[johnu]

y66, on 2019-April-29, 11:19, said:

From Medicare for Kids, a cheap step toward single-payer health care, explained by Matt Yglesias at Vox:


Is this stepping stone approach too smart for Dems?

Assuming Senate Republicans block any meaningful Medicare for All plans, this seems like it may have a reasonable chance of passing by shaming those Republican into voting yes. On the other hand, they have no shame in either defending or hiding their heads in the sand when it comes to immoral and criminal activities by Dennison, so who knows.

[johnu]

Winstonm, on 2019-May-01, 10:23, said:

Barr in front of the Senate committee is the live watching of the death throes of democratic norms.

Barr says he didn't review underlying evidence of Mueller report before making obstruction call

Quote

Attorney General[Dennison's government paid personal attorney] William Barr said Wednesday that he did not review the underlying evidence in special counsel Robert Mueller's report before he concluded that Mueller's findings did not reach the threshold to charge President Trump with obstructing justice.

Barr described this approach as a standard practice in which officials at the Department of Justice (DOJ) often rely on the characterization of the evidence uncovered in an investigation.

Apparently he didn't bother reading the summaries in the Mueller report either. It was unasked if he was relying on his own 19 page job application trashing the Mueller probe which he wrote before Mueller had written his report, presumably based on watching commentary on Fox Propaganda Network.

John Mitchell must be turning over in his grave in protest over comparisons between Barr and himself over who was the worst AG in history.

[y66]

From Nate Silver summarizing Quinnipiac:

Quote

Biden 38
Warren 12
Bernie 11
Butti 10
Harris 8
Beto 5

[y66]

From Barr’s Deflections Point to a Larger Failure by the Editorial Board at Bloomberg:

Quote

Slowly, carefully, relentlessly, Attorney General William Barr parried questions from the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday. It amounted to a bravura defense of his boss — and an unintended indictment of American politics.

Barr was testifying about special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into Russian meddling in the 2016 election. Confronted with a litany of corrupt acts by President Donald Trump and his associates, Barr dissembled, deflected, and dwelled on legalisms, all to muddle what the probe had really turned up.

It was of a piece with Barr’s behavior throughout the investigation. His public summaries of Mueller’s report — in a memo and a subsequent press conference — could most charitably be described as “not technically false.” He quoted misleading sentence fragments, took words out of context, obfuscated the legal issues at hand, and mischaracterized the investigation’s key conclusions. In doing so, he created the impression that the president had been cleared of wrongdoing.

Mueller said no such thing. In reality, he found that the Trump campaign welcomed Russia’s interference; that the president had made more than a dozen attempts to obstruct the probe; that he avoided more serious criminality largely because no one followed his orders; and that he had repeatedly abused his power to protect himself and his friends. Barr’s misdirection served only to blur these conclusions and protect his boss. It was canny politics and lamentable public service.

It was also emblematic of a larger failure.

Following Trump’s election, it wasn’t clear that any public institution had the credibility to establish the truth about Russia’s attack. A probe by the House Intelligence Committee imploded in a blaze of partisanship. A Senate inquiry has ambled on for two years, to little result. Into this void, kooks and charlatans across the political spectrum have offered their own feverish theories about “what really happened” — and a lot of otherwise reasonable people have listened to them.

A better approach would have been to appoint an independent panel on the model of the 9/11 Commission, one that could have held open hearings, questioned witnesses, assessed classified information, and published a report establishing the facts.

Instead, this essential task fell — more or less by default — to the special counsel. It was an awkward fit. Mueller’s official assignment was limited: to investigate any crimes that may have been committed in connection with Russia’s interference. But plainly the public was expecting something more: an airing of the evidence, a resolution of the many mysteries surrounding the case, a considered judgment on the actions of the president and his associates, criminal and otherwise.

Despite his limited remit, Mueller was largely able to answer that call. His report was transparent, fair-minded, thorough, and scrupulously evidence-based. Taken on its own, it could have established a baseline set of facts, put the conspiracies to rest, and allowed Congress to take action as needed. It might have enabled the country to move on from a scandal that has at times threatened to overwhelm civic life entirely.

