very extreme tensions, that could blow up anytime and lead to what would in fact be a terminal nuclear war, terminal for the species and life on Earth. We’re very close to that. Now, we could ask why. First of all, we should do things to ameliorate it. Secondly, we should ask why. Well, it’s because NATO expanded after the collapse of the Soviet Union, in violation of verbal promises to Mikhail Gorbachev, mostly under Clinton, partly under first Bush, then Clinton expanded right to the Russian border, expanded further under Obama. The US has offered to bring Ukraine into NATO. That’s the kind of a heartland of Russian geostrategic concerns. So, yes, there’s tensions at the Russian border — and not, notice, at the Mexican border. Well, those are all issues that should be of primary concern. The fate of — the fate of organized human society, even of the survival of the species, depends on this. How much attention is given to these things as compared with, you know, whether Trump lied about something? I think those seem to me the fundamental criticisms of the media.

Trump wants to invade Venezuela

According to the AP, Trump has repeatedly pressed his aides to consider invading Venezuela. Any claim that this could be about democracy or human rights simply is not credible. Regional stability? Venezuela’s neighbors seemed aghast at the suggestion. Oil? That must be it, although the former CEO of Exxon was Secretary of State at the time and was also aghast. We’re in year 2 and counting of the Trump presidency with no war – can we make it to the end?

“all criminal roads led to Trump Tower”

  • Here is the New Yorker article on the Steele dossier. Basically, it exposes the largely successful Republican attempts to discredit Steele as pure propaganda. The truth is that Steele is an ex-British civil servant with no ties to U.S. politics, who runs a private investigation agency specializing in the Russian government. Apparently, it is common for politicians to hire private investigators through law firms in a sort of double blind arrangement, where neither the politician nor the investigator knows who has been hired or who is paying the bills. That is what happened in this case. First an anti-Trump Republican hired a law firm which hired a U.S. private investigator who hired Steele, and later the DNC and Hillary Clinton campaign took over paying the bills. The Clinton campaign never knew they were paying Steele, and Steele never knew who was paying him. The information he dug up was shocking, basically that Trump and his associates have extensive ties to Russian government and organized crime figures, and they are at least in a position to be blackmailed if they are not actual Russian intelligence assets. Steele took this information to the FBI, who started and supposedly are continuing a serious counterintelligence investigation. So the information in the dossier appears to be credible, and both the FBI and Robert Mueller special counsel investigation have it and are following up. So if Trump is a Russian spy, he is going to get nailed.

The article is long, but keep plugging through it and you come to the fascinating story of multiple investigations Steele has been instrumental in, including the one that brought down FIFA. And those investigations, which are completely disparate, keep leading back to Trump Tower.

Steele might have been expected to move on once his investigation of the bidding was concluded. But he had discovered that the corruption at fifa was global, and he felt that it should be addressed. The only organization that could handle an investigation of such scope, he felt, was the F.B.I. In 2011, Steele contacted an American agent he’d met who headed the Bureau’s division for serious crimes in Eurasia. Steele introduced him to his sources, who proved essential to the ensuing investigation. In 2015, the Justice Department indicted fourteen people in connection with a hundred and fifty million dollars in bribes and kickbacks. One of them was Chuck Blazer, a top fifa official who had embezzled a fortune from the organization and became an informant for the F.B.I. Blazer had an eighteen-thousand-dollar-per-month apartment in Trump Tower, a few floors down from Trump’s residence.

Nobody had alleged that Trump knew of any fifa crimes, but Steele soon came across Trump Tower again. Several years ago, the F.B.I. hired Steele to help crack an international gambling and money-laundering ring purportedly run by a suspected Russian organized-crime figure named Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov. The syndicate was based in an apartment in Trump Tower. Eventually, federal officials indicted more than thirty co-conspirators for financial crimes. Tokhtakhounov, though, eluded arrest, becoming a fugitive. Interpol issued a “red notice” calling for his arrest. But, in the fall of 2013, he showed up at the Miss Universe contest in Moscow—and sat near the pageant’s owner, Donald Trump.

“It was as if all criminal roads led to Trump Tower,” Steele told friends.

So there you have it. It appears Trump is an international criminal mastermind, a Professor Moriarty, except that Professor Moriarty never got himself elected Queen.

why deny science when you can just make it up?

