James Comey
Jill Abramson reminds anyone who needed reminding, that Comey is no hero.
Sure, the focus should be on Trump, his maladroit and possibly illegal attempts to strong-arm Comey to drop his investigation of then national security adviser Michael Flynn; his heavy-handed demands for loyalty; his many references, some blacked out, to Vladimir Putin; and even his lurid references to Russian prostitutes. But the part of the memos that most caught my attention and greatly troubles me is the one that reflects a blatant disrespect for freedom of the press by both Trump and Comey, who is no martyr.
The best thing about Comey and Trump fighting is that someone has to lose, and if you’re lucky, they both lose. Trump is only interested in demeaning Comey to make him an ineffective witness. Comey is interested, as always, in holding up his elevated ego that entitles him to break rules that bind mere mortals.
In a memo dated 14 February 2017, Comey says Trump complained during an Oval Office meeting about classified information being leaked to the media. ...
“I said something about the value of putting a head on a pike as a message,” Comey writes. “[Trump] replied by saying it may involve putting reporters in jail. ‘They spend a couple days in jail, make a new friend, and they are ready to talk.’”
Then, as a grand finale, Comey “laughed as I walked to the door Reince Priebus had opened”.
This exchange chilled my blood. Jailing journalists is no laughing matter and the image of these two supremely powerful officials sharing a good chuckle over the prospect of it is simply nauseating.
Nope, leaking is restricted to those whose very good brain allows them to pass information directly to the Russian ambassador in the Oval Office, and those who are so sure that no one else in the DOJ will do the right thing, that they have to do the wrong thing.
Come inside and read pundits.
Racism
Leonard Pitts provides a introductory primer on race, racism, and Starbucks.
Racism is a white problem.
I know that many white people will instinctively and emphatically resist that observation. They’ll note the self-evident truth that prejudice is confined to no one culture or color. Having known more than a few African-American bigots, homophobes and anti-Semites, I’ll be happy to concede the point.
But racism is more than prejudice. It is, rather, the system by which prejudice is encoded into the laws and customs of a society so that, to take an example not quite at random, two black men can be arrested for waiting quietly on a prospective business associate to arrive for a meeting at Starbucks.
Those three paragraphs are worth burning onto a few hundred business cards, so you can hand one to every person who starts to “explain” to you how both 1) they are not racist and 2) movements like Black Lives Matter are.
What you are less likely to encounter when confronted by racism is white people who will own the problem, who will have the guts, humanity and humility required to confront it, assess it and resolve it. So this column is a standing ovation for Starbucks.
Last week, faced with the public relations disaster noted above, CEO Kevin Johnson did all the expected things. He said what happened was wrong. He issued apologies. He did the whole this-is-not-who-we-are routine.
It’s Leonard Pitts. Of course you should read the rest.
Dana Milbank on someone who talks like a racist, and acts like a racist, and is Donald Trump.
I’d like to pause... to reflect on just one thing the president did this week that, amid Russian hookers and his assaults on truth, law and decency, got little attention: his talk of immigrants “breeding” in America’s sanctuary cities.
“There is a Revolution going on in California. Soooo many Sanctuary areas want OUT of this ridiculous, crime infested & breeding concept,” the president tweeted on Tuesday.
What could he mean? Immigrants are breeding thoroughbred horses? Prize-winning cattle?
Or perhaps Trump was using “breeding” in the sense now popular among white supremacists?
Hmm. I wonder . . .
At the time, I put the sentence down to another of Trump’s manglings and suspected he meant that Sanctuary Laws were breeding crime. But … that’s giving Trump a lot more benefit of the doubt than he deserves.
The image of Latinos breeding makes them not quite human, parasites among a host people, an enemy within given sanctuary when they should be cast out. The aliens among us are not like us, but, unfairly protected, they breed and bring danger.
That sounds like something that Trump could say at a rally. And get applause.
Hugo Drochon on the new thought-leader for the conservative movement.
American conservatives, especially among the country’s powerful Catholic minority (which includes six of the nine supreme court justices), have found a new champion for their cause in the Notre Dame political theorist Patrick Deneen. His latest book, Why Liberalism Failed, has been critically acclaimed throughout the conservative press, with the prominent Harvard legal scholar Adrian Vermeule, himself a recent convert to Catholicism, declaring it a “triumph”.
