Whistle-blower, Ukraine, Biden & More Collusion

It's hard to keep up. Just when you get a good rage going about the latest Trump bullshit, something else comes up. And just like the sun comes up every morning, Trump will try to deflect the attention elsewhere.

Let's dissect the newest:

Back when Barack Obama was the president, The United States government had some concerns about a culture of corruption in Ukraine at a time when we were assisting them with loan guarantees. They needed cash to fund their defense against Russian aggression in the eastern districts of the country. One of the officials whom we determined was egregiously corrupt was the chief government prosecutor, Viktor Shokin. The United States, as well as other NATO nations, pressured the Ukrainian president to remove Shokin. At one point Vice President Biden was dispatched to Kiev to give the president the message that if Shokin was not fired, then the $1 Billion in loan guarantees would be withdrawn. Shokin was canned.

At the same time Hunter Biden, Vice President Biden's son, was on the board of a Ukrainian company. Trump and his team are alleging that Shokin was investigating Hunter Biden and his company and that Joe Biden used his position to stop the investigation of his son. There are conflicting reports regarding whether Biden was under investigation by Shokin. Adam Entous, who has written extensively on Hunter Biden, told NPR that his interviews with Ukrainian officials revealed that no investigation was taking place. Another prosecutor, however, did investigate Biden and his company and found no illegalities or ethical issues. Furthermore, there has never been any suggestion that Vice President Biden used his position to help his son, either in the case of the investigation or in any other circumstance. Hunter Biden eventually resigned from the Ukrainian company.

Fast forward to 2019. Joe Biden has decided to run for the Democratic presidential nomination and is polling ahead of the other Democrats, but also ahead of Trump in a hypothetical head-to-head general election contest. Trump has devoted a fair amount of Twitter time to attacking Biden, hanging the nickname "Sleepy Joe" on him. Just last week the Congress was informed by the Inspector General of the combined intelligence agencies that there was a whistle-blower complaint that he found credible and of "urgent concern". The Acting Director of National Intelligence prohibited him from forwarding the actual complaint to Congress. The media soon reported that the complaint involved the president. Soon after it came out that it involved the president asking Ukraine to investigate Joe and Hunter Biden.

At first Trump denied that his call with the Ukrainian president was anything but routine, but soon, Trump and his lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, both confirmed that both Trump and Giuliani asked the Ukrainians to open a corruption investigation into the Bidens. As of this writing Trump is attacking the whistle-blower as partisan, a member of the "Deep State", and the complaint a partisan Democratic hack-job and a new witch hunt, all the while admitting to the basic facts. He is insisting that the "real" story is not that he is asking for foreign assistance in taking down a potential election opponent, but that he cares deeply about corruption and that Biden is the one who used his position for corrupt purposes. The actual rationale is hard to follow, because, as usual, Trump is quite incoherent when not using a TelePrompter.

Trump's assertions are nonsense on their face. Nobody seriously believes that Trump cares about corruption, especially not in Ukraine. Nobody seriously believes that this would have come up if Biden wasn't doing so well in the polls. (If the polls are all fake, why the concern?) Only an idiot would believe that this was anything than what it appears to be: the President of the United States recruiting the assistance of a foreign government in order to influence another election.

The Mueller Report found no clear coordination between the Trump campaign and the Russian government, and the campaign's actions did not rise to the level of conspiracy, but the report was clear that Russia offered help and Trump and his campaign were happy to accept that help. In the aftermath of the release of the report Trump said that if offered foreign help in 2020 he would at least look at it. Now we have a brazen attempt, first in secret, but now in broad daylight, to actively coordinate with a foreign government to influence the election by casting a dark cloud over the front running challenger.

Does he literally have to shoot someone on Fifth Avenue in order for Congress to remove him from office?

Trump & The Raccoons

I saw this today; supposedly by Steve Harvey. First of all, it’s not by Steve Harvey, secondly it makes a lot of assumptions about why people don’t like Trump. (Original in regular type, my comments in bold)

HOW I FEEL ABOUT TRUMP:

You’ve been on vacation for two weeks, you come home, and your basement is infested with raccoons.. Hundreds of rabid, messy, mean raccoons have overtaken your basement.. You want them gone immediately!.. You call the city and 4 different exterminators, but nobody can handle the job.. But there is this one guy, and he guarantees to get rid of them, so you hire him.. You don’t care if the guy smells, you don’t care if the guy swears, you don’t care if he’s an alcoholic, you don’t care how many times he’s been married, you don’t care if he has a plumber’s crack, you simply want those raccoons gone!.. You want your problem fixed!.. He’s the guy.. He’s the best!

