AMERICA NEEDS & DESERVES BETTER THAN MIKE PENCE: Just Being Somewhat Smarter & Less Evil Than Trump Doesn’t Cut It In Crisis! — Bess Levin @ Vanity Fair & James Downie @ WashPost Toast “Second Clown” 🤡 For Putting Obsequiousness To Trump Above Truth & Our National Interest! 🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡👎🏻☠️⚰️

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/04/donald-trump-liberate-tweets

Bess Levin writes in Vanity Fair:

LEVIN REPORT

Tweets, Deal With It

According to the VP, the president is simply “communicating” with the people when he whips protestors into a frenzy.

BY BESS LEVIN

APRIL 17, 2020

On Thursday night, perhaps having been zapped with some sort of taser that sent a momentary current of sense through his body, Donald Trump announced that despite previously, falsely claiming he had “total” authority to force states to reopen far sooner than experts say is safe, the decision would be left to the individual governors. “If they need to remain closed,” he said, “we will allow them to do that.” Then he went to bed and woke up the exact same lunatic we’ve come to know and fear over the last three-plus years, and decided to spend a portion of his day whipping anti-social distancing protesters into a frenzy, contradicting everything he had said less than 24 hours prior.

The three states Trump all-caps called out have the distinction of being run by Democratic governors who’ve had the temerity to insist that logic and science will dictate when and how they will get people back to everyday life, a plan that has been met by mobs of angry protesters who’d prefer to congregate in large groups ASAP, wildly contagious coronavirus be damned. While some of them, like Virginia’s Ralph Northam, dismissed Trump’s tweets as the ravings of an online troll, saying at a press conference that he’s “fighting a biological war” and “[does] not have time” to involve himself in “Twitter wars,” others were less inclined to let them slide.

The president’s statements this morning encourage illegal and dangerous acts,” Washington governor Jay Inslee wrote on Twitter. “He is putting millions of people in danger of contracting COVID-19. His unhinged rantings and calls for people to ‘liberate’ states could also lead to violence. We’ve seen it before.” He continued: “The president is fomenting domestic rebellion and spreading lies—even while his own administration says the virus is real, it is deadly and we have a long way to go before restrictions can be lifted…. The president’s actions threaten his own goal of recovery. His words will likely cause a spike in infections where distancing is working. That will further postpose the 14 days of decline his own guidance says is necessary to ease restrictions…. I hope someday we can look at today’s meltdown as something to be pitied, rather than condemned. But we don’t have that luxury today. There is too much at stake.”

Meanwhile, in a Friday call with Mike Pence, Senate Democrats questioned the vice president re: what the hell Trump is doing and if they can expect someone in the administration to sit him down and tell him to cut the shit. To which the answer was obviously no:

Senator Tim Kaine (D-Va.) pressed Pence on Trump’s Twitter feed at the end of the call, asking why the president was trying to incite division by tweeting “LIBERATE” Virginia, Minnesota and Michigan and aligning himself with protests in those states over their lockdowns. Pence said the administration is working with governors but that the president will continue to communicate with the American people as he always has.

So that’s something to look forward to.

If you would like to receive the Levin Report in your inbox daily, click here to subscribe.

Trump sends an additional half a billion dollars to states to fight COVID-19

No, just kidding. That money’s actually going to his completely useless wall, per the Daily Beast:

In the middle of a pandemic that has killed 27,000 Americans and counting, the Army this week gave a politically connected Montana firm half a billion dollars—not to manufacture ventilators or protective gear to fight the novel coronavirus, but to build 17 miles of President Trump’s southern border wall. On Tuesday, the Army Corps of Engineers announced it awarded BFBC, an affiliate of Barnard Construction, $569 million in contract modifications for building “17.17 miles” of the wall in two California locations, El Centro and San Diego. That works out to over $33 million per mile—steeply above the $20 million-per-mile average that the Trump administration is already doling out for the wall. Construction is supposed to be completed by the end of June 2021.

On the bright side, it’s not like the money is effectively being lit on fire except, oh wait, that’s exactly what it’s like:

Smugglers sawed into new sections of President Trump’s border wall 18 times in the San Diego area during a single one-month span late last year, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection records obtained by the Washington Post via a Freedom of Information Act request…. The records do not indicate whether the one-month span last year is a representative sample of how frequently people are trying to breach new sections of Trump’s border barrier, which are made of tall steel bollards partially filled with concrete and rebar. The Post reported last November that smuggling crews armed with common battery-operated power tools—including reciprocating saws that retail for as little as $100 at home improvement stores—can cut through the bollards using inexpensive blades designed for slicing through metal and stone.

On Wednesday, a group of 66 representatives and 25 senators sent a letter to the administration calling for the halting of construction on the wall until the coronavirus crisis is tackled. “We should be using all resources and funding to combat this virus and protect Americans, instead of using critical funding and resources to continue the construction of a border wall,” the lawmakers wrote. “The construction of a wall puts workers, law enforcement personnel, and border residents in immediate danger.” Said letter will presumably be used as toilet paper in the West Wing washroom, but it was a valiant effort nevertheless.

. . . .

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You can read the rest of the “Levin Report” at the above link.

Meanwhile, over at the WashPost, James Downie weighs in on our spineless Veep:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/19/even-trumps-best-lackey-cant-defend-him/

When Donald Trump chose Mike Pence as his running mate in 2016, the obvious political benefit was that Pence, a former governor and House member who is famously Christian, could boost evangelical and conservative turnout to help Republicans up and down the ballot. But for the egomaniacal Trump, Pence had another key qualification: “He says nice things about me.”

Since being named to the ticket, Pence has repeatedly put his obsequiousness on display: Few on Team Trump are better at deploying up-is-down reasoning to spin news to Trump’s benefit. But during the vice president’s appearances on NBC’s and Fox News’s Sunday morning talk shows, it was clear that even Pence could not bootlick his way out of the lurch the president’s actions leave the rest of us in.

On Friday, Trump spoke out in support of protests against stay-at-home orders imposed by Democratic governors in Minnesota, Michigan and Virginia. It’s disturbing enough that the president would undermine the fight against the pandemic. Worse was his provocative call on Twitter to “LIBERATE” those states — and, in Virginia’s case, “save your great 2nd Amendment” — which caught the attention of far-right extremists. Washington Gov. Jay Inslee (D) rightly observed Friday, “The president is fomenting domestic rebellion and spreading lies — even while his own administration says the virus is real.”

Protests with honking horns, anti-shutdown signs and angry Americans continued in Maryland, Texas and Wisconsin on April 18. (The Washington Post)

[Full coverage of the coronavirus pandemic]

Naturally, hosts on both NBC and Fox asked the vice president to explain the president’s comments. After all, as Fox host Chris Wallace pointed out, “they’re protesting your own guidelines to stop the spread.” On Fox, Pence focused on bragging about the White House coronavirus task force. When pressed, he assured viewers that “no one in America wants to reopen this country more than President Donald Trump” — a line he repeated on NBC. In both interviews, he then turned to touting guidelines that Trump issued Thursday for reopening states. Pence omitted that the guidance leaves key decisions up to governors, who Trump has said should call the shots on reopening. Both are in keeping with this president’s refusal to take responsibility for the pandemic crisis or a national response.

. . . .

The simple truth is that Pence dodged because the president’s actions were indefensible. But Pence can’t say that, both because the protests are being cheered by Fox News and like-minded outlets and because Pence wants to stay in the good graces of a president who values loyalty to him above all else. So long as conservative media and egomania mean more to the president than Americans’ lives, the rest of the country suffers.

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Read the rest of Downie’s op-ed at the link.

Actually, Pence is the only person in the Trump regime that the Clown-in-Chief can’t arbitrarily remove from office for speaking truth. Sure, Trump can toss him off the ticket for November. But, there are other factors here:

- In the best case scenario, it won’t make any difference because Biden will win;
- Trump might still remove Pence from the ticket on a whim, no matter how much he sucks up;
- At some point is being a coward/toady/apologist for the most corrupt President in U.S. history really worth sacrificing the health and welfare of our nation as well as your human dignity?

I guess for someone like Pence, toadyism has no limits. But, America needs and deserves better from its #2.

This November, vote like your life depends on it. Because it does! Throw the Clowns out!🤡

PWS

04-20-20

THE “MAINSTREAM MEDIA” HAS FALLEN FOR BILLY BARR’S LATEST “CON JOB” HOOK, LINE & SINKER — But YOU Shouldn’t — Bess Levin @! Vanity Fair Decodes Billy’s Real Message to His Don: “Let [me] turn the judicial branch into your own personal score-settling operation in peace!“ — Plus, My Bonus “Friday Essay” — “Don’t Believe A Word Billy Barr Says!”

Bess Levin
Politics & Finance Writer
Vanity Fair

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/02/william-barr-trump-doj-tweets

Bess writes:

Even before he was hired as Donald Trump’s attorney general, William Barr made it clear that he would be acting as the president’s lackey first and the chief lawyer for the United States second, having auditioned for the role by sending an unsolicited letter to the Justice Department calling the Russia inquiry “fatally misconceived” and describing Robert Mueller’s actions as “grossly irresponsible.” Since then, Barr has told Congress it’s perfectly okay for the president to instruct aides to lie to investigators, suggested that Mueller’s report fully exonerated Trump, which of course it did not, and attempted to bury the “urgent“ whistle-blower report that became the basis of the House’s impeachment proceedings.

Now, if it were up to Barr, he’d happily carry on doing the president’s dirty work, but for one problem: Trump, with his flapping yap and quick trigger finger, has been making it a little too obvious that the DOJ, in its current form, exists to punish his enemies and spare his friends. The most recent example of this, of course, came this week, when the president tweeted, at 1:48 a.m., that the sentencing recommendation of seven to nine years for his longtime pal Roger Stone was “horrible,” “very unfair,” and a “miscarriage of justice.” Then, after Barr’s DOJ intervened with a new filing calling for a much lighter sentence—which prompted the four prosecutors on the case to withdraw from it—the president tweeted his thanks, congratulating the attorney general on getting involved in matters relevant to his personal interests.

For many people long aware of Barr’s status as a boot-licking hack, this was a bridge too far. The calls for him to resign or be impeached were swift. And they got so bad that on Thursday, the attorney general felt compelled to sit down with ABC News and send the message to the president that if he’d like the DOJ to continue to do his dirty work, he needs to stop tweeting about it. Do criminals tell their social-media followers “Check out this sweet scam I just pulled”? No! Of course, rather than stating directly that the president’s penchant for telling the world about the many ways he’s corrupted the government have made it difficult for that corruption to continue, Barr had to pretend his comments were all about ensuring the DOJ’s independence, which would be a funny, not-at-all-believable thing for him to start caring about now.

“I’m not going to be bullied or influenced by anybody….whether it’s Congress, newspaper editorial boards, or the president,” Bill Barr tells @ABC News.