Rising inequality, the degradation of the environment, decreasing living standards, increasing loneliness, the destructive polarisation of our political world – Deneen blames liberalism for all the ills currently afflicting society. Surprisingly, he does not attribute these ills to the failures of liberalism, but to its success.
How did liberalism break everything, when conservatives have their hands on all the controls? Deneen directs his fire at “society.” It’s not so much liberal politicians who are to blame, but all that sex, drugs, and rock and roll out there, destroying America’s traditional values and covering it with rainbow flags and 4/20 stickers.
To make this argument work, Deneen lumps together all the various ideas and movements that have been associated with the term “liberalism”, whether they are compatible or not – from classical “check-and-balances” liberalism to New Deal progressivism, from neo-liberal economics to liberal identity politics. What ultimately unites all these strands, in Deneen’s eyes, is rampant individualism, which has been a bugbear for conservatives dating back to the French revolution.
This is a “read it if you want to understand what Gingrich et. al. are spewing about now” assignment.
The Washington Post on Trump’s war against sanctuary cities.
The Trump administration’s failing campaign to bully so-called sanctuary states and cities by denying federal grants to police departments unless they offer unconditional cooperation to U.S. deportation agents is a study in the arrogance of power.
North Korea
Max Boot says that Kim Jong-un is pulling a fast one on the slow Donald Trump.
Kim has let it be known that he is willing to discuss denuclearization and a peace treaty to end the Korean War — without insisting on a pullout of U.S. forces. CIA Director Mike Pompeo has journeyed to Pyongyang to meet with Kim. And on Friday Kim announced that he will end nuclear and missile tests and shut down the site where the nuclear tests have been conducted.
In light of all this news, a reader writes to ask: “Just wondering if you are going to update your March 8 ‘snooker’ piece.” Yes, I am. Here’s the update: Kim is a more adept con man, and Trump an easier mark, than even I had imagined.
Donald Trump has either never checked the history of North Korean actions over the last two decades, or he’s completely forgotten that old Republican adage “fool me once, shame on, shame on you. Fool me, you can't get fooled again.”
These are not “breakthroughs” signaling peace in our time. These are indications of how skillfully Kim is maneuvering to preserve his nuclear program while relaxing international sanctions and dissipating Trump’s “fire and fury.”
Everybody wants to see great progress with North Korea, even if it’s Trump making that progress. But so far we seem to be getting a lot of theater.
History
Mitch Daniels and the blurriness of foresight.
The European peoples of a century ago fell hard for the errors of presentism. They were riding the tide of a century of stunning economic improvement and technological advances, every bit as transformational as those of the past few decades. Between 1815 and 1914, Britain’s per capita gross domestic product grew nearly three times as fast as it had in the preceding century. The steam engine, the sewing machine, the railroad, electricity, the telegraph, the telephone, the airplane and so many more breakthroughs convinced the people of 1914 that a Golden Age had arrived, in which a benevolent science was on its way to conquering distance, want and the tedium of daily work.
There are too many people anxious to believe the same thing today. But that golden age, in which war between nations seemed an unimaginable thing of the past, exploded into war, destruction, disease, depression, and …
Even worse, the collapse of their golden age ushered in a new dark age over much of the globe, in which totalitarians such as Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot murdered tens of millions and enslaved the survivors within their reach. It is presentism’s smug folly to assume that we in the present day are superior intellectually and morally and that the past has nothing to teach us.
See. History doesn’t rhyme. It’s more like one of those albums where if you play it backwards, you get a satanic message … because this time we’re doing the totalitarians first.
Anne Applebaum and some of the many ways democracies go down.
In light of the major speech French President Emmanuel Macron made to the European Parliament this week calling on fellow Europeans to “take the firm choice to defend democracy,” it is worth looking at why Malta changed so dramatically. Most analyses of Macron’s speech assumed he was talking about Hungary and to a lesser extent Poland, countries whose current ruling parties have politicized the judiciary, turned public media into party propaganda organs, and made life difficult or impossible for independent media. But in an era when international flows of money dwarf the state budgets of many countries, Macron’s warning about the weakness of Western democracy should be read much more widely.
Applebaum looks primarily to the example of Malta, a tiny country that turned itself into a tax haven neatly snuggled inside the EU, drawing wads of both oligarchs and shell companies eager to buy their way in. Malta politicians got loads of bribes. Malta citizens saw property values rise as criminals snatched up available land. And all it cost them was their soul.
