President Trump’s longtime lawyer, Michael D. Cohen, secretly recorded a conversation with Mr. Trump two months before the presidential election in which they discussed payments to a former Playboy model who said she had an affair with Mr. Trump, according to lawyers and others familiar with the recording.
The F.B.I. seized the recording this year during a raid on Mr. Cohen’s office. The Justice Department is investigating Mr. Cohen’s involvement in paying women to tamp down embarrassing news stories about Mr. Trump ahead of the 2016 election. Prosecutors want to know whether that violated federal campaign finance laws, and any conversation with Mr. Trump about those payments would be of keen interest to them.
And of keen interest to the rest of us!
On the other hand, Rudy Giuliani says this is a big nothingburger, and he’s a pretty reliable guy. So maybe the nation really doesn’t care much about its president paying off Playboy models to hide affairs. I suppose we could probably find out by putting it up on YouTube and seeing if anyone bothers listening to it.
It would be massively unfair if, in the end, it was some stupid hush money scandal that finally brought down Trump. But at this point I don’t care. Any port in a storm.
Consumers in both Covered California and off-exchange in the individual market will see an overall average statewide rate increase of 8.7 percent to their gross premiums if they renew coverage in the same plan for 2019.
[Covered California Executive Director Peter V. Lee] said the elimination of the penalty for those who choose not to buy health insurance had a negative impact on rates for 2019. Carriers added between 2.5 and 6 percent to their rates, with an average of 3.5 percent, due to concerns that the removal of the penalty will lead to a less healthy and costlier consumer pool. Covered California estimates the 3.5 percent increase added to the rates will mean Californians will be spending more than $400 million more on their health care coverage in 2019.
And here it is in table form:
California benefits from being a big state, but mostly it benefits from being a state that tries hard to run a good Obamacare exchange. And that would pay off if Republicans weren’t so hellbent on taking away health care coverage from the working class and the working poor. Take a look at the third row of the table. If it weren’t for the purely spiteful elimination of the mandate penalty, the lowest priced silver plan would increase only 1.7 percent. Adjusted for inflation, that’s zero. There’s no real reason that anyone in California should pay a nickel more for health insurance next year than they did this year.
But they will, because that’s how Republicans want it.
Like everybody else in the country, David Frum is disturbed that Donald Trump met with Vladimir Putin alone for two hours:
Typically—in fact, almost invariably—the national-security adviser joins the president’s meetings with foreign leaders, especially adversarial ones. You may remember the famous picture of President Nixon talking for the first time with Chairman Mao. In the wider-angle image, Henry Kissinger shows up just outside the close-up frame. Or think of President Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev in Iceland, chatting informally on a red couch—and surrounded by note takers, cabinet secretaries, and senior aides.
It’s highly disturbing that Trump would exclude his own national-security adviser from his conversations with Putin. The exclusion bespeaks a lack of presidential confidence in his closest foreign-policy aide. For Bolton to acquiesce is equally disturbing: It suggests overeagerness to hold on to a high office whose functions he is not trusted to perform.
Yeah. I mean, I wouldn’t trust Bolton either, but I didn’t hire him as my National Security Adviser.
But what I’m really more disturbed about is this: has Trump told anyone what he talked to Putin about? Is Bolton still in the dark? Coats? Pompeo? Mattis? Haspel? Huntsman? Pence? Kelly? Nakasone? Anyone?
I don’t have anything sophisticated and nuanced to say about this except that it’s fucking nuts. I suppose the best possible option is that this is just Trump doing his reality-show suspense thing, and nothing really happened. But everything goes straight downhill from there.
Sure, Buzz Aldrin did land on the moon 49 years ago today. And I’m happy to see him get his due. But I wonder who thought of this headline? I would have reflexively written “49 years ago, Neil Armstrong landed on the moon.” It wouldn’t have occurred to me to sub in Aldrin’s name even though it’s true that they both landed at the same time. (Armstrong was the first to walk on the moon.) I dunno. Maybe Elizabeth Svoboda is just a big Buzz Aldrin fan?
Artist's conception of completed Air Force One based on design guidance and Pantone swatches submitted by commander-in-chief.Courtesy of White House press office
As you probably know, our current pair of Air Force Ones are showing their age and it’s time to build a couple of new ones. But this is an expensive proposition. Sure, the planes themselves only cost about $600 million or so, but then you have to lard them up with top-of-the-line communications, armored windows, a medical suite, missile counterdefenses, an oval office, a situation room, the best avionics available, a presidential stateroom that would make Louis XIV blush, and a few billion dollars worth of other knickknacks.