“I cannot do my job here at the department with a constant background commentary that undercuts me.”

http://

abcn.ws/39yd9bE

“I’m not going to be bullied or influenced by anybody,” Barr insisted to ABC News chief justice correspondent Pierre Thomas. “Whether it’s Congress, a newspaper editorial board, or the president. I’m gonna do what I think is right. And you know…I cannot do my job here at the department with a constant background commentary that undercuts me.” Just in case that extremely obvious hint was lost on its intended audience, Barr added: “I think it’s time to stop the tweeting about Department of Justice criminal cases.”

Maybe it’s not the tweets damaging his integrity but the nakedly partisan and quasi-legal decisions he’s made on the tweeter’s behalf? Just a thought.

AG Bill Barr: “I’m not going to be bullied or influenced by anybody.” He says Trump’s tweets “make it impossible for me to do my job and to assure the courts and the prosecutors in the department that we’re doing our work with integrity.” via @ABC @PierreTABC @alex_mallin

Asked about the decision to reverse the sentencing recommendation for Stone, Barr insisted that it definitely had nothing to do with the guy being a longtime friend of Trump’s, claiming that he came to the unbiased conclusion on his own that the seven-to-nine-years call was excessive and that he was planning to file an update even before Trump tweeted about it being “horrible and unfair.” (He was not asked about the NBC News report that he additionally removed a U.S. attorney from her post for failing to punish Trump’s enemy Andrew McCabe, or that the Justice Department also intervened to change the sentencing recommendation for convicted criminal and former national security adviser Michael Flynn.)

Barr said Trump’s middle-of-the-night tweet put him in a bad position. He insists he had already discussed with staff that the sentencing recommendation was too long. “Do you go forward with what you think is the right decision or do you pull back because of the tweet? And that just sort of illustrates how disruptive these tweets can be,” he said.

Barr also told ABC he was “a little surprised” that the entire Stone prosecution team had resigned from the case—and one from the DOJ entirely—which presumably has something to do with the fact that after using your department to do the president’s bidding for so long, you sometimes forget that other people will take issue with such behavior.

Asked if he expected Trump to react to his criticism of the tweets, Barr responded: “I hope he will react.”

“And respect it?” Thomas asked.

“Yes,” Barr said. You hear that, Mr. President? Let the man turn the judicial branch into your own personal score-settling operation in peace!

********************

DON’T BELIEVE A WORD BILLY BARR SAYS!

By Paul Wickham Schmidt

Exclusive for immigrationcourtside.com

Feb. 14, 2020

Even smart folks like The NY Times’ David Leonhardt are babbling about, perhaps, giving Billy “the benefit of the doubt.” Come on, man!

As Bess Levin points out, Barr’s faithfully been doing Trump’s “dirty work” for him since even before he set foot inside the DOJ again. It’s not like he’s suddenly had a “moral awakening” or discovered human decency.

No, Trump is the “unitary Executive” that Billy and some of his GOP righty neo-fascists have always salivated over. But, understandably he’d prefer more privacy as he deconstructs the DOJ and undermines fair and impartial justice, including, of course, further trashing the Immigration Courts that, incredible as it might seem in a country that actually has a written Constitution supposedly guaranteeing Due Process to “all persons,” belong exclusively to him.

Remarkably, and quite stunningly to anyone who has actually studied the law, the Article III Courts, all the way up to the feckless Supremes, have gone along with this absurd charade. You get the message: Immigrants, migrants, and asylum seekers aren’t really “persons” at all. They have been dehumanized by the regime and “Dred Scottified” by the Article IIIs.

There is no particular legal rationale or justification for this ongoing miscarriage of justice. It’s just a matter of enough folks in black robes being too cowardly or self-absorbed, or maybe in a few cases too ignorant, to stand up for the Constitutional and human rights of the most vulnerable among us.

To paraphrase an expression from the world of religion: “What would Jesus think about this blindness to human suffering?” Nothing good, I’m sure!

If he’s actually out there among us today, he’s undoubtedly among those suffering in the regime’s “New American Gulag” or waiting in squalor along the Mexican border for a “fixed hearing” that’s probably never going to happen anyway. I know where he isn’t: among the sign waving crazies shouting hateful slogans glorifying human rights abuses at the “hate fests” z/k/a “Trump rallies!”

In Immigration Court, the conflicts of interest and threats to human decency aren’t just “implied” or “apparent.” They are very real, and they are destroying real human lives, even killing innocent folks, every day.

And, unlike U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson, whose life tenure allows her to “ignore the noise and do what she thinks is right” (as Trump’s GOP toadies love to point out), Immigration Judges are “wholly owned commodities” of Billy and the regime: disposable, subservient, and told to “follow orders.” They can’t even schedule their own cases without political interference, let alone apply the law in a way that conflicts with Billy’s unethical precedents or those entered by his “wholly owned appellate body,” the Board of Immigration Appeals!

The latter has recently gone out of its way to show total subservience to the regime’s White Nationalist anti-asylum, anti-due-process, anti-immigrant agenda. Indeed, they have even drawn the ire of at least one conservative GOP-appointed Article III Judge by contemptuously disobeying a direct court order in favor of a footnote in a letter from the Attorney General.

This remarkable, yet entirely predictable, event was first highlighted in “Courtside.” https://immigrationcourtside.com/2020/01/25/contempt-for-courts-7th-cir-blasts-bia-for-misconduct-we-have-never-before-encountered-defiance-of-a-remand-order-and-we-hope-never-to-see-it-again-members-of-the-board-must-count-themse/

It was also the subject of a highly readable analysis by my good friend and NDPA leader Tess Hellgren, at Innovation Law Lab, certainly no stranger to scofflaw behavior by EOIR and “go along to get along” complicity by Article IIIs. https://immigrationcourtside.com/2020/02/01/tess-hellgren-innovation-law-lab-when-it-comes-to-the-captive-bia-weaponized-immigration-courts-the-article-iiis-need-to-put-away-the-rubber-stamp-restore-integrity-to-the-law-fac/

More recently, EOIR’s trashing of judicial norms under Billy Barr has been highlighted in another fine article in CNN by Professor Kimberly Wehle, herself a former DOJ prosecutor.https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/02/12/a-conservative-judge-draws-a-line-in-the-sand-with-trump-administration-114185

“Shocking” as this professional malpractice and contempt for the justice system might be to those journalists and former DOJ employees who haven’t been paying attention, it’s nothing new to those of us involved in immigration. For the last three years, the regime has been actively and unethically “gaming” the unconstitutional Immigration “Court” system against the very migrants and asylum seekers whose legal rights and human dignity they are actually supposed to be protecting! How is this “just OK?”

Feckless Article III Courts have largely “gone along to get along,” although they might be showing less patience now that the scofflaw actions and disrespectful attitudes promoted by Billy and his predecessor “Gonzo Apocalypto” Sessions are directed at them personally rather than just screwing vulnerable migrants and asylum seekers.

While it’s nice that at least some Article III Judges are finally reacting to being “given the finger” by Barr, Trump, and their gang of White Nationalist thugs, outrage at their own disrespectful treatment pales in comparison with the death, torture, rape, extortion, and the other parade of horribles being inflicted daily on vulnerable migrants by the Immigration “Courts” and the human rights criminals in the Trump regime while the Article IIIs fail to step in and save lives.

In the end of the day, as history will eventually show, human lives, which are the key to the “rule of law,” will prove to be more important than “hurt feelings” among the Article III “lifers” or the kind of legal gobbledygook (much of it on “jurisdiction” which often translates into “task avoidance”) that Article IIIs, particularly those from the right wing, like to throw around to obscure their legal tone-deafness and moral failings from their fellow humans.

Due Process Forever; Complicity in the Face of Tyranny Never!

PWS

02-14-20

BESS LEVIN @ VANITY FAIR: White Nationalist Trump Revs Up Anti-Semitism: “You’re brutal killers, not nice people at all.”

https://apple.news/APvXpviE8ThetKCXwBZpQkg

Back in February 2017, Donald Trump was asked what the government planned to do about an uptick in anti-Semitism, to which he characteristically responded, “I am the least anti-Semitic person that you’ve ever seen in your entire life.” That statement, like the ones he’s previously made about being “the least racist person there is anywhere in the world,” was, and is, obviously not true at all. Prior to being elected, Trump seemed to suggest to a room full of Jews that they buy off politicians; tweeted an image of Hillary Clinton’s face atop a pile of cash next to the Star of David and the phrase, “Most Corrupt Candidate Ever!”; and released an ad featuring the faces of powerful Jewish people with a voiceover about them being part of a “global power structure” that has “robbed our working class” and “stripped our country of its wealth.” After moving into the White House, and just a few short months following his assertion that he is the least anti-Semitic person to walk the earth, Trump refused to condemn neo-Nazis and, just last August, accused American Jews of being “disloyal” to Israel by voting for Democrats. And if you thought the coming holiday season would inspire the president to pump the brakes on blatant anti-Semitism, boy, do we have a surprise for you!

Speaking at the Israeli American Council in Hollywood, Florida, on Saturday night, Trump hit all of his favorite anti-Semitic tropes before a room full of Jewish people. He started off by once again invoking the age-old cliché about “dual loyalty,” saying there are Jews who “don’t love Israel enough.” After that warm-up he dove right into the stereotype about Jews and money, telling the group: “A lot of you are in the real estate business, because I know you very well. You’re brutal killers, not nice people at all,” he said. “But you have to vote for me—you have no choice. You’re not gonna vote for Pocahontas, I can tell you that. You’re not gonna vote for the wealth tax. Yeah, let’s take 100% of your wealth away!” (It feels beside the point that neither Elizabeth Warren nor any other Democratic candidate has proposed a 100% wealth tax.) He continued: “Some of you don’t like me. Some of you I don’t like at all, actually. And you’re going to be my biggest supporters because you’re going to be out of business in about 15 minutes if they get it. So I don’t have to spend a lot of time on that.”

Not surprisingly, the remarks by the self-described “King of Israel” were swiftly condemned by Jewish organizations. “Dear @POTUS,” the American Jewish Committee tweeted Sunday afternoon, “Much as we appreciate your unwavering support for Israel, surely there must be a better way to appeal to American Jewish voters, as you just did in Florida, than by money references that feed age-old and ugly stereotypes. Let’s stay off that mine-infested road.” Calling the comments “deeply offensive” and “unconscionable,” the Jewish Democratic Council of America said in a statement, “We strongly denounce these vile and bigoted remarks in which the president—once again—used anti-Semitic stereotypes to characterize Jews as driven by money and insufficiently loyal to Israel. He even had the audacity to suggest that Jews ‘have no choice’ but to support him. American Jews do have a choice, and they’re not choosing President Trump or the Republican Party, which has been complicit in enacting his hateful agenda.” The group’s executive director added: “Jewish support for the GOP has been halved since Trump has been in office, from 33 percent in 2014 to 17 percent in 2018, because Trump’s policies and rhetoric are completely antithetical to Jewish values.”

Trump, on whose watch hate crimes have hit historic levels, has not seen fit to respond to any of the criticism yet, but presumably when he does it’ll be to note his appointment as “the second coming of God” and all of his many Jewish friends.

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Strange campaign “pitch!”

Wherever he goes, hate follows and thrives.