Instead, the whole probe — nearly two years of meticulous investigation, occupying 19 federal prosecutors and some 40 FBI agents — has now been reduced to yet another gross political circus, with everyone entitled to their own versions of reality. As Barr sparred with his Democratic interlocutors, Republican senators spent Wednesday’s hearing rehearsing their greatest hits: the Steele dossier, Fusion GPS, and (lest anyone forget) Hillary Clinton’s emails.

It will get worse. Expect months of subpoena fights, court battles, tendentious hearings, simmering paranoia, scaremongering, recrimination — the whole partisan maelstrom will continue. An honest and sober evaluation of the special counsel’s report wouldn’t have settled things, but it would have helped. Sadly, that didn’t happen.

[y66]

From Barr's Rough Day by David Leonhardt at NYT:

Quote

Barr went before the Senate to testify yesterday, and he didn’t do well.

“How can Bill Barr possibly continue to lead the Department of Justice, the only federal agency with a moral value in its very name, after this shocking performance?” asked Lawfare’s Susan Hennessey.

Barr offered a litany of shocking views during his testimony, as the journalist Marcy Wheeler points out. Among those views: A president who feels wrongly accused can undermine an investigation without committing obstruction. “Several times during the hearing, it seemed [Barr] still has not read the report, as he was unfamiliar with allegations in it,” Wheeler writes.

Barr and the Trump administration have staked out the legal position that anything that rankles the president — congressional oversight, press coverage, the Mueller investigation itself — is illegitimate, writes Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick. “It’s Nixonian in scope to imply that anything Trump wants to do in order to push back against the media and protect his reputation is legal and justified,” she writes.

Neal Katyal, who wrote the special counsel regulations, offers a more optimistic take in The Times. He argues that Barr’s failure to defend his spin under congressional questioning is evidence that the system is working. “Barr’s deeply evasive testimony on Wednesday necessitates and tees up a full investigation in Congress,” Katyal writes.

Mueller’s letter of complaint about Barr was extraordinary, says Wired’s Garrett Graff, who wrote a book about Mueller’s tenure as F.B.I. director. “I’ve read just about every word Bob Mueller has ever said publicly or published. He’s written precisely one letter like the angry one he sent to Barr: It excoriated Scotland for letting the Pan Am 103 bomber out of prison,” Graff tweeted.

The Times’s editorial board writes: “For an institutionalist like Mr. Mueller, who never once spoke up to defend himself or his work from relentless attacks from the president and his Republican allies, the letter is an unusual (and welcome) breach of protocol.”

Who came out of the hearing looking good? The consensus answer seems to be Kamala Harris. “An attorney general whose slipperiness and legalistic hairsplitting had frustrated Democrats for several hours finally appeared to be caught off-guard,” The Atlantic’s Russell Berman writes.

[y66]

What could Mueller have done differently by David Leonhardt at NYT?

Quote

Robert Mueller seems to have been an honorable, patriotic public servant in every government job he’s had — United States Marine, federal prosecutor, F.B.I director, special counsel and more. But he is not perfect. It’s now clear that he mishandled the end of the Russia investigation.

Mueller naively trusted that William Barr, the attorney general, would act honorably and patriotically, as well, and let Barr decide how to handle the initial release of Mueller’s report. Barr, of course, wrote a letter that misled the public about what was in the report, creating a perception that the investigation cleared President Trump.

“For 27 days, the debate over Mueller’s findings was twisted by Barr’s poisonous distortions that implied a full exoneration of President Trump,” as The Washington Post’s E. J. Dionne wrote yesterday. Mueller himself has since complained to Barr about the letter.

What could Mueller have done differently? He could have recognized that Barr wasn’t trustworthy, given that Trump had nominated him for the attorney general job largely because Barr had expressed hostility to Mueller’s investigation. Mueller could then have acted accordingly.

