It's a Breakdown. Go Ahead And Give It To Me...

A good sign of how incompetent a Cabinet Secretary is doing at the job is the high number of resignations of key persons from that Department. Just yesterday, Secretary of Defense Idiocy Pete Hegseth got a vote of no confidence with Army Secretary Dan Driscoll jumping the figurative ship (while Navy crews are literally jumping).

A worse sign of how bad it's going within a department is when leaks get out to the media. That's often coming from underlings unable to resign but desperate to cleave an exit route for themselves before the ship sinks everybody. How else to explain the release of rather classified internal briefs to the Washington Post this weekend, detailing how most of the military commanders Hegseth hasn't fired yet are issuing "non-concurrances" in opposition to Hegseth's ongoing mismanagement of unwanted wars.

Mark Hertling over at The Bulwark provides some context:

The Post reported Sunday that several of America’s senior military commanders have warned Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that continuing the current pace and scale of operations against Iran risks weakening the military’s ability to respond to crises elsewhere. The warnings appeared in the highly classified Secretary of Defense Orders Book.

The most eye-catching part of the Post story was that several senior commanders registered “non-concurs” with continuing some deployments. That sounds dramatic because it is—not because non-concurs are unusual in this process, but because of what they tell us about the condition of the force after six months of war.

The Book is essentially an operational and strategic assessment of how America’s military forces are allocated around the world. The people who assemble it are the staff for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Many sections with different responsibilities contribute: Logisticians assess the ability to move and sustain forces, strategists consider the effect on global commitments and other contingency plans, and the services and combatant commands then assess what providing or losing a particular capability means to their overall missions. The operations directorate takes all this expertise into account and prepares the Book for the chairman, who then reviews it and gives it to the secretary of defense.

The Book doesn’t just concern itself with infantry divisions, fighter squadrons, and aircraft carriers. Modern military operations depend as much on intelligence platforms, air-defense units, military police, engineers, communications specialists, medical units, transportation companies, postal detachments, and even organizations responsible for showers and laundry. Those units aren’t glamorous, but commanders can’t fight without them. Every one of those capabilities must come from somewhere. That’s why the Book is ultimately about risk...

I saw this firsthand when I served on the Joint Staff as the J7, which at the time oversaw contingency planning. We were routinely asked to assess what satisfying one combatant commander’s request would do to another’s war plans. It didn’t matter if it was an armored division, an aircraft carrier, or a single aircraft: If someone wanted it, it usually meant someone else didn’t want to give it up.

When I was in the Pentagon, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld went through these Books weekly during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, questioning units and even numbers of personnel being deployed. The discussions were often painful for the Joint Staff briefers. But his purpose was straightforward: understand the consequences before deciding...

If there's anything we've seen from trump and from his lackeys like Hegseth, those two have no understanding of anything. /headdesk

This isn’t just Pentagon competition among commanders who want more forces. The reported non-concurs are occurring after months of munitions expenditure, extended deployments, deferred maintenance, and the movement of scarce capabilities from around the world to the Middle East. The Book is doing precisely what it was designed to do: expose tradeoffs to the secretary before he makes another decision.

It is also why the leak itself is so serious.

The Book is highly classified because, taken together, its contents provide an X-ray of American military readiness. It tells senior leaders not only where forces are, but where commanders believe they are short, which capabilities are being stretched, what war plans are accepting additional risk, and where the United States might have difficulty responding to a future crisis. That’s invaluable information for America’s adversaries.

But for the Secretary of Defense, it should be something else: a warning. The Book exists to identify risks before they become vulnerabilities—and the secretary’s job is not merely to read those warnings, but to act on them.

Hegseth can't. And won't.

The Secretary of Defense Pandering can't act on the warnings because they go against the fantasy narrative his boss trump has spun: Not only about the war on Iran, but also the overall fantasy that the United States is great under his leadership. Anyone in TrumpWorld who ruins that narrative gets exiled to the 2:00 am infomercial slots on the Newsmax channel.

Hegseth won't act on the warnings because of his own rage and frustration dealing with a military chain of command he views as "woke" or unmanly. This is a guy who's highest military rank was a major in the National Guard, obsessing over a "Warrior" ethos that remains at odds with the armed forces' focus on professionalism. Half of what he's doing to the military right now is expressing that rage towards generals and admirals he now "outranks", clearing out anyone who doesn't buy into that Warrior Code - or doesn't fix his racist/sexist world-view - he's trying to infuse into the troops at the detriment of morale and discipline. 

Leaking this information - that the upper ranks of the US military are at odds with their civilian (inept) bosses - is a major red flag: There is chaos instead of organization in one of the most important departments of our federal government; and there is a good chance the lower ranks of our armed forces are going to mutiny in some form or another when - not if - Hegseth and trump push them too far.

Who Owns What, When It's All Debt?

Update: Thanks again to Steve in Manhattan for including this article at Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up! 

P.S. I am waiting at home this morning to get new toilets installed, so while I'm sitting here I'd like to promote my book Notice a Trend to help pay the bills uh encourage more man reading! And women reading! And sentient rock creatures who travel through space! And...

This is something Comrade Misfit posted over the weekend, and I wanted to delve into this nightmare a little more (by Victor Tangermann at Futurism):

AI companies are pouring untold billions of dollars into enormous data centers in their efforts to sustain increasingly complex and resource-intensive AI models.

It’s an extremely costly undertaking built on seemingly bottomless hype — and a mountain of debt. As Japanese financial newspaper Nikkei Asia found in a recent investigation, just five US tech giants — Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and Oracle — are hiding an estimated $1.65 trillion in debt that doesn’t appear on balance sheets. That’s even more than the $1.35 trillion in debt the five companies officially reported in their financial data for the most recent quarter.

This is the sort of thing that screams FRAUD. And nobody's doing anything about it except let it pile up.

Meta alone has amassed around $420 billion in off-balance-sheet debt, according to Nikkei, highlighting how precarious the AI industry’s steep investment in AI has become, and inspiring comparisons to energy company Enron, which collapsed in spectacular fashion in 2001 because of similar debts hidden behind shell companies. Like Enron, they’re using special purpose vehicles, or off-balance sheet arrangements such as legally distinct subsidiaries, as a way to make their financial reporting look healthier than it actually is — often a glaring sign that something is deeply amiss behind the scenes...

That none of these accounting tricks - those shell companies or "special purpose vehicles" - were outlawed when we had the chance spells out just how broken our federal government is when policing the uber-rich megacorps that are "too big to fail."

For the love of God, in my own lifetime we've witnessed financial collapse - the bankrupting of Savings and Loans - after financial collapse - the era of Enron and other tech companies collapsing under their own greed - after financial collapse - the mortgage industry meltdown of 2007-08 that led to a near decade of unemployment and housing woes. That last one directly affected me and my poor parents when I lost my job in 2008, and spent four years looking for a job and unable to sell my home to afford relocating to places where jobs were available.

I've learned a lot from that last economic collapse. For starters, I learned that we shouldn't bail out the CEOs first, we should bail out their victims - us - first, and then send those goddamn bastards to jail for their incompetence and greed. 'Cause one of the things I guarantee you is that these tech companies are getting us to pay in some form or another to cover for the massive costs they're adding up to keep their bubbles afloat. We've seen what happens when those bubbles pop: us taxpayers foot the goddamn bills (again).

I've also come to wonder why these businesses are allowed to accrue so much debt in the first place. My basic understanding of economics tells me debt is bad, and too much of it is very bad. I understand that in the complexities of running a business, companies may borrow loans to cover for expenses today on an understanding that in the future they will have more money to be able to pay off such debts. That they can use those debts to obtain more loans and add more debt to where they have more debts than money on hand is where things start looking insane IMHO.

This is where something like regulations and laws should be in place demanding that businesses hold themselves accountable to some degree: To prevent them from building up too much debt in the first place. You know, some sort of debt cap that says "whoa there, pay this off first before you go putting yourselves into billions more in debt." Without those regulations in place - and we've seen the damage when we've deregulated financial systems like Savings and Loans and the securities/financial markets - those corporate idiots can't stop themselves, spiraling into an ongoing cycle of borrowing and debt all because they're hoping their ship of gold-pressed latinum reaches port that big tech breakthrough pays off.

And this begs the question "WHO is lending these greedheads more and more money to put them further into debt?" The large international banks, obviously, but you have to ask them "At what point do you call in those debts? At what point do you stop lending to these guys - these techbros addicted to their AI hopes - when it's clear they're not going to deliver on any profit?"

In what way is all of this debt any good? Who benefits from this?

Because debt leads to one thing: Control. Any person - or business - deep in debt to another person has to obey the creditor. Otherwise, you lose your business, your car, your home, your livelihood, your very identity.

Debt is another form of slavery.