PWS

12-09-19

BESS LEVIN @ VANITY FAIR: Trump “Uber Toady” Billy Barr Just Can’t Help Pushing False Narratives To Protect The Corrupt “Supreme Leader”

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/12/william-barr-russia-ig-report

Bess writes:

Last March, after Robert Mueller submitted the results of his investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and obstruction of justice by Donald Trump and his campaign, but before the world got to see it, Attorney General William Barr sent a summary of the findings to Congress. In it, Barr wrote that the Mueller probe did not come to a conclusion about whether the president had obstructed justice, leading the A.G. to decide on his own not to charge him. Trump, naturally, was thrilled by this assessment, but others, like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, were not content to take Barr’s word for it, saying, effectively, that Barr was a bootlicking hack who could not be trusted, in light of the fact that the guy literally got the job by sending an unsolicited 19-page memo to the Justice Department in which he called the special counsel’s inquiry “fatally misconceived,” described Mueller’s actions as “grossly irresponsible,” and insisted “Mueller should not be permitted to demand that the president submit to interrogation about alleged obstruction.”

Pelosi, of course, turned out to be right: Mueller’s report, in fact, found numerous instances of obstruction by Trump that, were Mueller’s hands not tied by Justice Department guidelines that say you can’t indict the president, could have resulted in Trump being charged with a crime, a far cry from Barr’s rosy interpretation of the findings. That didn’t stop Barr from continuing to undermine the almost two-year-long investigation by his good friend, likening it to the birther movement, claiming that, actually, it’s “not a crime” for the president to demand that staffers lie to investigators, and coordinating with the White House to make Trump look good. And now it appears that Barr is still trying to discredit the entire Russia investigation, even if it means going against the word of his own agency, according to the Washington Post:

Attorney General William P. Barr has told associates he disagrees with the Justice Department’s inspector general on one of the key findings in an upcoming report—that the FBI had enough information in July 2016 to justify launching an investigation into members of the Trump campaign, according to people familiar with the matter. The Justice Department’s inspector general, Michael Horowitz, is due to release his long-awaited findings in a week, but behind the scenes at the Justice Department, disagreement has surfaced about one of Horowitz’s central conclusions on the origins of the Russia investigation. The discord could be the prelude to a major fissure within federal law enforcement on the controversial question of investigating a presidential campaign.

Barr has not been swayed by Horowitz’s rationale for concluding that the FBI had sufficient basis to open an investigation on July 31, 2016, these people said…. The Russia investigation was opened after the FBI was told of statements made by a then Trump campaign aide, George Papadopoulos, that the Russians possessed hacked Hillary Clinton emails. Papadopoulos’s alleged comments were key because they were made well before any public allegation that Russian intelligence operatives had hacked the Democratic National Committee. The attorney general has privately contended that Horowitz does not have enough information to reach the conclusion the FBI had enough details in hand at the time to justify opening such a probe…the prospect of the nation’s top law enforcement official suggesting the FBI may have wrongly opened an investigation into a presidential campaign, even after the inspector general announces the agency was justified in doing so, will probably generate more partisan battles over how the Justice Department and the FBI operate.

People familiar with Horowitz’s report told the Post that while it included some criticism of the FBI, it did not agree with Trump’s claim that the investigation was a politically motivated “witch hunt,” an assessment Barr, as Trump’s chief toady, obviously cannot abide. While the special counsel’s probe may seem like ancient history, it is actually a key part of the impeachment inquiry; last month the general counsel for the House of Representatives asked a federal appeals court to grant Congress access to secret grand jury evidence from the Russia investigation, saying that “there is evidence, very sadly, that the president might have provided untruthful answers…. Did the president lie? Was the president not truthful in his responses to the Mueller investigation? The House is trying to determine whether the current president should remain in office. This is unbelievably serious and it’s happening right now, very fast.”

Covering for Trump re: Russia isn’t the only criticism that has been (justifiably!) lobbed in Barr’s direction of late. Democrats were also enraged by the Justice Department’s quick decision not to investigate Trump over his attempt to convince Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden, and telling the acting director of national intelligence he had no obligation to send an “urgent” whistle-blower report to Congress that has become the basis of the impeachment inquiry. “The attorney general has gone rogue,” Pelsoi told CNN in September, adding that “he has for a long time now.”

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Bess doesn’t even get to Barr’s “maliciously incompetent” mismanagement of the unconstitutional Immigration Courts in support of Trump’s racist White Nationalist agenda.

PWS

12-05-19

BESS LEVIN @ VANITY FAIR: Trump Taps Favorite Slumlord Jared To Seize Private Property For “Show Wall” — What Could Go Wrong?

https://apple.news/ArI8xX4mHT-CGSh_DnR78OQ

Bess writes:

Great Ideas

Jared Kushner’s New Big Boy Job: Building Trump’s Wall

First order of business: Seize all the private land.

When we last checked in about the progress of Donald Trump’s fantasy border wall, things were not going super well in that very little of it had actually been built. Plagued by logistical issues—not to mention opposition by the majority of Americans—as of last month the administration had reportedly acquired only 16% of the land it needs in Texas, where at least 100 landowners will have to give up valuable property for the project to happen. That news was presumably of little bother to the millions of people who think the border wall is a patently absurd, wildly racist, completely pointless monument to Trump’s ego, but for the president it was completely unacceptable. So, insistent that he will deliver the fence by the end of 2020 as a gift to his rabid base, he’s brought in the big guns: Jared Kushner.

Yes, in addition to his 387 other jobs at the White House, which include bringing peace to the Middle East, solving the opioid crisis, “fixing the government with business ideas,” reforming veteran care, and overhauling the entire immigration system, the first son-in-law is the “de facto project manager” for constructing the border wall, according to a new report from the Washington Post. What big ideas has he come up with so far? Well, where government officials have been resistant to the president’s “take the land” edict, wherein he thinks using eminent domain to seize private land will go over great both legally and politically, Jared is all for it. Once a slumlord, always a slumlord!

According to one person involved in the matter, Kushner has “annoyed” officials due to his total lack of knowledge of the government’s procurement process for obtaining land and the “realities” of the project. “So he took a much more hands-on role in figuring out, mile by mile, how to get more wall up,” this person told the Post. “It didn’t help put wall up faster and cheaper. His interventions actually just created more inefficiency in the process.”

While Kushner insists that everything is on target to meet the goal of 450 miles by the end of next year—a pace that means accelerating construction at least fourfold—to date just 83 miles of new barrier have been completed, with nearly all of that classified by CBP as “replacement wall,” a characterization the president does not appreciate:

Though Kushner has blamed his predecessors for not moving quickly enough to obtain necessary land, a former Department of Homeland Security official told the Post the reason for that was this little thing called the law. “We weren’t taking people’s land willy-nilly,” said the official.

The White House declined to comment; Kushner’s allies in the administration say he is bringing private sector know-how to the project, which is a bit worrisome given his track record in the private sector.

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Imagine what we could do if the time and money spent on these political gimmicks were redirected to humane, practical immigration enforcement that complied with laws and Due Process. Gee, we might actually solve problems instead of making them worse and unnecessarily creating new ones.

Also, remember that there was a time when the GOP claimed to stand for the “sanctity of private property.” But, that was then; this is now.

PWS

11-27-19

ADMINISTRATION CONTINUES TO PILE UNPRECEDENTED CRUELTY ON ASYLUM SEEKERS! — Latest Target Is Work Authorization!

Bess Levin writes for Vanity Fair:

TRUMP ADMIN HAS A CRUEL NEW PLAN TO HURT ASYLUM-SEEKERS

Just when you thought it couldn’t get more evil, it rose to the occasion!

BY

BESS LEVIN

NOVEMBER 4, 2019

One of the regular themes of the Trump administration is the idea that there’s no way it will be able to continue outdoing itself when it comes to wildly evil policies. And yet, on a near-daily basis, it rises to the occasion! While its evilness does not discriminate—women, Democrats, the LGBTQ+ community, Muslims, pro athletes, the poor, and the media all get a taste—very often it relates to immigrants, with Team Trump finding new and inventive ways to demonize them and make their lives miserable. Recently that‘s involved deporting kids with cancer, and now it extends to refusing to allow asylum-seekers who work when they come to the U.S.

NBC News reports that the administration is working on a proposal to prevent asylum-seekers from applying for work permits for at least a year after they enter the country. Yes, the same administration under which visa denials for poor Mexicans have “skyrocketed”, and which announced in August that new factors that will count against green card applicants will include not having the money to cover “any reasonably foreseeable medical costs” related to a medical condition, having been approved to receive a public benefit, “financial liabilities,” and a low credit score, among other things. Obviously not being allowed to work for at least a year will no doubt contribute to the likelihood that people will be forced to turn to welfare, or force them to work in the shadow economy. It also doesn’t make a lot of sense for an administration that clearly prefers upwardly mobile immigrants, unless, of course, the point of the policy was to put such individuals between a rock and a group of assholes, and simply discourage them from coming to the country altogether.

The policy is expected to be discussed at a meeting Monday afternoon between Kevin McAleenan, the outgoing acting Homeland Security secretary, and heads of agencies for the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, according to two of the officials. And it is meant to target Mexican families seeking asylum, a demographic that has recently risen while the number of Central Americans has decreased since May.

One of the DHS officials said proponents of the policy believe prolonging the period when Mexicans are not allowed to work while they wait for their claim will deter them from coming to the U.S. in the first place…DHS did not respond to a request for comment.

**************************************************

Of course, the intent here is to discourage individuals from making the asylum applications that U.S. law entitles them to, but that Trump, with help from complicit courts, has all but extinguished without any legislative changes from Congress.

So, first the Trump Administration artificially and intentionally inflates the Immigration Court backlog through “Aimless Docket Reshuffling,” so that applications take much longer than they should in a fair and professionally administered system. Then they penalize the victims.

Meanwhile, the Article III Courts, who should have put an end to this unconstitutional nonsense long before now, continue to compound the problem by allowing a biased, xenophobic Administration to run a major court system as a branch of DHS enforcement.

Also, it’s important to remember that these outrages are happening on the watch of “Big Mac With Lies.” Those who care about honest public service and American justice should make a point not to allow “Big Mac” to “reinvent” himself to profit from his wrongdoing and the pain and suffering he has unnecessarily inflicted on asylum seekers and others entitled to justice in America but finding none during “Big Mac’s” tenure as “Trump’s Acting Toady.”

Of course, things are going to continue to get worse for humanity when Trump’s new “Acting Toady of Homeland Security,” Chad Wolf takes over.

PWS

11-06-19

JUST WHEN YOU THOUGHT HE’D HIT ROCK BOTTOM, TRUMP OUTDOES HIMSELF: War On Kids With Cancer Shows America’s Cowardly, Racist Leader At His Worst!

https://apple.news/AqbWMB-62RZuFir_I5xBMlQ

Bess Levin in Vanity Fair:

Evil

The Trump Administration Is Now Deporting Kids With Cancer

The new policy is a major departure from longstanding legal practice, which allowed the federal government to exercise discretion where a little humanity is warranted. Unfortunately for sick kids, humanity is not part of Trump’s agenda.

