unraveling

27.Feb.2019

Punch lines

There will be a lot (more) said about today's hearing. Reading the seven (!) NYT's reporters' live chat from the morning, I was struck by how steeped they all are in the evidence that's unfolded for the past three years, and how much they've discounted it all. But hearing Michael Cohen say it out loud, to a Congressional hearing, to describe in detail the president's grifting and lies, packed a wallop. To see two of Trump's "bodyguards" in the House, Mark Meadows and Jim Jordan, completely dismiss any and all of the content of what Cohen has to say and only try to attack him as a not credible witness, given all that's been exposed, no matter how much corroboration the DOJ and SDNY have already dug up, and new (to us) bits in his statement's exhibits, was truly remarkable.

To have Mark Meadows bring in a black woman who works for Trump to point at her as evidence that the president could not really be a racist, my god.

All that led up to this, the money quote for the day, just before the first break:

"I did the same thing that you're doing now for ten years. I protected Mr. Trump for ten years," Cohen said.

"The more people that follow Mr. Trump as I did blindly are going to suffer the same consequences that I'm suffering."

Here's the 53-second clip, embedded in a tweet from @TomNamako.

I come not to praise Caesar, but to bury him

First thing on my twitter machine this morning, the prepared remarks of Michael Cohen, former "fixer" for Donald J. Trump, now at the bottom of a ton of legal trouble devolved from that long-time career.

I read it out loud, in its entirety, off my phone, to myself and to my wife. And then sat down to see Cohen deliver it, live, via C-SPAN3, to the House Oversight and Reform Committee.

"For the record, 'Individual #1' is President Donald J. Trump."

"Since taking office, he has become the worst version of himself."

"I am ashamed because I know what Mr. Trump is.
"He is a racist.
"He is a conman.
"He is a cheat."

Updates: my live-tweeting thread.

Mr. Cooper (D-TN) asks Cohen what was the tipping point. Several things.
"Helsinki, Charlottesville. the daily destruction of our civility." He calls out the minority, stabbing his finger toward them.

"I did the same thing you're doing now. I protected Mr. Trump for 10 years."

— Tom von Alten (@fortboise) February 27, 2019

26.Feb.2019

Memorandum of misunderstanding

Before he stumbled into the oval office, our current president had a remarkable career of running businesses into the ground, making something out of almost nothing (other than the $413 million leg up from his dad's success at grifting), building his "brand," cheating business associates, contractors, and the hapless general public. Then the stint as a reality TV star. He's convinced himself, at least, that he's the smartest guy about everything.

Robert Lighthizer is the odd duck in the Trump cabinet: someone with significant relevant experience for the job, and apparent competence. So imagine the scene... oh hell, you don't have to imagine it, there's video of the back-and-forth between the US Trade Representative and his boss, hammering out the finer points of legal jargon, while the rest of the cabinet's "brain trust" of Steven Mnuchin, Larry Kudlow, and Wilbur Ross looked on.

U.S. News & World Report has the story, but really, you have to watch the video.

With Lighthizer's Chinese counterpart sitting next to him, and a gaggle of reporters in the room, the president expressed his displeasure with Memoranda of Understanding.

"I don't like MOUs because they don't mean anything. To me they don't mean anything. I think you're better off just going into a document. I was never ... a fan of an MOU," Trump said.

Lighthizer corrected him. "An MOU is a contract. It's the way trade agreements are generally used [sic] ... A Memorandum of Understanding is a binding agreement between two people," Lighthizer said. "It's a legal term, it's a contract," he said.

Trump hit back, "By the way, I disagree," and the Chinese trade representative chuckled nervously. The president goes on to patronize Lighthizer in the middle of his counterfactual blabber by saying "but to me the final contract is really the thing, Bob, and I think you mean that too."

As Trump rambled on nonsensically, pumping his invisible accordion, Lighthizer had the chance to absorb the blow, come up with a solution, and move on.

"What... From now on we're not using the word Memorandum of Understanding anymore. We're going to use the, the, the term trade agreement, all right?" he said. ("Good," Trump interjects.) "No more, we'll never use the term ... we'll have the same document, it's going to be called a 'trade agreement,' we're never going to use 'MOU' again."

"Are they going to put that into another agreement?" Trump asks, someone incredulous at how easily he has quashed "MOU" forever. "I like that much better," Trump says, "I like that term much better."