And if the megacorps collapse under debt, that cascade of financial ruin spreads out: Every other person doing business with them loses money and goes into debt they can't pay, which spreads out even further. A lot of us fell into debt after the housing crisis almost 20 years ago (!), and a lot of us are still paying that off.

Who owns all that debt? We don't, and yet we're the ones who are going to get stuck paying for it (again).

Goddammit. This cycle of economic short-sightedness and greed needs to end.

The Neverending Cycle of trumpian Failure: War With Algae Edition

This all for the record started back in April of this year when trump - high on his own narcissism regarding the desecration of the East Wing, and decades believing his own architectural tastes were above reproach - decided out of nowhere to have the great Reflecting Pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial get its surface painted blue.

As Collin Binkley reported for AP News back then: 

President Donald Trump is having the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool coated in a swimming pool surface hued in “American flag blue,” covering up a decades-old granite surface that he said was “leaking like a sieve” and would take years to replace.

The president announced the renovation at an Oval Office event Thursday, saying the coating had already begun. He was inspired to tackle the project after a friend visited from Germany and lamented that the water was filthy and looked disgusting, Trump said.

I don't think trump ever mentioned who the friend was - one of the many faceless "brave strong types" who come up with tears in their eyes calling trump "sir" in eternal gratitude - and I don't believe trump ever pointed to any official study into the pool's condition as justification for getting this done. I am firmly convinced trump decided to get the reflecting pool painted because he got it confused with "swimming pool," which is a different type of pool altogether.

The project is one more makeover refashioning the nation’s capital to Trump’s liking, following others such as the demolition of the White House’s East Wing to make room for a new ballroom...

In Trump’s telling, the reflection pool project is a case study in business acumen. The president said he scrapped plans to have the granite replaced, which he said was estimated to cost $301 million and would take at least three years.

Instead, Trump said he called a few pool contractors he knows from past real estate projects — “I have a guy who’s unbelievable at doing swimming pools up the road,” Trump said.

The guy in question turned out to have gotten a no-bid contract for $1.7 million or so (and cost overruns no surprise ballooned to $13 million), and that the guy once bribed Democratic congresscritter James Traficant Jr. back in the day. You can't make this shit up.

trump bulldozed ahead on this project in spite of people warning him that painting the pool surface would cause rapid algae growth. Because it turned out, yes it did (via Jenna Lee at Washingtonian):

The Trump administration’s renovations of the Reflecting Pool on DC’s National Mall held up for about a week.

Construction crews spent weeks painting the more-than-2,000-foot-long pool “American Flag Blue” at Donald Trump’s request, ahead of the country’s 250th birthday. Although the shallow Reflecting Pool has long been plagued by algae growth, a pool renovation expert told Washingtonian that the color of the paint could be exacerbating the problem.

On Wednesday, a day after the basin was refilled, workers were seen cleaning out clumps of algae—which have transformed the pool’s signature reflection to a mossy green. The algae resurfaced by Friday morning...

Steve Goodale, a Canadian swimming pool specialist who goes by “Swimming Pool Steve,” said the darker blue of the renovated pool may worsen the pool’s existing algae problem absent other mitigation efforts, because the darker color will absorb more sunlight and increase the water temperature, making the pool ripe for more algae blooms. 

“If we change nothing else except the color, and we go from a lighter color to a darker color, absolutely you’re going to have more prolific algae growth,” Goodale said. “It’s a foregone conclusion.” 

This wasn't a case study in business acumen. This was a case study in self-aggrandizing stupidity, driven by an ignorant asshole who thinks he's smart and classy and nowhere near either.

The locals have seen algae in the reflecting pool before, but by most accounts on social media they've never seen it bloom as quickly or thoroughly as it has with the painted surface.

Making things worse is that the paint isn't working: it's peeling away in chunks highlighting how cheap and ill-done the whole job had been (via Sahil Kapur and Sophie Ziedalski at NBC News):

President Donald Trump’s makeover of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool ahead of America’s 250th anniversary celebrations is not going according to plan...

Then, the new Trump-branded “American flag blue” color was short-lived as algae turned the pool green, causing the administration to send crews to dump hydrogen peroxide into the expansive pool to deal with the problem.

In recent days, NBC News spotted some blue paint chipping off the surface, with strips of it peeling away and floating atop the pool for visitors and passers-by to see as the busy summer tourist season in the nation’s capital gets underway.

Not a good look at all for trump, is it?

Which is why trump's response isn't so shocking: Rather than admit a screwup, trump is blaming everyone else as "vandals" and having police - some of them from other states??? I need verification on that report - go around the pool arresting people. For example, this former Olympian (via Bailey Richards at People (yes, they've actually been doing solid reporting on trump's failures)):

Former Olympic canoeist David Carter "Davey" Hearn was arrested for destruction of government property at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, hours before President Donald Trump claimed it was vandalized following its recent renovation. Hearn claims he was just touching a piece of detached liner.

United States Park Police officers arrested the 67-year-old — who competed in the canoe slalom in three Summer Olympics — on Friday, June 19, after he stopped to look at the newly renovated Washington, D.C., pool in the midst of a 52-mile bike ride, according to The Washington Post.

Hearn told The Post that after noticing a piece of liner that was partially detached from the pool, which was painted "American Flag Blue” as part of its more than $14 million renovation, he reached into the water to see what the piece felt like — and just moments later, he was being arrested.

While preparing to leave and continue his bike ride, the U.S. Park Police officers arrested and detained the former Olympian on a misdemeanor charge of destruction of government property, per The Post. Hearn claimed to the newspaper that his detainment at a Park Police facility lasted for nearly five hours, and he was allowed to leave at around 9 p.m. local time.

If the police are going around arresting people for "destruction of government property," they need to go arrest trump for how he fucked up the reflecting pool in the first place (as well as what he'd done to the East Wing of the White House).

And Hearn is not the only one: Social media is displaying other arrests going on around the poolside over the weekend. Given how trump is using the Justice Department to go after his enemies, I wouldn't be surprised of any escalation of arrests so that trump can shift blame onto any locals and tourists his thugs can grab along the Mall.

trump is desperate to have everything "look perfect" for his glorified attempt to hijack the 250th birthday of the nation this 4th of July, even if it means putting National Guard troops - they're still stuck in DC on trump's orders - around the Mall to prevent anyone getting close enough to see how algae-clogged our national landmark is. Never mind the physical damage left behind by trump's bloated and unpopular UFC staging on the White House lawn - NOW it looks like a landfill, thanks trump! - which will cost millions to landscape: Just add that to the ugliness of the pit trump has dug into the ground for his ballroom vanity project.

In the meantime, the algae keeps growing back, thanks to trump's deluded beliefs he alone can make things better.

Gods help this nation. 77 million of us elected a vain moron, and the damage is becoming more clear even without a reflective pool to show us.

Airline Service Getting Colder By the Minute

Update: Thank you, Steve in Manhattan, for sharing this article at Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up! Everyone: Stay safe; Abolish ICE; Stop the Wars; and Defend Your Vote!

File under the "What Could Possibly Go Wrong" category of putting thugs in charge of public transportation (via Luke Garrett at NPR):

President Trump said he is sending Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to U.S. airports as some air travelers face longer security lines due to the partial government shutdown.

"On Monday, ICE will be going to airports to help our wonderful TSA Agents who have stayed on the job," Trump posted on social media Sunday.

The Trump administration has blamed Democrats for the shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security, which has entered its sixth week and paused paychecks for Transportation Security Administration workers.

"This pointless, reckless shutdown of our homeland security workforce has caused more than 400 TSA officers to quit and thousands to call out from work because they are not able to afford gas, childcare, food, or rent," Acting Assistant DHS Secretary Lauren Bis told NPR in an email.

What trump and his lackeys aren't mentioning is that the Democrats put a hold on DHS funding in order to curtail escalating violence and civil rights abuses by those very ICE agents. Of course, they can never be in the wrong, can they...

DHS did not respond to NPR's question of where ICE agents will be deployed.

But Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens said Sunday evening that agents would be at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport to help with "line management and crowd control." In a statement, he said federal agents "indicated that this deployment is not intended to conduct immigration enforcement activities."

Which counters trump's own claim that the ICE agents will be there to detain any and all undocumented travelers (with heavy emphasis on those from Somalia, because trump is still obsessed with punishing Somali from Minnesota, Ohio, Maine, and elsewhere).

Because of the shutdown, by the by, actual TSA agents aren't getting paid through emergency funding, but ICE agents are, which is going to make things very painful around the water cooler at the workplace this Monday...

The head of the union that represents TSA officers denounced the plan to send ICE to airports.

"ICE agents are not trained or certified in aviation security," Everett Kelley, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, said in a statement on Sunday.

He said TSA officers spend months learning to detect explosives, weapons, and threats designed to evade detection at checkpoints.

"They deserve to be paid, not replaced by untrained, armed agents who have shown how dangerous they can be," he added.