When you’ve already separated families, thrown children in cages, and held them in conditions that “could be compared to torture facilities,” it’s a bit of a challenge to come up with your next act. Evil takes creativity, and once you’ve forced migrant kids to go weeks without a shower or change of clothes and fed them expired food, it’s tough to continue nailing those Hitler comparisons. Somehow, though, the Trump administration always rises to the occasion:

The new policy is reportedly a major departure from long-standing legal practice; for decades, the federal government has used it to exercise discretion where a little humanity is warranted, like when a child is critically ill and will die if ordered to leave the country. Unfortunately for such children, humanity is not part of the Trump administration’s agenda. Per the Boston Globe:

“I can’t go back to Haiti,” Marie said in an interview on Monday organized by local immigration advocates. “I won’t find this medical care for him there.” According to Mahsa Khanbabai, chair of the New England chapter of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, the exact number of immigrants potentially affected by the change is unclear, but estimated to be in the thousands, including children with cystic fibrosis, leukemia, and muscular dystrophy.

“This is a new low,” Senator Ed Markey told the Associated Press of the news. “Donald Trump is literally deporting kids with cancer.”

**********************

Read the complete article with “missing quote boxes” at the link. But, you get the gist from this.

Pretty much says it all about what we have become as a morally bankrupt nation under Trump.

PWS

08-27-19

TRUMP, MILLER, & “COOCH COOCH” ARE AS INTELLECTUALLY DULL AS THEY ARE RACIST — “USEFUL IDIOTS” PROVE NO MATCH FOR SMART WOMEN: CNN’S ERIN BURNETT, HUFFPOST’S SARAH RUIZ-GROSSMAN, HISTORIAN ANNIE POLLAND, & VANITY FAIR’S BESS LEVIN — No Wonder The Administration’s Malicious Incompetents Surround Themselves With (Mostly Old White Male) Folks Who Might Be Even Dumber (But Not More Vile) Than They Are!

Watch Erin eviscerate “Coach Cooch” — talk about debunking many of Trump’s flse narritives and blatant racist lies in one short piece:

https://apple.news/AzfXx6N_GTA-c-0HtLeBxmQ

Sarah Ruiz-Grossman — Sarah Ruiz- Grossman
News & Politics Reporter
Huffington Post

Read Sarah’s report of the mismatch, featuring American Jewish Historical Society’s Historian Annie Polland:

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/ken-cuccinelli-statue-liberty-poem-about-europe_n_5d535ed3e4b05fa9df0671ee

POLITICS

7 hours ago

Ken Cuccinelli: Statue Of Liberty Poem About ‘People Coming From Europe’

Trump’s citizenship and immigration chief followed up his earlier comments about the famous Emma Lazarus poem with a racist clarification.

Content loading…

Ken Cuccinelli, the Trump administration’s acting head of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, reinforced his controversial interpretation of the inscription on the Statue of Liberty ― this time giving it a racist twist.

CNN journalist Erin Burnett was asking Cuccinelli about his earlier interview with NPR, in which he reworded the Emma Lazarus poem “The New Colossus,” saying: “Give me your tired and your poor who can stand on their own two feet, and who will not become a public charge.”

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“‘Wretched,’ ‘poor,’ refuse’ – right? That’s what the poem says America is supposed to stand for. So what do you think America stands for?” Burnett asked Cuccinelli.

“Well, of course, that poem was referring back to people coming from Europe,” Cuccinelli answered, “where they had class-based societies, where people were considered wretched if they weren’t in the right class … And it was written one year after the first federal public charge rule was written.”

It is unclear why Cuccinelli felt the need to specify the group of immigrants Lazarus was referring to. The poem itself describes the Statue of Liberty by saying, “From her beacon-hand/ Glows world-wide welcome.” USCIS did not immediately respond to HuffPost’s request for comment.

Cuccinelli was on NPR defending the Trump administration’s controversial new rule effectively barring legal immigrants who are on government benefits, like food stamps and Medicaid, from becoming permanent residents.

Josh Marshall

✔@joshtpm

Lotsa folks asking for longer version of this cuccinelli clip. Here it is.

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7:36 PM – Aug 13, 2019

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After his remarks on NPR, HuffPost spoke to Annie Polland, a historian and director of the organization that has the original manuscript of Lazarus’ poem.

“To see how something so expressive of the country’s greatest ideals, to see how it could be so contorted or distorted, is really, I think, dismay is the only word,” said Polland, the executive director of the American Jewish Historical Society in New York, adding that she was “not surprised because we’ve been hearing these sentiments more than we have in the past.”

Lazarus originally wrote the poem in 1883 and it was added to the statue in 1903. Since then, the poem has become a symbol of the United States’ history of immigration.

Polland argued that the poem “is as much about who America or what America should be, as it is about immigrants,” adding that “in many ways, America defines itself by how it’s welcoming immigrants.”

And, speaking of “evisceration,” perhaps no pundit in American does it better than Vanity Fair’s Bess Levin, who as had “Don the Cons’s “number “dialed up” from the get-go:

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/08/ken-cuccinelli-statue-of-liberty

Lady Liberty

TRUMP OFFICIAL REWRITES STATUE OF LIBERTY POEM TO REFLECT TRUMP’S “NO POORS” POLICY

Ken Cuccinelli doesn’t think the whole “give me your tired, your poor” business applies anymore.

BY

BESS LEVIN

AUGUST 13, 2019

BY WIN MCNAMEE/GETTY IMAGES.The base of the Statue of Liberty famously displays the words of Emma Lazarus, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” But, if Donald Trump’s top immigration official had it his way, the poem would be revised to reflect the president’s “rich immigrants only” policy.

Speaking to NPR on Tuesday, the day after the administration unveiled a new rule that will penalize green card applicants for “financial liabilities” like having a low credit score or using Medicaid, Ken Cuccinelli, acting director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, was asked if Lazarus’s poem, “The New Colossus,” remains “part of the American ethos.” To which Cuccinelli offered some suggested edits inspired by the executive branch’s take on who should or shouldn’t be allowed to live in the United States. “They certainly are,” Cuccinelli said. “Give me your tired and your poor—who can stand on their own two feet and who will not become a public charge.”

Aaron Rupar

✔@atrupar

Here’s acting USCIS director Ken Cuccinelli saying on NPR this morning that the Statue of Liberty plaque should be changed to read, “give me your tired and your poor who can stand on their own two feet, and who will not become a public charge.”

8,535

8:31 AM – Aug 13, 2019

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One day prior, Cuccinelli had told reporters at the White House that he was “certainly not prepared to take anything down off the Statue of Liberty,” though apparently, having slept on it, he’s now up for some kind of appendage. During his interview with NPR, Cuccinelli noted that the plaque bearing Lazarus’s words “was put on the Statue of Liberty at almost the same time as the first public charge was passed—very interesting timing.” It’s not at all clear what point he thought he was making.

WATCH NOW:

Jon Favreau Breaks Down The Lion King’s Opening Scene

Despite having zero actual experience in immigration policy, Cuccinelli was hired in May thanks to previous work sponsoring bills that tried to repeal birthright citizenship and would force employees to speak English in the workplace. (Had the latter passed, we assume Cuccinelli would have proposed revising the Statue of Liberty’s poem to read, “Speak English, bitch.”) In 2013, his mother told the Washington Post that as Christians, the Cuccinellis raised their children to “care [for] the poor” and that “if someone is starving, you want to bring him a meal, not a book on how to cook,” lessons her son apparently forgot. (Speaking of his Christian values, Cuccinelli has said that homosexuality “brings nothing but self-destruction, not only physically but of their soul.”)

This isn’t the first time a member of the Trump administration has cast aspersions on the whole “give me your tired, your poor,” business. Back in 2017, Stephen Miller, the president’s chief white rage officer, told Jim Acosta that he didn’t give a shit about the poem because it “was added later and is not part of the original Statue of Liberty.”

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We are “governed” by evil racist fools. It’s up to the “The Due Process Army” and others to defend America and American ideals from these ignorant, yet existentially dangerous, White Nationalist racists!

PWS

08-14-19

BESS LEVIN @ VANITY FAIR: KAKISTOCRACY IN ACTION — America Suffers As Trump Bumbles Along With His White Nationalist, Pro-Kremlin Agenda!

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/01/bye-bye-donald-trump-throws-a-fit-after-pelosi-tells-him-no

Bess writes:

Today is the 19th day of the government shutdown. If it drags on much longer, the U.S. is at risk of losing its triple-A rating, which could increase borrowing costs and put a chill on the economy. At present, 800,000 federal employees are either furloughed or being forced to work without pay, including T.S.A. agents and the Secret Service. Farmers are struggling to get the subsidies they were promised to offset the damage done by the president‘s trade war. Financial-fraud investigations have “ground to a halt.” Human shit and garbage have piled up in national parks. Speaking of shit, food inspections by the F.D.A. have been curtailed, including inspections of food considered “high risk,” raising the possibility of E. Coli and salmonella outbreaks. At the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, 1,523 of 3,531 employees “are considered non-essential,” while D.H.S.’s Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction Office is reportedly two-thirds empty.

Understanding that Democrats are unlikely to ever agree to fund a border wall—barring getting something major in exchange, like a DACA deal—did the president decide to cut a deal to get things up and running again? Not exactly! Chuck Schumer told reporters on Wednesday that when Democrats didn’t fork over the hostage money during a meeting at the White House, Trump slammed the table and stormed out of the room, like a tween who’s been told she can’t leave the house in a crop top. Shortly after, Trump confirmed:

For those old enough to remember back to mid-December, Nancy Pelosi’s position has not changed—the only thing that has changed is that the president, who told Pelosi and Schumer on December 11 “I’m not going to blame you for [the shutdown],” is now trying to blame the completely unnecessary closure of the government on Democrats. His lies have shifted as well— after claiming that the unpaid federal employees are “mostly” Democrats, ergo he has no sympathy for them, on Wednesday he insisted the workers facing evictionand permanent loss of wages want the wall as much as he does. “You take a look at social media,” the ex-Miss Universe owner explained, “[And] so many of those people are saying, ‘It’s very hard for me, it’s very hard for my family, but, Mr. President, you’re doing the right thing.’”

Elsewhere in delusions, the G.O.P. continues to believe that Trump will get Democrats to bend to his demands by employing the same negotiating skills and business acumen that led him to acquire the Plaza Hotel for $60 million more than it was thought to be worth, purchase the Eastern Air Lines Shuttle for, again, some $60 million more than high estimates said it should go for, overpay for football players as a team owner in the doomed United States Football League, and put multiple Trump companies into bankruptcy, most memorable among them the “the debt-bloated Trump Taj Mahal.” Instead, this is the level of savvy we’re dealing with:

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy said that Trump had brought candy to the meeting in an effort to smooth things over.

Who could have predicted Chuck and Nancy wouldn’t immediately write a check for $5.6 billion after being plied with Baby Ruth bars, M&M’s and Butterfingers? That kind of thing totally worked when he was negotiating a licensing deal for Trump Steaks! People were lining the streets to give him money!

