When I start railing about Israel’s government — he’s “Netanyahoo” as far as I am concerned — some of my co-religionists chide me for singling out Israel and exempting Putin’s Russia or Xi Jinping’s China from my complaints. My usual reply is that as a Jew I feel morally complicit in what Israel’s government does; I don’t feel that way about what Putin or Xi does.
Here are your Weekly Primers on Voting Rights and Democracy and the Battle for Obamacare (Prime access). Take three minutes a week to read these Primers and you will always be up to date and know what to expect.
You probably saw the news yesterday that just days before President Trump tweeted that he was intent on saving that sanctions-busting Chinese telecommunications company, China had agreed to loan $500 million to a major Trump-backed development in Indonesia. These kinds of situations are now basically commonplace in the Trump Era. But it is important to look at them from a macro- and a micro-perspective. The details are quite complex in the latter case. We are still digging into them. But I wanted to give you a first sense of what we’re finding, because they make Trump’s connection to the operation and potential profits look considerably tighter than what I’d been led to expect yesterday from early reports. Read More
From the outset, there was little reason to think that North Korea would agree to surrender its nuclear weapons and the infrastructure and labs required to build them. If we set aside the never-very-plausible idea that the Kims are madmen intent on prepping some secular apocalyptic nuclear confrontation with the U.S., a more prosaic, rational strategy becomes clear: build a credible nuclear deterrent, thus making military-backed regime change unthinkable. Then reach an accommodation with the U.S. from a position of strength and fundamental equality. Such an agreement might involve restrictions on nuclear weapons development, limits on numbers of warheads. But fundamentally it would mean accepting North Korea as a nuclear power. Read More
The Schlapps are one of the great power couples of the Trump Era. She’s a top communications staffer at the White House — Mercedes Schlapp. He’s the head of CPAC and a major pro-Trump talking head on CNN — Matt Schlapp. Both are longtime lobbyists and DC power players. They made a stir for making a great show of walking out of the White House Correspondents Dinner early on their way to hit the after parties, allegedly as a splashy protest over “elites” at the dinner and comedian Michelle Wolf. The two apparently tweeted their outrage from a limo on the way to the NBC afterparty. “It’s why America hates the out of touch leftist media elite,” wrote Mercedes Schlapp.
Now the two have garnered attention as the most conspicuous defenders of Kelly Sadler, the White House staffer who reportedly joked about John McCain’s terminal illness. Read More
Fox Host Jeanine Pirro says Donald Trump fulfilled biblical prophecy by moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem.
Judge Jeanine: Trump fulfilled biblical prophecy by moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem. pic.twitter.com/iZOkj3b5OM
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) May 13, 2018
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TPM Reader DV wrote in this morning with what I have to say is a completely obvious point that totally eluded me. There are twenty different ways Michael Cohen’s apparent shakedown of various Fortune 500 companies is sleazy. There are a handful of ways it might break the law. But there’s another pretty big problem I at least haven’t seen explicitly mentioned. Read More
A lawyer has come forward who claims he spoke indirectly to Donald Trump (via an intermediary) and directly to Michael Cohen in 2013 about abuse allegations against former New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman.
CNBC just reported that AT&T CEO Randal Stephenson is calling hiring Michael Cohen a “big mistake. They are also reporting that their Senior Executive Vice President of External & Legislative Affairs, Bob Quinn, is ‘retiring’. That long title means head of their DC office, where lobbying and all government-facing activities are run out of. Here’s the critical backstory. Jim Cicconi, Quinn’s predecessor, had been in that position for about a decade and was a real player in the DC/Government Relations world. He only left about a year and a half ago. In other words, Quinn just showed up and now he’s out, apparently as fallout from the Michael Cohen debacle. Read More