Word is already this weekend that check-in lines at airports are backed up, delayed by hours and getting worse. There's little evidence that bringing in ICE agents - untrained for crowd control, more likely to be abusive towards passengers already under stress - will free up the lines and improve departure times for people. There's also the risk that anyone "suspicious" in ICE's eyes - anyone with darker skin than a Duggar scion - is going to get harassed and attacked for no other reason than just standing there.

All of the bad governance spawning violence in our cities is now going to be working inside our airports.

What can possibly go wrong? (hint: everything)

General Disarray Heading Into October

My paranoia about this next stunt by trump and his lackeys is getting the worst of me this week (via Steve Inskeep and Tom Bowman at NPR):

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has called top military officials from around the world to a meeting in Virginia (this Tuesday). The reason for this unusual gathering isn't known.

INSKEEP: How much do you know?

BOWMAN: Well, again, not too much. We're talking hundreds of generals and admirals who will meet on Tuesday at Marine Base Quantico just outside Washington. The Washington Post was the first to report on this meeting. In a statement, Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said, quote, "the secretary of war will be addressing his senior military leaders early next week." And he was using the term secretary of war, which both President Trump and Defense Secretary Hegseth prefer, instead of defense secretary.

INSKEEP: Have you heard of a meeting like this ever in your decades covering the Pentagon?

BOWMAN: No, absolutely not. This is - on this scale, never. At times, you know, they'll bring in combatant commanders - those who oversee military operations around the world - bring them to the Pentagon for annual meetings. But this is far different in the numbers. Now, Secretary Hegseth has talked about reducing the number of admirals and generals - who stand at more than 800 - reducing that number by 20%. And he talked about that during his confirmation hearing and also put out a video statement back in May once again referring to this...

The rumor mill right after that notification spun in a number of directions, especially at the possibility Hegseth was going to stage a public purge among the flag officers to put the Fear of trump in those remaining. Military analysts believe it's tied into the projected National Defense Strategy where trump's administration will reportedly shift the military focus to "homeland security" meaning "arresting immigrants and civilians - maybe even killing them - on Stephen Miller's whims." 

It later got out that Hegseth plans to give a "motivational speech" about the "warrior ethos" he wants to see in our armed forces: He wants to see more rah-rah blood knight enthusiasm towards committing war crimes "being warriors" wherever the battlefield is set.

Throw into this the last-minute announcement that trump himself is going to attend this "lecture" and a clearer understanding emerges: This is going to be a goddamn staged spectacle of the crassest kind.

As a lot of observers are noting, this whole thing could have been an email. Tom Nichols over at the Atlantic is noticeably vexed:

...I was not, however, a senior officer in charge of a major command, with responsibility for thousands of people and millions of dollars of weaponry. Those folks are busy, which is why the DOD has very advanced—and very expensive—teleconferencing equipment designed to obviate the need to move people around the world for a chat.

But Secretary of Defense/War/Lethality Pete Hegseth isn’t going to use that technology. Instead, he recently decided that some 800 generals and admirals needed to come, in person, from every corner of the planet to a Marine base at Quantico, Virginia, reportedly to listen to their boss, a former TV host, lecture them on the “warrior ethos”—and, for some reason, personal grooming. The Tuesday meeting will feature not only Hegseth but also a last-minute addition: the commander in chief himself.

Hegseth has had a lot of bad ideas, but this one is disruptive and even somewhat dangerous. All of these men and women have real jobs they should be doing. Even if Hegseth is calling this meeting to discuss serious issues of national defense—and so far, the Pentagon has given no such indications—few things are important enough to justify the security risk of putting the entire top U.S. military command, the secretary of defense, and the president all in the same room.

It is possible, of course, that Hegseth is convening this jamboree because something genuinely terrible is afoot. Perhaps he wants all of America’s top officers in the same room when he tells them, for example, that the United States is on the brink of going to war, or that the Pentagon has been deeply compromised by spies and all of our military secrets are now in Moscow or Beijing. But if America is heading into a crisis, then Hegseth’s call for a meeting is even more irresponsible, because in a time of danger all these people should be at their posts, not in an auditorium in Virginia.

The other rumors spinning out there cover some of the fears Nichols points to, especially the part about going to war to serve trump's growing rage towards the rest of the world that won't give him a Peace Prize. There's been a lot of saber-rattling towards Venezuela, especially the unjustified attacks on various boats in international waters that trump's administration keeps claiming were smuggling drugs (but which they also refuse to present evidence to back those claims). trump has been public in his demands to go to literal war against drug cartels, refusing to recognize how that would violate other nations' integrity, and arguably dragging the United States into yet another quagmire that would waste lives and money and end up changing nothing.

No matter what this speech will bring, it's also happening on the eve of yet another Republican-backed government shutdown that's scheduled to implode once October 1st clocks in. Just the logistics of bringing in every general and admiral to one location is a headache: Just imagine what those officers are going to go through if the money isn't there for their transportation back to their command posts? This is another reason why people fear this meeting is going to be a purge, with the shutdown as an excuse to gut the military of its leadership.

Every foreign power aligned against us - not only China and Iran but also Russia (so eager to watch a rival superpower collapse into civil war) - have got to be laughing at the United States tonight, and drawing up a number of plans to cause chaos while our military leaders are stuck in an auditorium listening to maniacs scream at them and demand utter obedience. 

No matter what, this is not going to be a fun week.

One Sentence Thought About trump's Big State of the Disunion Speech Tonight

Oh gods, he's going to declare war on Mexico and Canada and then activate the selective service draft to make every white guy under 25 into his cannon fodder while surrendering every tank and artillery we got to Russia so BFF Putin can finish off Ukraine, isn't he? 

The Problems with trump's Tariffs

This week's trumpian chaos focused a lot on his threat to impose broad and heavy tariffs on three of our major trade partners of Canada, Mexico, and China, something that the economic experts warn would trigger more inflation than U.S. voters realize and escalate retaliation and trade wars across the globe.

In the days following, there had been a good amount of punditry and pushback on the matter, during which trump's people walked back the comments or tried to reframe the topic. There are think pieces about how trump might be "bluffing," that he's trying to force the likes of Mexico and Canada to the negotiation table - much like how trump shredded the existing NAFTA deal to force a new USMCA agreement that barely changed anything - to gain more concessions he didn't get then.

My view on all this is to consider taking trump at face value when it comes to tariffs. he's had a long history of loving the concept of them, and he had spoken - early and often - that trade wars are "good and easy to win". And it's not even a trade war trump seems focused on: he talked during the 2024 campaign about the McKinley Tariffs of 1890 and how such tariffs could replace income tax as the government's main source of revenue.

There's no chess game here: trump genuinely wants to increase tariffs because he views them as win-win.

trump - and his pro-tariff allies in his transition team - refuse to see the larger historical trends surrounding tariffs, trade wars, and their impacts on economic stability. The non-profit Tax Foundation published Erica York's report looking into how other factors in the 1890s countered the negative economic impacts of the McKinley Tariffs... factors that were NOT in play during the later tariffs of the 1930s:

As a review, tariffs are a type of excise tax (a narrowly targeted consumption tax) applied to domestic consumption of foreign-produced goods. Since the depths of the Great Depression and the collapse in global trade after the 1930 Hawley-Smoot tariffs, US policy shifted away from restrictive tariffs in favor of multilateral cooperation to reduce tariffs (as economist Douglas Irwin explains in his book Clashing Over Commerce).

That shift in policy sent the average tariff rate on a downward path, from highs of 59.1 percent on tariffed goods and 19.8 percent on all imported goods during the Great Depression to an average of 4.7 percent on tariffed goods and 1.4 percent on all imported goods in 2017...

As Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, McKinley shepherded the Tariff Act of 1890 into law. At the time, the federal government was running a budget surplus of nearly 50 percent, and tariff revenues substantially outpaced government spending. The McKinley tariff was designed to fix that problem, moving sugar (which accounted for a large share of revenues) to the “duty free” list, providing direct subsidies to sugar producers (to replace the benefit of tariffs and increase spending), and raising tariffs on a variety of other imports.

The McKinley tariff and higher government spending brought a swift backlash, earning the Republican-controlled Congress the nickname of “Billion Dollar Congress,” and leading to Republican defeats in the 1890 midterm elections (McKinley himself lost his reelection). In 1892, while monetary and banking policies were larger issues, Democrats ran heavily against the protectionist tariffs and the “Billion Dollar Congress,” and won unified control of government.

Democrats did not get to make good on their promises to address protectionist tariffs immediately, because the nation fell into a deep recession (caused by monetary policies). In late 1893 and early 1894, Democrats took up the tariff issue, but as the bill worked its way through Congress, it strayed from its original goals: a House amendment added an income tax, Senate amendments added back many protectionist tariffs, and ultimately, President Cleveland allowed the law to take effect without his signature.