Okay, let assume that this comparison is accurate, that our country’s position is analogous to a raccoon-infested basement. I’ll get back to that later.

Here’s why we want Trump: Yes, he’s a bit of a jerk; Yes, he’s an egomaniac; but we don’t care!.. The country is a mess because politicians suck, the Republicans and Democrats can be two-faced and gutless, and illegals are everywhere.. We want it all fixed!..

Great, let’s continue assume that there’s something to be “fixed”. But here’s where there’s a logical breakdown, Why do we assume that just because Trump said that he could fix this “mess”, that he actually had a plan to do so? He certainly didn’t even get close to articulating a plan to “fix” anything. 

We don’t care that Trump is crude, we don’t care that he insults people, we don’t care that he has changed positions, we don’t care that he’s been married 3 times, we don’t care that he fights with Megyn Kelly and Rosie O’Donnell, we don’t care that he doesn’t know the name of some Muslim terrorist.

But for some reason “we” cared about all those things when there was a Democrat in the White House.

This country became weak and bankrupt, our enemies were making fun of us, we are being invaded by illegals, we are becoming a nation of victims where every Tom, Ricardo, and Hasid is a special group with special rights to a point where we don’t even recognize the country we were born and raised in; “AND WE JUST WANT IT FIXED”.. And Trump is the only guy who seems to understand what the people want..

And there it is. If the invocation of “illegals” in every paragraph wasn’t a hint, it’s getting a bit more overt. The not-so-subtle change of “Tom, Dick & Harry” to “Tom, Ricardo & Hasid” should alert us to the underlying bigotry. Though perhaps the author didn’t realize that a “Hasid” is a member of an orthodox Jewish sect and not a Muslim name.

We’re sick of politicians, sick of the Democratic Party, sick of the Republican Party, and sick of illegals!..

Somehow I think the author of this piece has a problem with “illegals”.

We just want this thing fixed.. Trump may not be a Saint, but we didn’t vote for a Pope.. We voted for a man who doesn’t have lobbyist money holding him back, a man who doesn’t have political correctness restraining him..

The myth that Trump was somehow not influenced by contributions from lobbyists has been long ago been disproven. The backdoor lobbying by spending money at Trump properties has become epidemic.

We all know that he has been very successful, he’s a good negotiator, he has built a lot of things, and he’s also NOT a politician, NOT a cowardly politician.!.. And he says he’ll fix it..

No, we don’t “know” that he has been successful. If he has been successful at all, it has been at convincing everyone that he is a good businessman when he has multiple bankruptcies under his belt. If he has a skill it’s been to suck every dollar out of a business into his own bank account while running it into the ground and stiffing contractors. His negotiating skills are nothing but bullying & throwing money around, which may work when it comes to screwing small businesses out of their livelihood, but hasn’t worked when it comes to screwing sovereign nations.

And we believe him because he is too much of an egotist to be proven wrong, or looked at and called a liar..

That part is partially right. He will never admit to being wrong, and lies through his teeth when he is proven wrong. It’s always someone else’s fault

Also, we don’t care if the guy has bad hair.. We just want those raccoons gone, out of our house, NOW!!!

But the raccoons are still there, even though he is claiming that the raccoon population is the lowest in 94 years, and hiring people who have a vested interest in there being more raccoons.

I don’t care about his multiple marriages or his philandering either. However, most of you Trumpists seemed to care about those things when Clinton was President. 

• I do care that the supposed president of all Americans routinely attacks and belittles those he disagrees with. I care that he regularly calls the free press “the enemy of the people”. 
• I care that his executive orders chip away at regulatory protections for ordinary Americans. 
• I care that science-based and other evidence-based decision-making has given way to “what will it cost?” decision making. 
• I care that his foreign policy consists of threatening to obliterate whole nations and then backing off when he gets “a beautiful letter”. 
• I care that he verbally attacks our longtime allies and cozies up to dictators. 
• I care that he cavalierly withdraws us from international agreements that had taken years of negotiations to put together, causing the rest of the world to view American commitments as not worth the paper that they’re written on. 
• I care that he makes economic decisions without any understanding of economics or the consequences of his actions. 
• I care that his trade wars have done nothing but financially impact American businesses. 
• I care that he is running the executive branch as if he’s a dictator, including refusing to cooperate with Congress, and withholding information that is within their oversight authority. 
• I care that he views the Justice Department as his personal lawyers. 
• I care that he finds no problem with asking foreign governments to investigate his political rivals. 
• I care that he lies constantly, even about things that can easily & quickly be fact-checked.
• And yes, I care about the rampant bigotry.