He could have insisted that Barr release a summary written by Mueller and his team. Mueller may not have had the statutory power to insist on such a release, but he did have the actual power. If Barr had refused, Mueller could have made clear that his own summary would leak to the press, in short order. Yes, that’s how politics sometimes works.

I understand why Mueller took the gentler route. He and Barr had been friends for years, and Mueller has a reputation as a tight-lipped rule follower. In this case, though, his boy scout nature allowed him to be manipulated.

It’s impossible to know whether it will ultimately matter. Maybe an accurate initial summary of Mueller’s investigation wouldn’t have changed Americans’ view of Trump’s behavior. We’ll never know. In that way, Barr has served Trump very well — as his fixer, rather than as the nation’s top law-enforcement officer.

[Winstonm]

How Democracies Die is a troubling but highly-recommended read:

Quote

“Coalitions of the like-minded are important, but they are not enough to defend democracy. The most effective coalitions are those that bring together groups with dissimilar—even opposing—views on many issues. They are built not among friends but among adversaries. An effective coalition in defense of American democracy, then, would likely require that progressives forge alliances with business executives, religious (and particularly white evangelical) leaders, and red-state Republicans. Business leaders may not be natural allies of Democratic activists, but they have good reasons to oppose an unstable and rule-breaking administration. And they can be powerful partners. Think of recent boycott movements aimed at state governments that refused to honor Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, continued to fly the Confederate flag, or violated gay or transgender rights. When major businesses join progressive boycotts, they often succeed.”
― Steven Levitsky, How Democracies Die

[Winstonm]

I borrowed this from Marcy Wheeler's emptywheel blog: https://www.emptywhe...-he-obstructed/

Quote

Bill Barr just finished testifying to the Senate Judiciary Committee.

It was remarkable.

Among the opinions the Attorney General espoused are that:

>You only need to call the FBI when being offered campaign assistance by a foreign intelligence service, not a foreigner

>It’s okay to lie about the many dangles hostile foreign countries make to a political campaign, including if you accepted those dangles

>Because Trump was being falsely accused (it’s not clear of what, because the report doesn’t address the most aggressive accusation, and many other accusations against Trump and his campaign are born out by the Mueller Report), it’s okay that he sought to undermine it through illegal means

>It’s okay for the President to order the White House Counsel to lie, even about an ongoing investigation

)It’s okay to fire the FBI Director for refusing to confirm or deny an ongoing investigation, which is DOJ policy not to do

>It’s okay for the Attorney General to call lawfully predicated DOJ investigative techniques “spying” because Fox News does

>Public statements — including threatening someone’s family — cannot be subornation of perjury

>You can exhaust investigative options in a case having only obtained contemptuous responses covering just a third of the investigation from the key subject of it

My conclusion: One of the true enemies American democracy is facing is the theory of the unitary executive, which, although I am not a lawyer, to my understanding assumes virtual monarch-like power for the president to rule the executive branch of government - which includes the DOJ and Justice Department. It is this theory that allows Barr to conclude that the president can - with no proof - shut down any investigation he believes to be falsely based or order an investigation be started on anyone, including political opponents.

Although this is but a single step on the road to autocracy, it is imperative to snuff it out in its inception, before it is normalized through partisan court rulings and partisan legislation and by Attorney General fiat.

We are at a tipping point. I think it is important now to understand how other stable democracies have been replaced. We are tempting ourselves with that prospect and the future is certainly unsure for our progeny.

[Zelandakh]

Winstonm, on 2019-May-02, 10:30, said:

We are at a tipping point. I think it is important now to understand how other stable democracies have been replaced. We are tempting ourselves with that prospect and the future is certainly unsure for our progeny.

it is worse than this Winston. Under the new DoJ direction the POTUS can literally kill anyone on 5th Avenue, providing they can obstruct the resulting investigation enough to avoid the case being declared a murder (as opposed to self-defence or the like) since there is no OoJ without an underlying crime, and it is only an underlying crime if a case can be brought beyond a reasonable doubt. Americans have to wake up and think through the full implications of the line Barr is pushing.

[hrothgar]

rmnka447, on 2019-April-18, 15:40, said:

Are you suggesting AG Barr is lying?