Bravo to Carlos Barria and his lucky location, primed to open the shutter to capture the moment for Reuters and posterity:

Zip it

The 3 year old Lifehacker video, How to Fix Every Zipper Issue had 2,379,804 views when I spun it up this morning, and hundreds of comments, many pointing out not every issue. Whatever. On lifehacker itself, if you like a blog presentation, How to Fix Every Common Zipper Problem. Again with the "Every." wikiHow offers, succinctly, How to Fix a Broken Zipper, with good photos and a positive attitude.

marcellahella's How to Fix a Zipper on Instructables is woefully uncomprehensive, but I love the very large detailed pictures of the one she fixed.

Hadn't heard about using graphite for this lubrication issue, but I imagine it would work, and delivered from a pencil wouldn't have the messiness problem of the tube of powdered graphite I have for locks. I've used nose oil in a pinch out in the field, with limited success. (May not have a pencil handy, but I've always got my nose.)

And on down the search stack: familyhandyman.com, sewguide.com, oureverydaylife.com, ohmy-creative.com, ifixit.org, and here's commercial quality advice from REI: How to Fix a Sleeping Bag Zipper. Narrowly titled, but more generally applicable. Do they, uh, sell those zipper parts?! Who knew, zippers come in numbered sizes, #1 through #10, explained by the FixnZip® people, who have a two-piece replacement slider they'd be happy to sell you in lieu of repair. Oureverydaylife tells you How to Identify a Zipper Size. (Shorter: look for a number on the bottom of the slide.)

One of the bad zippers at our house is in the "replace slider" realm, the pull having exited with a chunk of the diecast slider body that captured it. (The hem-end of ski bibs is a seriously hazardous environment.) Step 1 is "find a replacement slider." A #4 slider. Sounds like a job for thrift store shopping, maybe.

21.Feb.2019

That did not go well

It's all upside for Jim Risch, aka Senator James Risch (R-Idaho), aka the newly minted chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and professed "friend" of the president. "I really give the President a lot of credit," he said early and often, and asked to criticize any action by the president, any of the falsehoods the president trucks in, daily, well, homey don' play dat.

Credit to Tim Sebastian interviewing Risch for DW at the Munich Security Conference, and we wish we had more of this kind of interview happening stateside, to put our leaders on the spot with pointed questions, and yes, to make them sweat profusely in air-conditioned hotel rooms.

The good Senator apparently expected a lot more deference, and more in the way of softball questions.

Starting with the Iran agreement, Risch claimed "we didn't walk out of it," when that is e.x.a.c.t.l.y what we did. And then bullied our allies to join us, including sending the Vice President to tell them what to do. (Talk about air conditioning! Pence's reception was totally chill.)

The fact that he didn't get what he wanted out of the agreement made by the Obama administration is... actually beside the point. Unless the point he was trying to make is that the United States can't be trusted to keep its commitments, based on the whims of one party in Congress.

Also, did he mention that he's on the Senate Intelligence Committee? Yes, he did, so he Knows Things That He Can't Talk About.

Then Risch tried to tone-police Sebastian, including him of being "hostile." All I can say is, there haven't been enough people asking him tough questions, have there.

Challenged as to the TRUTH of one of Trump's factually incorrect statements, Risch says "I wasn't there." Are you... here now, sir? Debate? Argue? Risch is acting like he's in a boxing match, and it's just a reporter asking him pointed questions.

"The INF is another issue that we think you have a great, great stake in."

Sebastian did not follow that lead, say with a question about he US deciding to unilaterally withdraw from that agreement, and what that does for Europe, exactly.

"We are the first branch of government," Risch mansplains to the reporter, who, you might understand, would have been unaware, given the lapdog performance of the Senate Majority Leader and almost the whole of the Republican Party.

"We're not doin' very well here," Risch complains when called to task to represent the country, and the Senate Foreign Relations committee. "You're doin' it again."

What about the killing of Jamal Khashoggi, and the US' failure to hold Saudi Arabia fully accountable?

"Look, there's nobody... I, I hope you're not thinking that there's somebody who is soft on this, that thinks that this is alright. This is not alright."

Risch used his favorite tactic, all the secrets he knows about but can't divulge. That lets the president, and his son-in-law, who actually do come across as a little soft on this, off the hook. The founders never imagined the "First" branch of government to have so menial a role as Risch is content to play.

