Category: Politics

Well: ex-campaign manager Paul Manafort and associate Rick Gates were indicted today, on conspiracy, money laundering, foreign agent and false statement charges.  They had to hand their passports in, and they are under house arrest.  Manafort’s bail money was set at $10 million.

A third name made even bigger news: that of campaign staffer George Papadopoulos that had already plead guilty to lying to the FBI, about a meeting in London with a Russian contact to obtain ‘dirt’ about Hillary Clinton (her hacked e-mails).  An ex-FBI agent said today the ‘significance of this evidence can almost not be overstated’.

News broke on Friday that special prosecutor Mueller’s first charges are to be made, as soon as Monday, in his investigation into the Trump campaign. The charges are still sealed, so the nature and the persons to be charged are not yet known. It would be a political earthquake if ex-campaign manager Paul Manafort or ex-National Security Advisor Michael Flynn is indicted.  Some observers point out that these first indictments may very well be for crimes by lesser players, to start ratcheting up the pressure on the bigger fish. From what I learned from newspapers and cable TV, there seems to be a wide range of possible crimes to go after, from money laundering to running afoul of foreign agent laws, to election campaign collusion with the Russians and obstruction of justice.

It’s all a hoax! cries Trump and his supporters on Fox News. Fox News is a cable TV ‘news’ channel, that has hosted 19 fawning, sycophantic, soft-ball interviews with Trump so far this year. And ‘What about Hillary and her e-mails? And the uranium deal with the Russians? (This was in 2010!). And paying for the Steele dossier?’. Well, sorry.  Hillary is not under investigation, and she is not President of the United States.

Here a great analysis of the multiple lies from Trump and the damage control that the White House staff had to engage in since last Monday.   (Four American green berets were ambushed in Niger, Africa, on Oct 4, bringing to light that at least 800 American soldiers are there, something not even senior members of Congress were aware of.  Some lawmakers have called for the 9/11 authorization from Congress – now 16 years on – for the US armed forces to go after terrorists across the globe, to be redefined and reauthorized).

American political commentator, professor, and author Robert Reich posted a thesis on Facebook and Twitter that says America actually has six political parties, and not just two.  So to get any significant legislation done, the Senate and House leaders have to get a coalition of two or more of these ‘inside’ parties to agree.   (For the record, I am an anti-establishment Democrat).

President Trump has waged war with the media and the press since Day One of his presidency, and it just seems to get even worse.

So many things wrong with these tweets. NBC and the networks hold themselves to the highest standards, while Trump tweets out blatant lies and distortions almost every day.  2/3 of Americans think they are bad for the country. And by the way: there is no ‘license’ that can be revoked for the national networks, only for local TV stations. Also, the Executive Branch cannot even do that – it’s up to the Federal Communications Commission.

NBC reported on Wednesday that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson called President Trump a ‘moron’* in public. This was in July, at the Pentagon, after Trump had left a meeting. Shortly after that VP Mike Pence had to talk Tillerson into staying on and not quitting.     *It’s actually worse than that .. whispers are that it was ‘f-ing moron’.  The political publication The Hill tells NBC to come clean and report the exact phrase that was used.

Anyway, does it matter? Both Tillerson and Trump denied on Wednesday that anything was amiss.  (Tillerson: the President is a ‘smart man’; Trump: NBC is ‘fake news’, ‘totally made-up’). Right.  I will go with NBC’s version, to believe.

It does matter. It’s not good that there is such a rift between the President and his Secretary of State.  And Trump seems to routinely undermine his cabinet’s efforts by tweeting totally contradicting policy points of view.  Example: I told Rex Tillerson, our wonderful Secretary of State, that he is wasting his time trying to negotiate with Little Rocket Man .. Save your energy Rex, we’ll do what has to be done!  

‘Drain the Swamp!’ was Donald Trump’s rallying cry during his campaign. Well, the swamp is alive and well. Trump’s Health & Human Services (HHS) secretary Tom Price, finally quit on Friday. He brought a scandal onto himself with his ultra-exorbitant travel expenses.  The feat he pulled off: pile up expenses to the tune of $1,000,000 of overseas trips and the more than two dozen trips he has taken on private planes domestically since May.  This is after he cut the HHS travel annual budget of $4.9 million by $663,000 (15%).  And for comparison, his predecessor Kathleen Sibelius, took one private plane flight in all of her 5-year tenure.

Even so, it appears Price’s ultimate sin was not being able to repeal Obamacare (that is: take away healthcare money for millions of Americans), and so he had to go.

‘When you’re born you get a ticket to the freak show. When you’re born in America, you get a front-row seat’. – said George Carlin, American stand-up comedian, actor, author and social critic, 1927-2008.

This is certainly not the craziest year in the American republic’s history (there was the Civil War, and there was 1968, after all) .. but some days sure feels pretty surreal.

