Even by Trump-era standards, Sean Hannity is a joke these days. Trump could give the Louisiana Purchase back to France and Hannity would find some way to hail it as the most brilliant foreign policy coup of all time.
In other words, there’s no reason to bother with him, even for a bit of drive-by mockery. But every rule has exceptions, and anyway, tonight’s episode has turned into a viral meme already. You do want to keep up on your memes, don’t you?
Note Kellyanne Conway’s Freudian use of the word “yet.” Maybe she knows something we don’t?
From Donald Trump, explaining how he pressed Vladimir Putin about whether Russia was responsible for campaign hacking in 2016:
First question — first 20, 25 minutes — I said, “Did you do it?” He said, “No, I did not, absolutely not.” I then asked him a second time, in a totally different way. He said, “Absolutely not.”
Damn, that Trump is a tricky one. I then asked him a second time, in a totally different way. If Putin had been guilty, he never would have stood a chance.
Last summer, Donald Trump, Jr. met with a Kremlin-connected attorney in an attempt to obtain information “that would incriminate Hillary.” Earlier this year, on May 12, 2017, the Department of Justice made an abrupt decision to settle a money laundering case being handled by that same attorney in the Southern District of New York. We write with some concern that the two events may be connected—and that the Department may have settled the case at a loss for the United States in order to obscure the underlying facts.
This is where the Trump-Russia thing starts to get sort of Watergate-y. The Watergate scandal started off with a burglary of DNC headquarters in Washington DC, but by the time it was over it was all about ITT, Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, interference with the CIA, 18-minute gaps, using the IRS to intimidate enemies, etc.
Donald Trump has only been in office for six months, so there’s no way he could have built up a Nixonian level bill of particulars like this yet. Still, we might discover more than just campaign collusion as leakers get busier and reporters start to take the whole thing more seriously.
In this case, Don Jr. initially said that he met with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya because she wanted to discuss Russian adoptions. But the law banning Americans from adopting Russian babies is a nothingburger, a minor bit of Putin score-settling enacted in retaliation for Congress passing the Magnitsky Act. When you hear “Russian adoptions,” Magnitsky is the real topic of conversation.
The Magnitsky Act is a set of sanctions designed to punish Russia for arresting and killing Sergei Magnitsky, a Moscow lawyer who had uncovered a state-sanctioned scheme of tax cheating that implicated police, the judiciary, tax officials, bankers, and the Russian mafia. Over $200 million was involved, much of it laundered through overseas companies, including several who used the money to buy up high-end Manhattan real esate. One of these companies was Prevezon.
Natalia Veselnitskaya was one of Prevezon’s lawyers. Preet Bharara was the US Attorney prosecuting the case, which was not going well for Prevezon. However, Donald Trump fired Bharara in March, and two months later the Justice Department surprised everyone by abruptly settling the case for $6 million. The settlement was so meager that one of Prevezon’s US attorneys said it was “almost an admission that they shouldn’t have brought the case.” Veselnitskaya herself crowed that it was “almost an apology from the government.”
So: was there a deal made last year? Did Trump campaign aides—or Trump himself—agree to scuttle the case against Prevezon in return for dirt on Hillary Clinton?
This might be a big stretch, nothing more than a bit of connecting-the-dots conspiracy theorizing. Alternatively, it might be the real deal. If it is, it’s the first step toward the Watergate-ization of the Trump-Russia scandal.
I sometimes get scoffed at because Lunchtime Photo never features an actual lunch-related photo. Even when I put up a photo of my favorite burger joint last month, it was a picture taken at night.
Fine. Here’s a lunch photo. It’s our squirrel, caught in the act of snarfing down one of our roses. Stupid squirrel. I thought they were supposed to eat pine cones or something?
A couple of days ago I wrote about climate change, which is, in any useful definition of the word important, more important than the doings of the president’s idiot son. I want to follow up with a little more detail on one of the points I made.
Right up front, I want to acknowledge that lots of other people have made these points before, and I haven’t studied them closely enough to provide any details. But I still think they form a useful prism for examining the challenge we face. This is a list of various groups and why they resist the big changes necessary to halt climate change:
Regular people: don’t want to be constantly badgered and guilted about the car they drive or the meat they eat.
Poor countries: don’t want to be stuck forever in low-energy poverty compared to currently rich countries.
Oil companies: don’t want their businesses to crater because no one is buying fossil fuels anymore.
Republicans: don’t like the business regulations that would be necessary to truly address climate change.
The rich: don’t want to pay the taxes necessary to address climate change.
OPEC countries: don’t want to leave $10 trillion of wealth sitting in the ground.
I’ve probably missed some, but you get the idea. The problem is that there are simply too many powerful groups who are fundamentally opposed to dramatic action on climate change. The odds that we’ll get even half of them to see the light in time to make a difference is pretty small.
Like it or not, then, we have to bribe everybody. Here are the bribes we have to offer:
We have stop guilting people about their personal choices. Instead, spend a ton of money putting them to work building and installing solar/wind infrastructure.