19.Feb.19

Stop the insanity

The videorecorded super-chill reception our vice president and chief toady Mike Pence received from the Munich Security Conference is making the rounds for comedic effect, but it's not quite so laughable when viewed in the larger context that Roger Cohen provided in an op-ed yesterday. Javanka were there to kiss and cheer the veep, and apparently nothing else. Not exactly a good venue for their side-hustles.

"As it was, Pence went on the attack. He inflicted on the audience an extraordinary exercise in obsequiousness, arrogance and mawkishness: obsequiousness toward President Trump, whose name seemed to appear in every other sentence as some God-given fount of wisdom; arrogance toward the Europeans who were admonished, as vassals, to tear up the multilateral Iran nuclear deal, which is enshrined through a United Nations resolution in international law; and mawkishness over a visit to Auschwitz last week that was used to convey a message to Europeans that if they did not obey American orders on Iran they are de facto anti-Semites.

"The overall effect was B-movie bizarre and offensive, a careful-what-you-wish-for warning to any Democrat tempted by impeachment of Trump. ..."

Back at home, Mr. I-Alone-Can-Fix-It's edifice complex and his make-believe "crisis" has run into resistance from the States of California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Michigan's Attorney General on behalf of the people of her state, and the Commonwealth of Virginia, for its "flagrant disregard of fundamental separation of powers principles engrained in the United States Constitution."

Unlike the president's free-form Rose Garden word salad, the 57 page complaint is coherent, and fact-based. For example:

"6. There is also no objective basis for President Trump’s Emergency Declaration. By the President’s own admission, an emergency declaration is not necessary. The federal government’s own data prove there is no national emergency at the southern border that warrants construction of a wall. Customs and Border Protection (“CBP”) data show that unlawful entries are near 45-year lows. The State Department recognizes there is a lack of credible evidence that terrorists are using the southern border to enter the United States. Federal data confirm that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than are native-born Americans. CBP data demonstrate that dangerous drugs are much more likely to be smuggled through, not between, official ports of entry—rendering a border wall ineffectual at preventing their entry into this country."

The president has, as all of my readers well know, left a voluminous record of what has been on his mind, and the complaint picks up the breadcrumbs going back to 2014, when WALL became a permanent fixture in his mind.

As a mnemonic to keep him from wandering into the swamp of his ever-less structured thinking, it has worked far too well. It now surrounds the "emergency" in his mind, created by the "unreasonable" people in Congress who would not give him what he wants, would not give him "a fair deal." Also, unreasonable people write down what he says.

160. At a press conference announcing the Executive Actions, President Trump acknowledged that Congress provided more than enough funding for homeland security, and that the Administration has “so much money, we don’t know what to do with it.” In explaining his rationale for the Executive Actions, the President candidly admitted that the emergency declaration reflected his personal preference to construct the wall more quickly, rather than an actual urgent need for it to be built immediately: “I could do the wall over a longer period of time. I didn’t need to do this. But I’d rather do it much faster.”

Reporters, members of Congress, and state officials are also paying attention to the heads of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Federal Bureau of Investigation, and Central Intelligence Agency, and what they have to say about international threats to the United States. None of those officials said there is a security crisis at the US-Mexico border when they testified at the Senate Intelligence Committee on January 29. Similarly, there is no evidence that a border wall will decrease crime rates, or impede drug smuggling. The prayer for relief asks (among other things) that the Court

3. Permanently enjoin Defendants from constructing a border wall without an appropriation by Congress for that purpose; and

4. Permanently enjoin Defendants from diverting federal funding toward construction of a border wall.

18.Feb.2019

The deregulation boon

I was a week late getting to the print version of the story about the Brazilian tailings dam that collapsed, killing more than 150 people. I see online, it's an interactive feature, starting with a short video loop of the moment when it started disintegrating in full, and then following the so-called Tidal Wave of Mud over the mine headquarters, a hotel, farmland, and a residential area before it reached the Paraopeba river, 5 miles from where the dam used to be.

And I hadn't picked up on the earlier stories, on Jan. 27, Jan. 29, and Feb. 2. The first of those has a video ending with the scene of President Jair Bolsonaro flying over the disaster, and, next to the view of "after," this: "During his presidential campaign, he promised to reduce enforcement of environmental regulations."

The interactive shows the stepwise schematic of what's called an "upstream tailings dam," said to be "one of the oddest structures known to engineering," comprising a "starter dam" of compressed dirt, and a sequence of smaller dikes added on top, and tailing (sorry) upstream. To contain mine tailings that are nominally solidified, but are actually more of a "wet landfill" as one professor put it.