1. On Friday, President Trump called NFL players that kneel during the anthem to protest racial inequality ‘sons of b****es’. Surely, a first for any US President in public. Is the F word next? The N word?
2. We all survived the latest apocalypse on Saturday. Some guy called David preached about a biblical doomsday of Sep 23, which came and went .. and hey! we’re still here. He simply issued a new doomsday date.
3. Today Republican Senators Graham & Cassidy (boo! boo! to you) still pushed their zombie healthcare bill that propose to drain tens of billions of dollars out of healthcare. They lied about its effects in the public hearing today. Again confirming Republican health policy: die if you’re sick, and make it quick; you’re costing us money. (The New York Times reports that Republican Senators’ billionaire donors are getting antsy and want their tax cuts). Before the hearing started, Capitol police carried out screaming (disabled) protesters in their wheelchairs.
4. I watch the Vietnam War documentary and think: history repeated itself with Iraq, and is repeating itself right now in Afghanistan. We sent thousands more troops there just a few weeks ago – with no exit strategy. Just last week, the Senate passed a $700 billion defense policy bill, far more than what Trump requested. Someone calculated that the increase in the defense budget can fund free education country-wide for a year.
5. Trump finally acknowledged the post-Maria hurricane crisis in Puerto Rico (tweets), but criticizes them for their poor infrastructure, instead of offering help or support. Houston and Florida is yesterday’s news by now, and I assume they are doing OK.
6. North Korea now threatens to shoot down American warplanes – even outside their airspace, saying Trump ‘declared war’ on them.  There are reports that commercial airlines have started to give the airspace there a wide berth.  Not a great feeling, this game of chicken between President Trump and Dear Leader Kim Jong-un.

The polls have closed and the projected results are in. Angela Merkel’s party won, but lost ground, as did her coalition partner Martin Schultz, from the left-center Social Democratic Party.  Schultz announced that the four-year coalition between the Social Democrats and Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) is over.  The far right AfD gained a lot of ground and came in a solid third.  They will be seated in the Bundestag for the first time, something that does not sit well with many Germans.  But hey, this is not a Brexit outcome, and it is not a Trump-like victory: so, good.

Here’s my collage of Twitter pictures for Germany’s federal elections on Sunday. The consensus is that Angela Merkel (Christian Democratic Union) is safely in the lead for a fourth term as German chancellor, but since there are seven parties vying for votes, it’s all about the second, third and fourth percentages of votes.  This will determine the coalition that the CDU will have to form, to get to a governing majority.

The Constitution of the United States was signed by 39 delegates 230 years ago to the day on Sunday.

There were several glowing tweets on Twitter (#ConstitutionDay), such as ‘greatest political document ever written in human history’ and ‘written by patriots, protected by patriots’.

To me, it is more complicated than that.  There is no question that the United States Constitution was a landmark document, and an enormous influence over the constitutions of republics in other parts of the world that came into being later. But over the years, there have been 27 amendments to the original US Constitution, so it had to change and clarify itself with the times.  And take the 2005 Iraq Constitution. It guarantees minimum wage, universal health care and free education (acknowledging that Iraq still has a lot of basic peace and security problems to deal with).  Section 9 of the 1996 South African Constitution explicitly forbids discrimination on the basis of sex, gender or sexual orientation .. something which is not clear at all in the US Constitution.  In fact, the proposed Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) of 2009 that would end workplace discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity by employers with at least 15 employees, has still not become law.

It’s the 21st century, and we no longer ask ‘Who watches the watchers? (on the city walls)’. What we should ask is ‘Who watches the algorithms? (on Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft).

ProPublica* found that Facebook to this day had perfectly enabled marketers of say, Nazi memorabilia, or recruiters for marchers for a far-right rally, to find ‘Jew haters’ (it was an actual ad category, gleaned from Facebook profiles and posts), and send them ‘promoted posts’. (After the ProPublica report, Facebook removed the anti-semitic categories and promised to improve monitoring).

And just last week, Buzzfeed News reported that Facebook’s vast reach was used in the 2016 elections by a Russian troll operation that set up fake accounts and sent misinformation (presumably about the Clinton campaign), to the tune of $100,000 worth of political ads.  The new media/ social media are escaping many regulations and media standards that are far behind the curve, and that have yet to catch up with the digital age.

*ProPublica is an American nonprofit organization based in New York City. It describes itself as a nonprofit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest.

President Trump ended DACA today (actually had his AG Jeff Sessions do the dirty work of announcing it).  He is giving Congress 6 months to come up with a permanent solution.  Then as a firestorm from churches, business leaders, advocacy groups, and protests erupted, he tweeted out at the end of the day he will take another look at it if Congress does not come up with a solution.

DACA stands for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals.  The program was created by President Obama by executive order. It allows undocumented immigrants that had been brought illegally to the USA by their parents, as kids under 16, to register, be background-checked, and recorded in a database. It costs $500 to register and allows the recipient to work legally. So one finds DACA recipients in tech companies, in the US Army, even working as first responders in the Hurricane Harvey crisis.  They may have younger brothers and sisters that are US citizens (a person born in the USA is a US citizen). Does not matter. We will deport you now, to a foreign country you have never known. Critics say the DACA program is ‘unconstitutional’ since it was not established by Congress.  But the US Supreme Court has ruled on it, and declared it constitutional. Trump the candidate was extremely critical of Obama establishing the program by executive action. But now that he is President, he does the exact reverse, by executive order.  Is there any iota of a law or action of Obama’s that Trump will not reverse? Why are our immigration laws still such a mess, and so, so broken?

No, this is not a reference to hurricane Harvey. It’s Trump’s accord with Putin to build the Trump Tower Moscow.  This monster series of 200 tweets was compiled by Seth Abramson, from information in the public record. It’s about Trump’s dealings running up to the agreement to build Trump Tower Moscow, and what had happened after that.   It really reads like a Russian spy novel. Only: one of the participants is now the President of the United States.