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White House decides letting 38 million people starve during shutdown would’ve been a bad look

To be fair, you could see them going either way on this one:

Trump administration officials said Tuesday that the Agriculture Department will be able to pay out food-stamp benefits for the entire month of February—tamping down fears that the partial government shutdown could have resulted in rationing or halting of benefits. . . . Just a few days ago, White House officials had said funds for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program were likely to run out in February if Congress didn’t act, an outcome that would have led to a sharp cut in benefits for millions of low-income Americans who rely on the program to help them pay for groceries each month. Democrats had seized on the White House’s threat as both sides tried to increase their political leverage as the shutdown, now in its [19th day], entered its third week.

This is obviously good news for the people who depend on the SNAP program, assuming they avoid the food that the F.D.A. won’t be able to inspect thanks to the furlough.

Treasury set to ease sanctions on Putin pal’s companies

Aw, we could never stay mad at you (for reasons Robert Mueller’s forthcoming report may or may not reveal):

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin will brief lawmakers in the House of Representatives on Thursday about his department’s plan to terminate sanctions on three companies linked to Oleg Deripaska, a Russian billionaire with ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin. . . . The meeting follows Treasury’s December 19 notification to Congress that it would end sanctions on Rusal, EN+, and EuroSibEnergy in 30 days. Mnuchin said at the time that the decision was made after the companies “committed to significantly diminish Deripaska’s ownership and sever his control.”

Deripaska, a metals tycoon and close friend and ally of Putin, remains sanctioned, meaning no American may conduct business dealings with him directly or indirectly. He has come under scrutiny in the United States for his ties to the Kremlin as well as to Paul Manafort.

In September, we learned that the Treasury had effectively fallen ass-backwards into sanctioning Deripaska and Rusal last April after Mnuchin got flustered and announced sanctions that the administration never intended to implement.

At least some people are benefitting from Trump’s lies

I.e. the people who put money on just how many falsehoods will spew from his mouth at any given moment:

A gambling site is paying out thousands of dollars to people who correctly bet that President Donald Trump would tell more than 3.5 lies in his Oval Office address on Tuesday. Bookmaker.eu asked people to wager on the president’s truthfulness, offering odds of -145 for more than 3.5 lies and +115 for less than 3.5 lies. That means if a person bet $145 dollars that Trump would lie at least four times, they would win $100.

And some people won big. Odds consultant John Lester told BuzzFeed News the site will lose $276,424, with 92 percent of its bettors correctly wagering that Trump would lie a lot.

Lester said that Bookmaker had, of course, expected that Trump would lie but underestimated just how many “alternative truths” would spring from his mouth given the time constraints of the speech.

Bob Mercer will have to find a new way to dodge gun laws

Last April, we learned that when he wasn’t facilitating Brexit or getting Donald Trump elected, former hedge-fund manager Bob Mercer was spending a week each year in Yuma County, Colorado, in order to qualify as a volunteer sheriff, a status that allowed him to carry a concealed weapon in any state or locality. But according to a new report from Bloomberg, the Long Island billionaire will have to figure out an alternative workaround should he wish to continue packing heat in a covert fashion:

The New York hedge-fund magnate and conservative donor had his status as a volunteer deputy sheriff revoked by Yuma County, Colorado, Sheriff Chad Day on Monday, his last day in office. Day lost his re-election bid last year after Bloomberg News reported on Mercer’s role and his purchase of a new pickup truck for the sheriff’s official use.

The arrangement provoked controversy in the prairie county that borders Kansas and Nebraska. Day submitted papers last week ending the appointments of Mercer, 72, and at least a dozen other volunteer posse members, effective January 7, according to documents signed by Day and filed with the county clerk.

This isn’t the first county to force Mercer to turn in his badge: last year, the mayor of Lake Arthur, New Mexico, announced that he was shutting down the volunteer reserve-officer program and requiring existing reserve officers to turn in their credentials. Hopefully this turn of events simply means that Mercer won’t be able to, for instance, walk into Grand Central Oyster Bar with a gun in his pocket, and not that he’ll put those extra six days in his calendar toward helping get another papaya-colored fascist of his choice elected.

Jeff Bezos has a new lady friend

The Amazon founder is reportedly dating Lauren Sanchez, after announcing on Twitter than he and his wife are divorcing after 25 years of marriage. (Bezos and Sanchez did not respond to requests for comment.) Unsurprisingly, various wealth-trackers have already crunched the numbers—in this case, divided by two—and informed us that MacKenzie Bezos stands to become the richest woman in the world, assuming she and Jeff split their $137.2 billion fortune evenly (which, to be fair, is a fairly big assumption!).

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Read the complete “Levin Report” at the link. (Or, better yet, sign up to have it delivered directly to your mailbox — I don’t believe that you have to be a Vanity Fair subscriber.)

Placing the government in the hands of a racist incompetent like Trump and his sycophantic stooge Cabinet Members is a prescription for national disaster. But, that doesn’t seem to bother the “Party of Putin.” The GOP seems to have sold us out long ago.

PWS

01-10-19

THE LEVIN REPORT: Yes, We’re Being Governed By An Idiot! – As His Policies Help Destroy Ohio Jobs, “The Don” Threatens To Kneecap GM’s Mary Barra (For The Kind Of “Business Decision” To Screw Workers That He Made On A Frequent Basis)

As you’ve probably heard by now, on Monday General Motors announced it would be cutting 15 percent of its salaried workforce and closing five North American factories. While C.E.O. Mary Barra said no single event prompted the cuts, some of the factors that clearly led to the retrenchment include a slowdown in new car sales, bets on smaller vehicles not panning out, and the president’s trade war, which has spiked the price of steel, and which G.M. warned in June would impact its profits and U.S. jobs. In short, the move was a business decision that you might expect someone like Donald Trump, a self-described businessman who claims to know “more about” money, taxes, trading, banking, and the economy than anyone, to understand. But, of course, Trump is only a businessman in so much as he played one on TV—in real life, he bankrupted a casino and received a lifetime allowance from his father, who had to bail him out on numerous occasions. Which is why, instead of saying that he was disappointed about the news but understood that G.M. was in a tough position and hey, maybe in retrospect it was silly to promise that auto manufacturing jobs were “coming back” to Ohio and Michigan, and also, oops, perhaps he shouldn’t have passed a tax bill that incentivized companies to send jobs and factories abroad, Trump told a reporter that G.M. “better damn well open a new plant there very quickly,” that the company is “playing around with the wrong person,” and that Barra will have “a problem” if she doesn’t immediately open a new facility. And then on Tuesday, still foaming at the mouth, he came out with this:

Obviously, the president of the United States threatening to punish a private company for making a decision based on market realities that are partially his fault is . . . really something! But the whole thing takes on some extra hilarity when you realize, for the 927th time this year, what this not at all smart guy is unintentionally proposing. As Dan Primackpoints out, subsidies for G.M.-specific electric vehicles do not exist. Rather, there are industry-wide federal tax credits of up to $7,500 available for purchasers of U.S. electric cars, with “aggregate caps of 200,000 vehicles per manufacturer.” In other words, getting rid of the subsidy in its current form would hurt both American consumers and other auto manufacturers.

Of course, this isn’t the first time Trump has threatened to destroy a company for making a business decision. Over the summer, in a series of escalating tweets, the president went full Fatal Attraction on Harley-Davidson, essentially threatening to annihilate the company for moving some production overseas after he’d supposedly done “so much for [it].” And, apparently, he’s taking the whole G.M. thing similarly personally, with economic adviser Larry Kudlow saying Trump feels betrayed over the whole thing, especially after the administration struck “NAFTA 2.0” with Mexico and Canada (which car companies only supported as being better than Trump simply ripping up the original NAFTA without an alternative) and went after mileage standards (which car companies didn’t want it to do!). As for the whole “the U.S. saved G.M. and this is the thanks we get” bit, we’re sure it’ll come as a giant surprise that in 2012, Trump claimed Barack Obama’s auto bailout was “ruining American industry.” Anyway, sleep with one eye open, G.M.! Next time think twice before crossing Donald J. Trump!

Area lawmaker feels bad for Princess Purses

Apparently Ivanka Trump, who presumably heard her father suggest on one or two occasions that using a private e-mail account to conduct government business is a capital offense, shouldn’t be expected to know how to follow the most basic of rules:

The chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), said on Monday that it was “awfully tough” for government officials such as Ivanka Trump to comply with agency standards for secure communications when sending e-mails. “And it’s awfully tough, as everyone knows, when you’re sending emails about a lot of different things to make sure that you’re doing it according to the rules in the White House or wherever you’re doing it,” he added.

Last week, the president called The Washington Post’s story about Ivanka’s e-mail usage a “false story” and “fake news,” as he is contractually obligated to do, while also insisting that what Hillary Clinton did was exponentially worse.

Maybe society’s most vulnerable individuals should not be under the care of a private-equity firm

Just a thought! Per The Washington Post:

Under the ownership of the Carlyle Group, one of the richest private-equity firms in the world, the ManorCare nursing-home chain struggled financially until it filed for bankruptcy in March. During the five years preceding the bankruptcy, the second-largest nursing-home chain in the United States exposed its roughly 25,000 patients to increasing health risks, according to inspection records analyzed by The Washington Post.

The number of health-code violations found at the chain each year rose 26 percent between 2013 and 2017, according to a Post review of 230 of the chain’s retirement homes. Over that period, the yearly number of health-code violations at company nursing homes rose from 1,584 to almost 2,000. The number of citations increased for, among other things, neither preventing nor treating bed sores; medication errors; not providing proper care for people who need special services such as injections, colostomies and prostheses; and not assisting patients with eating and personal hygiene. . . . Counting only the more serious violations, those categorized as “potential for more than minimal harm,” “immediate jeopardy,” and “actual harm,” the Postfound the number of HCR ManorCare violations rose 29 percent in the years before the bankruptcy filing.

“Carlyle was a very interesting group to deal with,” Andrew Porch, a quality statistics consultant to whom HCR ManorCare referred questions about health-code violations, told the Post. “They’re all bankers and investment people. We had some very tough conversations where they did not know a thing about this business at all.” In a statement, representatives for Carlyle and HCR ManorCare told the paper that care at its nursing homes was “never compromised by financial considerations” and that cost-cutting affected only administrative expenses, not nursing costs.

Trump’s tariffs are making a shitty situation worse for U.S. farmers

According to data released from the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, 84 farms in Wisconsin, North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, and Minnesota filed for Chapter 12 bankruptcy over the 12 months that ended last June, which is more than double the number from the same period in 2013 and 2014. Part of that has to do overproduction, with Citizens State Bank president of Hayfield Mark Miedtketelling the Winona Daily News, “Farmers are almost too efficient for their own financial good and demand hasn’t kept pace with the abundant American supply of corn and soybeans.” And the other part?

The situation for most farmers has worsened since June under retaliatory tariffs that have closed the Chinese market for soybeans and damaged exports of milk and pork.