“There’s nothing blatantly wrong with this method of construction,” said W. Allen Marr, founder and chief executive of Geocomp, based in Boston, and a member of the national academy. When the structures fail, Mr. Marr said, “it’s usually a combination of several things that should have been done but don’t get done.”

That's slightly reassuring? This, not so much:

"A video of the Brumadinho collapse makes clear that the mud behind the dam did liquefy, experts who have seen it said. What is not clear is whether liquefaction caused the collapse, or followed it."

Or knowing that the dam had been "inactive for almost three years" and "had been certified as stable in September." Indeed, it did not collapse in September.

"In Brazil, given the dearth of government inspectors, companies are allowed to self-regulate, hiring independent auditors to verify dam safety through regular inspections and an analysis of written records — all provided by the company."

We see what could go wrong. And that they didn't see it coming, apparently.

“The dam had a safety factor in accordance with the world’s best practices,” Vale said in a statement. The structure, it said, had been inspected regularly, and the reports “attest to the physical and hydraulic safety of the dam.”

There are 87 other dams of this type in Brazil, 27 estimated to sit above cities or towns. How many in the US? Wikipedia reports an estimate of more than 3,000 worldwide, with the largest three in Canada, and the US. The Brumadinho dam disaster now tops the bullet list of failures in the "environmental damage" section.

Vale SA said it would dismantle 10 dams similar to this one that collapsed on January 25. That sounds better than "decommission," and way better than "de-characteriz[ing]" the structures as tailing dams.

Headlines that disappoint

The daily mail from LinkedIn inspires that title; they often succeed in a luring first line (aka "clickbait"), but what's on the other end has failed to deliver so often, I'm skipping the whole thing more often than not. But today's lead ("The one thing money should be buying") grabbed my attention a moment longer than usual, and I looked inside.

The one thing money should be buying is time, so I can save you some of that by just repeating the rhetorical question overlaid on the photo of someone on the beach (wasting time?), with sand slipping through her fingers. And a lovely bare thigh if you like that thing, very tasteful, and unintentionally comical. (At that age, sitting on the beach, money is no object, eh.)

"In a World of Growing Uncertainty, Top Performers Focus Their Energies Here," meh. "Can Companies Have Relationships?" (Who's going to care?) Someone named Jeff Jones has a headline "Transparency, choice and transformation – building the new Block," making me wonder what the next twist in blockchain might be, and a subhead:

"Fifteen months into my tenure, and almost halfway through my second tax season, I’ve been reflecting a lot on how far we’ve come..."

Blockchain and tax season? And second tax season, this one will be way different than last one, so I took the jump to find the "Block" is shorter for the already short H&R Block name you would recognize, and might or might not be interested in. A little, maybe. Then he wrote this:

"Consumers told us that assisted tax preparation was the only thing they purchased in life and had no idea what they were going to pay until the end."

Apparently Mr. Jones and the consumers he talked to have no personal dealings with the medical industrial complex. Close that.

What every remote worker should do within the first 30 days. The robots are coming for your job. Empowerment matters (especially for Women in Science). Why bad leaders put their own needs before others.

Or just try that without the "why."

Does 5G Cause Cancer? should be worth reading? Except it isn't, really. It's a breezy and pointless survey with some h.s. physics, followed by the conclusion "don't sweat it," paraphrasing only slightly. So, it's an open question as far as I'm concerned, and I'll watch for a more definitive guidance than the CEO at [sic] The Palmer Group has to write as an opinion piece.

I even scanned the comments, a little, as far as "A well written article that uses fact - not emotion," and ugh.

15.Feb.2019

Gimme that old time religion

There's a long list of things like to make your head explode this week, but how about nearly half—half!—of what's left of people who will call themselves Republicans so embedded in their cognitive dissonance that they think the Supreme Being wanted this man to be president.

For the "white evangelical" tranche, it's over half who were willing to tell a pollster that yes, they believe it. As Mehdi Hasan put it, "it's probably the best argment for atheism out there."

Either that, or you're longing for the Old Testament God, capricious to a fault, endorsing incest and mass murder, pillage and what-not, even to the point of wiping out the whole of humanity, save for one special family. Which, yeah, is about right where we are in the plot today.

