[barmar]

y66, on 2019-April-01, 16:48, said:

NYT reported this today:

As I understand it, the President's budget is mostly meaningless. Congress makes the budget, and the President's proposal is just suggestions that are regularly ignored.

[kenberg]

y66, on 2019-April-01, 16:48, said:

NYT reported this today:

NYT reported this today

Quote

President Trump on Monday is expected to host about 300 guests, including convicted felons, at the White House for the "First Step Act Celebration," a party intended to bring attention to a rare piece of bipartisan legislation he passed last year, and which he plans to highlight on the campaign trail.

But some activists who helped work on the legislation — which would expand job training and early-release programs, and modify sentencing laws, including mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent drug offenders — have expressed concern that Mr. Trump is more attuned to the political opportunities the law offers him, rather than with ensuring it is enacted effectively.

Despite the high-profile party and round tables — and the White House releasing a presidential proclamation declaring April "second chance month" — Mr. Trump's budget, released last month, listed only $14 million to pay for the First Step Act's programs. The law passed in December specifically asked for $75 million a year for five years, beginning in 2019. The funding gap was first reported by The Marshall Project.

I don't know if I can clearly explain how offensive I find this.I imagine myself as one of the invited felons. Of course I am glad that I have not been forgotten and maybe I can have a future outside of prison. But I am also sure I would realize that I am being used as a political prop. I find this repulsive.

Carefully applied, I think trying to help people who have made mistakes is a very sound idea.Caution and realism are necessary, but I can see strong merit in this idea. But not this way. Treating someone as if he were a circus freak put out for display is not the way to start a rehabilitation process.

And yes, I often feel the same way about the various displays at State of the Union Addresses by various presidents. And here in the gallery is a beautiful cow from a dairy farm supported by your tax dollars. Say moo for the nice tv audience. To put it very mildly, it lacks class.

[jjbrr]

hrothgar, on 2019-April-01, 11:20, said:

FWIW, I found it amusing....

[y66]

Guest post from Jonathan Bernstein at Bloomberg:

Quote

I can’t manage to put aside an Axios item about President Donald Trump from last Friday. Jonathan Swan reported that “administration officials past and present have told us that Trump savors news coverage that shows him acting unilaterally.” Swan was focused on Trump’s habit of overruling and humiliating his staffers and appointees, which is partly why his administration has had record turnover and why the applicant pool is so small for open jobs. But the point about acting alone is worth delving into.

For one thing, Trump often seems to confuse acting with talking. Take the Special Olympics. Trump claimed to be overriding Education Secretary Betsy DeVos last week when he said he “just authorized a funding of the Special Olympics.” The only problem? Trump didn’t authorize anything. Instead, he contradicted his own budget request to Congress, which had in fact slashed funding for the Special Olympics and which Congress was going to ignore anyway. It’s not just that Trump’s reversal had no effect. It’s that Trump, after hiring extreme cost-cutters to write his budget and then (apparently) ignoring what they produced, was reversing himself without seeming to realize it. His pretense of unilateral action ended up being a substitute for doing the job in the first place.

It’s a reminder of what the political scientist Richard Neustadt explained decades ago: that presidents are at their weakest when they try to act on their own, and that doing so imposes heavy costs down the line. Every president gets rolled by the bureaucracy. To Trump, it happens repeatedly, in public, over an enormous variety of things. Every president gets frustrated when faced with stubborn staffers, selfish members of Congress, interest groups that refuse to compromise, and a court system that denies them what they think they’re entitled to. But every other modern president has understood that accomplishing anything requires dealing with all of those legitimate parts of the public-policy process and more. Which means bargaining, cajoling, politicking and horse trading. Two years in, Trump still hasn’t learned the basic rules of the game.

His decision this week to champion a (still nonexistent) health-care bill offers a good example. Republicans in Congress couldn’t wait to tell reporters that they had no interest in the plan, which produced yet another Trump retreat on Monday. Trump “acted” unilaterally and it got him nothing. It’s possible that he could’ve achieved his goal if he had worked with the allies he was going to need; or perhaps he would’ve gauged the intensity of their opposition and backed off quietly. Instead, he loses publicly once again.