“Dairy farmers are having the most problems right now,” Miedtke said. “Grain farmers have had low prices for the past three years but high yields have helped them through. We’re just waiting for a turnaround. We’re waiting for the tariff problem to go away.”

We’re just going to leave this one right here

“I’m doing deals, and I’m not being accommodated by the Fed,” Trump fumed on Tuesday in an interview with The Washington Post. “They’re making a mistake because I have a gut, and my gut tells me more sometimes than anybody else’s brain can ever tell me.”

Elsewhere!

New York woman pleads guilty to using bitcoin to launder money for ISIS (CNBC)

Investors Prepare for Another Brexit Surprise (W.S.J.)

“When You Get That Wealthy, You Start Believing Your Own Bullshit” (The Hive)

Trump Overlooks an Investment Opportunity in Climate Change (N.Y.T.)

Meet New York City’s highest-earning official. He’s a debt collector for predatory lenders. (Bloomberg)

U.S.-China “economic cold war” could turn stock sell-off into bear market, says BTIG’s Emanuel (CNBC)

Facebook Has a “Black People Problem,” Ex-Employee Writes (Bloomberg)

Fortnite Addiction Is Forcing Kids into Video-Game Rehab (Bloomberg)

“Going back to 1386, going forward through the Napoleonic wars, through to the Second World War where of course this . . . err was a—a place that, err, was, err . . .” (Express)

Wedding photographer arrested for having sex with guest, urinating on tree (N.Y.P.)

The Levin Report by Bess Levin at Vanity Fair

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Yup! What’s missing here is a discussion of what can be done to utilize the skills and dedication of all the hard-working Ohio folks at GM slated to lose their jobs through no fault of their own (other than the mistake that some of them made by voting for Trump & the GOP).

Why can’t they be put to work doing meaningful and important work on needed infrastructure projects in Ohio, which certainly needs them? Can some enterprising immigrant-run companies with need of a talented workforce step in and retrain workers for good jobs with a future that won’t have some of the problems of auto manufacturing jobs? Why isn’t Jeff Bezos putting “alternate headquarters” in areas that really need the boost, rather than grazing for tax handouts (for the world’s richest man) in already prosperous areas like N. Virginia and the NY Metro area? What’s the responsibility of GM for making suitable arrangements for folks who have made their (and their shareholders) prosperity possible over the years? What about putting more DHS or IRS “Service Centers” in these locations to take advantage of an elite workforce? Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) is a friend of the working class — what can he and his supporters do to help these workers to help themselves, without massive infusions of taxpayer money?

Seems to me that rather than issuing inappropriate and idle threats and engaging in more political gamesmanship, the Government, on all levels, should be leading the effort to capture the precious “human capital” being abandoned by GM. We’re at basically full employment; jobs that could further expand the economy are going unfilled. There has to be some way to match supply with demand and fully utilize the skills of fellow Americans who have shown the willingness to work hard and produce quality products.

PWS

11-28-18

TRUMP LACKS EMPATHY, HONESTY, VALUES, & FUNDAMENTAL DECENCY: Bess Levin @ Vanity Fair On The Latest Escapades Of America’s Most Notorious Sociopath!

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/11/donald-trump-puerto-rico-funding?mbid=nl_CH_5be9ce24cac6392da6572bd6&CNDID=48297443&utm_source=nl&utm_medium=email&utm_brand=vf&utm_mailing=vyf_vanityfair_news_newdb_active_20181112%20(1)&bxid=MjMzNDQ1MzU1ODE2S0&hasha=8a1f473740b253d8fa4c23b066722737&hashb=26cd42536544e247751ec74095d9cedc67e77edb&spMailingID=14604914&spUserID=MjMzNDQ1MzU1ODE2S0&spJobID=1520941540&spReportId=MTUyMDk0MTU0MAS2

Bess writes:

Donald Trump has never had a particularly good track record when it comes to Puerto Rico. After Hurricane Maria ravaged the island in September 2017, the president took nearly a week to even mention the catastrophe, and when he did, it was to scold the U.S. territory for owing Wall Street money. A short time later, he deemed it appropriate to publicly trashthe mayor of San Juan, for the crime of requesting more relief funds. When he finally saw fit to visit the disaster zone, he told the locals that their hurricane wasn’t “a real catastrophe like Katrina.” In September, to commemorate Maria’s one-year anniversary, he smeared 3,000 dead Puerto Ricans by claiming that the death count was a hoax cooked up by Democrats to make him look bad. And now, he’s reportedly decided to really cement his legacy in the territory by trying to end relief funding, despite the fact that the situation remains dire.

Axios reports that Trump told senior White House officials last month that he wants to “claw back” some of the federal money Congress has set aside for Puerto Rico’s recovery, claiming that the local government has been “mismanaging” it. The basis for such a claim? Apparently Baby Huey read an article in The Wall Street Journal noting that “Puerto Rico bond prices soared . . . after the federal oversight board that runs the U.S. territory’s finances released a revised fiscal plan that raises expectations for disaster funding and economic growth,” and got it in his head, sans any evidence, that Puerto Rico has been using disaster funds to pay down its debt. That naturally lead to an utterly baseless tweet about “inept politicians . . . trying to use the massive and ridiculously high amounts of hurricane/disaster funding to pay off other obligations,” and a threat to cut off funding. Shortly thereafter, the perennial bankruptcy artist reportedly let it be known that he didn’t want to include any additional money for Puerto Rico in future spending bills and wanted to try and take back funding that had already been allocated by Congress.

Luckily, despite Trump’s wishes, he can’t actually take away disaster funds that have already been approved by Congress. But he could refuse to sign future spending bills that include more money for Puerto Rico’s recovery. To put that possibility into perspective, the federal government has thus far spent more than $6 billion on relief funding for Puerto Rico, which is a drop in the bucket compared to relief for the post-Katrina Gulf Coast, which received $10 billion four days after the hurricane hit, another $50 billion six days later, and, more than a decade later, is still receiving monetary assistance. But in Trump’s mind, Puerto Rico has already received too much money. Cutting off funding to—what is, as a reminder!—a U.S. territory now would be a slap in the face regardless, but particularly so given that it’s based on our not-very-bright commander in chief’s poor reading comprehension. As Axios points out, not only is there zero evidence of Puerto Rico’s officials funneling disaster funds toward debt repayment, but Congress put steps in place “to keep disaster relief funds from being used to pay down the island’s debt.” As Bloomberg reported in 2017, “neither the island’s leaders—nor the board installed by the U.S. to oversee its budget—are proposing using disaster recovery aid to directly pay off bondholders or other lenders.” But Trump has “always been pissed off by Puerto Rico,” so here we are.

And now California—where 31 people are dead, 228 are missing, 6,453 homes have been destroyed, and only 25 percent of the fire has been contained thus far—is getting a taste of the fun, too:

[Tweet Omitted]

Of course, out here in reality, the compelling evidence is that a little thing called climate change contributed to both disasters, but that’s something Trump would rather not discuss.

********************************

Bess really has Trump “pegged.” His stunning lack of humanity, knowledge, compassion, and any qualifications for the position he holds continue to amaze!

There are natural disasters and then there are man-made disasters like the Trump kakistocracy.

Trump’s vile and ignorant attack on American victims of natural disaster earns him a “Five Clowns.”

🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡

PWS

11-13-18

TRUMP ADMINISTRATION PLANS TO KILL 1,400 AMERICANS! — Is Anyone Paying Attention?

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/08/trump-coal-plan-will-kill-1400-americans-a-year

Bess Levin writes for Vanity Fair:

Last week, we learned that Donald Trump’scoal-loving administration was set to release a proposal that would allow coal-burning plants to flood the planet with greenhouse gas emissions, raising a giant middle finger to the killjoy tree-huggers who insist on protecting the environment and human health through silly little things like government regulations. Whereas Barack Obama’s 2015 Clean Power Plan would have caused a shift toward less-dirty energy sources like wind, natural gas, and solar, the White House’s plan would prop up coal plants by giving states free rein to come up with their own rules, or letting them petition to opt out of regulations altogether. On Tuesday, the administration officially unveiled the proposal, and as it turns out, it’s not as bad as everyone feared—it’s much, much worse, if one considers the deaths of 1,400 Americans and the hastened demise of the planet to be “worse.”

The New York Times [reports] that, buried within 289 pages of technical analysis, the Environmental Protection Agency casually notes that under the scenario individual states are most likely to follow in order to comply with Trump’s hilariously titled “Affordable Clean Energy rule,” between 470 and 1,400 premature deaths will occur each year by 2030 due to “increased rates of microscopic airborne particulates known as PM 2.5.” On the flip side, Obama’s Clean Power Plan was expected to prevent between 1,500 and 3,600 premature deaths annually by 2030, but that guy’s a law-flouting Commie, so screw him. In addition, the Trump administration’s own analysis concludes that its plan would cause 48,000 new cases of “exacerbated asthma” and a minimum of 21,000 missed school days a year by 2030 due to ozone-related illnesses. By contrast, the plan it is replacing would have resulted in a significant drop in new instances of asthma and 180,000 fewer missed school days annually.

But breathing, going to school, and a normal life-expectancy are obviously for losers, which is presumably why William Wehrum, the acting administrator of the E.P.A.’s Office of Air and Radiation, simply referred to the plan’s downsides as “collateral effects” in a comment to the Times; he also said that the administration has “aggressive programs in place that directly target emissions of those pollutants.” (Incidentally, Wehrum spent much of the past 10 years working to destroy air-pollution rules as a lawyer representing—wait for it—coal-burning power plants, chemical manufacturers, oil drillers, and refineries. He was able to so seamlessly transition to weakening air-pollutant rules from within the E.P.A. thanks to “a quirk in federal ethics rules [that] limit the activities of officials who join the government from industry [but are] less restrictive for lawyers than for officials who had worked as registered lobbyists.”)

Speaking of premature deaths, Trump is apparently super concerned about them—not when they happen to humans, of course, but to birds, whose early demise he vastly overestimated last night in a characteristically crazy, off-the-rails speech decrying wind turbines and other forms of energy that both cost and pollute less than coal. Quoth the man who is somehow the president of the United States:

You can blow up a pipeline, you can blow up the windmills. You know, the wind wheels [mimics windmill noise, mimes shooting gun], “Bing!” That’s the end of that one. If the birds don’t kill it first. The birds could kill it first. They kill so many birds. You look underneath some of those windmills, it’s like a killing field, the birds. But uh, you know, that’s what they were going to, they were going to windmills. And you know, don’t worry about wind, when the wind doesn’t blow, I said, “What happens when the wind doesn’t blow?” Well, then we have a problem. O.K. good. They were putting him in areas where they didn’t have much wind, too. And it’s a subsidary [sic]—you need subsidy for windmills. You need subsidy. Who wants to have energy where you need subsidy? So, uh, the coal is doing great.

Really, what else is there to add?

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Read the rest of the Levin Report at the link.