Dissatisfaction with the broader state of the economy, still in a monetary-policy-related downturn, led to a Republican sweep in the 1894 midterm elections and the election of Republican President McKinley in 1896. Just four months after convening, Republicans sent a new tariff bill, the Dingley Act of 1897, to McKinley, raising protective tariffs even higher than the Tariff Act of 1890.

Many at the time credited tariffs for the economic recovery that soon took shape. Likewise, Trump often credits these high tariffs with the industrial growth of the US during the period.

But as economist Doug Irwin explains, around the same time as the new tariffs were enacted, the global supply of gold began to increase, easing the monetary conditions responsible for the economic downturn and bringing about a recovery.

Further, many economic historians have cautioned that impressive growth in the late 1800s and early 1900s cannot be explained by high tariffs. Instead, labor force growth and capital accumulation—neither of which have strong links to tariffs—are responsible for America’s fast growth during this period. If anything, it is possible that the high protective tariffs of the late 19th century somewhat hindered America’s economic growth.

Ironically that period saw a massive increase in immigration, which fueled that labor force growth. Something that trump and his anti-immigrant allies are going to undermine the same time they'll push their tariffs plans. York and Irwin both point out how our gold reserves expanded - that Klondike Gold Rush by the by - back in a time when the gold standard established our currency's value. We won't have those resources today to balance out the economic chaos that trump's tariffs will unleash.

trump's agenda to replace our current income tax system - which would be a massive boon to the uber-rich - with tariffs would be a disaster all its own. Kimberly Clausing and Maurice Obstfeld at the Peterson Institute for International Economics - a nonprofit think tank - looks at the numbers on that:

To be sure, when Trump vents before friendly audiences, one has to take it with a large grain of salt. But a partial substitution of tariffs for income tax revenues is nearly inevitable under a Trump presidency. He has repeatedly proposed increased tariffs, including a 10 percent across-the-board tariff on all trading partners as well as 60 percent or higher tariffs on goods from China. He has also called for extending the tax cuts enacted in 2017, which are due to expire next year, a step that could easily cost as much $5 trillion over ten years. And Trump has suggested further cuts, particularly on the corporate side...

Can tariffs replace the income tax?

Simply put, NO. Tariffs are levied on imported goods, which totaled $3.1 trillion in 2023. The income tax is levied on incomes, which exceed $20 trillion; the US government raises about $2 trillion in individual and corporate income taxes at present. It is literally impossible for tariffs to fully replace income taxes. Tariff rates would have to be implausibly high on such a small base of imports to replace the income tax, and as tax rates rose, the base itself would shrink as imports fall, making Trump’s $2 trillion goal unattainable.

A recent Peterson Institute policy brief calculated that revenues from Trump’s 10 percent/60 percent tariff proposals would total about $225 billion per year in current dollars. This figure is certainly an overestimate because it does not account for lower economic growth due to the inevitable economic shocks caused by retaliation against US exporters and the losses suffered by the import-dependent manufacturing sector. Exporters would also be hit by an appreciating dollar...

Another consideration that comes into play is that the United States already raises about $50 billion from tariffs on imports. That amount reduces the revenue potential of new tariffs relative to figure 1. In addition, a tariff as large as 50 percent would create very large distortions in Americans’ economic activity (moving resources away from sectors where the United States has a comparative advantage and toward sectors where it is less efficient), while increasing tax avoidance and evasion (including shopping abroad, smuggling, lobbying government officials for exemptions, etc.)...

trump is looking to replace an established - and deep - means of revenues for our federal government and installing a revenue source that's neither deep nor reliable. If we want to talk about "running government like a business," this is akin to price-hiking your goods or services to where you lose your customers who refuse to pay even if you're the only business in town.

Now you can see how trump kept driving his own casinos into bankruptcy.

If there's any good news about all this tariffs speculation is that for anything tariff increase on a large scale, trump could be stymied by the existing USMCA agreement as well as a Congress - even one that's Republican-controlled - that's not about to commit political suicide like this.

However, we exist in a new reality where the Supreme Court expanded presidential powers to where trump could get away with ANYthing without Congressional approval under the umbrella of "official acts." And given how he'd unilaterally forced tariffs during his first term, he's going to want to do that again, this time with more devastating results.

Thanks again, 75 million voters. You unleashed this economic chaos on us. I only hope the Tariff Leopards eat you first.

When a Wannabe Dictator Tries to Sway the Wrong Crowd (w/ Update)

I don't know how this happened, but somehow someone got donald trump an invitation to speak before the national Libertarian conference this year. It's about to happen tonight around 8ish, depending on how libertarians keep time. By all accounts, this wasn't a bright idea (via Alex Isenstadt, Peder Schaefer, and Brittany Gibson at Politico): 

As delegates gathered at the Washington Hilton on the eve of his speech, the party’s decision to host the former president, which had split the organization, erupted Friday into open revolt. Fuming delegates at the convention said they plan to protest Trump’s speech, and one group sought unsuccessfully to remove the former president along with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., from the agenda — a move that resulted in thrown punches and obscenities between supporters and opponents of the move.

“I would like to propose that we go tell Donald Trump to go fuck himself!” Kaelan Dreyer, a Libertarian from New Mexico, yelled into a microphone, winning cheers from the crowd. After shouting vulgarities at the convention’s chair and fending off punches, he was led out of the convention hall.

The raucous opening to the convention reflects the pockets of hostility that Trump faces as he appeals to the Libertarians to help him box out a growing, third-party threat from Kennedy’s independent presidential campaign...

Third Party wannabe RFK Jr is running as an anti-Biden candidate but running on a platform of anti-vaccinations that appeal to MAGA... and there's signs he's stealing votes away from trump more than Biden. Hence trump's panicked attempt to appeal to a Libertarian party - that's kinda pro-RFK - that has a couple of reasons to hate him.

Part of it is simple party partisanship. Libertarians keep running into the problem of never winning enough votes, and a lot of it has to do with they and Republicans sharing the same ideology when it comes to deregulation of (federal, in some cases even state) government and lower taxes. Voters tend to go Republican because as one of the two major parties they're more likely to win anyway, and the Libertarians hate that.

It doesn't help that Libertarians are viewed as "Republicans Who Smoke Pot" because the two parties do split over civil liberties such as legalizing things like drugs and prostitution. Libertarians don't like the "Law and Order" stances that Republicans promote, and are ideologically opposed to a number of things that trump himself wants, such as Absolute Immunity and broad presidential powers to abuse anyone and everything.

Libertarians are not about to enjoy getting treated as second-class people within their own convention when trump shows up to speak, as he's bound to bring in his own MAGA audience to stage the event as a pro-trump success.

This is awkward: The Libertarian delegates wrapped up their voting and came in to discover that the priority seating in the room where Trump is speaking has been claimed by Trump fans. Now the Libertarian chair is asking Trump people to move, but most are not moving. pic.twitter.com/GMsTpSGINN

— Meryl Kornfield (@MerylKornfield) May 25, 2024

Yeah, it's gonna be that kind of night.

Bring all the popcorn, will ya?

Update: Apparently trump tried to hold out to force the Libertarians to let "his" audience sit up front. he finally gave his speech during which cries of "hypocrite" and loud booing kept interrupting him. Here's a sample from Acyn on Twitter (never X, Elon!):

Trump: Combine with us in a partnership.

Crowd: booooooo pic.twitter.com/NO46Gsxv5w

— Acyn (@Acyn) May 26, 2024

trump is up there - almost threatening, hiding his need to beg - insisting that the Libertarians side with him against "crooked Joe Biden," but to Libertarians he's just as crooked if not more: They're well aware of his criminal charges and not blinding themselves the way his MAGA base does. 

It's not helping that trump is bashing the Libertarians for their poor electoral performance every Presidential cycle (that's right trump, insult the crowd to their faces).

At some point I worry the Secret Service is gonna toss flashbang grenades to disperse the hecklers.

More popcorn.

Update 5/26: The day after did not go well for trump. Most of the media commentary covered how the attendees booed him off the stage. When the convention held their first round of balloting, trump wasn't officially on the list but got write-in votes... six of them. RFK Jr was on the ballot and received nineteen votes. Both missed the cutoff and the Libertarians are going to be going with one of their own.

This tweet clip pretty much sums up the whole trumpian fail:

Request for information at the Libertarian National Convention: Did this body grab a former president by the p—— last night? pic.twitter.com/qizZehgVYh

— Acyn (@Acyn) May 26, 2024

C'mon, Libertarians, show some decorum... /evil grin

trump's Hostile Takeover of the GOP

Update: Thank you Batocchio for sharing this article at the Crooks & Liars Mike's Blog Round-Up. To the visitors, please take the time to leave comments below, and check out the more recent articles I've posted here!

Considering how much Republicans love the idea of running government - and apparently political parties - like a business, of course there was a hostile takeover of the Republican Party itself. donald trump effectively hijacked the organization in toto this week by ousting RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel because she wasn't giving him all the power (and money) he wanted (via Lara Priluck at Politico):

Trump has been increasingly public about his mounting discontent with the committee and with McDaniel in particular.