At this point in time, I suspect that the better question is "Do you actually still believe that Barr was telling the truth?"

[Winstonm]

Zelandakh, on 2019-May-02, 12:50, said:

it is worse than this Winston. Under the new DoJ direction the POTUS can literally kill anyone on 5th Avenue, providing they can obstruct the resulting investigation enough to avoid the case being declared a murder (as opposed to self-defence or the like) since there is no OoJ without an underlying crime, and it is only an underlying crime if a case can be brought beyond a reasonable doubt. Americans have to wake up and think through the full implications of the line Barr is pushing.

Although I am not a lawyer, my reading leads me to see a pattern that originalists (in their many forms) tend to be authoritarian types. What I can't understand is how they assimilate two parts of Article II into a coherent argument for their unitary executive position: that the (Art. II, Sect: I) power of the executive is vested in the president but (Art.II, Sect: III) states that the president's duties include "to make sure that the laws are faithfully executed".

But placing this "take care" clause in the Article pertaining to the president, it seems to me that the framers meant to create a clear delineation between the chief executive and the law. If the Barr theory is used, instead, it would mean that a president could lawfully stop any federal investigation, placing him and his allies unaccountable to law, and thus invalidating the need for the "take care" clause, as, in essence, the chief executive would become "the law".

Without laws to which even the chief executive must adhere, the "take care" clause is meaningless.

[Winstonm]

hrothgar, on 2019-May-02, 12:54, said:

At this point in time, I suspect that the better question is "Do you actually still believe that Barr was telling the truth?"

Benjamin Wittes - of Lawfare - responded to Barr's latest Senate testimony this way in The Atlantic

Quote

I was willing to give Bill Barr a chance. Consider me burned.

[johnu]

Winstonm, on 2019-May-02, 14:12, said:

Benjamin Wittes - of Lawfare - responded to Barr's latest Senate testimony this way in The Atlantic

Wittes wrote

Quote

but nonetheless concluding that “I suspect that he is likely as good as we’re going to get.

With the quality of Dennison's appointments dropping from unqualified to unacceptable, one could argue that we won't get a better appointment than Barr. Attorney General Rudy Guiliani??? Attorney General Kellyanne Conway??? Attorney General Sarah Sanders??? Attorney General Herman Cain??? Sadly, I can't say that any of these people would be worse than Barr, and they probably wouldn't be any better. The only difference is that they won't be as diligent in skirting and usually just barely crossing the line of perjury as Barr.

[Winstonm]

More bad news for the U.S.A. on the corruption front.

Quote

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. State Department allowed at least seven foreign governments to rent luxury condominiums in New York’s Trump World Tower in 2017 without approval from Congress, according to documents and people familiar with the leases, a potential violation of the U.S. Constitution’s emoluments clause.

[johnu]

Winstonm, on 2019-May-02, 17:21, said:

More bad news for the U.S.A. on the corruption front.

Speaking about emoluments:

Federal Judge Rules in Favor of Democrats in Emoluments Lawsuit Against Trump

There are too many lawsuits and criminal investigations involving Dennison to keep track of without a large spreadsheet.

[johnu]

rmnka447, on 2019-April-18, 15:40, said:

Are you suggesting AG Barr is lying?

I'm saying Dennison's government paid personal attorney Barr is a liar and committed perjury while under oath. Nothing new, he perjured himself when serving under Bush I. I continue to to be be amazed that some people were surprised that Barr exposed himself as a liar when he was already documented as a liar years ago.

MotherJones JF93: Shredded Justice

[cherdano]

rmnka447, on 2019-March-30, 19:52, said:

If you want to claim that Barr is misleading the public with his summation, go ahead. Barr impresses me as a very straight shooter who wouldn't tarnish his already illustrious reputation by trying to hoodwink the public about what Mueller came up with when that information will eventually become public.

Now that rmnka447 has been conclusively been proven wrong about this, he will

• [ ] reckon what would have led him to be so credulous
  
• [ ] acknowledge his error but make a good faith effort to provide some broader context that we on the left side might be missing, or
  
• [x] drop the topic and return to this thread at a later point to troll gaslight enlighten us about a different issue.

