Unsurprisingly, the Trump Inaugural was a veritable orgy of Trump world sloppiness and sleaze, well beyond even conventional Washington buck-raking standards. Here’s why prosecutors are so interested.
Last night I wrote a couple quick posts on Jeff Bezos’s revelation about The National Enquirer, its parent company AMI and its attempt to blackmail him with ‘intimate photos’. This isn’t just a tabloid story. I suspect this is a huge story with potentially mammoth implications. I wrote this post explaining why and this one about key clues Bezos left in his public statement.
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In addition to the all the bombshellish parts of that Jeff Bezos posts I discussed below, there are a few breadcrumbs strewn through the text that may reveal more than it seems on a quick read. Let’s go over them. Read More
Late this afternoon, Jeff Bezos published a letter on Medium that is, frankly, one of the most stunning things I’ve ever read. It is also extremely important, far beyond the celebrity gossip of a billionaire caught in an affair or compromising photographs. Read More
There are so many threads of this ugly and increasingly bizarre (three scandals at once) set of scandals in the upper ranks of the Virginia state government. But one is the proximity of these two events to the end of Jim Crow in the South. Before delving into this, let me stipulate that by saying there were lots of racist attitudes in the 1980s I’m not saying there aren’t a lot today. I am trying to make a different point. These events happened in the early 1980s. The Civil Rights Act of 1965 was 15 years or so earlier. Brown v Board was almost thirty years earlier. But actual desegregation, even de jure, let alone de facto desegregation was accepted by the courts as a years long process. Basically the de jure end of Jim Crow had only happened maybe 15 years or so earlier. To place ourselves in time, it’s like looking back at the 2004 presidential election day. In other words, just a short time ago. Read More
Jerry Nadler will go into tomorrow’s high-stakes hearing featuring acting Attorney General Matt Whitaker with a subpoena in his back pocket.
One of the most important lessons, I would suggest one of the most ingrained lessons of the passage and subsequent defense of the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) is that Democrats gained nothing for their efforts to accommodate Republican insistence on market-oriented solutions to expanding health care coverage. The ACA was, famously, based on the plan then-Gov. Mitt Romney (R-MA) passed in Massachusetts in the early aughts. The concept originated as a Heritage Foundation proposal meant to provide a ‘market-oriented’ alternative to Democratic universal coverage plans. Even worse than Republicans’ maximum resistance, many of the shortcomings of Obamacare were based on the plan’s concessions to the private insurance model of coverage.
For all these reasons, the experience has triggered a critical shift among Democrats. Single payer plans have always had substantial support among Democrats. For decades it was actually official party policy. But there was a middle group who supported single payer in principle but found either the politics intractable or the process of transition too complicated and disruptive given how entrenched the private system is and how interwoven it is with employment. Probably the majority of elected Democrats have been in this middle group for the last couple decades. Read More
Treasury Secretary Mnuchin says US is sticking with Trump’s policies, not “going back to socialism.”
Treasury Secretary says US not "going back to socialism" we had before Trump. pic.twitter.com/pntW3SjXU2
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) February 6, 2019