There’s an old saw that applies here about how it’s easy to get things done as long as you’re willing to give the credit to someone else. (I’ve seen it, with various wordings, attributed to different presidents.) Trump obviously isn’t the first politician to have an exaggerated sense of his own importance, and he isn’t the first to want to hog credit for everything. But again, most successful politicians realize that there’s a lot more to the job.

[kenberg]

y66, on 2019-April-02, 04:58, said:

Guest post from Jonathan Bernstein at Bloomberg:

I agree with Bernstein, it represents my view of Trump from the beginning. But the guy is still president, he still seems to have a lock on much of his party, and I wouldn't bet the house on him losing in 2020. We need to think if how this can be.

I think back to 2016 when there was talk of how he used bankruptcy laws to make money while letting others pick up the pieces. He presented this as evidence of his skills. It reminded me of a story I have mentioned before. There was a newatory about a guy being arrested for scamming. He told investors that he was really good at hiding money in off shore untraceable accounts and they shouold give him their money and he would do this with it. So they gave him their money and he hid it in offshore untraceable accounts! With Trump we have a guy who is very proud of how his ability to humiliate others scam others, and generally screw others. For some reason people believe that this skill will be used in their favor, against others. Even if i wanted some scam artist to use his skills in my favor against others, I think there is reason to be suspicious of such an offer.

[Winstonm]

kenberg, on 2019-April-02, 06:49, said:

I agree with Bernstein, it represents my view of Trump from the beginning. But the guy is still president, he still seems to have a lock on much of his party, and I wouldn't bet the house on him losing in 2020. We need to think if how this can be.

I think back to 2016 when there was talk of how he used bankruptcy laws to make money while letting others pick up the pieces. He presented this as evidence of his skills. It reminded me of a story I have mentioned before. There was a newatory about a guy being arrested for scamming. He told investors that he was really good at hiding money in off shore untraceable accounts and they shouold give him their money and he would do this with it. So they gave him their money and he hid it in offshore untraceable accounts! With Trump we have a guy who is very proud of how his ability to humiliate others scam others, and generally screw others. For some reason people believe that this skill will be used in their favor, against others. Even if i wanted some scam artist to use his skills in my favor against others, I think there is reason to be suspicious of such an offer.

I like your reminder of the scammer and his willing victims. What turns my stomach is when the U.S. president calls predominantly black countries "shitehole counties", cuts off aid to Central American countries, cages like animals the children of asylum seekers, and says that some who marched through Charlottesville, chaning "Blood and soil" were "good people".

What is truly disheartening, though, is that my reactions are what makes the base happy and supportive.

[kenberg]

Winstonm, on 2019-April-02, 08:45, said:

I like your reminder of the scammer and his willing victims. What turns my stomach is when the U.S. president calls predominantly black countries "shitehole counties", cuts off aid to Central American countries, cages like animals the children of asylum seekers, and says that some who marched through Charlottesville, chaning "Blood and soil" were "good people".

What is truly disheartening, though, is that my reactions are what makes the base happy and supportive.

Maybe a winning campaign slogan for 2020 would be "We are better than this".

[y66]

kenberg, on 2019-April-02, 06:49, said:

Even if i wanted some scam artist to use his skills in my favor against others, I think there is reason to be suspicious of such an offer.

This lack of suspicion and judgment by Trump's fan base is bewildering, as if Trump's favorite parable about the snake did not apply to his fellow snakes.

[y66]

From Forget collusion, the problem is corruption and complacency by Isabel Sawhill at Brookings:

Quote

Robert Mueller has reported. There was no collusion. There is instead corruption and complacency.

The corruption is obvious. It is why so many of President Trump’s associates have been indicted and some are going to prison. It’s why there has been so much turnover in the cabinet. It’s why the President continues to put his own interests above those of the country.

Complacency, in contrast, has gotten less attention. It’s more about sins of omission than of commission. It’s more about us than about the president. It’s not just what we, as a people, have done, but about what we have failed to do. As Congressman John Delaney puts it, “the cost of doing nothing is not nothing.” The Mueller investigation can’t address these sins of omission. The problems are far deeper and more long-standing.

