monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

David Frum‏Verified account @davidfrum 15m15 minutes ago
Trump’s coverage was somewhat worse than Clinton’s. But his conduct was radically worse. Marginally worse coverage = very unfair treatment

Dave Weigel‏Verified account @daveweigel 2m2 minutes ago
Dave Weigel Retweeted Kayla Tausche
The national debt won't matter politically until the next Democratic president puts her hand on the bible.

Rush Limbaugh will be evacuating South Florida, just days after the popular conservative radio host claimed that Hurricane Irma would not hit the United States and that scientists and the liberal media were hyping up the hurricane as proof of their global warming “lie.”

LOU DOBBS (HOST): Donald Jr. saying he believed the attorney might have information about Hillary Clinton's fitness to serve as president. He wanted to hear her out which I think was very kind of him.

[...]

GREGG JARRETT: About an hour ago I was watching another channel, he said "oh it's a crime to have a foreign national be involved in your political campaign." That anchor didn't actually cite the statute because there is none. It's not a crime. In fact it's just the opposite.

DOBBS: Why do I think I know which network --

JARRETT: I think you know which network, we won't mention MSNBC's name. But all you have to do is go to the Federal Election Commission's website and it says, it cites the law and it says you are allowed as a foreign national to participate in a foreign campaign. You can sit in on meetings, you can provide information.

DOBBS: And Gregg by the way, was the first one to cite the FEC regulation. And here we are with this pretend news network going on about a pretend crime against a very real member of the president's family.

JARRETT: Yeah and his other crime according to the mainstream media is he said "I don't recall" several times which is an old lawyer trick. I used to drill it into my clients, unless you absolutely remember every detail of an event or a conversation say "I don't recall" because you can't get in trouble generally, if you say "I don't recall."

Greg Jarrett Lied. This is the actual law. https://www.google.com/url?... Read "Participation by foreign nationals in decisions involving election-related activities" They are prevented from doing so or giving information unless they have a green card. EDIT: "Commission regulations prohibit foreign nationals from directing, dictating, controlling, or directly or indirectly participating in the decision-making process of any person (such as a corporation, labor organization, political committee, or political organization) with regard to any election-related activities. Such activities include, the making of contributions, donations, expenditures, or disbursements in connection with any federal or nonfederal elections in the United States, or decisions concerning the administration of any political committee. Foreign nationals are also prohibited from involvement in the management of a political committee, including any separate segregated fund (SSF), nonconnected committee, or the nonfederal accounts of any of these committees. See Explanation and Justification for 11 CFR 110.20 at 67 FR 69946 (November 19, 2002) [PDF]."

From the FEC's own website:

The Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA) prohibits any foreign national from contributing, donating or spending funds in connection with any federal, state, or local election in the United States, either directly or indirectly. It is also unlawful to help foreign nationals violate that ban or to solicit, receive or accept contributions or donations from them. Persons who knowingly and willfully engage in these activities may be subject to fines and/or imprisonment.

https://transition.fec.gov/...

I would contend that the Office of the President of the United States has intrinsic value, and thus. information that would help secure that office also has value. making it a donation or contribution.

Lash wrote:

His novel "Between the World and Me" should get on the list of required college reading. I handed my copy off to a graduating student a couple of years ago.

An important voice.

Oh! So sorry! I forgot that me appreciating Ta'nehisi Coates doesn't jive with your cowardly narrative about me. Quick, hide this from your sight too, before your brain explodes!!

Lou Dobbs is another one who regularly misinforms his viewing public.

Betsy DeVos’s Title IX Rollback Is a Victory for Men’s-Rights Groups

While the bluntness of her language may have surprised some listeners, DeVos’s distaste for Obama’s approach to campus rape has not exactly been a secret. During her confirmation, critics noted that she and her husband had donated $10,000 to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), a group then actively campaigning against the “Dear Colleague” letter.

And then there was her infamous meeting this summer with several fringe men’s-rights groups, including one that has suggested as many as 90 percent of rape accusations are false (most experts think the real rate is somewhere between 2 and 10 percent) and another that recently published an article arguing that the “real reason” Democrats opposed DeVos so vociferously is that “[t]hey did not want to lose their most powerful weapon against men — false sexual abuse allegations.”

The “Dear Colleague” letter that caused so much wailing and gnashing of teeth among men’s-rights activists, conservatives, and libertarians was a policy statement from the Office for Civil Rights in the Education Department reminding college administrators that they have an obligation under Title IX to actively pursue rape cases and punish offenders in order to keep their school from becoming a hostile environment for women.

Especially controversial was the letter’s insistence that schools judge the merit of rape accusations by a “preponderance of evidence” standard rather than the more demanding “clear and convincing evidence” standard some had adopted for their campus rape tribunals. While “preponderance of evidence” is the standard in civil cases, critics say the lowered standard has deprived college men (and the occasional accused woman) of “due process,” turning college disciplinary proceedings into “kangaroo courts.” (Never mind that college tribunals are not courts of any kind, and college administrators cannot sentence anyone to prison.)