But it wasn’t always this way. McDaniel, who is the niece of retiring Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), first captured Trump’s attention when she held the role of chair of the Michigan Republican Party in 2016. Trump rewarded McDaniel after his historic win in the state by installing her as RNC chair...

Most of Priluck's article covers how often McDaniel as RNC chair would rise to trump's defense as various scandals arose. It especially points out how McDaniel teamed up with trump's handlers to throw out the legal results of the 2020 elections:

McDaniel was also one of the many Republicans called to testify before the Jan. 6 select committee.

Her deposition footage revealed that — after the 2020 election — Trump connected her with John Eastman. Eastman is the architect of the fringe legal theory that the vice president had the power to swap official electors with ones who supported Trump during the certification process.

“He turned the call over to John Eastman, who then proceeded to talk about the importance of the RNC helping the campaign gather these contingent electors in case any of the legal challenges that were ongoing changed the result of any of the states,” McDaniel said in the deposition video.

She then confirmed the RNC helped the Trump campaign assemble “contingent” electors...

Yet even with all that legal help to commit a serious act of illegality, trump came to blame the RNC - and thus McDaniel - for failing to help him get the courts into accepting his baseless claims of "stolen" ballots. After all, trump can't blame himself for not having any evidence behind his Big Lie.

It hasn't helped McDaniel's case that the Republican Party has been struggling since 2016 to pull off any major electoral gains. Even the major victory of flipping the US House to the GOP in 2022 wasn't enough because it left them with a disorganized and fractious House unable to do anything except grandstand on Fox Not-News.

It's been clear to a number of observers that the power struggle between the Establishment faction of the Republicans and the invasive trumpian force were coming to a head. This is the most public sign that trump decisively won that battle. It wasn't enough that trump held the power with the GOP voting base: trump wanted control of every possible decision-making role in the party so he can effectively raid it like a vulture capitalist, strip it for parts, keep the good stuff for himself, and abandon the husk when he moves on.

They're not even hiding it. trump is putting in control of the RNC a family member - Lara Trump, Eric's wife - whose only skill set is mangling Tom Petty songs. And Lara's making it clear that her father-in-law is after every penny in the GOP he can take (via Gabriella Ferrigine at Salon):

Lara Trump, the wife of Eric Trump and the daughter-in-law of former president Donald Trump, promised on Tuesday that she would use "every single penny" of Republican National Committee (RNC) funds to see Trump back in the White House if she becomes co-chair of the party.

During a recent appearance on the conservative network Newsmax, Trump claimed that “the RNC needs to be the leanest, most lethal political fighting machine we’ve ever seen in American history..." 

"No one tell her the RNC is supposed to be in charge of assisting the entire party at the federal, state and local level. Not just Trump’s personal slush fund," quipped attorney Bradley Moss on X/Twitter. 

Republican strategist Bobby Trivett, a self-acknowledged Nikki Haley supporter argued that Lara Trump has "no interest in Republican Victory up and down the ballot, she just wants Trump legal fees paid."

Former Department of Defense official Mike Walker seemed to posit that Lara Trump's claim of financial support for MAGA might not be politically aligned with other conservatives, tweeting that her assertion will likely come as a "surprise GOP candidates for the House and Senate and other offices..."

While individual candidates and state-level organizations of the GOP can make their own fundraising, they need the foundational support of the national party to ensure they keep their budgets in the black. The way Lara's talking about it - and how the other campaign experts are interpreting it - is that trump will ensure the RNC won't pay out, it'll vacuum up.

And as Trivett noted, a lot of evidence is out there that trump has been using his own campaign funds to pay for all of the expensive legal bills and court cases he's endured over the last three years. With a massive civil case ruling just last month over his sexual assault and defaming of Carroll costing him $88 million - and with the expected NY civil case ruling this Friday over his business and tax frauds costing him $250 million at the least - trump is going to vacuum up all the money he can get his hand on as soon as possible.

For all of trump's talk about being a big billionaire, the truth is that on his person he barely has any wealth at all. Most of a billionaire's wealth is on paper: That is, the expected value of various properties, corporations, investments, and financial papers they have on them at any given time. Elon Musk for example may be the richest man on the planet, but most of that wealth is tied up in stock holdings and investments he can't easily liquidate to put more money in his pocket right at this moment.

And in trump's case, a lot of that wealth was a lie (hence the New York civil case). trump doesn't have that much money for real.

For trump to pay off - or place in escrow for the courts while he fights his appeals - that much money would require him to either sell off a number of his properties and financial holdings - which weakens his overall claim to power and cuts into future grifting and emolument schemes - or gain access to on-hand cash, which is where the campaign donations come in. Knowing trump, he'll steal other people's money first before using his own.

Most of the other deep-pocket fundraisers for the Republican Party are the same way. Their wealth is mostly on paper as well, which was one of the reasons why the GOP across the board has been struggling with campaign fundraising the last year or so as those deep pockets are evaluating the Return On Investments their money isn't achieving. While the SuperPACs are still out there, how many of them are going to share their money with an RNC organization that's not going to help with the costs of campaigning - the ads, the office staffing, the signs, the rallies, the snacks - heading into 2024?

This is going to get messy as trump and his lackeys clean out the Republican Party vault to pay off his debts (and whatever indulgences trump still enjoys).

This is what running a business looks like, Republicans, if the aim is to crash and burn everything and move on to the next victim. Congratulations, GOP, you're now Sears.

The Devil We Know Now in the House GOP

Again, I'm not so good with the prediction stuff.

I figured the House Republicans would flail at finding a replacement Speaker for whatever was left of this year - well into 2024 - out of the belief that the Freedom Caucus extremists knew it would force an inevitable shutdown. Apparently, there was an agenda by those extremists to eventually confirm a "consensus" candidate as soon as they found someone the Rational factions could accept without openly vomiting on the floor.

Jim "Scandals Aplenty" Jordan was clearly not the consensus choice: He angered up too many people on a personal level, and he reeked of both incompetency and guilt. The GOP couldn't accept the "moderate" - although that word no longer holds meaning for their ranks - choices of Scalise or Emmert, but they could accept a virtual unknown at the high chair in someone named Mike Johnson out of Lousiana.

Just because nobody ever noticed Johnson before now doesn't mean he's a safe choice. It means he kept himself out of the limelight long enough for people to not notice the extremist world-view he brings with him. Amanda Marcotte over at Salon has taken a closer look and has recoiled:

Ahead of his sudden ascension to House speaker late last week, the media had little time to vet Rep. Mike Johnson, R-La., thoroughly. And because he sucks in so many ways, it's been hard for his critics to settle on one of his many evil inclinations to focus on. He's a Christian nationalist. He's an election denier. He wants to destroy Medicare and Social Security. He's a fan of neo-Nazi conspiracy theories. As Brian Beutler of Off Message writes, "typecasting an opposition leader" may be tedious, but it's politically necessary. Democrats have benefited from the fact that the most famous Republican villains have one standout trait that defines their personality: Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio is a pugnacious bully. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia is a loudmouthed Karen. Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California is a spineless suck-up.

...What stands out to me about Johnson — and I suspect will be compelling to most people — is what a sinister little creep he is. The man gives off strong incel energy, and his elevation really showcases how much the politics of bitter sexual obsession have come to dominate the Republican Party.

I don't know if I ever covered the term "incel" at this blog, so a refresher is in order. "Incel" means "Involuntary Celibate," referring to heterosexual men who are frustrated that they are either socially unacceptable to women, or unable to find women who are submissive enough to their needs. Rather than blame their own behaviors - their own failures as men to adapt and improve themselves to behave better towards women - incels prefer to blame "feminists and queers" who have "disrupted the natural order of the patriarchy" that would have otherwise gotten these assholes laid by now.

In other words: Incels believe women are trophies, they are possessions, they are chattel meant only to serve the pleasure of men. And if that sounds a lot like how the Far Right religious Republicans sound when it comes to punishing women over abortion rights, divorce rights, the basic human right to think for themselves then you get where Marcotte is getting that vibe from Johnson.

In true incel fashion, Johnson is haunted by all the erotic adventures he imagines the straight ladies of America are having when he's not in the room. When New York's Irin Carmon interviewed him in 2015, he blamed legal abortion for school shootings, saying, "When you break up the nuclear family, when you tell a generation of people that life has no value, no meaning, that it’s expendable, then you do wind up with school shooters.” Nor was that a one-off. In 2016, he gave a speech in which he blamed feminism, liberal divorce laws, and the "sexual revolution" for mass shootings.