From the end of World War II until about 1980, democracy worked reasonably well because we were less complacent and more interested in institution building. To be sure, Vietnam and Watergate roiled the country but were resolved through political action. Young people fought for civil rights and marched against the Vietnam War. A president resigned. The economy produced rising incomes but other “indispensable” institutions, such as unions, business leadership, community organizations, as well as government, itself, worked hand in hand with the market to ensure that prosperity was widely shared. Market failures—such as the degradation of the environment—were restrained.

Then the cold war ended and later generations tended to take peace and prosperity for granted. They turned inward and focused more on getting ahead. They watched while our leaders cut our taxes, deregulated for both good and bad reasons, made union organizing more difficult, and allowed businesses to become bigger and less competitive. They worried too little about the effects on people’s lives and the ultimate sustainability of democracy itself. Inequality grew, those affected by trade and technology were left to struggle on their own. Floods and droughts multiplied, and the opioid epidemic devastated communities. The ability of social media to use our personal data to manipulate opinions and affect electoral outcomes was not recognized until it was too late. Our current president may not have colluded with the Russians but he has ignored the threat to the integrity of our elections. The growing influence of money in politics has meant that even though a strong majority supports higher taxes on corporations and the wealthy, tax policy has moved in just the opposite direction. Tax cuts under Reagan, under Bush, and under Trump not only deprived us of the resources we needed to fix some of these problems but were an indictment of democracy itself, a sign that it was out of step with public opinion. Although fiscal and monetary policy saved us from the Great Recession, their ability to do so in the future is now in question.

This complacency has both global and domestic variants. My colleague at Brookings, Robert Kagan, has laid out the global story well. He argues that authoritarianism is a big threat to liberal democracies, that Russia and China are in a stronger position than ever to challenge the United States—and to become models for other nations. Again, the period from the end of World War II until the end of the Cold War was unique; it required U.S. leadership and a willingness to use our resources and power to check tyrants and encourage democracy around the world. Without a commitment to provide that kind of “indispensable” leadership going forward, a liberal world order and democracy itself are at risk. It is a mistake, in Kagan’s view, to assume that a liberal world order can be sustained without American leadership. It is a mistake, in my view, to assume that a liberal democracy at home can be sustained without an active citizenry and a different kind of leadership.

[y66]

Guest post from Mayor Pete:

Quote

Amazingly, the chyron is not the most foolish thing about this picture.

To get ahead of a potential refugee crisis caused by great suffering in Central America, it would make sense to use our resources to help reduce that suffering.

This is self-defeating.

[y66]

re: the strange lack of suspicion of Trump by his base -- Max Fisher at NYT has an explanation that sounds right to me:

From Brexit Mess Reflects Democracy’s New Era of Tear-It-All-Down:

Quote

LONDON — If you ask British voters what sort of plan for leaving the European Union they support, you tend to get hesitant, vague answers.

But ask them what they oppose and you hear forceful clarity. No to Prime Minister Theresa May’s deal. No to leaving the European Union without a deal. No to “remoaners,” as tabloids call those who want to stay in the bloc.

No to Ms. May herself, whose approval ratings are deeply negative. No to her rival and leader of the Labour party, Jeremy Corbyn, whose poll numbers are even worse.

In a recent YouGov poll asking Britons whether Ms. May or Mr. Corbyn would make the better prime minister, the runaway winner was “not sure.”

British politicians turn out to have a similar problem making any choice at all. On Wednesday, lawmakers said they would seize control of Brexit by holding votes on eight different ways forward — then voted them all down.

Like the electorate, Parliament turned out to oppose everything. The result is chaos and drift.

There is more than indecision or gridlock at play here. Britain’s breakdown, though particularly acute, represents a much wider phenomenon.

Across Western democracies, politics are increasingly defined by opposition — opposition to the status quo, to the establishment and to one’s partisan rivals.

People have always organized more easily around what they’re against than what they’re for, but this is different. Politics have grown viscerally tribal and voters instinctively destructive.