So what’s the damage? The blue columns in the chart below tell the story. In early 2016, GAO estimated $3.2 billion for the whole program. By the end of 2016, outside analysts figured the cost at more like $3.7 billion. By December 2016, thanks largely to new requirements imposed by the Air Force, Boeing was internally estimating a cost of about $4.4 billion and offered Trump several options to reduce it. He turned them all down. However, in August 2017 Boeing reduced the program cost anyway by offering to use two fully built “boneyard” jets that had never been delivered and were currently sitting in storage. Finally, after eliminating a few small things here and there—airborne refueling, custom furnishings, advanced environmental controls, etc.—in February of this year the Defense Department estimated a finalized cost of about $3.9 billion. Later in the month Boeing confirmed an “informal” deal at that price, and earlier this week the White House announced that the contract had officially been awarded to Boeing for $3.9 billion. The blue bars in the colorful chart below show the whole timeline:
The alert reader will notice two red bars added to the chart. The first comes from early 2017, when Donald Trump suddenly announced that in a mere hour of negotiation at Mar-a-Lago he had shaved $1 billion off the price. Nobody had any idea where this number came from. Then, during this week’s formal announcement, the White House said the $3.9 billion price tag represented a savings of $1.4 billion from Boeing’s original price of $5.3 billion. Once again, no one had any idea where Trump had gotten this number.
If you want the real Air Force One story, here it is: it went through the standard procurement process; briefly got a little pricey in late 2016; stayed pricey because Trump’s Defense Department turned down every proposed cutback; and finally came in under $4 billion thanks to Boeing locating some 747s in storage and then scraping a few dollars here and there from the original spec. Donald Trump played no part in any of this.
The only thing he did was to announce that the cost was too high and that he had personally negotiated it down a billion dollars or more. How did he get away with this? Well, his own Defense Department wasn’t going to contradict him and Boeing didn’t need any grief either, so they just shut up and let him gloat. Over at the White House, Sarah Sanders issued a press release claiming that Trump saved $1.4 billion from the original $5.3 billion contract, and virtually every single major non-specialist news outlet—USA Today, AP, the New York Times, Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, ABC News, CBS News—just shrugged and ran with it. They were too busy oohing and aahing over Trump’s plan to get rid of Jackie Kennedy’s baby-blue design and replace it with something manlier.
The only major exception was Samantha Masunaga of the Los Angeles Times, who actually picked up her phone and then wrote: “But an aviation analyst has said the new Air Force One planes were always expected to cost about $4 billion. And Defense Department budget estimates for fiscal year 2019 project that the Air Force One program will cost about $3.95 billion through fiscal year 2023.”
This is why it’s so important to assume that everything Trump says is a lie. If he says the sky is blue, check it. If he says he had oatmeal for breakfast, check it. Always remember the Trump motto:
People will just believe you. You just tell them and they believe you.
Hey, remember last weekend’s geography lesson about England vs. Great Britain vs. the United Kingdom? It’s about to come in handy!
As you’ll recall, Northern Ireland is part of the UK, which means that when Brexit is implemented it will be out of the EU just like the rest of the country. The borders of the EU will look like this:
This is a problem. Ireland will now have a hard customs border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, something that’s wildly unacceptable to both sides. In fact, the 1995 Good Friday Agreement, which ended a quarter century of violence by squaring the circle of a kinda-sorta-united Irish island but with a sovereign Northern Ireland, was largely based on demilitarizing the border and leaving it completely open. It’s obviously a colossal fudge, but it’s worked well for 20 years, and nobody wants to take a chance on what happens if it goes away.
So what to do? One option is a hazy, soft Brexit with borders that look like this:
The keeps the Irish border open, but it also presents some pretty obvious problems. If there’s no national border with the Republic of Ireland—which is a member of the EU—and no internal border between Northern Ireland and the rest of Britain, then there’s effectively no border between the EU and the UK. An alternative is a soft border down the Irish Sea, but that makes Northern Ireland a sort of second-class country within the UK.
So what to do? Until now, the hazy, muddled soft Brexit option has mostly been on the table, but that’s about to end. Theresa May is laying down the law:
In a speech in Belfast on Friday she is expected to brand the [EU’s] calls for regulatory alignment north and south of the border as a “backstop” solution in the event of no deal as “unworkable”, and repeat her assertion that a border down the Irish Sea is unacceptable to any British prime minister. “The economic and constitutional dislocation of a formal ‘third country’ customs border within our own country is something I will never accept, and I believe no British prime minister could ever accept,” she will say.
So it’s Option #1, with a customs border between Ireland and Northern Ireland. This also means that Northern Ireland won’t be obliged to follow EU regulatory standards, which was one of the whole points of Brexit in the first place. But it’s also something that will increase the legal separation between Ireland and Northern Ireland, and that’s not something the Irish are happy about—especially since the the power-sharing agreement that’s kept Northern Ireland peaceful since 1998 broke down a year ago and shows no signs of repairing itself. Toss in some border troubles, and there’s no telling what might happen.
Nevertheless, the Irish are preparing for the possibility that there will never be a Brexit deal between the UK and the EU, and withdrawal will happen automatically and with no agreements in place:
Ireland’s taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, has expressed concern that the turmoil in the House of Commons suggests a withdrawal agreement would never be supported in Westminster, whatever the outcome of Brexit negotiations. On Wednesday night Varadkar said Ireland was looking to hire about 1,000 officials for customs, veterinary and export checks to cope with a no deal.