Valentine's Day 2019

And now, the emergency

From January 20, 2017, through the end of 2018, the Republicans controlled both the House and Senate, and had installed their hijacker in the White House. The kitschy campaign slogan about a wall on the southern border that Mexico would pay for was lost in the chaotic noise for most of that, but it now demonstrates its utility as a mnemonic device for a man who can't seem to stay on-topic for a whole sentence, let alone a paragraph.

Build the wall.

He couldn't even stick with that. At the most recent rally, it had morphed into FINISH THE WALL, which, ok, there has been some wall (and fencing, and steel slats, vehicle barriers, what-not) for quite some time, so technically correct, in a weird way. (We don't expect anything the president says these days to be correct.)

Facing another round of whithering criticism from Fox News harpy Ann Coulter, and his bedtime phone pal Sean Hannity, SOMETHING had to be done, and who better to enable SOMETHING than the Senate's Majority Leader and quisling-in-chief, Mitch McConnell.

THE NATIONAL EMERGY IS OK WITH ME McConnell told his colleagues in the Senate. Thank god he'll sign the dog's breakfast spending bill, and no one will talk about how the FY2019 budget should have been done 4 or 5 months ago, back when the GOP controlled the Congress.

Instead we'll be talking about the full-on Constitutional crisis enabled by the Congress' long-term fecklessness and the rise of autocracy, driven by fascist ideology under cover of the "theory" of the "unitary executive." (That is, until the president tries to get his newly minted AG to fire Bob Mueller, and the crisis kicks into third gear.)

Peter Schuck: The Real Problem With Trump’s National Emergency Plan is that the president "may actually possess the legal authority to require agencies to waste billions of dollars simply to fulfill a foolish campaign promise he thinks won him the election."

"In hundreds of laws, Congress has given the president the power to decide. (The Brennan Center for Justice has compiled an exhaustive list.) But by failing to define crucial terms, legal standards and accountability rules, Congress has handed presidents an all-too-handy tool of tyranny commonly used by autocrats to amass more power, crush dissent and eviscerate democratic institutions. In Mr. Trump’s case, it has handed an unguided missile to an ignorant, impetuous man-child."

As crazy as all that sounds

Liz Cheney, spawn of "Dick" and Wyoming's offering to GOP nepotism, is sending political spam my way, at least 3 in the last 2 days, addressing me as "Friend." Wouldn't that be a thing?

She and her fellow GOP members are talking about taking back the House, naturally, and using the most caricature of strawmen to giddyup. Seems appropriate enough for them to put it on a bullet list, here on Valentine's Day, notorious for that other mob boss, Al Capone, and now the one year anniversary of the Parkland mass shooting. The "true" political ideology of the left-wing party of NO! is, she tells me, based on:

• No God
• No Second Amendment
• No Protection for Babies
• No Free Speech
• No Freedom of Religion
• No Airplanes
• No Cars
• No Cows

You hardly need to say "crazy" and "wholly misguided" and "dangerous," and "totally unhingined," right?

"The contrast between House Democrats and House Republicans couldn’t be starker."

Amen, sister. What with Fearless Leader making a mockery of religion, democracy, decency, honesty, integrity, and respect for the rule of law, and how long the right wing has been going along for that ride.

But wait, there's more.

Rep. Gym Jordan is in the news, or the next best thing, Twitter, to enumerate the "un-elected" members of the Department of Justice who have been fired, demoted, and/or resigned during the current administration, and saying that they "all plotted against the president."

Kevin Kruse responds with the first draft of history on that:

So these non-political law enforcement officers were investigating the president for possible crimes and they were all summarily fired?

That's an argument you're making in *support* of the president?

Good luck with that, champ.

— Kevin M. Kruse (@KevinMKruse) February 14, 2019

Speaking of nepotism and unelected officials, what is up with the William Barr family business? The patriarch awaits his Senate confirmation vote for Attorney General, and he's got a daughter and son-in-law already embedded, although the latter is on his way to the White House counsel's office.

I'm sure that's perfectly normal, too.

Updates:
That 1:27 snippet from Andrew McCabe on 60 Minutes (that Jordan retweeted to deride) is definitely worth a listen.

And the Senate confirmed Barr, 54-45. Party on, dudes.

8.Feb.2019

The tangled web coming into focus

Jonathan Rauch and Peter Wehner's point that getting out of the swamp will take some Republicans seems likely true. What will be the tipping point? They're fine with the attacks on the press, up to and including murder, and the parade of indictments, guilty pleas and convictions swirling around the chief grifter have so far been ignored. Our you-cannot-be-serious executive doth tweet-shout too much that it's a GIANT AND ILLEGAL HOAX.