In Malta, the independent institutions that should, in theory, enforce a neutral or impartial version of the law are, in practice, far too weak to do so. Paul Caruana Galizia, one of [journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia]’s sons, argues that in Malta, the prime minister in practice controls the police force, judicial appointments and the attorney general. As a result, few of his mother’s stories, even those connecting the prime minister and his entourage to secret offshore accounts, ever led to official investigations, let alone prosecutions: “No attorney general has ever brought a case against the government,” he told me.
Joe Scarborough predicts that Trump is one and done.
It is true that GOP leaders stand silent as President Trump trashes the rule of law, attacks federal judges and declares America’s free press the “enemy of the people.” These lap dogs even remain muzzled as younger Americans are chained to a future of crippling debt. And they shame the memory of the first Republican president — who gave his life ending slavery — by marching alongside a bumbling bigot who labels Hispanics “breeders” and “rapists,” seeks to bar tens of millions of Muslims from entering the country, and defends white supremacy in the ugly aftermath of Charlottesville.
Again, when everything that’s happening looks like racism, there could be a reason.
And yet these same morally enfeebled enablers have become muted when asked whether they’ll support their fearless leader’s reelection bid.
“Look, I’m focused on opioids,” muttered Tennessee’s Lamar Alexander, suggesting that a U.S. senator is not mentally adept enough to fight a drug epidemic while also figuring out whether he backs a president in his own party. Alexander is not the only GOP senator to offer up tortured answers to this simple question.
Republicans are willing to support Scott Pruitt at the EPA, Betsy DeVos at education, and Rick Perry at … what was the third one? But they’re not willing to sign on to Trump 2020. At least, not yet. Most likely they’re keeping fingers crossed in hopes that Trump does not run. But if he does, they’ll be back in line, and hope Trump never notices that they stepped away.
Energy
David Von Drehle on the big changes roiling the energy market.
What does this tell us? That change is not just possible, it’s real. Your Energy Star appliances, LED lightbulbs, aluminum vehicles and weatherstripping are not merely symbolic efforts. They are part of an efficiency revolution at home, at work and on the road that’s producing meaningful results without disrupting our way of life.
Which is, of course, why Pruitt has been working to destroy the EnergyStar program, and why Republicans have treated LED light bulbs as if they are the second coming of fluoride in the water. Saving energy doesn’t just cut down on electric bills, it cuts down on electric demand — and drops the need for fossil fuels.
We’re also seeing significant shifts in the sources of our energy. Coal consumption is sharply down; cleaner natural gas is surging. But the steepest angle of growth is in the renewable energy sectors (though they admittedly started at a much smaller base). Wind is projected to exceed water in electricity generation within the next year.
Donald Trump’s last scheme to make America use more coal was blocked by his own regulators. That’s why he’s now reaching back more than 60 years to an emergency power that was given to Harry Truman. And I’ll write about that … right now.
Jennifer Dlouhy and Jennifer Jacobs explain Trump’s latest scheme to make you burn more coal.
Months into the Korean War, President Harry Truman capped wages and imposed price controls on the steel industry, seizing authority under a newly passed law to take action in the name of national defense.
Now, more than a half century later, Trump administration officials are considering using the same statute to keep struggling coal and nuclear power plants online, according to four people familiar with the discussions who asked for anonymity to discuss private deliberations.
The original power given under the law was to protect availability of resources, but Trump is trying to turn it into a program that requires power plants to use one source of power over another, and requires them to pay more when they do.
Under the approach, the administration would invoke sweeping authority in the 68-year-old Defense Production Act, which allows the president to effectively nationalize private industry to ensure the U.S. has resources that could be needed amid a war or after a disaster.
Except they’d be taking money from the national purse, and giving it directly to private operators for coal no one needs.
Obama-Stalgia
Colbert King is feeling nostalgic.
The Trump administration serves as a daily reminder of how much the United States lost when President Barack Obama vacated the White House.
More than ever, I miss our 44th president’s grace, coolness, sense of humor, intelligence and empathy. I miss Obama’s crew of competent advisers and his Cabinet, which was filled with members who knew how to do their jobs — unlike President Trump’s pretentious, self-aggrandizing Cabinet members living high on the public’s dime.
We’ve all been there, Colbert. We’ve all been there.