As a citizen of a country that elected Donald Trump president, I can hardly act too righteous about national governance right now. But Brexit might well be even stupider than Donald Trump. At least we have a chance of getting rid of him in a couple of years. The British, however, are likely to pay a big price and gain no benefit from Brexit, and it will last forever. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
I turned on the TV for a few minutes to snap some pictures of commercials, and boy howdy did I see plenty of white men. Of course, some of them were like this guy, forced to take care of the baby because the femlibs have totally emasculated us. Plus, there were plenty of black men and women in the commercials too.
Here’s an interesting sort of story. Over at the Washington Post, Monica Hesse tells us about her Facebook friend Tom, who is unhappy at the increasing absence of white men on TV. So she sent him a couple of studies showing that TV still had plenty of white men. It didn’t work. Eventually they agreed to a test:
A scientific experiment was Tom’s idea. He’s a data guy; he likes experiments. In this one, we’d make our own data by watching an hour of the same channel, coding ads by gender, by voice-over vs. on-screen appearance, main actor vs. extra….He suggested the experiment would be a win-win for him. “Either I get to prove you wrong, or I’m wrong, and the world is less scary than I think it is.”
So, a Nissan commercial (one speaking white man, one nonspeaking white woman). A Kotex ad (one white woman). Realtor.com. Aveeno. Home Depot. Febreze. Tom emailed the next day, attaching a spreadsheet and a note:
“In reviewing these statistics, I have to change my opinion. They do represent the population fairly well. There are some commercials that don’t have any white males in them, but this is to be expected.”
His spreadsheet matched mine, but the email was still stunning. Had his mind really changed? Over an hour-long experiment? A few days later I phoned him, certain I’d missed something. Nope. “Give yourself a win,” he said. Something about that analytical-viewing hour had been cathartic. He’d begun reminding himself, for example, that if there was no man in one ad, there might have been in the previous one.
Unfortunately, this experiment entirely misses the point, and I’m surprised that neither of our participants noticed it. What Tom said was that he saw fewer white men on TV. To test that, you’d need to pick random hours of commercials over the past few decades and see what the trendline looks like. But there’s not much point in wasting your time: the number of white men has declined. We all know this. It’s because TV was overwhelmingly white up through the 60s, and after that people of color started agitating for change. The result—slowly but steadily—is more blacks, more Hispanics, more Asians, more women, and by simple arithmetic, fewer white men.
That said, about 30 percent of Americans are white men, and I’m willing to bet that the average TV commercial still features more than 30 percent white men. The problem is (a) most whites live among other whites and assume that the percentage is higher, and (b) there are a lot more blacks and Hispanics in TV commercials these days. My guess is that Tom has only barely noticed the decline of white men, which has maybe gone down from 40 percent to 35 percent over the past decade, but has noticed the growth of blacks of both genders, which has maybe gone from 8 percent to 12 percent. The absolute numbers may be small, but that’s an increase of half for blacks, while the decrease in whites is about a tenth.¹
So we’re back to where we started. The fact is that Tom is basically right: there are fewer white men and more people of color on his TV. This has been a deliberate change, and as he acknowledges, it fairly represents America—or is getting closer to it, anyway. The question is what we can do to make this less scary to white men—and yes, it matters that we do this. If your attitude is “suck it up, snowflake,” then we’re likely to get a lot more Donald Trumps in the future. That may not be fair, but the fact is that we have to suck it up and deal with it if we want a better, more tolerant, less fearful country casting ballots every two years. So what are we going to do about it?
¹I pulled these numbers out of thin air just to illustrate a point. I have no idea what the real figures are or how to find them.
Jewish organizations criticized the far-right Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ), the ruling coalition party in the state of Lower Austria, over pursuing a proposal that would require Jews to register with the government if they seek to purchase kosher meat. The same rules would apply to Muslims….Jews and Muslims would still be allowed to purchase kosher and halal food, but only if they can prove that they live in Lower Austria and are observant members of their religious communities. Sales would be restricted to a certain amount of meat per week. Effectively, this means that restaurants would no longer be able to offer halal or kosher options, either.
A spokeswoman for the Islamic Religious Community in Austria (IGGÖ), an organization that defends the religious interests of Austrian Muslims, shared the criticism from Jewish associations this week, saying that it was bringing back “memories of one of the darkest chapters in recent history.” The proposal, she told Austrian media outlets, “was in reality meant against us, given that the FPÖ has long stirred tensions against Muslims and divided the country.”
Congratulations to the newly elected President of the United States Donald J. Trump! The political left and the elites as well as the deep state are being punished by the voters step by step and removed from various decision-making functions. That’s good, because the law is based on the people. Various Austrian mainstream media and journalists, who have been agitating against Trump for weeks and have already declared H. Clinton the winner in the run-up, were once again embarrassed by the voters.
My lawyers are working on that. I’ve always wanted to do an interview, because look, there’s been no collusion. There’s been no talk of Russia. There’s been no phone call. There’s been nothing. And it’s I call it a witch hunt. That’s exactly what it is. It’s a it’s a vicious witch hunt. And you know what? It’s very bad for our country. Very, very bad for our country.
No phone call? What does that mean? What phone call is he referring to that doesn’t exist anyway? Inquiring minds want to know.
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