In this view, Johnson agrees with mass shooters, who claim they were driven to it because of women's sexual freedom. In the year before Johnson blamed male violence on women's sexuality, the incel-identified killer Elliot Rodger went on a shooting spree in California, claiming he was forced to do it to "punish" the "sluts" who had sex with other men while he remained a virgin. Since then, there's been a rash of violent incidents, some quite deadly, conducted by men who employ the same logic: Female sexual autonomy offends them, and must be punished with pain and death...

It is not exaggeration on Marcotte's part to paint Johnson as a dangerous radical, because he is. Not only with his fervent public stance that America is a "Christian nation," - in opposition to the Constitutional facts of "No Religious Test" and "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion" - but also his open disdain towards women as human beings with their own beliefs, their own minds, their own rights.

Johnson has similar views. He wants to lock women down into unhappy marriages with abortion bans. And, in a twist that incels will love, he wants to throw away the key. He's long been outspoken against "no-fault" divorce, which allows someone to leave simply because they no longer want to be married. These laws don't just benefit those in garden-variety unhappy marriages. By lifting the burden to "prove" their suffering in court, abused women have an easier time escaping. That's why liberalized divorce laws led to a 20% decline in female suicides...

We saw it recently in Florida where the GOP-controlled legislature and DeSantis signed off on laws weakening women's ability to get divorces as well as proper alimony that could let them live outside of the control of the men they're trying to flee from. The Religious Right don't like divorce - not that it disrupts society like they claim, but because it guts the controls men would have over "their" women - and would prefer increasing the likelihood of domestic violence that bad marriages compel.

There are still many in the punditry who are confused about why Christian conservatives like Johnson glommed onto Trump, a thrice-married chronic adulterer who touches the Bible like it will burn him. But, of course, it was never really about Jesus. What Trump and the men who worship him share is anger that any woman would have the right to say no: To a date, to a marriage, to having your baby. It's why Trump has a long history of sexual assault. And it's why men like Johnson embrace a "religion" that is hyper-focused on caging women like they're farm animals. And why they resent gay people for their perceived sexual adventures. It's a coalition of men who fear, often for very good reason, that their repulsive personalities exclude them from a world where sexual expression requires consent. Johnson's now the most powerful Republican in Congress. The incel-ization of the GOP is complete...

Where the Republican-controlled House is likely going to get a lot of attention drawn to the inevitable government shutdown that the Freedom Caucus desires, don't be at all surprised that this Johnson-led House decides to go nuclear by passing a federal-level abortion ban - that thankfully won't get past the Democratic Senate or Biden's desk - and stage more assaults on women's rights than ever before (even as the polling experts are screaming at Republicans that strict anti-abortion stances are destroying their numbers).

Johnson is no Man of God. He's just another Republican huckster shilling faith as campaign slogans, hiding his misogyny behind fake platitudes and hypocrisy. And he's the one the House GOP settled on to lead them into the 2024 election cycle.

Gods, truly help us.

Anniversary: Saturday Night's Alright For Obstructing

Update: Thank you driftglass for including this article in Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-up! Stick around everybody, enjoy the cheesecake! (whispering noises) Wait, WHO ate all the cheesecake?! Dammit, man! Quick! To the nearest Cheesecake Factory!!!

Get a little action in
- "Saturday Night's Alright for Fighting," by Bernie Taupin / Elton John

With all the current political craziness happening in the U.S. - the House Republicans stuck in a corner punching themselves in the face over who gets to lose the Speakership vote next, donald trump's Big Lie attempts to overturn the 2020 elections starting to see his co-conspirators plead out - it's high time to remember one of the biggest plot twist moments in political scandal history.

October 20, 1973 is when Richard Nixon committed the Saturday Night Massacre (via History Channel):

On October 20, 1973, solicitor General Robert Bork dismisses Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox; Attorney General Richardson and Deputy Attorney General Ruckelshaus resign in protest. 

Cox had conducted a detailed investigation of the Watergate break-in that revealed that the burglary was just one of many possible abuses of power by the Nixon White House. Nixon had ordered Richardson to fire Cox, but he refused and resigned, as did Ruckelshaus when Nixon then asked him to dismiss the special prosecutor. Bork agreed to fire Cox and an immediate uproar ensued...

Just as a refresher: By early 1973, more details about the Watergate break-in of June 1972 ensnared more of President Nixon's aides to where AG Richardson - having replaced John Mitchell, one of Watergate's main participants - promised the House Judiciary Committee of an independent counsel in order to avoid any taint from a potentially compromised Justice Department.

Cox took the duties of the special prosecutor seriously, and dug into a lot of the rot inside Nixon's administration. When it got out that Nixon taped his Oval Office conversations, Cox issued subpoenas to get the tapes and transcripts. Nixon refused, citing Executive Privilege. A legal battle ensued to where the Courts sided with Cox, denying Nixon's privilege claims.

Nixon then tried a compromise deal to have Senator John Stennis - not only a hard-line Southern conservative but also hard of hearing - to listen and transcribe what he heard on those tapes, but Cox refused such an obvious diversion.

That offer was made and rejected by October 19th, which was a Friday that year. Everyone expected the weekend to pass and the legal battles to continue that Monday.

Thing was, also that Friday in another courtroom, John Dean was pleading guilty to obstruction in his role during the Watergate coverup. As Nixon's legal counsel following the administration's shakeup following the break-in, Dean was privy to a lot of discussions - plotting, would be another word for it - regarding the handling of the affair and any ties between the campaign, the West Wing, and the federal agencies investigating the scandal.

The likelihood Dean had to share what he knew to Cox, combined with the likelihood that Cox was going to get those tapes sooner or later, had to trigger a fight-or-flight response in the increasingly paranoid Nixon.

And so that Saturday, Nixon pulled the trigger to fight.

Richardson, having promised Congress under oath not to interfere, refused and resigned. Ruckelhaus had made the same promise under oath and when Nixon tried to pressure him to do it, Ruckelhaus also went out the door. As the next in line at Justice, Bork found himself promoted up to Acting Attorney General and - because nobody thought he would ever be asked to interfere - having made no promise under oath he was fully capable of "doing my job" and firing Cox.

I dunno what Nixon was thinking, committing so open an act of obstruction. The only thing within reason was his fear that Dean knew too much, that his recordings exposed too much - not just what he knew of Watergate, but many other illicit and illegal topics Nixon would rather the public not know - and that Cox was getting too close to proving criminal acts.

Nixon may not have gauged how widespread the condemnation would be. Telegrams - this was before Twitter, DAMN YOU ELON MUSK - flooded the White House in outrage, and polling a week after the incident revealed the public flipped their views supporting impeaching Nixon over his actions. The House Judiciary was noticeably livid, and they continued their hearings while crafting articles of impeachment they would approve nine months later.

Rather than saving his ass, the Massacre accelerated the race towards Nixon's doom.

From what I've read of the moment - although I was living at the time, I was three and barely even watching cartoon shows on the telly - this was one of those pivotal moments in American history where the public mood shifted, as chaos undermined the national faith - built up by decades of New Deal policy, the great War Effort of World War II, and the ongoing Cold War fight against Global Communism - in the honesty and devotion of our institutions.

We witness the fallout of Nixon's actions to this day. The sins of Reagan's administration culminating in the Iran-Contra scandals. The failures of Dubya's War on Terror including a horrifying torture regime. Above all, we see the legacy of Nixon in trump's own criminality: Ranging from firing FBI Director Comey; obstructing his ties to Russia; extorting Ukraine to use Hunter Biden as scandal to harm Joe Biden's campaign; and above all trump's election denials that led to violent insurrection in the halls of the Capitol.

It was this event - this open act of obstruction - that led to all of the chaos we're seeing today.

Damn you, Tricky Dick. We are never going to forget nor forgive you for this.

It Begins: The Gaetz Folly to Vacate

Welp, there I was getting onto the underground version of City Of Heroes to try and form a Shardtober task force - I'll explain later - when I get word that the wingnut madness in the GOP House upgraded to Defcon Nutty:

BREAKING: Matt Gaetz has officially introduced a resolution to remove Kevin McCarthy as House speaker.

— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) October 2, 2023

(insert ALL the popcorn GIFs here)

Lemme find a link to a news site for better details. Here we go, AP News has it with Farnoush Amiri and Kevin Freking reporting:

Speaker Kevin McCarthy is facing an extraordinary referendum on his leadership of the House of Representatives after a conservative member of his own conference, a longtime critic, moved to trigger a vote on whether he should remain at the helm.

“I have enough Republicans where at this point next week, one of two things will happen: Kevin McCarthy won’t be the speaker of the House or he’ll be the speaker of the House working at the pleasure of the Democrats,” GOP Rep. Matt Gaetz told reporters after he filed the motion. “I’m at peace with either result because the American people deserve to know who governs them.”

McCarthy responded minutes later on social media, “Bring it on.”

This is all stemming from the ongoing power struggle - both in public and behind doors - involving Gaetz and the Freedom Caucus faction that never truly respected McCarthy, tried to deny him the office in humiliating fashion in order to squeeze out major concessions, and sought to undercut any authority he has as Speaker in order to ensure a dysfunctional Congress.