There is no reason to deny facts or evidence when you can just make up new ones that suit your pre-conceived notions, you truly believe anything that comes out of your own mouth is true, and tens of millions of other people do too.

This is not supposed to be a political blog. But it is supposed to be a blog about whether our civilization is progressing or at risk of a catastrophic downfall. And when the things in the first paragraph I just wrote are happening, I have to lean toward the catastrophic downfall side.

From Bloomberg:

“The ice caps were going to melt, they were going to be gone by now, but now they’re setting records,” Trump said in excerpts of an interview with Piers Morgan on the U.K. television network ITV broadcast Jan. 28. Trump didn’t specify the data behind his statement about setting records…

“There is a cooling, and there’s a heating,” he said. “I mean, look, it used to not be climate change, it used to be global warming. That wasn’t working too well because it was getting too cold all over the place…”

In 2014, less than a year before he entered the 2016 presidential race, president, Trump said on Twitter that the “POLAR ICE CAPS are at an all time high, the POLAR BEAR population has never been stronger. Where the hell is global warming.”

Anybody with some basic science or information literacy knows that a short-term fluctuation in the data does not prove or disprove a long-term trend. You can look at a lot of those short-term fluctuations together and begin to determine whether they represent random noise or whether they are consistent with some longer-term trend you are seeing in the larger data set, as scientists are doing with recent hurricanes, droughts and fires.

This was my favorite quote of all though:

“The Paris accord, for us, would have been a disaster,” Trump said in excerpts of an interview with Piers Morgan. “Would I go back in? Yeah, I’d go back in. I like, as you know, I like Emmanuel” Macron.

I can’t picture Emmanuel Macron, but what I can picture is Sasha Baron Cohen kissing Will Ferrell in Talladega Nights. Sometimes fiction actually does turn into reality!

Samantha Bee takes on the Apocalypse

I’m not a big Samantha Bee fan. I find her un-funny and would rather get my news elsewhere in a more serious form. It also makes me uncomfortable that she is essentially making fun of people’s religious beliefs here, even though yes they are kind of ridiculous on their face to those of us who don’t share them. You need to try to understand where people are coming from before you have any chance if changing their minds or at least staying well out of their way. On that note though, it is interesting watching this clip just to see some Christian fundamentalists talk about their beliefs in their own words. That, and the one laugh-out-loud-funny moment that kind of makes the point nicely that Trump is not part of any moral majority, religious or otherwise.

how to defraud the U.S. Census

From the Department of Pre-crime, a guy the Trump administration might appoint to run the 2020 Census might try to cook the books. It seems a little unfair to accuse someone of a crime they haven’t even had an opportunity to consider committing yet, but I found it interesting to consider how it could be done. This sort of thing definitely happens in some countries, for example to perpetuate minority rule in spite of demographic change.

Each census starts with a simple questionnaire sent to every household. In 1970 and 1980, over 75% of those queried sent back responses. In 2010 that figure dropped to 63.5%, and in 2020, with distrust of government at an all-time high and increasing fears of data breach, the response rate will likely be significantly worse—current estimates range from 55% to 60%. To identify the non-respondents—at least 40% of Americans—the Census Bureau will have to exert considerable energy.

Thomas Brunell will determine how vigorously to track down these unidentified people in diverse locations. In rural areas that commonly vote Republican, he could direct workers to scour the trailer parks, while in urban Democratic strongholds, he could order census takers to visit non-responding households only during working hours. He could spend his advertising budget wisely in some places and less so in others. He could dispatch non-Spanish-speaking personnel into Hispanic neighborhoods. He could feed fears of deportation in immigrant communities. He could use credit rating companies to locate non-respondents, although many of the poor will never appear on such registries.

There is a simpler route Brunell could take. He might choose to do little, a tool almost as effective as the nefarious schemes detailed above. So far, the Census Bureau’s budget has been held to its 2010 level, despite a significant increase in the population and the expected rise in the percentage of those who do not respond to the initial questionnaire. Without greater resources and dedicated will, the Census Bureau could leave tens of millions of Americans uncounted. The GAO has warned that the 2020 Census is at “high risk of failure,” but requests to add funds have not yet been granted by Congress. New coping technologies are being introduced, yet trial runs have been curtailed due to lack of financing. Plans to test a Spanish-language questionnaire have also lapsed. Such constraints raise the stakes. When resources are limited, how to allocate those resources becomes paramount.