The criminality "by the president or those closest to him (including family members)" hasn't been "clear" enough yet, really? The Trump Tower meeting with Junior, Jared, Manafort and Russian agents in June, 2016, with Senior dictating a cover-up letter wasn't clear? Trump firing the FBI director to get out from under "this Russiar thing" and then laughing with the Russian Foreign Minister and Ambassador in the Oval Office with the Russian press agency and no US media sitting in does leave some things to the imagination, but it's nothing if not clear.

And yet that may have been too much in plain sight. Will Bunch's twitter thread about "last night's bombshell developments," about the "tangled web involving the Saudis, MBS, their allies, Team Trump, global hacking rings, Khashoggi, the Washington Post and Bezos" could be what "take[s] everything down." One of our very own oligarchs, who wouldn't be blackmailed.

There is apparently direct evidence that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia threatened to murder Jamal Khashoggi, who is now "a close ally of the Trump White House," and its "senior adviser" Jared Kushner.

There was another Trump Tower meeting during the campaign, summer of 2016, reported on by the NYT last May, that was arranged by mercenary specialist Erik Prince, and including "two wealthy Arab princes" and "an Israeli specialist in social media manipulation," whose company had "drawn up a multimillion-dollar proposal ... to help elect Mr. Trump." That was during Junior's "I love it" phase. There were continuing meetings with Kushner and Michael Flynn.

That's quite a lot of work for the Special Counsel's team to unravel, but I suspect they're up to the task. While you're helping with the election, could you also help finance some of Kushner's funky real estate deals? How about David Pecker's Saudi propanda deals?

Just what will be too much for the cuckolded GOP to quietly accept? Back to Wehner and Rauch:

"There may be no single smoking-gun tape in Mr. Trump’s case, but the sheer weight of financial and ethical wrongdoing could become too much, even for many Republicans. And today’s Republican politicians, while more partisan than in Nixon’s day, remain acutely sensitive to public opinion. If some combination of criminality, incompetence or crisis moves the center-right against the president, his end could come quickly."

Which will still not be before one hell of a lot of damage has been done.

"The most troubling — and from our point of view the most disappointing — development of the Trump era is not the president’s own election and subsequent behavior; it is the institutional corruption, weakness and self-betrayal of the Republican Party. The party has abandoned its core commitments to constitutional norms, to conservative principles and even to basic decency. It has allowed itself to be hijacked by a reality television star who is a pathological liar, emotionally unsteady and accountable only to himself. And it has embraced presidential conduct that, if engaged in by a Democrat, it would have been denounced as corrupt, incompetent and even treasonous."

6.Feb.2019

You've got to pick up every stitch

The southern border wall wasn't actually born as "campaign-rally red meat" as much as a convenient, bland, talking point that a man with an infamously short attention span could reliably remember. As with any catchy phrase ("drain the swamp"), if the crowd loves it, it stays part of the schtick. Which is, ah, "great" for campaigning, but for governing, not so much. Long after a wider, taller, longer, and "more powerful" wall had lost even tepid same-party support, the little dictator could not get it out of his mind.

The jingoistic scapegoating of immigrants is the beat Trump's speechwriters are working to drum up support for the lost cause. Is there anything those e-legals can't ruin for true blue patriots? As comically as the president* is claiming credit for everything we like ("I accomplished the military"), he's blaming every imaginable ill on the foreign menace. Lost your job? Didn't get a raise? Can't afford healthcare? Your kid is failing 5th grade? Crime in the streets? You Know Who Did It.

But this is not actually a demonstrable emergy, even with more troops (and—ahem—fewer Guardsman) rushing south, so this is awkward. How's he going to keep the excitement going after Feb. 15 comes and no one wants to go another round of shutdown? Damn the torpedoes and stop paying millions of federal workers and contractors again? Or just declare victory with a "strategically" see-through barrier.

Yeah, that's right, it'll be the Emperor's New Wall.

4.Feb.2019

What have you got to lose?

If you were banking on Canada's biggest cryptocurrency exchange, QuadrigaCX, the answer might be your share of $190 million. That's only a couple grand on average (115,000 clients), but still, it seems irksome. The founder died sooner than he expected to, and... didn't share his password with anyone. Awkward.