So what does DeVos propose as a replacement for this “failed system?” She’s got nothing.

That’s right. After torpedoing the “Dear Collegue” letter, she offers college administrators precisely zero guidance on how the Department of Education expects them to fulfill their Title IX responsibilities. Indeed, at one point, she seems to suggest that providing colleges with any kind of guidance is somehow anathema to democracy itself, complaining that “[f]or too long, rather than engage the public on controversial issues, the Department’s Office for Civil Rights has issued letters from the desks of unelected and unaccountable political appointees.”

If she has a plan, she doesn’t want us to know what it is. Instead of guidance, DeVos offers only a promise that her department “will launch a transparent notice-and-comment process to incorporate the insights of all parties in developing a better way.”

So the era of “rule by letter” is over, but the “better way” is yet to come. What exactly are college administrators expected to do in the in-between days? More to the point: What are victims of sexual assault on college campuses supposed to do?

Betsy DeVos literally has no answer.

Trump-administration lawyers want Masterpiece Cakeshop owner Jack Phillips to know they’ve got his back. Few plain civilians will remember Phillips, who has run a small bakery in Denver’s suburbs for nearly 25 years, but there’s an excellent chance they remember the drama caused by his refusal to bake a wedding cake back in 2012: David Mullins and Charlie Craig wanted a cake for their reception, Phillips said their request conflicted with his Christian beliefs, they went elsewhere, and the state of Colorado eventually ruled that he’d broken its anti-discrimination laws. Phillips appealed, taking the case all the way to the Supreme Court, which declined 11 times to hear it, but then reversed course in June.

The Justice Department, now under an administration with different ideas about gay rights, yesterday filed a brief on Phillips’s behalf, agreeing that his pro fondant skills are free speech.

So far, the courts have mostly disagreed that pastries are a form of self-expression, just like they’ve generally failed to recognize establishments’ rights to refuse business to customers simply for being gay. In Phillips’s case, the court said that “merely abiding by the law” doesn’t mean he supports same-sex marriage. Especially since he was making money selling wedding cakes, which made it about commerce, too, not just his First Amendment rights.

“Democrats got more done in a single Oval Office visit in one afternoon than the congressional Republicans have achieved all year,” complains one Republican operative. To conservatives who have distrusted Trump all along, this proved their suspicion that the president was not a true conservative. The deal is “a glimpse of how the ‘pivot’ to the center would work,” warns the Federalist’s Ben Domenech. “President Trump spent his first day as a Democratic president on Wednesday,” says Ben Shapiro. “At least we don’t have to suffer through any more earnest liberal think pieces about how Trump is actually an arch conservative,” argues Noah Rothman.

This point of view, which is close to the center of Establishment Republican thinking, has heavily inflected news coverage, which has amplified the intra-party backbiting. “President Trump, a man of few allegiances who seized control of the Republican Party in a hostile takeover, suddenly aligned himself with Democrats on Wednesday on a series of key fiscal issues,” blares the Washington Post.


These are not, in fact, “key fiscal issues.” Raising the debt ceiling is a pure mechanical operation that has happened with regularity under both parties. Trump may have submitted to the Democrats prematurely, but he was going to have to compromise with them eventually, since he needs their votes. (This is because a wing of the Republican Party refuses to vote for debt-ceiling increases.) Trump might have given them leverage to demand policy concessions down the road, but there is no reason to believe either that Democrats will actually win those concessions, or that Trump is aware that he might have enabled them.

This has created a philosophical crisis of sorts for a certain brand of conservative, those who oppose Trump while trying to extricate conservatism from what they foresee as his failure. Proceeding from the premise that Trump is a hostile alien who landed on their party purely by accident, they have presented his failures as the result of personality flaws unrelated to substance. When Obamacare repeal collapsed in Congress, anti-Trump conservative John Podhoretz called it “the necessary end result of seven months in which the president of the United States ate up all the oxygen in Washington with his ugly, petty, seething, resentful rages and foolishnesses as expressed in 140 illiterate characters.” In truth, Trump did not help the cause, but the party’s clear inability to agree on a plan that did not have horrific humanitarian consequences was an obvious, unacknowledged culprit.

From the perspective of these conservatives, Trump’s fealty to right-wing orthodoxy was decidedly inconvenient. The debt ceiling presented a rare opportunity for them to present Trump as the figure they cast him as all along: the New York Democrat posing as a conservative Republican. The fact that they had to wait seven and a half months to find an example of his ideological heresy — and that the case they found was the picayune issue of a three-month debt-ceiling increase versus a six-month debt-ceiling increase — itself disproves their point.