I suppose with a President who favors KGB vet Putin over our intelligence officers, is dodging criminal charges for payoffs to an adult entertainment star and a Playboy model, and surrounds himself with family members, criminals, grifters, and wingnut ideologues, deciding to sacrifice 1,400 Americans to promote a dying industry that damages the health and welfare of its employees is sort of “below the radar screen.”

But, it’s on the screen over here at “courtside.”

PWS

08-23-18

HE’LL BE EVEN WORSE THAN YOUR WORST NIGHTMARE: VANITY FAIR’S BESS LEVIN WITH THE LOWDOWN ON JUDGE BRETT KAVANAUGH — Wonder If Being Eaten On The Job Is An Occupational Hazard For A Supreme?

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/07/brett-kavanaugh-seaworld?mbid=nl_th_5b45315eb6f2ad0babc6e950&CNDID=48297443&spMailingID=13849001&spUserID=MjMzNDQ1MzU1ODE2S0&spJobID=1440846153&spReportId=MTQ0MDg0NjE1MwS2

Bess writes:

. . . .

One fun example of the conservative judge’s take on workers’ rights is his dissent—the only one—in a case involving the SeaWorld trainer who was eaten by a killer whale during a performance in 2010, the third time the whale had been “involved in a human death.” While his colleagues upheld a prior ruling that the theme park had violated safety standards by “exposing . . . trainers to recognized hazards when working in close contact with killer whales during performances,” Kavanaugh thought that was bullshit, writing that lots of sports are dangerous, but that doesn’t mean the Labor Department should use its authority to implement regulations aimed at minimizing the chances that trainers will be eaten in full view of paying customers. “When should we as a society paternalistically decide,” Kavanaugh asked, “that the risk of significant physical injury is simply too great even for leager and willing participants? And most importantly for this case, who decides that the risk to participants is too high?” Presumably B-Kavs, as we imagine his fellow Yalies called him, also believes that coal-mining companies shouldn’t have to comply with onerous rules intended to prevent mine collapses—because those miners know what they’re signing up for, dammit.

Unsurprisingly, Kavanaugh’s take on the SeaWorld incidentdidn’t go over well with labor unions and workers’-rights groups, many of which have opposed his nomination. (“Judge Kavanaugh routinely rules against working families, regularly rejects the employees’ right[s] to receive employer-provided health care, too often sides with employers in denying employees relief from discrimination in the workplace, and promotes overturning well-established U.S. Supreme Court precedent,” AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said in a statement.) But his opinion that trainer Dawn Brancheaubasically had it coming is just one of many that scare people who value things like workers’ rights, clean air, and consumer protection.

It’s also one of many items on Kavanaugh’s résumé that the administration is touting to the business community, in the hopes that it will help push his nomination through, per Politico:

The White House on Monday immediately played up Brett Kavanaugh’s pro-business, anti-regulation record and is asking industry trade groups for help pushing his confirmation through the Senate . . . With Republicans holding only a sliver of a majority in the Senate, deep-pocketed business groups could have enough influence, especially in an election year, to help swing votes in Kavanaugh’s favor.

In a one-page document, which was obtained by Politico, the White House wrote that Kavanaugh has overruled federal regulators 75 times on cases involving clean air, consumer protections, net neutrality, and other issues. Most recently, in PHH Corp. v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, he favored curtailing the power of independent federal regulators.

“Judge Kavanaugh protects American businesses from illegal job-killing regulation,” the White House bragged in its e-mail, adding that “Kavanaugh helped kill President Obama’s most destructive new environmental rules,” and has “led the effort to rein in unaccountable independent agencies.” Indeed, the nominee has in fact written that “independent agencies pose a significant threat to individual liberty and to the constitutional system of separation of powers and checks and balances.” In a 2016 appellate-court case, he said that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was “unconstitutionally structured,” because its director cannot be fired by the president without cause, suggesting that, should it come to it, he’ll grant Acting Director Mick Mulvaney’s lifelong dream of seeing the agency burned to the ground.

Watch Now:

Michael Douglas Breaks Down His Career, From “Wall Street” to “Ant-Man”

Elsewhere, critics say that Kavanaugh’s time on the bench has been marked by “hostility to federal regulatory agencies trying to protect the environment.” According to Bill Snape,a senior counsel with the Center for Biological Diversity, Kavanaugh “sides with industry, he sides with deregulation, he sides with those who would have science be in retreat. He has been a dark force on the D.C. Circuit and now seems to have the opportunity to bring his bag of tricks to the Supreme Court.”

All of which, obviously, makes him the perfect candidate for Trump. Just something to remember should you work in an environment where you could be construed by colleagues as a tasty snack.

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Trump has no idea how NATO works

Here’s what the president of the United States tweeted on Tuesday, one day before the summit in Brussels:

In fact, that’s not how the alliance works at all. Members do not pay the United States, hence they cannot be “delinquent for many years in payments,” nor should they “reimburse the U.S.” Rather, as President Twitter is seemingly unaware, NATO is a collective defense organization whose members agree to defend one another in response to an attack by an outside party. While it was agreed that members will increase their defense spending levels to 2 percent of their G.D.P., they said they would do so by 2024, not whatever earlier date Trump has in mind. As is the case with most instances of the president saying or tweeting things that are factually inaccurate, one cannot, as New York’s Jonathan Chaitwrites, “rule out the possibility that Trump lacks the mental capacity to understand the basic form of America’s most important alliance.” But given his apparent hatred of NATOand desire to pull out of any multilateral agreements signed before he took office, it’s equally possible that, as Chait writes, Trump is “choosing not to understand this, so that he can precipitate a fissure within the alliance.”

Of course Rudy Giuliani is working for foreign clients while serving as the president’s lawyer

He’s not even trying to hide it!

Giuliani said in recent interviews with The Washington Postthat he is working with clients in Brazil and Colombia, among other countries, as well as delivering paid speeches for a controversial Iranian dissident group. He has never registered with the Justice Department on behalf of his overseas clients, asserting it is not necessary because he does not directly lobby the U.S. government and is not charging Trump for his services.

His decision to continue representing foreign entities also departs from standard practice for presidential attorneys, who in the past have generally sought to sever any ties that could create conflicts with their client in the White House.

“I’ve never lobbied him on anything,” Giuliani told the Post,referring to Trump. “I don’t represent foreign government in front of the U.S. government. I’ve never registered to lobby.” Among the ex-mayor’s clients is the Mujahideen-e-Khalq, a.k.a. MEK, an Iranian resistance group that the State Department listed as a terrorist group as recently as 2012, from whom Giuliani said he has regularly received payments for the past decade.

Carrie Menkel-Meadow, a legal-ethics professor at University of California-Irvine told the Post that, obviously,it’s not a great idea for a lawyer serving the president to have foreign business clients because of the high probability they’ll have opposing interests. “I think Rudy believes because he is doing the job pro bono the rules do not apply to him,” she said, “but they do.”

Oops: the tax cuts might not juice the economy at all

Of course, given that this analysis is coming from economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, we assume anyone on Team Tax Cuts will write it off as pinko claptrap:

The tax cuts Republicans enacted in late 2017 will likely provide less of a boost to economic growth than many forecasters predict—and possibly none at all—economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco said Monday.

That’s because the changes took effect at a time when the economy was already firing on all cylinders. As a result, there are fewer unemployed workers, spare resources, and idled factories ready to kick into action than there would have been during a downturn.

Citing a bevy of recent research, economists Tim Mahedyand Daniel J. Wilson said fiscal stimulus measures tend to make a bigger splash when there is more slack in the economy.

“The projected procyclical policy over the next few years may raise concerns regarding the nation’s fiscal capacity to respond to future downturns and its ability to manage the growing federal debt,” Mahedy and Wilson wrote. “However, it also has important implications for the macroeconomic impact of the fiscal stimulus represented by the [tax law] and the consequent increase in the deficit.”

Sell-side analyst chooses road less traveled in resigning from job

That’s one way to go!

An irate sell-side analyst appears to have chosen a memorable way to resign—by uncorking a champagne bottle and spraying it around his boss’s office and then pouring the bubbly on the floor around the rest of the office.

A video of the after-hours rampage was posted to an Instagram account belonging to Francesco Pellegrino,formerly of Sidoti & Co.

Music is heard in the background of many of the video’s clips, including Whitney Houston’s “How Will I Know” and Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch’s “Good Vibrations.”

Pellegrino did not return the Post’s requests for comment. When asked about the office trashing, Sidoti said, “I don’t even know how to respond,” before hanging up.

Elsewhere!

Hedge Funds Facing Trump’s Trade War Crossfire Feel the Pain (Bloomberg)

McKinsey Ends Work With ICE Amid Furor Over Immigration Policy (N.Y.T.)

Elliott Management launches action to take control of AC Milan (Reuters)

Swiss Say 1MDB Used as Ponzi Scheme to Bribe Officials (Bloomberg)

Credit Suisse’s Paul Dexter Departs Firm After Intern Investigation (Bloomberg)

Elon Musk doesn’t like being called a billionaire (Twitter)

Mike Flynn Joins Global Consulting Firm (W.S.J.)

Walgreens Analyst Finally Dumps “Spectacularly Wrong” Buy Call (Bloomberg)

Morgan Stanley C.E.O. Candidate List Takes Shape with Promotions (Bloomberg)

Man solves 2,474 Rubik’s cubes one-handed in 24 hours (UPI)

**************************

Yup. Standing up for the rights of the already overprivileged against the vulnerable masses. This Dude should make mincemeat out of the Bill of Rights. After all, the Founding Fathers wanted to protect corporations against the actions of individuals.

I can hardly wait for him to uphold reparations for the tea merchants so grievously harmed by those rowdy “patriots” during the highly illegal “Boston Tea Party.”

It was an outrageous assault on commerce, stability, private property, the rule of law, and societal order, as well as an affront to investors and the privileged! If anyone ever deserved to be eaten by Killer Whales, it was those lawless and scummy “Tea Partiers!”

B-Kavs is certainly a judge for whom common sense, humanity, reason, facts, and the US Constitution will never get in the way of protecting corporate privilege and GOP political interests. And, he’ll still be meting out injustice and inequality long after I’m gone.

PWS

07-11-18

BESS LEVIN @ VANITY FAIR: SPLITSVILLE – RUDY PARTS COMPANY WITH GREENBERG TRAUIG – “In his short time representing Trump, he’s made a name for himself as one of the worst lawyers of all time, so comically bad that even Donald Trump, Mr. Incompetent, can’t believe what a terrible job he’s doing. Those sorts of reviews are typically seen as a negative for companies advertising their legal services.”

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/05/rudy-giuliani-greenberg-traurig-resignation?mbid=nl_th_5af4c66c5650d54955bc0586&CNDID=48297443&spMailingID=13488304&spUserID=MjMzNDQ1MzU1ODE2S0&spJobID=1400981072&spReportId=MTQwMDk4MTA3MgS2

Rudy’s Ex-Law Boss: Please Stop Implicating Us In Your Crimes

Giuliani and his former employer apparently don’t see eye-to-eye on the subject of hush money.

Bess LevinMay 10, 2018 5:45 pm

Thinking about what he’s done, or not.By Mike Segar/Reuters.