We have to make sure poor countries can continue to grow. That means spending money on infrastructure for India, Malaysia, Bolivia, etc.
We have to ensure that oil companies get a piece of the de-carbonization pie.
We have to give up on trying to regulate our way to carbon reduction. Sure, a carbon tax would still help things along, but it doesn’t have to be massive.
We have to give the rich a piece of the de-carbonization pie. Frankly, this will probably happen automatically.
We have to give OPEC—what? I’m not really sure what we can do for OPEC.
This is what leads me to think that our only real chance of success is to spend vast amounts of money on R&D and infrastructure buildout. Offhand, I’m thinking of about a trillion dollars a year.¹ Is that a lot? Why yes, it is. But it’s only about 5 percent of GDP. Here’s some context for that:
When we talk about a “wartime effort,” people tend to think about World War II, with its enormous defense buildup, rationing of supplies, and Rosie the Riveter. But we don’t need anything close to that. We don’t even need to spend what we did on World War I. We basically need a Korea-sized commitment. That shouldn’t scare anyone.
And here’s one other thing. A couple of days ago I put up this chart:
The orange line is median male earnings, but it’s inverted to show how closely it follows the trend line for spikes in oil prices. When oil prices spike upward, earnings go down. For example, in 1974 earnings dropped 5 percent thanks to the recession that followed the 1973 oil embargo.
This is amateur economics, but listen anyway. We’ve had periodic recessions for the entire history of our country, but median earnings rose anyway. They took a small hit during recessions, and then rose more during the subsequent expansions. In 1973 that stopped happening. There are lots of reasons for this, but I think oil is a big and underappreciated one. It has made the global economy far less stable than in the past, and ordinary workers generally don’t do well in an unstable world.
So that’s another reason to take decarbonization seriously: it would return us to a more stable global economy, which would most likely be good for workers. Shed no tears for the rich, though. They’d do fine. They just wouldn’t gobble up nearly the entire value of economic growth. And in return, for surprisingly little pain, we all get a world that’s safer, more habitable, and economically more stable. What’s not to like?²
¹For the US. Other countries would add to that. If we figure 5 percent of GDP, total global spending on R&D and infrastructure buildout would be about $3 trillion.
²Plenty. The rich are going to have to pay higher taxes, one way or another. Federal spending is going to skyrocket, which will be opposed by lots of tea party types. But what if Republicans were persuaded that (a) liberals will stop badgering them for lots of new regulations, and (b) the money will mostly be like Social Security, just passed through to private sector companies who build the infrastructure and nothing else will be done with it? Maybe a lot of them would decide to go along. Maybe.
Atrios has been listing the books he’s read this year, and this got me curious about which books I’ve read this year. The answer is that I don’t know. Some time ago I began using Nook as my regular e-reader because the Kindle app is a piece of crap on Windows tablets. And it turns out that Barnes & Noble makes it all but impossible to figure out when you bought a book. You can check your orders for the past six months, but they provide only order numbers, not book titles. I looked and looked, but unless I missed something obvious there’s no real way to know when you bought a particular book.
That’s kind of annoying—at least, for those of us who are easily annoyed. Anyway, take this list with a grain of salt, but here’s what I’ve read in the first half of the year, in chronological order:
Charlie Jane Anders, All the Birds in the Sky
Ethan Canin, A Doubter’s Almanac
Michael Eric Dyson, Tears We Cannot Stop
Connie Willis, Crosstalk
Alice Dreger, Galileo’s Middle Finger
Brian Stavely, The Emperor’s Blades
Brian Stavely, The Providence of Fire
Brian Stavely, The Last Mortal Bond
Rob Sheffield, Dreaming the Beatles
Joan Williams, White Working Class
Al Franken, Giant of the Senate
Cory Doctorow, Walkaway
Charles Stross, Empire Games
David Weigel, The Show That Never Ends
Paul Beatty, Sellout
Did I also read one or two dead-tree books? I think I did! But I don’t remember what they were.
It’s mostly fiction. Political nonfiction (broadly defined) has become so partisan that I find I don’t enjoy it much these days. There are several books I liked on this list, but none that blew me away. I guess my top picks are A Doubter’s Almanac among fiction¹ and Galileo’s Middle Finger among nonfiction.
¹Assuming you get a kick out of novels about disturbed, world-class mathematicians, which I do.
The first story was published on July 8th, one day after Trump’s meeting with Vladimir Putin….Sec. of State Tillerson is the only person other than Trump, Putin and Lavrov who knows what was said and discussed during that meeting between the two heads of state.
Rex isn’t saying why, but he is very angry about the meeting with Putin.
— Rogue POTUS Staff (@RoguePOTUSStaff) July 7, 2017
To the extent we can believe that Rogue POTUS Staff tweet, he played the good soldier with the press, but was making it known among staff that he was pissed about something that happened.