And for those of you who don’t care about any of those things that I care about, and still believe that he’s going to “fix” things: he hasn’t. 

All of his “accomplishments” have benefited a narrow constituency: the rich. His “massive” tax cut was a pittance while corporations reaped a huge windfall, which they, in most cases, failed to pass on to employees or consumers. The so-called Trump Economy, which was never more than an extension of Obama-era growth, his starting to sputter, as businesses begin to worry about how the erratic tariff policies will affect their future.

The raccoons are still in the basement…and they’ve mutated.

Comey is Still Living Rent Free in Trump's Head

I stopped counting, but I believe that Trump has tweeted about former FBI Director James Comey a dozen times in the last few days. If you haven't been keeping track of the Dotard-in-Chief's ravings over the weekend, he apparently wants us to be sure that we are aware that the Justice Department Inspector General just concluded that Comey broke Justice Department rules when he turned over certain memos to the press.

To refresh your memories, James Comey was the FBI Director when Trump took office. Many of us were ready to lynch him when, a few weeks before the election, he announced that the investigation into candidate Hillary Clinton's handling of emails was being re-opened. A week later it was "Oops, nothing to see here, nothing new, false alarm." He referred us back to his much earlier proclamation that Clinton had broken no laws, but "was extremely careless". This guy was no friend of Democrat or of anyone who opposed Trump. It was widely believed that this late announcement tipped the scales toward Trump in what turned out to be close margins in battleground states.

What he didn't announce was that the FBI was also investigating the Trump campaign regarding Russian influence. It became known that several top Trump officials, including then National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, were under investigation. Flynn soon resigned. Comey was summoned to the White House for several one-on-one meetings with Trump. In several of these meetings people such as then Attorney General Jeff Sessions, technically Comey's boss, were excused from the room for these private discussions. Comey kept notes of these meetings during which he says that Trump asked him to "let this Flynn thing go" and asked him if he was loyal. Comey was fired as FBI Director shortly thereafter. Trump is reported to have said to visiting Russian officials that Comey was a "nut job" and that now that he was gone the Russia investigation would go away.

Once he was fired, Comey took his notes of these meetings with him and eventually turned them over to the press. The memos themselves, with some redaction, are available to anyone who wants to look at them. https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4442900-Ex-FBI-Director-James-Comey-s-memos.html It is possible that getting this information out spurred the appointment of the Special Counsel.

For the last two years Comey has been a target of attacks by Trump, who has painted him as "a liar and a leaker", in all likelihood to undercut any credibility that Comey may have and frame his memos as politically motivated. The attacks, as I previously noted, have escalated in the past few days. The Inspector General's Report makes two main points: that the memos were not, as Comey claimed, personal recollections, but were FBI records and that holding on to them after he was fired and giving them to the media violated FBI rules. At no point in the Inspector General's report are not contents of the memos called into question.

Trump has been crowing about this report as if it's some great victory. I beg to differ. Comey has been accused of being a grand-stander; he has been accused by Democrats and Republicans alike of making improper announcements and of improperly editorializing on investigations. I don't disagree, but passing on these memos looks to me to be the equivalent of whistle-blowing. The conversations that Comey memorialized in his memos could be interpreted as the beginnings of the obstruction that clearly has been taking place throughout Trump's presidency. Trump tried to get his FBI Director to drop an ongoing investigation; he tried to secure his personal loyalty. When he couldn't get either, he fired the man, laughed about it with officials from a hostile government, and embarked upon a campaign of disparagement and attempted to undermine his credibility.

Personally I'm glad that we have public servants who will put the good of the country above bureaucratic rules.