The tipping point was the recent fight over yet another looming Shutdown that the Far Right wanted to impose but that McCarthy avoided through deals with the Democratic caucus because McCarthy - for all his slavish devotion to the Far Right ideology already - knew his legacy in the history books as Speaker was at risk. Thing was, Gaetz and his allies were going to pull this Motion to Vacate no matter what McCarthy did because he hadn't given them everything - even things that were out of his power to grant - they desired.

So now we get the circus most observers knew was coming: The power struggle not between Moderates and the Far Right - because there ARE NO MORE Moderates in the GOP, they are all fevered Conservatives - but between the Rational and Irrational factions of the Republican Party.

The Rationalists are likely going to stick with McCarthy because the long-term health of their party requires them to actually do things in office to ensure their constituents - the deep-pocket lobbyists - get their piece of the federal largesse. The Irrationalists are going to stage their coup attempt on McCarthy not to get one of their own into the Speakership but to create enough chaos that the House can't pass anything, and thus force future shutdowns to appease their trumpian voter base.

There's no certainty that Gaetz has the votes to pull off the motion. He can't honestly have every Republican congresscritter aligned to his side (otherwise McCarthy's back-room allies would be signaling alarm) and he can't honestly expect the Democrats to knee-jerk a vote against McCarthy out of partisan spite (there seems to be serious debate among the Democratic congresscritters to not commit either way and let the GOP punch themselves).

What Gaetz does have is the Irrationalist belief that he can stage this coup attempt without punishment or consequence: That he can compel his fellow GOP congresscritters to vacate McCarthy through threat of primary challenges and boycotts from the Far Right financial backers they need to fund their 2024 campaigns. 

He's not entirely wrong: The entire RINO purge of the past 25 years revolved around the removal of more rational party leaders - Cantor, Boehner, Ryan - through successful primary ousters or the threats of them.

But it all depends on how many incumbent Republicans can be threatened by such challenges. If McCarthy can rally enough of the sitting GOP to his side - say, all but the 20 die-hard wingnuts aligned to Gaetz - the threat to primary them all can fall flat. And it could impress the deep-pocket PACs to avoid a party split, and let the Rationalists stay on the ballots to improve the odds of keeping the House after 2024.

Gaetz faces the possibility of expulsion for committing this coup - he is facing a House ethics inquiry that could hurt him where the earlier FBI investigations couldn't - but is gambling on the belief that McCarthy would not dare risk the slim party majority in the House the Republicans control at the moment. Thing is, McCarthy does have some wriggle room with at least a 5-seat lead over the Dems. He can happily afford to kick Gaetz out of Congress - along with a scandal-plagued Matt Santos - and live with the remaining wingnuts who might realize such public stunts can backfire. Given the gerrymandered nature of congressional districts, McCarthy could well get those seats refilled by Republicans anyway during the rest of this congressional session, so the risk for him lessens.

I'm not predicting anything: Last time I tried - the looming Shutdown last week - I whiffed.

We're going to have to see if the House Republicans will stand with their Speaker or fall into infighting and chaos.

In the meantime, the popcorn should be ready and hot.

(Update 10/3): I'm seeing reports on Twitter the Motion to Vacate vote is scheduled this afternoon. Reuters has verified it, noting that McCarthy has not gone to the Democrats to see about making a deal to avoid getting kicked out. That means the Dems may vote as a bloc to vacate, even though they know this could lead to utter chaos. The Democrats are reportedly telling reporters that they won't help McCarthy because he's broken several promises earlier this term (and an unspoken level of anger that McCarthy rolled over for the extremists to start that clown show of an impeachment inquiry).

That means whatever it takes to Vacate, it's all on the Republicans to do. I'm seeing the number needed around 20 Republicans to do so, and it's a question if Gaetz truly has that in his pocket. If he does, hoo boy, this all goes nuclear. And then it becomes a question of which idiot volunteers to be the next GOP Speaker.

(Further Update): Motion to Vacate was tabled and 11 Republicans sided with Democrats to let the vote proceed. Apparently I am STILL wrong on the math: Gaetz doesn't need 20 he needs 6, and if those 11 Republicans carry through on the motion that would mean the end of McCarthy's Speakership.

(Follow-up to the Further Update): As of 4:45 PM EDT, the House voted to remove Speaker Kevin McCarthy, a historic first. McCarthy lost the support of I believe nine Republicans in a 216-210 final (several Democrats and Republicans were absent for various reasons).

Once again, this isn't the fault of Democrats. It was up to the Republicans to stay united, and they couldn't. This chaos is on them. It's been on them the last 30 years.

(Final Update On This): The House is apparently adjourning until next Tuesday, meaning the Republicans are going to stretch this out on the calendar as much as they can.

Without a full Speaker, nothing in the House will get done until that's resolved. So Gaetz and his allies get the shutdown they want for the next few weeks (and if they can extend out past the 45-day CR, the shutdown will turn real).

It now becomes a question of what the various GOP factions will do, if they will rally around one decisive figure or else split into factions between candidates. It will be obvious whoever does replace McCarthy, that person will inherit the same broken model of leadership and face the same fate sooner rather than later during this term.

It's now a matter of history to look at McCarthy's tenure as Speaker - one of the shortest, and the first to suffer at the hands of his own party like this - and judge how badly he did at it.

As Minority Leader during the last days of the trump Presidency, he failed to hold trump accountable for what happened on January 6th. Instead, McCarthy played to trump's ego, posing and preening so that the MAGA voter base would accept him as a dutiful acolyte to trump's hostility and fearmongering. It still didn't save him.

When he tried for the Speakership, McCarthy pandered to the worst factions among the Republicans, trading off every favor he could just so he could claim the high office. And it still didn't save him.

McCarthy played to the fears and rage of the Fox News audiences, offered them every lie, provided every justification, just so he could stay Speaker for a little while longer. He still fell from power in one of the most humiliating events in American history.

It wasn't worth it, Kevin. Selling your soul to the worst people of your party wasn't worth it.

And the Republicans still have far to fall.

Twitter Now Has a New Master

Well, back in April a fellah by the name of Elon Musk was trying to buy his way onto the board of the publicly-owned Twitter company, but got stymied by the rules and then decided to waste $44 billion to buy the social media app outright.

Well, after months of Musk trying to weasel his way out of the deal - when it proved to hurt his overall net worth - only to have the Twitter board sue in Chancery court - yes, that is a thing - to force Musk to buy them out - hey, $44 billion ain't nothing to sneeze at - this week an arrangement was finalized and Musk now owns Twitter.

Well, what the FUCK happens now?

If we go with what Shirin Ghaffary says at Vox Recode: 

Until relatively recently, Musk’s primary business interests were in building electric cars, rockets, and underground tunnels. Now, he will have to figure out a new, very different business challenge: how to effectively run a social media platform that’s used by nearly 400 million people — including highly influential world leaders, journalists, and other public figures — and deal with the political speech moderation issues that come with that. Musk also needs to figure out a better business model for the company. Twitter has never made nearly as much money as its social media competitors like Facebook and YouTube, and along with other major tech companies, it has also seen a major decline in its stock value in the past year. According to a recent report in Reuters, the service’s most active and lucrative users have been leaving in droves since the pandemic...

That last part is kind of shocking to me. Social media like Twitter was the only way we could keep in touch during the COVID pandemic! Anyway:

Musk’s most consistent messaging about why he wants to buy Twitter is that he wants it to be an open digital town square of ideas, without intervention. He has said that he will allow anyone to say anything they want on the platform, as long as it’s legal...

The recent proliferation of “free speech”-themed platforms like Parler, Truth Social, and Gettr have shown that if you let anyone say whatever they want on a social media app, there’s a good chance that app could become a hate-filled, toxic place — which is why even these relatively more lax platforms have some basic content moderation policies.

There’s a lot of perfectly legal stuff you can say that is unpleasant to look at: racial slurs, graphic violent content, bullying, spam (more on that later). That type of content is generally bad for business because most users — and advertisers — don’t want to be around it...

It should be noted that after one day of crowing "free speech," Musk changed his tune and is "setting up a committee on content moderation" to set rules, hinting at the reality that the advertisers keeping Twitter afloat REALLY want moderation to work. But I can't see how Musk can establish a safe and working public forum if he goes through on his earlier calls to un-ban donald trump: 

...Musk’s comments about bringing back Trump, paired with his free speech mantra, has made him popular with conservatives who have long felt censored by Twitter and other social media companies, despite the fact that there hasn’t been tangible evidence of systematic anti-conservative bias and conservative influencers continue to have massive followings on platforms like Twitter.

While many conservatives would cheer Trump’s return to Twitter, it would simultaneously prompt major resistance from people, many of them liberal, who argue that his tweets pose a threat to a peaceful democracy. We’ll see how Elon is prepared to handle that blowback if he does reinstate the former president...