Maybe! It’s certainly possible that Tillerson and other State Department folks were briefed about Don Jr.’s meeting with the Russian lawyer. However, they wouldn’t have had access to Junior’s email chain. That leak has to have come from someone else.
Circular firing squad….blaming one another for the decisions of the last few days….[Trump] trained his ire on Marc E. Kasowitz, his longtime lawyer….[Kasowitz] complained that Mr. Kushner has been whispering in the president’s ear about the Russia investigations….mulling a staff change….zeroed in on the chief of staff, Reince Priebus.
Ah, Priebus is in trouble again. Poor guy. Every time there’s trouble in the White House, sources start leaking that Priebus is about to be fired. The Washington Post elaborates:
Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter and senior adviser; Jared Kushner, her husband and another senior adviser; and first lady Melania Trump have been privately pressing the president to shake up his team — most specifically by replacing Reince Priebus as the White House chief of staff, according to two senior White House officials and one ally close to the White House.
Priebus has survived nearly monthly rumors that he was on the chopping block, but he’s still there. More Post:
President fumes against his enemies….senior aides circle one another with suspicion….President Trump…hidden from public view….enraged that the Russia cloud still hangs over his presidency….public relations disaster….infighting often seems like a core cultural value….have begun what could be an extensive campaign to try to discredit some of the journalists who have been reporting on the matter….research the reporters’ previous work, in some cases going back years.
The initial Times story about Don Jr.’s meeting with a Russian lawyer was attributed to “three advisers to the White House briefed on the meeting.” That’s an odd bit of sourcing. Not White House officials, but “advisers.” And these apparently weren’t people who had copies of Don Jr.’s email. They had merely been “briefed” about the meeting. But the meeting happened a year ago and they only leaked the story this week. So presumably they were briefed fairly recently.
Who would be briefed about this recently? It has to be a pretty small circle. Legal advisers? Outside legal advisers? Who else would need to be briefed about this? Intelligence sources? But those wouldn’t be “advisers to the White House.”
And then, a few days later, the Times gets a copy of the emails setting up the meeting. Who would have that? Not someone who was part of the email chain last year, since they’d have no reason to suddenly leak it now. Again, this seems more like someone on the legal team, or perhaps someone who does national security vetting.
But why would any of these folks have a grudge against either Don Jr. or Don Sr.? Curiouser and curiouser.
Actually, this is the Post doing its best to defend Trump Sr. If everyone can be convinced that Junior’s Russia meeting was merely the work of a pea-brained buffoon, then it means there’s no real story here. It’s just the family idiot trying to impress dad.
Of course, Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort were also in this meeting, and they weren’t there to talk about Russian adoptions. They were there hoping to get dirt on Hillary Clinton provided by the Russian government. And unlike Don Jr., Manafort was a political pro and Kushner is currently a top White House advisor. What are the odds that they didn’t pass along any of this to Trump Sr.?
Hard to say, but the “Junior is an idiot” defense is supposed to keep us from even asking. Needless to say, the genius of this approach is that Don Jr., is, in fact, an idiot. It’s one of the few opinions that unites our sadly divided country.¹ But we should all be wary of going too far down this road. Maybe this whole affair really is just the crayon scribblings of the family dolt, but we don’t know that yet. We have many months of investigation to go.
David Brooks writes today about ways the upper middle class dotes on its own children but denies working class children the same opportunities. He provides two examples: residential zoning restrictions and the “college admissions game.” Fine. But then he says that informal barriers might be even more important:
Recently I took a friend with only a high school degree to lunch. Insensitively, I led her into a gourmet sandwich shop. Suddenly I saw her face freeze up as she was confronted with sandwiches named “Padrino” and “Pomodoro” and ingredients like soppressata, capicollo and a striata baguette. I quickly asked her if she wanted to go somewhere else and she anxiously nodded yes and we ate Mexican.
….To feel at home in opportunity-rich areas, you’ve got to understand the right barre techniques, sport the right baby carrier, have the right podcast, food truck, tea, wine and Pilates tastes, not to mention possess the right attitudes about David Foster Wallace, child-rearing, gender norms and intersectionality.
This has come under enormous mockery from liberal Twitter. Can someone please tell me why? I can’t think of a single word in this excerpt that deserves it.
If I were to criticize Brooks’s column, it would be only on grounds of chestnutitude. This is city-mouse-country-mouse stuff, and it’s not only been a feature of every society ever in human history, it’s been the theme of widely-read tales for at least several millennia. Like, um, “The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse,” allegedly composed by Aesop around 600 BCE.¹ The problem it describes is neither especially American nor especially 21st century.
Still, there’s nothing wrong with pointing it out again. I’m not sure there’s much we can do about these kinds of informal barriers, but it’s surely worthwhile to at least acknowledge them every once in a while.
¹See also: The Prince and the Pauper, Trading Places, Pygmalion, The Quincunx, Poor Folk, Upstairs Downstairs, and thousands of others.
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