Groundhog Day

Duck and cover

The midcentury headline is back in style again, with the U.S. abrogating the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, one of the Ronald Reagan administration's (and Gorbachev's) most important accomplishments. As drily noted in the New York Times report, "some experts are skeptical."

“Nobody in the administration has laid out what the action-reaction cycle looks like as the United States makes all these moves — building new warheads, withdrawing from treaties, pursuing new missiles,” said Jon Wolfsthal, a nuclear expert on the National Security Council during the Obama administration.

“The enemy gets a vote,” he added. “The idea that we’re going to do these things, and they’re going to stand still, is nonsensical. They’re going to respond for both political and military reasons.”

One thing is clear: If a new arms race begins, it will be expensive. ...

We're looking to spend half a $trillion in a decade on "nuclear upgrades." What could go wrong?

It also occurs to me to wonder how much of the plan was decided by Vladimir Putin, and dictated in those secret meetings with Trump in recent months.

Congressional oversight has never been more needed, but one of the key committee chairs, Idaho's Senator Jim Risch heading Foreign Relations is a Trump Tower doormat. He issued a statement to say "I know that we have unanimity of our allies in the decision," which is presumptuous bullshit on his part. Deutsche Welle reports that Merkel's government "regrets" the decision, the German Foreign Minister saying that it puts Europe at risk, their Defense Minister emphasizing the importance of including "all NATO states" in the discussion, which of course they haven't been.

1.Feb.2019

The sabotage plan

The Koch brothers and their ilk are getting full value for the investment in deconstructing government, as the fetid swirl of current events distracts us from the underlying program that Nancy MacLean detailed in her 2017 book, Democracy in Chains: The deep history of the radical right's stealth plan for America.

However the captains of industry planned to bend the future to their will, it beggars my imagination to see it involving an ignoramus-King showing up to randomly break things, but here we are. One of the most over-the-top moments of the Trump Time was his in his nomination acceptance speech at the Republican national convention, when he said "I alone can fix it." It was preposterous, ludicrous, absurd, unbelievable, and cheered wildly at the rancid red meat.

In this interregnum between shutdowns (you know he's going to do it again; because he can), we have a moment to consider the depth of incompetence, and malevolance being carried out on the federal government. With most of the marginally decent, and capable adults gone run out of the room, we're down to Trump's closest, most complicit advisors and lieutenant fixers. The nepotic duo of Javanka, and the unexpectedly gigantic John Michael "Mick" Mulvaney, acting as most everything, risen up from a TEA Party backbench flamethrower into an all-purpose blunderbuss. You need a fiscal conservative? To lead the Office of Management and Budget? He's your man. Now let's blow up the deficit with a $trillion give-away to the people and enterprises who need it least.

Consumer Financial Protection Bureau offering too much protection? Not a problem! No one answering the call for Chief of Staff to a deranged narcissist? Mick is happy to step in, and doesn't mind an "acting" asterisk. Look at him go.

A week ago, the Washington Post reported that his organization acumen was being applied to "press[ing] agency leaders to provide him with a list of the highest-impact programs that will be jeopardized if the shutdown continues into March and April." He wanted it "by Friday" last week, which turned out to be the day that part 1 of the shutdown ended, hoist on the petard of air traffic control beginning to stop working, and Congress' Speaker barring the attention-mad president from a State of the Union audience in her House.

There were two million people with their paychecks cut off, less than half of them with an expectation of backpay being made up. A few of their stories were being shared, but if we give each one a minute, it would take almost four years for them all to be heard.

Mr. I-alone-can-fix-it might have felt a twinge of pique and annoyance, slightly flushed at "Nancy," as he calls her getting the best of him, but no interruption in the flow of hamberders into his feeding trough. The man who complained the White House was a "real dump," has visited a genuinely real dump on the nation. For example: Joshua Tree National Park could be centuries recovering from the Make American Great Again deputies.

The libertarian looters don't care much about small, midsize and rural transit systems, so what's their existential crisis to them? Transit users are not really their people. Politico reports that "some agencies, if they shut their doors, may never reopen" which is exactly what Steve Bannon and so many others had in mind. That's the "fix it." The Fix.

And in his next tranche of airtime, the president is bragging about all his "accomplishments," including "I accomplished the military." (Not bad for bonespur-hobbled draft dodger.) Also, did you hear? He single-handedly made the U.S. the largest economy in the world. In just two years on the job! He's accomplished so much.

raveling

Tom von Alten