A brief note on that massive bomb the US Air Force just dropped in Afghanistan. For those of us who remember, the US made a lot of noise and threatened to use this bomb in the invasion of Iraq in 2003. That was likely as much psychological warfare as anything else. It was never used. Read More
Let me share a few thoughts on the latest developments in the Trump Russia story, or perhaps better to say, elements of it that don’t seem to be getting a great deal of attention.
There’s quite a lot going on at the moment. The President has two genuine international crises on his hands. But I wanted to note the latest developments on health care and so-called ‘tax reform’ because they are striking both for the President’s on-going failure to pass any legislation through Congress but also because of his seeming inability to grasp the new politics of health care he has in many ways created.
President Trump Finally gets his North Korea intel briefing.
From The Wall Street Journal … Read More
The EPA has requested 10 security agents to provide a 24/7 security detail for EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt. Some specific threat? No, to handle “continuing activities from the left to foment hatred” and from “hostility within the agency.”
A rogues gallery of voting rights restrictionists is urging Attorney General Jeff Sessions to resume some of the hiring practices that politicized the George W. Bush Justice Department during some of the darkest days in the department’s history. For longtime readers, this will be more than a little alarming. Voting rights advocates are warning about where this could head.
Just to give you some of the flavor of the how bad things were at DOJ back then, here’s a 2007 TPMMuckraker account, 10 years ago this month, of a veteran DOJ official who left the department after he “lost faith in the institution as it had become.”
Note here: Trump’s budget chief says Medicare Phaseout is still on the agenda. He’s working on convincing Trump. And big Social Security cuts too.
There’s something a bit funny going on today. The White House is simultaneously claiming that news of the Carter Page FISA warrant vindicates their claims about Obama administration surveillance while also insisting Page had virtually nothing to do with the campaign. This is a complicated story because the Trump campaign – especially at that stage – was so chaotic and disorganized that the line between central and peripheral could be hard to detect and change from one day to the next. But the White House can’t get away with saying that Page was an “informal” advisor one with “no official title.”
He was as official as it got.
People are talking seriously about Sean Spicer possibly losing his job over his remarks yesterday. Who knows what will happen? But this drama is infinitely emblematic of everything about this White House. Mainly because this whole drama is entirely self-inflicted and ridiculous. I see no sense here that Spicer inadvertently let slip his true feelings – a so-called “Kinsley Gaffe”, inadvertently telling the truth. There are lots of people in this White House with dark and malevolent attitudes toward Jews. I see no reason to believe Spicer is one of them. This was just a clumsy and ridiculous, an entirely self-inflicted injury which Spicer was too clownish to avoid and too ridiculous to clean up.