Bonds

The President of the United States is an idiot. There, I said it. I'm not saying "I disagree with him", or even "I think his policies are harmful", but that he is an idiot, that he has no understanding of how things work, and doesn't care. Some of his idiot supporters applaud his bull-in-a-china-shop approach, reasoning (I am using "reasoning" quite loosely) that the government needed shaking up by an outsider who didn't play by the old tired rules. No, Dotard Donnie's approach is analogous to a the owner of a repair shop deciding that internal combustion is just an attempt by the "Deep Garage" to make him look bad and that any car that comes into his garage will have its engine replaced by windmills. His mechanics patiently explain why this plan won't work, but he decides that no one knows more about cars than he does and goes ahead with the plan.

No, it's not that Trump is boldly implementing new approaches to governance, it's that he doesn't  even understand the basics of economics, global trade, tariffs, military alliances or the functioning of a free press.  The newest unveiling of ignorance regards bonds.

While stocks, put simply, are ownership shares of a company, with the price fluctuating based on the perception of value of a company, bonds can be viewed as a loan to a company or a government. In order to turn a profit from a stock, you have to sell it at a higher price than what you paid for it. Bonds, on the other hand, have a prescribed maturity date, 2 years, 10 years, 30 years, 30 days - there are multiple varieties. In general a $100 bond is purchased for $100, but may pay a predetermined annual interest rate to the bond holder. However, bonds may be bought and sold at prices that differ from the face value. Just like with any other commodity, high demand for a bond may cause it to be traded at higher than face value (a premium) or with lower demand or perception of high risk, at less (a discount).

Donnie has been complaining lately that what we need to do is issue negative interest rate bonds, like Germany is doing. He takes the simplistic view that if an investor is paying more for a bond than what is going to be paid out, the issuer (in this case the Treasury) is making a profit. He can't understand why The Fed won't lower interest rates to below zero so we can make a profit this way. It's not simple, however. Popularity of bonds that yield less than what was paid for them is a sign that investors feel that just parking their money somewhere is the safest bet in a volatile economy. Not only is it a sign that simply warehousing cash is the prudent option, but they're locking into these bonds now in the belief that the market will sink lower.

Now, what you have just read is a very simple explanation. It is by no means complete. But that's the point, it's very complex and has difficult-to-predict consequences. Everything about economics is complex, it's a chaotic system with countless variables, yet Donnie tries to paint it as simple, with obvious solutions. When he implements his "solutions" and the inevitable chaos ensues, he then refuses to acknowledge that he may have been wrong and flails about looking for scapegoats: the press, the Democrats, the Federal Reserve, the "Deep State". A prime example is his "easy to win" trade war with China that he continues to escalate. It is having a negative effect on the economy, costing US importers and consumers money and harming businesses, yet he continues to deny the obvious.

Many people rationalized their vote for Trump in 2016 as a pragmatic vote for a "successful businessman" when even a cursory look at his career would suggest quite the opposite. Trump was mainly successful at securing a big paycheck for himself at the expense of businesses that he bankrupted and contractors that he  didn't pay. He was a genius at one thing: marketing himself as a successful businessman and playing one on television. It was obvious during the 2016 campaign that he was ignorant and would certainly be incompetent, and time has confirmed it.

Now? Do You See It Yet?

On my last visit with family, I got into a polite political discussion with my 85 year-old mother. I had vowed to avoid arguing politics with her because (1) She's my mom & I love her (2) She's an old lady [sorry mom] (3) There's no way that she's going to change her mind based on anything that I say. But she kept bringing up! During one discussion over coffee and the local diner one night, she suggested that Dotard Donnie was doing a good job "because the economy". And I hear this a lot from Trumpists: the economy is doing so well, better than ever, because of Trump. It's not an unusual sentiment, self interest. I'm doing okay, so I'll ignore the bad things. And if you're going to support Donnie because you think the economy is doing well, you have to ignore or rationalize away the hate speech, the accommodation and encouragement of racism, of hatred, of misogyny, of xenophobia. You have to be okay with the constant lying, not just your usual butt-covering lies that politicians tell, but lies about everything, lying about what we all heard him say five minutes ago. You have to be okay with the appointment of cabinet secretaries who either have no knowledge of the departments that they are tasked with overseeing or are hell-bent on dismantling or neutralizing the mission of those departments. You have to be okay with the utter incompetence and ignorance of the basics of governance. It's one thing to cheer on an outsider who shakes up a moribund system, but we have laws that constrain what our elected officials can do, but he doesn't seem to understand that. He has no concept of how laws are made. He is completely ignorant about economics, economic concepts that a first year college student has mastered are a mystery to him. You have to be okay with his antagonizing our allies while cozying up to dictators, calling them his good friends. You have to be okay with his reneging on international agreements that took years to negotiate. You have to be okay with the daily Twitter rants, often attacking American business or individuals that disagree with him. You have to be okay with the garden variety evidence that he's nuts...buy Greenland?