[Winstonm]

Quote

The president says that faith helped him through the ordeal of the Mueller investigation.

God is Rod "I can land the plane" Rosenstein. Wow.

[hrothgar]

cherdano, on 2019-May-02, 23:39, said:

Now that rmnka447 has been conclusively been proven wrong about this, he will

• [ ] reckon what would have led him to be so credulous
  
• [ ] acknowledge his error but make a good faith effort to provide some broader context that we on the left side might be missing, or
  
• [x] drop the topic and return to this thread at a later point to troll gaslight enlighten us about a different issue.

I'm hoping for

[*] Dies an ignominious death when his own sleen reaches up and chokes him

[y66]

Guest post from Neil Irwin at the Upshot at NYT:

Quote

The labor market the United States is experiencing right now wasn’t supposed to be possible.

Not that long ago, the overwhelming consensus among economists would have been that you couldn’t have a 3.6 percent unemployment rate without also seeing the rate of job creation slowing (where are new workers going to come from with so few out of work, after all?) and having an inflation surge (a worker shortage should mean employers bidding up wages, right?).

And yet that is what has happened, with the April employment numbers putting an exclamation point on the trend. The jobless rate receded to its lowest level in five decades. Employers also added 263,000 jobs; the job creation estimates of previous months were revised up; and average hourly earnings continued to rise at a steady rate — up 3.2 percent over the last year.

Compare that reality with the projections the Federal Reserve published just three years ago. In mid-2016, Fed officials thought that the long-run rate of unemployment would be around 4.8 percent, and that this would coincide with 2 percent inflation.

If that were the jobless rate today, 1.9 million Americans would not be working who are instead gainfully employed. And despite this ultralow unemployment rate, inflation is only 1.6 percent over the last year, below the level the Fed aims for.

Because this is 2019 and everything immediately devolves into partisan warfare, these good results are immediately seized upon by Trump partisans who view the good news as a result of the president’s policies, and by opponents who give credit to the already-improving economy that President Obama handed over in January 2017.

There is truth in both. The job market had already been improving for years when President Trump took office, and its performance since then has been more continuation of the trend than an abrupt upturn.

After more than two years of the Trump administration, warnings that trade wars and erratic management style would throw the economy off course have proved wrong so far, and tax cuts and deregulation are most likely part of the reason for the strong growth rates in 2018 and the beginning of 2019 (though most forecasts envision a slowing in the coming quarters as the impact of tax cuts fades).

In particular, it now appears that recession fears that emerged at the end of 2018 were misguided — especially once the Fed backed off its campaign of rate increases at the start of 2019.

But beyond the assigning of credit or blame, there’s a bigger lesson in the job market’s remarkably strong performance: about the limits of knowledge when it comes to something as complex as the $20 trillion U.S. economy.

The last few years have made it clear that the Phillips curve — the relationship between unemployment and inflation — has either changed shape or become irrelevant.

The breakdown of the old guidelines suggests that policymakers need to avoid overreliance on them, and to stay broad-minded to the full range of economic possibilities. Maybe using data from a few decades in the middle of the 20th century to set policy in the 21st isn’t actually a good idea.

The results of the last few years make you wonder whether we’ve been too pessimistic about just how hot the United States economy can run without inflation or other negative effects.

There are even early signs that the tight labor market may be contributing to, or at least coinciding with, a surge in worker productivity, which if sustained would fuel higher wages and living standards over time. That further supports the case for the Fed and other policymakers to let the expansion rip rather than trying to hold it back.

It’s tough setting economic policy. To make decisions, you have to create a forecast, and there’s a reason these forecasts tend to be based on historical experience.

But the last 20 years have been a wrenching period for the world economy, with all sorts of forces that have reshaped fundamentals: globalization, demographic shifts, technological changes and much more.

The continued boom in the American job market suggests that economic policymakers need to be open-minded about when the old relationships and rules of thumb no longer apply.