This trend, driven by social change, economic upheaval and technological disruption, is worsening some of democracy’s gravest problems.

It is feeding partisanship’s rancor and intransigence, as voters organize around opposing the other side. It is deepening instability, with elections that fracture parties and eject whoever holds power. And it is driving populist revolts, as citizens clamor to tear down establishments and status quos.

Across Europe, mainstream parties have splintered, weakening centrist leaders and empowering hard-line populists. In the United States, all-out partisan warfare has made cooperative governance unthinkable.

The trend is captured best by France’s “Yellow Vest” protesters, who can agree only on their anger at their status quo and distrust of institutions. Their tear-it-all-down ethos has left them, despite their impressive power to mobilize, politically inchoate.

“This is happening everywhere,” said Steven Levitsky, a Harvard University political scientist, referring to the collapse of what scholars call Schumpeterian democracy, named for the Austrian theorist Joseph Schumpeter. Long the basis of modern democracy, in which establishments managed popular will and sought a common good, it is giving way to a new system that is both primal and distinctly 21st century.

“For better and worse, the moderation, policy stability and informal checks imposed by the establishments’ monopoly over access to elected office are disappearing,” Mr. Levitsky said. With social distrust and political chaos rising, he added, “This is going to be a major challenge going forward.”

Good summary of what everyone who has been paying attention has figured out. I like Mr. Levitsky's optimistic note in "for better and worse".

[kenberg]

I just looked up "chyron". It might be nice to have a president that occasionally uses words that I have to look up. There are a lot of other things about this guy that I like. Apparently I am not the only one. We will see where this all goes.

[johnu]

In the past, golf has been called the gentleman's game.

Donald Trump Cheats At Golf In Some Really Ridiculous Ways: Sports Writer

Soccer/futbol/football fans might like this comparison:

Quote

“He [Trump] cheats like a mafia accountant. He cheats crazy. He cheats whether you’re watching or not. He cheats whether you like it or not,” Reilly said. “He kicks the ball out of the rough so many times the caddies call him Pelé.”

In defense of mafia accountants, many top mafia golfers scrupulously adhere to the rules of golf (getting shot, stabbed with a knife, or having their car blown up by a disgruntled opponent may have something to do with this )

This was unbelievably weird,

Quote

“He said when he buys a new course, he plays the first round by himself and calls that the club championship,” Reilly said. “So I started calling around, people said, ’Yeah, one day he was at Trump Philly, and we played the club championship at Trump Bedminster, and he called and said, ‘Who won the championship?’ They said ‘Joe Shmoe’ shot 76, Trump goes, ‘I shot 73 up here at Trump Philly, make me the champion.’

Quote

“When he started campaigning on this as ‘I’m a winner, I can close out, I’ve won 18 club championships, and that’s against the best players,’

Another case of no lie to small, and no lie too big for Dennison.

[Winstonm]

This Lawfare article makes, I think, an important point.

Quote

The special counsel’s prosecution and declination decisions tell only a small part of the story that all Americans, and their elected representatives, should care deeply about. After all, criminal culpability is not the standard by which someone’s fitness to be elected to the office of president of the United States, or in this case to remain in that office, should be judged. As some observers have correctly explained in recent days, this distinction goes to the heart of the difference between a criminal investigation, on the one hand, and a counterintelligence investigation, on the other. Barr’s summary speaks only to the former and omits any facts, findings or conclusions from the latter. Counterintelligence is always where the action was going to be.

[y66]

re: cheating at golf -- I played a lot of golf over the years with my dad who was a very competitive golfer. He got into and out of a lot of tough spots over the years and never doubted that he could thread a 4-iron through a 3 foot opening between two trees. No guts, no glory was one of his favorite sayings. I remember playing with him at Army Navy in Arlington and seeing then President Clinton slice a drive into the trees on an adjacent hole and then kicking it out into the rough. We both just shook our heads. You can learn a lot about people on the golf course.