When Lexington Avenue lothario Rudy Giuliani declared last month that he would be joining Donald Trump’s august legal team, he said that he would only be taking a “leave of absence” from his law firm, Greenberg Traurig, because it’d take just a week, two weeks tops, to resolve the Mueller investigation. On Thursday, though, the law firm announced that the leave of absence has, sadly, become permanent, with Giuliani tendering a “resignation” letter on Wednesday. “After recognizing that this work is all consuming and is lasting longer than initially anticipated, Rudy has determined it is best for him to resign,” the firm’s chairman, Richard A. Rosenbaum, said in a statement. So that’s the party line. More likely, as others have speculated, “America’s Mayor” was told he had 24 hours to cough up a letter announcing his departure, or the firm would cough it up for him.

Greenberg Traurig might have seen this one coming. For starters, any lawyer worth their salt could have told Giuliani that defending the president of the United States in an investigation into possible collusion with a foreign power couldn’t be a side hustle. Second, no one outside of Giuliani actually thought that the Mueller case was going to wrap up in two weeks, or even a month. Perhaps Giuliani’s former bosses would even have granted him a sabbatical, and then allowed him back, if the words coming out of his mouth since joining Team Trump hadn’t become so thoroughly mortifying by association. While Giuliani has said a number of cringe-worthy things since joining Trump’s legal team—that he fantasizes about riding to Ivanka Trump’srescue; that it would have been really bad if the Stormy Daniels story got out a month before the election, etc.—perhaps the most embarrassing was his appearance on Sean Hannity, wherein he implied any lawyer worth his salt has pulled a Michael Cohen.

At his law firm, the sentient denture suggested, such payments porn-star payouts were standard practice. “That was money that was paid by his lawyer, the way I would do, out of his law firm funds,” Giuliani said. Cohen, he added, “would take care of things like this like I take care of this with my clients.” You can see how Greenberg Traurig might have come to the conclusion that Giuliani was not the ideal advertisement for the firm.

Indeed, according to The New York Times, they were not pleased at all. “Firm partners . . . chafed over Mr. Giuliani’s public comments about [the] payments,” write reporters Michael S. Schmidt and Maggie Haberman. They were particularly displeased by the implication, which Giuliani spake as gospel, that it’s perfectly normal for a lawyer to secretly take the initiative to silence the porn stars who say they banged their clients. At least not without informing their client first. “We cannot speak for Mr. Giuliani with respect to what was intended by his remarks,” Jill Perry, a spokesperson for the firm, told the paper. “Speaking for ourselves, we would not condone payments of the nature alleged to have been made or otherwise without the knowledge and direction of a client.”

Also likely playing into Greenberg Traurig’s decision to happily part ways with ole Rudy? The fact that in his short time representing Trump, he’s made a name for himself as one of the worst lawyers of all time, so comically bad that even Donald Trump, Mr. Incompetent, can’t believe what a terrible job he’s doing. Those sorts of reviews are typically seen as a negative for companies advertising their legal services.

If you would like to receive the Levin Report in your inbox daily, click here to subscribe.

Pharma giant: In retrospect, we probably should not have agreed to pay the president’s “fixer” $1.2 million for dubious consulting work

Novartis AG “made a mistake” in striking a deal with Michael Cohen through his shell company, Essential Consultants, for guidance “as to how the Trump administration might approach certain U.S. healthcare-policy matters,” the firm’s C.E.O. toldemployees an e-mail today. “As a consequence, [we] are being criticized by a world that expects more from us.” Vasant Narasimhan did not say if the mistake specifically was agreeing to pay someone $1.2 million before holding a single meeting with him, or if the whole thing in general was one giant mistake, but presumably it’s the latter.

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Hit the above link to read the rest of “The Levin Report.”

You heard it months ago at “Courtside.” I said that Stormy D was smarter, more credible, more decent, and probably a better overall self-promoter than “Don the Con” and predicted that her lawyers would run circles around the 21st Century version of “The Three Stooges” hired by him.

To date, nothing to show I was wrong. Actually, I think I underestimated the incompetence of the Trump Legal Team. But, when everything the client says is a lie, and he can’t keep them straight, it’s hard for those around him to figure out which lies are part of the “party line” and which are . . . well, just plain old lies.

PWS

05-13-18

HERESY IN THE HOUSE?: DID RYAN AX CHAPLAIN FOLLOWING UNWELCOME REMINDER THAT “THE POOR ARE CHILDREN OF GOD?” – Is He Seeking WASP Male Evangelical Replacement Qualified To Minister To Needs Of House GOP Kleptocracy!👹👹👹

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/04/paul-ryan-patrick-conroy?mbid=nl_th_5ae255955bf9e03bdb5e6fd3&CNDID=48297443&spMailingID=13395516&spUserID=MjMzNDQ1MzU1ODE2S0&spJobID=1382357241&spReportId=MTM4MjM1NzI0MQS2

Bess Levin writes in Vanity Fair:

Levin Report

DID PAUL RYAN FIRE THE HOUSE CHAPLAIN FOR TAX-CUT BLASPHEMY?

It sure seems like something he’d do.

BY

BESS LEVIN

APRIL 26, 2018 6:27 PM

“I don’t care who you are, you bite your god damn tongue!”

By Alex Edelman/Getty Images.

The December 2017 passage of the “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act” was thrilling to a great many people, among them Donald Trump, corporate America, and the uber-rich, whom the legislation was structured to disproportionately benefit. But in truth, the day belonged to one man: CrossFit devoteeand Eddie Munster doppelgängerPaul Ryan, who had fantasized about redistributing wealth to those at the top since his boyhood days in Wisconsin, devoted his entire career to making it happen, and promptly announced his retirement when it became clear that his other lifelong dream—dismantling the social safety net and cutting off the lazy takers—wasn’t going to happen ’til at least 2021. So we imagine it must have really frosted Ryan’s cookies when, in the midst of many a late night and early morning on the Hill devoted to dragging this sucker across the finish line, Reverend Patrick Conroy, the House chaplain since 2011, had the stones to include these outrageous lines in one of his prayers:

“God of the universe, we give You thanks for giving us another day. Bless the Members of this assembly as they set upon the work of these hours, of these days. . . . As legislation on taxes continues to be debated this week and next, may all Members be mindful that the institutions and structures of our great Nation guarantee the opportunities that have allowed some to achieve great success, while others continue to struggle. May their efforts these days guarantee that there are not winners and losers under new tax laws, but benefits balanced and shared by all Americans.”

Ryan, one assumes, had never heard such sacrilegious words from a man of the cloth and was probably of a mind to drag Conroy out of the room by his collar and throw him out on the Capitol steps then and there. But because he is a disciplined lawmaker whose Holy Grail was so close he could taste it, he stayed focused and decided to deal with the blasphemy at a later time. And apparently that time came earlier this month, per The Hill:

House Chaplain Patrick Conroy’s sudden resignation has sparked a furor on Capitol Hill, with sources in both parties saying he was pushed out by Speaker Paul Ryan. Conroy’s own resignation announcement stated that it was done at Ryan’s request.

“As you have requested, I hereby offer my resignation as the 60th Chaplain of the United States House of Representatives,” the April 15 letter to Ryan, obtained by The Hill, states.

While one source claimed that “some of the more conservative evangelical Republicans didn’t like that the Father had invited a Muslim person to give the opening prayer,” others offered a more compelling reason: Ryan “took issue with a prayer on the House floor that could have been perceived as being critical of the G.O.P. tax cut bill.” According to a Democratic aide, Conroy’s ouster was “largely driven by [the] speech on the tax bill that the speaker didn’t like.” The New York Times notes that a week after his sermon, a staffer from Ryan’s office told Conroy “We are upset with this prayer; you are getting too political,” and that the next time he saw the Reverend in person, Ryan told him “Padre, you just got to stay out of politics.” AshLee Strong, a spokesperson for the speaker, declined to explain the personnel decision, noting only Minority Leader Nancy Pelosiand her office “were fully read in and did not object.”

Now, could Ryan have forced the guy to resign for completely legitimate reasons? Sure! But it also seems entirely plausible that this is exactly the sort of thing that would constitute a bridge too far in his book. Stand up for neo-Nazis? Water off a duck’s back. But suggest that a $1.5 trillion tax cut should help all Americans and not just the already-rich? That’s obviously a (potentially!) fireable offense right there. And don’t bother saying sorry after the fact to Ryan, Reverend. Say sorry to God. As a major corporate shareholder and beneficiary of the legislation, you’re in the doghouse with him, too.

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Read the rest of the “Levin Report” at the link!

Obviously, it takes a very special type of pastor to provide spiritual counseling to a bunch of guys who have devoted their entire careers to taking from the underprivileged and giving to the over-privileged. It also takes a very special kind of theological scholarship, since almost all of Christian theology suggests that exactly the opposite is required and that greed, promoting inequality, and abusing the less fortunate are actually sins that could have serious repercussions in eternal life.

These dudes have to face the very real chance that they will pass into an another world where those whom they have dispossessed, mistreated, mocked, dumped on, and scorned in life will be the “honored ones” and the GOP lifetime grifters will be at their mercy. The day of reckoning for today’s GOP and their evangelical backers could get ugly — they almost have to hope that there is no God, or if there is, that She is not a “Just God” or they will have “Hell to Pay” so to speak! No wonder they are in need of serious spiritual help!

Ryan apparently had to act quickly to scotch the blasphemous rumors floating around the Hill: JESUS WASN’T REALLY A RICH WASP. HE WASN’T EVEN A CHRISTIAN, AND HE DIDN’T BELONG TO ANY CHURCH AT ALL. HE SUPPOSEDLY TURNED FISH INTO LOAVES OF BREAD AND DIDN’T EVEN DENY BREAD (let alone cake) TO THE LGBTQ GUYS IN THE CROWD!

Some misguided souls are even claiming that ”our very own” Jesus Christ actually was an indigent swarthy Palestinian disgruntled Jew who led a ragtag band of vagrants — some of whom had quit gainful employment and abandoned their families — around Palestine undermining legal authority, failing to respect THE LAW, and spreading seditious lies like “The meek shall inherit the earth,” “Blessed are the poor,” and “Fat Cats riding camels will never make it through the eye of a needle or pass through the gates of Heaven!” They were “takers” — non-self-supporting, non-contributors to the community, and lived on handouts and public charity!

Some apparently have the audacity to claim that Jesus spoke of a “spiritual kingdom” unrelated to material possessions and tax breaks where rich White Guys would be judged equally with everyone else. Shucks, what’s the purpose of being rich & White if it won’t even buy you preferential treatment? Heck, even a poor guy who wasn’t a lobbyist would have direct access to Mick Mulvaney under that scenario!

This obviously false Prophet reputedly was so poor that he couldn’t afford a lawyer for his trial, not even Rudy Guiliani. He tried to represent himself, and the result was pretty ugly.

False news, false news, false news! Gotta find a true minister who preaches the gospel according to Fox & Friends!

PWS

04-28-18

This November, vote like your life depends on it. Because it does! Throw the Clowns out!🤡

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