But, hey, the economy is doing great!

Until it's not.

We're starting to see some signs that some problems are appearing on the horizon. A healthy economy in large part depends that people believe that it's a healthy economy. The lower yields on ten-year bonds is a direct result of lower confidence of investors. Foreign investment is down and domestic companies are starting to slow their investment because Donnie's unpredictable "policies" create uncertainty, and if there's anything that businesses hate, it's uncertainty.

So what will the Trumpists do when the economy starts to tank? Will they abandon him? No, they'll do what their cult leader is already doing: blame The Fed (which they don't understand), blame the media, blame the Democrats, blame the "Deep State".

There's no convincing them, stop trying. There just needs to be more of us than them next election day.

Senator Warren

Was Senator Warren’s claim to have some Native American ancestry insulting to Native Americans? Was her apology sufficient? Was she a racist for these actions? I will leave it to Native Americans themselves to decide those questions. As the latest cliché goes: that’s not in my lane. There are, however, facts, and here are a few of them:

• Senator Warren’s family talked about having an unspecified ancestor a few generations back who was a Cherokee
• The young Elizabeth Warren believed this family lore and was proud to count Cherokee as one part of her ancestry
• Unless you’re part of some country’s royal family, it’s not likely that you will have accurate records going back more than a few generations & family myths may be the only “history” that you have
• People like to emphasize aspects of themselves that are unique and different. If you’re surrounded by white people, mentioning some Native ancestry might seem “cool”
• Probably NOT cool to appropriate a culture that’s not yours, but people aren’t always rational
• Senator Warren never used her claim of Native American ancestry to advance her career, notwithstanding her filling out “Native American” under “race” on a bar association card
• Senator Warren was used by Harvard University to claim that they had a diverse faculty
• Other than a few instances in her early career, there is no record of Senator Warren emphasizing her belief that she had Native American ancestry, and certainly no instance of her using this belief in her political career (her opponent in the first Senate race brought it up & Trump jumped on it)
• Elizabeth Warren at no time benefited from quotas or affirmative action by claiming Native American ancestry

The DNA test was perhaps a boneheaded move, aside from the fact that these tests don’t have a solid scientific basis, they don’t address cultural or identity issues. They don’t have anything to do with Tribal affiliation/enrollment, which Senator Warren never claimed. Warren also made the mistake of trying to engage Trump using Trump’s rule-book; she was never going to get him to back off, even if birth certificates (ha!) or other records were produced to prove a recent Native American forebear.

There’s a lot of misinformation, “fake news”, if you will, about this subject. A lot of mocking and faux-outrage from the right wing. If Senator Warren becomes the Democratic Party presidential nominee she will have to deal with it all – the racist, insulting nickname from Trump as well as the twisting of the facts from the rest of the MAGA brigade. The way she handled this causes me to suspect that, despite my belief that policy-wise she’s the strongest of Democratic candidates, she will be unable to stand up to Trump head-to-head. I hope I’m wrong. 

Presidential Addresses vs. Campaign Rallies

By now we've all heard about the speech that Dotard Donnie gave at the Shell plant in Pittsburgh the other day. The speech was supposed to be about U.S. energy independence and the importance of manufacturing jobs. In any other administration, this wouldn't have been a big deal. Presidents in recent years have regularly made appearances to talk up important sectors of the U.S. economy, or showcase an administration's signature programs. This isn't normally a problem...normally. This, however, isn't a normal presidency. Normally, while a president in a similar situation might discretely pat himself on the back for his administration's accomplishments, he would usually refrain from overtly partisan statements, would refrain from attacking political opponents and stay on topic. This abnormal president did all of those things, including exhorting the attendees to vote for him, and if their union leaders did not endorse him, "vote them the hell out".

It's bad enough that Donnie spends significant parts of each and every day attacking his real and imagined enemies, it's bad enough that he spends virtually every weekend golfing, but apparently it was too much to expect that he would stay on topic and not turn this visit into just another campaign rally. After all, he turns visits to military bases into rallies on a regular basis, indulging in his paranoid recitation of grievances.

Once again, he has mistaken the office of the presidency for a platform for promoting his own ego.