[johnu]

y66, on 2019-April-02, 18:42, said:

re: cheating at golf -- I played a lot of golf over the years with my dad who was a very competitive golfer. He got into and out of a lot of tough spots over the years and never doubted that he could thread a 4-iron through a 3 foot opening between two trees. No guts, no glory was one of his favorite sayings. I remember playing with him at Army Navy in Arlington and seeing then President Clinton slice a drive into the trees on an adjacent hole and then kicking it out into the rough. We both just shook our heads. You can learn a lot about people on the golf course.

Have you seen Welcome to Mooseport with Gene Hackman and Ray Romano. A couple of funny scenes where the (ex) President (Hackman) hits his drive deep into the woods and the ball bounces back into the fairway about 5 seconds later, courtesy of the Secret Service detail. He also took lots of mulligans, and gave himself 10-20 foot putts. Hackman, like Dennison, was delusional in thinking he was actually an excellent golfer.

The thing about Clinton is that he never claimed to be a great, or even good golfer and didn't brag about how good he was. Unlike Dennison who claims to be a many times club champion at many different clubs. At most of the better clubs, the club champion is one of the better amateurs in the local area, maybe as good as a former Division 1 college golf team member. Dennison would probably be a 3rd or 4th flight participant if he counted all his strokes. In practice, he would be disqualified from any tournament he played in because he cheats, unless he was playing at one of the courses he controls.

[johnu]

Dennison and Republicans care a lot about fetuses, not so much about babies

After hundreds of crashes, this Britax jogging stroller faced recall. Then Trump appointees stepped in.

Quote

The crashes were brutal. With no warning, the front wheel on the three-wheeled BOB jogging strollers fell off, causing the carriages to careen and even flip over. Adults shattered bones. They tore ligaments. Children smashed their teeth. They gashed their faces. One child bled from his ear canal.

Quote

Ann Marie Buerkle, a Republican, was named acting chairwoman in February 2017. Trump has nominated her to take on the role permanently.

Buerkle, who has served on the commission since 2013, was the only commissioner to oppose proposed portable generator rules aimed at reducing carbon monoxide poisoning in 2016. She was again the lone vote that year against a then-record $15.45 million penalty for a company accused of making humidifiers prone to catching fire.

Buerkle declined to be interviewed by The Post.

In Buerkle’s first two years as chairwoman, the number of companies fined for misconduct declined to five in 2017-2018 from 12 in 2015-2016. Public voluntary recalls fell about 13 percent during the same period, resulting in approximately 80 fewer recalls, according to agency data. Last year, the number of public recalls fell to its lowest level in a decade, consumer advocates say.

Quote

Two months later, just two days before Thanksgiving, Britax and the agency announced an end to the recall lawsuit with a settlement, which required the company to run a public safety campaign and offer replacement parts or discounts on new strollers to some users in what was clearly not a traditional safety recall. The commission voted 3 to 2 along party lines to accept it.

Don't depend on the federal government to protect you from unsafe products, or consumer fraud. There is profit to be made and payoffs to be doled out.

[johnu]

Trump taunts Biden amid misconduct allegations: 'You having a good time, Joe?'

We've seen this hundreds of times. When Dennison attacks others, it a clear signal that he is acknowledging that he is guilty of the same or worse behavior. By trying to deflect attention away from himself, he is actually confirming everybody's worst suspicions. If he took up high stakes poker, his surefire tell would make him lose so much money that he would be living on skid row in a week.

[y66]

johnu, on 2019-April-03, 01:17, said:

Have you seen Welcome to Mooseport with Gene Hackman and Ray Romano. A couple of funny scenes where the (ex) President (Hackman) hits his drive deep into the woods and the ball bounces back into the fairway about 5 seconds later, courtesy of the Secret Service detail. He also took lots of mulligans, and gave himself 10-20 foot putts. Hackman, like Dennison, was delusional in thinking he was actually an excellent golfer.

The thing about Clinton is that he never claimed to be a great, or even good golfer and didn't brag about how good he was. Unlike Dennison who claims to be a many times club champion at many different clubs. At most of the better clubs, the club champion is one of the better amateurs in the local area, maybe as good as a former Division 1 college golf team member. Dennison would probably be a 3rd or 4th flight participant if he counted all his strokes. In practice, he would be disqualified from any tournament he played in because he cheats, unless he was playing at one of the courses he controls.