It won't be pretty. I know a handful of fellow Tweeters who will flee in protest if the Rioter-in-Chief is brought back without anything reining in trump's worst impulses, and I may jump off the platform myself if it happens.

The problem with trump isn't a matter of Free Speech, it's Hate Speech: trump is a prime example of how Hate Speech undermines the public discourse, and increases the risk of violence towards those regardless if they're on social media or not. I think I've argued before about the damage of Hate Speech, and that it shouldn't be given First Amendment protections. The foundation of any Hate Speech is lies - distortions and insults and defaming characterizations of people to dehumanize them - and every result of Hate Speech are acts of violence like mass shootings at churches, temples, schools, shopping malls, pretty much everywhere.

Elon Musk - who has never shown much understanding outside of marketing himself as a business genius and Futurist technophile - doesn't seem to understand the seriousness of the First Amendment debates. The constant struggle between allowing individuals the right to speak their minds but countering the civil right needs to protect other individuals who can get harmed by hateful rhetoric.

If Musk is buying into Twitter as a foothold into an effort to buy into social media to expand the app into a larger, life-dominating platform, he's going to have to come to terms with what's harmful and what's safe.

I honestly don't think he understands the pitfalls he's about to face.

I honestly think Twitter is going to get fucked up in a bad way.

The Aftermath of trumpian Scandals, Still Acted Out

One of the sadder thoughts I carry with me is how - looking back on it now - I had so much hope that the Mueller Report - into Russia's involvement in the 2016 Elections cycle and their involvement in trump's attacks on the American electoral process - would expose all of trump's sins and hold him accountable.

Alas.

Even with all that Mueller did find regarding the Russian end of the scandal - which produced real results, numerous arrests/plea deals/convictions, and exposed the facts of how foreign influence in our elections is an ongoing problem - the investigation closed - thanks to incoming Attorney General William Barr who rewrote and redacted the final report - before any direct links between trump's 2016 campaign and Russian operatives could be proved. At best, Mueller found evidence that trump obstructed the investigation, but he couldn't pursue an arrest and tried to get Congress to file impeachment (which they failed to do. The Democratic House decided to impeach over trump's misdeeds with Ukrainian military aid). 

That should have been, for better and worse, the end of that.

Except for trump's misbegotten narcissism, which casts himself as both Hero and Victim with every action taken against him.

Just as the Mueller investigation wound down, trump kept pushing the narrative that the FBI shouldn't have been investigating him for his ties to Russia in the first place. he insisted on a conspiracy theory that the "evidence" that started the Mueller probe was tainted: That it came from a hastily written and half-proved Steele Report that was started by Republican operatives trying to stop trump during the 2016 Primaries, instead of the FBI getting bits and pieces from other criminal investigations and clues well before the Steele Report was even started. trump argued, and kept screaming ever after, that he was the victim of an illegal spying campaign by both Obama and then Hillary Clinton using their ties to the FBI to embarrass the "ever-innocent donald trump."

So as Barr entered the scene to shut down Mueller's probe, Barr also fished around for a special prosecutor to follow up trump's claims of victimhood, and found one in US Attorney John Durham in Connecticut to handle that investigation.

Tasked with finding any malfeasance among the FBI investigators, and with any persons in Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaigns that may have done any illegal misdeeds, Durham has spent the last three years following any accusation that trump and his handlers insisted were real.

To summarize what Durham found during his witch hunt investigation into the FBI and Hillary's campaign: Not a lot.

If I can refer to Margaret Carlson at Washington Monthly about the uselessness of Durham's efforts:

Durham’s mission was impossible. Robert Mueller successfully convicted every bad actor he’d charged—more than three dozen—and stopped short of Trump because of a Justice Department memo saying a sitting president couldn’t be indicted. Mueller’s investigation was investigated and found to be predicated on sufficient, credible evidence by Inspector General Michael Horowitz. Republicans on the Senate Intelligence Committee agreed. They had to, there’s so much out there...

Barr set the tone for the inquiry by taking Durham on a James Bond–like three-star hotel, four-star eating tour of Rome to interview a peculiar professor we would never hear about again. From there, the probe dragged on. In 2021, Durham eked out a guilty plea from the former FBI attorney Kevin Clinesmith that he altered an email, with information he believed was true, to quickly fill out a surveillance warrant on Page, who frequented Moscow. Durham wanted Clinesmith, the first in his family to go to college and with a wife expecting their first child, to be incarcerated for six months for behavior that showed “his strong political views and/or personal dislike of [Trump].” Manna to Trump, if he were paying attention. The judge gave Clinesmith one year of probation (Editor's note: not even much of a slap on the wrist)...

If you recall Mueller's work - and several other special counsel probes throughout the decades - one of the key tools is getting lower-rung persons involved in shenanigans to plead out and then flip the higher-ups they can prove were committing other illegal acts. You can see Durham was trying to get several people he caught in relatively minor lies into flipping. And yet, none did.

Because no matter how much trump - and trump's cultists - yell and scream about it, the most likely scenario about how the FBI did its job investigation trump and the Russians is that, well, the FBI did its job. The people in Hillary's and Obama's orbits had no reason to flip for Durham because there was nothing really there in the first place.

Leading up to Durham's biggest failure yet to turn a gaslit lie into fact (back to Carlson):

The question is urgent after a Washington, D.C., jury returned a verdict of Not Guilty in Durham’s biggest case to date, charging the lawyer Michael Sussman with making a false statement. It followed on a meeting Sussman had with the FBI general counsel, James Baker, to inform him about information he had been given about curious activity between the computer servers of Donald Trump’s campaign and the Alfa Bank of Russia. Baker told Durham that Sussman hadn’t revealed his firm’s connections to Hillary Clinton’s campaign, although he admitted that his memory on the point had evolved. 

That gave Durham a premise for charging Sussman with a false statement by omission. It gives the rest of us a premise for thinking Durham is a Justice Department careerist out of gas. After the (Not Guilty) verdict, the jury foreperson said that the government’s time “could have been spent more wisely” than on a “possible lie to the FBI.”

Whatever Sussman did (which is so meager an omission and so minor an issue), to the jury it didn't rise to the level of guilt that Durham (and trump) needed. The truth about Sussman's warning to Baker didn't even seem to be at issue. Durham just wanted to catch someone close to Hillary in a lie. No one else bought it.

Without that guilty verdict, Durham's next court trial - going after Russian Igor Danchenko, accused of lying to the FBI about the contents of the Steele Dossier - is looking more like a show trial beating a dead trumpian horse.

I'm not the person you need to read on all of the miscues and screwups of Durham's flawed probe. Emptywheel is a far more dedicated and informed resource, and this is just one of many things she found wrong in Durham's work:

This entire three year process was launched with no evidence that a crime was committed, and it seems likely that only the Kevin Clinesmith prosecution, which DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz handed Durham months after he was appointed as a fait accompli and which could easily have been prosecuted by the DC US Attorney’s Office, provided an excuse to convene a grand jury to start digging in the coffers of Fusion GPS and Perkins Coie.

There was no crime. Durham was never investigating a suspected crime and then, as statutes of limitation started expiring, he hung a conspiracy theory on a claimed false statement for which he had no solid proof. Eight months into Durham repeating those conspiracy theories at every turn — conspiracy theories that Durham admitted would not amount to a crime in any case! — a jury told Durham he had inadequate proof a crime was committed and that the entire thing had been a waste of time and resources...

Compare that to the Russian investigation, which was started to figure out which Trump associate had advance knowledge of Russia’s criminal hack-and-leak operation and whether they had any criminal exposure in it...

The answer, by the way, was that at least two Trump associates had advance knowledge, George Papadopoulos and Roger Stone, and Stone shared his advance knowledge with Rick Gates, Paul Manafort, Steve Bannon, and Donald Trump, among others. By all appearances, DOJ was still investigating whether Stone had criminal exposure tied to his advance knowledge when Barr interfered in that investigation in February 2020, a fact that Barr hid until the day before the 2020 election.

With the Russian investigation, there was a crime: a hack by a hostile nation-state of a Presidential candidate, along with evidence that her opponent at least knew about the related leak campaign in advance. With the Durham investigation, there were only Fox News conspiracy theories and the certainty that Donald Trump shouldn’t be held accountable for encouraging Russia to hack his opponent...

There should be some sense of relief from those of us on the sidelines watching this theater of the absurd play out to a diminished whimper. It would be nice if it did.

But trump will not let go of his fear and his rage and his victimhood. He kept screaming after the decision that the "legal system is CORRUPT" and isn't letting this damage to his ego go away.

For trump, the grievance is the only way he can convince everyone else he wasn't in cahoots with Putin to fuck up our elections. And he wants to clear a path to redo those dirty tricks when 2024 rolls around.

Gods help us. This train wreck isn't over yet.