I'm a Gene Hackman fan but I haven't seen Welcome to Mooseport. Trump's cheating and bragging dwarf Judge Smails in Caddyshack and are several orders of magnitude more pathetic than Clinton's mulligans.

[y66]

From How Rupert Murdoch's Empire Of Influence Remade the World by Jonathan Mahler and Jim Rutenberg at NYT:

Quote

The right-wing populist wave that looked like a fleeting cultural phenomenon a few years ago has turned into the defining political movement of the times, disrupting the world order of the last half-century. The Murdoch empire did not cause this wave. But more than any single media company, it enabled it, promoted it and profited from it. Across the English-speaking world, the family’s outlets have helped elevate marginal demagogues, mainstream ethnonationalism and politicize the very notion of truth. The results have been striking. It may not have been the family’s mission to destabilize democracies around the world, but that has been its most consequential legacy.

Over the last six months, we have spoken to more than 150 people across three continents about the Murdochs and their empire — some who know the family intimately, some who have helped them achieve their aims, some who have fought against them with varying degrees of success. (Most of these people insisted on anonymity to share intimate details about the family and its business so as not to risk retribution.) The media tend to pay a lot of attention to the media: Fox News is covered almost as closely as the White House and often in the same story. The Murdochs themselves are an enduring object of cultural fascination: “Ink,” a play about Rupert’s rise, is opening soon on Broadway. The second season of HBO’s “Succession,” whose fictional media family, the Roys, bears a striking resemblance to the Murdochs, airs this summer. But what we as reporters had not fully appreciated until now is the extent to which these two stories — one of an illiberal, right-wing reaction sweeping the globe, the other of a dynastic media family — are really one. To see Fox News as an arm of the Trump White House risks missing the larger picture. It may be more accurate to say that the White House — just like the prime ministers’ offices in Britain and Australia — is just one tool among many that this family uses to exert influence over world events.

What do the Murdochs want? Family dynamics are complex, too, and media dynasties are animated by different factors — workaday business imperatives, the desire to pass on wealth, an old-fashioned sense of civic duty. But the Murdochs’ global operations suggest a different dynastic orientation, one centered on empire building in the original sense of the term: territorial conquest. Murdoch began with a small regional paper in Australia, inherited from his father. He quickly expanded the business into a national and then an international force, in part by ruthlessly using his platform to help elect his preferred candidates and then ruthlessly using those candidates to help extend his reach. Murdoch’s news empire is a monument to decades’ worth of transactional relationships with elected officials. Murdoch has said that he “never asked a prime minister for anything.” But press barons don’t have to ask when their media outlets can broadcast their desires. Politicians know what Murdoch wants, and they know what he can deliver: the base, their voters — power.

The Murdoch approach to empire building has reached its apotheosis in the Trump era. Murdoch had long dreamed of having a close relationship with an American president. On the surface, he and Trump have very little in common: One is a global citizen with homes around the world, a voracious reader with at least some sense of self-awareness. (Murdoch was photographed last year on the beach reading “Utopia for Realists,” by Rutger Bregman, the Dutch historian who later told Tucker Carlson in an interview that Carlson was a “millionaire funded by billionaires.”) The other is a proudly crass American who vacations at his own country clubs, dines on fast food and watches a lot of TV. But they are each a son of an aspiring empire builder, and their respective dynasties shared the same core value — growth through territorial conquest — and employed the same methods to achieve it, leveraging political relationships to gain power and influence. In Trump’s case, these relationships helped him secure zoning exemptions, tax abatements and global licensing deals; in Murdoch’s case, they allowed him to influence and evade antimonopoly and foreign-ownership rules.

Murdoch has carefully built an image during his six decades in media as a pragmatist who will support liberal governments when it suits him. Yet his various news outlets have inexorably pushed the flow of history to the right across the Anglosphere, whether they were advocating for the United States and its allies to go to war in Iraq in 2003, undermining global efforts to combat climate change or vilifying people of color at home or from abroad as dangerous threats to a white majority.